The Megyn Kelly Show - Culture War Disconnects, Nike Hypocrisy, and the Religion of Woke, with John McWhorter and Ethan Strauss | Ep. 189

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by John McWhorter, Columbia University professor and author of "Woke Racism," and Ethan Strauss, Substack sports writer, to talk about the cultural war disconnects in America today, the religion of woke, offensive attacks on Condoleezza Rice after her "The View" comments, Dave Chappelle firing back over free speech, the NBA and Nike promoting social justice but doing business with China, Nike's hypocrisy and turn against men, Kyrie Irving and vaccine mandates,  athletes speaking out, 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. Today we have a great program for you. There's so much to go over. One of my favorite people, he is such a great guest, is here, John McWhorter. We're going to kick it off with him in a minute by discussing former President Barack Obama calling issues that Republican and other voters, too, it's not just a Republican thing, care about nothing more than, quote, phony culture wars. This is an effort to support Terry McAuliffe down in Virginia. And the culture war down there involves the National School Board issue, the man who alleged his daughter was raped. There's an update on that. Is that a phony culture war? We'll talk about it. We're also going to discuss the fact

that the National School Boards Association has now retracted that letter that likened upset parents to domestic terrorists. What a turnaround, right? What a crazy turnaround. So we'll get into what that means for the DOJ investigation and an absolutely disgusting new attack on former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who for some reason went on The View this week. And boy, did the knives come out. Then later, we're going to talk a little bit of sports because the Celtics star Ennis Cantor. Oh, my gosh. Have you heard? So I didn't know Ennis Cantor. You know, I don't know sports, but something extraordinary happened with this guy. He absolutely torched Nike in a new video that's really about China. And that's why it's so extraordinary. He was mad that Nike has remained silent on China's human rights abuses. And you know what happens in the NBA when you criticize China. They completely cut you out of their basketball feed over there. It can cost you hundreds of millions of dollars. We saw that happen once before. And this guy, Enes Kanter, went off. He called out LeBron James by name, Michael Jordan by name.

So who is this guy and what's going to happen now? And should there be about several hundred more like him in the NBA finding the stones to do this? I'm going to take it up with a guy named Ethan Staus. Ethan is a sports journalist who writes for Substack after he left the establishment sports media recently, and he's not afraid to go to the uncomfortable places, so he's going to fit right in here. First, though, we begin with John McWhorter. John is a linguistics professor at Columbia University and an opinion writer now for the New York Times and the author of the new book, Woke Racism, How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. John, great to have you back. Thanks for being here.

Good to be here, Megan. Thank you very much. All right. So let's kick it off with Barack Obama, which he's trying to get Terry McAuliffe elected back into the governor's mansion. And this has become a tighter and tighter race because McAuliffe committed a pretty big political blunder on stage at one of these debates saying parents shouldn't really have anything to do with the curriculum that their child is taught in a school. And his opponent, his Republican opponent, got all over him, Glenn Youngking, on that in all these ads and so on. And now it's getting tighter and tighter. And McAuliffe, who had this as basically a straightaway, he could lose. The odds are he's probably going to win, but it's gotten a lot tighter because of that statement. So Barack Obama was called in.

He's the big gun in the Democratic Party and went down there and said the following. We don't have time to be wasting on these phony trumped up culture wars, this fake outrage that right wing media peddles to juice their ratings. And the fact that he's willing to go along with it instead of talking about serious problems that actually affect serious people. That's a shame.

Your take on it, because I'll tell you, I mean, I have virtually every single one of my friend is a liberal, you know, I've spent the past 20 years in New York. And I don't know a mom who's not upset about what's happening in the schools. From you know, it could be COVID mask policy, could be CRT, could be the trans ideology being shoved down the throats of, you know, eight-year-olds who aren't ready for it and so on. I don't think this is a phony culture war at all. And I don't think it's entirely driven by the right. What do you think? Yeah. There is a massive disconnect between the way we are trained to talk about what's going on and what's actually going on. And I should say, I'm a big Obama fan.

I have no animus against him at all. And I know that sometimes he needs to play politics because that was and is his job. But on this one, no, we're not talking about a phony culture war. This is not the people yelling and screaming about tenured radicals taking over university campuses 20 years ago. Something really serious is going on that really does hurt people, and disproportionately, it's Black people, because part of these culture wars involves white, liberal people being taught that to be a good person, you're supposed to excuse Black

people from real challenge, that you're supposed to treat Black people essentially like children as a way of atoning for America's moral stain of slavery and Jim Crow. And all of this stuff, in terms of what you do in the present tense, is really scary. And so, for example, CRT, we're supposed to think that there's certain people who are just dedicated to racism and slavery not being taught in schools, and that these are people who don't understand that America has some explaining to do. But that's not what most people who have a problem with CRT in schools are thinking about. We're talking about what sorts of ideas, what sorts of self-conceptions you impose upon children, not law students reading articles 30 years ago, but children now in classrooms. And, you know, I don't know if anybody has the ultimate answer about these things,

but to wave away parents' real concerns about really bizarre things that have been happening in our schools, especially with the major uptick over the past couple of years to wave all of that away as just quote unquote, phony culture wars. Again, I say I have no problem with Barack Obama. But that view, especially when coming from other people is is is overly simplistic. And no, we have some real problems going on right now. Mm hmm. There was a there was a piece in the Washington Post recently on October 21st. It was authored by Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Jennifer Berkshire, freelance journalist, who are more on the this is a phony culture war side. They said this is a Republican driven thing, this objection to CRT,

that they are working right now to ensure their base turns out in force by stoking white racial grievance. And they say that the recent firestone of a critical race theory is a perfect case in point. Quote, never mind that this concept from legal scholarship isn't actually taught in K through 12 schools or that it isn't what most protesters believe it to be. And they talk about how Republicans are gaining an electrical advantage by convincing their base that white children are being taught to hate themselves, their family, and their country. Can you speak to that? Because we hear this more and more from people defending what's happening in schools. It's not critical race theory. That's a fake boogeyman. That's a law school concept. And people who say it's being taught are are not correct. My own take on it is there's yes, there's a theory that gets taught in law schools that that may not be the exact thing that's being

taught. It's become a short form for this racial division that's being stoked. You can call it whatever you want to call it. It's been given this useful short form because before it had that, I think thanks to Chris Ruffo, none of us really had a short form way of describing what was happening. Yeah, those people need to stop that. I mean, I frankly think at this point that they're aware that what they're doing is a rhetorical trick. It's a straw man. Nobody has claimed that obscure legal doctrine is being taught to people who are seven years old. Why would that happen? Why would anybody think so? Things change. Labels are imprecise. And when people say CRT, they don't mean that somebody is being taught the legal theory of Kimberly Crenshaw in overalls. What we're talking about is what is derived from that way of thinking, which very much is a trend that's happening all over the country. And all you have to do is metaphorically open a newspaper in any big city to see it,

which is that especially in private schools, but now it's trickling into public schools and quickly kids are being taught that the most interesting thing about America is that there are power differentials based on race and that there are always have been that white kids need to be taught that they are part of a ruling class with a certain responsibility and guilt that is being taught to people who are eight years old, often with those words, that black kids are to think of themselves as potential victims of this oppression and should be wary of what white people are going to do to them. These things are actually happening, including kids being separated into different groups. And what it comes down to at this point is this. It's been happening for such a short time that there are not academic surveys yet of exactly where this is happening and

to what degree. But the anecdotal and journalistic evidence is coming so fast and thick that we can say this quite simply. If there were exactly this much evidence of cops killing Black men, one in Detroit, one in Atlanta, one in New England, something happens in LA, and you have a whole bunch of them. If that was what there was, that would be considered, because it is, a national epidemic, racist stain, America has a problem, America must atone. All it would take is exactly the amount of evidence that we have for this takeover of CRT. People like me who are worried about it are not crazy. We're watching what's happening. And if this is really all about the right wing, if it's all about these people waving the flag and,

you know, wishing that Ronald Reagan was still around, I don't know what world these people are in because I'm hearing problems with this from moms with, you know, half a glass of Chardonnay on a play date who vote Democratic and are blue American people with higher degrees who are really worried about what's happening in their schools. I think that we've got to stop this idea that it's only about descendants of Newt Gingrich on this. This is a national problem.

And people who are worried about CRT are not people who are wishing that Dwight B. Eisenhower was still president. There's something larger going on. It's, you know, I've said before, when I had Glenn and Coleman Hughes on my show a year ago, we talked about why I pulled my kids from the New York City private schools. And it was all of this stuff, you know, it's all this stuff. But you can call it whatever you want. In my school, they were promoting an article by some so-called scholars saying in every classroom where white children learn there is a future killer cop i don't you don't have to call that crt i don't care what you call that don't teach it to my child don't teach it to his classmates

couldn't care less you call whatever you want but i want it to stop and i think that's how most parents are feeling it looks like to me the other side that doesn't i don't know want republicans to i'm not sure exactly what the motivation is, because, you know, everyone should be concerned about this kind of message if they're not woke. Right. We understand elect, as you would call them, the elect. Everyone who's not elect should be concerned about this and not trying to diminish it as a as a purely partisan issue. It's not. And in part, it's what your your whole new book is about. Before we get to that, though, let's stay on Virginia and McWhorter and Youngkin for just one second, because one of the things that's come out of Virginia is that one of the items cited by the National Association of School Boards as evidence that parents might be looked at as domestic terrorists now was dad in Virginia who showed up at a school board meeting and was dragged out and was made sort of the poster boy for bad behavior at a school board meeting. Turns out the guy's daughter had been raped a week or two before. And the school got

up, the superintendent at that school board meeting and said, it's never happened. We have not had a student attacked in a bathroom. And this guy knows it just happened to his daughter and that the superintendent's lying. So he got upset. Somebody told him that his daughter was a liar and he called that person a bitch and things went downhill. But that's all that really happened. Okay. So that's the backstory to why we saw this guy getting dragged out. The National School Board Association, without probing further, decides to say, based on that behavior and a few other examples, people should be treated as domestic terrorists. DOJ should get involved. And they say, we'll do it. Well, there was just a reversal by the National School Boards Association. They were forced to apologize for their letter in an

extraordinary 180 with with on which they had coordinated with the Biden White House. We know that thanks to a group called Parents Defending Education, which, like the group and I support, FAIR, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, is doing great work, nonpartisan, totally nonpartisan, just supporting parents who want to push back against this stuff. So Parents Defending Education gets the email showing the White House had pre-gamed the whole thing with the School Boards Association. They wrote to the White House. The White House farmed it to Merrick Garland at DOJ. They wrote the letter saying, yeah, we're going to be looking into parents. Total mistake. Massive backlash. Parents everywhere complained. The National School Board Association members started complaining,

we don't support this. This wasn't run by us. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So far, the DOJ hasn't officially backed off its letter, though. Its statement saying it might go after parents, and you tell me whether it needs to do that ASAP or this is going to remain, the explosive issue it's become. I mean, parents are angry that they're being labeled in this way because they're speaking out about this stuff. You know what this is, if you pull the camera back, what this comes from is that many people would be surprised at the difference between what you would think training in education is, including educational administration, and what the people in question are often taught. And the truth is, it took me

about 20 years to fully see this. If you are trained by a school of education and you take in what they're telling you often, you learn very little about how to teach kids. What you're taught is how to be somebody of a certain kind of radical leftist politics. And, you know, God bless radical leftist politics, but in another universe, there wouldn't be this massive intersection between a field that's supposed to be about how to teach kids how to read and write and do arithmetic and teaching them a certain radical and sometimes even utopian political view, which frankly these days is very much infused with this thing that we're calling CRT. And so what that means is that when parents resist, when parents resist a certain orthodoxy,

such as sometimes trying to say that the fact that there are a disproportionate number of black boys who be violent in a school because it's kind of a symbolic fight against the establishment, and you don't want to be bigoted against Black boys, for example. That CRT is okay because what kids should be learning is to protest the very foundations of the society they live in. That's what these people believe, and I'm not trying to make them sound like fanatics, but they, in a very placid but unreachable sense, do believe that that is the soul of what education and educational institutions are. That, I have to stick in the plug, is the sort of thing that woke racism is about. Not specifically school. I don't want people to think this is a book about education. It's about, frankly, the world. But that is the ideology that

we're talking about. So Condoleezza Rice goes on The View. And why, I cannot tell you. This was not necessary for her. But she did. And they asked her her thoughts on CRT. And she gave them. I'm going to play them one second in part. Boy, oh boy, is she getting attacked. I mean, she's getting attacked, of course, you know, by the mainstream press. But I'll play one attack in particular. I'll highlight for you one attack in particular that's just gone below the belt and is indicative of this view that we're talking about, right? Well, we'll see. Let me set it up with Condi's statements about whether CRT ought to be taught in schools on The View. It either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past. I don't think that's

very productive. Or black people have to feel disempowered by race. I would like black kids to be completely empowered, to know that they are beautiful in their blackness. But in order to do that, I don't have to make white kids feel bad for being white. It goes back to how we teach the history. That's what I'm saying. We teach the good and we teach the bad of history. But what we don't do is make seven and 10 year olds feel that they are somehow bad people because of the color of their skin. We've been through that. Yeah. And we don't need to do that again. So whoopie kind of pushed back saying, well,

we need to teach history. And, um, Condi wasn't saying we don't need to teach history. She was saying, you don't need to have to shame children for the color of their skin and doing that. So Q,

this guy, Trey, he got fired from MSNBC for incendiary comments along these same lines. He now writes for The Griot and he writes that her stance on CRT, quote, proves she's a foot soldier for white supremacy. Her appearance was offensive and disgusting. And her thoughts on CRT are completely white centric as they revolve around the thoughts and needs of white people. feel bad and says, if your white kid doesn't feel bad when he learns about how all the stories where white people knock us down and stand on our necks and then ask why we're on the ground, I really don't care about them. I don't care if learning it makes them feel bad. They ought to

feel bad. Your thoughts on that? Toure is an interesting figure. I'm disappointed in him on this, frankly. He wrote a book about 10 years ago called Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? And yet it's just not necessary to hurl names like that around so indiscriminately. It's not right. I'm sorry. And really what it comes down to is this. Ture is assuming that the proper view, the Black view, I guess, is that we need white people to walk around feeling guilty for things that they as individuals didn't do. I think Ture is assuming that the case for that vision has been made

in an impregnable way, but it hasn't. And I would say, for example, that yes, history needs to be taught. We shouldn't even need to say that. Who thinks history shouldn't be taught? We're not- No one's arguing the opposite. Of course, history needs to be taught. But the question is, after the history is taught, after a white person thinks, God, that's awful. And they may even think, hmm, my grandmother participated in that. Are they then supposed to walk around feeling guilty? I make a proposition here. No. And I'm not alone. And there are a great many black people who feel the same way. I can definitely say I am a black man, and I think about it all the time,

and yet I do not need for my sense of well-being white people to walk around feeling guilty about things that they as individuals didn't do. I hereby make that statement. I do not consider it naive. It is not immoral. It is shared by millions of Black people. The idea that white people need to walk around feeling guilty is largely a conceit of the intelligentsia and certain elements in the media. All power to them, but it is not truth. And as such, for Condoleezza Rice, with her lifetime's experience, including growing up in the segregated effing South, she grew up in serious racism of a kind that neither me nor Toure ever had to deal with. For her to be

called a white supremacist and for her views to be called revolting, I just think that it's extreme, it's rhetorical, it's not fair, and it's not truth. A great many of us, and by us I mean Black people, don't need that white guilt that a certain other kind of black person seems to think is so necessary for us to overcome. They have a case to make. I'd like to hear it. messages maybe even more uh the so-called elect that have decided that in penance for sins of the father or mother or whatever uh that they need to spend their lives somehow doing penance and making it up to the black community per robin d'angelo so uh we're gonna have more with john mcwarder next his views on so many things are fascinating and we're gonna ask him about the

latest because there's an update on the dave chappelle saga and we'll get into his latest book, which I know you're going to find really interesting. Stay with us. So before we get into the book, let's talk about the latest on Dave Chappelle. He's been all over the news this week. And it's been sort of an interesting thing. One of the things he's getting criticized for in his latest Netflix special is that he was accused of pitting the trans community against the black community and not sort of understanding that there are a lot of black people who are also trans and not understanding that there doesn't need to be a war between black people and trans people in general. Right. And he has stood his ground. He has not apologized for anything. Netflix has stood behind him, though. Ted Sarandos, one of the leaders, has said he probably could have been more sensitive and sort of rolling it out. He the head of Netflix and Dave Chappelle has now come out and said, is this on? Yeah, actually, we have this on camera. So let's listen. Here's what he's now saying. Watch. Even though the media frames is that it's me versus that community.

It's not what it is. Do not blame the LBGTQ community for any of this shit. This has nothing to do with them. It's about corporate interests and what I can say and what I cannot say. To the transgender community, I am more than willing to give you an audience. But you will not summon me. I am not bending to anybody's demands. Sort of an interesting thing. I mean, to me, I see,

you know, normally the media would definitely be siding with Dave Chappelle as a black man who's made it in a tough field comedy. He's killing it. 20 million bucks is special for Netflix. But he touched another one of their, you know, golden geese, the trans community. And that's that's a third rail

that the trans activists will be very, very loud and coming for you no matter who you are. And so far, it's sort of this standoff. You know, it's like there's impasse. Dave's not bending and Netflix hasn't bent, which is shocking, but good. And the trans community is not bending. They had their walkout. They're still on it. They're still pushing that. Although Dave does go on to say that his movie that he had coming out this summer with a bunch of his comedy specials in it, I think has been canceled by virtually everyone. But what do you make of this whole controversy, John? It's the issue of degree. The idea seems to be that he's not allowed to say things, that there are things that he's not supposed to say.

So it's not that he said some things that some people didn't like and they explain why tartly and maybe even abusively. The idea is that he shouldn't have said it. And a platform that shows him saying it and supports him saying it deserves to be walked out upon. In other words, he sinned. The way people are behaving is as if he's committed some kind of heresy. This is a very unusual kind of behavior, unless you understand that we're talking about religion. And so however you feel about his comments about the trans community and who he's aligning against to, what's interesting about the whole thing in the socio-historical perspective

is the notion that what you do when you don't like what people are saying is forbid people to say those things, make it so that everybody's afraid to open their mouth about those things. And the problem is that despite the cathartic pleasure that there is in telling people to shut the F up, And I completely get it. You have a sense that, and I don't mean sense of power. That makes it sound like they're walking around with a mallet. You feel like you can make a difference and you can get what you want. Anybody would enjoy that. And especially if it's about something that you're sensitive about, such as whatever your identity happens to be. But the thing is, after you do it,

you're not stopping people from thinking it. And I'm not sure people fully realize that just because you can't say something out loud doesn't mean that people aren't having conversations behind your back. Doesn't mean that they're not going to keep thinking what they're thinking. You can't control what people are thinking. The words are just an expression of it. And unless that's what people want, that people can think things, but just not say it in public. And the problem is, why would you want that? Why are you seeking that? What you really think is that you're changing the world, but you're not. You're just zipping people's mouths shut. We encourage that too much in this culture. We look at that sort of thing being done in the deep past, and we think of it as quaint, that you're not allowed to

say certain things, that it's heretical. Now, we just use different words like hegemony and social justice, do the same thing, and think of it as the height of sophistication. I'm not sure it is. This, your comment reminded me of a scene from a show I used to watch all the time and loved, Everybody Loves Raymond, where Raymond is talking to his wife, Deborah, and she says to him, me thinks thou doth protest too much. And he says,

don't say me thinks thou doth protest too much. And she says, okay, I won't say it, but me thinks it. That show is not streaming and it's making me mad because I only got up to the fourth season. I can picture that scene. It's spectacular, but that's the point, right? Me thinks it, me still thinks it, even if I can't say it. You're going to keep thinking it. This business of you can't say it simply doesn't work. I know that the people who are doing all of this shutting

down think of themselves as on the side of the angels. They think they're continuing the struggle. They think this is how you create social justice. But I think if they really took a look at themselves, they'd realize that, I hate to say it, but there's something childish in this notion that you can't say that. It doesn't work. I kind of thought, I'm going to start sounding old, but I kind of thought we learned that back in the days of PC. That's not PC. And everybody knew all it meant was that people would talk about it when you weren't around. It's the same thing now. I guess we have to learn that lesson again. For example, changing thought about trans people is something that can happen. We're seeing it. I mean, we are undergoing a massive shift in the visibility of trans people, what we think about trans people.

The whole thing is changing with dazzling rapidity. But these things do take time. It doesn't take just a year. It happens over a few decades. We've seen this with the acceptance of, say, gay marriage, of homosexuality in general. And with trans issues, I think it's going to be the same sort of thing. And I think I'm seeing it. But part of that cannot be telling Dave Chappelle he can't say things. It's just not going to work. We have a whole segment on the show. You can't say that. So the

point of your new book, and I've heard you say it with Glenn Lowry on your show that you guys do together. But the point is that, as it says in the title, it's a new religion. Wokeism, woke racism, it's a new religion. You call them the elect. We talked about this last time. We thought wokesters was too kind. It makes them sound too hip. Wokerati, too much like glitterati, that's too complimentary. The elect is what you've gone for. And you say their time is limited. But in the meantime, they're powerful. They are coming for your kids. Make no mistake, they absolutely are. And it's beyond the university and K through 12 education system. And that I really would love to talk about this, that it's futile to dialogue with them, that it is futile to dialogue with them. So what is the alternative to dialoguing with the elect? Yeah, this is a major plank of woke racism. It's not just 150 pages about how it's a religion that would get boring. The issue is what to do about these people. And the sad fact is you cannot reason with them on these issues.

You can reason with them about tax policy. You can reason with them about how to make a fruit tree grow in your backyard. But you cannot reason with them about issues having to do with power differentials. It's a religion partly because of this utter imperviousness to reason. You cannot teach somebody that Jesus doesn't love them. There are very few people who would be open to that. In the same way, you cannot reach these people on these issues. And so the question is not, how can you break bread with an elect person and make them see things your way and maybe change some of their behavior? You can't. So few of them would be available to that that it wouldn't be worth trying. But what this means is that woke, truly woke, as in most of us Americans, have a new job.

And it's a shame that we have so many jobs. But it used to be that white America had the job of learning that black people were human. The idea of racism as a stain, white America had to learn that. White America didn't like it. White America, I think, has learned that now about as well as white America ever will. But it was counterintuitive at first. It took work. Now there's a new thing, and it's white and black people. We have to stand up to the elect. When an elect person is trying to take over your curriculum, take over your workplace, take over what your kids are being taught, or even just take over a conversation, that person needs to be stood down. We need to stop being afraid specifically of being called racists on Twitter. What the elect do is that if you say that you don't agree with them or you say something they don't like, you say some words that they have decided they don't approve of, you get called a racist on social media and especially Twitter.

You get flamed. And they do that because they see it as creating social justice. They genuinely think they're doing a good thing. However, it hurts. It hurts to be called a racist or a self-hating person if you're Black on Twitter, or you're a white supremacist. Condoleezza Rice apparently is a white supremacist. You get called that on Twitter. We need to start walking on. We need to get used to it. People often ask me, how can I stop them from calling me a racist? And I say, you can't. You have to watch them calling you a racist

when you open up your phone and realize that it'll die down in a week or two and walk on. Some people will be more in a position to do this than others. For some people, and I hear from at least one a day, it's their job that's on the line. They can't speak out or they lose their job. But that's not everybody. There are little things that almost everybody can do in the meantime to teach the elect that they can't run the show. And I don't want to chase the elect out of the room. They want to chase us out of the room. I don't want to chase them out of the room. I want them to sit down at the table where they were circa 2010 and give their ideas. And one listens, one needs to hear things from the hard left. Very slowly, they can help us push life forward. But since about June 2020, the elect have learned

that they can stand up and have their way by stringing together a few words like intersectionality and hegemony and calling you a racist on Twitter if you dare to disagree. That's no way to run a country. And so we need to learn how to stand these people down. And I think it'll work if we all just develop a spine and stop walking around pretending to agree with these people because they're scary. They'll back down. I think I have an addendum to your comments, which is if you speak out and you get fired, and I realize that's a scary thing. I realize that. But that all that that might doesn't necessarily need to be a deal breaker. Perhaps you will land at a different place that you're more aligned with

that doesn't fire people for speaking out against nonsense like this, that doesn't judge you based on your political views or something you write on Twitter or a meeting you go to protesting CRT. Perhaps you weren't meant to be at a place that is as intolerant as the one for which you work. So I do think, I know it's easy for me to say now I own my own company and so on, but I got here by ruffling a lot of feathers and taking off a lot of people and being called awful names. And I would say I'm much better off and happier now than I was when I was working for places that tried to speech police me one way or the other. Yeah. And, you know, I would say, Megan, that you are quite right. And, you know, I'm in a similar position.

But then we also do have to acknowledge that there is, say, the assistant professor at a school who feels a certain way. But, you know, if they express their views, they wouldn't get tenure and they'd have to go try to find another job and they might find themselves unhirable. Because, for example, the one place that really does scare me, unfortunately, is academia, where I had started, where it's getting to the point where the people who run the show are almost all elect. And so you can't get a job if you're not one of those people. So with them, I'm not sure that they would see it as feasible to leave and become better people by doing something, unless they leave the field completely. I'm still in my camp.

Yeah, but look at Peter Boghossian, right? He just left his college in the Northwest and they were far left. And I think he's going to do better, not in that environment. You know, they were so intolerant of him. They were so cruel to him. They targeted him for having,

and again, he's a, he's more of a left-wing guy, but he's not woke and he spoke out against it. I think he'll wind up killing it on Substack or in the podcast world like Brett Weinstein did, right? You can't, I think you can't dispute that his life has settled in a better place now than it was when he was on the college campus with his wife, Heather, and they were being targeted. I just think, I don't know if it's the universe, if it's God, if it's karma, something happens where if you just continue working it, continue rowing, you will ultimately land in a better place if you stick by your own ethics, your own morals, and you don't let your voice be silenced. It's not to say you have to scream every position you have from the rooftops,

but I think this is an important fight and we need as many soldiers in it as we can get. We do. I worry actually at this point about younger people who are seeking to go into academia. I think we need to work on concrete pathways that we can point them to

where they can use their talents somewhere other than the university because it's getting to the point where as you say, that kind of person might be happier, not even going into academia at all. It might become difficult for that person to do it unless they've been unusually circumspect on Twitter, because it's getting to the point where committees are looking at people's social media beforehand in order not to be caught short. So yeah, things are really changing in that way, but it's better to live honestly. Well, you point out in your book that if you think you can sort of choose like you do on a menu between the precepts that the woke follow,

the elect follow, think again, because it's not enough that you, I'm thinking of the actor, Sarah Paulson, who has been very outspoken on LGBTQ rights. She is part of that community, but wouldn't say her pronouns. That was like all the chips she had put into the elect bank, John, did not matter. You're not allowed to pick and choose. You have to adopt the entire religion. It's a religion, in other words. And there are some people who are pushing back against me calling it a religion.

And I understand that. In another world, I might call it an ideology. But there's a heat, there's a fervency, and there's an imperviousness to reason involved in this that is more like the bad aspects of religion than just what was going on in China during the Cultural Revolution. And part of it is that if you say something that has been prescribed, you are treated basically as a witch. The idea is not that you have a different opinion or that you're quirky. If you go against any of the tenets, you are considered a bad person, unworthy of being dealt with, and you have to be pushed out the window. People cannot stand to be in the room with you.

That's not sophisticated thought. That's one of the big themes about this, which is that it's being put forth as if it's the next step. It's the great leap forward when really a lot of it is very simplistic and sometimes even juvenile. We have to stop pretending that this sort of thing is wisdom just because it's scary when those people write the word racist on Twitter because yeah, they are really mechanical. They can be really mean, and we cannot teach them that they're not right. You call it, I love this, Ken D'Angelo-nian gospel. That's so beautiful. It took me a few

reads to realize what you'd done there. Ken D'Angelo-nian gospel. Well done, well done. But one of the points you make in the book is, and this is quoting the elect on what should matter to concerned black people. This is one of the exhibits that you offer. Historical figures who weren't woke on race must be canceled. And, you know, you sort of take this on mockingly. It made me think of the fact that in the New York City City Hall, they just took down the statue of Thomas Jefferson, which has been there for 100 years. They've also announced as of this past June that they are taking down the Teddy Roosevelt statue that's been in front of the Museum of Natural History since 1940, because they say it symbolizes colonialism and racism, because Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson were not woke. They were not woke when it comes to race. I think that is a fair accusation. And therefore, they must be thrown out and their statues must not be seen. Yeah, you know, each one of those cases is different. And so I'm going to ruffle some feathers and say, I think I understand the Teddy Roosevelt case. He was a great man in some ways, but he was all about America coming to bestride the world. And America's bestriding of the world hurt a lot of people in a lot of ways. I'm left enough to understand that. Now, big surprise, Roosevelt was a racist by our standards. That's no reason to take the statue away. Everybody was a racist in 1903. But you

could say that the thing that he stands for most is this business of bullying going up the hill. Now, some people may say he was also a progressive and make an argument. There's an argument there. Jefferson, though, I'm very disappointed in that. I mean, the man lived hundreds of years ago. He was a man of his time in certain ways, including thinking of Black people as inferior, which he wrote down, but that was a default view at the time. And in terms of his contribution to the United States, he was indisputably a great man, not to mention he was an incredible polymath. He was a fascinating person. Now, was his moral life pristine? Clearly not, and we all know what I'm referring to,

sure, but judging him by our standards, once again, it's simplistic. The idea is to say, look at him, look at what he stands for. We are going to slap back at the deep past to show that we know what racism is. Why? I think any 10-year-old could see, well, if Thomas Jefferson was a racist, it's because essentially everybody was at the time. And to expect him to have been able to see past it is asking a bit much, given that very few of us can see past our own time. Any 10-year-old can figure that out. You're taught that it's sophisticated to instead say, we shall not look at this statue of the person who wrote the Declaration of Independence because of Sally Hemings and because he thought Black people

were inferior. Well, good for them. I'm not sure what they've proven. Frankly, I think they're giving into simplicity. I'm not sure why that's sophisticated. Well, and I mean, I can relate. Women were not in the Declaration of Independence either. We did not get a mention. Do I hold it against Thomas Jefferson? Do I think he was not pro equality when it comes to women's rights? I do believe that. I don't care. It happened a long time ago. I can appreciate what he did in the founding of this country, an extraordinary act of courage and intellectual prowess that I don't have to go back and expect him to have 2021 attitudes on all these issues. But I don't know. I think, John, you and I are in the majority. And

I would like to get your thoughts on how big you think this group is, the elect. I realize it's grown beyond academia, but I continue to believe that most liberals are with you and with me. And I know all conservatives are, except for maybe 2%. Yeah, it's a small group, the elect. They are overrepresented in the media and in academia. But it's a small group of people, relatively. I have no official numbers, but most people left of center are not like that. They aren't that dogmatic. They aren't that dogmatic. They aren't that prosecutorial.

The issue though, is that the people who are like that end up exerting disproportionate influence because they scare you into doing things their way. I have made with Glenn Lowry a graceless analogy, which is also in the book, but unfortunately it's the only one. And it involves that we left of center people these days are people who have, if I may, and please bleep it if I can't, we've peed ourselves. I just I see that all over where people are pretending to agree with a certain kind of angry vocal person who will call you dirty names in the public square if you don't pretend to agree with them. And that's not going to work. I don't think that suddenly everybody left of center has become this religious elect figure. It's just a few. But because of this invention called social media, and we're never going to do without it, but if it didn't exist, we wouldn't have this problem. Because the whole world is in our hands, everybody can now talk to everybody, and it's so easy to get a mob together. You can exert this kind of influence by basically calling people the moral equivalent of pedophiles on social media if they don't jump to your tune.

We can't let these people have that kind of influence. Now that we realize that that's the problem, we're rubbing our eyes post-pandemic, we have to start standing up. Otherwise, we're going to have this country taken over by a religion, which is really not what this experiment was supposed to be about. It's extremely backwards. The solution is not to dialogue with them. The solution is to fight them. I said it before, I'll say it again. You and Glenn Lowry got me through, and my friend Coleman Hughes, who I love, got me through the past couple of years just watching you guys on Blogging Heads TV. You can see it on YouTube as well. You're sort of ticked off little exchanges. You know, John calls himself, I think it's a cranky liberal, and Glenn is more of a conservative, but

just reason and fact-based and honest, and you don't really give two dams who's going to come after you. One of the things I love about you. Thank you so much. Good luck with the book. Want to remind people, go out and buy it. It's called Woke Racism, How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America from one of the greatest thinkers on these issues.

I've had the pleasure to listen to. All the best with it. Thank you so much, Megan. Hope to speak soon. Coming up, actually after the break, we're going to have the segment You Can't Say That.

Speaking of You Can't Say That. So we'll bring you the latest on why you can't say the latest thing. And then we're going to be the segment. You can't say that. Speaking of you can't say that. So we'll bring you the latest on why you can't say the latest thing. And then we're going to be joined by subtext sports writer Ethan Strauss on Nike, LeBron, Kyrie and vaccine mandates and much, much more. It's time for another edition of a feature we have here on The Megyn Kelly Show called You Can't Say That or Think That or Do That. Oh, wait, this is America. I feel like John McWhorter, he would have liked this. Hopefully he's still listening. Today, we are taking you deep into the world of birds. Yes, if the wokesters can affect the world of

knitting, they can absolutely affect the world of birds. And here we talk about the racist bird names, which are now causing all sorts of drama amongst scientists and others in the ornithological space. According to a recent article in Science News, racist legacies lurk in the world of animal names. 142 North American bird names endure as verbal monuments to people who are deemed problematic, according to Jamie Chambers. 142, I say. For example, there is the beautiful yellow and black Scott's Oriole found in California. Look at it. Yeah, you can tell it's gonna be problematic. Scott's Oriole found in California, which was named after Winfield Scott. He killed Native Americans along the Trail of Tears. How'd he get a bird? Scott's Oriole, you got to go in 2021. Thankfully, there are bird lovers with a whole lot of time on their

hands, including a grassroots campaign called Bird Names for Birds, which has made it a mission to replace all eponymous bird names with descriptive ones. I don't really know what they mean. What does that mean? But then there's a group opposing that effort. And that's the American Ornithological Society, which initially rejected a recent effort to rename the bird known as McCowan's Longspur, named after a Confederate general. They don't think you need to rename the Confederate bird. But then after pushback, the society changes minds saying, well, we're going to undergo a new name changing process because, as the president there says, we are committed to changing these harmful and exclusionary bird names. God. And remember, it's not just birds. No, it's not. For example,

the gypsy moth has been deemed problematic because gypsy is considered by some to be a slur for the Romani people. So the next time you call a moth a gypsy or an Oriole a Scott, you just remember you're a racist and you can't say that or think that or do that. Oh, wait, this is America. Don't go away. Coming up, we got a sports journalist who broke away from mainstream media

to report on all sorts of things like China and the NBA. We are going to lead with that when Ethan Strauss joins us next. Joining me now is former ESPN writer and beat reporter with The Athletic for the Golden State Warriors, Ethan Strauss. He's recently broken away from mainstream sports media to forge his own path on Substack called the House of Strauss. Ethan is no stranger to tackling tough topics in sports, including Nike turning against its core audience, men, vaccine mandates, not to mention the NBA's dealings with China. Ethan, thank you so much

for being here. Welcome to the independent media world. It's wonderful to be in the independent media world. And thanks so much for having me. sure all right so you know you have a big advantage over me because i know nothing about sports i mean truly i like i truly know next to nothing i'm interested in it though like when it crosses over into the news world i'm always like i should pay more attention to this this could be a a stress reliever people seem to get great joy out of talking about sports i don't know clay clay travis kind of lured me into wanting to become a sports fan because he said it's like sort of the male Real Housewives. I was like, this is a getaway. It's an emotional getaway. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. I often wonder myself,

is this an opiate of the masses that distracts us from what we need? Or is it pro-social and it's a bonding opportunity that we are desperately in need of right now because we're always fighting. And I'm not sure. I actually haven't even sorted that one out for myself. I mean, I just know that it's the industry that I follow. I know it crosses into culture. I know that, as they say, a lot of, what is it, politics is downstream of culture.

I always reverse those two. And sports is all part of that. So it's worth watching. Yeah. And team sports, they offer the opportunity to a lot of life's lessons. I see it now with my kids learning how to cooperate, how to take a loss, how to be a gracious winner, all that stuff. Unfortunately, now you got places like ESPN that are trying to teach all sorts of other lessons that it's not their business to try to teach. And that's why, you know,

sort of alternate sports media sites, whether it's Outkick or Dave Port that's why, you know, sort of alternate sports media sites, whether it's Outkick or Dave Portnoy's, you know, Barstools or you are doing so well, because I don't think most people want their politics shoved down their throat in their sports. Yeah, I guess it's a good question as to why that happens, because I hear that from a lot of fans, from a lot of readers, they say, I don't want my sports to turn political. I don't want it to turn into a lecture that's aimed at me. But the reason it's happening is because of the neutrality they want and the neutrality that they're used to. For a propagandist of any bent, place a space that reads as neutral, I mean, that's great territory to have because if you can take a space that reads as neutral, I mean, that's great territory to have. Because if you

can take a space that reads as neutral, and if it's very popular and people come together, then you can really shift the conversation because whatever is being said in that space is going to read as just objective. And I know people from the left would point to military flyovers as a kind of propagandizing where you're using the platform of sports. But in recent years, it's been more of the social justice messaging that we've seen. But it really opens up these fascinating incongruities where the messaging coming from sports teams sometimes bumps up against just the natural fan response. I mean, I was fascinated the first game of the NFL season of 2020, uh, first post pandemic NFL game. And they all, the players, it was at the chief stadium.

They all linked arms with one another and they were doing some big, uh, speaking out against racism and they, uh, speaking out against police violence and the jumbo traumas involved. And it was fascinating to watch because the crowd thunderously booed. And you could just look at the faces of the players and these just visages of shock as it washed over them because they had been on social media for months during that hot and heavy summer of 2020. And I don't think it ever occurred to them that the sense of consensus that they were absorbing from social media was just completely contradicted by what the NFL fans were feeling at that moment. So in that way, at that time, you just got a taste of the politics of the fans and how so much of the messaging towards the fans were completely

perpendicular to it. The media doesn't want people to know how the fan base feels. For that matter, we found out last week that the media doesn't want you to know how a liberal icon like Ruth Bader Ginsburg feels about things like protesting at the football games and taking a knee. Katie Couric admitting that she edited that part out of her interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She didn't think it was befitting for a liberal icon. Well, that's really not the job of a journalist to try to protect somebody's

rep because you think it's going to hurt them with the left wing. I think more accurately, it would have shorn up a position that Katie and other liberals don't want to see shorn up, which is where they don't want to see kneeling at the football game. Even post-George Floyd, people don't need a black national anthem. They don't need people to be separated based on race when they're just trying to take in a game. And the polls reflect that. All right. So let's get into what's happening now in sports and China, because I find this really fascinating. You know, I had this very contentious interview with Mark Cuban when I launched this show, not the one on Sirius. Sirius. I think people know this. Actually, I'm not sure.

We are doing the podcast live now for Sirius XM on the Triumph channel, 111. But later, we released it as a podcast. So I don't know how people consume it. But the podcast before Sirius launched about a year ago, and it was our ninth show, October 12th. And he was talking all about Black Lives Matter and how it's important to speak out for what you believe in, human rights abuses. And that's why he defended the logo BLM on the basketball courts, blah, blah, blah. Great, great, great. I see it.

You know, you're deeply held convictions. What about China? What about the hundreds of millions you're taking from China? Because like they're kind of engaged in an ethic genocide right now. Seems kind of problematic. You want to speak out against them?

And boy, oh boy, he wouldn't. And now today, this guy, Enes Kanter, this big basketball player has gone to the place where no one wanted to go before. There was one guy, one guy who spoke out. It was like a team coach or a team manager, but Mark Cuban certainly didn't. So I'll give you just a flavor of what happened with Mark Cuban because we have it queued up and then I want to get to the news of the day. Ennis Cantor taking the stand as boldly and bravely as anybody I've seen. Here was Cuban refusing to do it. Why would the NBA take $500 million plus from a country that is engaging in ethnic cleansing? Why would? So basically, you're saying that nobody should

do business with China ever. Why don't you just answer my question? No, Megan, I'm just trying to get to the root of it. So why would you do that? You're the one because they are a customer there. They are a customer of ours. And guess what, Megan, I'm okay with doing business with China. You know, I wish I can solve all the world's problems, Megan. I'm sure you do too, but we can't. And so we have to pick all battles. And while you'd like to get proclamation so you can create a clip that says, look what I got Mark to say,

you don't want to deal with the actual action item. You might think silence is violence, but action gets change, right? And so when I start to talk about- I await your action. He's not alone. That's how most people in the NBA would defend it. They will not condemn China.

Oh my God. I remember listening to that interview at the time, and it was fascinating. I mean, credit to Mark Cuban for showing up and facing the fire. But to just take a step back, I know we'll return to China and the NBA. I found it so fascinating because he had been on such a run on Twitter. He had been tweeting a lot going into that interview, Megan, and it seemed like he wasn't prepared. And he had these little rejoinders, I remember, that he was using with you. For instance, at one point, you were confronting him with the ratings falling apart for the NBA. And he made

some point about the Kentucky Derby having bad ratings. And he said, are horses woke? And you just did the auditory equivalent of just kind of blinking at him and going, no, here's the question. And I think it was just a fascinating taste of somebody getting used to the Twitter environment, how you can have a snappy rejoinder and have your cheering section and walk away. And it leaves them utterly unprepared to deal with a real interview. He fell apart. He was terrible in that interview. It's uncomfortable. He sounds angry. And it's because there's no moral defense. There's no moral defense in doing business with China when you are promoting yourself as a brand in the way that the NBA has, and we can get into that and how they promoted themselves, there's no defense for it. And what gets so frustrating is I actually will take the

answer that he eventually gives, which is it's about the money. What gets so frustrating and insulting is when the NBA tries to pretend it's something else. I mean, I'm looking, I could look at just some of the stuff Adam Silver, the commissioner, says is so ridiculous and insulting about their position on China. I remember a few months back where he's asked about it, and I'm reading the quote. As a former political science major from Duke University, I'm still a believer in soft power. I think these cultural exchanges are critically important. And he goes on and on and on again about how this is somehow going to cool the tension between these two nuclear armed superpowers.

This is going to save the Uyghurs, the Muslim minority that's being tortured. It's ridiculous. And I think there's a component to this conversation that is getting ignored by a lot of the media, though, and that's that we're living in the aftermath of failure when it comes to the NBA's China policy to say nothing of the moral concerns you're talking about. The NBA had this big colonial adventure into China. They were going to make a ton of money and they were going to incubate a bunch of Chinese superstars in the NBA. Everybody remembers Yao Ming. He was seven foot six in the early 2000s

and from China, it was a big deal. It was a big deal, pardon the pun. So the NBA funded all these academies in China. Adam Silver in 2017, the NBA commissioner was expressing frustration that there were no NBA players from China and there are still no NBA players from China. So when you see China punishing the NBA and cutting off contact sporadically as punishment for a player like Enos Cantor criticizing Xi Jinping or criticizing the former general manager of the Rockets, now the 76ers, Daryl Morey, for doing a free Hong Kong tweet, there's this element of, well, there's no real leverage that the NBA has over China because China is a very nationalistic country that likes to promote nationalism, and there are no Chinese players in the NBA. So because of that, I just think the dynamic is

broken. It's like one of those election nights where you get the results early in the night, and you know that South Carolina has gone red or California has gone blue, and we just haven't counted up the votes. The NBA in China is a dead dynamic. It's not going to work. Trying to stand on both of them is like trying to stand on two rafts that are floating in opposite directions. And the NBA has been so cynical on this issue as to be naive. That's my conclusion. I just don't see much of a future for it. And that's the thing that was so infuriating about, you know, Cuban. And I do give him credit for coming on. But and frankly, I probably wouldn't have gone as hard on him if he hadn't been so incendiary on Twitter. He loves to pick fights, especially on these issues, dropping F-bombs, going after people

like Ted Cruz, and sort of always trying to get the last word. And with me, it was a real life human being who had facts, and, you know, kept pressing him and it was a different dynamic. I'd love to have him on again. I'll give him a second chance. He could have another bite at the apple. But that's sort of why I really want to get into it. Because if you're going to play the moral arbiter of us all and lecture on BLM and why the United States has so much work to do when it comes to how it treats its people, and then take money from this regime that's forcing sterilizations on women, putting them into work camps against their will and so on. You can spare me, please. You've lost the moral authority. It's like Joe Biden lecturing us on sexism in the United States when, you know, girls are not getting their heads chopped off by the Taliban in Afghanistan. He can stop. He can stop because they're there exposed because we pulled out so soon. so soon. So let me ask you about this guy. It's Enos?

It's not Enos Cantor? Frankly, I just know him as Cantor. Is it Enos? Is it Enos? I'm not sure. I just know he's from Turkey. And I know he's an NBA journeyman center who has had many outspoken positions over the years. Okay, so badass Cantor.

Cantor. He decides, unlike everybody else. So literally, the only person who has spoken out about human rights abuses in China is that guy you just mentioned, who's now running the 76ers. And the 76ers are being punished by China, right? They're not airing their games on Tencent. And now Ennis' team, because Ennis said the following. Here's a clip. Dear Nike, your company says that you are making a positive impact in our communities. And that is true. Yes, you are.

Here in the United States, but when it comes to China, Nike remains silent. You are scared to speak up. Don't forget, every time you put those shoes on your feet or you put that t-shirt on your back, there are so many tears and so much oppression and so much blood behind it all. To the owner of Nike, Phil Knight, I have a message for you. How about I book up plane tickets for us? Let's fly to China together. We can try to visit these slave labor camps, and you can see it with your own eyes. LeBron James and Michael Jordan, you guys are welcome to come too. He's like throwing down. All right, so who does he play for? He plays for the Celtics. He doesn't get a lot of playing time. I would say, I would caution a

little bit. I do think he's at the end of his career. He's not wrong about anything he's saying. I mean, this is all correct. But he has had a tendency a little bit like Kyrie Irving to do attention getting things. I'm not denying that he feels a moral compunction in this instance. And I'm not denying that there is an element of bravery to it. I just sometimes would caution against just saying, hey, I blanket endorse everything that Cantor says because you really don't know what the next thing is going to be. But the reason that this is such purchase is because it's true, because it's raw, because these companies, they advertise themselves as virtuous. That's part of their self-branding. Even if people I don't believe are that interested in it, I don't think it has much to do with why people resonate to these brands. But the NBA and Nike both have gone all in on this and it's an obvious vulnerability. So it's hilarious. And there's an element of schadenfreude when somebody like

Enos Kanter just takes a fire poker and just presses on it it's funny because you know they can't handle it they really have nothing to say they get angry like mark cuban does well so what's going to happen because what i hear is that they're not airing so china's now already not airing the 76ers games and you know the poor 76ers because they really had nothing to do with it the guy said the remarks when he was on another team the one other guy um i say that facetiously because good for that guy for taking a stand. But now he takes a stand and now they're not going to air the Celtics games. And that, I guess, could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, that's

actually going to cost. Is it the Celtics or the NBA a lot of money? I would say mostly the NBA before the Daryl Morey tweet in 2019, the Free Hong Kong tweet that initially caused the NBA to get bounced off CCTV in China. China accounted for 15% of basketball related income. So that's quite a bit. It was really amusing in the aftermath of that, by the way, Megan, because all these NBA people were asked about it and they would say the same thing, which is it's complicated. We don't understand China. And I thought to myself, all the major superstars every offseason fly to China to hawk their shoes. I mean, there's no country other than the United States that the NBA has become more obsessed with than China. But suddenly when this issue pops into the foreground, it's, oh, I don't know anything. Please don't ask me. I haven't done my research. I have no idea. And I will say that there's this additional component that I think is being underplayed because, yes, China, ethnic cleansing, horrible, Hong Kong, terrible. But there's this other aspect of it where are we really just going to be hunky

dory with this rival superpower that does want to supplant us, is not shy about it, has spies all throughout our university system, has incubated, whether by accident or whatever else, the virus that has killed over 700,000 of our fellow citizens in addition to shutting down the world. And it's funny, Megan, because you look at the situation, you look at where the NBA is on it, you look at where China is on it, and then you look at Gallup polling that says that 79% of Americans disapprove or have negative approval of China. And you think to yourself, why is this not getting more of a representation among people of influence? Why are they not criticizing China? Why is somebody like Kyrie Irving on the nets getting more

criticism for spreading coronavirus because he doesn't want to take a vaccine than the nation of China? There is a massive incongruity, it seems, with what public sentiment in the United States is towards this nation and what anybody with influence and power, anybody with money seems to say about. Can I tell you something just anecdotally? A couple of years ago, a couple of summers ago before the virus, I was at, I just swung by basically this sort of big think tank get together of all these muckety-mucks in journalism, in tech, and beyond, representatives from all these industries, and some celebrities. And it was very pro-China. And Mila Kunis, the wife of Ashton Kutcher and successful actress in her own right, both of them were there.

And she stood up and she said, why is everyone so unabashedly pro-China in this room? Don't we have reason to believe they're spying on us, that they're an enemy to us, that they're working against us militarily? I was like, oh my God, look at her go, go girl. And the room, the media elites, the tech elites, you know, all sorts of industries were like, and didn't expressly accuse her of being a bigot. But it was kind of like, if you're so small minded, you can't understand how the partnership we can have with China could change both worlds for the better.

You know, then we can't explain it to you. Dumbass Hollywood actress. All right, I'm being too harsh. That's not really. But that was essentially the messaging. And she sat down and she was right. She was right. But it was an example of how the elites won't allow that kind of coverage or talk to take place. No, they're greedy. They want the money and then they make it about something else because they know that looks bad.

And it's about ping pong diplomacy or whatever Adam Silver is using as a justification. And look, I have respect for China, despite some of the awful things they're doing as a country, as a country that has raised the standard of living for its middle class of the last 20 years, but they are clearly not a friend to the United States. And so I think it's fair to ask our leaders, do you care about this country? Is this a country you care about? Do you want it to do better than the nation of China? Because these are things that the people want. And I think that perhaps on no issue is there a greater gap between the public opinion and the opinion of the, for lack of a better term, the elites than on this issue, where you will see in polling, people are angry at China over what happened with COVID-19. Who's their tribune?

Who's their voice at the New York Times, on CNN? And one of the main reasons why this voice does not exist, Megan, as you know, is the intense corruption when it comes to these multinational media companies. I mean, just look at it. You look at Comcast, for instance. Well, they're building theme parks in China. China can just cut off the spigot immediately like they did with the NBA if there's any criticism towards their country. So you're not going to see a lot of criticism on NBC, for instance, towards China. Obviously, the same thing with ESPN, which is owned by Disney. Disney has so many interests in China, the movies, the theme parks. That's why you don't see any criticism. I mean, it's insane to me, Megan, that you have China just cutting off the

NBA completely in the aftermath of a tweet from a general manager of an NBA team, a free Hong Kong tweet. Where are the people on the set of ESPN saying that's crazy? Where are the people on the set of ESPN saying, yeah, in America, we should be allowed to say what we want. That's the way it works here. We don't take kindly to people from other countries trying to control our speech via its corporate proxies. This is wrong.

You don't see any of that. It's completely corrupt. We're not teaching them anything. We're not teaching them. We're bending the knee to them. That's what we're doing. And it is with the cooperation of companies like Nike, that's gone completely woke and abandoned. You'd written this in a piece that I want to talk to you about to sort of abandon its base men with its new woke messaging. And how's that working?

I want to get into that next. Nike, we sort of pulled, we pulled a couple of ads to show the difference, the evolution of Nike. We'll talk about that and also what ESPN did to Alison Williams, who's now found a new job with our pal Ben Shapiro. We'll talk about that in a minute. Okay, Ethan, so you had a piece recently going after Nike on its evolution as a new wokester. You know, they're behind Colin Kaepernick and so on. And hearkened back to a 1996 Nike ad. And this, you know, it's not that long ago. I was fresh out of law school.

1996 is not exactly 1956. But here's how Nike was selling itself to the world in 1996. Watch. Listen. I'm not sure what we just saw, but for our listeners taking this in by radio, Ethan, can you explain what we just saw? I thought you were going to play the chicks dig the long ball ad with the Atlanta Braves pitchers who were getting really into the home run chase to try to impress Heather Locklear. That was one that americans remember that ad that

just played was this nike soccer players versus the devil ad that was super popular outside the united states that culminates i mean it's it's just a fun ad it's all these great nike soccer players and they're fighting satan's army it's the sort of weird stuff that whedon and kennedy the ad firm that commissioned that one, did. And it ends with Eric Cantona, the French soccer star, super French guy, popping his collar and just kicking a fireball through the devil who is keeping goals. So that's a crazy ad, too. But the main point was that Nike used to have very inventive ads, the kinds of ads that would stick and be remembered. Chicks dig the long ball is not a politically correct phrase, but it's a phrase any man

over the age of 30 in the United States probably remembers from that hilarious ad. But the recent ads have turned towards sanctimony. They've turned towards, as John McWhorter would say, the elect's preferences and political worldview. And now they're just lecturing people. They're not fun. They're not funny. They're just cringe. And we have an example of 2021 Nike.

Take a listen to this. Here, you can be whoever you want. Be with whoever you want. Or just be. So bring your love. And leave the hate. Welcome to the land of new football starts to build all right that's enough of that let's get out of this okay so you've seen a little it's basically women women women women with babies two men kissing woke woke woke identity politics on display and apparently my team really wants us to play one on basketball to watch this. Today, I have a presentation on dynasties.

But I refuse to talk about the ancient history and drama. That's just the patriarchy. Instead, I'm going to talk about a dynasty that I actually look up to. An all women dynasty. Women of color. Gay women. Women who fight for social justice. Women with a jump shot.

A dynasty that makes your favorite men's basketball, football and baseball teams look like amateurs. Gay women. Women who fight for social justice. Women with a jump shot. A dynasty that makes your favorite men's basketball, football, and baseball teams look like amateurs. A dynasty with fire braids. A dynasty with sick style. A dynasty with crazy dimes. A dynasty that makes Alexander the Great look like Alexander the... Okay. The dynasty that's been reigning for the past 25 years. It's undefeated since 96.

The USA Basketball Women'signing for the past 25 years. It's undefeated since 96. The USA basketball women's national team. Oh my Lord. Oh my Lord. This is ridiculous. I don't get, I'm not subjected to these cause I don't watch the sports channels, but this is absurd. That's how I knew I had something with this,

with this article, by the way, Megan, I showed it to my mom. My mom was very liberal Sierra club, that kind of thing. And she just started scoffing at some of these modern ads because they're beyond parody. They look like some SNL satire of modern orthodoxies. They're completely insane. And it's not charismatic. I don't think customers want to be lectured about the patriarchy when

they're thinking about Nike, for instance. And they actually don't even have the convictions of their courage. Because if you notice in that ad for the women's national team, there aren't any highlights of what the women's national team for the US very successful what they're doing. It's just all lecturing and these quick shots. And I think what's happening, I mean, a lot of things are happening. But one of them is this sort of, you had Ryan Holiday on, you guys talked about, there's this phrase I love, and it's actually a favorite of the Miami Heat general manager slash president slash whatever, Pat Riley, which is keep the main thing, the main thing. These companies, whether it's the NBA, whether it's Nike, are not keeping the main thing, the main thing. They've got a core market. They feel comfortable with that core market, but they're dreaming on this other market. I call it the undecided whale. When you're trying to grow as a business, you take for granted your core market. In the case of Nike, they're one of the few apparel companies that has far more male customers than female customers. They take it for granted and they just dream about how much money they could be making if they somehow get women to buy Nike. But the way they go about it is super cringe.

It's not like those ads are appealing to women. Maybe you could contradictory. Do they think women hate men? I mean, really, do they think we hate men? Because the only way to make more little women is for us to like men. Yes, I would agree with that. I think there's this other thing happening in addition to this sort of undecided will dynamic, which is the externalization of blame because Nike had a sexual sexual harassment scandal and a lot of the male leadership was ousted. And like Hollywood in Me Too, remember all those award shows where people would get up

after Me Too? They would lecture you, you, Bob in Iowa. You need to change. It's time for all of us to change. It wasn't that we are in, I don't know, a completely depraved industry, a meat market with a casting couch. It's not us who need to change. We're externalizing it.

We're making it about you. And I think that's also happening at Nike. Nike, when they do their messaging, they're not saying, hey, we're sorry, we screwed up. We need to change our culture. It's you, the patriarchy. We've got to stop. Now we have all sorts of crazy ambitions and goals that are related to it. In another ad, they said that they wish that the WNBA becomes more popular than the NBA, the NBA that actually made Nike into the brand that it is thanks to Michael Jordan. So yeah, those are the two big dynamics as far as I see it, externalization of blame and undecided will. Oh my God, it's ridiculous. It's so absurd. And just to think about all these companies doing business with China, it's the same thing. It's

like, where's your ad talking about? OK, so you're upset about the patriarchy here in America. Like, where's your ad on the forced sterilizations? Oh, whoops. That's something you don't want to touch. How weird. I mean, it's amazing that they actually succeed in painting themselves as these heroes of, you know, social justice warriors and that, you know, they're totally committed to all these values. People buy it because it's like them going and preaching and like kneeling at the altar of these social justice warriors. They're going to buy into that religion.

They want those customers. And yet, as we just discussed with John McWhorter, it's not that big a group. They're just loud. Isn't there somebody in the marketing department of Nike or are these other groups to say, yo, this bullshit is a very small group. What about the masses of America? Why would you thumb your middle finger at men and all the women who love them? Well, I think there's this other component, which is that they're insulated from consequence. You've got these companies in the United States, these mega corporations that have such a stranglehold on the market where there's some recent indicators that say that Nike sales have stagnated of late. I don't think the strategy is working, but they're so far ahead of the game. All major corporations, the stock market

in the pandemic went way, way up. And so this is what you do when you get a little bit complacent. You start doing dumb stuff like this. You're not as hungry as you were in the 1990s where you're trying to be popular and be charismatic. It becomes about something else. And I think that's one of the most fascinating aspects of the modern era we're in is this other thing. And it's something I've observed, which is you would think that the financial incentives overwhelm all. It's clearly part of why the NBA wants into China. It's clearly why Nike wants in to China.

But it does seem like we're living in an age where the social media incentives are more powerful than the financial incentives sometimes that the urge to be popular on Twitter or the fear of one's employees staging a walkout, the craziest employees is governing a lot of what powerful institutions are saying governing a lot of what powerful institutions are saying and a lot of what they're not saying. And that opens up these market inefficiencies for independent actors. I hope to be one of them who just talks outside of that and talks past that. But it is rather strange to have something more powerful, just the fear inspired by the social media mob, more powerful than even the

money. My God, who are these, forgive me, ball-less wonders who are truly, and I say this metaphorically and physically, where are their balls? Where are they? They're not the ones actually on the courts doing the athletics, and they're not the ones behind the scenes who have the spine, let's say, to actually make tough decisions and stand up against social media bullies. Grow a pair. Well, that's a funny thing that you're a little bit getting into here, which is that the culture of sport is not, for lack of a better term, woke, right? It is Darwinian. It is brutal uh my job before all this was being a beat writer and uh

following the golden state warriors around from locker room to locker room to locker room the culture of sport overwhelmingly is quite masculine um i know this is when people say well what about the women's team and you know my my sister is a huge sports fan i get it i'm just saying that the among daily viewers of espn it's four times as male as female. I just did a story on the top newsbreaker in the NBA, Adrian Wojnarowski, passing around a social media resume to potential sources. And in the resume, it said that 94% of his followers were male. There's no country in the world that has more women who are sports fans than men. So it's a very masculinized space. It's the province mostly of men, not exclusively, but mostly.

And so when you get into some of this messaging, especially on the issues of gender, there is an incongruity. There are things that cannot be reconcilciled and it creates a lot of cringe messaging. I'm feeling it. All right, let's talk about Kyrie Irving because he's been sort of celebrated as this hero because he isn't getting the vaccine. And now he, first they said, you just can't play the away games. He plays for the Brooklyn Nets, but then they changed it to, you know what, you can't play for any games. It's just too complicated. And so you're not going to play. And he, he's sort of stood his ground you had an interesting piece i love pieces that make me think i really do i and it was like i get it you know he's being heralded by the right now as this sort of hero maybe not and slow your roll and um let's see because you might not know who you're talking about. Ted Cruz may not fully

understand Kyrie Irving and his history and what he stands for. But can you expand on why you wrote that piece and what your point was? Yeah, I'm not any sort of expert on COVID or the civil liberties implications of mandates. I mean, I'm vaxxed, but I don't. It's just not an issue that I feel like I'm an expert on when it comes to cities making their laws versus corporations. I'll leave that to people like Glenn Greenwald, who goes on your program. But I did view him almost as a window into the two warring political movements. And I, I said, when you look at Kyrie Irving, somebody who, and I know people have worked with him, gets a lot of his information about the world from sitting around and just

watching Instagram video after Instagram video without much discernment, which has a lot to do with why he once came out and said that he thought the earth was flat, or at least that there wasn't enough proof of its roundness. To go from earlier, this guy being a man of the left, who was with the Standing Rock protesters. He wanted to blow up the 2020 NBA bubble playoffs for racial justice. And he was being heralded by Dave Zirin of the nation as like Muhammad Ali. These were the names that were being used to comp Kyrie Irving when the left liked him. And now he takes his position on not wanting the vaccine. And you've got Ted Cruz praising his courage and people on the right saying, look up to Kyrie Irving. And the whole

time Kyrie Irving is just this guy. And I think it's part of this cultural dynamic. I think Peter Thiel has said that courage is in shorter supply than genius. So when somebody is being courageous and Kyrie is courageous, people will flock to him and they won't necessarily ask questions about, does this guy have a process that makes sense? Is he sharp? Is he discerning? They just like that his courage overlaps with their cause. conservatives are insecurely opportunistic and progressives are scornfully possessive. And so when you have an athlete, a black athlete, a lot of conservatives, they know when they're animated by just the knowledge that when there's a vote, it's roughly 90% to 10% Democrat to Republican in the black community. And they know that a lot of black athletes don't like them very much. So there's any sort of overlap with any issue they like. They completely glom on and are obsequious and are praising Kyrie and holding him up. And on the other side, a lot of people on the left have that same knowledge and that same fear. They know they get

90 percent of black votes versus the 10 percent. They worry about what might happen if there's any slippage. I know David Shore, the Democratic pollster what might happen if there's any slippage. I know David Shore, the Democratic pollster, has written that there's some slippage. And so when a black celebrity like Nicki Minaj or Kyrie Irving takes this position, there's a bit of a freak out. And on CNN, on MSNBC, these celebrities who are just celebrities, they're just being ripped to shreds. I don't think these celebrities are going to move the needle of black America. But a lot of people with platforms are completely neurotic about platforms, especially ever since Donald Trump won in 2016, because of all in their mind, all the free advertising from CNN. So I just look at Kyrie as this window into how these warring movements are getting so ridiculous as the fight over the affections of a guy who doesn't know what he's talking about. That's fascinating. I mean, as we speak, apparently Floyd Mayweather has issued a

statement on Kyrie and says some of, you know, espouses some of the opinions that you just offered. He says, I commend him for having some integrity and for quote, being your own man. America is the land of the free, freedom of speech, religion, supposedly freedom to choose, never be controlled by money. I respect you for having some integrity, being your own man. Free mind makes his own choices and an enslaved mind follows the crowd. Stand for something, fall for anything. One man can lead a revolution to stand up and fight for what's right.

One choice, one word, one action can change the world. It's crazy how people hate you for being a leader i hope your actions encourage many others to stand up and say enough is enough i mean but back to our other conversation isn't this i mean i could make the case he found his balls sorry sorry to be so crude but you know what i mean like there's so much pressure not to not to bitch about the vaccine. It's the vaccine mandate. Apparently he's upset about and so are many others. But I don't it sounds like he's not vaxxed. I don't know. There is something admirable about something.

Somebody going against the grain. Well, yeah, he's a ballsy guy. He hit the biggest shot, maybe an NBA history for some background since I know you're not too into sports. So I did not. I mean, he's yeah, he's a ballsy guy. He's got that. What's the phrase where fools rush in, where angels fear to tread? I'm not saying that. Look, what I'm saying is that somebody could potentially take a principled, thoughtful position on refusing a mandate. I don't necessarily

think that he's that guy, but he clearly has the courage to do it, which has put him into the fore and put him into the news cycle that he's in right now. And it is funny, again, to just see the freak out from prestige media, which I think has abandoned their mandate to call balls and strikes and be objective and are now in this position to prevent as uh tamir quran the professor at duke calls a preference cascade uh this fear that there is going to be one person who has a position and then another and it just completely like dominoes i feel as though so much of the media right now is animated by guarding against a preference cascade among normal people that is definitely tainting the coverage.

And it's getting increasingly angry and increasingly paternalistic. And it's not just saying, hey, this is what Kyrie Irving thinks. It's, hey, you need to understand how bad he is. And that's the tone of the coverage. It's, I go back to the tone of the coverage. virtually everything better than Katie Couric or I will ever understand anything. She was absolutely brilliant, even if you didn't share her politics. She was brilliant. But that's how they see, you know, like the stupid masses need to have it explained to them by those of us who understand. But I object to the use of the term prestige media. They are not prestige media. You're prestige media. We're hopefully going to be prestige media. Their prestige is in the eye

of the beholder. And I don't think the corporate folks have it. You're fun. I enjoyed talking to you, Ethan. I hope you come back. Well, the feeling is mutual. I'm a big fan of the podcast and thanks for having me. Oh, my pleasure. All right. Ethan Strauss, a new superstar on our show, but an established one in his own right. And if you haven't checked him out on Substack, do it. He could use your support and we should be supporting people who tell it like it is. Tomorrow, we've got MMA athlete and military vet, Tim Kennedy, fascinating guy. In the meantime, if you'd like to support the show, I would love it if you'd go to youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly and subscribe to the YouTube channel. You can watch the show there too, or show some clips to your friends. And you can also download the show as a podcast,

Apple, Pandora, Spotify, Stitcher. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.