The Megyn Kelly Show - Disney's Decline, and Alarming Crypto and Stock Drops, with Chris Rufo, Eric Bolling, and Bethany Mandel | Ep. 320

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Chris Rufo, journalist at City Journal, Eric Bolling, host of Newsmax's The Balance, and Bethany Mandel, editor of Heroes of Liberty, to talk about Disney's woke activism, the political actions taken after Rufo's videos that have led to Disney's decline, the marketing and PR tactics of the woke left and how to beat it, Rufo's next focus on gender ideology in schools, the importance of language in political debate, the massive losses in the stock market and the cryptocurrency markets, the alarming baby formula shortage, the true costs of inflation for Americans, the negative headlines about Bitcoin, the trouble with startup cryptocurrencies, Elon Musk's Twitter deal and Tesla stock, Biden administration vs. fossil fuel producers, how parents are dealing with the formula shortage, 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. Whoa, there's a lot happening right now. Christopher Ruffo is going to be here in a minute with details of his latest crusade against Disney, a fight he's winning, if you hadn't noticed. Their stock's down again today. Rufo was first on our show back in February 2021, and his success in matters we hold near and dear to our hearts here has been enormous ever since. Not saying we're the cause, just saying, just coincidentally, those two things both happened. But first, President Biden, just a little over 24 hours after reassuring the

American public that fighting inflation is his top priority, not to worry, got just a bit more frank when talking at a high-priced DNC fundraiser when no cameras were there, admitting that the problem of inflation is, quote, going to scare the living hell out of everybody. No doubt right now, it may be scaring the living hell out of you. It's a scary time in general as we watch massive stock market sell-offs over the past few days. Even Amazon losing 30% of its value over the past month. Amazon. And an alarming baby formula shortage in America. You've heard us reference it. I'm sure you've heard it referenced elsewhere. It's getting not enough coverage in the mainstream, but we're going to talk about it in just a bit with Bethany Mandel, who's been doing reporting on this.

Okay. So cryptocurrencies is the lead. They saw a $200 billion loss, $200 billion erased in a single day amid warnings of a so-called crypto winter. What does that mean for you and me? And what does it mean for the stock market at large? Here to help us sort through all of that, Eric Bolling, host of The Balance on Newsmax. Eric, so good to have you here today. These are scary headlines. What are we to make of it? Put it in perspective. Wow. Well, thanks for having me, Megan. Yeah, crypto. Okay. So I started getting involved in crypto around 2016, 2017. So it was kind of that dark world, the dark web. It was a place where drug dealers got involved and people were doing illicit things and sending money back and forth. As it got a little bit more mainstream,

it became a lot more used, a lot more invested in. Over the last three years or so, it really went mainstream. Goldman Sachs has crypto. You can go to Morgan Stanley and do these funds that have crypto tied to them. So it went mainstream. But the problem in the meantime is it's still in infancy. So things, markets, brands have these life cycles and they grow and they mature and then they kind of die out. I mean, there's so many going on. The crypto is in its very, very infancy. So by nature of that, infants are volatile. Are they not? Young kids are unpredictable. They're volatile. And that's what we're experiencing right now. I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be the end of crypto. I'm not selling any of my crypto. I'm staying with my crypto. I'm not buying anymore. I'm not

buying anymore. But I do believe that what this is, and for the vast majority of the last five years, if stocks were going higher, crypto wasn't. It was kind of flat. When stocks started to falter, people said, oh, I have all this extra cash. I'm selling my stock. I'm taking the money out of the volatile stock market. Where am I going to go? I'm going to play this crypto market a little bit. And so it went up because it was lightly played. It was in its infancy. So moving of cash from stock market into crypto had a little bit. And so it went up because it was lightly played. It was in its infancy. So moving of cash from stock market into crypto had that opposite effect. Stocks went down, crypto went up. As it matured, as it got bigger, as it went from maybe an infant to a, I don't

know, a toddler to a young teen, people realized that the crypto market had the same effects, had the same risks and rewards that the more volatile part of the stock market, the NASDAQ, it was actually tracking the NASDAQ for the better part of a year and a half. If you're not deeply involved in Wall Street, the tech stocks, Amazon, Netflix, Tesla, Apple, Facebook, these are tech stocks. They make their money in technology, in selling technology, and selling ads on technology, have been obliterated. You want to talk about a bloodbath.

There's a bloodbath happening on Wall Street in the technology stocks. Of course, because it's crypto, they've been tied to it. It's been going down as well. I'm not a doom and gloom guy. I've been doing this for, what for 35 years. Every time the world falls apart and it's going to be the end of the world, it's not. It's actually the time you should continue to do what you've always been doing. And in the long run, it's always worked out. It's literally always worked out since the beginning of markets in America. Okay. That's good to remember. And I also want to remind the audience that Eric made his fortune, which is far greater than you may know, on Wall Street. So you know, before you get to Fox News and Fox Business, and now Newsmax, that's where you were making your

day to day living and doing very, very well at it. So you know of what you speak. So can you just expand on that? Because the big headline is what's happening with crypto, but you're linking it now to the tech stocks, which is an equally large headline. I mean, Amazon has lost 30% of its value and Tesla's way down, which has some people wondering whether Elon Musk still is going to have the money to buy Twitter because it's all related. So those two things are linked. Which is the bigger concern? Understanding we feel it'll all work out eventually, which is the bigger concern right now? So here's how this whole thing has played out over the last, I guess, four months or so. Inflation is absolutely ripping the face off of people's budgets. The family budget is just eating it.

A $40 fill-up is now $90. Everything's going up and it's all tied to energy. They don't get it. The whole thing about the Biden administration could solve the inflation problem if they just did energy. I spent 20 years in the energy business. I know exactly what every single thing that you look around wherever you are, your apartment, your home, your work, your office.

If you look around, every single thing that you see will have an energy component to it. So if they just solve the energy problem, oil is $105 a barrel in the US. It's $110 a barrel overseas. They just need to fix that. And there's ways to do that. We've heard them all. They're all true. Bring oil prices down. Everything comes down and you'll be able to find baby formula. You'll find baby formula. But because Joe Biden and the Democrats don't want to do that, they don't want to drill. It's against the progressive mentality, the Green New Deal. They just will not tick off the progressive wing of the party.

So they won't do the things it'll take to bring inflation down. So the Fed has to come in and say, OK, so energy policy is not going to change. We need to find a way to tame inflation. And the only way to do that is to raise interest rates. When you raise interest rates, it costs people a lot more money to borrow, to invest in things, and they stop investing in things. Investing in things is what got the inflation thing ball rolling and really, really rolling. Home prices went up. Rents went up. Stocks went up. Everything was going up because people had more money to spend. Well, when you make it harder, when people don't have as much money to

spend, inflation tamps down. So inflation goes down. Problem is, when you do that, when you raise interest rates, you also take the legs out of the a little bit more risky stock market plays, which are the NASDAQ, the tech stocks, the Amazon, the Apple, the Facebook, Google, all of those. A lot of people borrow money and then go invest in those stocks. Those are the riskier stock market plays. And so that basically took the wind out of the sails of the tech sector. And then crypto, like I said, for the past year and a half, for some reason, for whatever reason, crypto has been following the tech stocks and it followed it down and actually followed it worse. There are also a couple of, there were two headlines over the last couple of days that

really spooked the crypto market. One, Coinbase is the biggest crypto exchange in the world. And it's also a publicly traded company, went public about a year ago. Coinbase said that if they go bankrupt and boom, blow people's minds, I got money in Coinbase. It's where my account is held. Boom, they go bankrupt, blow my mind, but I might not be able to get my money back. So it freaked people out. They're like, sell everything I have, move my money back into my bank. And so there's a lot of that going on. I'm telling you, I've done this for a long, long time. The biggest panics that aren't existential, real existential threats are the best buying opportunities. This is one of them. Crypto is not going away.

I don't know if Coinbase is or not crypto. I'm going to stay with my crypto position because these are the times when someone said, I think it was J. Paul Getty, when there's blood in the streets, that's when you start buying. Coinbase, I know nothing of these subjects as my audience knows, but you do. And my team gives me the proper information before I go to air. Coinbase, the one you just mentioned, so reported a $430 million net loss in the first quarter or almost $2 a share, $1.98 on declining sales and active users. Analysts were expecting a profit of $0.08 per share. Instead, there was a $1.98 loss per share. Then they mentioned bankruptcy in their risk disclosure in their quarterly report. This is from Bloomberg. In its quarterly report, Coinbase added a risk

disclosure. If the company were to file for bankruptcy, the court might treat customer assets that the exchange is custodian for, their Bitcoin, Dogecoin, or whatever, as Coinbase's assets. And then the investors would be at the back of the line for repayment, forcing normal people unaccustomed to the ins and outs of federal bankruptcy court to try to claw back their money along with everybody else owed money by the exchange. It's a huge amount at stake. Coinbase was custodian for 256 billion of customer money as of March 31st, according to the filing. So you mentioned the word bankruptcy in your risk disclosure, in your quarterly report, and you are absolutely going to see the equivalent of a run on the bank. I mean, that's just so predictable, even for somebody like me. Right.

Because it's not a bank. My background's changed. It's not a bank. And that's the thing. The Fed doesn't back cryptocurrencies. Had it backed cryptocurrencies, then you'd say, okay, well, my money's going to be safe. I'll take Coinbase to court. I'll take the courts to court, okay, well, my money is going to be safe. I'll take Coinbase to court. I'll take the courts to court and I'll get my money out. But there is the risk factor

involved in cryptocurrencies, in Bitcoin, et cetera. Also coming with that, Megan, the minute Coinbase says everything's clear or someone says, I'm done pushing this cryptocurrency market down, you're going to have massive, massive upside in this stuff because people try and jump back in. They go, wait a minute, I got out at 26,000 Bitcoin. Well, that's if it's still around. That's if it's still around. I mean, I get that because the last time, well, not last, I don't remember, when you were on like a year ago, this is kind of around the time Chris Ruffo was, February 2021. I remember we were

talking about Bitcoin and you were saying it costs about $50,000 right now for one Bitcoin. And now it's down to like $27,000, $28,000. I was like, oh, Eric, probably tell me now's the time to do it because I never did it. I would do it. I mean, I'm not buying anymore, but I'm not selling it here either. But it went to $70,000 from $50,000 to $ 70,000 from 50 to 70. Now this is a, this is a boy. You also had Goldman Sachs or BlackRock. I'm sorry. BlackRock saying that they may have been manipulating the Bitcoin market lower and they admitted to that. So there's a lot of news headlines happening right now. Okay. If it digests all this, I do believe it's, it's, it do believe it's a run out. Now, our friend Peter Schiff.

Yes, yes. You know him. He's not a fan. Now, he runs his own investment firm and they love gold and things like that. He's never been a fan of crypto, though. And this is what he tweeted. I'll give you a couple. Anyone who doesn't sell their Bitcoin now has no one but themselves to blame for their losses.

Hold at your own risk and prepare to lose everything! Don't say I didn't warn you and don't reply that this tweet won't age well because it will. Then he goes on to say, anyone who had anything to do with the promotion sale, trading or custody of Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency or crypto related equity had better lawyer up quick as you're about to be sued. Last but not least, the saying hope springs eternal certainly applies to Bitcoin holders. Despite being below any viable chart support, the price of Bitcoin is just drifting lower. It's still trading above 28,000. Selling now is not panicking. It's smart to cut and run. It's dumb to hold and hope. Well, okay. So I've known Peter a very, very long time. Peter was not always a gold bull. When I first started at Fox, Peter hated gold. Peter thought gold was a moronic investment. He

was a stock guy. Jim Cramer, 2005, 2006 came on a show. I was on CNBC fast money and he came on, he was coming after me cause I was the gold guy. I was golden oil. And he said, no, no, no. You're out of your mind bowling on TV. And he said, it's, it's financials, 2006 ballpark financials. I said, Jim, I'll tell you what, I'm the new guy in television. You're Jim Kramer, mad money, Jim Kramer.

I said, I don't know, just live on air. I said, I'll bet you $50,000, Jim, for charity that Golden Oil will outperform financials over the next year. He didn't know what to do. It was on TV. He couldn't say no. He's awkward. Awkward, right?

Couldn't do it. So he said, big hat, no cattle, you're on. That was 05, 06. The financial market proceeded to fall apart. We were almost going into, like almost beyond depression. We were almost at default, a global default. Financials, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, all the stocks that he was talking about, zero, bankrupt, countrywide, bankrupt, bankrupt. Golden Oil took off. My point is, Jim, Jim, Peter, Schiff, Schiff, I've been doing this a long time.

I see things. I probably see dead people in markets. This is not the end of Bitcoin. However we do it on air, on your podcast, Megan, I'll bet Schiff anything he wants to bet. Dinner, embarrass me. He's got to run around the building in his underwear if he's wrong, or I do, that whatever today's price is a year from now, it'll be substantially higher, not lower. All right. No one needs to see that. Correct. That's not necessary. But maybe we'll bring him your offer because he comes on the show and he may be into it. All right. Can I ask you about Terra? And is Terra the same thing as Luna? Because they're saying the subreddit Terra Luna was inundated with several posts of investors noting their losses, some saying that they could lose their houses or had lost their life savings. It's now got a suicide hotline pinned to the top of the forum for investors. I don't understand what Terra slash Luna is, but that one looks particularly bad. I think there are a lot of them. Maggie, what happened was, and this is a really odd thing.

So I spent some time in Boca and I have a house, but the two doors down, there's a guy with this incredible house. He's got just, it's probably a $7, $8 million house. He's probably has $5 million in cars in his driveway. I'm like, what the heck does this guy do? And he's not afraid to show it off. And he writes programs. He writes the back end of new cryptocurrencies. And the point is this, every day, there's five, six new things. Dogecoin started out,

Doge started out as a joke. Someone said, let's put a Shiba Inu dog on the front of a coin, make that the cryptocurrency logo. And Elon Musk thought it was cute and talked about it. All of a sudden, it became hundreds of billions of dollar investment from a joke to this. So there are these things happening all the time. I would highly recommend staying away from all these smaller ones and stay with the established. Bitcoin, Ethereum, maybe Dogecoin, probably not.

Stay with the big ones. Ethereum's not looking so good though, right? That one's in trouble too. That's the world's second largest cryptocurrency. It's joined the crash, Daily Mail reporting. It's plummeting in value by over 20% over the last 24 hours. It's now lost more than half of its value this year. That Luna had 98% of its value wiped out overnight.

That's the one with the suicide hotlines pinned now to their Reddit page. That is just alarming. But even Ethereum has lost more than half of its value. While we're talking, Ethereum's up almost 2,000. Now it was down to 1,500. Bitcoin's up to almost 30,000. These things are super volatile. That's your power. That's the power of Eric Bolling on SiriusXM Live. Well, it's probably not that, but I need to highlight that. To look at anything,

what's it doing today? You talk about Amazon. Amazon, 2150,150, $2,100 today. Amazon could be $2,500, $2,600, $2,700 tomorrow. It was $3,770 a couple of weeks ago. It's extremely volatile. These are not the things you want to put your next rent payment back into. This is stuff that you go, look, look how there's Bitcoin billionaires, billionaires who bought some of this stuff when it was, I don't know, you get 10,000 Bitcoins for a hundred bucks. Wow. 39,000, 29,000 per Bitcoin, billionaires are made. But they didn't put their life savings into it. They put money that they're willing to speculate with. I just hate the word speculation because I do believe in cryptocurrency for one reason. Ask Peter Schiff if he likes governments controlling the money supply and the direction of money. Ask Peter Schiff if he likes the US government telling us how much money is in the

money supply. Because when they print more money, inflation goes up. There's a very viable argument that says the reason why we're inflating so heavily, so high and so strong is because the Fed pumped so much money into people's pockets. They just went out on spending sprees. And they can't- I think you'd agree with that. I think you'd agree with that. And now we're trying, we're flailing trying to fix it because Joe Biden sees as, you know, people, it's going to scare the hell out of people, inflation, and it's not just going to scare them. It's really going to hurt them. You know, it's hurting them right now. Can't pay their bills. The numbers don't add up the way they should at the end of the month. And they're going to want somebody to blame. So he's not, he's not wrong about that. And the Fed raising the interest rate by to 1%, I guess. It's been at basically zero forever. Yes, that's going to help a little, according to my understanding, on inflationary grounds, but it also causes things like this. So you lose out of one pocket and you gain in the other pocket. And politically, I don't know that any of this really helps the president and his re-election

concerns, which is what it's all about for him. No, he's screwed. He's screwed. He's absolutely screwed. He has inflation. He had border. He had issues all over the place, but he also had a strong stock market until about a week ago. And now you add that to all these other crises, this is going to be the biggest red wave, maybe ever. I mean, maybe 70 House seats, maybe 10 Senate seats. It's going to be a big red wave. So just to be clear, because I do want to talk to you about the politics of it, but before I get to that, the ma and pa sitting at home who can afford to just hold, just sit there, just weather the storm, that's what they should do, yes? So for the entire history of my television and trading and Wall Street, I've always done

regular interval investing. You just don't stop. You don't stop when you think it's too high because it's too expensive. Buy it. You don't not buy because the market's going down. You continue to do what you've always done. And in the course of history, in the course of time, it has never failed you unless you die the day of a big crash. And on the subject of Bitcoin, let's say you were one of those guys

who bought a hundred Bitcoins or whatever, 10 Bitcoins when they were only a hundred bucks, whatever. And now they're, okay, now they're trading at 28,000. That's a lot of money. How does one know when to cash in on a stock like that? A lot of the people who had Bitcoin probably when it was at 10,000 were like, holy crap, I'm cashing in when it was at 50, when it was at 70. How does one know when the time is? There's a great story, Megan. There's a great story. Someone at the very beginning of Bitcoin had these Bitcoin, got a little bit more popular and a pizza delivery guy delivered a pizza and he paid him something like 10 Bitcoin as a tip or the pizza.

Look up the story, true story documented. And whoever held on to that could be worth a quarter of a million dollars if they held on to it. I have a friend, this is a real story too. I have a friend who paid his, he had a strip mall that he was paying rent on one of the units in, and he paid rent in Bitcoin. And it was like, Bitcoin is like $1,500 a Bitcoin and he paid it with a Bitcoin. And then it went to 50,000. He was literally ready to jump out of his skin. Here's the point. Put it in your pocket, put it in your wallet.

It's called a wallet, crypto wallet, and hold it. And when you think you're happy with the return, take it out, spend it, enjoy it. That's what it's for. All right. Let's spend a minute on Elon Musk before we get to politics. The Tesla has fallen 36% in the last month. They're now trading at 734, a dramatic drop from 1145 a month ago. I just bought it at 750 for the record for your audience, just today. What's your level of concern that the dip in the Tesla stock, where a lot of Elon Musk's money is, the value, his fortune is kind of in the Tesla stock, affects or erases his ability to buy Twitter.

I don't think it will. I don't think it will have anything. Before the dip in Tesla and whatever else, Elon was worth a ballpark of $300 billion. And now maybe it's, what, $220 billion, $230 billion. And there'll be outside investors who've already committed to the Twitter purchase. This deal will go down if, and I just heard today that the SEC is opening up some sort of investigation into Elon Musk, how convenient that the government gets involved in

Elon Musk's background as soon as he announces a bid for a company that could very, very much even the playing field in American First Amendment rights. I'm a conspiracy theorist when it comes to these things that people say no government would never do that. Yeah, I think they do. I think they do. And I also think this misinformation- Of course. You and I lived through the IRS scandal when they were targeting conservatives for their viewpoints. It wouldn't be the first time. You think the misinformation board is going to stick to foreign players? Right.

He's their target number one. OK, so on that subject of what the administration is doing, what do we make of it? Because you mentioned oil and gas and how that would completely change the inflationary situation. The news today is that Biden has canceled the oil and gas lease sales that were once pending. They halted the potential to drill for oil in over one million acres in Alaska's Cook Inlet, along with two lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. They say it was due to a lack of industry interest in leasing the area. So therefore, the department's not going to move forward with the proposed oil and gas leases in these two places. What's that all about? And do we really trust that this administration is doing all it can to open up the oil and gas industry and try to save us there? I don't know if I can say this. That's bullshit. Okay, here's the real- Is that your attempt to bleep yourself?

Well, I'm not sure. I don't know if we have any people saying, don't use bad words, but it's bullshit. Go for it here. It's political. It's politics. It's them wanting to say, look, we have these leases. You didn't use them. We're going to take them back. Therefore, there's not that much demand to produce oil. Bullshit. Here's the deal. Here's the real deal. They don't know what they're doing. We have an energy secretary that laughs when asked, what should we do about gas prices? We have a transportation secretary who said, I have an idea, just buy an electric car if you don't like the price of gasoline. Well, electric car is $60,000. And if everyone bought an electric car, no one would have power because we can barely, barely keep electricity through our grid right now, let alone add, I don't know, 100 million

new cars onto the grid or even a tenth of that number. It would be a disaster. By the way, where does the electricity come from? It comes from natural gas, coal, and certain fuel oils, all fossil fuels. They're out of their minds. They don't know what they're talking about. When you say we're focusing on green energy initiatives, renewable fuels, solar, hydro, wind, those things, you're telling the world, you're telling the energy producers of the world, don't invest in projects that aren't solar, that aren't renewable, because the government's not backing you. You need to make the environment for all types of fuels, whatever, even if it's renewables

down the road. You don't ignore it because maybe someday they'll be valuable and useful to us. Right now, they're not. Right now, we are a fossil fuel, cheap energy, lifeblood of the economy country, and we need to continue to do that. You're basically telling energy producers, we're not going to support you. And therefore, any of your initiatives aren't, it's a bad, it's not a friendly business environment for fossil fuel energy producers, which by the way, have 9 million high paying jobs under their belt. It's just the wrong message you're sending to the people who say, you know, it's a lot of money.

It costs hundreds. It's not billions of dollars to drop a drill bit into the ocean to pull natural gas out of the ocean. Hundreds, if not billions of dollars to do that. And so to tell them, go risk it and hope the prices are good enough for you, but maybe they will be, and we're not going to support you. Of course, they're not going to do that. That's why you have leases that aren't used because the business environment is too risky for them to spend billions of dollars to try and produce a well that may be nothing. They have to, they drop, drill bits into the ground and into the ocean. And sometimes they come up with nothing. And to ask the energy industry to do that and not support them is foolish. You need to come out and say all, remember the old, what was it? All of the above

strategy, all of the above. Use nuclear, use oil. Yeah, use renewables if you want. Wind, solar, hydro. Great. Let's do it all. And what you do then is then you reduce the price. Any way you slice it, bring in all these different types of energy and you reduce the price because you increase the supply. Demand will be what demand is. It's going to be there. But with the increased supply, you bring prices down. That's really the answer. Baby formula shortages is a metaphor for the Biden administration's foolishness and blindsidedness as to the energy problem in America. It's like the fox looking at the chickens like, I'm going to get you. I'm going to eat you alive. You're going down. And then he hangs out a little sign that says, party, having a party,

cocktail party, 10 at 530. Why isn't nobody? Why is nobody coming? Where are they? Where are my party guests? I threw a party. You guys didn't come. So it's not on me. It's on you.

Exactly. Eric Bolling, I will be at your party any day of the week. It's always a pleasure, my friend. Great to see you, Megan. Great to talk to you. We'll do it again soon. Coming up next, Chris Ruffo is here on Disney, the leaks he got and the leaks that are still coming to him. My next guest is one of the biggest names in the anti-woke movement, leading the charge against schools and against Disney.

Chris Ruffo is now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor for City Journal. Chris, so good to have you back on. How are you? Very well. It's good to be with you again. Good, good, good, good. Okay, so much to go over. Boy, you've been busy, busy, busy since we last spoke. And it's been wonderful to watch, I have to say. I got the full New York Times treatment, which is good for you for even talking to them, but you knew how that was going to go. They're not fans, but they are spreading the name Chris Ruffo and how to reach you to all potential whistleblowers out there, which is who contacts

you. That's how you found out about Disney, which is as good a place to start as any Disney corporation. So was Disney in your sights before you got the leaks that now have become so viral? Just to refresh the audience, Chris is the one who got all those videos of I'm sneaky. I'm putting my not so secret gay agenda in wherever I can. And nobody's giving me a hard time. And, you know, the videotape of the president talking about her queer children and how they need to have more queer representation and all their leads and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That was all from Chris. So were you focused on Disney before that? Yeah, actually, last year I did a report on Disney, which was promoting critical race theory. I reported on their internal employee training

program that was saying that America is fundamentally a racist country. It was telling white employees to complete a white privilege checklist and address their white fragility. And then kind of supporting a number of fashionable left wing causes like defunding the police, decolonizing your bookshelf, et cetera, et cetera. And it was really among all the companies that I reported on, one of the most egregious and shocking examples of critical race theory in the workplace. And those same sources, I have a number of sources within the company, came back to me this year and said, hey, Chris, in this dust up with the governor about the parental rights and education bill, which prohibited schools from teaching about sexuality to kids in grades K through three, I have these videos. And so my source dropped me the videos. And when

I saw them, I knew it was going to be a big story. You just have that feeling that goes kind of on the back of your neck saying, OK, this is some exclusive information people need to hear. And it really did change the game. I actually attended the bill signing with Governor DeSantis when he stripped Disney of its special self-governing status. And he said very clearly to the audience, these videos were really what pushed me over the edge in saying that we need to start taking action against these companies that are transgressing the values of of his constituents, of the people in Florida. What was it about the Disney videos that made you have that feeling? Because you've received countless leaks from people in different

corporations and schools. And I mean, this is your business now. You're the guy people go to if they've got this. So what was it about the Disney videos that stood out? You know, one of the show producers said that they actually created a computer program to track the number of transgender characters, bisexual characters, asexual characters, gender non-conforming characters. They're actually tracking this as far as data, kind of embedding this in programming, targeting kids as young as two years old. And then you have other employees very brazenly saying, you know, we're following this kind of radical left- wing gender ideology.

They banned the word boys and girls in all of the theme parks, preferring kind of gender neutral pronouns and descriptors, you know, and then they're supporting, for example, transgender surgeries for the employees of Disney's and for the children of Disney employees and so on and so forth. And so the content itself was, I think, quite shocking and very relevant to this debate that we're having. And then also the context is this political fight. So you have a very high intensity political fight. It's really the first time conservatives have really stepped up and pushed back against these woke corporations led by the governor of Florida. And so I knew that there was the explosive context of this political fight and this content that would really set it off to the next level. And so when you have those two things, you know, you know, you have a good story, you know, something fun is going to happen. And, you know, it's like part of I don't know whether Disney did this specifically, but we've

been I know it's overused, but gaslit so many times by people on the left telling us this stuff isn't happening. They haven't gone woke. They're not pushing critical race theory. There's no radical trans ideology being shoved down the throats of America or on our children. And we know it's not true. We've lived it. We saw it during Zooms and the pandemic. And yet they continue to lie right to our faces. So it is extraordinary to have it. I mean, at the highest levels, you know, within Disney on camera, all right there in black and white. Here's just a little OK, just to refresh people's memory, I think, let's see. Let's do Carrie Burke.

She was the Disney executive talking about needing more characters. Soundbite one. I'm here as a mother of two queer children, actually. One transgender child and one pansexual child. And also as a leader, one of our execs stood up and said, you know, we only have a handful of queer leads in our content. And I went, what? I, that can't be true. And I, and I, and I realized, oh, it actually is true. And I hope this is a moment where, shoot, the 50% of the tears, sorry, are coming. We just don't allow each other to go backwards. That clip is so aggravating because as the mother of three young children, I reject her tears.

You know who I'm crying for? I'm crying for the young children who you are sexualizing with inappropriate content for their age. You know, I'm crying for my friend who tried to watch a movie about a panda and left her very young daughters there to watch it, only to come back and find out they'd been educated on periods, something she was denied the opportunity to talk to them about first, thanks to that woman there. Like, I don't, I have no empathy for her tears, none whatsoever. And we wouldn't know about it if you didn't open up this

channel of communication with, I have to say, brave Disney employees who took a risk by taping it, cutting it and sending it along. Yeah, that's right. And I think what I saw in a lot of these videos is that you see the personal politics and then sometimes the personal pathologies of a lot of these employees that are then elevated into a kind of corporate dogma. And what's happening inside Disney is something that's happening inside a lot of companies. It's actually really, I think, the more interesting story as far as the structure and how politics works. You have the CEO, which is, of course, a straight white male. He's made to feel very guilty for those attributes.

And then he was basically bullied into creating these race and sexuality segregated employee activist groups. So there's a kind of black activist group, which they originally called Wakanda. There's a gay activist group, et cetera, et cetera. And then so the CEO is delegating the company's moral authority to these internal activist organizations who then turn around and really bully him into submitting to whatever the fashionable political ideology of the day is even if it contradicts the values of most disney employees and certainly most disney customers but he's powerless to do anything.

You can see very clearly the video where he's speaking. It's almost like a hostage tape. It's really a remarkable document how corporate leaders have delegated their moral authority to these activist groups, and then they're really at their mercy. And so whatever kind of theory, which would seem maybe appropriate or at least expected in a gender studies class at Vassar College, is now driving programming decisions targeting kids as young as two years old. And so companies are in this bind. How do they push back against the radical ideological elements within their own corporate culture? And will there be a price to pay if they do not? And I think what's been gratifying with this reporting and then the activism that I've done around Disney is that it is making a difference. You've noticed that Disney, which was all in on teaching gender ideology to kindergartners, has been silent on Roe versus

Wade. And they've really been silent on this controversy ever since it really turned public opinion against them. Yes. Well, that I've been saying that you haven't been here. You've been doing busy things and important things. But I've been pointing out to people, yes, the DeSantis law pushing back on Disney and its tax status and so on. That that's an interesting fight. But what really has turned the public tide on Disney is those videos. We don't you know, his political fight is him punching the bully back in the nose. But the thing that made people really angry was those videos because it was them admitting what their agenda is. There's no wiggling out of it. So they can criticize the Florida bill all they want.

That's annoying. But to me, the shocking thing was seeing all of them on camera, admitting what they're trying to do to our children. They are actively doing to our children right now, right? Like that is the game changer in what I think is, I realize a lot of factors, but Disney stock being down 42% year over year right now. Yeah, I mean, I think that's certainly true. But I actually think that both are really important. And you know, what I did, I actually used some of my journalism to launch an activist campaign at DropDisney.com, encouraging conservative Disney customers to cancel their Disney Plus subscriptions and pledge to kind of stop doing business with the company. We've had thousands of people sign up, but I think both are really important.

You have some of the folks that I've talked to in the private equity world and kind of corporate boardroom world. They said, Chris, companies can manage a PR crisis, but when it starts to hit their bottom line, when it starts to hit their tax and regulatory treatment, that's when the members of the board start putting pressure on the CEO. And so I think that these things have to go hand in hand. You have to have public pressure. You have to have really exposing what's happening in these companies in the interest of the public good. But you have to

have political players who set the rules of the game. They set tax treatment. They set regulatory treatment. They set really those kind of hard black and white issues as far as the company's bottom line. You have to have that as well. And I think that when those two things come together, when you have both the companies on this Roe versus Wade story to now stay silent. If the Disney stuff had not happened, I think we'd be in a very different world. And so conservatives need to get tough. They need to get strong. They need to really understand how to not just complain about woke capital, not just point out double standards, but to actually push back using real

political and economic power to change the incentives in which executives operate and to change the rules of the game. I would like to believe you are right about that. Believe me, I'd like to believe that's why they issued that advisory on Roe versus Wade, which I've also read that went out from a big PR firm to a bunch of corporations. But I don't believe it because I think when it, I can't, I don't, you can't put abortion in the woke bucket. Abortion is an issue that's been around forever. Everyone knows how divisive it is. They know that it's not 50-50, but it's a very divisive issue. You've got millions of Americans on each side. So any PR firm would probably have said, not a good idea to weigh in on that one. Don't touch that. That's the third rail. But wokeism is styled. You know this better than anyone. Part of your genius in

running these campaigns has been your inherent knowledge of marketing techniques and how messaging matters. And you've been using it against these people in a very effective way. But wokeism has been sold very effectively to corporate America as a matter of sort of good and evil, you know, being on the side of the angels or the devil, like either you're for marginalized, vulnerable teens wrestling with their gender ideology, or you're not either you're for equal rights for black people, which is how they style their race essentialism, or you're not right. So it's like a much harder sell to tell them not to touch that stuff. There's there's yeah, there's definitely some truth to that. And I

think that what we have to do on those on those issues is really create our own language to describe it. That's more accurate than these euphemisms. And then also to to start hammering away at these specifics. And look, I talk to a lot of people in these companies. They say it's not a majority opinion, but we're bullied into agreement or at least bullied into silence because, as you say, it's presented as these very kind of unopposable. Well, you must be against diversity. You must be against inclusion. We have to get beyond that language. That language is really a falsification. It's kind of masking some political ideology in euphemism or soft language. And then we have to expose what's really happening. And I think the other thing we have to

do as well, the same kind of principle applies with Disney, is disincentivize companies for pursuing these kind of policies. And a lot of the so-called diversity and inclusion business, which by the last measurement is now an $8 billion annual business for corporations, is based on a lot of precedent, a lot of legal requirements, a lot of liability concerns. And so we can simultaneously expose it as far as media generating public pressure against it, exposing the falsifications of language, et cetera, but also start to look at those HR policies, kind of EEOC policies, all of the different legal mechanisms that have incentivized this bureaucracy over time. Now, how much of a problem is it that,

and forgive me because this is a stereotype, but I would say in general, conservatives aren't really the marching kind, you know, other than on abortion, where they do the pro-life march every year. They're kind of like going to church and they're going to work and they're living their lives

and they're not running around judging other people's behavior and they're not marchers. And I think a lot of liberals, that's true of two. It's these far left, weird, woke, progressive types who have small little lives, who find meaning in canceling people who they think have misstepped their own values. Those are the ones and they're very motivated. So how big a challenge is it for you trying to organize on the other side? You know, activism can be defeated with more activism is sort of the Chris Ruffo way, like get loud, cancel your subscription, make a phone call. You know, there are millions of people on the non-woke side, way more than there are on the woke side.

How much of a problem is that for you? Well, the political reality is that politics is almost always a competition between highly motivated factions. So small groups of people that have high levels of motivation, that have high levels of strategic sophistication, that can serve as political entrepreneurs by bringing new ideas, new policies, new coalitions into the public sphere, and then motivating those kind of more weakly held partisans to the cause. And so what we need, I think, first and foremost, is a very clear and a very, very explicit and unapologetic political right that can start to tackle these issues to make space for those more moderate people to start filling it out. You're not going to expect people to show up by the millions. But what we did, for example, with critical race theory is we provided people with the information.

We provided people with the language and we provided people with a sense of the stakes. And then you had hundreds of thousands of people in thousands of school districts across the country showing up to say, we don't want this in the curriculum. There's no reason that we can't motivate that same coalition because what's happening is that it's not just, oh, that's happening in the universities. We can ignore that. It doesn't affect us. This is affecting people in their everyday life, in their workplace, in their kids' school, in their churches, in their kids' school, in their churches, in their local communities.

And so as it starts to put pressure on people, and especially as it starts to really start to make inroads with their kids, you're going to see people who were maybe kind of inactive or just passive start to get very active very quickly. And so that's what we're really going for. That's the coalition we're trying to build. And it's been really a stunning success with very little infrastructure, very little money, very little support. It's really true the way you just put it. You wake up on Sunday, you go to church, there's going to be a strong chance you're going to hear some sort of woke ideology foisted on you. You wake up on Monday, you take your kid to school, your kid's going to get it

foisted on them at school. You go to sports after school, increasingly good chance your daughter is going to have to run against a biological boy who's decided he wants to run with the girls and win blue ribbons. You come home, you relax with a Disney film, you have this ideology shoved on you there, nevermind anything on Netflix, et cetera. You can't escape it. And I think for too long now we've felt it, but it hasn't been identifiable clearly as this strain of wokeism being forced on us by a small minority whose values the rest of us don't share. So now shining a light, you know, sunlight being the best disinfectant, that's part of it. And then try to mobilize angry people, the vast majority in the country who don't want this.

People of all political stripes, people of all races, people of all genders to fight back is sort of where you're focusing your energies. Schools in particular, which is where we're going to pick it up next. That's Chris's next big mission. Chris Ruffo stays with us over this break. Much more to go. Don't forget, The Megyn Kelly Show is available as an audio podcast on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can leave me a comment over there on Apple. I will read it. I read them all. Yes, I'm reading the ones asking me to watch the new Dinesh D'Souza movie. And let me just say I'm way ahead of you, and so is my team. And when you're there,

subscribe to our podcast, you will see our archives, more than 315 shows, including episode 59. The first time Chris Ruffo was on, it was a great profile of him and his background. Highly recommend. I am joined once again by Chris Ruffo at the center of fighting back against wokeism in all its weird, pernicious forms. And I was delighted, Chris, to read that you plan to write a series of articles on classroom practices that we've rightfully seen as outrageous and widespread. I mean, this is not one of those things that, oh, you're only getting that in New York. We've had stories out of Iowa. We've had stories out of Indiana, the heartland, Texas, obviously even Florida until that's why DeSantis had to step in and do what he did. So it's happening in a lot of places. So what, give us the broad 30,000 foot overview on what's happening in American schools right now with respect to this. at gender ideology. And surprise, surprise, they go really hand in hand. A lot of the districts that have been promoting CRT are also promoting this gender theory and grades as young as pre kindergarten and kindergarten. And so kind of leading by example and showing people exactly

what's happening in the classroom with original source documents, things that are irrefutable. And so I started with a story in Evanston, Illinois, kind of suburban Chicago. And they were teaching kids as young as pre-kindergarten about gender and sexuality and sexual orientation. They were having them celebrate the transgender flag in kindergarten. Then by first grade, they were actually giving these kids scripts to read where they would be performing and experimenting with different gender pronouns, not just he, her, but also things like they, them, ze, zur, even what are called xenopronouns like tree. So you identify as a tree kind of in the natural world, not even the human

world. And these are kids that are four years old, five years old. They have no idea what this is, but they're already being habituated into saying my pronouns are they them, my pronouns are ze, zim, which are kind of bunk. These are kind of fabricated and really fake, fake ideological constructs. who are in a position of authority, kids naturally trust their teacher, in some cases behind the backs of parents, to kids that are four and five years old that should be learning ABC, how to tie their shoes. And instead, they're learning to kind of celebrate all of these different sexual identities. And I think parents are rightfully very apprehensive about this. You're saying, wait a minute, we're taking sexual theories from kind of graduate and college level, uh, kind of fringe ideologies. And now we're packaging them in kind of with bright colors, appealing to kids, trying to really get into the, the kind of sexual identity of kids at a very young age.

As a parent, you know, I have three kids, another one on the way, or I have two kids rather with one on the way. You know, if an adult is teaching my young kids to explore their sexuality with him or her together, that raises red flags for me. That's creepy. Don't really like it. Don't want it. Yeah. Same. Yeah. And I have been following your reporting. It's crazy that this kid's as young as kindergarten saying to them, your identity is for you to decide. They truly offer it up like a menu item, like it's your daily clothing. You forget what you've been told by your parents and society from point of birth to this point. It's totally up to you what gender you want to be. Meanwhile, the actual number of people who suffer truly from gender dysphoria is minuscule, but they offer it up like that's not like a disorder that's affecting a smaller number of Americans and we should be kind and supportive to those people. They're trying to normalize it for the entire society writ large, starting with your five-year-old.

That's right. And I think one of the things that I've noticed is that there's a kind of connotation set with all of these constructs. You know, being straight, cisgender, white, male or female really has a connotation in a lot of the materials that I've reviewed as negative. These are things you don't want to be. These are shameful identities. These are oppressive identities or privileged identities. And then the other identities are really kind of loaded with a connotation that is very appealing. And so in the sexual realm,

I think this may explain in part why a lot of white females, like juveniles, young white females, have this kind of very high rate of adoption of these kind of neo identities, pronouns, et cetera, because they're told very clearly being a straight white female is low status. It's low prestige. It's low desirability. And so there's an incentive structure with a lot of these materials. And again, if someone has suffering from gender dysphoria, you should treat those kids with respect. It's a kind of dangerous thing. It's correlated with a lot of kind of very scary and dangerous outcomes as far as mental illness, eating disorders, et cetera. But we shouldn't generalize those as a kind of roadmap for everyone else.

And no, it's like, it's like taking depression. You're not supposed to say that. You're not supposed to say that. But I think that the literature that you see is very clear what's happening. And parents of all backgrounds, I'm doing reporting in New York City and other places where they say, hey, look, we're good Democratic voters, but this stuff is getting crazy. I mean, listen, don't get me started on New York City. I lived that life for 10 years with three kids in the city. So I, my audience heard a lot about it,

but it's like taking depression, which is a real thing that people suffer from and just offering it up to the children while they're sitting there. Like FYI, you may be depressed. You may feel really low. You may have a condition that makes you feel sad and blue and dark all the time. You're not alone. A lot of people are sad and blue and dark. And it's just this negative reinforcement to the child. Like, no, humans sometimes feel down. Sometimes they feel up. That's called being normal. It doesn't mean you're a depressive. Same as a child who, you know, for play over at the sort of acting booth in the first grade, a boy might want to put on a dress. It doesn't mean

he's transgender. A little girl like me may want to wear only pants and cowboy outfits. It didn't make me a boy. It made me maybe a tomboy. But I'm all woman, trust me, and I didn't need anybody pushing me to cross over. Your reporting on Evanston is eye opening, because that is the Midwest. You know, I mean, that's yes, it's outside of Chicago, a liberal city, but that's Midwest values. And I've got friends there who don't think this kind of thing is happening there. And you've got the slides. Okay, so we pulled some of what you're reporting. This is for third graders from Chris Ruffo's reporting. It says to them, think about the year 2021, 100 years from now, write a letter or draw a poster to the future generation in the year 2021 with what you hope the world will look like. Things to think about may include LGBTQ plus equity, racial equity, and other ideas that connected to equity that are important to you. How do you hope the world is for people in the future? We're showing this slide on the board for the YouTube audience. Then they have an example for the children, just in case it wasn't on the nose

enough. This is their example to third graders. For example, you could write something like this. Dear future human in 2021, 2121, my name is Jay and my pronouns are they, them, theirs. I am nine years old. Right now it's the year 2021 and we're in the middle of the COVID pandemic, blah, blah, blah, going on about how unfair society is. Some people think they're better than others. They're afraid to stand up for what's right. And of course, they get into gender, skin color and religion. So so there it is black and white. And then to kick it off, they've got the Billy Porter shot from one of the awards ceremony. This is an actor who went in a dress. It's like a huge dress on the bottom, ball gown, and a tuxedo on the top. And Billy Porter is used as an example for the children on how gender

is how someone feels inside, inside. We may perceive someone's gender by how they look, but we cannot know for sure. Very important that our eight-year-olds see Billy Porter as an example of that, Chris. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the images that they include are kind of little boys in dresses, et cetera. And so, you know, there are real situations, can't minimize it, that where kids are suffering from dysphoria, kids are trying to deal with this. And again, those kids should be treated with respect. They should be given all the dignity and protections and responsibility and care of any other kid. But this is something very different. This is a kind of ideological and activist campaign.

And one of the things that I've noticed, and I'm kind of putting it as a working hypothesis, but trying to see if I'm right or wrong in the actual reporting, the actual empirical evidence, is that you have a lot of, in the past, subcultures. You have teenage subcultures. Teenagers are always rebelling. I think, depending on what generation you are, you had goth, you had punk, you had a kind of emo, you had different things that dealt kind of either explicitly or implicitly with gender and sexuality, et cetera. But they were always led by and contained by the youth culture themselves. What's different about this?

What's different about the kind of non-binary, they, them, et cetera? It's being driven by adults. It's being institutionalized in the curriculum and in extracurricular clubs that are being managed by adults as a youth subculture. It's very weird. I mean, it's very weird to have adults managing and encouraging a highly sexualized youth subculture. And so I think that there's something very interesting there that I'm trying to pick apart and understand in my reporting is how much of this is driven by a genuine or maybe even a passing fad. kind of kids are always rebelling and exploring different identities in that adolescent stage, and how much of this is being engineered by adults who are using the institutions,

in many cases public institutions and public dollars, to engineer this sexual identity or sexuality based on a political ideology. Because again, queer theory, for example, is not really about gender or identity or individual sexuality. It's at heart a political identity with a political program. And so I reject this idea that being critical in looking at these programs is somehow being opposed to LGBTQ kids or gay kids or gay adults. It's nothing of the kind. It's a disagreement with this political ideology that is using, in many cases, these kids as a human shield to say you can't oppose anything we're doing because you're against trans

kids. I reject that. I think most people see through it. And that's how I'm going to be dealing with this issue of my reporting to come. Okay. So we just got a statement from the school who's reporting, on which you were reporting, District 65 in Evanston in Illinois. They write, thanks for reaching out. In district, I'm not going to go through this very long, but here's the statement in part. In District 65, we believe strongly in creating inclusive, welcoming environments where every child can feel safe, valued, and has the support and encouragement to reach their full potential. You get the trigger words, right? Safe, right. How's it safe for somebody who's totally secure in their gender identity to be offered repeatedly the notion that it's fluid, that it could change on a dime, that they might reconsider it. They go on to say, throughout our LGBTQ equity unit of study, educators in pre-K, pre-K through eighth grade students, broadened their understanding

of identity of self and others, allyship, family structures, vocabulary, gender expression, stereotypes, colors on the intersectional pride flag and history. This includes state of Illinois requirements for public schools across the state to include the roles and contributions of LGBTQ people in its curriculum. So they're saying, don't blame us, blame the state.

But we love it. During the month of April, each grade level engaged in a developmentally and age appropriate selection of these topics, blah, blah, blah. This is the third year we've done it. We believe the lessons center the academic and social emotional needs of the children. They build community and so on. What do you make of it? I mean, it's all it's all it's all lies. It's all falsified language. It's all Orwell in all of the language. So first of all, safe. They say safe because they

say, if you disagree with us, you're going to be putting children at risk of violence or death or suicide, et cetera. Again, using some truly vulnerable kids as symbols and then as almost human shields to defend their political ideology. Inclusive. Inclusive of whom? It's not inclusive of conservative Christians. It's not inclusive of maybe Muslims. It's not inclusive of a whole range of different people who make up a significant portion of

the student population and student family population, even in a place like Evanston. It's exclusive of their ideas, but this kind of repressive inclusivity, again, is a kind of linguistic tell. And then they say things like developmentally and age appropriate. Those are pseudoscientific words. It gives you a sense of that some experts in pedagogy and child development have vetted this material very seriously, very scientifically. They've put it through their formulas and decided that this is age and appropriate. Clearly not. I mean, clearly the reaction against it suggests that most parents don't think it's age appropriate or developmentally appropriate. I think encouraging first graders to

identify as a tree, as their sexual and gender identity, is pseudoscientific. It's fake. And it's not developmentally appropriate or age appropriate. It's totally bunk. And so throughout all of this, you get this gauzy language that is supposed to lull you to sleep. It's supposed to activate your shame kind of emotional functions or emotional response, and then shut you up. They're saying, no, no, if you oppose this, you're a very bad person. And parents are getting smart to this. I think five years ago, even two, three years ago, it would have really cowed most people into silence. It's not cowing people anymore. We're going to break through this language. We're going to break through this ideology. We're going to break through this smoke screen and get to the heart of the question, which is a political question.

What should public schools be transmitting as the system of values from one generation to the next? What do parents and voters want in their public schools as far as curriculum? And then how can we then expose and then, if voters desire, break up the bureaucracies and kind of adult-led institutions that are the transmission belt for the ideologies of critical race theory and gender ideology. That's the real question that exists below this thin layer of euphemistic and falsified language. You mentioned the tree gender. We had Dr. Deborah So on the program, and she was talking about how some believe in moon gender. You only know what gender you are when the moon is out.

Libs of TikTok, the one and only, put out a video yesterday showing some woman talking about how she's cake gender. C-A-K-E, cake gender. You're cake gender. If you're sort of light and fluffy and sweet, that's a dumb ass gender. That's what you are. You're not a cake gender. And there's a certain sense where this could be harmless teenage rebellion. I mean, every generation has their own expression. This might be an expression. So when you see statistics like 20 to 40% of adolescents identify as queer or non-binary or gender non-conforming.

One way of looking at it is to say, oh, this is kind of a fad. You can see the chart. It's, you know, boom, and then it's going to go back down as the next thing takes hold. But again, the problem is the institutionalization of the ideology that underpins this stuff. That stuff is happening everywhere. And the adults behind it are very sophisticated. They're saying, we're going to institutionalize this and extracurricular clubs and activities and curriculum. We're going to specifically try to keep parents in the dark about it.

And this is very weird. Again, when you have adults that are very politically motivated to explore the sexuality of other people's children using their power and authority as leaders or teachers in a public school system. This should raise red flags. And you're not supposed to say that. It's some sort of transgression to say that. But any parent, look, I'm a parent, you're a parent, every parent knows when you're sending your kids to school, when you're sending your kids to church, you have a talk with them. You say, Hey, look, if someone is telling, talking to you about sexuality, talking to you about genitalia, touching you inappropriately, uh, trying to corner you and spend time alone with you.

Here are the kind of red flags. Here are the warnings. Tell me, tell the, uh, tell the other adults, this is the conversation that you have to have as a prudent parent. But we're now being told that that itself is kind of a phobic response or you're accusing people of being up to no good. No, this is a normal parent response. And when you see institutions deliberately sexualizing and targeting your kids with this kind of ideology, doing so without notifying, without having your participation as a parent, this is crazy. We should have no shame and no fear in saying, hit the pause button, let's figure out what's going on, and let's make sure we're protecting our kids from being sexualized by the government, again, being sexualized by the

government as early as pre-kindergarten. It's so true, Chris. You don't get to have secrets with my child from me. My kid is there because I placed him there or her there. They're there by my decision. I essentially am employing you and creating this relationship and I don't get excluded. If anybody's going to get excluded, it's you weird teacher who wants to talk about this inappropriate content with my eight-year-old. It's outrageous when you frame it properly, which is your gift. That's right. And then, I mean, and just really think about it. Think about it as just an adult adult person, to have a very keen, passionate, overriding interest in talking with other people's small children about their sexuality is weird. It's just, I mean, it's like, I do not want to talk to my friend's kids, you know, okay, talk to your parents, you know, it's like, it's very strange. It's very bizarre.

And I think that what's happening right now is parents are feeling that. They're feeling the, oof, this is kind of weird. I'm kind of uncomfortable with this, but I'm scared to speak out. And so what we have to do is we have to give them the kind of media narrative, kind of justification or validation or substantiation of their concerns to say, hey, this is the kind of justification or validation or substantiation of their concerns to say, hey, this is the kind of thing they're teaching in schools. And then we have to give them the language where they can speak about it with confidence. They can speak about it directly and they can speak about it with the requisite level of aggressiveness that it's going to take to say, hey, wait a minute, we have to stop

this. This isn't appropriate. You know, you could have sex ed in middle school and high school talking about pregnancy, talking about sexually transmitted diseases, et cetera, the kind of eighties, nineties sex ed class that made everyone kind of uncomfortable, but, but there is kind of an argument for utility, but getting kind of a gender ideology out of the kindergarten classroom is a very, it should be very, a very low light lift. Uh, it should be common sense. So we have to give parents the, the, the vocabulary, the argumentation, the substantiation, the evidence, uh, to start pushing back.

And then what do they do? Right? Like if you're advising, you know, parents who are seeing this pop up, cause it doesn't just, it's, it's not usually the flip of a switch. Tomorrow we are beginning our new DEI program. They sneak the DEI person in and then they sneak in five more, like we saw places like Dalton. And before you know it, they have more DEI heads than they do teachers. And bit by bit, it starts to creep its way into gym class and music class and art and math. So what, what is your advice on how a parent who let's say it's somebody not used to being a squeaky wheel, um, more prone to going along and getting along, um, who starts to see this, what are they supposed to do? There's a couple of different kind of domains or a couple of different strategies. I mean,

first off, I tell people that, and they ask me all the time, oh, you know, this is taking over my kid's school. It's, it's this and that, you know, you have to make a hard decision, whether you want to stay at that school and fight or, or just take your kids somewhere else, place that already kind of matches or reflects your values. That's a very individual decision. And I think it's, it's, it's totally, totally smart and maybe a good idea in many cases for parents to say, you know what, I'm going to exit this environment that doesn't reflect my values and find another one. But if you want to stay and fight, or if you want to help other people who are hoping to stay and fight, there's a couple of things you can do. You can start small. You can start by talking to

the teacher, talking to the principal. Then you can talk to the superintendent. Then you can talk to the school board. There's that kind of vertical starting from the beginning, starting from the most local and grassroots level to that local political level where you can actually have an influence. You can change school board policy. You can run for school board. In Texas, anti-CRT and anti-gender ideology candidates just this last couple weeks swept Texas school board elections all over the state. They're changing the policies. And then you can actually go to

your state legislature because at the end of the day, the public school system is created and funded by and accountable to the state legislature. So just as they did in Florida, no gender and sexuality grades K through three. They can have that in other states. But what I think we need parents to understand, and this is a lesson I learned kind of the hard way or over time having been mistaken at the beginning is you are not going to win by appealing to a kind of mythical, rational center. I've never seen it done. Well, we're going to accommodate. We're going to have a good DEI program. We're going to just go to this center. The political reality is that the squeaky wheel

sets the game. They set the agenda. And you have great groups like Moms for Liberty, for example, where you can get connected with other people and then start pushing back. But I actually think that you have to stand tough and stand strong on your beliefs. You have to stand in a way that is confident, that a way that is clear, in a way that rallies people to the cause. And I think that the parents who are doing that, who are stepping into the breach, give space for those other, maybe more moderate people to follow in. But you're not going to win by appealing right off the bat to the center. You have to stand tough and then go out in concentric circles to add people to your cause or your movement. That's a very interesting notion. I agree.

You can't, when dealing with the woke, at least, you can't negotiate with them. I agree with John McWhorter. It's pointless. He followed a similar path to the one you just outlined, where he sort of thought they could be bargained with and now has realized no. And he wrote the book Woke Racism, which was number one in the New York Times for selling this for a long time. Anyway, but I think it's near impossible to go to a school in today's day and age and say, I object to your DEI program. I mean, one of the things I like about FAIR, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, on which I'm on the advisory board, is they at least give you an alternative that you can offer to your school. If you feel you must do this, here are some sane alternatives that don't look anything like Robin DiAngelo's prescription for our K through 12 students. But you don't, you think that's not the way? No, I disagree. I think that is a, it's such a fundamentally failing strategy because what it does is it legitimizes the frame of the

opposition. It legitimizes their the opposition. It legitimizes their institutional structure. It legitimizes their bureaucratic authority, and it legitimizes the background concepts that they use in order to achieve power and push their ideology. And so if you accept the entire background frame of your opposition, you're never going to be able to exit that frame. And so you can't legitimize their ideology and legitimize their bureaucratic power. Because in every kind of revolution, if we consider this as a cultural revolution, a revolution succeeds when it attaches ideology to administrative power. That's what they're doing with DEI. And I think that you really

can't succeed if you legitimize that. You're going to fail more slowly or fail more gently, but ultimately it's a failing gambit. I think what we're seeing that needs to happen, and I'm working on this from a policy matter, is to abolish apartments of DEI and replace them with departments of perhaps EMC, equality, merit, and colorblindness that are based on entirely different set of values and entirely different set of policies that can be passed at the school board level, that can be passed at the state level,

can be passed as an executive order at the governor or presidential level to say, we're not going to legitimize the concepts of DEI. We're going to pursue the concepts of equality, equal treatment of individuals, regardless of race or identity, merit, the idea that we should be striving for and prioritizing individual excellence, and that the most talented students we can cultivate to kind of rise to the top, regardless of their background, regardless of their socioeconomic status, race, et cetera.

And then colorblindness. All of our policies should be based on colorblind principles. This is the basic 14th Amendment. So saying that we're going to have policies of admission, policies of student treatment, policies of discipline, policies across the board that have to adhere to pure colorblind principles. And so when you can take that, then you have a truly alternative framework. But by saying we're going to have DEI light, I just don't see it succeeding. No, I think that's fascinating.

You give me a lot to think about. Now, wait, this is important. If there's anybody out there who wants to maybe not go this route, but just leak to Chris Ruffo and see it wind up in City Journal or Fox News or here with me, how do they reach you? Yeah, I have a tip line. It's at chrisruffo at protonmail.com. That's chrisruffo at protonmail.com.

My team checks it every day. So if you have documents, videos, slides, anything that would fall under these kind of categories, send them my way. I'll be happy to keep you anonymous. Just have to kind of vet the sources for authenticity, but I always protect my sources because look, people are scared. People feel like they can't put their name on it.

They can't speak out. So I'm the kind of conduit. I'm the voice for so many people who can't speak out. So I'm the kind of conduit. I'm the voice for so many people who can't speak out themselves. If there is someone who's done more to fight back against this lunacy than you, I don't know who it is. Chris Ruffo, I remain grateful and in admiration of you. Thank you for coming on and thank you for what you're doing. Thank you. Coming up, we are going to take a dive into the growing baby formula shortage. How bad is it? How did it happen? And is there any plan to deal with it when Bethany Mandel rejoins the program? Terrifying time right now for parents across

the country. Some, many, in fact, cannot find baby formula to buy on store shelves. My next guest says, if you thought parents were mad about not being able to send their kids to school during the pandemic, you just wait for the anger of parents unable to even feed their babies. Bethany Mandel is a mom of five and editor of the children's book series, Heroes of Liberty, which I highly recommend. Their May edition will be about Rush Limbaugh. We read them to our kids and they love them. Bethany, great to see you again. How are you doing? Hi, thank you so much for having me. All right, let's start at the beginning. How did it happen? What's causing it? Yeah, so it's sort of a mega storm of

things that all sort of came together and created this super problem. So we have a supply chain issues, you know, a supply chain is affecting everything under the sun. And in sort of weird ways, turns out that, you know, when you shut down the economy, it has like this wave of consequences. 46% of our supply of formula in this country comes from China. So when you don't have ships leaving China, and you're having a hard time unloading ships here, that has consequences for our supply. But in January, an Abbott plant, a sturgis plant in Michigan, was shut down because a whistleblower came forward and said, it's actually interesting and important to note that the whistleblower came forward in October. And the FDA didn't interview that person until December. And then the plant was shut down

in January when two babies died after consuming the formula that was produced there. And so the whistleblower said that there were a lot of cleanliness issues in the plant, standing water, it was just it wasn't safe. And, and bacterial infection allegedly got into the canisters, a formula that parents were feeding their babies and two babies died and multiple babies were hospitalized. And so at that point, the FDA shuts it down. That was in January. Here we are in the middle of May and the plant, there's a Daily Mail story two days ago saying like, we're ready to open. We want to reopen. The FDA is giving us no date. They're giving us no metrics, nothing. We are chomping at the bit. And the problem with that plant being closed is that it was the number one producer of plants of formula

that was specialized for babies who have milk allergies or soy allergies. So the situation is extremely dire for families who can't just switch from formula to formula. They really need the specific kind that they use. And so I'm seeing a lot of people sort of downplay what's going on right now saying like, I just went to my local Target and I saw some on the shelf and it's like, great. It's not the specific kind that a lot of these families need. And so no baby in America is starving right now. You know, the majority of babies in this country can jump from formula to formula, different brands and different kinds, oftentimes cause stomach upset. It's not fun and it's not ideal, but you know,

there are alternatives for the majority of babies. But for these babies who like have a milk allergy, who have a soy allergy, like my, one of my kids had, um, it's these formulas or you're just, you're out of luck. And it's not just the United States. Um, a couple of my producers, and I've got two up in Canada and, uh, one of them has a young baby and she's going through the same thing up there. So she, you know, it's, yeah, it's not just the United States. So what, in your reporting on this, what, what, like, what are the, some of the disturbing stories that you've heard? Like what are mothers doing? Yeah. So what, in your reporting on this, what are some of the disturbing stories that you've heard? Like what are mothers doing? Yeah. So the disturbing stories that I'm hearing are from

mothers who have babies with feeding difficulties or nutritional deficiencies. They really need specific formulas. So I spoke to one woman, a mother in Brooklyn, her name is Chaya. And she said she was down to about a half a canister of what she was using. And she went to every single Walgreens, CVS, Duane Reade, you name it, all across Brooklyn. She spent her entire night doing it after she put her baby to bed. And finally, in one loan, I think it was a Walgreens in a different zip code, she was able to find what she needed and the hours that she puts into it now. There's WhatsApp chat in my community where people are sort of crowdsourcing, like, this is the kind I'm looking for if anyone sees it,

because lots of people are sort of, you know, going from store to store trying to find what they need. And so, you know, you're keeping an eye out for five different people while you're looking for your formula for your own baby. So I'm hearing a lot of those stories. I heard from a guy in Ohio who said that they have a family text chain. His niece lives in Boston and the niece's daughter is on a special kind of formula. And when they find it, they overnight it to her and she pays for the FedEx for overnight. And so this is how she's feeding her baby with overnight shipments from all of her aunts and uncles and cousins from around the country. That's very scary. It's like, you know, that they could run out too. And then what? It's not like, you know, if you have especially a newborn, it's not like you can start giving them solid foods yet. You know, they need one of two things, breast milk or formula, which of course has led

some clueless people to be like, why don't you just breastfeed? Just breastfeed. Would you like to take that? Yes, I do. So I have five kids, all of whom have breastfed at least for a year. So like, I am not, I'm not a novice to this concept. And you know, when I, when I go to the doctor and they ask a question like at the breast health, like how many months of your life have you breastfed? I consistently get the, get the response like, wow, that's the most I've ever heard. So I'm very familiar with the ins and outs of breastfeeding and it works for us because I, frankly, I don't leave my baby. And so that's the only way this works for us. And it doesn't work for millions and millions of American moms. So up until six months old,

a baby can only have formula or breast milk. That's it. At six months old, the data shows that only 35% of babies are still breastfed at six months of age. And it's not because their parents don't like them as much as the other 35%. It's because it didn't physically work for their family for so many different reasons. Mom wasn't producing enough milk. Mom was on a medication that it was dangerous for the baby. That's why I wasn't breastfed. My mom was on heavy duty medication that it made it dangerous for me to consume her breast milk. You lack mammary glands, like you name it. There's so many things that can go wrong. So up until six months, it's only formula breast milk. And then up to 12 months, it's still their primary source of nutrition, but they're eating other solid foods.

And so, you know, I keep on getting this really frustrating question from boomers, not to like put them on the spot, but like, well, I had this like recipe card of evaporated milk and Karo syrup. And it's like, yeah. Did you also take like cocaine cough drops? And did you sit in a car seat that was just a basket in your parents' front seat? Like, yes, I'm back in the olden days. I'm so glad you survived. Lots of people didn't. My mom did not breastfeed me because she too was on a specialty drug called a martini and a bunch of cigarettes and i mean i don't know i'm pretty thankful it didn't go down that way but yeah so the other thing is and i actually don't know the answer to this

if you if you breastfeed your baby a lot of women breastfeed their baby for month one or two or three and then they go back to work and then they stop breastfeeding. Could you resume your breastfeeding? You know, like I was, I, like you, I breastfeed my kids, breastfed them for the first year, which was not easy because I was back on the air and it was just nonstop pumping. Um, but once they deflated, it was over. I don't know how I would have fired them back up. Is it, can you fire them back up after you've let them deflate? You can't fire them back up. It's not a faucet that you can just be like, let's crank it up. Let's crank it up to high speed and donate that milk to a milk bank. And that's the other question I get. What about the human milk banks? They're super duper expensive

because they have to be screened very carefully because you have to make sure that the mother who's donating is not taking drugs, is not sick herself. There's a lot of screaming that happens with those human milk banks. And so- I never even heard of a human milk bank. Oh, really? I didn't know there was such a thing. Is that for women who want to use breast milk, but can't access it? Yeah. So it's ideal for babies who are born severely prematurely. 99.9% of babies are

great on formula and you just have to find the right formulation. And this is the problem with this shortage is that if you can't find your formulation, you're like in a bad spot. But for that 0.1% of babies who are born maybe at like 26 weeks or something, their intestines are not developed enough to necessarily handle formula. And their mother has almost always gone through a real serious physical trauma if they're delivering a baby that early. And so they need to feed that baby something and formula is not often the right thing to feed them at that moment. And so that's when human milk donation really is critically important and life-saving in that.

That's fascinating. Well, that's the other thing so it's like you know you talk about the reasons mothers don't do it i mean breastfeeding is not easy i know it's like once you have it down mothers make it look easy but getting it down is hideously painful for a lot of women i'm self-included well you i mean there was not to be too graphic but there was one point it was like there was blood coming out of my eyes blood coming out of wherever no there's blood coming out and you know your baby's spitting up your blood you're thinking maybe i'll pursue another alternative so there are all sorts of reasons i had my for all all my births were natural births i didn't have epidurals or whatever not because i like hate myself and i'm a masochist it's just sort of you know how life happened my husband, after our first was born, said, you're screaming harder

than breastfeeding than you did in labor. It hurts. It's really bad. It's true. It's toe-curlingly hard at times, like painful. Toe-curling, exactly. And my first child did actual physical permanent nerve damage, not to get super... You talked about your bleeding nipples. I'll talk about my nerve damage. It's not fun, boys, for tweeting me. Right, right. Exactly. Because I need to save your advice for somebody else. All right. So these poor moms are needing the formula. What about a homemade formula? Is there a way? Is there a way? So yes and no, but no, don't do it. It's just my answer. So there's this fascinating story out of Israel about 10 years ago, maybe eight. A formula company was making sort of special kosher formula,

making it in Germany and sending it to Israel. And it was a soybean-based formula. And it needed a specific vitamin called thiamine. And that vitamin comes naturally out of soybeans. But the problem was the formula company cooked the soybeans before they put it into a powder form into the formula. And that process of cooking killed that vitamin or whatever that nutrient. And so it ended up that 15 babies were horribly injured and brain damaged by this and two babies died. And this is a vitamin that I have never heard of. Have you ever heard of thiamine? I had to look up how to even pronounce it. So the idea that we can, in our kitchen, come up with a recipe that covers every single nutritional need is a terrifying proposition and extremely unlikely. But my best piece of advice to people,

if they want to sort of cobble something together is, and it's not legal, so don't sue me, European formulas are not FDA regulated and they're not fda approved but they're fine but the european babies are living and living full lives wait now can i just ask not to turn this political but of course everything turns political everything is political but it's genuine question like why didn't the biden administration well first why did why was there the delay when it was brought when the whistleblower came out of the Abbott lab and said it's not safe? What do we know why the delay they reported in October? I mean, investigation till December. I think we've seen over the course of the last two years, the urgency with which the FDA and the CDC operate, even when lives are at stake. So, I mean, my favorite example is the COVID shots, and they were administering them to teenage boys, and they saw that there were some heart defect issues. There was myocarditis popping up, and they said, we take this so seriously, we're going to schedule a meeting in three weeks. And then that meeting comes around, and they scheduled it on Juneteenth. And then Juneteenth became a national holiday that they had to honor. They had, they could not move that meeting.

And so they couldn't, they had to move that meeting. And so they kept on pushing it back further. This is the urgency that they were sort of operating with on these shots for teenage boys. And they're using the same urgency with formula with babies. Like these are government bureaucrats and you're sitting in the DMV. Same thing. Those poor parents with the two dead children. I mean, I'm sure there's going to be

some attempt at a lawsuit, but the government only has immunity. So wait, why when they shut down Abbott Labs for that period of time when it comes to formula, genuinely, why didn't somebody say, this is going to lead to a big problem? This is a massive manufacturer. And I don't what what percentage of the baby formula did they produce? It's some huge percentage of the American supply. It's the I so I don't have the number off the top of my head, but it's biggest, biggest domestic supplier supplier and the only domestic supplier of these specialty formulas. So I mean, this is why didn't somebody see this coming? Like, that's, that's pretty on the nose. Yeah, no, absolutely. So I was talking yesterday on Dana Perino's show and she said, if I was in the White House and this happened and I stopped her and I was like, Dana, this never would have happened if you were in the White House because this isn't like, oh, you know, things, you know, Dana, she's like so like magnanimous and charitable. And I'm like, no, no, no, Dana. This isn't like a crisis that popped up on one day. Jack Reed, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, exactly a month ago wrote a letter

to the FDA and the Biden administration saying, this is a growing problem that we need to address and you need to take it seriously. And they ignored the letter. So this didn't happen overnight. I wrote about this three weeks ago for Deseret News. This is not a secret. I mean, like the number of things that they have been prioritizing is kind of horrifying when you think about maybe they could spend some time talking to their disinformation minister about this. I mean, because that they had time to create. Mrs. What do they call her? The singing.

Oh, God. Chris Rupa had a great name for I can't remember. It was like this singing. So I'll get I'll get it. Anyway anyway they're focused on her and not this now finally bethany they've found time to talk about it he made remarks joe biden did on tuesday and didn't say anything and just an hour ago just as you were coming on air we received the announcement joe biden will speak with baby formula retailers and manufacturers on Thursday. That's today. He will receive an update on efforts to make infant formula supply more available to American families. The meeting will take place virtually. Later Thursday, the White House is

expected to announce additional actions that the feds will take to solve the problem. None of this is going to be available to the press so that's convenient we're just going to have to take their word for what's gone down yeah no questions and no accountability and one wonders whether even at this point what can joe biden does anyone have faith that joe biden can fix it does he even know what's going on right genuinely does he know i don't know i mean the the incoming press secretary was asked you know who's the point person on this and her answer was i'm not sure yeah that's true that's actually a very good imitation of what went down there yeah who is there is no point person on this so got the disinformation czar check baby formulas are with while babies have died and we've had

massive so it happens when you have a whole bunch of childless millennials running the white house with an eight-year-old at the helm so here's my question for now is this affecting certain states more than others like is this a regional problem or is it, is it all 50? It's not all 50, but it's definitely worse in the middle of the country. If you look at the map of, you know, which states are down to 50% or less, it's like, it's a, it's a stripe right down the middle. Pretty much. It's, it's a lot of the Midwest. Uh, it's a lot of Texas. Um, they're in the worst spot for sure. Hmm. Well, I had you on not long ago. We talked about how annoying the masks were and all the mandatory vaccines and all that. I've got to run this by you before I let you go.

Not long ago, I went to see Company on Broadway. It was okay. I loved my own company at the play more than I love the actual play. But Patti LuPone is in it. She's Broadway royalty. And Patti LuPone decided to have an argument with an audience member who didn't wear a mask.

Here's a soundbite of it. I just had to ask you about the soundbite. Put your mask over your nose. That's why you're in the theater. That is the rule. If you don't want to follow the rule, get the fuck out. Who do you think you are if you do not respect the people that are sitting around you? You pay my salary.

Bullshit. Chris Harper pays my salary. Who do you think you are? Just put your mask over your nose. My God, what a bitch. Your thoughts? my god what a bitch your thoughts so first of all i don't understand why anyone would sign up to go to a broadway show in a mask i i don't get it i i don't do anything in a mask anymore i just won't except for like the pediatrician which i have no choice right um yeah but this is this is like a power hungry people need more therapy in their lives

i want her to know because if you go to a broadway show or at least it was when i went a couple months ago like the mass nazis are truly walking up and down the aisles with a wear your mask wear your mask and then and then calling to you like pull it up over your nose this person did have a mask on. It just wasn't totally over the nose. And I want Patti LuPone to know that when I sat and I watched her performing company and she was awesome, my mask was below my nose the entire time and we all lived. So take that. Troublemaker. I love it. Bethany, always a pleasure. Thank you so much. And we'll follow up on what the Biden plan is on all of this and your thoughts on it soon.

Great to see you. Want to tell you that tomorrow we're going to shift gears a little bit and we're going to help everybody out. Want to get that body ready for summer? Who doesn't? We've got you covered. Just listen to tomorrow's show to lose 10 pounds by Memorial Day or maybe the middle of June. OK, in the meantime, download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher. Go ahead and leave me a comment and a five-star review.

Go to YouTube to check us out visually. And thanks everyone for tuning in. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.