The Megyn Kelly Show - Criminalizing Speech, and Performative Outrage, with Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch | Ep. 328

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by The Fifth Column hosts, Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch, to talk about former journalists becoming hysterical anti-free speech crusaders, the inclination to criminalize speech you don't like on the left, fighting "authoritarianism" with authoritarianism, the self-loathing political industry, the gross Steve Schmidt meltdown, the lack of guardrails when it comes to standards in the media, Ricky Gervais' latest comedy special, the seismic transgender conversation shift, performative outrage, the latest in the Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper Central Park confrontation story, the media's focus on the narrative over the facts, Christian Cooper's new "bird watching" show, the truth about the Buffalo shooter, how to fight back against Cancel Culture, the latest on Amber Heard vs. Johnny Depp, Megyn Kelly accused of something a Real Housewife actually did, the Fifth Column guys' move to Substack, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh, we have so much to get through today and we have the perfect guests to talk about it all. President Biden taking us closer to another potential military conflict with China. This one over Taiwan, just like a throwaway. Here you go. We may be going into Taiwan with troops, depending on what China does. Wait, what?

The hysterical reaction from the media and the Democratic Party over the terrible Buffalo shooting has only grown stronger. I'm sure you've heard by now what Carl Cameron, my old pal from Fox News, is saying. I had to stop and rewind. I'm like, wait, what? So we'll play that. And supermodel Kate Moss is scheduled to testify tomorrow in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial. Why is that? We'll get into it. Plus, monkeypox. Joining me now to get into all of it, the hosts of the fifth column now on Substack. Camille Foster of Freethink Media, Matt Welsh, editor-at-large for Reason Magazine, and Michael Moynihan, a correspondent for Vice News Tonight.

Welcome back to the show, guys. Great to have you. Howdy, Megan. Great to be here, as always. So much to get into. And I was asking the team before we started, I'm like, where should I start? Because people have, my producers and I sometimes have different, and they had good hard news headlines. And I was like, I don't want to talk about it. I want to talk about Carl Cameron. I want to talk about, I realize it's not the biggest news ever, but I'm shocked. I've known this guy since I was a young correspondent in the D.C. Bureau. He was always a totally straight shooter right down the middle.

One of the things I loved about him was you couldn't tell whether he was left or right in his reporting. You know, campaign Carl Cameron. And you couldn't tell which side of the aisle he was on. And I knew him personally. And he you couldn't tell when he talked about politics, he was right down the middle. And then he left Fox News in January of 17. And I could tell I was kind of leaked. And then he gave an interview after I'm like, Okay, I get it. He doesn't like Trump. And he doesn't like with the network's direction on Trump. Well, that that wasn't particularly unusual. A lot of a lot of people who, you know, were straight shooters didn't really love Trump. But now to hear him talk, it was like, all right, I guess we'll.

Oh, yeah. OK, so this sound that we put together has two butted soundbites. The one that I heard him was on MSNBC with Nicole Wallace. And he doubled down on the remarks because a part of me, even after I heard the lunacy, I was like, oh, maybe he had a bad day. No. Then he went on CNN. He talked to Jim Acosta and he doubled down on the lunatic remarks about what should be happening to people who say things he finds incendiary online or on cable television. This was in the context of Buffalo. Here he is in a butted soundbite, Carl Cameron. Take a listen. Tucker has been screaming fire in a crowded movie house for years. If you disturb the peace by starting a riot in a movie theater, cops are going to arrest you

and you might end up in jail or you might end up in something worse. The president has to be more forceful. And sooner or later, the law enforcement and the US government is going to have to stop the lying because it's causing people's deaths. It's time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail. What? I can't believe it. Like, I can't believe he's gone that far over to the lunacy side. The police are going to have to start arresting people because of the lies they tell. What? Who wants to take it? The president of the United States has to take charge of the lying.

We're going to do something as president to make the lying stop. And that's going to result in people going to jail. Also, I really hate Trump because he's an authoritarian. Yeah, right, right, right, right. And of course, Jim Acosta follows that up by saying, you's a lie, should be going to jail for saying things on TV that are unrelated to a tragedy that happened a week and a half ago. I mean, I don't know what world we're living in, but it's absolutely terrifying. And at some point, I wonder if anyone will ever get the memo that the whole fire in a crowded theater thing. Yes. Is it true? It's not. And it's not true.

He changed it there. He usually it's used to make a free speech point to say you're not allowed to say that in a crowded theater. And by the way, go ahead and look at the history. If you just Google this online,

you'll see you are allowed to say that. Sorry, you are. But it was, and it was actually used. He changed it to disturbing the peace. He found another crime

to attach to it. So Tucker's disturbing the peace on his cable news show and whoever writes bad stuff online, they're disturbing the peace. That's the new crime. that that was actually invoked in the arrest of someone selling anti-war newspapers. I think it was in Yiddish during the First World War, saying we should not join the First World War. It is a fool's errand. The person was arrested and then accused of firing a crowd at a theater. So the origination of that is actually trampling on free speech. What's crazy about it is he knows he's got to know.

You don't have to be a lawyer to be able to understand that a cable news pundit or the purveyor of a website is not disturbing the peace by offering their opinions, in Tucker's case, on our open border on the South. And I know you guys are in a different position than Tucker is when it comes to discussing the border, but that's his opinion. It's not disturbing the peace. That's not the disturbing the peace that the law aims to capture. They mean like your neighbor won't turn off his damn stereo at like one in the morning and you can't sleep, like maybe, or, you know, a crazy parade that has no permit that doesn't shut up all day and it disturbs your quiet enjoyment of your home. This is lunacy. And to me, it's an example of Trump derangement syndrome and how it it's like long COVID. It never goes away. It's also the concept of disturbing the peace should be especially chilling to people to hear in the mouths of an American, let alone a journalist or someone who otherwise pretends to care about the First Amendment.

Disturbing the peace is a very specific term that's been used in communist countries and authoritarian countries over and over again as a catch-all federal statute to arrest and pressure dissidents. It's the name of a Vacáclav Havel book length interview from like 1988, disturbing the peace. It's the statute that they remove as soon as they usher in freedom after totalitarianism. We don't want a federal government at all interested in the notion of disturbing the peace. You can enforce anti-riot statutes in the District of Columbia. Okay. But we don't want the feds saying, you know what? I don't know. This speech is making me feel unpeaceful. That's a terrible, terrible place that we're going. And I think it's not just Trump-Generations Syndrome.

It's definitely part of it. But there's a right-left, maybe 10 years worth of it, but there's a right left, maybe 10 years worth of, of creeping, seeing speech as violence. And, and I wish that it was only on one of those sides and it's not, it is increasingly on both sides and it's a terrible place that we're going with speech. That is speech that I deem unacceptable is not just not okay for someone to say it ought to be illegal. It ought to be prohibited. It is actively dangerous. And we no longer believe in this principle of free speech in so much as it allows those other bad people to get away with saying what they like. There's a very real sense in which we're talking about criminalizing political opposition. That is what is being flirted with. And it's really important

to name it in that particular way. And it is entirely possible to be in a position to, if you believe that this is appropriate, criticize Tucker Carlson, perhaps even criticize Fox News broadly without crossing that threshold and putting yourself in the position where you're suggesting that the federal government, the president of the United States in particular, ought to be able to use some arbitrary standard to incarcerate people, incarcerate people who say the wrong kinds of things in public. It's obscene and it is a dangerous, dangerous kind of crossing of the Rubicon here. And you know what else, guys? Yeah, I'll give you the floor in one second.

But, you know, to me, it dovetails perfectly with what was just in the news today and yesterday, which is that National School Board Association and its now infamous letter to the White House trying to sick the feds to Merrick Gar. They wanted the National Guard. The National School Boards Association thought this would be a good idea. And we do know that the letter was coordinated with the White House. So who exactly had proposed that and who took it out? But yeah, it's like this knee jerk thing to bring in the government and to bring in law enforcement now to crack down on people saying the things that you don't like because you have some argument that their words are violence or might inspire violence? I mean, this is the natural endpoint. And this is what we get for not fighting back against this stuff. And I should say that the fifth column has been fighting back against this stuff for about six years now. But it is a natural endpoint of classifying this as violence. It was done for a very specific reason, right? I mean,

if you say that my opponent's speech is so noxious and so odious, and I hate it so much that these people must go to jail, everyone on earth will turn on you and say, this is kind of soldier needs and territory. This is authoritarianism. This is fascism. This is communism. But if you reframe it and you say that people are being hurt, nobody likes violence. People are opposed to violence. So how do we stop this violence? We have to stop the speech, which itself is violence, and then provokes violence. And then all of a sudden, you notice that on MSNBC and on CNN, when you have Carl Cameron saying something that, excuse my language, is completely batshit. I mean,

this is beyond anything I've heard a serious journalist say on the air multiple times. I mean, it's important that you put that up twice to say that this wasn't a slip of the tongue. It happened and doubled down. And the thing that's crazy to me is that the journalist on the other end just says, and in the case of Jim Acosta says, that's absolutely right. It's like, no, it's absolutely wrong, both legally, morally, you know, in every possible way this is not the way of dealing with speech that you don't like at a minimum you would expect to get that kind of perfunctory pushback well shouldn't there be some concern about free speech don't you think it's appropriate for us to take into consideration you know the boundaries are just a little bit

fuzzy aren't they we know they're terrible but the boundaries are fuzzy. Not even. We're past that at this point. You couldn't say anything bad about Trump. He was like, you're with him or you're against him. It's like Trump, Trump, Trump. And I remember thinking like there's like a zombification effect happening here on certain diehard MAGA people in the beginning. We're like, they can't hear any criticism of him without understanding this is politics. Well, he's going to get some criticism. What are you doing? And and now it's happened on the other side. Now it's like Carl Cameron's been zombified. He's been sucked over into the world of like the liars must be thrown in jail. They don't tell the truth. They are bad for America. And it's like there's no getting him back. You know, he's gone. Like they've gotten Carl. You know, it's like Stepford Wives. Like there's there's robotics behind the eyelids now. There's it's too late. We can't get him.

What happens as soon as you get into the kind of political catastrophizing of if the opponents win and you're seeing this right now in the run up to the midterms, I just read a piece in The Nation by the odious damn Frumkin talking about this. You know, the midterms authoritarianism basically is on the line. The Republicans win. That's it. We're on the authoritarianism basically is on the line. If the Republicans win, that's it. We're on the slope towards Viktor Orban's Hungary. It's kind of over. And the press must portray it like that. As soon as you have it in your mind that it's a Flight 93 election, as the pro-Trump crowd were saying in October, November of 2016, then you're ready to go. You are unable then to see that your preferred policy initiative, if given to the other team, would be used against you in the face.

That argument no longer works to people who think that if the woke run everything, the cathedral is just going to ram it down our throats and we're going to never see this country again. We're not going to have a country in Donald Trump's words. He said that over and over again. As soon as you believe that on either side, and right now there's huge swaths of America, thank God it's not all of us, but there's a lot of us, nobody in this conversation who think like this. And as soon as you do, then free speech is no longer a principle. It's an instrument. It is, can I control this zone in such a way to exclude and punish the people who would otherwise do the terrible thing that I don't want to have happen?

And it's just too much of America believes that right now. You know, a quick sort of adjunct point to that is that it's the creeping authoritarianism argument, which you've seen from so many people. And again, so many people that I respect in some senses and used to respect, academics who said that we were becoming because, you know, like most fascist countries, we have an election every four years and then the guy's gone. Exactly what happened in Nazi Germany. But when all this heavy breathing happens, the what the irony of it is that it creates another sort of authoritarianism. Right. It's like to stop the authoritarianism. We need to throw people in jail for speech to stop Donald Trump putting people on the Supreme Court.

We need to expand and pack the Supreme Court because it's not going our way. So to prevent authoritarianism, we ourselves have to be slightly authoritarian. And it's kind of a weird instinct. And to your point, Megan, about about Carl Kner being zombified. You know, I see the same thing. I saw this with Trump Republicans, so many people that I respected going just completely drooling and becoming maga type so quickly without much thought in changing their mind on so many things. But as you mentioned, the same thing is true with people on the other side. I mean, Bill Kristol appears to, you know, somebody I know appears to have changed his views on everything in a matter of four years. I don't know how that's possible. Like mathematically, is it possible that all of your views, you've been a man in the political fight for your entire life. Your father was the

founder of neoconservatism. And then in a space of three and a half, four years, you've decided that everything you previously believed is not something you believe now. I mean, does that maybe suggest that politics is a little more than just a sort of straight intellectual honesty about what you've believed over a certain period of time? Because I suspect it probably is more about team sports at this point. Oh, 100%. The nonsense with the Lincoln Project lawyers is the same, right? All those guys are in exactly the same boat, where I don't know if you saw Steve Schmidt, who I try never to discuss because he's just such a basement bottom dweller.

Um, but he came out with a, I need to do a mea culpa. When I was working for the McCain campaign, we tried to kill a story about him having an affair with a lobbyist and the New York times was running it. And I, I disparaged the New York times reporters and I said it was lies. And I later found out it was true. So I guess John McCain allegedly had an affair with, you know, some lobbyists. OK, it's like a marital thing, whatever. And like, so now to clean to cleanse his soul all this time later, he he it's like you're now a Democrat just looking to smear any anyone you were ever associated with who happened to be Republican and try to make yourself feel better about all your years as a Republican. And no one is looking to absolve you of that or really wants to hear from you at all. And to keep the paychecks coming, too, by the way.

I mean, especially for Steve Schmidt, who makes an enormous amount of money on this. And I know Matt can speak to this as somebody who's wrote a book about John McCain. And I've talked to Matt about the Steve Schmidt stuff. But this is somebody who does these hilarious interviews from his palatial kitchen in this mansion that he got from scamming people from the Lincoln Project and various other things. I don't know where all this money goes, but it's a profession. The man's professionally sorry, David Brock, professionally sorry. I mean, professionally wrong. I mean, it has become an industry in DC

to be somebody who hates themselves for their previous incarnation as a political operator. Yes. Steve Schmidt is just so slimy and disgusting and hateful. My God, he's so angry. He's like the angriest guy. And so be coming out with a McCain thing like all these years, the man's dead. I mean, to Steve Schmidt's credit, he understands that you can't defame a dead person, which is probably also why he waited this long to come out and say, it's true. It's true. Who knows? But I just think the whole thing is so unseemly and just shows, you know, it's like these these former Republicans who got sucked into their Trump hatred that like made them go crazy are the least attractive of the bunch. And that's saying something that they it Steve Schmidt inserted himself into the story. Let's let's remember what the root cause of him having an absolute epic meltdown was.

It was, I think, a media story about Meghan McCain's book sales. There is no reason to insert himself into the story unless you start thinking about what he needed, what he needed to do for him because all of his friends now are on the left. He needs to have a story that somehow absolves himself from his role in picking Sarah Palin, who is a figure of hate on the left. So how do you do that? And he ends up doing it in such a way to draw this really absurd idea that John McCain was soft on Russia. That doesn't work. There's no universe. I wrote a book that was critical about John McCain and critical about his foreign policy. And I can tell you, dude was not soft on Russia. That was not the issue. But that soft on Russian is lines up with where Democratic prerogatives have been in the age of Trump.

So how can you absolve yourself of Palin, who Democrats hate and also excite people? Well, you can go after Maine because a lot of people on the left don't like Meghan McCain. And then just apropos of nothing, throw in an affair allegation that The New York Times tried to prove really, really badly back in I think it was 2008 in a really awful and lawyered story that did not sell the goods at all. So, no, it's it's despicable. It's despicable kind of laundering of a professional hack who has to do something in order to sort of justify his continued existence and good graces on the left. Wouldn't it be fun if we if we picked on John McCain's widow? That'd be fun. Let's dump a let's dump a whole extra unneeded amount of pain on her.

That's how I'll spend my afternoon in response, again, to an article about Meghan McCain's allegedly weak book sales. OK, sure. That makes sense. But that's just the whole thing is like these hyper partisans who have been drawn into this lunacy are driving our national conversation. Steve Schmidt is still a contributor on MSNBC, notwithstanding all the covering up for the pedophile who worked at the Lincoln Project. No problem for him. He says the most hateful things and therefore he can still have a job there. Carl Cameron, I'll bet you he's going to wind up on on MSNBC's payroll sometime soon. We're going to get an announcement soon.

Right. I mean, the media has lost its mind. Jen Psaki, I guess, is officially now at MSNBC. She might wind up being the most sane person over there. There's no longer a standard. There used to be at least some nod towards a standard cable news outlets that you wouldn't want someone who's just brazenly caught in a lie. Maybe even Brian Williams had to go and take a pretty long time out before they welcomed him back based on his sort of exaggerations of where he was at various key news moments. But they have more serious kind of

fabulisms and lies on staff now, and they've stopped caring. I mean, there's no way that a fair-minded person looking at the record of certain people in that building would say, you know what? They tell the truth. They're being honest about stuff, whether it's in response to coverage or whether it's covering their own behinds about, you know, people dredging through their past. And that standard is no longer a fireable or distensible offense in cable news. And it's part of the reason why people don't trust that stuff. Maybe I'm imagining a glorious past that never existed, but I, and you know, Megan, you worked in the cable news industry for a long time, But I imagine, and I'd like to think it was true, that if it was maybe 15 years ago, and Joy Reid went on the air and said that Elon Musk is buying Twitter so he can celebrate apartheid because he's from South Africa and he loves apartheid.

This stuff is real. I mean, this is so bananas and so defamatory to say that this guy, because he's the richest man in the world and he's going to buy Twitter and nobody likes him at the moment. So go on television and accuse him of being a supporter of apartheid when he is actually on the record many years ago saying that he left South Africa because he didn't want to join the South African army where we'd have to enforce racist policies. That's what he's on the record saying. But she says, you know, he's my political opponent. He supports apartheid. No one blinks. It gets a little clip on media. We talk about it on the fifth column. Thank you for giving us 20 minutes to rail on you, Joy, because you're so easy to beat up on. And that's it. idea to accuse somebody of supporting one of the most gruesomely racist systems in the latter half of the 20th century when they're the richest person in the world because they also sue us but nothing nary a peep no one says a word anymore because as matt says the expectation is just that you know lying is fine as long as nothing matters nothing matters or two okay so two points i want to tell you about nbc and standards but i also want to just you mentioned

media and i mentioned jen sake can i just tell you, Mediaite has a piece up today. It's for people, nobody goes to Mediaite outside of the media industry. But so for our listeners, it's a website that just covers media and their headline is just in, MSNBC announces Jen Psaki is joining the network. Okay, we know.'s there's an actual line in the story ready the hire of one of the most admired press secretaries in recent memory is a coup for msnbc say what that's serious hello swear to god it's in the piece that's incredible that's amazing you sound like a little person to me uh okay but the story about nbc to your point um michael but when i was at nbc and their their standards and practices people meaning the lawyers who are supposed to look at the scripts and look at the programming and it applies at msnbc it's an arm of nbc so fox we were just kind of on our own i used to joke but it's true tom lol Tom Lowe, my EP and I, our standards in practice was, holy shit, get that off the air. That's wrong. Take that down. Right. And we would, that's what we would do. MSNBC is connected to big NBC and they are subject to the same review ostensibly that the NBC people are.

So there was a story was during the Me Too movement that involved Roger Ailes and his Me Too situation that I I had to report on. And the script, the morning script where I was going to have to read it was like the opening news report had to go by standards and practices and it said like scripts is something like um you know roger ailes was accused by multiple women um and he denied ever having harassed anyone um and i i remember saying well i'm i don't really want to read that uh or I want to comment on it because I live that. I'm one of the accusers. So I'm not just going to end that with he denied it. He was accused by 17 women, including me. And they were like, no, you have to just offer his denial. And it was like, okay. So I wound up reading it on the air, something to the effect of, he was accused by 17 women of sexual harassment. He denied that, but it's a fact that I know is true because I was one of them.

It seems a fair addition to that. My only point raising it is they're tough. Standards and practices at NBC is tough. It's tough. So how on earth all this shit gets out of Joy Reid's mouth? They must be, maybe they've just given up. I don't know. But she must keep them up at night. They're losing hair, losing sleep. There's no way they're signing off on anything that woman says.

This is a hangover from the Trump stuff. I mean, it's really interesting. The New Yorker famously has this vaunted fact-checking department. And there's a famous story where somebody wrote that one of the characters in the story was bald. And one of the fact-checkers called to confirm that the person was in fact bald. I mean, that is how stringent their standards are. And I read, particularly on the website, less so in the magazine, the stuff in the Trump universe now and keeping in mind, I have no love for Donald Trump and have been probably as critical as many of the people at The New Yorker, but they get a bit flabby when it comes to that. And despite the fact, and we were joking about this right after Donald Trump lost the election, and it was about the disappearance of a particular sentence in the media. And I had predicted and rightfully predicted that the sentence without evidence would disappear. Because that all of a sudden was creeping into every news story. Donald Trump said, comma, without evidence, comma, and then in the in the administration. And that, of course, has disappeared. But it also started to affect them, too, because if the goal was to unseat Trump,

to knock him down, we'll play by his standards, too. And really, we say whatever the hell we want. And, you know, I'm not even saying that Donald Trump started this, but I thought it was kind of ironic that people got so excited about this and said, you know, democracy dies in darkness and truth, truth, truth. And, you know, the woman on CNN who wore the sweater that said, you know, truth matters or whatever during the broadcast. And then all of a sudden, you know, when it comes to the other side, truth matters a lot less because we believe that we have, you know, a goal, like, you know, a goal to save democracy. And it's back to that thing that you become undemocratic when you believe you're saving democracy, much in the same way that people on January 6th that were storming the Capitol believed because they were bananas and believed all sorts of conspiracy theories that they had to save the republic from it being stolen by these nefarious forces. That doesn't make it okay because they believe this nonsense. But this is what happens on the other side, too, is that we must take these things, Carl Cameron saying, we have to put people in jail. Because look, you know, if we don't,

our democracy is over. So, you know, in the process of doing that, we must crush democracy. It's very scary to think about uniform government, right? This is why we like divided government, which we don't have right now it's just an argument for exactly the opposite outcome at the midterm election that they're raising the flag on like we do we need divided government because the parties have gotten a little too crazy like i look maybe i'm biased because i'm center right but i think the left is seriously the problem and there are definitely problems on the right too but i think like the people pushing this nonsense like the biggest on cracking down on free speech and speeches violence and and all that. Those are lefties. Am I wrong?

No, you're right. It does happen on both sides, but I think the majority of it is. To me, it kind of depends on the day. I think at the moment, the president of the United States is a Democrat. The Democrats happen to control both houses of Congress at the moment. With respect to the federal government, I'd say that we have a unique problem if this particular party isn't committed to defending particular values. And I think for anyone who is a partisan, who is a Democrat, who believes in things like, you know, quaint ideas like freedom of speech, you have to look at the fact that the party you support is in some respects kind of vacating long held principles and self-immolating in some respects over over what might be described as threat inflation when it comes to Donald Trump,

who, again, no longer president of the United States. And to the extent he has influence in the party, like we're actually seeing in very real time, it degrade in really material ways. The Pence v. Trump proxy lost on the national stage in election where he's not proven to be the guy who can deliver victories amongst Republicans. We're not talking about campaigns where he has to go out and it's a Democrat versus a Republican. We're talking about multiple conservatives who are looking at different candidates and say, oh, this is the guy Donald Trump supports and this is the guy he doesn't. I'm going to go with the guy he doesn't support. That matters. It matters if Democrats are still myopically focused on that particular issue. If there's supposed to be a range of important policy issues they're supposed to be fighting

for and defending and the number of different political or philosophical things that you value as an individual and you say, you know, I'm a progressive, I'm a liberal, I'm a Democrat. It matters if your party can't really be relied upon to do that because they're so obsessed with Donald Trump, because they're so obsessed with demonizing the other side. That threat inflation is dangerous for the nation as a whole, but it's also dangerous for the political prospects for Democrats. It's not just Trump anymore. It's like Trump, Tucker, you know, J.D. Vance, sort of this backdraft that they associate with him. Go ahead, Matt. I want to put in a word for how that group, actually, the Trump, J.D. Vance group right now on the right, are starting their own process of threatening freedom of speech. For 40 years or

more on the right, broadly speaking, an associate of the Republican Party. Conservatives were in favor of basically deregulating media. They wanted to dismantle the fairness doctrine, which was used as a weapon to exclude voices from political speech. It was used by politicians to pressure, whether it was Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon to pressure newspapers and other people like that. They wanted to free up spectrum and all of this kind of space. That is over. Trump wanted to re,

he threatened to reuse the fairness doctrine. He wanted to use antitrust as a weapon against NBC and other places that he didn't like, that he felt bad. And now this has become widely shared on the right. The idea, it's again, it's the instrumental notion of what should our media policy be. And I would point this out to people and then I would say, hey, look, you're reversing 40 years of pretty good free speech policy on the right with this very petulant, I want to punish

things. And people on the Trumpian right would say, yeah, but did you win? People wanted that sense of hashtag winning, which means punishing people. So I'm afraid that when Republicans retake power, which they will because we live in a two party system, that they're going to use that to rewrite Section 230. The Communications Decency Act is going to be regulation of big tech because big tech almost stole the election in 2020. There's going to be this punitive sense. So I don't see it as a, oh, look, there's a safe harbor in our politics right now. The point for me is that there's not. That's interesting.

But it's right in the sense that both sides are attacking big tech, right? I mean, whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop stuff, or we cannot have Elon Musk take over Twitter because Twitter is a public utility and he's a bad guy who wants more free speech. I mean, the fact that people are arguing against Elon Musk, not because he's a billionaire and the richest man in the world, but because he wants more free speech is rather odd that you wouldn't expect that from the left. You expect the other argument. And from journalists. And from journalists too. But I would say, Megan, I agree. Particularly on the cultural level, I was just kind of playing out while Matt was talking,

like, what would be the equivalent if, say, at Spotify, a whole number of employees walked out and said, we are not going to work here. We're going to pressure you. And the company, in this case, does not buckle. But we've seen a lot of cases where the company does buckle. And those people who are marching out say that we're doing this because we're Christians. And because there's Christian content on here or there's content that's anti-Christian, etc. I mean, the mainstream media, I would imagine, and they'd be right to do so, would be like, what?

No, go back to work. But when it has something like, you know, I saw this morning, apparently it went online about an hour ago, the new Ricky Gervais special. I mean, his last special was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. But apparently this one has transphobic jokes. And I put air quotes in that because I haven't seen it. And that is a term that is thrown around pretty loosely these days. But you will. But you will, sir, because we have a clip pulled. Oh, you do? Oh, really? But you know what? Is it funny? Canadian Debbie says it's time to take a break,

so I'm going to squeeze in a little break, and then we will play the Ricky Gervais soundbite and get all of your thoughts on it. Michael, we'll start with you. All right, stand by. All right, Michael, so you were going to react to uh this new ricky gervais special that's about to come out so i'll tee it up for you i knew you were coming so i baked a cake here's ricky gervais in part the old-fashioned women oh god you know the ones with wombs

those fucking dinosaurs no I love the new women I know the new women they're great aren't they you know the new ones we've been seeing lately the ones with beards and cocks they're as good as they're as good as gold

I love them no it's the old fashioned and now the old fashioned they go oh they want to use our toilets why shouldn't they use your toilets? For ladies. They are ladies.

Look at their pronouns. What about this person isn't a lady? Well, his penis. Her penis, you fucking bigot. What if he rapes me? What if she rapes you? What are you fucking turf for? Oh, man. I am absolutely not laughing at that because it's so offensive and horrible.

Are you predicting there's going to be backlash to that? I mean, I sent something to a friend this morning because we always talk about these things. And I just sent this. It was a screenshot from Variety, the industry Bible. The headline was Ricky Gervais' Netflix comedy special gets backlash for transphobic jokes. It has been released for about 13 seconds. It was released and they already had the backlash story prepared, which either means the critics are so boring and predictable or they're trying to stoke the criticism themselves. But the great thing was journalism. This is the journalism where

they described as artigone criticism for a string of graphic and hurtful transphobic jokes. That's the journalist saying that they're hurtful. I mean, I don't know who it is that's deciding this stuff. I mean, look, that bit is kind of a predictable bit. It's funny. I mean, Gervais is funny. And it's, I mean, it's not, how is it transphobic just to say what 98% of the world is having to get used to is, you know, when you say to somebody, you know, my mother, you know, somebody in my family, that the person with the beard and a penis is a woman, is they don't, they're like, what are you talking about? And it requires a bit of readjustment. So making fun of that is itself not transphobic, but it's also just a joke about how quickly the culture has changed

when a feminist like J.K. Rowling, who's a lefty and a feminist and a philanthropist to so many women's causes too, can be called, and you heard Ricky Gervais use the acronym, TERF, which is the trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Those are the radical feminists that are in the crosshairs of trans activists. But the fact that this stuff is considered transphobic before it comes out, number one, and number two, it's like, look, this is reflective of the way a lot of people feel about this stuff. And they'll laugh at it because they're like, yeah, it's so weird that when you find out that the swimmer from Penn is, you're not biologically a male, like physically a male. Can I put it that way? I don't know the terminology, so I don't want to get in trouble, but it's physically still a male.

Biological. Yeah, right? Can I say that? Megan, am I okay? Am I going to get canceled or fired? Yes, yes, you are, but what you're saying is correct. I'm making no value judgment on whether that person should be swimming. And notice I said that person, I don't want to screw up the pronouns. But this stuff is like, is this minefield of life now is so perfect for comedy. And this is the thing that bothers me so much about the late night stuff in all of these like SNL, all these shows, this it's such a rich vein for comedy because it's so wild that everything changed so quickly. And it's just like in some of the bizarro woke things that people get upset

about. It's not, it's not being mocked by anyone, which I find totally stunning. It's imminently mockable. And by the way, you say we need some time to get adjusted to it. No,

I mean, some of us will never, we're not going along. It's not that I'm, I'm not Matt Walsh, who I love, some time to get adjusted to it. No, I mean, some of us will never, we're not going along. It's not that I'm, I'm not Matt Walsh, who I love. Not to be confused with Matt Welsh,

who's here today. Yeah, he's more transformed. Yeah, over at Daily Wire. Yeah, if he can say what he said on my show, you can certainly say what you just said. Yeah.

But like somebody who, you know, the guy who had like the long hair, he was on Dr. Phil, super long hair and a beard and a mustache. He's clearly a man, but like with long hair, he was on Dr. Phil, super long hair and a beard and a mustache.

He's clearly a man, but with feminine hair. I don't know. I'm not going to get adjusted. I'm always going to feel uncomfortable. I'm going to root for you as a human, but I'm not going to. That's not a woman. You're a man with long hair and a beard and a penis. That's not a woman.

Okay, sorry. Love you and hope life works out great for you. But I know what a woman is and that's not it. Okay, so what Ricky Gervais is hitting on though is real. It's 100% real. And we just saw it last week. I asked Canadian Debbie to pull the soundbite because her name is Amy Arambide.

And she was testifying before Congress on the Roe versus Wade outcome and what's likely to happen. She's executive director of the abortion rights nonprofit Avow Texas, speaking for the U.S. House Judiciary hearing. And she was asked a bunch of questions about abortion, which she would like to see all the way through pregnancy. And then this question came up of gender and all the stuff we're talking about. Listen. What do you say a woman is? I believe that everyone can identify for themselves. Okay. Do you believe then that men can become pregnant and have abortions? Yes. There you have it. Yes. Men can get pregnant. Men can have abortions. No, they can't. Amy, I don't know. You got to go back to square one in your organization because they can't. And it really angers a lot of women like me to say otherwise. It's one of the unique things that women only can do only we can do it sorry guys

you guys can do a lot of fun things too i can't pee standing up um but you can't have a baby all three of them look at all three of them telling me i can do it yeah i mean i'm just telling you yeah we believe in you I think to Michael's point, though, it's the if you create a taboo and it's a big one and it's so new, that's you're creating this comedy. Yeah, you're not creating the new rule that everybody is going to follow immediately, although it's completely different than the way everyone talked, you know, two years ago, two weeks ago. Right. Like how when was Barack Obama still against gay marriage? It was 2013. It was Joe Biden stumbling into like, yeah, well we'll bomb China and we can, we can have gay marriage. I guess there's some use to it to Joe Biden after all. But, uh, I mean, these, these things change so fast. And of course that is the stuff of comedy.

It's about taboos. And it's not even that the comedy is there to mock the new thing. It's to mark the taboo. Comedy is part of how that stuff gets lubricated. We had Colin Quinn, the great Colin Quinn live show we did in New York last week. And the New York story is one of the most amazing specials, sort of comedy, sort of sociology, history of New York. And the basic thesis is the way that comedy is used to lubricate social situations between rival ethnic groups in New York to create a commercial and tolerant society, not tolerant,

like, oh, we all love each other, but like that we all hate each other. We're going to make fun of each other. And it's kind of cool. And that to lose that sense, you're you're you're actually you're making it more difficult for your new taboo to stick because you're you're actually making it a taboo. And people don't like to be told that you can only talk this way suddenly right now. If you it's also not going to be. Yeah, go ahead, Camille. I was just going to say, if you want like durable, social, cultural evolution on an issue, if you want people to have developed and cultivate some sort of empathy amongst people who are inclined to disagree with you, because it's always important in a context like's to create space enough for us all to exist in our own weird particular way, whatever our particular religious inclinations are, our intimate inclinations are. We can find room for you in this tapestry of America. That's the goal.

And there's something I find just really jarring about, one, comedy being the place where these battles are playing out now, which is very interesting. Because in general, I don't think we want to hurt each other. We don't want to offend each other. We may have concerns about one another's behavior. But even that stuff, most people want to talk about in a way that is respectful and that is courteous and arrives at a solution. I think that's the case most of the time. But there's something really weird about the preemptive and very performative outrage that tends to accompany the release of these comedy specials. I seem to remember Louis C.K.'s Sorry special kind of animating the same sort of concern very recently about the same issue,

trans jokes. But I also remember the very first joke in that special happened to be about pedophilia and nobody mentioned it. It was a hilarious joke. It was also brutal. I'm not a fan of pedophilia and I don't think people should take light of pedophilia. And I think Louis C.K. would generally agree with that, but this is also comedy and that's how it works. And we appreciate that on a range of other issues. People make jokes about rape, about murder, about incest, about a range of things, about war. And we find ways to cope with that. And at least even if we don't find it funny, we can turn the station.

We can not log into that particular website. Like Dave Chappelle said, you clicked on my face. What are you doing if you don't like it? And these people at Netflix, if they're upset over the Ricky Gervais thing, they're in for quite a disappointment given the Netflix statement just last week that if you don't like the things we put out, yeah, you don't need to work here. Hello, that's exactly the right. There are all sorts of places you can work.

You don't have to work at a Spotify or a Netflix or a Sirius XM. If you don't believe in free speech and the different points of view that people want to express that may be diametrically opposed to your own, move along. I always tell my staff, not this particular staff because they're awesome, but I've said to people who work for me for years, for that, there's KeyBank. You don't want to work the weekends? No problem. You go to KeyBank. It's wonderful. Opens up at nine, closes at four. You're good. Nobody bothers you. You choose a certain profession, or in this case, news. You know that your life's going to be a little chaotic. You choose to go work for a company like Netflix. You're going to be subjected to POVs from all across the spectrum if Netflix is doing its job right. And they appear to be

determined to do so, right? At least now, right? I mean, I think their experiment in woke-ification of America has failed as a business matter and they've gotten back on track. To Matt's point about where, why it kind of is playing out in the comedy battlefield, this has become the battlefield, is kind of my issue with the kind of trans conversation in general. I mean, I've studiously avoided it just because I don't have a huge interest in it. And I kind of watch from the sidelines and say, you know, that is a hockey fight. There's no kind of ballet in that. That's just brutality. And I'm not very interested in the idea. But because it has become so brutal, it has gone to the comedy

world because that's the place where you can actually have these conversations, the kind of last place you can have these conversations. And comedians don't really care. In a sense, the more taboo subjects they take on, the better the specials do, which is what you see in the Netflix reaction, which is, you know, it's pretty good for business. I think those Dave Chappelle specials did very, very well. But the main thing with this is that it presumes a lot. It presumes that this stuff hurts people, and it doesn't. And if you go back and look at, you know, Eddie Murphy's specials from early 80s, kind of homophobic. And guess what happened since then?

Things got a lot. Yeah. Everything's okay. All right. Now, there's so much to discuss. Camille had an interesting exchange with Justice Clarence Thomas that kind of, kind of picks up on a discussion I had right here on the program yesterday with Jonathan Haidt about what do you, what do you do to fight back against cancel culture? Do you, do you fight fire with fire or do you take the high road?

We're going to get into that. And plus, Camille's been doing a little reporting on that. Remember the Central Park bird lady, Central Park Karen, they called her. Camille actually did great reporting on this and has a follow up today. So lots more to go over when we come back. Let's start with your old pal, Christian Cooper. Christian Cooper. There's so many Coopers, Camille.

I got to try to keep this story. It's so confusing. Now, people may have forgotten all about the so-called Central Park Karen. That's Amy Cooper. These two people are not related, but they were involved in an incident that would just blow up online and dominate news cycles left and right for a long, long time. And it was right after George Floyd, wasn't it? Or was it right before? It was May of 2020. It was the same day, actually. I believe that the Christian Cooper encounter happened in the morning. The George Floyd situation happened a little later in the day, in the afternoon.

Interestingly, the Christian Cooper story was kind of the bigger of the two stories initially. I think it was, I'm trying to remember who, I think it was Gayle King who kind of talked about these two stories, the time that took a deep dive into this so-called Central Park Karen case and revealed a lot of facts about this case that was sort of the quintessential, quote, Karen case that the media had totally ignored. And now there's an update in, you know, remember this is birdwatcher Christian Cooper who was confronted by this. Well, he confronted this woman, Amy Cooper, Christian Cooper, the birdwatcher was black. Amy Cooper, the dog walker was white. She was there with her dog. He was mad. Her dog was in the ramble off the leash. She allegedly said, well, I know this is the only place to walk him. Christian Cooper didn't like that. He wanted to watch his birds in peace. And just to remind people, here's a bit of the original video that went viral that was taken by Christian Cooper midway into his confrontation with the so-called Central Park. Karen. We'll get to that in a second. Listen, watch. There is an African-American man. I am in Central Park. He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog. I'm sorry, I can't hear you. I'm being threatened by a man into the ramble. Please send the cops immediately. Now, she had, in fact, been threatened by him. He had threatened to hurt her dog, or at least that's how it sounded. But there's more to the story.

And I'll just start by this, Camille. And I know you've done a great deep dive on this. The problem as I saw for Amy Cooper at the time was not that she described him as an African-American male to the 911. It was that she told him before she called 911, I'm going to call and I'm going to tell them I'm being threatened by an African-American male. That is what made a lot of people say, well, that's different. That's different because it had the feeling of, you know what might happen when the cops get here and you, this white lady, are saying the African-American male is threatening me. And you you seemed it unnecessarily to him inject race in it. So I'll let you take it from here with the update in your reporting.

And I'll start with I'll start with that. I mean, that is certainly the thing that made this interesting to most people. The fact that she says African-American in that context, I mean, obviously we're jumping into this 32nd video at the, at the tail end of a confrontation of some sort. We don't know what happened before the video started rolling, unless we listened to an account from someone. Um, and up until last year, a little after now, um,

you would have never really had an account of what happened beyond the one that Christian Cooper provided. And what actually made me inclined to go back and look at this story again was a story I saw published in NBC News last year this time. And last year this time, Amy Cooper's lawyer was filing a charge, not a charge, but it was filing a case against her then employer for wrongful termination, saying that her employer rushed to terminate her without really conducting a legitimate investigation. And buried at the end of this story was a disclosure in NBC talking about the legal filing and how it included this letter from a guy named Jerome Lockett, who NBC describes himself as a 30-year-old Black man.

And Jerome Lockett said that he had not only had a similar confrontation with Christian Cooper, but that there was a physical altercation with Christian Cooper because he felt like Christian Cooper was not merely threatening him, but threatening his dog. And the same NBC story says that NBC spoke to Jerome Lockett at the time. They conducted an interview with him, but they never go on to explain why it took them a year to publish the gentleman's name and mention the fact that there were these previous altercations. And that made me want to know a little bit more about what happened with Jerome Lockett, if there was anyone else, and if there might be additional details of this story that had been sat on by other journalists. And the reporting that we went out and did, we were able to uncover a number of facts. And anyone interested should

go back and listen to that podcast that I recorded with Barry for her podcast, and honestly. But I can say a couple of things at a very high level. What we know for a fact is that Christian Cooper most certainly threatened Amy Cooper by his own admission. He says to her in the park that day, leash your dog. And if you don't, if you're going to do what you want to do, I'm going to do what I want to do. And you're not going to like it. That's him verbatim saying, this is what I said to her. Now, some people will interpret that as a threat and some people won't. But when you're a single woman alone in a park and someone says that to you, I think it's fair to regard that as a threat and some people won't. But when you're a single woman alone in a park and someone says that to you, I think it's fair to regard that as a threat. But what makes this even more interesting is that Christian Cooper had a habit of doing this. And over the course of my reporting,

I spoke to multiple people who had these encounters with him, nearly all of which wanted to go on background or off the record because they were too afraid to talk about this kind of thing publicly. But we did get to kind of give you the two accounts that we have, one from Amy Cooper and one from Jerome Lockett, which are both on the record and published. And furthermore, we found some additional contests from Christian Cooper himself, admitting that in the several months prior to his encounter with Amy Cooper, he'd had not one but two physical altercations with other dog owners in Central Park in the ramble. This is a very peculiar thing.

I was a New Yorker for almost 10 years. I know all of us had some experience in New York. We've certainly seen fights and arguments break out on the street before. I think it is highly unusual for someone to be the kind of person who, as a vigilante in Central Park, goes around accosting fellow park goers to the point where they feel sufficiently threatened that it results in some kind of physical altercation. And that is the actual context of the story. There are so many stories that have been written recently because Christian Cooper has this Nat Geo show that is going to be airing soon. It's unbelievable. That he's obtained because of the celebrity he managed to claim for

himself as a result of this whole encounter. But the stories, the headlines always say, you know, Christian Cooper, who was falsely accused by Amy Cooper of threatening him, or Christian Cooper was falsely accused by white women of threatening her. Um, well, that is objectively false. He did threaten her. We know that, but even worse, there is additional context that at this point, given how much this story was covered, it is very difficult for me to believe that most of these news organizations don't have someone on staff who knows that there are more details here, who knows that the reason Amy Cooper seemed so hysterical on the phone then might be explained on that 911 call by the fact that the 911 operator could not hear what she was saying and was asking her over and over again to repeat herself. So you got that. Complicating details here.

You got that. And it does shed some light. And we actually have it. Okay, so here's soundbite two. Ma'am, I cannot hear anything. The phone is breaking up really bad. Okay. So explain that, Camille. What does that show us? I think what it shows us is that rather than this being a woman who, you know, you can only see one side of the conversation, who seems to be getting increasingly agitated as though there's a kind of performance taking place, it's at least feasible to believe that if that encounter before the cameras started rolling was sort of sufficiently hostile and aggressive from Christian Cooper's standpoint or from Christian Cooper, then Amy

Cooper's response when she's calling for help, becoming increasingly hysterical, might have something to do with the fact that the people she's calling for help aren't actually able to come right away. And again, very different from the demeanor that Christian had once the camera started rolling. Amy and others insist that when Christian Cooper approached her and he approached her is what she says, not the way that it's been reported in a number of contexts, that he was yelling at her. He was screaming at her. Not the polite gentleman who kind of was very contained once the video started to roll, but aggressive, angry. She made reference to the fact that he was

gripping a bike helmet in a way that seemed kind of aggressive, as did other people I spoke to who had similar encounters with Christian Cooper. Right. Now the media has totally lionized this guy. It's amazing he has a Nat Geo special. Of course he does naturally. And because there can't be two sides to a story involving Central Park Karen, like she was the start of it all. And therefore the narrative must be upheld. And if her life has to be ruined and thrown away, so be it. I mean, she's now, I understand, like left the country.

She's looking for a new country to live in where they don't even speak English. So there's absolutely no knowledge of this for her. And in the exchange, as recited by Christian Cooper, he says that he said that he made the threat. It's clearly a threat. He said, me, look, you're going to do what you want. I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it. And she said, what's that? And he said to her dog, come here, puppy. And she said, he won't come to you. And he said, we'll see about that. Then he writes, I pull out the dog treats I carry for just such intransigence. I didn't even get a chance to toss any treats to the pooch before Karen scrambled to grab the dog. Her, don't you touch my dog. That's when I started recording with the iPhone and when her inner

Karen fully emerged and took a dark turn. Okay. So obviously this guy's tightly wound and he's got problems of his own, but I go back to Camille and I appreciate the full context of all this stuff, but like, and you can explain it. Maybe you can just say, maybe she's just a very district descriptive talker, but like, I just can't imagine myself looking at a man in this situation and say, I'm going to call the cops and I'm going to say an African- is I can speculate about what Amy might have meant. And she does provide some context herself for what she insists that she meant in that moment and why she said it that way. But I can only speculate about it. Maybe she meant something nefarious by it. Maybe she was just kind of reaching for something she thought might

frighten someone who was staring her. But what I know is that the situation is infinitely more complicated and nuanced than many of the reports that have been published about this story suggest. And it's worth remembering. We're in New York City right now. This is one of the most extensively covered stories of 2020. And now we're still in 2022 and we're seeing new stories written about this. And media organizations, and I think this is really the most important thing. Media organizations either systematically avoided covering the more complicated details or they omitted it from their coverage in order to satisfy a particular narrative. And this isn't my opinion. This is what I discovered after talking to multiple journalists,

after finding multiple instances of people who knew about Jerome Lockett, who knew about Christian Cooper's very odd behavior. And I don't think Christian Cooper is a bad person. I mean, it seems to me that Christian Cooper is someone who perhaps doesn't appreciate boundaries and doesn't appreciate the way in which his behavior can make other people feel. Although he also seems like someone who set out to make people feel uncomfortable as a tactic for for them to try to force them to comply with park rules um and again he should spend time talking to rich lowry rich lowry he watches the birds and he's very sweet about it he's a big bird man bird is supposed to be relaxing. It's supposed to be you. It's supposed to be you.

I've always thought Rich Lowry was watching. Yeah. He looks like a guy who watches the birds. Let's say he's supposed to bring peace and relaxation into your world. He's not supposed to wind you up like this. All right. So you raise good points about the narrative. We saw it with Buffalo, the absence of nuance, the avoidance of certain facts that may not jive with your preferred narrative like the fact that this the shooter in buffalo i mean i've been talking about the mental health issues plaguing men of that age for a while and um very few people are going to the cat you know you have to work to find the details about do you guys know he beheaded a cat? I didn't. Yeah.

Because, you know what, it hasn't been widely reported. Yeah. This guy, not long before all this happened, in addition to having threatened an earlier mass shooting, a year earlier, he beheaded a, people want to say a feral cat, as if, like, that makes it different

than the house pet. I'm not sure that it does. But if you get into the details, and forgive me, I did last week, just so people could understand. I mean, it's really it was like a torture of a cat and beheading of a cat at his own hands. And the media doesn't really want to go there because it shows you this guy's sick. I mean, he's probably a sociopath. And we don't have anything to do with sociopaths in this country. We don't know what to do with them. They cannot be therapized out of their sociopathy. And so we've kind of thrown up our hands and said, like, what should we be doing when young men in particular show show signs of sociopaths being sociopaths? They take a deep dive into. Did the Buffalo mass shooting suspects, 90 percent white hometown fuel his hate? This thing is insane, even by our modern day weird media standards. Let me give you a couple of pull quotes. Okay. His rage, yeah, dot, dot, dot,

is becoming an increasing danger in towns like this where extremism is seeping into the mainstream. All right, what's their evidence of that? That extremism is seeping into the mainstream all right what's their evidence of that that extremism is seeping into the mainstream yeah yeah in in conklin well 90 of conklin's over 5 000 residents are white that's down from 96.8 you're setting up the white the white grievance line right they're down the whites are down in um only 90 right like this is a problem uh then they go on in conklin uh distrust of media and fear of reprisal for talking freely are common especially among the older residents

they go on to point out his mother's a registered republican the dad's a democrat they say unsurprisingly as a relatively rural community conklin is redder than the oval county uh 60 of those in his hometown went for trump here in conklin is redder than the overall county. 60% of those in his hometown went for Trump. Here in Conklin, even unrelated conversations often turn to the assertion that President Biden and or socialism are destroying America. And then it goes on. Hold on. Where is my page 10? Here it is. At a local bar, jumbos, number one, there's a sign next to the liquor shelves. They take that try to take down jumbos. There's a sign next to the liquor shelves. They try to take down jumbos. There's a sign next to the liquor shelves that reads,

this place is politically incorrect. The prosecution rests, your honor. And lists several terms that, quote, we say, including, can you guys guess what any of them are? What would a place like Jumbos, number one, have under a sign that reads, we're politically incorrect. And we say, I'll give you a clue. Merry Christmas.

That's the war on Christmas. It's the war on Christmas. The war on Christmas. I'll give you another clue. The front line is Jumbos. Jumbos clown room. Jumbos is directly tied to the Buffalo issue. Okay.

The next one is one nation under yeah no i got that wrong under god it jumbles number one we salute our flag and give thanks to our troops and warns patrons that quote if this offends you leave then listen to this here's the capper here's the capper the extent of the influence of this place on the shooter and the formation of the extreme views that allegedly led him to carry out the saturday attack will probably never be known but an entire town racist range limited i don't know if this is true but listen here's the big here's the summation he grew up in this community this is the air he breathed oh lord yeah that is poisonous wow jeez let's start with that

i went to a i went to college at it uh briefly uh at a place called uc santa barbara which was i think 99.8% white. So like if I would have ended up being a mass shooter, that would have proved it was the air that I breathe. Was there a Jumbo's? There was something close to 90 miles south. By the way, I went to so many bars that have that sign like across the country over the past like 10 years of reporting. There's one in Manhattan. Yeah. We can go there for lunch yeah you see you didn't even know that they were trying to make

you into white supremacist when you looked at that sign you just thought it was sort of a tongue in cheek so so tucker is not mentioned in the manifesto and as far as we know the 18 year old kid is not drinking at jumbos right we're making a lot of connections that are not uh obvious to the to breathe the air okay yeah what's in the air well we should that's what's so insane like there's absolutely nothing in here there's nothing in here they have no evidence this is some lunatic writer's assumption that because the town is split politically and there's a lot of discussion uh unrelated conversations often turn to the association that that the assertion that biden or socialism are destroying america aha aha conklin is to blame the air in conklin this is

madness it's also 60 years since the same line of argument was used for shooting jfk as michael can tell you to exhausting detail yeah sorry describing 17 of the books behind his right shoulder. I do talk about that often. Yes. That's what, that's what people do when they either, uh, want to sell a particular thing, which is very much the case after a JFK. They want, they wanted to use that as a moment to go after the John Birch society, to go after extreme right-wingers. They did this, you know, when Jared Loeffler went on this rampage too, like, uh, that was a time to go after the tea party,ers they did this you know of the when jared loffner went on this rampage too like that was a time to go after the tea party even though there wasn't any connected tissue at all um or they just uh they don't want to pursue the truth which is also the case in jfk the truth was this guy uh i don't know um went in he had a little bit of a communist yeah no

trying to kill the general walker the head of the John Birch Society before he shot JFK. But the word the phrase it's always used is climate of hate. Yeah, because, you know, you don't really have a lot to grab onto. So then you use this kind of, you know, airy term like climate of hate. But, you know, of course, it's unidirectional. We're talking about the Netflix special of Ricky Gervais. There was an interview, what, two days ago with the guy who attacked Dave Chappelle on stage, and he said, I did it because I didn't like the trans jokes. A man got on stage

with a knife, or as it was described in the media, a gun-like knife, because it was a knife shaped as a gun. It was very strange. He couldn't make up his mind. A little schizophrenic, this guy. And jumped on stage and tried to stab and kill Dave Chappelle. This is presumably what you're trying to do when you run on stage with a knife, and then you're beaten, arrested, and then interviewed and said, yeah, I don't like those jokes. Those trans jokes are very bad for the trans community. Can we establish that a climate of hate has been created around

this stuff by consistently accusing Dave Chappelle as somebody who's creating this nasty climate that's making it dangerous to be trans in America and the world, which will presumably be applied to Ricky Gervais today. But you don't see that happen. And it shouldn't happen, by the way, that we're going to start talking about the climates that are created because people criticize people or people have certain political opinions. Now, if the entire town that he lived in was, you know, a bunch of neo-Nazis, the town council was neo-Nazis, then maybe you're onto something. But, you know, a father who's a Democrat, a mother who's a Republican or whatever the split was. And, you know, a six percent drop over a period of time of whiteys in the town does not make an environment or a climate of hate. But Matt brings up the JFK thing for for the great example that when a man who defected to the Soviet Union was a communist,

tried to kill the head of the John Birch society and was handing out pamphlets for the fair play for cuba committee shoots jfk you say it must be the right i mean it's bizarre i mean this stuff is like the guy is like hey i you know don't like him he's too anti-communist for me and they say you know but it just does not fit and the narrative our narrative is serviced in a different way michael this stuff about climate of hate is so it's it falls on deaf ears when I listen, because it's like, would you spare me when you this just this week alone, we took a deep dive into what the left is doing to Professor Roland Fryer at Harvard absolutely ruined the poor guy's life. He did. He did nothing. I mean, it was like the me to

trumped up allegations against him were a professional assassination against a brilliant guy whose research didn't tow the party line when it came to, quote, acting white. He had looked into that with black students who maybe didn't want to get straight A's because they thought they would be socially punished if they did for, quote, acting right white for police shootings, which he said are not more likely to happen to black men than they are to white men. I mean, there's all this anathema. You're not allowed to say that stuff at Harvard. And he got me too right out of his job, really. I mean, he's they can't fire him because he's tenured, but they're certainly trying to make it as inhospitable as possible. Then we talked yesterday about this guy, this professor at Princeton. Same thing. He was

accused of a me too situation was a consensual affair with a student many, many years ago, 2006. He already took a year off. They made him a forced year off to pay the penalty for breaking a rule. And now they've trumped it back up because he wrote an open letter being critical of the demands by black faculty members for like an extra paid sabbatical and extra pay for something else. And he disagreed. He said, why should you get these extra benefits based on pigmentation? Well, guess what? The Me Too investigations reopened. Right. So like, stop me with your culture, with your culture of hate. That's you. You are ruining person after person based on your own political agenda. That is hate. Don't you think Roland Fryer feels it? Don't you think this professor at Princeton feels iteton feels it you know and so this led to

a discussion i had with jonathan height uh who wrote the coddling of the american mind on my show yesterday where i said you know what needs to be done we need to we need to bring down the president of princeton as he tries to ruin this latest professor's career literally i want every student who's ever had an affair with that professor to email me email me uh at at my company right now what's our email again hold on what's our email larry flint that's questions it's questions at devil may care media with with the nest questions at devil may care media.com because i guarantee you this guy's not pure this guy's done things in his past which are sinful which he'd like to have back including in his role as president of princeton or while a professor

there no one is totally pure no one can pass these insane purity tests that they're imposing on these guys. And then, yes, make him pay a penalty. This this is this is revenge. You know, this is this is trying to silence viewpoints. So the big build up to Clarence Thomas and Camille who are hanging out together and and whether you're going to out me. It's not just Republicans. OK, it's just it's reasonable people on the other side of the cancel culture nonsense. And I really feel like we have to fight fire with fire. They won't listen to reason. We have to hurt them. They need skin in the game. They need to understand that if they pursue this insane behavior much longer, we're going to hurt them. We're going to turn it and do it right back to them.

But Clarence Thomas is saying we have to take the high road, Camille. So thoughts on that? Well, I agree with him. And interestingly, I didn't know that there were cameras in the room that were broadcasting at the time that that conversation was happening. So I asked him a question after he said that, I just asked if he thought conservatives were living up to that, to that, uh, charge to, to take the moral high road, to, to conduct themselves in political arenas in a way that, you know, comports with their values rather than kind of trying to pursue like the lowest common denominator tactics and saying, well, we'll fight

fire with fire and try to get our opponents fired from their jobs as well. I'll say this. I think if you have values and if cancel culture isn't what you want, to use a phrase that I have very complicated relationship with, then I think it is your responsibility to not only model the correct behavior, but to articulate an actual defense that's credible and that is persuasive about why it's important for us to have a political and a social cultural context that we can all share together that isn't just something that is governed by you did the bad thing, you must go forever. Permanent excommunication from your institution. And I think it is well and good to point out hypocrisy. And to the extent there are stories about a dean of a university

or a professor who was carrying on illicit affairs with their students, that's newsworthy. It is appropriate to publish those stories. And it's appropriate for them to be censored for that behavior to the extent that is inconsistent with the values of the institution. But I think that pursuing those strategies as a way to try and get the other team to kind of back down is misguided. And I think that it is, one has to acknowledge it's at least as likely to inspire a downward spiral as opposed to-

That's what Jonathan Haidt said. Have your values become the ones, the ones that you say are your values anyways, become the ones that we all share together because it's mutually assured destruction. And I just don't think I see a lot of evidence of mutually assured destruction. And I just don't think I see a lot of evidence of mutually assured destruction as a value working in the culture war context. What I see is a reactionary spiral.

And I've seen it play out pretty consistently in the current culture war, quite frankly, where everyone seems to abandon their values. And the only value that matters is whether or not the other team loses. I think there's a way of doing this. That is a bridge between what Megan says and what you say, Camille, which is to apply the exact same standards that they use for other people to drag them through the mud and to destroy them. Like what has happened to Roland Fryer, who by the way, is, you know, not only the nicest, funniest man, he's very funny guy. He's also done research that actually doesn't align with or aligns more with what people on the left think too, but they ignore that because he's,

because he said, you know, black men are stopped more often by the police and they have more aggressive- Everything's short of killing. He said it's worse, even for compliant black suspects. Exactly. And just saying that other thing was enough to put him in the crosshairs. But my issue with this is, I mean, apply the same standards while trying to change those standards, rather than just abandoning everything at one time and saying, let's destroy, destroy, destroy. I mean, let's apply the same standard to them while we try to undermine their system. Because I mean, I think of something like there was an interaction of a woman and a young black, he's probably 13, 14 or something. Camille remember

this because we talked about it on the show, who was accused of, the woman accused him of stealing her phone. It was at a hotel in downtown New York. And he hadn't. And the woman was arrested and she was not white, by the way. I believe she was, you know, half Asian, half Hispanic, doesn't matter. But she was arrested. Yeah, she was white passing. She was white passing and she was arrested. And this thing went to court and the rest of it. And, you know, my thought when I see something like that is, you know, that's a false accusation. She's not being tried for racism. You can't try somebody for that. It's a false accusation. And I live in, in observe a universe in which the false accusation of racism is made every day with no sanction. And it's actually encouraged. I mean, there's, there's, you know, what I hope

is that these people can stop doing this sort of thing because there's some sanction on the other end. There's no penalty for falsely accusing somebody of racism. You just say it, fling it out there. If it sticks, it sticks. Great. It's like napalm. It's burning the skin and they're going to be screwed. If it doesn't, ho-hum, we'll just walk on from this. But, you know, that thing is like the woman who makes this accusation ends up in court.

I just think these false accusations have to carry more sting because I have seen so many lives destroyed. And you mentioned Roland. I've met him one time. I had a lovely interaction with him. But people I do know very well who have gone through this, and some of whom I know because they went through this, because they had called me and said, what do I do about this? And I have watched their lives be completely destroyed before any due process. And the pile on too, because everybody piles on Twitter and the rest of it, particularly journalists to say, I'm on the good guy side here.

I'm one of the good people. I think this person is bad. I think what they're accused of is bad. I'm not sure what they did it, but the accusation is pretty bad. I'm going to make my objection known. That has gone so far in this culture that I think we need to turn up the heat a little bit on people who make false accusations. Well, I love that. And speaking of false accusations, has one been made against Johnny Depp? I know the guys are into the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard trial. We're going to pick it up there. And guess what? A false accusation was made against your humble anchor. And I'm going to tell you that story, too. Wait until you hear what people accuse me of falsely and wrongly.

And I've got the proof. That's next. You guys made some big news with the fifth column. By the way, I love that you were at the Comedy Cellar. Spectacular that you did a live show there. So what's the latest? How can people find you? Just go to wethefifth.substack.com.

Correct. And subscribe right away. Right away. Subscribe for free. But the really fun way to subscribe is by giving us money. Right. You'll feel better. We'll feel better.

It's better for everyone yes and you would have gotten access to tickets to the comedy seller show which we put out to subscribers and they sold out before all the plebs before all the cheapskates could even get to them so that's amazing yeah i mean congratulations you must have i mean especially in new york city that's not easy right like how you- We had two of the most New York people on stage with us, which was Colin Quinn and Michael Rappaport, guys who still have New York accents. Michael Rappaport's busy. He just hosted for Wendy Williams. Did you see that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So confused. He took a break to come hang out with us, which was great. Like, his career path confuses me, right? I knew him from the movie, was it what was the movie he was and it was so good with natalie portman and uma thurman um and the and uh oh come on uma thurman was totally delightful in it anyway he was in that beautiful girls is that it yeah might be yes that was it beautiful girls so good so worth your time if you haven't seen it and then why am i spending all Girls. Is that it? Yeah. Might be. Yes, that was it. Beautiful girls. So good.

So worth your time if you haven't seen it. And then why am I spending all this time on Michael Rappaport? I'm abandoned. I don't know. He's a hardworking man. He's a hardworking man. Yeah. Well, then he had an ugly breakup with Dave Portnoy, I think.

Yes, I think they're in the lawsuit. Then he's sitting in for Wendy Williams. Then he's with you guys. I can't keep track of this guy. I don't know what's going on there. But anyway, congrats. Not sure that he can either. One thing we'll say about Substack is part of the reason why he moved is they're really,

really good about protecting their partners, their creators, their whatever from any kind of free speech battle. They are against cancel culture and the mob. And that is part of their selling attraction and organizing principle. Obviously, given the foul mouth of especially Moynihan, but also Camille says a lot of terrible things too. I was about to say something and then I realized that we're on Sirius and I just didn't want to point out. It's like you've never been here before. Sirius, you can say it.

That's not true because we used to have the call used to be on serious until they stopped syndicating it because matt wells was swearing too much no joke i swear all the time what do you mean my audience my audience will be the first to tell you i swear all the time though i tried to stop i think it was on it like sunday at like noon or something yeah it's like you're like you're right after Cardinal Dolan. Well, that's, yeah. That's a bad form, guys. We tape at night and sometimes get into the supply a little bit.

We do get into the supply. That's kind of one of those. Jumbos! Yo! Yeah, we have jumbos all the time. We're politically incorrect. But, you know, if people want to pony up and actually subscribe, you can subscribe for free, but pay,

because you get an extra episode every week, and it's much raunchier and more horrible. Yeah. And you want to support the guys. We want to see you do well. So, yes, I agree. Go and pay and check it out. All right. Now, Amber and Johnny are still at it.

She's expected, I guess, to rest her defense any day now. And then he is expected to bring in Kate Moss, I think, tomorrow in rebuttal because apparently the reports are that she she slipped up and she opened the door to Kate Moss testifying by saying she she alleges that Johnny almost threw her down the stairs. She, Amber, when she had some, one of the infamous exchanges was when he allegedly almost hit her sister and then she hit Johnny. And then Johnny, according to the sister's testimony last week, punched Amber several times in the face. That is what the sister claimed. And that Amber said, as I thought I might go down the stairs, I had this flash of like Kate Moss and stairs as if, you know, there had been a report that maybe when he was dating Kate Moss, he threw her down the stairs. But apparently, oh, we have this out of the sister in part talking about the alleged abuse. Here's Amber Heard's sister on the stand last week. Watch.

But I'm standing up there talking. I'm standing up there. I'm at the top of the stairs with my back to the stairs. And that's when Johnny runs up the stairs. And my, again, I'm facing Amber. He comes up behind me, strikes me in the back, kind of just somewhere over here. He strikes me in the back. I hear Amber shout, don't hit my fucking sister. She smacks him, lands one one and then he grabs at that point that's when travis runs up the stairs after amber landed one and but by that time johnny had already grabbed amber by the hair with one hand and was whacking her repeatedly in the face with the other as i was standing there travis pulls them apart i get amber into mine i close the doors behind me and lock them.

I then hear Johnny's voice shouting. Never mind. Sorry. I hear Johnny's voice shouting. I fucking hate you. I hate you both. You fucking cunts. You fucking whores.

So you can swear on Sirius XM. And that's why we could play that soundbite but uh let me just finish my point on Kate so Kate Kate Moss is apparently going to take a stand and say she's expected to say Johnny Depp was nothing but a perfect gentleman to her and that actually she once fell off of like as she was coming down the stairs and he he caught her and tended to her and you know I think his side is looking forward to offering this sort of character witness because there's nobody in his past love life who said he hit them. Ellen Barkin, she took the stand and said he was an angry guy and got extremely drunk and, you know,

intoxicated on drugs and so on and would like throw things, but not at me and so on. Anyway, that witness testimony was pretty compelling because it wasn't Amber and it wasn't Johnny. It was a sister. And I grant it's a sister, blood relative, but I thought she was pretty credible and told a story that was rather disturbing. And I wonder what you guys think about where this case stands and what it means. Seems like a really, really healthy relationship. No matter what celebrities understand, you're like, God, this is the relationship that I want never to happen in my life. But no, I mean, the thing about it is that watching this play out, and I don't want to step on Camille's lines here,

because there is nobody more interested in this case than Camille Foster. I mean, if you think the Cooper, the double Cooper stuff, I mean, Roetzel, the forthcoming Amber Heard. And the Supreme Court, he's like a legal correspondent at heart. Correspondent. He knows nothing about law. He's never studied law, drinks too much. Never been in trouble with the law. That's for sure. He's like, Amber

Heard is lying. No. By the way, I just want to say separately, the reason I haven't seen her in anything is that watching her on the stand, she's a very bad actress. And there's just kind of dramatic flair and everything. I agree with that. And the reason that it's captured a lot of people's attention is, you know, number one, it's obviously celebrities on the stand, weirdly, in Virginia. And, you know, they're coming up and you get to hear it from their mouths.

It's being televised. But it's also the first time after the kind of Me Too stuff where you hear something being adjudicated, right? You actually hear in court these people arguing and saying, oh, this stuff is actually complicated. And it looks like the guy might be a drunk idiot, which I think is probably a fair characterization, you know, from a lot of the stories that I've heard, but maybe not violent or maybe responding to violence, or maybe she's actually the one who's precipitating this violence, which is kind of different than what we've been talking about. It's such a he said, she said. It's like one of them is lying to us. Yes, and that's what it always is. But we always get the news story about these famous people. The famous people disappear from their Netflix show. The professor disappears from his classes.

And that's that. And now you get to see this thing back and forth. And I think that that's why it's so interesting to people beyond the celebrity aspect is actually to see these things adjudicated in the courtroom. Finally. Yeah. Camille? Remember Michelle Goldberg's piece from the New York Times last week, which was Amber Heard and the death of me too. And I remember being struck reading it by a

bit of a passage in there where she describes how if Johnny manages to win, how this will be so terrible because all sorts of men who find themselves accused will want to go and file these defamation lawsuits and essentially put themselves through the same ridiculous, heinous ordeal of having all of your dirty laundry aired in court, which I just don't think that that's true. And I also don't think that it is an inherently bad thing for people to develop an interest in evidence related to claims of severe abuse. If I am interested in adjudicating whether or not this is factually accurate, that is progress. That is meaningful progress from a place where if women were disbelieved before, if someone was suggesting, well, no, we have to

believe all of them. No, the appropriate standard is if something terrible happened here or may have happened here, we as a society, as a culture, have a genuine interest in figuring out what went wrong and how. And the person who has been wronged here should be kind of protected and cared for. And to the extent some sort of compensation is due, they should earn it. And the person who did wrong, they should be punished. But you have to actually care about the truth for there to be any semblance of justice here. And we, I think, went obviously too far with Me Too as a standard, because it isn't a standard in an important respect, and now seem to be coming back to a place where we can have an honest appraisal of the facts, the complicated, messy facts. And I think that's a very healthy and good thing.

Me Too has been weaponized to take down men who are unpopular for one reason or another. That doesn't mean it never happens and that every Me Too accuser is lying and weaponizing it. But the same thing with the race, you know, with the race situation, race too has been weaponized to take down people. Doesn't mean it's never a factor. Well, we're really no more clear on that case than we were. I mean, the jury's going to go one way or the other, but I don't think we're going to walk away knowing the truth. People have their minds made up.

They're going to believe what they believe right now, no matter what that jury says. But listen, back to my case, okay? Because this is really what I wanted to talk to you guys about. Let me tell you something. I moved to Connecticut, right? We're new. We're new to Connecticut, new to our schools and so on, trying to make friends. Well, not long ago, a friend of ours came to us and said, hey, did Megan see a bunch of seniors, senior guys in this restaurant boozing it up while underage and call the cops and call the head of the school on the boys?

And Doug was like, hell no. He's like, we haven't even been at that restaurant. And then he asked me, he was like, you weren't at this restaurant calling the cops and call it like right now. I'm like, of course not. What is it? What is this? And he said, all we know at the school is that it was a mom, a Connecticut mom who has a podcast. And I'm like, well, I agree that I meet those two criteria, but I did not do any of this. And so apparently the rumor spread that it was me, it was me, it was me. And I'm trying to make new friends here. Meanwhile, half the people are running around thinking you called the cops on my kid for having an underage drink. Screw you. I'm like looking at everybody now like it wasn't me.

It wasn't me. It wasn't me. Well, guess what? Now America knows it wasn't me it wasn't me wasn't me well guess what now america knows it wasn't me because guess who it was oh no outed herself on her podcast it was real housewife bethany frankel oh my god the lady who doesn't she make booze she makes like skinny margarita she doesn't want underage men drinking it apparently and people drink her booze she makes like skinny margarita she doesn't want underage men drinking it apparently and she people drink her booze underage kids she don't she went this whole thing on her podcast here's just a snippet listen there was a group and they were drinking these large cocktails and they all just look so young to me right and boys sometimes look younger they're not wearing tons of makeup and promiscuous clothing they just looked so young so those drinks came out i checked it i thought about it i remember saying like

how is this restaurant serving them and my daughter and they're so stupid they're talking about the prom in a restaurant they're consuming alcohol and i see them get into cars and drive away now you just fucking put me over the edge like we went from the giant cocktail to the beer back to the bottled beer back to the shot. So, by the way, I took a picture of the table three times. These guys drive away. I take a picture of the car and the license plate. I find myself on the phone calling the police. I'm like, these guys drank excessively.

They're underage. But I make an agreement with myself and I say to my friend, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to call the headmaster of the school. So I told the story and I said, I have a picture. I'm going to send you a picture. Can you tell me if these are students from your school? And they said, these are students from my school. But they said, we will not expel these kids, but there will be very serious ramifications. Like I'm down for the parents knowing possibly something legal. So it wasn't me. It was Bethany Frankel. And I have to say, you know, she said she didn't want them expelled. But I have to tell you,

not only was it not me, but I would never do that. but that if i saw if i actually saw a bunch of underage kids in a bar boozing i would ignore it probably to be perfectly honest with you um and then if i saw them to get getting behind the wheel of a car i i would probably say either you're calling the uber or i am or we can call your mom that would be another plan but i think you're mad at the restaurant by the way she she was like i'll handle the restaurant she said to the head of school but like to call their school to call the cops to try it like i know she says she didn't want them expelled but you really can blow up the kid's life over doing something that honestly let's face it the vast majority of us all did not drink and

drive but she doesn't know if there was a designated driver and so on and so forth what do you make of my wrongful accusation and the fact that i've been vindicated and how did bethany handle in your view well first of all you're wrong about not all of us not drinking and driving because morning hands from boston i've never done that so i didn't say driving i said underage drinking i never underage drank yeah yeah never at a restaurant but i can give you the address somebody get j somebody get Jumbo's back on the line? Yeah. I mean, by the way, she, that voice, by the way, good Lord.

And just for the record, your clothing cannot be for insurers. She's like, they've got the clothing. They dress like whores. I'm like, just let them have fun. Good Lord, woman. But yeah, I mean, it is crazy that that that um your thing is to rat on random kids that you don't even know if they go to school there you're trying you're saying you're trying to track them down she's like i mean i mean the

headmaster assure me they weren't getting expelled well did they get kicked off the sports team did like like this is a very aggressive again you don't know did all of them drink the same maybe one stayed sober man like are you sure that like this is to me beyond and so i just really wanted to get on the record she blames it on you i had nothing to do with it blame megan kelly she'll take the fall i don't know why she sounds like that but close enough guys thank you so much for the legal correspondence and in-depth reporting. And we look forward to paying for more of you at Substack. Camille, Matt, Michael, to be continued.

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