The Megyn Kelly Show - Elite Panic Over Alternative Media Power, and Press Ignores Biden's Mental Fitness, with Matt Taibbi | Ep. 310

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Matt Taibbi, editor of the TK News Substack, to talk about the latest push to police Americans over "disinformation," the rise of alternative media, the panic among the elite over free speech, cooperation between tech companies and the government to censor speech, uproar over Elon Musk buying Twitter, the true problem with content moderation, the limits of speech on social media, the fact-checking bias, how Biden's mental fitness is becoming a real story which the press is ignoring, reporters favoring bias over the reporting the truth, Dr. Fauci's comments on the pandemic (and immediate reversal), Sage Steele suing ESPN over free speech, the latest on Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, what happens next with Russia and Ukraine, 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. In just a second, I'm going to be joined by Matt Taibbi. But first, I wanted to tell you that today we uploaded exclusive content on our podcast feed for all of our podcast listeners. It has insider details on our show, my thoughts on how our first 18 months on the air has gone. We've done 18 months of the podcast and I don't know how many months since September now with Sirius. And we've included a story about a recent interview we pulled. We did not air because the guest, who champions themselves as a warrior for free speech and non-divisive politics, lifting themselves above divisive politics, demanded an edit right after the interview

that we refused to comply with. Turns out the guest wasn't quite as courageous as they wanted our audience to believe. And we'll get into what happened after that. So you might find it interesting. It's short and sweet, and I think you'll enjoy it. Anyway, you can find the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free. And while you're there, you will find over 300 episodes. Our archives are all on our podcast feed. So go ahead and download, enjoy, follow the show so you can listen whenever you want. If you're not able to catch us live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111. Joining me now, one of my favorite guests, Matt Tabi editor of the tk news substack matt great

to have you back thanks for having me megan all right so let's start with i'm sure this is going to come as a great comfort to you that now the department of homeland security is going to crack down on disinformation on the internet okay that's one of their homelands these guys used to be protecting us from radical islamists who wanted to unleash terror attacks on us here at home, or so they said. And now they are attacking us as disinformation purveyors, the random American citizen who has access to a computer or a microphone. And the chief, the chief of this effort is going to be a woman named Nina Jankowicz, who will be the executive director. As far as I can tell so far, her most notable accomplishment is calling the Hunter Biden laptop a, quote, fairy tale, a, quote, Trump campaign product.

And this is the person who now will be in charge of regulating what is and is not, quote, disinformation. What do we make of it? Well, look, this has been going on for five or six years now. There's been, ever since Donald Trump was elected, a pretty concerted effort on the part of mainstream politicians, really in both parties, but particularly in the Democratic Party, to make the internet a place that will be under some kind of governmental control. And this began in 2017 when we had members of the Senate calling up executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter to the Hill and essentially demanding that they come up with strategies to prevent what they called the foment of discord. Back then, the bread and butter.

Right, exactly. The boogeyman back then was Russian disinformation. Then it became hate speech. Then it was disinformation about the pandemic. You know, now we're circling back to Russian disinformation with regard to the Ukrainian conflict. And, you know, I think the problem is we're in a generation of people who they agree that there's a problem with disinformation in the media landscape, but they don't understand that the biggest lies are always official lies. And the only real defense

against that is free speech. And so they want this top down system of control, which I think is very, very dangerous. That's so true. If you hear the Barack Obama remarks from late last week, he was longing nostalgically for the days in which it was just ABC, NBC and CBS and information was controlled. Right. We didn't have all these Internet hacks and trolls out there pushing so-called disinformation. And I'm sure that was a much more delightful time for people in the position like he had at the White House. But think of all the lies that have been told to us over the years from people in that post, that the evening news, for whatever reason, went along with or had an incentive not to check too far into. And today, it's no different. You know, today, it's like, OK, do we not think that the people at Fox were manipulated by Trump? Do we not think that the people at every other network are manipulated by Biden? Like, that's the way it works. Right. But the problem is people have an alternative now.

They have a way to get around that, which they didn't have before, as President Obama noted. And I remember this pretty graphically because I was a campaign reporter in 2004 and 2008 back in those alleged salad days, or I guess towards the end of them. And I would be on the bus listening to journalists talk about which candidates they thought were serious or electable and which ones weren't. So, you know, you'd be in a bus full of CNN and Fox and MSNBC anchors, and they'd be scoffing at Dennis Kucinich saying, no, we're not going to take him seriously. And then there would be some other candidate like John Kerry, like, oh, he's electable. And they made those judgments and they were important judgments because, you know, what they signaled to audiences back then had an enormous impact on how people, voters behaved at

the ballot box. It's different now. Ironically, Barack Obama was a beneficiary. He was one of the first people to lose the so-called invisible primary of donors and still win the nomination. But then when Trump broke through in 2016, that was really when the chokehold of those networks collapsed. And they missed that. They just they really do. And so how do we think this is going to work? I mean, this woman can't really crack down on on anything like what the DHS is going to come try to, what, censor what happens on your show, on this show, on your sub stack? How on earth is this going to work? I don't know. But I think we've already seen that they'll go to pretty extraordinary lengths to try to have influence over information that's online. We've seen in the last six years that there's been

pretty extraordinary cooperation between the Senate, between bodies like the CDC and the FDA, and platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. I mean, I did a story randomly about a podcaster who was having trouble with YouTube. And when I called them up for comment and asked them how they decided what was misinformation and what wasn't, they just told me outright that they made those decisions

in consultation with federal agencies. So I think this is the world we're going to be living in, where we have basically a privatized speech landscape, but there are going to be political actors from the government that are going to be influencing the moderation decisions of those platforms. It's very, you know, we're going a lot closer to blatantly protected First Amendment speech. Like the reason Twitter and Facebook and YouTube can censor content is because they're not the government. They're pretty close. I mean, they're pretty close to having the power and certainly the fingerprints of the government all over their editorial decisions.

But technically, still, the law does not recognize them as the equivalent of or certainly as an actual government actor. Not the case for DHS. They're not allowed to censor our speech. So I don't really know what they think they can do. But they may be sad to realize it's written right there in the First Amendment. They're not allowed to censor speech. There's a teeny tiny category they get to touch. And the vast majority of what they're going to object to won't be in it.

That's true. But somebody still has to do the test case. They have to file that lawsuit and win that First Amendment case. And, you know, who's going to do that? The reality is these government agencies have already been meddling with speech on private platforms, whether it's the FDA and the CDC, you know, sort of encouraging platforms like YouTube to go by their guidelines and deciding what's misinformation and what isn't. Or it's the FBI, which has been in consultation with some of these platforms about things like hate speech

and which groups might need cracking down on. So, yes, you're right. I think there's already a powerful First Amendment argument that they've crossed the line. But that has to be challenged. And who's going to issue that challenge? It's a very difficult road ahead. I mean, possession is nine-tenths of the law. And if they're already doing this, it has to be undone.

It doesn't matter if it's illegal. Well, speaking of possession being nine-tenths of the law, people on the right half of the aisle are just the sane half. It's not just all righties it's a lot of centrist lefties too um are rejoicing that elon musk is taking over twitter is going to buy twitter and so it appears and there's a stock problem at the moment and people we have to keep our eye on the twitter shares and on the tesla shares because he does need money in order to buy it um peter schiff came on and explained all that to us yesterday. I don't

totally understand it, but it's not a done deal. It's not a totally done deal. He's very, very rich, but he does need his actual $44 billion or at least $21 billion of it to buy. So they're happy, but he's already taking crap from, I mean, all corners of Twitter and the Twitter top executives. The chief legal officer at the general counsel was reportedly in tears when upon learning on Monday that he was actually going to close the sale. You know, they agreed to the sale. And Elon, I guess, liked to tweet or took a shot at her yesterday and then took all sorts of crap in response, right? Like he, let's say he shared a meme Wednesday that mocked her response to accusations of the company's political bias. And it was this thing involving Tim Pool and Joe Rogan and when they all went on there and how she's got the circular reasoning and she denies viewpoint discrimination, but we all know they do it. And this is the thing that,

you know, the Twitter CEO from 2010 to 2015 response, what's going on? You're making an executive of the company you just bought the target of harassment and threats. Bullying is not leadership. And Elon kind of defended himself saying, you know, what are you talking about? So this is the thing. He doesn't behave like your normal CEO or owner when he takes over these massive corporations.

You know, he's being sued right now for some of the tweets he sent out about Tesla. But this is how they get you. You offered your opinion. His opinion is that this woman is biased and has been wrongfully manipulating content on Twitter. He said it publicly. The way they shut you down is how dare you? How dare you? Online harassment, sexual harassment, comments threatening. Right. We talked about this yesterday with Vivek Ramaswamy, which is he said they smuggle in viewpoint discrimination through the guise of hate speech, threats, you know, words or violence, all those principles, which are in active form at Twitter. Yeah, absolutely. I, and I'm one of the people who's, who's enjoying a schadenfreude moment this week, you know, to watch the reaction to Musk potentially buying Twitter, because

first of all, I'm one of the few reporters who for years now has been covering the phenomenon of content moderation, who took it seriously from the very beginning, warned that this was going to be a problem that was going to become a bigger and bigger part of American life. And I was laughed at by, you know, a lot of my colleagues, particularly like my left-leaning colleagues who I thought were free speech advocates, you know, after the Alex Jones episode, which I thought was deeply troubling, not because I like Alex Jones, but because the precedent of big companies like, you know, Apple and Facebook and Spotify getting together and making sort of an ex parte decision to kick somebody off the internet. That was a radically different approach to policing speech than what I grew up with, which is if you make a mistake, you get sued and there's an open forum and there's a process and it's all transparent. I think what I said from the beginning, the issue isn't who is being censored. The issue is

how it's being done. And if you were in favor of a handful of mega wealthy executives back then kicking off people like Alex Jones and, you know, and then eventually Donald Trump off the internet, you can't now cry that there's a different billionaire who you just happen not to like sitting in that same chair and meddling with speech in a way that you don't like. You had to have objected on principal grounds before and they didn't. And so, you know, look, I don't have any sympathy for these people. They they had a chance to stand up for something like speech principles once upon a time, and they didn't do it because they wanted to censor people. And now they're now they're feeling, you know, a taste of their own medicine.

Let's talk about the Alex Jones case for one second, because I reported on all of that and lived through that in a weird way myself. But I know very well that Alex Jones was in a weird place versus most people who get targeted on the internet because he had been serially unleashing like very personal and in your home threats pretty much on purpose to the most sympathetic group of people in our country, namely the Newtown grieving parents. So people who had their first graders shot to death in class kept getting harassed by his listeners, who he kept telling to believe this was all a hoax, that it was made up. And one family had to go into hiding. It was found in court that they had been receiving death threats by this lunatic inspired by Alex Jones. Many of them had been having to deal with the Alex Jones listeners for years in deeply painful ways. And honestly, Matt, it was like that's I don't think you can compare that to, you know, James O'Keefe with his secret camera getting dishonest New York Times reporters saying something in a bar one way

versus what they put in the pages of the Times another way. I just think he's in a class of his own and it wasn't just the Newtown families. I could go down the list for you of people who have been actually hurt by people he intentionally inflamed. It's much closer legally to what we know as incitement, which is not protected speech. Well, I don't think anything that he said with regard to Newtown was protected speech. And I said that at the time. I also said, I think it was probably pretty obvious that he violated the terms of service of each one of those platforms. Again, I had no interest in defending Alex Jones on any grounds. The issue for me had to do with the method, right? So once upon a time, the way we would have dealt with

speech like Alex Jones was he would have been sued and the penalties, the financial penalties would have been so great that he probably would not have emerged with a career at the end of it. I mean, that's, that's typically how those things, right. That's happening. It took a long time. Right. And, and, and people were impatient to, to, to go through that process. And I understand that, like, look, as this is happening, none of those private businesses want to deal with that. I totally get that. The problem is that by doing this, they open the door for a new kind of speech policing that didn't involve any kind of open and transparent process in that all these companies got together clearly coordinated you know they all did it at the at the same time and they essentially decided you know this person is going to no longer be on the

internet um so that opens the door you know the next thing is going to be O'Keefe. And then before you know it, it's the Babylon Bee. And that was the issue that I had. I mean, that is what happened. That's why it's hard. That's why it's hard because for years they'd been censoring like these radical Islamists who wanted to show people how to build bombs and commit terrorist attacks. And I've got zero problem with that censorship. Go for it. We don't need that shit on the internet. And, you know, people will die as a result of that. And I just, that's indisputably not okay to me. I don't see anybody defending that censorship

by the big tech companies. But that's not even censorship because those things are actually against the law. Like, you know, the authorities can come in and they can stop actual insight, imminent incitement to violence. But if I just sit in front of the camera and I show you how to make a dirty bomb, that's not against the law. No, it's not. But, you know, and that's neither is hate speech, but that's part of what the American experiment is all about. They raised that bar very, very high for a reason. If you go back and look at those cases, you know, in the Supreme Court that, you know, that decided what what's legal speech and what is not. pretty clear that they were willing to tolerate some pretty extreme stuff in order to protect

the principle of free speech. No, I agree with that. But that's why this is so dicey, because if I were running YouTube, I would not allow that. I would not allow videos of how to make a dirty bomb to be posted, even if there weren't. I mean, and it's not it's it's not unprotected. That is protected speech. But am I going to let somebody sit there and show people how to create that level of dangerous weapon that could kill a bunch of people on my platform? I'm not because I'm not a government actor and I don't have to. So I would draw some lines, but I don't know. And would I have allowed the Alex Jones speech against the Newtown families over and over and over? I don't know. I mean, it's very sticky, right? It's like there's a great, there are gradations on this. And if you wind up canceling the Babylon Bee, you've gone too far. If you cancel James O'Keefe, you've gone too far. So I just feel like, why aren't there adults in the room who can distinguish between genuinely

dangerous behavior that can and has gotten people hurt or killed and these false claims of words are violence that you know like claiming what what was said about this twitter general counsel is somehow the same as this other stuff you know look i i, I'm as close as one gets to a free speech absolutist. But even I, you know, grew up understanding that there were a whole ranges of things that as a journalist, I can't say, right? You know, we're trained that we can't commit libel. We can't, we can't, uh, incite people. We can't do a whole list of things. And we have to run things through lawyers before we publish and all that. And that's not the case in the internet. And I understand that, that we have to come up with some kind of process for dealing with difficult speech. My criticism throughout this period has been that a lot of the people who are looking at this

problem, I don't think they're really interested in solving those difficult issues that you talk about. Like if you ask me, I think, you know, for something like Alex Jones or, you know, making bombs, I think there should be some kind of transparent, open process where you get to actually see how these things are decided. But what you've seen instead is you've seen a lot of politicians who seem very, very anxious to use the quasi-monopolistic power of these platforms to push speech in a certain direction. They're attracted by that power. And that's where the danger is. Because as soon as somebody sees that, oh, wow, if I just flick a switch, this person's gone, they're going to be tempted to take the next step and find the next person they don't like. And, and, and that's, that's how you end up with the Babylon. But here's the problem. So here, so, okay, let's say that they do,

they do make it more transparent. You know, we're going to be more open about how we ban somebody or what have you. That's, they don't care. They don't care about saying you Babylon B said Rachel Levine is a man and that's hate speech. That's harassing. We have a policy against harassing someone based on their gender identity. That's what you're doing in the view of us. And then flash to the trans person on their board who says, hateful. You have no idea the suicide rate. You get that.

Therefore, you're banned. And I don't think they'd have any qualms about owning what we see as viewpoint discrimination, but what they see as just this universal non-bullying campaign. Yeah, I agree. I would just quickly like to point out that when they started this campaign, obviously a lot of the people who were sort of discriminated against first, and you talk about viewpoint discrimination, a lot of them were on the right, but a lot of them were on the left, too. I mean, some of the companies, the media outlets that saw enormous drops in traffic when companies like Google were told that they had to prevent the foment of discord, they were outlets like Truthdig and the World Socialist website and even Democracy Now! because the new algorithms essentially just favored large carriers over small ones. But no, I agree with you. But I do think that there has to be some way to do this that mimics the effectiveness of the litigation based the rules were very clear about what we were and were not allowed to publish. There was a pretty high bar that you had to meet to prove that somebody had committed libel or slander.

And yet when there was a real egregious violation, it was usually, if not career-ending, close to it. But you just raised a good point, though, Matt. You raised a good point because back in those days, this is the Barack Obama golden days, and in this way, I see the point. There was a self-imposed high bar of class, of dignity, of not, you know, unfairly targeting one individual over and over or creating a circumstance where somebody could literally get hurt. You know, there, you wouldn't have had Alex Jones in print, you know, in the, in the times and in the post. Back then, those papers were more respectable. Yeah, sure. They still had a left-wing bias, but they were nothing to what they are today. You know, they were definitely more committed to trying to be fair.

And then they would not have allowed these types of things to appear in their papers. So it was sort of a better approach on both sides. They were less censorious, but they had a higher bar for what could be printed and you know who could be targeted in the first place well that's what i mean i think that's what we're all striving for is a system where um where there's kind of sensible uh self-censorship before you you print something i mean i i think the processes that we went through uh before we published things in major magazines i always thought that was that was a good processes that we went through before we published things in major magazines, I always thought that was a good process, that we weren't afraid to use strong language. We weren't afraid to say things about people if we had a strong opinion. But when it came down to facts, you know, we had to be accurate.

We had to check. And if it was a close call, we usually erred on the side of caution, left it out of the paper because the penalties were high. Now on the internet, there's nothing like that right now. No. And there's plenty of people who don't do any fact checking at all. No, there's no fact checking. And this has bled into quote unquote mainstream media, which has learned that its audiences now forgive mistakes as long as they're in the right direction. So they're not careful anymore. They make constant factual errors. They don't worry about it. They don't worry about being sued for libel nearly as much as they would have once upon a time. Again, I'm not particularly

sympathetic to Kyle Rittenhouse, but I was shocked by the way he was described in the first days of that story. There were major news outlets that were calling him a white supremacist. The president was calling him that. Sorry, the future president. big problem. I understand that there has to be something that done to fix all the craziness on the internet or at least address it. But what they're doing instead, I think is, is they want to leave the system in place so that they can push speech in a certain direction. And that, that, that's the sense that I, the clear sense that I get from. I mean, I think if you asked me to sit there and say, what's the difference between, you know. Threatening messages that actually could harm, you know, physically harm somebody.

Forget emotional harm. That's just we can't deal with that. But physical harm. I could tell the difference between a tweet that did that and something that just expressed a controversial view. And so, you know, I feel like maybe what Elon Musk needs is people who are just less ideological, you know, people who are committed to free speech as a principle, but people who are reasonable and don't want to see, you know, people get hurt unnecessarily because you've got some lunatic on the internet continuing to dock somebody and call for violence or come close enough to the line.

But they don't have ideological diversity at these companies. And I've told my audience before, Matt, I went out to Silicon Valley in 2016. It was 2016, right before the election. And I met with the heads of a lot of these companies. I was on the campuses. I was meeting with the top executives and they wanted to know my thoughts on how they could do better at what they recognize as their own ideological bias. And I told them all the same thing, which is get more ideological diversity on your boards, get more ideological diversity in your C-suite. And certainly if you have any sort of a monitoring or a censorship group, make sure it's totally even. Totally even,

right? You can't just have a bunch of people on one side of the aisle making all these calls and not expect that to be reflected in your decision making. And guess what? Nobody listened to me. Well, of course. Yeah. And again, I think this gets to the fact that although some people ask you for your advice, mostly people don't want to do that kind of self-reflection. Mostly they want to exercise that authority in a certain way, which is unfortunate. And the clear line between threats and opinion, there's lots of stuff that's already illegal that's allowed on these platforms. And, you know, the platforms would do well if they were, if they just focused on, well, let's eliminate the stuff that we, that's already against the law. Let's, let's try to cut down on libel. Let's try to establish things like factual truth and say that something is disinformation or misinformation because that's a moving target that you basically can't get right

in a way that's gonna be fair. And, you know, or if they're trying to define something that's an opinion as being beyond the pale and abusive and hurtful. Hurtfulness isn't a standard that can be applied in any way I think that's rational. I agree. It just can't hold up. I agree.

As something that's consistent. That's why it's like, okay, well, what is bullying? Perhaps if there's some large campaign, you know, designated at one person that just completely upends the person's life, it would have to be massive, massive, not just a few tweets from the Babylon Bee that gets, you know, a bunch of likes. Maybe, I don't know. But otherwise, like, we can't really do feelings. We can't do feelings. We can definitely take account for physical threats. But words are violence and my feelings are hurt. Stay off the Internet. It's a cesspool. If you to engage with forums that you know are hurtful and toxic. They are under Elon. They will be right now. Twitter's totally toxic. I love all these libs who are like it's rainbow and unicorns. Walk a mile in my shoes on the Internet while you people

run it because it's been disgusting. Yeah. And totally humorless and miserable experience for quite some time now. I also think they get into incredible trouble when they try to police misinformation and disinformation. Because I think most journalists understand, I mean, Megan, you know this, in the first days of any news story, there's always some error baked into the reporting that only comes out later. Right. So if you, you know, if you have some kind of star chamber of fact checkers who are declaring this or that to be the truth and everything else needs to be wiped out, inevitably what's going to happen is you're going to have fiascos like the lab leak business where for some initial period, they're going to declare, well, this is an untruth. This is conspiracy theory. Oh, but six months later, it turns out it might be true. Like the COVID lab leak theory. Right. Yeah, exactly. And once you do that, you lose all credibility with audiences. And now what's going to happen is they're going to trust what you call the official trusted version of reality. They're going to distrust that even more once you make a couple of mistakes like that. And they're going to drift even more towards conspiracy theories. So that for me is like, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of how

news consumers work. If you try to weed out conspiracy theories and crackpots and all these other things in the name of truth, what you end up with most of the time is more of that. And I think that that's not very well understood. I'm going to squeeze in a break, but I'll read this from the very well worth your time sub stack from Taibbi. This site, talking about Twitter, used to be fun, funny,

and a great tool for exchanging information. Now it feels like what the world would be if the eight most vile people in Brooklyn were put in charge of all human life, a giant hyper-pretentious thought Starbucks. So good. All right, stand by, Matt. We're with Matt Taibbi after a quick break, loving this conversation. And we'll tell you about Dr. Fauci's reversal and what Biden's doing that Trump never did before. Back with me now, Matt Taibbi, editor of the TK News Substack.

All right. So the reason I stumbled on the intro is because I've got Joe Biden in my head. This just in, he made remarks this morning that Tom Cotton, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, is tweeting out as, quote, alarming because of the little bit of slurring and a lot of stumbling. Take a listen for yourself. We're going to seize their yachts, their luxury homes and other ill-begotten gains of Putin's kleptocracy. The guys who are the kleptocracies. But these are bad guys. Oh, my God, Matt. I ended up moving to Substack. Because I was covering a I was doing a feature on on Biden on the campaign trail for Rolling Stone. And I was noticing what everybody else was noticing, like this guy's having trouble getting through sentences. Every time he has to ad lib, he gets lost. He forgets where he is. He forgets what the question is. And I called back some of the people I had talked to for a story about

the potential use of the 25th Amendment to get Donald Trump removed on the grounds that he was mentally incompetent. If you remember, there was a big drive to do that. And I was assigned to cover that story. And lots of psychiatrists were very happy to talk about that then. But nobody would talk about the Biden issue. And I just realized we were in a completely different media environment where, you know, certain things were just sort of off limits. And I think it was, we did kind of the country a disservice by not talking about this a whole lot before he was elected. Right. Did you see the Title 42 thing last week? No.

Oh, you've got to see it. We have it. So he was asked about, I think about Title 42. My team will refresh me whether the question was about 42 or the mask mandate being struck down. It was district judge in Florida. And he answered it about Title 42, the COVID immigration regulation that allows our border agents to reject everyone who wants asylum. Just saying, oh, it's COVID, get out. So he gets totally confused about the two. They start meandering. He starts intertwining. Just take a listen. On Title 42, Mr. Are you considering delaying lifting Title 42?

No. What I'm considering is continuing to hear from my... First of all, there's going to be an appeal by the Justice Department because as a matter of principle, we want to be able to be in a position where if in fact it is strongly concluded by the scientists that we need Title 42, that we'd be able to do that. But there has been no decision. My God. So you hear he's asked about the mask mandate. He starts meandering all over about 42. He can't keep it straight. Vice versa. Neither can I right now, but I'm not the president and I wasn't facing the reporters and he had to issue a cleanup later in a written statement. We've seen it happen time and time again. Yeah. It's, it's certainly not reassuring, uh, when you look up

with the president of the United States and the emotion that's, uh, being betrayed in betrayed in his eyes is terror, right? Because he's not quite sure what the question is or whether he's answering appropriately. I've seen this with some other politicians in the past, but Biden got worse quickly in the last election. And again, I think the reporters just kind of decided to not talk about it because they had already decided that he was going to be taking on Donald Trump and they didn't want to give him ammunition, which I think was a huge mistake. Did those presidents' last names rhyme with Megan? Because there was a real issue with one of them in his second term that went on to become quite a news story right yeah well reagan was one of the ones i was thinking of i you know i've seen

it i saw with boris yeltsin when i lived in in russia um you know i think the issues there might have been a little bit different but you know similarly he had some cognitive issues. But but look, you know, this is what happens when reporters start messing with things beyond their purview. Like our job is just to tell you like what we see and, you know, worry about whether it's right or right or wrong. And then it's up to the public to figure out what they think about it. What started to happen in 2016 when Trump came on the scene is reporters suddenly were like looking at news stories. Just to take an example, there was that issue with Hillary Clinton not filling up her crowds, right? So she was having trouble filling the halls. And reporters got together and they kind of silently decided not to make an issue out of that

because they didn't want to make it look like her campaign was doing badly. But that ended up hurting her because it created a false sense of security in the campaign. And, you know, instead of doing something to try to fix it, they just kept going and they ended up losing. So, you know, reporters should just, you know, tell us what they see and, you know, let the chips fall where they may. And they won't make they won't affect history in a negative way, at least that way. Well, and it's like, you know, when grandpa starts to lose his marbles, you know, when he

starts to starts to go south, grandpa can be easily manipulated. You know, we don't do that because we love grandpa. But this is the sitting president of the United States. And we were promised somebody who wasn't going to be some far left wokester. And he has been. And we were promised somebody who was going to be the voice of reason. And he hasn't been. And we were promised somebody who said he was very skeptical of, quote, forgiving student loans because he understood the problems that would create and the fairness issues it would create. And now he's about to do it. And one wonders, what did I buy? What did I get? What who is running the show legitimately? Who is making these decisions? And if it is Joe Biden, who is manipulating him into these decisions? Because I'm not sure I elected them. Yeah. And that was another question. Because there was so clearly a competency issue with Biden, there should have been a secondary news story, like who's actually going to be running the country if this guy gets elected. And there weren't a whole lot of those stories. I mean, I blame myself. I didn't really do it either. But somebody needed to do that story and it needs to do it now, too. And we're not we're not really

doing it. We know that we know that there's some infighting, but we don't know. We don't know exactly how decisions are being made. Well, so Joe Biden is doing something that Trump didn't do. And that is as the sitting president, he's about to go to the now reborn White House Correspondents Dinner, which is going to happen in Washington, DC this weekend. Cue the vomit emoji. I've been- I know that. I've been- I call it the White House Self-Congratulation Dinner, but go ahead. It's disgusting. They're awful. My favorite was, I went to one where Pamela Anderson was. They always invite these celebrities. George Clooney was there once. He was like the biggest star ever there, bigger than any president. Pam Anderson was at one. And they said, so, Ms. Anderson, what are you doing at the White House Correspondents Dinner? And she said, oh, I'm sorry. I thought I was at the White Trash Correspondents Dinner.

Greatest thing ever to happen. That's great. So Biden's going to go. He's only going to sit. He's not going to have the dinner out of COVID fears. He wants to be responsible. He's not going to sit for the actual dinner. He's just going to go for the, you know, the humor and the roasts.

I mean, that's what everybody wants to do. No one wants to sit for the damn dinner. So he's basically just, you know, parachuting in for the humor and the roasts. I mean, that's what everybody wants to do. No one wants to sit for the damn dinner. So he's basically just parachuting in for the comedian. But then it turns out the comedian's Trevor Noah. So who wants to see that? We all know what we're going to get. And the other sort of subline to all this, Matt, is that Dr. Fauci was supposed to go, but bailed

because the four-time vaccinated Fauci doesn't think this is safe. Yeah, I mean, that story is ridiculous on so many levels that it's just hard to even know where to begin. But they've been consistently irrational about this from the very beginning. From the very start, they were saying to us that they didn't really think the vaccines worked. You know, why did we have to stay in lockdown if the if the if the vaccines were effective? Well, it turned, you know, they just don't really believe in them.

And I think there's some sending mixed messages, which, again, gets back to the point of, you know, when people stop trusting you, that's when they drift even more towards conspiratorial interpretations of things. So they, I think it sends a terrible message, what he's doing. It's so true, right? It's like, aren't the vaccines supposed to protect us from severe illness or death and reduce COVID to something rather mild that the average person can handle? Yes, is the answer. So why are they behaving like this is the very first form of COVID, which actually was more severe, far more than what we're dealing with now, Omicron, whatever, the second version

of Omicron. Why are they pretending like it's still that version and we have no vaccine and we have no therapeutics, right? They aren't going out and living their lives. Or maybe it's just all one big massive virtue signal to try to cover for their overextended big government hand, which is still literally over the mouths, in effect, I guess not literal, of little children in New York City, two-year-olds who are masked. Yeah, clearly there were people who just loved all of the rules to a degree that was a little bit unseemly. There were lots of policies in the last two years where I thought, well,

maybe I agree with that. It's possible that that might be the sensible thing to do, but I was put off by the glee with which people were, you know, glad to impose some of these restrictions, especially with schools and kids where, you know, it was suddenly became taboo to talk about the fact that kids didn't really get sick with this very much. You know, that's disturbing. I think there are people who just like it too much, like the rules too much. And that's not a good thing. That's like Brian Stelter. Would you go to a party with no rules? He speaks for so many of them.

Okay, listen, when we come back, I'm going to play you Dr. Fauci, who literally in the course of a few hours declared the pandemic was over, only to reverse himself moments later. It's not over. It's over. Celebrate. We's not over. It's over. Celebrate. We finally. No, it's not. Is anyone surprised? There's much, much more to go over, including the news we just got about what we're prepared to do in Ukraine, where Matt has had some good thoughts on Russia and what our potential role should be all along. More with Matt coming up. All right, Matt. So staying on the subject of

Fauci, literally in the course of a few hours, he said the pandemic was over, only to reverse himself and say, no, it's not over. It's never going to be over for Dr. Fauci, I'm sure. Take a listen to these butted soundbites. We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase. Is the pandemic still here? Absolutely. So when I said phase, I probably should have said the acute stage of the pandemic phase. I see you laughing. It is laughable. It is. It is. And again, this just gets back to why you can't have YouTube or Google or Facebook or Twitter relying upon government officials to tell you what the truth is about something because even they don't know they they change their minds every 10 seconds about stuff uh including like really important things like whether or not to wear a mask or um you know whether the the vaccine is actually going to protect you from getting

infected like that's why you you need you you cannot have top-down information controls because, you know, the truth is always a moving target. I feel like either he had a momentary slip, you know, when he said it's over, because I don't think he's ever going to say that and really mean it. He doesn't really want that. Or he just got woodshedded. He said it because it's actually a fact and he slipped into factual reporting for a second there, only to get woodshedded by the administration. He said, we're not admitting that. We have mandates in place. We're still firing people for not like, no, it's not over. Get back on message. Yeah, I think they took out the cattle fraud and found a nice quiet room somewhere to set them straight about what the official message is. Yeah. That's what it sounds like.

A lot of these vaccine mandates are still in place. People are still getting fired. Even I wonder about in my schools. They have vaccine mandates in our schools. They don't kick in until they're 16 years old. And I'm not there yet with my kids. But I wonder, like, how do you justify that? Right. For the kids who are about to turn 15 to 16. You can't justify that anymore. You got you got Fauci on tape saying the pandemic phase,

at least, is over. It's over. So what's going to happen? Do you think, you know, do these politicians and bureaucrats and school administrators follow through with these things? The writer Christopher Lash once said the essence of propaganda was keeping the public in an ongoing state of emergency. And I think we've, especially in the Trump years, we've fallen into the pattern of always being in an emergency and politicians finding ways to find that useful. The pandemic has been extremely useful to politicians. It has given them the ability to dictate all kinds of behaviors and to allow them to stick their fingers in things like the news and internet content moderation. I don't think they want the emergency to end. I think they like this new normal, you know, and it's a problem.

You know, the fact, the idea that there aren't people who are motivated to end crises is a big problem just generally, I think, in politics. So speaking of the vaccine mandates and how they've impacted people's lives, an interesting couple of cases in the news. One has to do with the mandates, one doesn't. Sage Steele of ESPN just filed a lawsuit against ESPN and its parent company, Walt Disney, alleging that the company treated her unfairly for comments she made on a podcast interview last September. This made news at the time. She had been one of the lead anchors for ESPN's flagship show, SportsCenter. I know you're big into the NFL draft and things like that. I am not. I know nothing about sports,

so I'm reading this. OK. But since that interview, she says she's been sidelined for the prime assignments. She does continue to anchor the noon SportsCenter broadcast, but quite a few things were taken away from her and she was pulled off the air for some big assignments, she says. So she had gone on former NFL quarterback Jay Cutler's podcast and shared her thoughts on ESPN's vaccine mandate, sexism in sports, journalism, and on Obama's ethnicity. The fact that he selected black as his ethnicity on the census because he's biracial and she's also biracial and had some thoughts on it.

So here's what she said on the Jay Cutler podcast that she's now alleging she was punished for. I respect everyone's decision. I really do. But to mandate it is sick and scary to me in many ways. But I have a job, a job that I love and frankly, a job that I need. But again, I love it. I just I'm not surprised it got to this point, especially with

Disney. I mean, a global company. So ESPN melted down. We embrace different points of view, dialogue and discussion are great. That said, we expect those points of view to be expressed respectfully in a manner consistent with our values and in line with our internal policies. She got hit by, of course, Jemele Hill hill who just once again lost yet another show over there on cnn plus how many shows can jamelle hill lose um and then espn required her to issue an apology uh so the thing about espn and normally they could punish her for her viewpoints because they are not a government actor. But the state of Connecticut, where she is and where I am, they have apparently a law that actually says corporations can't always do that.

And she's taking advantage of that. So what do you make of her fighting back against what this company allegedly did to her? This is a difficult issue for me. I'm of two minds about this because, you know, I remember when Liz Spade, the former public editor of the New York Times, got in trouble some years ago, among other things for talking about New York Times writers being on social media too much.

And, you know, I understand the rationale for that because once upon a time, you know, in my father's day when he was on the news, viewers didn't really know a whole lot about the political views of reporters. And that was and that actually added to their, their credibility. Like they, you know, if you didn't know whether a person was liberal or conservative and they were just delivering the news, it did kind of tend to make people feel like they were more likely to believe just that they were watching a news program. However, you know, nobody really is just a pure newsreader anymore. And everybody has a social

media presence. So you can't, I also think you can't punish people for talking. Especially at ESPN. Yeah, especially at ESPN. They're encouraging these anchors to go out there and they've forced moments of silence on them and they've gotten very politically active on the air there so why single out sage yeah i mean and again i know a lot of people in news in the news business who were who were outright told by their bosses like you have to get a um a twitter handle you've got to have more of a presence in social media um clearly on espn you know they're trying to build up the brand the individual brands of all these on-air personalities

so when they do that but they do that in a way that doesn't fit with some kind of orthodoxy i don't i don't think you can punish those people i think that's's crazy. It's once again, it's viewpoint discrimination. By the way, the Connecticut law, just to clarify what I said, it states companies cannot discipline employees for exercising their First Amendment rights as long as the comments do not directly impact their work performance or the company. She's arguing that her comments remain in a third party podcast and that she should be considered a private citizen in this situation, making these comments. And the thing is, like, I don't see how ESPN gets away with punishing just her given its push to make its anchors go totally woke on the air. And now you have one person here who happens

to be a woman of color who pushes back on some of the narrative. She didn't want to get the vaccine. She didn't think it made sense. She didn't like what she didn't say. She didn't like that Obama choosing black, just to clarify what she actually said. She said Barack Obama chose black and he's biracial. I'm like, well, congratulations to the president. That's his thing. I think it's fascinating considering his black dad was nowhere to be found, but his white mom and grandma raised him. But hey, you do you. I'm going to do me. That's why is that an unfair point? She's basically hey, you do you. I'm going to do me. Why is that an unfair point? She's basically asking, why do you identify with one side of the family versus the other when it was the other that raised you? OK, you can say I'm offended by that. I don't like that.

It's her POV. Same as, you know, some audience members may get offended by the incredibly woke, anti-patriotic statements coming out of the mouths of the anchors sitting on set during the big basketball games or the big football games. And we've heard that, too. ESPN has no problem with that. Yeah, and what I would say is as a sports fan, I don't want to hear it. Like when I turn on ESPN, I'm turning it on, or I used to anyway, because I'm looking for an escape from politics.

That's the thing. She didn't do it in the anchor chair. Unlike those guys, she did it on a podcast. Right. Exactly. You know, so I don't know, I don't know what they're thinking. I mean, the, I think a lot of these, these companies that have gotten away from what really works, you know, sportscasting used to be a really, you know, interesting and colorful and creative wing of the media world because they were able to write with style. They were able to use humor and wit in ways that regular newscasters weren't really allowed to do. But it's become just as dreary in a lot of ways as the rest of media.

And I don't really understand why they would voluntarily do that. What did you call the Starbucks? What did you call the Twitter now? Thought Starbucks. There is Thought Starbucks too now. Nobody wants to be that. Okay. So the second lawsuit I wanted to ask you about, I realize you're not here in any legal capacity, but they're interesting. 2018. This is two years after she had made sure she was caught on camera by the paparazzi with

what she claimed was a bruise on her face from what she claimed was a phone thrown at it, the face by Johnny Depp. We've had witness. So she's laying the foundation. I'm an abuse victim at his hands. The WAPO op-ed did not name Johnny Depp, but everybody knew that's who she meant. And now he's sued her. He got fired from, I guess it was the fifth installation of Pirates of the Caribbean right after that, and lost millions of dollars, not to mention reputational damage. And he's filed a lawsuit for defamation against her. And the trial has not gone well for her. It has not gone well at all. There's been plenty of testimony about how they're both hot messes and they're both way into drugs and violent and weird, but it's certainly established at a minimum she has attacked him repeatedly. And so, I mean, that's at a minimum. Okay. Best case scenario for

her is they attacked each other. She did it more, but he, a couple of times may have hit her too. That's best case scenario. All inferences in her favor. That does not necessarily support. I'm an abuse victim. And I've I've had the you know, the Internet unleashed against me as you abused him repeatedly. You cost him the end of his finger. You you or your friend actually defecated in your marital bed.

The evidence has shown. I mean, it goes on, Matt. And this is Johnny Depp's testimony in court this week in part. Take a listen. I can't remember what kind of mineral spirits thrown at my nose. You can please tell people that it was a fair fight and see what the jury and judge think. Tell the world, Johnny. Tell them Johnny Depp. I, Johnny Depp, man, I'm a victim to those domestic violence. And I know it's a fair fight. And see how many people believe or side with you. And what did you say in response when Ms. Hurd said, tell the world, Johnny. Tell them Johnny Depp. I, Johnny Depp, a man, I'm a victim to of domestic violence?

I said, yes, I am. So that's her admitting basically on tape that she cut his finger off with a vodka bottle and him complaining about it and her kind of mocking him like, oh, go ahead. Good luck. Tell the world you're the victim. And him saying, you know what, alive, I am. Yeah, I don't know. This is a tough one.

You know, I've obviously gotten in trouble over the subject in the past and uh i i do understand the idea that uh there needs to be an initial reaction that we believe women at least enough so that they get a hearing um you know to not believe but well keep an open mind yeah like at least least accept the seriousness of the accusation initially. You don't need to dismiss it like we used to. Right, which is what happened in the past. And that's something that a lot of trouble and had all sorts of issues financially, really over allegations and not really about substantiated conduct. that's just become a little bit i think too easy in modern media which is you know we raise an allegation of something or we imply that some something happened and before you know it you know the twitter takes off and turns it into a fact and next thing you know it's a reputational harm issue and we can't have that person working at our company because you know the the staff will be upset

about it um that's just become too easy like we i think there has to be some kind of happy medium where you have to prove these things out before before people really um you know go through serious damage yeah i mean you're you're not wrong because mean, I do think like the believe all women thing was always a lie and stupid and absolutely un-American. Nobody gets a presumption of belief. Nobody. Right. It's the worst case scenario is you're you're charged with a crime and the system says you get a presumption of innocence because the state has such an advantage over you when you're sitting there in shackles and he or she gets to go in on the other side in their suit saying, I represent the United States of America. For those reasons, because the deck is stacked against the defendants, we give them a presumption of innocence. We want to hold the system to account before we throw somebody in jail, take away their freedom.

You don't get that presumption of truth telling in any forum, including a court. And so I'm glad he brought this case because she really was painted as just this poor victim who'd been abused by him. And definitely he suffered from it financially and otherwise, not that he needs the money, but still, it's just the principle. And I think this trial has exposed that at a minimum, these situations can be a lot more complicated than we admit. Well, and this has always been a big of reporters think that, you know, there's a playbook to news stories or that you can, you know, lapse into cliches when you report things. The reality is you have to clean your slate every time and approach every news story as a completely new set of facts, because, you know, what might be a Matt Lauer story, you know, in, in, in one instance, you know,

you might have a completely different fact pattern the next time you can't, you can't carry over expectations from your previous reporting and just kind of shoehorn in a, you know, a cliched understanding of what happened. And I think that's, we've gotten away from doing that of, of just wiping the slate clean each time. That's good. It's part of our drift toward collective guilt. You know, this, he must be guilty. He did it. He's a man. He's a rich man. He's a celebrity. He did it. And you can't, that's just not the way life works. He doesn't have any collective guilt

because of any, because of his gender, because of his celebrity status. Okay, hard turn now, because I do, before we go, want to get your thoughts on Ukraine. You've been really interesting on this whole conflict over there, which goes on. And the news of the day is that Biden wants another $33 billion from Congress for Ukraine emergency funding. It's a big price tag. Germany has now reversed itself on sending arms to Ukraine after claiming it would tap into its reserves. So some rollback from the Europeans, America sending more money.

There's still some calls from Republicans and Democrats even for us to get more involved, more weapons. And even still, some people are saying no-fly zone and so on, though I don't think that's going to happen. So where do you make of where the United States is now and where this conflict is now? So first of all, I was one of the people that got this wrong. I never expected Russia to actually invade Ukraine or at least the western part of Ukraine. And so I made a wrong call on that. And then you did something extraordinary. You admitted that you were wrong and you apologized to your listeners and your readers, which is all that's expected. But nobody does that anymore.

I mean, it's crazy. Nobody takes accountability, responsibility. Yeah, you do have to do that, but you know, I, I got that wrong and it's an unpredictable situation, but, uh, but I think what's happened, um, over time is that, uh, we're not really reporting on, um, what the United States is, what their policy is. You know, Secretary of Defense Austin said this, I thought, really fascinating thing this week, where he said that, you know, basically what our plan is, is to is to weaken Russia so that it can't do this to the next Ukraine. Now, that seems to me at cross purposes with Ukraine's mission in all this. I'm sure Ukraine wants to defeat Russia militarily, but they may also come to a point where they just want to end the conflict with minimal damage.

And so if the United States is committed to a different policy where we're not going to give them the ability to negotiate, for instance, the end of sanctions, then Russia is really at war with us, not with Ukraine. Like if Ukraine doesn't have that autonomy, then this is an immensely complicated situation. And I also think the United States is delusional if they think that this is going to end in some kind of happy regime change scenario in Russia. The much more likely outcome is that you're going to get a more hardline leader who's going to come in after Putin and they're going to drop vacuum bombs on every city in Ukraine. Like that's my worry. And the whole thing is that we're pursuing this with this sort of fairyland expectations about how it's going to end. Yeah. I was joking the other day that they seem to think Biden and those around him,

that if they could just get rid of Putin, they'd get Jed Bartlett. There he is just waiting. He's dying for democracy. If somebody could take out Putin, I could come in with all my liberal ideas. Right. I mean, were they not paying attention in the last 30 years? I mean, that's the thing that's amazing to me is the United States has already been around this track many times with Russia. I was there during this process. Like, you know, we tried to voice an America-friendly leader on Russia. And those people were hugely unpopular, mainly because they were friendly with the West.

And it was part of the reason we got Putin in the first place. Because, you know, Boris Yeltsin was seen as too close to the United States. Putin was seen as somebody who stood up to us. And so he had popular backing. So the person who comes in after Putin, if they think it's going to be like, you know, Emmanuel Macron or something like that, they're high, you know, like they're not understanding what the situation really is. And I worry, you know, this is like all the president's men thing. Like this is these are just not very bright guys and things are going to get out of hand.

You know, that's what I worry about with this. No wonder Yeltsin was drinking so heavily. Nobody liked it. His only friends were in America. Right. It's been a pleasure as always. Thank you so much for coming on and to our audience. Go check out Matt's Substack now. TK News. Well worth your time, as you can see. All the best. Thanks so much, Megan,

for having me on. Take care now. Don't forget to join us tomorrow. Cheryl Atkinson will be here. Talk to you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.