The Megyn Kelly Show - Cultural Drift From Reality, and Depp Fallout, with Red Scare Podcast Hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova | Ep. 336

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, hosts of the Red Scare podcast, to talk about Ilya Shapiro's Georgetown resignation, ideological failures of elite colleges, the collapse of America, cultural drift away from reality, comparisons of America now with the old USSR, the decline in trust in institutions, the focus on identity on the left, the viral moment with Dasha taking on Infowars, their interview with Alex Jones, Elon Musk and Twitter, fallout from the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard verdict, the next phase of #MeToo, predicting Trump's election, the success of the show "Succession," Feral Girl Summer, how they deal with negative press or a Twitter mob, 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 and happy Monday. Coming up, we have the hosts of the Red Scare podcast here. Judging by the comments on social media over the weekend, you're as excited for this conversation as I am. But first, we need to bring you an update, a very big follow up this morning to our exclusive interview just this past Friday with Ilya Shapiro. Now, in case you missed it, he's a constitutional law expert who sent a poorly worded tweet about President Obama, President Biden's decision to select a Supreme Court nominee based on race and gender.

He was arguing that they should have chosen another guy from the D.C. Circuit who happened to be an Indian American and that anybody else would be lesser qualified. And in lamenting that it wouldn't be this one judge, he suggested. And instead, we're going to get a lesser black woman. And the left ran with it, not the left, but just sort of the woke left was completely ungenerous in their interpretation of it, even though he immediately deleted it and explained what he had meant. He just meant anybody other than this one judge, in his view, would be lesser qualified.

Well, they smelled blood. He was about to take over this big legal center at Georgetown, and they tried to kill him. I mean, they just got him completely on the ropes. He was about to take over this big legal center at Georgetown, and they tried to kill him. I mean, they just got him completely on the ropes. He was vilified for it. No one would accept his explanation, even though this guy has a totally professional, laudable, admirable history as a classical liberal. And he was put into a kind of purgatory by his new employer, Georgetown Law, while Georgetown took four months to determine if that one tweet should lead to the end of Ilya Shapiro's stint at Georgetown before it even began. All right. Finally, they determined, OK, you didn't actually even work here before we foisted this misery on you, this four months investigation. And never mind when you actually sent out the tweet. So we're going to let you start at Georgetown Law. Well, Ilya had just received that news the day before he came on our show and listening to him talk about what the requirements were going to be for him at Georgetown, what the dean had said publicly, even in announcing he could join Georgetown after all this, and Ilya's commitment to stand by his more originalist views of the Constitution, which they knew about in advance. It's a little bit more conservative leaning, more like Justice Scalia than it is like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We were forecasting with him in that interview. This is going to be a hell of

a bumpy road, even from this point forward. Keep in mind, of course, there's been huge outbreaks of upset on the Georgetown campus, the Black Student Law Association demanding reparations because of this one demanding that they not be criticized for their criticism of Ilya because they she claimed that they were the descendants of slaves. I mean, it got absolutely absurd. One demanding a cry room for students in the wake of that one tweet. It was insane. But in the end, not really because they supported his right to freedom of speech, but because they found his right to freedom of speech, but because they found a technicality saying he didn't yet work there when he sent it.

Georgetown said, OK, you can come. Well, today, unbelievable news on it. Before we get to that, let me set it up with a bit of Friday's interview. The dean put out a statement attacking me and calling me an appalling racist. It was honestly, Megan, probably the second worst day of my life. The worst being when my mom passed when I was in college. There were physical manifestations in my health, great personal and professional instability. And today I'm with you

the day after that purgatory ended. My whole team was talking during the break like this isn't going to last. How can this last? Whether that is going to be feasible now, you know, the proof will be in the pudding. That is an interesting question. And I hope to make a go of it. But if it becomes the environment becomes truly hostile, then I'll have to see what the next step will be. Well, just 72 hours later, Ilya Shapiro is out at Georgetown. He resigned. He resigned after that interview, writing in a letter to Georgetown Dean William Treanor that upon consultation with

counsel, family and trusted advisors, it's become apparent that his remaining at Georgetown has become untenable, saying there's now a target on his back, making it impossible for him to do the job that he had been hired to do in, quote, a hostile work environment. We called it. I'll say that we called it. And this is part of a growing and very disturbing trend. We covered a couple of weeks ago the turfing of lauded Professor Roland Fryer at Harvard. He got sidelined. His entire research lab got taken away from him, even though he had tons of, the youngest tenured black professor in Harvard history. He had the nerve to do studies on policing and whether it leads to a disproportionate killing of black men and concluded it did not. And that, among other equally provocative studies, got him turfed. Now, they blamed it on some trumped up me to allegation, but they've turfed him. They can't fire him, But he's effectively been rendered feckless at Harvard. And then it just happened to Professor Joshua Katz at Princeton.

Roland's at Harvard. This guy, Josh Katz, is at Princeton. Same thing, by the way, a trumped up me to charge from years ago, 2006. He had a consensual affair with a student. It was adjudicated. He was turfed for a year to pay for his crime. He was brought back now because he wrote an article objecting to some of the demands being made by the black professors, like an extra paid semester of sabbatical versus the white and the other race professors. He spoke out, said that that's ridiculous. We shouldn't do that. Suddenly, the Me Too thing reared its head. The same case. They want to go back, go back over it again. And he just got fired for not being cooperative in that investigation. Now you see Ilya Shapiro. One poorly worded tweet, which he immediately deleted and apologized for and explained the context of, effectively subjected to a hostile work environment to where Ilya, a very smart guy, realized, I'm walking in the lion's den. This is all set up. And by the way, the words he chose, I'll tell you as a lawyer, a hostile work environment. I consulted with counsel. Remaining in my job was untenable. I would suggest to you, Ilya being a talented lawyer, he's setting himself up for a lawsuit, as he should. Because your boss can fire you by saying you're fired. And then if you have grounds, you can sue him or her. But they can also make it absolutely impossible for you to work at the place. All these guys, I mean, Roland Fryer might

have that too, where you, it's like, sure, come on to Georgetown. It'd be great for you. You're going to have to meet with every upset student and explain to them all why you're such a racist. And you're going to have to go through DEI training from now to the cows come home. Enjoy. Good luck on your research and running the law center. So we will see whether that's where this goes, but I'm glad, I'm glad he's gone. I'm glad he did it because they don't deserve him. Ilya Shapiro is too good for Georgetown. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Princeton, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Harvard, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Harvard, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. To lose guys like this, brilliant professors who offer a little, a little ideological diversity, and every time they try to, you cut off their hand. You tell them you find some other reason why they have to be silenced. And Georgetown, you were the most disgusting,

because while you did this to him, you touted your free speech policy, which I pointed out to Ilya on the show on Friday, an episode you should go back and listen to. It made no sense. Well, I found a way, the dean said, I found a way to uphold our free speech policy, which allows for diversity of viewpoint, but also reminding everyone that you must be cautious in such speech and sensitive not to offend. Well, in today's day and age, that's a silencer. It's a total silencer. He saw it. I saw it. The dean understood. And Ilya was going in there like a lamb to the slaughter. So we'll continue to follow that. And the other nonsense that happens on these college campuses, I'll tell you what, my eldest

is only in sixth grade, just finished sixth grade today. I'm glad we have a few years to figure out what comes next. It's no longer clear that you want to send them to any of these universities, any of them. So I'm glad we have a few years to figure it out. All right. And I'm glad today to be joined by two very smart and interesting thinkers. In addition to being smart, it's almost better to be an interesting thinker who are here by popular demand, including my own. screwed up Dasha and Anna Kachian, the hosts of the Red Scare podcast, known to me as Dasha and Anna, are with us today. They are uncommon unifiers in the most ironic way possible.

Their cynicism and loyalty to no one has brought together people of all ideologies as their growing audience embraces their heterodox and often unpredictable points of view. We're excited to have them on the show and to bring you their perspective. Dasha, Anna, thank you for being here. Thanks for having us. You know, I can we just start now? You don't need to know Ilya Shapiro to comment on the opening story, but isn't it infuriating? I mean, I know you two often describe yourselves as people who with Russian origins originally are unoffendable. That's how I feel too. I always say that about myself. It's my Irish roots, just basically unoffendable. It's really, really hard. And yet this crowd running around demanding cry rooms because of his stupid tweet

has effectively now made it impossible for this great guy to take over this law center. And it's such a waste. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I guess I don't buy that anyone really is offended. Yeah. And I, but also on the flip side, you have to remember that things that seem like horrible travesties or errors are often blessings in disguise because they kind of lay bare the underlying mechanisms and alienate people and make them rethink things and turn them away from these massive institutions that are now coming under a crisis of credibility. That's very true. That's actually very true. I mean, I laugh because there was a young student,

I'll let her remain nameless for purposes of this discussion because i'm not sure she wants this public but actually she wrote an article about it on barry weiss's substack so it's fine um but she wrote she wrote an article uh about me for brown university and then brown university didn't want to publish it because they don't like me. What a shock. And they thought she should have been harder on me, what have you. And she wrote a piece for Barry Weiss saying this is ridiculous. You know, we have to have opposing viewpoints represented. And I think this young woman, who definitely was, you know, more of the left, has had a metamorphosis of her own as she sees viewpoint censorship pop up, perfectly normal mainstream views be labeled as racist or sexist or unspeakable. So you're right, Anna. I mean,

this kind of thing writ large, which it is now, can have the opposite effect of the one they intend. And you have to remember that, you know, haters are just fans who don't know it yet. And so any kind of critique or pushback from the peanut gallery has to be weighed with like a grain of salt. Often it's a major, major compliment. But I think the trick is also to not play into those dynamics, to not accept the terms or premises of the argument, which so many of us are guilty of doing. Like how? Give me an example. Well, in sort of agreeing to gin up the conflict, I'm not sure myself if there's an easy way out

because sometimes you do owe people like a response or a defense, but it seems that people are playing into this kind of like toxic attention economy. Which is why Ilya leaving Georgetown is ultimately kind of an alpha. Yeah. It's just sort of opting out of, of the discourse at large, which is an option that I don't think people realize they, they have. Well,

they, they had said, I think it was Roland Fryer at Harvard. Could have been, it could have been the other guy at Princeton. But one of them, both of them facing these sort of trumped up me too things. The conditions of staying were basically, you have to pull aside the students at the beginning of every year and confess to them all your sins. Oh, I'm sure that's going to happen.

They want that. Even that we know doesn't work because the minute that you start issuing confessions or apologia, they smell blood. Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, sometimes it's a condition of you maintaining your employment and you realize there's no other way forward. I mean, we've seen that happen many times. I'm thinking, oh, and it didn't work, but I'm thinking of Chris Harrison of The Bachelor. Remember his, it was the saddest apology of any apology I've ever seen because it was so clearly just rehearsed and repeated by like a hostage. And then they fired him anyway. The ABC fired him anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and you have to know, like in the case of, um, Ilya Shapiro, I don't know much about the specifics, but, um, he has the privilege, the option to opt out, um, which is a good thing because it sets a powerful example.

That's true. But most people don't know., exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, it's funny. It's like, I feel like my own, my own dust up with NBC happened so early in this whole curve. It was just, everything was so much less clear then, you know, it was like less clear what was happening in our society, less clear how these things were being used. And one of the first, on our very first episode, we had somebody, I know you guys both admire Glenn Greenwald on the program. I love him too. And he's also an unpredictable thinker. And he asked me, Are you sorry? Would you take back your apology now? You know, a couple years later. No, because the messaging had gone out from so many corners that were not my fans that I had said this terrible thing that basically I wanted blackface to be revived. You know, I was like a pusher of it as opposed to just saying, hey, when did we go from A to B? Because this used to be done without problem. And now we have such a recoiling to it.

And and so I said, no, I wouldn't take it back. But I sure would handle it differently. You know what I mean? Today's day and age, I definitely would have handled it much differently. Like the first thing I would have done was gone out there and showed the 50,000 shows on NBC where people were actually wearing blackface within the past two years of them claiming to be offended. And that's kind of what Ilya did in his piece in the Wall Street Journal, which he now

announces today. He goes through not for nothing. Just a couple of examples of the professors at Georgetown who have received no trouble. They're fine. Whose speech was defended. Professor Carol Christine Fair, School of Foreign Service, back in the Kavanaugh hearings. Look at this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist's arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists

laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus, we castrate their corpses and feed them to the swine. Yes. Georgetown said this was protected speech. No problem. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, the talk about the credibility

problem in academia, right? I mean, I went to a women's college where I was, you know, sort of indoctrinated with kind of extreme feminist rhetoric. And now that school is now defunct and doesn't exist anymore. I would like to think that's where these are going. But, you know, the endowments are so big. But I do kind of think that, you know, Victor Davis Hanson, I love him. He's a great commentator. You guys should consider talking to him.

He's an independent. He publishes in more conservative publications, but he really is an independent thinker. And he had a piece out today, which I want to talk to you about because, well, you'll see why. But the title of it is The Sovietization of American Life. I think you'll like it. You'll understand what he's saying. But he points out how now these universities and these institutions do this at their own peril because what does it mean now in today's day and age to get a degree from Harvard? Does it mean you're brilliant or does it mean you walked the perfect line on the necessary woke boxes you know like you played that game just right yeah or your parents went to harvard yeah or your parents

went to harvard he said that or you're so that was actually his second point i'll i'll read it to you because you'll you'll appreciate this um he says stand by well i don't know where it went but it was perfect you gotta find it it's Victor Davis Hanson that piece today in American Greatness I love that this is also a show where you struggle to find quotes on air we often encounter that

we do that often so much information I try to cram in before you come on. But sometimes the little hamster stops running on the wheel when it's actually go time. So now I think. Yeah, go ahead, Dasha. We were actually just talking sort of about the Sovietization of the way in which America is kind of mirroring the late Soviet period when things were starting to sort of fall apart and people were like, at least on the surface, pretending to participate in,

you know, the ideology of socialism, but no one actually really, really believed that. Wow. I wonder if Victor Davis Hanson is a listener to Red Scare. It's, you never know. Yeah, so let's talk about that, because this is how he puts it.

He begins the piece as follows. One day, historians will look back at the period beginning with the COVID lockdowns of spring of 2020 through the midterm elections of 2022 to understand how America for over two years lost its collective mind and turned into something unrecognizable and antithetical to its founding principles. Sovietization, he says, is perhaps the best diagnosis of the pathology. It refers to the subordination of policy expression, popular culture, and even thought to ideological mandates. Ultimately, such regimentation destroys a state since dogma wars with and defeats meritocracy, creativity, and freedom. The subordination of policy expression, pop culture, and even thought to ideological mandates. Man, that's so true. That's exactly what we're going through now yeah and that's exactly right but i would also point out that ideological mandates exist in some shape or form in all societies and in all cultures the problem occurs when the general underwriting ideologies are are decoupled from the sentiments of most people to

the point that they start to feel um gaslit or Like, give me an example of that. Like the idea, the kind of extremely progressive, like racecraft and gendercraft ideology circulating in elite spheres right now, which I think are confusing and alienating to the vast majority of people. Right. But people feel as if they're meant to say, if you don't think, for example, that children should be taking purity blockers, that you're somehow like condemning trans people at large to like a life of indignity and death or something.

Yeah. There's like plenty of examples. The idea that kind of white supremacy is our greatest sin as a nation. I think that these kinds of ideas don't jive with the sentiments of, you know, like 80% of the American populace across kind of demographic lines. Defunding the wholeheartedly. Yeah, exactly. That's why on the show, I'm always trying to make a distinction between the left and the woke because it's not the same group. And I've talked to Crystal Ball about this many times. And she wants me to stop saying even like extreme left because she, like you, is a Bernie gal. You know, she's like, I guess you could call me extreme left, but she's not woke and she's sensible.

She just has an attachment to certain economic policies that she thinks will help the working class and others in a way that they haven't so far. But she's she's she doesn't push this nonsense and she sees what a lie it is. I think, yeah, and the chief aim there is really to create a sense of moral fatigue in people to make them give up, to make them lose energy. And in that way, the United States in the present day does resemble a great deal the USSR on the eve of collapse. I'm very fond of that line that's attributed to Mark Twain, that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Yeah, like the DEI committees and stuff are very reminiscent of like soviet era culture commissars that were like you know approving things that fell in line with the dominant ideology except

in america right now it's the sort of yeah woke liberalism which is why me too gets weaponized the way that it does yeah i'm dying to talk to you about that and about some of the writings we've seen in the wake of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard verdict last week. Before we get to that, though, I definitely want to just, can you guys just explain your backgrounds for people who are not familiar with Red Scare or Dasha, in your case, Succession, which is where I saw you for the very first time, which you play an amazing role in that very popular show. But just give us a bit of your background and why it's called Red Scare.

I was born in Minsk, Belarus, and I moved when I was three in the early 90s to Las Vegas, where I grew up. Nice. Vegas. Big change. Yeah. Go ahead, Anna. And I was born in Moscow, and I came to the United States when I was five years old and

settled in New Jersey with my family. Also big. So you have parents who were born and raised over in what used to be the USSR. And in my experience, people of that generation with those roots really object to what's happening right now in our society because they've lived it and they can see where it's going. So, I mean, how are you, are you imparting, have they imparted that knowledge to you or do you have any independent memories of what things were like when you were really little? My parents are fairly young. My parents are sort of Gen X. So they grew up, like they were what

was called the thaw generation. Cause they were born, my mom was born in 70. Right. So, so they didn't really, they, they're not as right wing as a lot of like older people from the post Soviet States are. But definitely, I mean, when COVID, COVID I think is a good marker of time. Cause I remember, yeah, like not being able to buy flour at the grocery store. And, yeah, really having this feeling of like, wow, my parents sort of fled this post-Soviet regime for me to just kind of like end up back in this situation again. Right. Right. Yeah.

COVID lockdowns were eerily similar. Yeah. Go ahead, Anna. No, I think if you look at the situation it is very parallel my parents are a little bit older than dasha's they're boomers i think they came to the united states um hoping to reach some sort of freedom and prosperity that wasn't available in the soviet union and i think that they were sorely disappointed. And this was a great tragedy. I do, for example, count my father as a death of despair. He died when he was 53 in the United States, but I think he very much belongs to the Soviet lost generation of people roughly his age who were outlived by their parents from the war generation. So three of my grandparents lived into their 90s, and meanwhile my father and two of my uncles are gone.

That's awful. And we have that here and we have that there as well, the deaths of despair in America. That's a shame of ours that we continue to not address um so how did the two of you connect because you've formed this podcast Red Scare which becomes very very popular in very interesting corners I mean it wasn't just was it just your Soviet background or how did you find each other on Twitter yeah we were friends on Twitter. We had some mutual friends in New York. I used to live in LA. When I moved to New York in 2018, we started a podcast. Yeah, partly because we had this similar Russian-American identity, but also we had been talking about similar things as they pertain to like burgeoning Me Too movement and like feminism on on twitter prior to starting the pod i wonder did you realize at that point that your sensibilities were more

heterodox i know that word gets overused and did you connect it to your family heritage i've never seen um my sensibility as heterodox i see it you know, very boilerplate and common sense. But yeah, it was certainly like a culture shock coming here and being confronted with like a different value system or like ideological paradigm. I've always said, you know, not that I want to do my greatest hits, but maybe I will that, you know, Russians are optimists masquerading as cynics and americans are cynics uh masquerading as optimists and that's not to deny that there's obviously a market streak of like cynicism and melancholy running through the russian sensibility but i think because they acknowledge it and own it they can more openly envision or imagine certain optimistic potentials,

whereas in America, I think the kind of confrontation with reality is habitually ignored. Well, it certainly seems to be the news of the day. I mean, that's how it feels, like reality staring us in the face, but we refuse to acknowledge it. We keep getting forced upon us this alternate reality that you know is not true. And yet so many of our institutions have been captured by people saying the same thing. You start to wonder whether you're the crazy one. And you know, am I the crazy one? All right. So I mentioned that Dasha is on succession. What I didn't tell you is that her I don't know if it was your first big on-cam moment, but just the very first thing that a lot of people saw of you. And it was at a Bernie Sanders rally or event at which she happened to get cornered by a correspondent, I'm going to use

that term generously, of InfoWars. And they had an exchange that went totally viral. Dasha became known as Sailor Socialist, or something like your sailor outfit, which is also worthy of discussion. But that's just a tease to keep them tuned over this quick commercial break. You will see Dasha in her little sailor outfit and see how she handled herself when confronted by this woman. All right, don't go away. More with Dasha and Anna right after this.

All right, so there you are, minding your own business, Dasha, at a Bernie event. And this is before. It wasn't at a Bernie event? I was not at a Bernie event, no. I was at South by Southwest. Oh, okay. Promoting a film that I co-wrote and starred in called Wobble Palace. Why was she bothering you about Bernie then?

I thought her whole premise was, I'm going to embarrass a Bernie supporter. He was doing a rally at South by Southwest, but I couldn't go to it because I had to go to the Getty Images portrait studio to get my photo taken which is why i was um wearing that like anime um because the film wobble palace takes place on the eve of the 2016 election i thought um if i dressed like an anime character it would sort of appeal to maybe like a 4chan demographic that might like the movie was my thinking that's brilliant and provocative and fun so she singled you out and she decided to to get into um bernie and his ideas and here's how that went uh soundbite one hi are you a fan of bernie sanders yeah i am what do you like about him um that he's a socialist why is socialism good are you like uh um i don't really want to do this what is this for

um we're asking people why they like bernie sanders for info wars yes we are in four um i think he has a lot of integrity. I like his value system, like what he stands for. Exactly what values? Eating the rich. Eating the rich. Well, are you aware that Bernie Sanders lives in $3 million homes? No, I was not aware of that.

I just want people to have health care, honey. I don't want, like... Then Hugo Chavez. Oh, my God. when he was taking power in venezuela people have like worms in your brain honestly i mean you're the one who can't answer the question what question the question is why you support socialism you can have you can have health care without socialism i want people to have free health care why free pays for it why would the government pay for it because i think everyone has a right to have healthcare.

Okay, so what happened after that clip, Dasha? We went our separate ways. We were both very scared. I was definitely very afraid and could sense that Ashton was as well. And then Infowars posted it. definitely like very afraid um and could sense that ashton was as well and then yeah and then i guess info wars hosted it um and then it someone tweeted it and started to circulate online and then it was on john oliver or something um so yeah it went quite it went quite viral i feel like what was so compelling about it was just your manner, your affect.

There's something different about you in a really compelling way. Like you don't know what you're going to say next. And yet you really do project, I don't know if this is real, extremely comfortable in your own skin. Even though you say I felt nervous and you said I don't want to do this, you to me project very comfortable in your own skin. Thank you. Yeah. I, um, I, part of me definitely didn't want to do it, but then part of me, you know, being familiar with it for the first time, uh, want to seize on the opportunity. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I just want people to have healthcare, honey. That went totally viral. Everybody was like, who is this magnificent creature in the sailor outfit who speaks this way? Even people who disagreed with your points were fascinated by you. And that's what led to a viral moment. But this was not the beginning of your Hollywood career.

This was just in the midst of it. Yeah, sort of. Yeah. I was like an indie actress at the time. So now you two, once you came together and formed red scare would go on as i understand it to form kind of a friendship at least a professional relationship but definitely kind of seemed like more of a friendship with alex jones who's you know the creator and founder of info wars yeah we went to Austin to interview Alex Jones. So how did that go? And how did you wind up spending time with him? Well, when we started the podcast, my boyfriend had a premonition that it would end up with us shooting skeet with Alex Jones. And he was 100% correct.

It happened very organically. Yeah. How? Well, Alex Lee Moyer made a documentary called Alex's War that Anna's boyfriend did the score for. He also did the score for my film. And she sort of brokered the interview and we took her up on the opportunity to talk to him. Of course, because yeah.

Now, what were your impressions of him? He's a very friendly, charismatic, affable guy. I'm sure there's a part of him that's very troubled and tortured, especially with the colossal amount of fame that he has, which would make anybody go crazy. But I think that he's a fundamentally well-meaning guy and primarily important as an artist

who works in the mold of like a sad clown rather than like as like a political pundit what's fascinating yeah he on you know he's wrong about a lot of things but he has a lot of like clarity well i'll tell you something funny about alex jones um so i went to interview him as you may know and um he said all sorts of crazy things. Like, they sounded crazy. We didn't air most of them. It wasn't really about, you know, his theories on frogs and so on. But I did have my team go back and check.

Like, check it all out. And at NBC, they have, like, lots of fact checkers. And can I tell you, like, 98% of the stuff checked out. It was kind of crazy. You know, like, the number of things he actually is right about was pretty stunning to me. But of course, all of that sort of falls away because of what he did on the Newtown thing and not just Newtown, but there have been there been a few sort of targets of his that have been way, way off. And so it's changed the way a lot of people look at him and certainly Infowars. Yeah. And you have to remember that he, much like Glenn Greenwald, began his career as a critic of conservatism from the kind of liberal side. He very much has a kind of underlying social justice ethos like all Aquarius is and like Glenn yeah I think they both love truth as like an ideal

to aspire towards even if they you know Alex Jones uses hyperbole and conspiracy to sort of get at larger spiritual truths yeah like I'll give you that on the way he presents information on things like you know the there's like a goat with a human face.

I'm trying to remember some of the some of the things that we looked into. But there's just no getting around, you know, the lies that he pushed on Newtown and how pernicious they were and how how much pain they heaped on these families. You know, that was one of the reasons why I wanted to interview him. One of the reasons why our interview was very contentious. And, you know, it's still something that a lot of the Newtown families, they will never forgive Alex Jones for trying to say that they, that their children were not shot in the heads while they went to first grade on December 14th, 2012. And he's, you know, when I went down there going to interview him, I thought he was going to disavow it. And he didn't. He did not disavow it. He stuck by it and continued even that interview to suggest that the parents may have faked it. Well, when did you interview him?

It was in 2018. Okay. Yeah. Well, when we interviewed him, he seemed very contrite and remorseful, but I completely understand people who maybe don't buy what he's selling and feel like he's not being genuine or authentic. And, you know, it's not up to us to tell them that their feelings aren't valid. But I do believe, for my part, that he does feel apologetic over that incident. Well, and I have absolutely no problem with you going and talking to him. You know, that was one of the crazy things when I interviewed him was there was all this blowback for just talking to him. And we did a very hard hitting interview like nobody has done with Alex Jones.

I put that interview up against anything that's been done with him. But there was tons of blowback just for, quote, platforming him. Right. Just for platforming him. Right. Exactly. That's crazy, too. Like that's we really got no place where, as I've said many times, like we don't get to interview only like the perfect people. Right. The people who like are totally

the Dolly Parton's, the queen of England's, you know, like people who have no blemish on their record whatsoever. And he's a, you know, a massively influential thinker. So he's, you know, worth interrogating and worth talking to and worth. Yeah. Well, he certainly was back then. I mean, when I talked to him, the White House was retweeting Infowars press releases and, you know, pieces. So it was extraordinary, though he's not as influential today. I think rightfully some attention has been called to the hurt he's caused as well. In any event, that's Alex Jones. Let's talk about

what you guys think is sort of the big story right now, because my understanding is you are focused more on the class struggle in America at the moment than you are on the race struggle, the gender struggle, the LGBTQ struggle that is in all the news right now because of pride month um is that correct first of all am i am i right um uh i don't know that i would frame it exactly that way as like class reductionist yeah it would be called i think i'm i'm focused on um reality rather than utopianism so where do you think we're going on like cultural criticism i guess you say that you can you repeat that it's more cultural criticism than like political analysis now i think um for me at least it's like a an aesthetic critique an aesthetic project well how do you guys think we got this way you know

in the way victor davis hansen says we lost our ever-loving minds from the beginning of covid forward and we're sort of you know like the astronaut who gets disconnected from the rocket ship sort of being pulled out into this black hole and reality is the ship. Then we seem to be farther and farther away from it as a country in the way we talk about things and see things. What are those divides? What's pulling us apart? What are we doing that we shouldn't be? I don't know that COVID is really the watershed moment where we lost our way. I think COVID, much like Trump, laid bare certain processes that were already in place. There's a great article that reminds me of the one that you just mentioned by

R.S. Racino in Unheard Magazine about the decline of American empire in the age of COVID and BLM. And he makes this comparison between collapse era USSR and present day USA and talks about how there are certain similarities, for example, the deaths of despair, the radically lowered health outcomes and life expectancies, the rule, the symbolic rule by like a gerontocracy, the capture of the state and academic institutions by, he calls them a rapacious oligarchy. So I think those things were already in place, at least since, you know, the 70s. Sorry, Dasha, were you going to add to that? Yeah, well, yeah. And COVID merely like accelerated those processes. So what do you I mean, what is the solution to all of that, in your view? I mean, is it Bernie

Sanders type Democrat socialism or what? Or is it not a political solution? Is it, as you point out, some sort of cultural rebuke? Well, well, I yeah, so I was a registered independent prior to the first Bernie Sanders campaign where I registered as a Democrat to vote in the primaries. And then I've talked about this on the podcast before, but the way that like the Bernie campaign was just sort of funneled into the DNC, which is what I have a problem with speaking with, made me feel very disillusioned with, with left-wing politics as well as like, you know,

you could call it purity policing, right? Like being told constantly that I was like inadequate as a leftist or some kind of like crypto fascist or something. I think certainly has alienated me from any sort of like leftist democratic socialist political project. I don't think, I don't see that anymore as a successful or viable political strategy. And I think also the left wing habitually sort of disavows its real role in American politics, which is not to act as a critic of establishment politics or the binary party system, but basically to drum up votes for the Democratic Party by pretending to launch a legitimate critique against them. And I think that that's where

a lot of people felt disillusioned and betrayed by somebody like Bernie. Felt disillusioned by by bernie because why well because it turned i mean he when he came in right he spoke he was very plain spoken he spoke in this very no frills way he focused on class rather than all these kind of identitarian struggles yeah and movements and as time wore on, he began to what people perceived as like capitulate to the demands, the identitarian demands of what you call the woke left. I'm not sure that there's a useful distinction to be made between the woke left and the not woke left. Yeah. Interesting. I, you know, I see what you're saying, but I've always made a distinction in my mind, hard distinction between AOC and Bernie.

Right. Because if you look at their economic policies, a lot of them might overlap. But he just never sounded like her on the woke ism. She's all about identity politics. And that really wasn't his jam. But she just now I look at her. I'm like, you're on an island by yourself with your so-called squad mates and have absolutely no support. Yeah. But Bernie, you know, empowered the squad. It was, you know, the the Bernie movement, I think, that was parlayed into this new enthusiasm for this like conflated category of identitarian politics with like so-called leftism so who does that leave you if you know if you can't vote for bernie now who's who does that leave you i'm a non-voter yeah that's a great question i mean now you see like a resurgence

of like the populist right you see guys like um jd vance andance and Blake Masters making bids for political office. And their platform sounds very reassuring to a lot of people. But I'm unconvinced that anyone can really make a difference in a system where the kind of left liberal ideology is the dominant one, because we all have to agree to play by those terms that's depressing well yeah yeah and i often wish that i was um you know a political theorist and not merely a podcaster because i think all of us struggle to come up with a solution right yeah well maybe it's the it's the one we began the hour with right disillusionment from to come up with a solution. Right. With an alternative. Well, maybe it's the one we began the hour with, right?

Disillusionment from those who tried to believe but got burned bit by bit by bit, who then, those are the people who become revolutionaries. And if there are enough of them, maybe there's some way of recapturing institutions. And I mean, certainly there's a way of recapturing government, that's for sure certainly there's a way of recapturing government. That's for sure. Though too often it's been in with somebody who's not going to do that much to change

it or in with somebody who's going to do a lot to change it, but is further going to divide the nation. You know, it's just I don't even know what the quote savior looks like anymore. Mm hmm. I mean, I almost have nostalgia for the Trump era as hysterical as it was because it gave, you know, the woke left or whatever you want to call it, like a very clear target of their ire. You know, they can kind of they had their women's marches. They have like orange man is bad rhetoric. And I think in the Biden administration, it's been more like diffused and incoherent.

Yeah. Like to centralize. Yeah. administration it's been more like diffused and incoherent yeah like decentralized yeah it's a good point that now is in the same way that uh you know our guys went off to afghanistan and they fought the terrorists over there so that they didn't come attack us at home it's like trump was there dealing with these lunatics from the white house and they weren't focused on regular people they weren't trying to destroy the lives of you know mcdonald's workers back then uh and now they are. Now that's where all their ire is. Well, that's also very Soviet, the snitching.

Like when the phenomenon of people filming people having like politically incorrect nervous breakdowns on their phones and stuff is very reminiscent of like Soviet snitching on your neighbors. Yeah. And you see these like public morose of incident incidences where um children are like deputized to snitch on their parents or teachers or whoever um but you mentioned the question of class and to me the real political binary is the one between the elites and the masses which is very obvious and trite to say. But I think a big problem that we do have is elite capture of all institutions that are globally spanning. All right, I got to pause you there, but much, much more of the ladies of Red Scare right after

this. Guys, I have to ask you, is it true to your knowledge that the creator of the white lotus hbo's the white lotus based those two teenagers who were the stars of it on youtube um yeah it's uh 100% verifiably confirmed as true we have have the receipts. We got a care package out of it. Amazing. Getting royalties right now. For those who haven't seen The White Lotus, which is an amazing, amazing show, except for its very disturbing ending,

which Dasha and Anna have absolutely nothing to do with. Here is a clip of these two teenagers. One of them is the daughter of the main star on the trip, and the other one is her friend. And here's just a little bit so you know what we're talking about where'd you meet him three friends not raya raya no not right how long was the engagement we actually just met last september oh wow that. Yeah. Like, how'd you know he was the one? Oh, I don't know.

The chemistry was there. His dick's not small. I don't know. Shane really wanted to get married, and he's very decisive and pretty convincing. So it just felt right. so do you see any similarities there um totally us fellow teens yeah we can really relate to those girls um yeah mike white who's the creator of white lettuce they're not they're not based on us really explicitly but he is a big fan of the show and so inspired

inspired yeah he the he implemented sort of the post-red scare voice yeah i think he incorporated our vernacular and our bibliography just like our sources which is kind of surreal to watch yeah you know what i to me it's also that you don't suffer from something i suffer from uh which is you feel no need to fill the space you're happy just to like let the thoughts sit yeah well we don't edit our show so that's that's partly how we've developed a rapport to minimize the amount of editing that we have to do. But there's a searching, there's a searching nature to the way you speak to each other and in general. And that's actually captured in these two girls too. They're very good interrogators,

but they're kind of sneaky about it. You don't see it come, it doesn't hit you over the head until it does. Yeah, they're very well written. So this is near and dear to your heart. I imagine Dasha is somebody who's actually in Hollywood. And I guess I should ask you up front, how are you in Hollywood and you're not woke and you're and you say all these provocative things? How have you not been kicked out yet? I don't know. I'm waiting for them to kick me out. it's, I mean, it's hard to say really what professional opportunities I've, you know, I've been precluded from because of my political beliefs. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, it's too late for me to like course correct now and pretend to be woke.

And the podcast has probably also afforded me other opportunities that I wouldn't have had, had otherwise. Well, and you're doing the smart thing. You're becoming a creator of content, not just in the podcast, but making your own films now. And that's, that's really the way forward, right? Where you maintain control because you can go directly to the audience and the audience is there. Well, I think, yeah, academia hollywood is another institution um that is sort of bolstered by uh this paradoxical kind of like unreality i mean like the oscars this year like i don't really know anyone who saw any of those movies even exactly right But I think like the silver lining of this crisis of faith and institutions that we're experiencing is that there's a real opportunity for independent creators to come to

the fore and cultivate their own large and diverse and organic audiences. Yeah, I mean, we're seeing that more and more. And it's nice to see that the audience is there. And then you see these institutions try to crack down on it. They try to crack down on Substack or Patreon or whatever podcast. And Joe Rogan over at Spotify, you could go down the list. Even now, there's talk about how, well, at Substack, nobody edits you. You're sort of the mainstream elitist journalist. Well, no one's there to edit. Oh, sure, because that's worked out so well at places like the New York Times, which claimed something like 987,000 children had been killed in America from COVID. Hello?

No. Yeah, the COVID reporter. The COVID reporter printed that in one of her reports as if the editor is some magic button without which the rest of us are untrustworthy. Yeah. And I think the the silent majority does feel the crisis of legitimacy. Yeah. In media, academia, Hollywood, all of these institutions. I mean, the rise of fact checkers and experts is an attempt by the institutions to issue a corrective to the fact that they are getting more and more competition from extra institutional sources. And I mean, you tell me how this, if at all, relates to the old Soviet Union, while they're doing the fact checks and the attempts at speech control, they're manipulating us like Facebook and Instagram, you know, and the whistleblower that came out and then the what we've learned about how they're really just amassing data on us to try to further manipulate us to to really hurt our mental health without one care for that.

And I think like the chief distinction, we mentioned the similarities between the USSR and the USA. The chief distinction is that in the USSR, at least this was nominally enforced from a top-down authority. In the United States, it's much more decentralized. So nobody is ever really held accountable for spreading misinformation or for smearing others or abusing facts. And it's done through, I think, what looks like a coordinated attempt, but need not be between the state and various corporate entities. Yeah. You look,

just look at the shit storm that's come the way of Elon Musk since he said he wanted to buy Twitter. You know, it's like the pile on this guy, the demonization of him, the New York times basically called him a white supremacist because when he was seven, he wasn't marching in South Africa. He's crazy.

Well, he just offends their, yeah, their liberal sensibilities. But with social media, I mean, like Anna said, if it's about, He's crazy. He just offends their, yeah, their liberal sensibilities. But with social media, I mean, like Anna said, it's about, it's designed to demoralize you, to sort of overwhelm you with things that trigger and upset you so that you become invested in using it.

And ultimately, yeah, your mental health deteriorates. And I think we've really seen that post-COVID happen in the extreme because people are like sequestered in their homes and only really have access to what they perceive as reality through social media. I wonder if that's why the left seemed to lose its mind more than the right during COVID, because most Republicans or people who are not established left did not listen to all those mandates. They did go out. They did see their friends. They had social gatherings. They basically thumbed a middle finger at the most extreme lockdown policies, whereas the left was

extremely compliant and I think paid a dear price for it. Yeah. I don't know. I think, I think, by the way, Elon Musk, I want to tell the audience there was an update on that today, which we thought was important to get. Disturbingly, for those of us... I was just going to ask you, is he buying Twitter and that he has, quote, a right to terminate the merger agreement, according to a letter from his lawyers to the Twitter lawyers that was sent today. He's ostensibly disputing data. He wants Twitter to provide him with information that will help facilitate his evaluation of spam and fake accounts. He says that they've understated the number of fake accounts on Twitter.

They say it's only 5 percent. He says it could be as high as 20 plus, which would mean he's buying a product that's less valuable, right? If it's 20% bots. So he wants the real data. And as I understand it, he signed a deal that said, I'm basically buying Twitter as is, which anybody who's ever bought a car or a house that way knows, it means you don't get to kick the tires. You don't get to back out because of due diligence or because you find out the house has termites. And if the Twitter house has termites and he actually signed such a deal, that's not going to be helpful. But anyway, he's saying he does have the right to back out, a right to terminate the merger agreement. And that's sad, especially because Tesla stock now is suffering and there's going to be layoffs over there. So he's kind of, you know, he needs that money that money anyway i want to see him buy it i think twitter will be a better place if he takes it over so i i want all these problems to clear up and of course these people who write about feel exactly the opposite yeah well it'd be interesting i think it would be interesting yeah he i mean i don't think it is about the bot accounts for him i think it is it does have to do

more with the economy. And it no longer maybe being the wisest purchase. Right. Exactly. It's too bad, though. I mean, he has it to burn, so he should burn it. But easy for me to say. All right. Let's talk about Me Too, because this is back in the news now.

And I know you've been very outspoken, and I get it. I like your thoughts on a lot of these issues. But boy, oh boy, there's a meltdown in the wake of that verdict for Johnny Depp. And it was a verdict for Johnny Depp. I love how these newspapers are like split decision. No, it wasn't. He won five out of the six counts that were at issue. And the only one she won was some small allegation that he defamed her when he said she messed up their apartment to

make it look extra bad when the cops came on time. The jury said, we don't believe she did that. So I'm going to say she was like split decision. He said she said, we'll never know. Well, no, I mean, we may never know, but we certainly know how the jury felt about this. And it was not split. Here's a sampling. This is from Michelle Goldberg uh opinion columnist for the new york times and the amber heard verdict was a travesty others will follow the verdict in this case is difficult to explain logically she says i guarantee you michelle goldberg watched none of his trial she writes the confounding part isn't that the jury sided with him over her this is the country that elected donald. And she goes on to say the explosion of defiant, desperate feminist energy that was Me Too has now been smothered by an even fiercer reaction.

Me Too was a movement of women telling their stories. Now that Heard has been destroyed for identifying as a survivor. Other women will think twice. That's not why Heard was destroyed, because she identified as a survivor. She was destroyed because they did not believe her. Her claim was not found credible. She says, as a First Amendment issue, this verdict is a travesty because the New York Times cares deeply about everyone's ability to speak freely their opinion. The First Amendment. This is a joke, right? This is the these same forces are the ones who try to shut anybody up if they say there's a difference between trans women and biological women.

You know, the biological sex is real. I like that. Does she support my First Amendment right to say that? I'm going to venture no. Even if Heard had lied about everything during the trial, even if she'd never suffered domestic abuse, she still would have represented it. So she's defending her statement in The Washington Post that I've come to represent a figure of domestic abuse. We should slice that. She cares if it was true. She represented it like Jussie Smollett came to represent victims of racial hate crimes. It doesn't matter whether it actually happened you know when

you look at him you think of that and then she concludes in part with if there's one thing the american people hate more than decadent hollywood elites it's mouthy women it's mouthy so that was her takeaway from the verdict what do you make of it um Well, it seems that everyone, whether they're an advocate or a critic of Me Too, seems to think that this verdict signals the death knell of Me Too. And I don't see it that way. I think it's probably a rebirth of Me Too in a more diffused and ambient and arbitrary way like now you no longer have to be a man accused of sexual offenses to be me too'd it everybody's basically fair game and i think you know from the start for me it was apparent that me too was this like dress rehearsal for this overall erosion of due process yeah and what did what did you make of it, Dasha? As

somebody, you know, who sees the way Hollywood in particular works, and I'll give her the point that he had more power than she did, for sure. I mean, he had more, part of that was charm, part of it was star power, but what do you make of it? I mean, and there were, you know, problems in Hollywood with the old like Weinstein model which was functionally an open secret when I moved to LA I was told like oh you could be a Weinstein girl you know and then it was like then all of a sudden it wasn't sanctioned anymore and everyone sort of had to fall in line with these new behavioral guidelines um which you know maybe had some like ripple positive effects but basically it was a net negative because i i always saw me too basically as like

a cynical um power grab that wasn't actually going to correct me like power imbalances within the film industry um it was just going to make the most like vocal, shrill minority of women more powerful. The composition of the power structure would change, but the distribution would stay the same, basically. Yeah, like your Amber Heards, your actresses, you know, like who come to symbolize domestic abuse survivors, actually I think do a real disservice to women who actually are invulnerable physicians who people don't pay attention to because they're like waitresses

or hotel maids or something like that. Right. And the fact that a verdict, a jury who listened to this case for six weeks found against her has to be reduced to, I think it was Tarana Burke, who coined the phrase me to, something like our fascination with violence, you know, like our permissiveness toward violence. Why can't it just be this particular claim was not found credible? So many women's claims have been found credible and have been adjudicated in the court of

public opinion or in a legal court. Why is it just because of this one case now it's America's fault? It's the patriarchy. It's like she was rejected. Sorry, but these people didn't watch it. And I did a whole talking points memo last week on how when I watched her testify, I actually was one of the few who thought I believe a lot of these claims of abuse. I think she's telling them in a way that I find compelling and I can believe this. And then I went on to listen to her when she got cross-examined lie about the small, the medium, and the large all around those claims of abuse and concluded this is not a credible person. This is not a truth teller. She's lying about things she does not need to lie about and therefore I rejected her testimony as a whole, which is exactly what you are typically instructed in jury instructions, that is your right to do as a juror. If you think they lied about one thing, you can reject the testimony in full. Instead, you get things like this from the co-founder of Ultraviolet. They sort of jump into situations like this and typically advocate on behalf of

the alleged abused person, which is interesting because in this case, it was both. He was alleging he was the abused person. She as follows i was served an unbelievable amount of content from so-called survivors and feminists during this trial she means taking depth's side there was nothing authentic about it so now the actual quote survivors and feminists people have been working in this field people who say they've been through it they get dismissed because they sided with the wrong person you have to and when they're both claiming victimhood and abuse you're only allowed to side with the woman you see otherwise you're inauthentic yeah i mean i think believe women women does ultimately a disservice to women because it ignores, like you said, credibility and privileges like a victim status and then mines women for their trauma content to like gain footing. So one establishes a victory according to a bad faith precedent.

Well, the precedent, it's being righted, right? Bit by bit. Like due process is a good thing. Having one's claims tested with evidence demands is a good thing. Yeah. And I think you'll find that probably most people agree with you and agree with us that the verdict was correct in this case. But you get these kind of like proxy battles about race or gender, I think, to paper over the fact that very often the elites don't find the democratic result of a trial or a political process to be legitimate. They find it intolerable. Well, it's like, I think I've heard you, Anna, make this point about abortion, about how the vast majority of the American voters want to see it legal in the first trimester, do not want to see it legal in the last trimester, and don't want a lot of latitude in the first trimester, do not want to see it legal in the last trimester and don't want a lot of latitude in the second trimester. But, you know, to see the way like that, that vote that the

Democrats put up to sort of nationalize abortion as a right, which would have been a disaster for them anyway, because it just would have gotten reversed. If the Democrats have the power to make it a national right when they have control of Congress, Republicans have the power to make it a national ban when they have the power. They're much better off asking for a federalist system where some states allow it and some states don't. But apparently they were too stupid to realize that or they were smart enough to realize it, but just decided to do naked pandering on the issue of abortion by forcing through a vote that they knew they'd lose. In any event, I've heard you say, you know, like the messaging is really just it's so craven, right? Because it's just meant,

similar to the conversation we just had, it's meant to stir upset as opposed to stir action. Yeah. It's meant to browbeat and gaslight people because I think most people, again, the abortion issue is something that probably follows the bell curve distribution 80 percent of people are somewhere in the middle and not abortion zealots neither direction um but judging by um what you see on social media and mainstream media you would think that we live in some like handmaid's tale type scenario well then yeah and then they utilize the rhetoric of like free abortions on demand without apology, like up until birth, basically. Which is alienating. Yeah. I don't think, you know, most people agree with or would want.

Most liberals. Yeah. But it becomes like this refrain of the politically correct sort of opinion to hold. That was in their bill that basically abortion on demand through the entire pregnancy. And a lot of Democrats are already on record as saying it should just be up to the woman all the way up to the moment of birth, which is extreme. Yeah. So what do you think happens if, as we expect at some point this month, we get the Dobbs decision, which we've already seen the draft of, and it lands the way the draft lands, where Roe

v. Wade is overturned, and whether a woman has a right to an abortion goes back to the states for them to decide. Well, I want to know what the likelihood is that the final verdict will actually mirror the draft. It's not right but it will correct but the latest reporting was that no one had changed their mind so we right now other than just speculation we have no reason to believe that the 5-4 decision or it could be as many as 6-3 roberts hadn't yet you know revealed uh it sounded like it was gonna be 5-4 to overturn roe yeah but i feel like roe v wade gets invoked all the time to sort of whenever there's like a

midterm coming up or something. They invoke the threat of repealing. They've done it so many times that I would be surprised to see it actually happen. What do you mean by the Supreme Court or by the states after the decisions handed down?

I don't know. I mean, I think if it's the issue, we're really political heavy hitters. No, no worries. I think that if the issue, if abortion does inevitably or not inevitably eventually go to the states, Freudian slip there,

it will become virtually impossible of course in some states um but i think that this will actually be a blessing in disguise for the democratic party because they could always um do more fundraising and um whip up morale for their kind of complex of ngos which can literally will literally create kind of an underground railroad to red states to provide women with abortions. So I think even in that case scenario, everybody wins, by which I mean, the two parties of our political system and not actual people. Right. Right. So what did you make of the people dressing up like the Handmaid's Tale, you know, characters and protesting outside of the Supreme Court justices' homes and so on?

Yeah, well, it's like, you know, the resistance liberals and Trump, I think people are really attached to this fantasy that they are living in some kind of like neo-fascistic uh oppressive tyranny um which is not you know is not really the case now when trump was president did you support him or how did you feel about him i loved him um we're definitely losing that ho position now. That's it. I mean, I didn't vote for him. I'm a, I'm a non-voter as I've said, but I, yeah, I thought he was very funny. I thought he, you know, it was kind of this like as a, he was like a work of art, you know?

And I definitely think he was a better president than joe biden definitely yeah and he was he had a pulse yeah he was alive go ahead anna sorry i interrupted you no i think we were not nearly as horrified or offended by um donald trump as many people around us were um i think we could intuit that he would be a fairly standard establishment president president and that what really offended um you know both the liberals and the never Trump conservatives was this conflict of sensibility and not really anything he did because they did this. They were happy to do the same stuff. Well, that's so clear of you to have seen that in the moment, even though you're not of the right, you weren't natural, like knee jerk conservatives or Republicans are on the MAGA train. For

political reasons, you were just observing it as sort of a societal dynamic, what's happening. When he was elected, I was surprised. But I remember feeling almost vindicated. I was like, oh yeah, reality feels like it's actually reflecting the things that I know to be true about it, which might even have to do a little bit with me being from like Las Vegas, from being from this very like kind of like late capitalist, very like Trumpian landscape. To me, it made like a lot of sense that he would be the president of the United States. Yeah. Well, that leads me to my questions I have for you about Joe Biden, which I will save until after this break. And then we've got to talk about succession and a couple of scenes that I need answers to.

I have a question for you, Dasha. This is from a piece I think that was, let's see. Actually, I'm not sure where this Q&A came from, so forgive me. But the question was, or the statement you made was the infatuation with consent, back on the Me Too stuff, is a good example of something that's very black and white, which feminists and American thinkers have brushed onto. It's this very American liberal idea wherein everything is permitted as long as it is consensual, which is a very contractual framework that lacks nuance. Now, I can see that because I'm the same age as your mom. I too was born in 1970. And we were back in the day where it was like, long before they said no means no, we were kind of like, well, no might mean yes. Push it a little and we'll decide

together. But now it's like, you say that they're like, you want abuse. You want rape. Well, no, it's just like a sexual dance between men and women is complicated and layered. Uh, so I'm impressed that you say that because your generation, it's yet another reason they're going to disown you. You're going to be kicked out of the young female club for acknowledging such an obvious reality right yeah uh that power dynamics are implicit in seduction and you know in relationships um to me feels feels very self-evident yeah like that's what you know that's what it means to seduce someone it means that you know something they don't, which is that you're going to sleep with them. people in this world and did they find these views okay to talk about like what's happening

with people your age and i don't know i'm just curious like for a window into your world and whether you can speak freely like this i mean i know you do it on your podcast all the time but maybe they don't listen yeah i mean in new york people are very reactionary yeah it's funny because i think there's a perception that um new york is like overrun with liberals but i don't know anybody who thinks like that all of our friends are basically conservative and they're kind of artists and creatives um and i think what was the question this is whether there are other people who, you know, your age. Well, and I think also in like in real life,

we are normal, well-adjusted adult people who don't consistently and aggressively inject politics into everything. Yeah. Yeah. I actually think it's rude to talk about. So if I'm like on on on set if i'm like amongst like colleagues or something or i just won't really broach the subject of politics because i don't find it to be a good call i'll tell you i well i i've been living in new

york up until recently 17 years i had a very different experience when definitely i felt the very strong liberal bias but of course my views are outspoken and people have known, you know, where I stand on a lot of things, but I'll tell you something. I just went into the city on Saturday night with my husband, Doug, and we went to see Macbeth, which is having a 15 week run starring Daniel Craig. And we wanted to see Daniel Craig without that'd be cool. And he was great, but boy, oh boy, that was an interesting experience. So it's sort of the wokeification of shakespeare the we you know this macbeth i guess was written around 1606 someplace around there uh long long time ago right 400 plus years ago and um in scotland where there wasn't a lot of

diversity but the cast was definitely majority minority, but only only black actors because, you know, in the American Indian or Indian or, you know, any other like Hispanic, forget Asian. No, none of that rates on Broadway. Only certain kinds of minorities rate. There was somebody playing the son of the king who totally unnecessarily was a woman like who owned her. It wasn't like they tried to disguise her to make her. It was like she was a woman and showing us that she was a woman who got cast as the son. And there were plenty of women in the in the play. I mean, the two female leads or the three leads basically after Daniel Craig and two of them are women.

So it's like, why? Then we have the mask Nazis running up and down the aisles going mask up, mask up with signs that read mask up. And then if they see that it's dipped below, cause you're still masking for some reason, all these same people were at a restaurant right across the street, packed in like sardines right before the show. But magically you cross into the theater and the mask is going to protect you from one another. And then they're yelling at people, pull it over your nose, over your nose. I've stepped in and there was a woman at the front door and then five steps later was the guy who takes your ticket.

And the woman at the front door was like, excuse me, where's your mask? Where's your mask? I'm literally holding my hand, putting them. I'm like, it takes a second to get it from my bag onto my face. You're in the building now. It needs to be on your face, over your nose and mouth.

I'm like, what am I doing? Why am I here? Why am I doing this to myself? We go at the intermission to the bathroom and we get this sign outside the bathroom, making sure just in case you weren't sure that you were at a woke Broadway theater that reads as follows. like okay i don't need to deal with that either well i'm just trying to have a bathroom break over the and on top of everything there were no costumes and there were no there was no set design nothing absolutely nothing they said this is trying to get back to the original shakespeare but apparently they did this at west side story too i think it's just a budget thing so you're looking at a guy like in a Yankees cap trying to do Shakespeare. It was bizarre.

There was a guy in a wheelchair who opened it up. Perfect. With some, I don't know, lecture on. He broke the fourth wall and talked to us about Macbeth. It was the most bizarre two, four, ten never ending hours of my life. And I thought this may be a harbinger of things to come not just in Broadway but in entertainment writ large certainly America writ large perhaps that's crazy that they still make you mask on Broadway if they're not even masking on planes anymore but what this screams to me is

that Broadway's really hard up for cash if they can't even invest anybody in costume and set design I mean it also sounds like it could have been a really good psychedelic post-modern yeah i mean i like experimental theater but magic of acting but broadway yeah is like a bastion of like elite liberal values so you that the virtue signaling is really in the in the extreme of the the impulse to sort of like over correct um yeah i think is especially strong probably because mostly yeah affluent elite liberals go to the theater yeah and they feel so guilty it sounds like they squandered their entire budget on dei for its design of costumes it's a good point they should have invested a lot I wanted to see like a king's robe. That's I didn't ask for much. Just like something kingly, princely. And I would have appreciated if the sun had been played by a woman. I mean, by a man, not a woman. But I don't call the shots. And that's obvious. What do you make of feral girl summer? Have you heard of this? I've heard a little bit of it. Yeah, it's the new summer

trend. It's the new hot girl summer, which they've gotten rid of. That was, I guess, last summer after COVID. And now here's a clip. This is from TikTok. Somebody named Molly is explaining what it means to have feral girl summer nights out. I am convinced there are two separate versions of a pharaoh club rat night out version number one is a night when you are being obnoxious as fuck your instagram story is like five minutes long you're documenting yourself screaming just overall posting unhinged shit and your version number two there's no fucking trace of you you don't post a single thing you run away from your friends and there is just like no evidence of your night out there is no way to predict which type of night you're gonna have and i honestly cannot tell which one's better okay now there's now there's blowback to feral

girl summer saying it's setting a standard that no woman actually wants to meet and you know one of these girls i i can't keep up with the intra-feminist culture wars what do you make of it dasha or anna either one take it whoever feels something in response uh yeah a feral girl summer i guess it's like it's sort of a a wish of like for whimsy or something they want uh maybe a kind of nihilistic reverie in their femininity or something i don't know i can't i can't entirely really parse it is unclear yeah yes it the independent says as for what it actually entails, the spectrum is broad. Wearing tiny outfits, getting free drinks, and, quote, dancing naked around a fire under the moon are all definitions that have been bandied around social media. There's also a theme of subverting beauty norms,

like not shaving your legs or brushing your hair the general theme is unhinged chaos so what do we do this or do we not do this anna what are you it's very pagan but i think all the the beauty norms were already subverted by covid good point yeah it's true they can't take credit for that yeah i don't know yeah to me it's i mean it sounds a lot like hot girl summer i think yeah every summer there's a sort of fetishization of baki and ali revelry or something who's looking into like tiktok for their instructions on just how to be over the summer. Yeah. And every summer there's like a new TikTok catchphrase that allows people to be disgusting and sweaty. And generate discourse.

I'm not sure why one needs permission for any of that right it's like something disturbing to me about I don't just these trends where it's like okay now this is what we're gonna do and this is the hot trend and it involves no longer shaving I I don't get it um I'm doing uh I'm doing fertility girls um what does that mean um I'm eating a lot of like organ meats and like drinking raw milk and taking root supplements. Organ meats are as fertile as possible. That's the way to go. Organ meats are the way to go. We just had a couple of nutritionists and doctors on the show a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah. Amazing. And they were big on the organ meats. We're big on organ meats. Yeah. How do you, can I ask how you eat them? Because I haven't yet tried and I'm a little scared. With your bare hands. You're tearing

out of the animal. Fried liver. I mean pate is a great way to get your... Do you get it at the store or do you cook? I just buy pate at the store or at one of Keith Vignale's great restaurants.

Okay. This is good to know because I haven't yet tried it. Although I will say on our little date night in the city, I don't eat any seafood. I'm like anti-seafood. It's a psychological thing. They're big on caviar. So I ordered the caviar $150 later.

So I was like, I'm going to have to find a cheaper option. It was pricey, but it was good. You couldn't tell that it was fish. So thumbs up. Yeah. Well, there's vegan caviar now. Yeah. I feel Dasha that I suffered a childhood trauma in my grandparents' boatyard in Piermont, New York. Can't really say exactly what it was, but I had an older brother, half, and he loved to fish. And so I was immersed in like smelly fish from the Hudson River during the time that GE was dumping tons of chemicals into the water. And I was also swimming in it. And I do recall an incident with one of his friends and it was a dead fish and someone put a firecracker in it. It didn't end well. Oh, well, that'll tell yeah

i think that was immersive yeah yeah and you know what it's really like if you like a friend of mine recently tried to get me over this and she made me this beautiful halibut and it had like panko crust on the top and i actually did like it. It did not taste like fish, but then my husband who likes fish and likes to cook fish, apparently something I didn't know about him in our 15 years together, he's like, I can redo it. So he redid it and he served it to me and he left the bottom skin on it. Oh yeah. Total game changer. I was like, oh no, Hell no. Like this slimy fish just is just a reminder that it's a fish. Yeah. The scales.

But they are. It is healthy for you. If you can overlook all those chemicals that Alex Jones was right about. It'll really plump your skin. I know I need to do it. I just fix up baby steps. What would you recommend be my next try? I tried the halibut.

I did fish eggs. What's the next most gentle? I was going to say oysters, but that's a bridge too far. Maybe smoked oysters. I don't know. I'm going to be angry at fish girls being sloth as well. But that's going to be a very gonna be a very fishy messy abject experience yeah that's master's degree fish all right i'm gonna work still on my little like

ged and then i'll get back to you yeah and oysters um okay so we've got to discuss succession because i've teased it and now america wants to know what it's like to be across from greg the great greg from succession who's everybody's favorite character. They brought on your character, Comfey, right? Comfrey. Okay, Comfrey. She was new, like over the past season, and she's on team Kendall Roy, who's against the patriarch, Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox. And you're his PR advisor. And he's dealing with a shitstorm of PR. And you're similar to the way you are in real life.

Kind of deadpan, not overly emotional, total scene stealer. And here's just a clip of you. And forgive me, what's the actor who plays Greg? What's his name? Nicholas Braun. Nicholas Braun. You and Nicholas Braun in a little bit of TV magic. What's up?

Hey, I'm glad I ran into you. Yeah, yeah, me too. Right, because I might have to brief the press against you. Oh, the whole press? Yeah, just Kendall's really going balls to the wall and you know you're on the other team but i'm gonna try to keep it targeted rather than terminal thank you kindly ma'am it goes on from there but i love that targeted instead of terminal i read that you knew of what you spoke when you delivered that line because you're going

through your own pr whatever some stupid twitter dust up at the time and it was you were managing both your own pr and the role of a pr um guru yeah there was some meta irony in me playing a crisis publicist and uh my first day on set was when we got in trouble for our ISIS t-shirts. And I remember, yeah, like on my breaks, like looking at my phone and being like, wow, I made it to HBO and they're definitely going to can me after these ISIS t-shirts. You seem so unflappable. It doesn't seem like even that would upset you. So, you know, sometimes the pylons can be overwhelming.

Sure. But we've been through the outreach cycle so many times now that we're just desensitized to it. Yeah. So what happened with the ISIS t-shirts? Nothing. Nothing. It was like a joke based on, not exactly ISIS as I remember. It was based on like you did a t-shirt based on something else.

It was a sticker that the MAGA bomber put on one of his defective, or maybe it was on his van. But that's where we got the design from. And we just thought it was kind of clever and funny. So you don't care. It doesn't affect you anymore. Because I know when you first come into the public eye and people start attacking you as a terrible person. I mean, they really, you know, they don't just say, oh, that was I disagree with her. It's a complete personal attack and attempted takedown.

Does that not bother you gals anymore i think you have to keep in mind that it's actually not personal and you have to be like understanding and empathetic for the people who are angry at you um when they go low we go even lower um yeah yeah and understand that you're just like an avatar or an average an effigy for them that they don't seriously hate you necessarily as much as what you symbolically represent. Yeah, which to them is a kind of alienating cynicism. Or I think that people just don't really not respond that well necessarily to our like brand of humor it's good you have that perspective i i read a few of the things like one of them was something like leftist deadbeats or something i'm like now that i don't even get

i don't even understand that dirtbag dirtbag leftist that's what it was the american conservative i think did a great piece on you they said that's what some of your detractors got. It's kind of like a badge of honor. I don't know. Dirt I've always maintained that we're too glamorous to be dirtbags and too conservative to be actual left. I agree with you. I agree with you. So what's, I can't end without asking you about what the past, you know, three months has been like as people who come from Russia originally or Belarus, there's been so much anti-Russian sentiment here, this craziness of not letting the Russian players play.

And one of the big tennis matches was the Australian Open. And now like at the French Open, his name was up there, but the flag was blacked out. Has that been affecting you in your lives at all? Or what do you make of it? Well, there's always been anti-russian sentiment you know even going back to like the russiagate stuff with with trump um i think the the cold war mentality still kind of holds strong in russia much like us we just sort of represent something something amoral or detestable to people. But in my life, I haven't really felt the impact of

Russophobia more than I usually do. Yeah. And of course, I think while it's preposterous that Russian people who don't even sympathize with Putin or the war are punished by these kind of institutions and associations, or even if they do sympathize with Putin in the war, that shouldn't affect, you know, their standing as professionals. At the same time, it's not something that we've experienced personally. I mean, you can't, it's not like you can tell off the bat that somebody is Russian as you can with somebody who's like Asian or Black. It's a different kind of thing. And also, more importantly, I think our haters would even reject the allegation that we're Russian. They think that we're like LARPing for clout. I only recently learned what LARPing is. Do you think, because I went over to Russia a couple of times to interview Putin and

just was totally delighted with the people there. And I think of them all the time as we pile on the sanctions and all this. And my hope is that when this is over, however it ends, there will be a way where we, the American people, can connect with them, the Russian people, in an authentic, meaningful way where we say, these people running our countries are assholes. This is a bunch of bullshit. We're humans. We, you may want to go to your DACA and I may want to go to the Jersey shore, but in the end we both want, you know, our kids to be raised well and safely and to have healthcare and to have some basic things. And I don't know, do you,

do you have hope for that still notwithstanding what we're doing right now? Yeah, absolutely. But I think that that connection is already there. And I think like the people of any country can understand and sympathize with the people of another country and don't judge them by their leaders. I hope you're right. I mean, when we like ban Russian vodkas and kick, you know, Russian artists out of their productions, unless they say exactly the following words, I start to worry that we're going to create, you know, a generation of hate. We're doing it on a number of fronts. But look, you are part of the war pushing back against all of that. And a couple of fascinating broads. Thanks so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure. Support the ladies by

going to patreon.com slash Red Scare. They always talk like this. They're really interesting to listen to. And you've got like a nice car ride or whatever. Just put it on, sit back, relax. And I promise you, you'll learn. Tomorrow on the show, David Sachs of the PayPal Mafia back on the show. Don't miss it.

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