The Megyn Kelly Show - Fox Goes to War with Tucker Carlson, and Fauci Pressed on His Lies, with Michael Brendan Dougherty and Noah Rothman | Ep. 537

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined for National Review Day by Michael Brendan Dougherty and Noah Rothman, senior writers, to talk about how Fox News is going to war with Tucker Carlson, how Fox News is now trying to ruin Tucker's reputation, the claim that he created a toxic work environment,why these stories are coming out now, Christianity as a potential element to this story, why Tucker is unable to respond to allegations, the toxic and disgusting business of cable news, comparing "misinformation" at Fox and MSNBC, Dr. Fauci being pressed on lies about masks and more, finally admitting the truth about mask mandates, his outrageous COVID origin and lab leak spin, President Biden's age and The View demanding everyone get in line, VP Kamala Harris saying a lot while literally saying nothing, Steven Spielberg admitting he shouldn't have edited guns out of E.T., and more.Subscribe to NR Plus here: https://www.nationalreview.com/nrplus-subscribe/ Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Wednesday. First, we're going to get to the latest on Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox and the ongoing fallout. Joining me today on this, our National Review Day, is Michael Brendan Dougherty, MBD, as Rich Lowry calls him. And now, Noah Rothman, because Noah jumped ship from commentary to National Review, which I've been totally enjoying, and he is now a member of the Editor's Podcast, which is a fave. Both are senior writers, and you can find their work, on National Review, or through an NR Plus membership, which I recommend. You get to skip virtually all of

the ads and you get a bunch of fun extras. MBD and Noah, great to see you. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. Noah, you're going to be so much better on this podcast than you were on commentary where the very loquacious John Padora has never let you talk. Oh, that's not true. I bullied my way in so many times. I felt terrible about it most of the time. But yeah, I had to use some sharp elbows. I'll reserve them here. Yeah, that's right. No, you can. That's MBD can take it. All right. I want to start with you guys are both old media experts and I am so disturbed at how the Tucker thing is playing out. And I know Noah,

you're not against the termination and think TOA think that, um, Tucker brought this on himself. However, this is something different. Um, they're trying to destroy him and it's very obvious. And this is, I've been through this myself. It's not enough that you part ways with the company. They want to destroy you. They want to ruin your career and your employability. It's absolutely disgusting. Not every industry does this, you guys. Just ours. Just like media.

And in particular, cable news and broadcast news. Trust me on that. Today, there's a new piece. There's one in the Wall Street Journal, of course, that's owned by the same parent company as Fox News. Tucker Carlson's vulgar offensive messages about colleagues helped seal his fate at Fox News.

Several weeks ago, as Fox News lawyers prepared for a courtroom showdown with Dominion Voting Systems, they presented Tucker Carlson with what they thought was good news. They had persuaded the court to redact from a legal filing the time he called a senior Fox executive the C word, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Carlson, Fox News most watched primetime host, was not impressed. He told his colleagues he wanted the world to know what he had said about the executive in a private message, said these people. Mr. Carlson said comments he made about

former President Donald Trump, quote, I hate him passionately, that were in the court documents were said during a momentary spasm of anger, while his dislike of this executive was deep and enduring. The private messages in which Mr. Carlson showed disregard for management and colleagues were a major factor in the decision to let him go, according to people familiar with the matter. Here's the next paragraph. In recent years, because here's the tell about who they're talking about, battles between Mr. Carlson and Fox management got so bad that former Trump aide Raj Shah was appointed to be his internal advocate and an intermediary between Mr. Carlson and Fox's communications department, according to people familiar with the arrangement and filings in the Dominion case. Mr. Carlson was

livid that Fox News did not do more to protect him from the negative press coverage around the Dominion case that he was expected to testify in, given that the primary actors responsible for the false election fraud claims at the heart of the suit were other Fox hosts and commentators and so on. This is my guess. I don't have inside knowledge of this, but they're talking about Irina Briganti. Yeah, Abby's shaking her head. Yes, she runs the Fox News Media Relations Department, and she is as vicious as they come. And to some extent, it's not her fault

because she does the bidding of her bosses. Irene is not running around rogue, trying to take people down. She has the blessing of her higher ups. That's just the way corporations work. But this woman has terrorized enough people for long enough that there should be accountability. I went on the air at NBC,

at NBC in my new job job and called her out by name. Because let me tell you, it is a pattern that when you leave an organization like this, it's not enough to try to say goodbye, to say, okay, we hope she fails or he fails. They try to ruin you in the dirtiest and most disgusting ways possible. And that's what I believe they're doing to Tucker right now. And I'll just give you one other thing before I bring you guys in for comment. Rolling Stone with the following headline. Fox has a secret oppo file to keep Tucker Carlson in check. Sources say Fox News executives have in their possession a dossier of alleged dirt on Tucker should he attack the network in the wake of his departure. File includes internal complaints regarding workplace conduct, disparaging comments about management and colleagues, and allegations that the now former primetime host created a toxic work environment. his personnel file, any complaint, any minion at Fox News ever went in there to lodge against

Tucker, whether it was substantiated or not, whether it was a money grab as a part of a departure or not. We won't be given the context. They'll just try to ruin him. That's it. Why? Because they fired him. Wait, what? They fired him, but he must be ruined. I'm sorry, but it's disgusting, MBD. I know I'm supposed to shake my head and shrug my shoulders and say, oh, yeah, this is the business we're in. You know, this is the business we've chosen. I think we deserve better. Yeah. legal fees fighting for the rest of his contract to be paid out for the terms on which that will be paid out whether there's these phony non-disclosure agreements that get poured into

a severance agreement uh whether there's an agreement about how long there's a non-compete you know uh clause you know where he can't start up his own enterprise or join a competing network. You know, all that thing is that's going to be a major fight. And that's why they're already pre-fighting it in the court of public opinion. Right. Like there are stories now. Vanity Fair had a story basically alleging that, you knowpert murdoch was freaked out by tucker praying or encouraging people to pray um you know so the black eyes are being traded back and forth and uh it's it is a shame um you know i i mean i think the simplest theory of the case is that after the Dominion lawsuit was settled in which Tucker

wasn't playing a leading role, but in which, you know, if he had been outside the company before the settlement, he could have been a pretty devastating witness against figures like Suzanne Scott or, or even other hosts in the company about what they said about Dominion on air or off air. So the Dominion lawsuit was settled. And Rupert Murdoch, I think, has laid down the law in News Corp that they are not going to support Trump going forward. And Tucker Carlson, being the totally incorrigible person I know that he is, will not make promises about his political assessments or aspirations

or his opinions in the future going forward or how he's going to express them. So I think this is just cleaning up. I think that he was fired because they don't want the primetime spot on Fox to be unreliable going into the next election cycle. And so now the fight is on and it's going to be full on warfare. I mean, Tucker's hiring some very serious law people. I think he even hired your lawyer, Megan. Yeah, he did. Brian Friedman, who is the best in the business.

And he's a pit bull. By the way, if you try to sue did. Brian Friedman, who is the best in the business. And he's a pit bull. By the way, if you try to sue me, Brian Friedman will come for you and it will hurt. But he was smart. And so did Don Lemon hire him. So did Chris Harrison when they booted him off The Bachelor. Chris Cuomo hired Brian all after I hired Brian. Gabrielle Union, she had a dispute with NBC all after I hired Brian because Brian knows how to fight dirty. And these are disgusting companies that outwardly, outwardly want you to think that they're the highbrow ones.

They will be above board. But behind the scenes, they're as disgusting and vicious as they come. So you need a pit bull like Brian. He's a Harvard educated man. He's brilliant. But he's not afraid to sling with the best of them. Well, and you kind of know the story, that they're not dealing with you straight about this story. If Tucker used the C-word on an executive, and the story is about whether it came out in Discovery and whether it was redacted, it means they were fine with him using the C-word.

Of course they were. They didn't fire him on the spot months ago when he used it or years ago when he used it. Only, they're only letting this out now that the public relations warfare is in full effect. Exactly right. And what, and who is the Wall Street Journal report

all about? It is about some communications department worker that Tucker didn't like, that he, I believe is the references to her, may have used the C word about. And we know from the Dominion deposition that he did use the C word about Sidney Powell. I am not defending use of the C word, but these are private conversations that Tucker had about these people that were never meant to see the light of day. They only got had to be produced because the lawsuit and he complied with his discovery obligations and turn them over. But that's so what he was fired because of a private thought he had about this woman who is so bad. hire my own outside communications department because I couldn't work with this person anymore. And guess what? Fox paid for her. Fox paid for me to hire one of the top PR agents in Hollywood because I had to go outside of our industry because I couldn't deal with this jackal

for one more day because her job is to undermine the people at Fox News. So this is the same person who he may or may not have said a nasty word about. And if he can't stand her, he's not alone. Find me a person in the industry who has nice things to say about this person. And I'll find you a journalist

who's desperate for her info, who needs to write copy based on what she says. So this is, but you can see what they're doing. It's the absolute politics of destruction. And Noah, the Rolling Stone piece, we've got an oppo file on you. Um, again, comes why?

Because he got fired. He hasn't said anything. Tucker hasn't said anything publicly. He could have been out there. He could have pulled a Don Lemon and gone on with a tweet, you know, after 17 years, look what they did to me. Nothing. So this is all a threat will hurt you and it'll be bad. We own the journal, we own the post, we own Fox News, and we have tons of media sources who are dependent on us, Fox News, for copy. Well, he can't really say anything if he anticipates litigation, which is perhaps what he's anticipating, and he probably should. I certainly can't speak to your experience behind the scenes at Fox with the backbiting that you experienced. I can, perhaps, to some degree at NBC, which I was privy to, to a certain extent. But as you said, this is the business we've chosen.

I can't imagine what it's like, however, to work at an institution that maintains oppo files on you, or where you have to consider that your telephonic communications may be read aloud to you in a deposition at any given moment. That seems like a harrowing experience. But I also don't need to limit my I also don't need to delve into behind the scenes accounts to show and to say that Tucker Carlson, while being an extremely talented broadcaster, had become an extremely irresponsible broadcaster. He had put his company in positions that were unenviable, not just in this case against Dominion. He was in court and Fox was in court defending him as being an unreliable narrator. That was their defense of him even before the 2020 election. Well, that's illegal.

As you well know, that's a legal defense where you try to say this is just an opinion guy spewing opinions. No one would take it as fact, which gets you out of the defamation realm. Yeah, and one of the reasons why he does that is because he is married to a narrative which he advances on a regular basis that the institutions and the powers that be are dedicated to manipulating you, to lying to you, to putting you in a position that advances their interests at the expense of your own.

That is itself a manipulative enterprise. It is a paranoid enterprise. It is one of the reasons why I think the notion here that Tucker Carlson was fired on a whim because of his Christianity has somehow generated purchase among people who are suspending all disbelief. The notion that Fox is hostile to Christianity when it has hosts like Ainsley Earhart and Pete Hagseth leading prayer on air, it justifies belief and it pings the pleasure centers and people who are predisposed to a kind of paranoia that I think is supremely detrimental to the conservative movement. I guarantee you Rupert Murdoch doesn't sit there watching Fox and Friends every morning. He probably

loosely knows who Pete Hegseth is. To suggest he's watching that and seeing it and reacting to it is to misunderstand how Rupert lives his life. Tucker's a different story. Primetime is a different story. It's the most visible in your face. That's the face of the brand. And he would see that. So I don't know what happened on the religion front, whether it mattered or it didn't. I don't know either, but I can say that my own personal experience, I was on the air with him, confronting him with the facts against which he was predisposed to ignore in order to advance the idea that the Trump administration was manipulating the public to go to war. And he didn't like that. So he engaged in ad hominem. So he engaged in the dismissal and distortion of facts that are on record. And while I can't speak to anybody

else's personal experience behind the scenes, you can verify my experience for yourself. It's on YouTube. Noah. Okay. So you're more in the neocon field. And you know, you guys own that on commentary, and Tucker's exactly the opposite of that. So there's an ideological disagreement between you, I get that. That's not why he was fired. Literally, nobody cared about that kind of a disagreement by Tucker. And and the things that you're talking about, like, let's say the January 6 thing for suggesting that it was a false flag operation that happened two years ago, a year, I think it was two years ago, I think it's 2020 March, March, the segment that the segment where he alleged implicitly that an individual was an FBI plant absent. That's Ray Epps. And that's happened well before this past March.

No, well before this past March, the January six false flag, long term, a long form documentary or whatever they were calling it happened two years ago. It was one of the reasons why Shepard Smith threw a fit and why Chris Wallace left, if memories are certainly on the Chris Wallace thing. Trust me, that happened a long time ago. I understand the footage that he received. No, but you're suggesting that's why he was let go, and that's bullshit. The timing doesn't make sense. No, I reject that. It doesn't make sense. The footage that he received from Kevin McCarthy was broadcast in March. Correct. That make sense. The footage that he received from Kevin McCarthy was broadcast in March. Correct. That's different. The documentary that people quit over was two years ago.

If you think that's why they fired him, why did they renew his deal after two years? I mean, MBD, it had to be something else. And I think it very much could have been he got too big. And too big for his britches, too big for Rupert's pleasure. You know, nobody can get bigger than Fox News. That's Rupert's operation. And if you think you're bigger, he'll teach you a lesson the opposite way. Yeah, I think that's part of it.

I mean, listen, it's known in the media that Tucker moved, you know, broadcasts from his home studios in Maine or in Florida. He's not like in the building. He's not kind of in reach or under the thumb. He's kind of tried to establish, as you said, with his own liaison to Fox, Fox's press department, a kind of fiefdom where he gets bothered as little as possible by the top brass

in News Corp and Fox News. And, you know, and he drives conversation apart from the editorial line set at the morning meetings in Fox News, right? Like it used to be that Fox News kind of set the agenda for the day on the right, at least, and maybe even for the country in its morning meetings,

you know, where it kind of covers, these are the stories for the day that are going to be covered on the network. And then the primetime hosts are going to have them on their own. Well, Tucker doesn't do that. I mean, as far as I can tell,

Tucker spends the morning fly fishing and then sits down after texting with friends and reading the news and writes a monologue without consulting anyone. And that monologue will drive the conversation for the next 24 hours sometimes. So yeah, I mean, he was kind of beyond or beyond the reach of the institution itself. And, and like I said, I think, I mean, we saw the way, I think the last time I was on, on your show, Megan, we saw how the New York Post treated Donald Trump's announcement for president, which was like Florida man reapplies for job or whatever. It's like, you know, the line has gone out at News Corp. This is no longer going to be Trump country.

And I think that's something that Tucker Carlson won't agree to, you know, like he's so he just will not be reliable to to do to say something if he doesn't want to say it. The the other narrative emerging now is one I find equally unpersuasive, and that is that this woman who filed a lawsuit against Fox, Abby Grossberg, was instrumental to his termination. Now, this person worked for Tucker for about two minutes. Tucker was never in the building. And as far as I can tell, because she did an in-depth interview with Nicole Wallace on MSNBC yesterday, she doesn't even have any specific allegations about Tucker. Her allegations are at best about the people in his pod, in his news pod at the channel. Tucker didn't work in the Fox News

building. Neither does Hannity, by the way. And in part, I'm sure it's for reasons like this. When you're that big a star, you're that big a target. And people like to throw things at you that are not true as a money grab. They just do. That's not to say every allegation against anybody who's a star is bullshit, but there's a pattern of this kind of thing happening. And I'm sure they just enjoyed being home with their families and not dealing in the middle of this toxic work environment. Trust me, it's delightful to not have to do that. And my friends inside the building still say the same thing. They feel the same as I do. They would would love to not have to show up at 1211 every day. So she now is out there talking about how, you know, it was it was this word in this environment in which she heard the C word regularly that she was shocked,

shocked to show up and see that picture of Nancy Pelosi in the bathing suit with the breasts kind of hanging out, blown up in poster size and the newsroom pod. I mean, who are we kidding? Like seriously, MBD, you're laughing. Who are we kidding? Like that Fox News is going to fire Tucker and his EP because they're offended that he had that. This is a joke. Yeah, I mean, that is you could say that that's that's a little juvenile or a little bit in bad taste but i mean that's literally all it is it's juvenile and in bad taste it's not necessarily the sign of uh of a an environment that is dangerous or hostile I don't think you could ever get that across the line to a jury if you literally like blew up the photo and showed the evidence that a bunch of guys at the conservative

network were kind of laughing at the appearance of Nancy Pelosi. You know, people laughed at the appearance of Bill Clinton in his running shorts. I mean, it's just the nature of politics to kind of laugh at your enemies when they look like they've embarrassed themselves somehow. Um, yeah, I, I, I mean, the, it is interesting to me that the Grossberg, um, uh, interview landed when it, you know, landed when it did. Right. I mean, it's sort of like this lawsuit has been brewing for a little while now, but now it's becoming, you know, a public news story with video footage and interviews precisely at a time when Tucker can't defend himself in public. Yeah, that's that's right so so it does feel um you know obviously i'm not i don't want to prejudice anything before before it comes out like you know and i can fully believe that someone on tucker's staff you know crossed a line that's totally possible yeah um so so i don't want to prejudge it but it does feel like like i said like an ongoing pr war that that that fox knows is

absolutely massive and and important for them too is is going to be keeping him off the air and keeping him um from attacking them from a large platform. Right. So the more that they can have basically the airwaves to themselves to trash him, the better for Fox News. Just to add, Daily Mail's reporting that they talked to Tucker. It sounds like they just found him on his golf cart down in Florida. He said retirement's going great so far. I haven't eaten dinner with my wife on a weeknight in seven years. Pressed on his future, the flamethrowing former host of Tucker Carlson Tonight flashed a broad smile and joked, appetizers plus entree. Smart move, as you point out. No, he's limited in what he can say as as i pointed out yesterday on the show he's not yet actually been fired he's his show's been pulled his access to company email's been pulled um but he is not actually fired so they have to negotiate this and that's why brian freedom is representing him let's just

not move on from the abby grossberg thing um so here's this woman and it because yes msnbc gives her an interview a long interview and she says she's got tapes, some 90 tapes that she, Abby, has not yet been through. But she admits she doesn't think there's anything on there that led to Tucker's termination. That's what she told Nicole Wallace, though she she surmises maybe her lawsuit had something to do with it. She's talking about what it was like to be there. And I have a lot of thoughts on this young woman. But what I was going to say is not only did she get on MSNBC, but she keeps getting referenced in all these newspaper articles about Tucker's firing. He called Sidney Powell the C-word.

He may have called this Fox executive unnamed the C-word. And now this girl comes forward to say hostile environment in his workplace pod. Here's a little bit of this Abby Grossberg on with Nicole Wallace. I was hoping that it would be more professional and what he was portraying on air was just a show. And unfortunately, that wasn't the case. So when do you realize that? Immediately. I show up first day of work and I know that this is a popular one it's been widely publicized there are literally pictures like this big of Nancy Pelosi in a bathing suit in Europe plastered all over there was even one on my computer screen for the temporary computer I had to use and I had

to take it down just to work within a few days there I was called into Justin Wells' office with Alex McCaskill, who was a senior producer as well, and asked if Maria was having an affair with Kevin McCarthy. It was just, I was shocked. I couldn't even believe it. I was floored. Well, that might be relevant information for a company to know whether one of its main stars is actually having an affair with the possible next speaker of the house. So I'm not sure what context that came up. But here's the here's one of the things I wanted to ask you about, Noah. So I don't I have a lot of mixed feelings about Abby Grossberg.

I think she's too thin skinned to work in news. It's it's a rough and tumble business there. We don't speak the Queen's English. And if you can't take some inappropriate barbs here and there, you're not going to last very long in it. However, I'm not going to lie. I was moved by her talking about how she was ruined by her experience in news and at Fox and how it made her wind up hating news. She said she eventually had moral growth and stopped watching news because she became so depressed and disillusioned with it. Then there was a stomach-turning ending where Nicole Wallace asked,

do you watch Us Now? And Abby responded, I do. Okay, that's not the solution to your problems. But it does speak to what I'm trying to get to in this segment, which is news is uniquely disgusting. Thick skin or not, it has this dark, toxic effect on most of us who are in it. And it takes a daily effort to not become dark and toxic yourself. I mean, yeah, I would imagine that Abby's experience is not all that uncommon. Wasn't necessarily my experience, but I did have, you know, some encounters with that

sort of those incentives. However, because I believe her experience is probably rather common, I kind of doubt that she, her that whatever the facts that she can marshal, so far what we have in evidence before us suggests a rather sophomoric culture, which is hardly enough

to justify anything more than a nuisance settlement, is evidence that this was a contributing factor to Tucker Carlson's dismissal. But it may have been a contributing factor. I'm going to let you finish your point, but just to fill in, I found this soundbite.

Wallace asked her, are you aware of anything that came up in the discovery process as it pertains to Tucker, meaning in the Dominion case, that could have led to his firing? Answer, no, not that I'm aware of. Keep going. Yeah, well, I'm not entirely sure

that it's something that's easily dismissed. Just because if the alternative is not fiduciary, but editorial, then the evidentiary burden on us to prove that is far higher. We have plenty of evidence to suggest that fiduciary obligations or costly settlements will cost you the 8 p.m. slot. It happened to the last guy. I mean, that is Hawkins' razor. If this was about the Dominion settlement, why isn't Maria Bartiromo fired? Why isn't Jeanine Pirro fired? That's a good question. Lou Dodds ain't there anymore. And Lou Dodds isn't there anymore because of a costly settlement.

Oh my God, that's not true. That's not true. O'Reilly paid $69 million in sexual harassment settlements and they continued employing him and gave him $25 million a year, Noah. O'Reilly was let go because the press got a hold of the story. That's why they had no choice but to cut ties with him. But that's a fiduciary obligation to shareholders right there.

That's a reputational hit. No, no, they were fine to employ him knowing he'd paid out 70 million bucks to these women who had accused him. Right. And until it became public knowledge, his conduct, which became an unsustainable situation, he was gone because of the bad PR. He wasn't gone because he he got them caught up financially. Even the Andrea Macris thing, who was the first member, we were all super young at Fox. I was brand new there, 2004.

And we were reading the allegations on our computer. It was like, oh my God, he had this affair with a producer. And what did he do to her? And the reports were he had to pay some 10 million bucks out of his personal pocket. Roger knew all about it. Fine. They moved on. That's how it generally was in the news business until the Me Too era. And then we found out post Me Too, O'Reilly had to pay out all these. I'm just saying, to pin it on like, Fox had a problem with all these payouts. They did not have a problem with the payouts or with the fact that somebody kept getting them sued. They had a problem with the public knowing about it.

With it being public, right. As you say, it's becoming public, which is Occam's razor. I mean, in order to argue that something behind the scenes happened, you have to have behind the scenes knowledge. You do. I don't. And what I'm looking at in public and what's submitted in public constitutes a cumulative burden about on this program

that at least justifies skepticism about the value of its longevity. Well, there's that. I mean, that's the real question is, you know, what's the value of its longevity. Well, there's that. I mean, that's the real question is, you know, what's the future of cable news in the wake of not just Tucker's departure, but just the explosion of digital media? I actually looked this up to try to get, hold on a second, I'll find it, to see in the case of Tucker, what were the ratings? What's the ratings hit look like?

And hold on, Debbie, was that in our update today or was that in yesterday's packet all right i'll try to find the page um hold on i'm sure it's brutal so they lost 600 000 i compared last monday when tucker was on because you don't want to use a friday to a monday because fridays are always low uh in prime time so last monday when tucker was on he got 3.2 million. This Monday, the first that he was not on, they had 2.6 million. So they lost 600,000, 600,000 viewers, which is about a 20% drop. Last Monday when Tucker was on, he pulled 445,000 in the key demo, 25 to 54 year olds. This Monday without him, they a 294 which is about a 34 drop so 20 in the overall 34 in the key demo which is one third that's what they actually care about um i don't

know whether it will continue or whether it was momentary you know they had to know that was coming they had to know they were going to take that sort of a hit and prepared for it understood that that's what they were inviting. So you have to assume if they were going to take that kind of a hit, that the costs that they would incur and the benefits that they were anticipating were profoundly mismatched. And the benefits don't make sense if it's purely editorial. Well, and that's the thing is like MBD, we're sitting here speculating about the Wall street journal report, the Rolling Stone threat, the Gabe Sherman reporting on the religion, all of this, because Fox didn't give him a reason

when they said it's done and they didn't give their audience a reason. And what they do instead is they try to leak terrible things about the person in the media. So, oh, we were justified because he's a shit bag, right? it's really what's happening here and to me if i were a fox audience member and i don't really watch any cable news anymore or television news uh i'd be pissed i'd say you you make me fall in love with this guy then you pull him you don't tell him or me why i have no idea why i'm just kind of pissed off that my favorite host is gone and then i see you trying to ruin him in the press without putting your fingerprints on it. But it's clear that it's you.

So I don't think that's going to help Fox News restore trust and ratings at 8 p.m. But they're banking on Fox just being a juggernaut that people kind of only have Fox. If you're a conservative and you want to watch cable news. Yes, you've got Newsmax in some places, OANN, but those have never been truly meaningful competitors. So they're just banking on their dominance. Yeah. And listen, they're already putting out tons of stories that, oh, it's the real estate at Fox that's valuable, not the stars that occupy that real estate.

And there is a little bit of truth to that, right? Like people didn't know Tucker Carlson would take off the way he did, uh, in the 8 PM time slot. But the fact is, I don't, I don't know if I buy that.

It's true. I, I think Fox will have a very hard time reassembling the numbers in the key demographic, uh, after Tucker leaves. Um, and you know, a lot of people like to say that, oh, Tucker Carlson, you know, at most he's talking to 3 million people a night. And, you know, that's less than 1% of the country. That's, you know, less than, you know,

what, it's like 0.5,5 you know who knows what percentage of republican voters that actually i already had to do the math on those percentages on the demo and the overall please don't bring me in on the math equations anymore no that's that's all right but um but it's actually not true that his influence was just for the three million people that watched him live very unlike the days of bill o'reilly um tucker's content traveled across digital media right like it traveled across youtube it traveled across instagram uh and facebook in a way that other fox news content just doesn't um and so he had a much larger influence than the numbers suggested. And I just don't think there's another person who has both his broadcasting

skill and his native intelligence to do that. I mean, Tucker is Tucker's a unique bird in this industry. I mean, I think for one, he doesn't even own a television in his home right like he reads books and so he like necessarily brings a very kind of different sensibility to his broadcasting because of that um because natively and truly he's he is a great writer um right that is really his skill i mean he was he was

uh basically a a superlative prize-winning uh journalist as a as a feature writer for not just the weekly standard but also for esquire magazine and, you know, any magazine he wanted to write for before he kind of took off in his television career. So I think it's going to be very hard for them to recoup that audience. They may, however, they may, however, recoup the money because, and I think this is kind of an understated part of this story and one that I don't think Fox wants to advertise, but the advertising boycott against Tucker Carlson tonight was extremely effective. And

that's why his show was full of MyPillow ads, and Rachel Maddow is over on MSNBC promoting all sorts of insane conspiracy theories about Vladimir Putin, and she's selling Mercedes ads right like and that's that's a huge difference and I don't think Fox wants to tell

the truth which is that if this was a financial decision it was Fox caving into the left I mean like that's that is part of the story here too, that the left is able to exercise this kind of commercial influence over the Fox News brand. That's actually quite interesting. I hadn't I got into the place where I understood how Tucker wasn't making them a ton of money on the ad fees for sure. I mean, on the subscription fee is probably different story because he drives numbers and numbers are what gets DirecTV to pay more to have you as part of their offering. Yeah, but I hadn't quite connect you're right. I mean, it's why why is he not bringing in a lot of ad revenue? It's because of these chicken shit companies that get scared thanks to sleeping giants.

And so in a way it is a cave. It is a cave to the left. If you're going to hold that against the guy, if that's going to be. OK, but if you OK, so we understand that there is a distinct environmental problem that faces Republicans and they are judged by different standards. So you operate on a standard that can navigate that environment. I'm sorry. He was a dishonest interlocutor. He broadcast falsehoods and disreputable content. The notion that he would keep the suggestion of what he was suggesting on January 6 was not prov suggest, I would say, because I pride myself on this, that you can navigate the double standards that are applied to conservatism, get your message out,

and persuade persuadables in ways that don't draw fire just to make yourself a martyr. Well, how have you advanced the conservative movement? I see how you've advanced your own personal prospects. Good for you.

How have you advanced the movement? How have you made my life any better? MBD, do you want to take that one? One thing I will say for Tucker in Tucker's defense is his worldview of suspicion of institutions, which generates the stories about January 6th that Noah mentions, is also the one that generates ahead of everyone else suspicion about Dr. Fauci's advice on masks or whether a willingness to talk about whether vaccines really prevented transmission of COVID-19. And so whether or not vaccine mandates could even be rational, let alone justifiable as a matter of policy or the lab leak theory, right? Like,

I mean, he is, he, he kind of was ahead of almost everyone except maybe national review where Jim Garrity was very early on that as well. And so, yeah, I mean, there is a media, the reason you need a diverse media in a republic like ours is because there are some truths that can be expressed in the new york times and there's some truths that can only be expressed in tabloid media like headless body and topless bar right like that's a real news story and only the new york post can give it justice and it's the same thing with establishment trusting media and, you know, non-establishment media. And I think the really big story, the really big kind of like bow around the Tucker Carlson Fox News story is that fundamentally Tucker Carlson is and wants to be an outsider media figure like an a true like like joe rogan someone who floats theories maybe sometimes justifiably sometimes you know you could say not justifiably but stories that tilt against the establishment against the the major institutions which he views as basically

totally captive and corrupt um and it leads to, I agree with Noah that it can lead to big mistakes. And it can even lead to legal liability when you make those mistakes. But in our particular age, it sometimes leads to gold, which is, and that gold was found during the pandemic when our major public health institutions were lying to us, right? And we're self-interestedly lying to us. And if you begin with a hermeneutic of total suspicion of our institutions, you're going to get to that story first and you're going to reap the most from it. And he did. And that's the other thing. We didn't even touch on the FBI, people mocked the so-called deep state. But then we've had all these revel that. Right. And then you have people like Tucker who weren't afraid to press on these institutions that had been revered in conservative circles saying this is bullshit. It's right before your

very eyes. But he was on the leading edge of it. He wasn't a follower. So you're right. He wasn't 100 percent right on 100 percent of the things. But we needed his boldness as part of the national conversation. And I think Tucker be the first to admit he doesn't always get it right, but he's unlike most of these people, okay with admitting his frailty, his mistakes. And when he gets things wrong under, unlike people like Rachel Maddow at your old network, Noah, you know, I mean, I don't think I have to persuade you. We want to talk about who deals in disinformation, Fox News versus MSNBC, we could spend way more time on the latter. I mean, OK, so Tucker was somewhat controversial and took some rhetorical risks.

What the hell is Joy Reid still doing on the air over there? Truly, like, is there a more racist person on television? How does she have a primetime role there? Yeah, there's a bit of a hostage crisis, I would agree, particularly in the post-Andy Lack days over at MSNBC. And I think Michael's point is very well taken, that a particular worldview that starts from the position of suspicion and hostility, although while eschewing paranoia, can get to these stories faster than those who start from a position of trust and deference. But I disagree strongly with the notion that this outlook that he espoused, which somehow

sometimes led him to conclusions before others did that turned out to be correct, is also matched by a humility that concedes when the facts warrant a re-evaluation of his particular position. I did not see that. In fact, I encountered precisely the opposite and more often than not saw encouragement for individuals to dig in despite contradictory evidence, which is a pathway towards, again, and I just briefly reiterate the point. He didn't bow on your issues, but he, Tucker, unlike most of these people, I just had Glenn Greenwald on here the other day giving me the full list. Verifiable logic and the resistance to verifiable logic in pursuit of a comforting, causating worldview did his audience a disservice. They should be furious with him in the extent to which he exposed himself. So all the three million viewers who watch Tucker are idiots. He are idiots. They've been misled. They've been betrayed. And they're they're just

too dumb to understand that Tucker's a dishonest broker. Precisely the persecution complex that he inculcated in people and persecution complexes are not empowering. They are disempowering. They rob you of agency. So listening all day to people on Fox News, tell them that the war in Ukraine is a good thing and that we really need to win it. And then listening to an hour of Tucker saying it's terrible and what we're doing over there, that it's all they're too stupid. They followed the messianic complex of Tucker Carlson and he's to blame for it. People are smart. Megan, that's what he alleges. That's precisely what he alleges, that you have been cowed and manipulated into into a flawed cul-de-sac of logic that is sapping

America of industry and material. That's his case. He offers another worldview, another view of things like Ukraine, which I realize you have very differing opinions from Tucker on. And he's got the messianic power to completely erase everything else you've heard. Or he's offering an alternative viewpoint like Rod Rehrer. And people are persuaded by it. Some 3 million plus people. In fact, it's actually more than that, because as I learned when I was at Fox, it's not just the 3 million who watch you on Monday. It's a different set that come back on Tuesday. And it's a different set at the 45 mark than it was at the 01 mark. And that's why people like Tucker and Bill are household names. I once asked Roger Ailes that.

How do people know who I am? If I'm getting two and a half million viewers a night or three million in my case, too, how does that happen? Because it's different people every five minutes, every 15 minutes. So they're all dumbasses. You know what? A diversity of opinion on cable news is a good thing. Having Tucker's worldview is a good thing.

I realize you think he was a purveyor of disinformation. I'm not going to say he got everything right all the time. But to say this is a cause for celebration to have his worldview pulled and have him silenced by the Fox News Channel without a meaningful alternative with his POV coming up behind him is nonsensical. It is, which is why I never said anything of the sort. I hardly would celebrate anybody losing their job in broadcasting period. I have never once called for, with the exception of a suspension for Martin Bashir, when he said that he would like it if Sarah Palin, somebody defecated in her mouth. That is when I thought the suspension was warranted. It's the one and only time I'm very much on record. I have very few unexpressed thoughts for the last decade.

Most of everything I think is on writing or in recording. And I've never once called for a firing or a suspension. Having different views is very similar, is very distinct. I didn't suggest you called for it, but you certainly seem supportive of it. And I think my position in MVP is this is bad.

Should be allowed, should be allowed to mislead Take it up with your former network. Take it up with your former network. Enjoy read. Stand by. You got to squeeze in. They are very much my former network.

Well, you worked there happily for a long, long time, Noah. You worked there happily for a long, long time. Did you ever go and say we have purveyors of disinformation all across the primetime, all across the daytime? What are we doing? I was arguing with them on air. I'm very proud of my record. So you did. You went into management and said, I cannot work next to these dishonest people. It's bad for my country. No, I didn't go behind the scenes. I went on camera and argued with them. You did.

Did you ever go on Joy Reid's show and call out her racism? No, the two of us actually never made eye contact. The only time we were ever on the same set with each other was on Morning Joe, and she was not receptive to me on my presence. I got to squeeze in a break because we're going to get cut off.

Stand by. We'll be right back with a fiery National Review Day. Noah and MBD stay with us. We'll get back to our guests in just a couple of minutes. But first, speaking of Joy Reid, just the other night in the wake of Tucker's departure, she actually had the nerve to ask, has there ever been a more racist person in news, in cable primetime news? Preacher, heal thyself. Look at this. But in America, there's a thing about both white vigilantism and white tears, particularly male white tears. Really white tears in general, because that's what carrots are, right?

They carrot out and then as soon as they get caught, it's like, green waterworks. White Americans are never afraid of the cops, even when they're committing insurrection, because in their minds, they own this country. Ron DeSantis has been waging a full-scale war against the Black past. It's illegal to make white people feel uncomfortable in Florida.

You also have the restrictions in schools over what can be taught about race and gender for fear white children might feel bad when they find out that not all white people in history were heroes. This country was built on the idea that white men had a particular kind of freedom and a particular kind of citizenship that only they have. Do any of you guys trust Uncle Clarence? These Republicans are dangerous. They're dangerous to our national security because stoking that kind of soft white nationalism eventually leads to the hardcore stuff. The answer, Joy, is it's you. You are officially the most racist person on television now that

your colleague Tiffany Cross is gone. Work on it. We'll be right back with more of the National Review, guys. So guess what? Anthony Fauci thought it might be a good time to come out and do a huge mea culpa. No, no. He has finally admitted some of the things that people like you guys, Jim Garrity, yours truly have been saying for a long, long time, but without any sort of a mea culpa or apology whatsoever. He gave an interview to David Wallace Wells, who's been on this program several times of the New York Times and was as close to a voice of reason at the New York Times as you were going to get during the COVID pandemic. I mean, he wasn't exactly like Garrity, but he wasn't like a poor of a Mandevelli, their lunatic reporter who kept getting facts wrong every day either. So Fauci sat with him. They describe it as Fauci's most extensive interview yet. They say in this,

Anthony Fauci wrestles with the hard lessons of the pandemic and the decisions that will define his legacy. So here's, let me kick it off with masks. Okay. Fauci admits in this article, hold on. I had it right here and now I'm looking for it. One, two. Shoot. Sorry, guys. My papers are all over the place today. I'm so disorganized.

Let me. He basically admits that paper masks don't work and that the N95s. Well, here it is. I found it. Wallace Wells asks about whether they work. In a study from Bangladesh, in places where where mask use tripled positive test results were reduced by less than 10%. So he says, I'm somebody who doesn't think that masks work, but we have a study like that. So what's the story? And Fauci says, it's a good point in general, but I disagree with your premise a bit from a broad public health standpoint, okay, from a broad public health standpoint,

at the population level, masks work at the margins, maybe 10%. I'm going to tell you what he said next, but can we just, I want to repeat, from a broad public health standpoint, that's what he was supposed to be overseeing at the population level. Again, same masks work at the margins, maybe 10%. Then he goes on to qualify, but for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it's not at the margin. It really does work. Just in case you forgot, and I know neither of you guys did, here's what Fauci was saying. These soundbites are from 2021, 2022.

Over the course of every variant, nothing would have distinguished these positions as, oh, well, that made sense. No, this is what Fauci was saying throughout the course of the pandemic. He and Walensky's in here too. Are cotton and surgical masks effective at preventing the spread of Omicron? When the CDC says they are effective, in fact, they are.

New science that has demonstrated the value of masking three and a half times increased risk of school outbreaks. If you're masking and if you're unmasked in schools. Let me just state for the record that masks are not theater. When everybody finally realized it was important to wear a mask, that influenza was sort of off the map. The evidence is clear. Masks can help prevent the spread of COVID-19 by reducing your chance of infection by more than 80%.

You're wearing a mask to give comfort to others. You're not wearing a mask because of any sign. I totally disagree with you. It's unbelievable. Who would like to start? I'll go. They both are raising their hands. Let's go with Noah Rothman since he had such a contentious exchange before the break.

Let's go to the candy part. We can be friends again. Yes, the guy has been on record. All he did is talk for two and a half years. So it's kind of unsurprising that he has left behind a breadcrumb trail for anybody to follow back to a contradictory statement that he has made. He's made so many. He said in that interview that, you know, for kids, young kids, that a very well-fitting KN95 mask is the sort of thing that provides some protection, but the other stuff really doesn't. And you don't have to have a double, you know, double blind peer reviewed study. You just have to have some passing experience with children to know that they don't wear masks.

That no, there's no such thing as a well-fitting KN95 mask on a toddler because they will rip it off their face. This is just common sense. And it's the sort of thing that he also said later on in one of his many interviews that mask wearing as a convention should be something we should take with us in perpetuity, regardless of the pandemic or the level of transmission of this particular virus, because it's just good public health policy. It's also insane. It's not the sort of thing you can engineer in a population. He seems very frustrated with how the public has perceived him. And he speaks in veiled and masked ways that he insists you interpret literally. So when he says, show me the evidence, as you said in this interview, show me the evidence where I advocate it, where I shut down schools or businesses or factories. I think he literally means show me the document that I signed shutting down schools or boarding up businesses. No such thing exists. All we have are reams of evidence of his support for these policies, up to and including a statement that he gave to reporters in October of 2020, quote, I recommended to the president that we shut the country down, unquote.

Pretty unambiguous, wouldn't you say? Pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty on the nose. MBD, just again, from a broad public health standpoint at a population level, masks work at the margins, maybe 10%. Then he differentiates N95s. So he's clearly talking about the surgical masks, those cotton masks that everybody was in for the vast, vast majority of the pandemic until the very end. I run again, just the first part of that SOT montage we played with Fauci and

Dana Bash, January of 22. We were well into the pandemic. She's asking him about cotton and surgical masks. Are cotton and surgical masks effective at preventing the spread of Omicron? When the CDC says they are effective, in fact, they are. New science that has done. Michael, I can't with this guy. And we know we know he knew better. We know he knew better because at the very beginning of the pandemic, he said that the kind of masks that you buy at a pharmacy made of cloth or Jersey are not effective. We knew they would not be effective. The moment we knew

that COVID-19 was airborne, that it was not about droplets right that when if you if you inhaled a cigarette uh smoke put on the cloth mask that most people wore and exhaled the smoke just flies out just like the virus would that's why it doesn't really work at all to stop the spread of the virus and yet and he wore those jersey masks all the time but there was like noah said there's even a breadcrumb of trails that a breadcrumb trail that he knew the truth because sometimes during the pandemic he would say well masks are a a symbol of the sort of thing we should be doing right so he So he's kind of like, it's in the back of his head that he knows that this is ineffective. And yet it was a policy inflicted on everyone,

including children who didn't spread the virus as efficiently as adults and who didn't suffer from the virus as much as adults or hardly at all, but they suffered from the mask mandates. If you went into any preschool with three and four-year-olds that were in masks for two years, you saw kids drooling into those masks with rashes on their faces. You saw states require kids to wear masks with mask speech therapists during speech therapy, absolutely retarding their vocal

development and their milestone, developmental milestones. This was exactly the policy that the European CDC warned against when it said that you shouldn't be masking children under six or five years old because it can cause distress or developmental delays or other socialization problems. People know that that is true. And yet, and Fauci knew that was true and yet would not contradict. And in fact, reinforce these recommendations for childhood masking for over two years, doing incalculable harm to young people, especially. And that is what is so outrageous about him. And I think every time I think about, I'm going to say a nameless woman who contemplating this during the pandemic and contemplating Fauci's announcements would look at him and think,

think out loud in my presence, why is this man still standing? Where are the men? Like, why hasn't this guy been taken out? This, this guy is a total fraud, knows he's a fraud. And fundamentally he speaks to the American people like we're idiots right like he thinks we are children that just need to be directed and told what to do and can't understand the evidence can't handle being told the actual confidence levels that various health bodies have in this recommendation or that recommendation no everything is portrayed as completely and utterly infallible when it comes from Fauci. I am the science, he said. So, you know, he basically does not respect the fact that the United States is made up of free citizens who are self-governing.

And he is there supposed to be their servant. He is a public servant, an employee. And yet he acts instead like a dictator. But now he resents that he has this reputation. And I'm sorry, he says, I didn't close down the schools. prepared a boilerplate message to parents about masks or Zoom school or closures or quarantine policies saying, we are following recommendations laid out by county and state health departments, in turn following recommendations from the CDC. So he knows that the public health bureaucracy in Washington was in effect setting policy for much of the country, for much of the pandemic. He was their guy. Here's that portion of it. Fauci on schools. Wallace Wallace says, but when people say no, he says, OK, sorry, this is all Fauci.

This is how she says when people say Fauci shut down the economy, it wasn't Fauci. The CDC was the organization that made those recommendations. I happen to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations, but show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public health recommendation that echoed the CDC's recommendation and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make their decisions one way or the other. Okay. Before we, before we go leave masks though, Noah, for two years, for two years, not only did I have to wear a mask and so many people listening to this had to wear a mask and you guys had to wear a mask when we got on an airplane or any public transportation or for some period of time outdoors. Outdoors, we had to like when during the when the pandemic first broke out, we were in Montana to take my kids horseback riding, which was the only thing that was open.

So we just wanted to get them out for one day. We had to wear masks outside in Montana, a red state. Anyway, that's a level of insanity. And for two years thereafter, my kids, your kids, MBD's kids, Garrity, they had to go to school every day with those damn garments wrapped around their faces, no matter whether they were hacking up a lung, whether they had snot running down their noses, whatever it was, they had to put them on and they had to keep those masks on their face all day long, impairing language learning and so on. And as bad as I felt for my own children, remember this video? This video sums out how bad it was for the real littles who in places like New York had to mask up when they were three years old, two years old in a day. This video, it stuck out for me from the moment that

we played it and it's his fault. Here it is. right there. Yay, Mason! Yay! Keep it on, Mason. Look, we're going to keep it right here. I see you. Keep your mask on. Put your mask back on. What are you looking at? Keep it on your face. You got to keep it on your face. So they go outside. There you go. Nice and... Sweet baby.

Sweet baby. Sweet baby. And he's obviously only, what, maybe a year old. New York daycare, September 2021. Absolutely disgusting. And now this guy has a nerve to turn around and say, you know, at the margins, maybe 10%. It's heart-rending. And to compartmentalize that, you require the sort of technocratic lack of humanity that loves the public but hates people. And that's the sort of mentality that he embodied the notion that he

would suggest that he never criticized policymakers. All the man did was criticize policymakers when their policies went against his preferences. Republican ledled Florida, he was unsparing. Democrat-led Michigan, he was unsparing, saying these places were tempting fate and maybe we'll have to punish you with something akin to lockdown 2.0 for failing to abide by the recommendations of your superiors and your betters in the public health bureaucracy. He has evinced so much courage of his own conviction that he doesn't seem to recognize that it's distasteful when he admits, as he has admitted, that he has lied about the efficacy of max masking as he understood it in order to prevent people from buying masks when the public health app, when, when PP, uh, public protection mechanisms were necessary for, uh, public health officials. He has very little regard for you or your intelligence and profound respect for his

own. And it's extremely off-putting the notion here that he's he's he's been done a raw deal by posterity is profoundly myopic he has nobody to blame for himself and he's so averse to that sort of introspection that i don't know if he'll ever encounter it he's delusional he's delusional go ahead mb in some ways he's totally craven as well i mean when Go ahead, MBD. attending a college football game, he knows that the social expectation for him is to condemn them and to say that it's dangerous and that there's going to be a massive outbreak in Texas because people went to opening day to see the Texas Rangers play outside on a 90 degree day when we have every reason to think that COVID is not actually transmitting well because it's hot, it's sunny, and people are outdoors. And it's also not even in season. We knew it was a seasonal

disease at that point. And that the surges come all at once based on factors that have nothing to do with just individual human behavior, but with how long it's been since the last variant blew through the region. He knew all this, and yet he would go on TV and he would say the politically appointed thing for him to say. And he's doing the same thing now in some ways, because the spell has been broken. More and more people woke up, wised up at the end of the pandemic, and now he's backtracking. He is a worm, the his department along with the NIH controls basically the,

the scientific budget for almost every scientist working in the country. Yeah. That's right. They have to kiss his ring and do whatever he says that we've seen that time and time again. He controls their salaries. Let me, let me turn us to origins, lab leak versus natural,

because this is another thing he lies about. He lies. I mean, there's no other way of putting it. He lied to Rand Paul under oath in Congress about whether they were doing gain-of-function research, among other things. And he's lied to us, including in this interview.

Wells-Wells asked him about origins. Fauci says, I feel that until you have definitive proof of one or the other, meaning lab leak or natural, it is essential to have an open mind. Okay, great. Work on that. And I have been this way from the very beginning, as if we haven't all seen those emails between Fauci and Collins, who was running, he was his boss, the NIH at the time, saying, we got to squash this lab leak theory right away. Very dangerous, has to be dismissed as fringe, as conspiracy. And Fauci

worked to do that by getting all those scientists, those virologists to write that piece in Science or Nature magazine saying, lab leak, no, it couldn't have been, definitely natural origins. Two days after they all came to him and said, holy shit, this thing looks manmade, looks engineered. After browbeating by Fauci, they changed their tune. Okay. This is the guy. You have to maintain an open mind. And I've been this way from the very beginning. Then he goes on to say, if it's a natural occurrence, for goodness sake, natural, right? Meaning comes from animals. Natural occurrences occur all the time. We should have been doing something about that. If it's a lab leak, then we really should have been doing something about that. If it's a lab

leak, then we really should have been much, much more attentive to protocols and training and restrictions. And he goes on to add this. First of all, all of the intelligence groups agree that this was not an engineered virus. And if it's not an engineered virus, what actually leaked from the lab? If it wasn't an engineered virus, somebody went out into the field, got infected, came back to the lab, and then spread it out to other people. That ain't a lab leak, strictly speaking. That's a natural occurrence. Do you see the intellectual dishonesty here? First of all, it is not true that all of the intelligence groups agree that this was not an engineered virus. They agree it wasn't made as a biological weapon. That's the only thing that the lab that the experts have said. They don't think this was made intentionally by the

Chinese to hurt people. But the FBI, the Department of Energy and others are growing more and more confident that it did develop as a result of a lab intentionality to create gain of function, to do gain of function research that then led to the release of the virus in the lab, in the lab. So he, Noah, this theory that, oh, you know, the bat lady just took a stroll through a cave, caught this new coronavirus from a bat, went back into the lab where they were manipulating coronaviruses and boom, it originated. That's, He's so dishonest. And it would be one thing to just entertain the prospect of ambiguity or what we know and what we don't know. And as you say, open up or keep an open mind. He was not keeping an open mind, nor was he being honest, as the documents that you just read aloud demonstrate. If he were to

be honest and say, well, honestly, we just simply can't afford to alienate Beijing, a hostile and paranoid state, because we require their cooperation at this particular moment, that would have been distasteful. But it would have been at least honest. It would have been a rationale you can wrap your head around. What he said instead was mockery, mockery of the notion that anybody would entertain the idea that this state, which has regular occurring lab leaks of other pathogens, this is not something that's rare. And it's certainly a record that Fauci would be aware of. He said, I think it is, quote, quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill

themselves. He's making fun of you. He's calling you an idiot. And he's so much smarter than that. You should be too too you should be more like him is the unspoken unstated rationale there uh it is profoundly insulting and it's also deleterious to his industry public health needs public trust it does not function in the absence of public trust and he's done a profound disservice to both this country in its efforts to prevent future pandemics and the industry of which he is a part and professes so much faith and fealty to. Can I just be the raging populist for a second and point they've shipped environmentally hazardous production out of the United States and into China. Right. Where the regulations don't exist. So they're still doing the polluting, but they're not doing it here. So they get a big award. And that's, you know, that's kind of greenwashing of their reputation. What Fauci and others did by funding EcoHealth Alliance,

the cutout run by Peter Daszak, was a kind of hazard washing of gain-of-function research. They know that this was dangerous. They know it wasn't allowed to be done in the United States. They were paying attention to the regulations. They're paying attention to the very lack of them in China, which is why it was outsourced to China. So he's participating in a very characteristic corruption of our elite in this age of outsourcing the dirty work to China in order to profit back at home and then disclaiming all of the disaster that comes comes with it so I find it I find it really horrifying I mean he's he is like a figure out of a Dickens novel condemning our age it is really gross that he is that I mean you know he's

the kind of guy that inspired someone like me to say like, clap him in irons. Like, what are we doing? That we allow ourselves to be ruled by a person like this actually condemns us as a nation. It's really gross. And he has said, he gave an interview not long ago where he said, I can't think of anything I would do over. I don't think, I can't think of anything I would do differently if I had the chance to do it over.

And here he says to The Times, I sleep great at night. He asked him, Walswell said, if it were me and I were doing gain of function research in that lab and then this happened and, you know, almost 10 million people died. I think I might have trouble sleeping at night. I sleep fine. Sleep like a baby. Good for you. How about little Mason? How is he sleeping that night that he spent in hysterics because of your useless mask mandate or the rest of us? And then we haven't even touched on the vaccines. He makes admissions about those in here. You know, he's had no problem with the

lockdowns, which have led to such so many deaths of despair. I sleep great. This guy should be run out of the public square. There are literally instead superhero dolls of him in my old neighborhood on the Upper West Side, right next to the superhero AOCs, Michelle Obamas and Elizabeth Warren. This is why Trump's going to have it so tough in front of a Manhattan jury. They actually have superhero dolls of those people. Okay, we have to laugh or we're going to cry. Speaking of politics, let's turn to presidential politics. Joe Biden announced in the same kind of video that I would have shot of my little strudwick running around my backyard. And it's basically somebody took out an iPhone camera and had him say, I'm running for reelection with a couple of dark MAGA shots on Jan 6th. No fanfare. I don't know that he's capable of fanfare. It was all but next to the basement.

And now we're getting the absurd pieces about, you know what? He's, he's old, but like a lot of, a lot of people are old. A lot of people are old and a lot, a lot of presidents were ill. You know, FDR, he was in a wheelchair. JFK, he had a bad back. Um, I I'll go through it with you, but before I get to the written version, let me give you some of the visual version and the auditorial version of people defending just how fit Biden is, Sat.3. But how many 30-year-olds could travel to Poland, get on the train? He is younger than I am, so i don't know what the problem is but i can tell you having traveled with him a fair amount um sometimes he's hard to keep up with come work out with me in the morning oh my gosh he's the president of the united states you know he i can't even keep up

with him what about the respect for elders thing that we talk about? And he has a steady hand when you look at what's out there right now with Donald Trump. I think his schedule reflects an active person mentally and physically. I don't know what more they're asking for. OK, so you get a flavor, but I've got to get into this Daily Beast report today. OK, Daily Beast. David Rothkopf writes, Joe Biden's old. Get over it.

I'm going to give you some highlights. Voters need to weigh this issue for themselves. Will these limitations negatively affect his ability to be president? Objectively, Joe Biden was not negatively impacted by his age during his term of office thus far. He's accomplished more in his first couple of years in office than any other president since Lyndon B. Johnson. I know Noah's about to have a heart attack after what I'm about to read. His handling of difficult foreign policy challenges puts him in the first tier of U.S. presidents on that front. First tier, I say, Noah.

Did he stumble over his words occasionally? Yes. But he used to do that when he was much younger. George W. Bush did it when he was president and he was 54 when he took office. All people do it. The reality is Joe Biden's age has been an asset so far. Noah, thoughts on his wonderful foreign policy challenges that he handled with aplomb thanks to his age? Well, I suppose in Joe Biden's defense, his age is not why he's made horrible foreign policy decisions all his life. He's really reliable on that front. Engineering the worst humiliation for the United States abroad since the fall of Saigon is quite the feat. And you've got to give him a little bit of credit, at least for that. I read this piece in The New York Times the other day in which the reporter went to the old folks home and surveyed octogenarians and nonogenarians who all vote Democratic.

And they were just fine with Joe Biden's age. So to give you some idea of the level of comfort that his base has with his age, which, by the way, according to polls, according to 51% of Democrats in the NBC News poll over the weekend, they're not happy with him running again. They are not satisfied with it. They have to retroactively condition you into believing that the Democratic base is just peachy with his age. The fact of the matter is they're not. They're willing to tell anybody willing to listen that the Democratic base is just peachy with his age. The fact of the matter is they're not. They're willing to tell anybody willing to listen that they're not. And with

regard to Joe Biden's supposed accomplishments, that announcement video should send shivers down your spine. His accomplishments were absent from that video. He talked in a lot of platitudes. He discussed freedom and he really brazenly mischaracterized Republican legislative efforts. But what was striking to me about that video was mostly visuals. What did we see? We saw a couple of minutes of Joe Biden. We saw more Kamala Harris than we've seen in public in a year. We saw Barack Obama.

We saw the late John Lewis. We saw Reverend Al Sharpton. Who are they trying to turn out? This is a base motivating election. They they trying to turn out? This is a base-motivating election. They're trying to turn out the minority vote. It is not a referendum on this president's accomplishments because that doesn't animate the Democratic base. What animates the Democratic base is the notion of Donald Trump, the specter of Donald Trump, and the idea that the transitive property of Donald Trump in January 6th applies to all other Republicans from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Ron DeSantis. That's their strategy. It is laid bare. And Democrats are attempting

to whitewash this guy's record. And the notion that Joe Biden himself is that voters will render an affirmative verdict on Joe Biden himself rather than a negative one on his opponents is betrayed by how this campaign that they're displaying fealty to is operating. Yeah, right. The ad started, not ad, but it kind of was, announced it started by talking about these MAGA, the ultra MAGA Republicans. He didn't show Trump, but he's clearly just- Banning books. They're banning books, Megan. Oh my God. We actually went- Where? Twitter. You know what the books are? The books that get pulled from the school libraries,

because this is a cause near and dear to my own heart as well. Literally, the books that I've seen pulled show pedophilia. An adult male, a cartoon figure of an adult male, getting a blowjob from an underage boy. Yes, I want that book banned. And yes, I will defend the ban of that book in a school library. But it's not banned. It's simply off the curriculum. This is a category distinction that they declined to make because they want you to be mad. dangers associated with his smoking. Ronald Reagan was weakened by the assassination attempt on him. Richard Nixon drank to excess at times and took narcotics to sleep, a bad combination. Lyndon

Johnson, chain smoker, had his first heart attack when he was 47, went on to have five such cardiac incidents. JFK, whose assassination proved that age and actuarial tables are not always useful ways to predict the longevity of presidents. Oh, my God. We're going. We're going there. Also concealed his own serious illness. A sickly child was initially denied entry into the military because of his back problems. Back surgeries plagued him later in life while he was still in the Senate. Goes on from there. Franklin D. Roosevelt paralysis from polio when he was only 39 years old. Biden, unlike Roosevelt or Eisenhower or Kennedy or Trump, has not hidden his health from the public. He hasn't.

He has regularly been pronounced fit throughout his term of office. This is so dishonest. But we all know what was missing from his last presidential health assessment. Any cognitive assessment whatsoever, which is what people are worried about. Yeah. And it's also clear that he has had good days and bad days. And it's the sort of thing you see in your own, you know, your parents or your grandparents as they decline. Right. Like, you know, I and it's a dangerous quality in a president right like i mean if you have bad days where you know a little bit of dementia is sneaking into your thinking i mean

like my own grandmother i remember felt uh fell and was was picked up by an aid worker in in 1997 was asked who's the president of the united States? And she answered confidently, Richard Nixon. And then thought about it again and said, Gerald Ford. And that is something that happens when you are in your 80s and time is ticking away at you and you're uncertain about your mental state. And it's not something you want in a president who has to deal with the fact that the largest nuclear power on earth is currently in a hot war in which we are supplying the other side. Like you can't have him being confused about what time and space he's really in. And I'm afraid we're going to see a serious incident at some point in the next two years. I mean, it's, it's almost very likely that we're going to see it. And the, and Noah's right. I mean, we basically pull Americans and as a whole,

do you want Joe Biden to run again for 2024? And roughly 70% of the country says no. And yet he's, he is likely to be the nominee. The DNC is clearing the way, trying to make sure that no challengers come, come up and damage him by saying, we're not going to have any debates. We already know that. We don't care what RFK Jr. is polling.

We don't care about the commercials that Gavin Newsom is running in certain parts of the country. We're not having debates. We're going to protect this man. And they're protecting him in part because he's running, they anticipate that Donald Trump will be the other candidate. Biden beat him once. And they think the key to beating Donald Trump is running, you know, a man who I've called the last bag of bones labeled FDR coalition, right? I mean, this is a guy who can keep that party together. Midwestern Catholics, suburban moms, Northeastern liberals, and African Americans, a coalition that could come rapidly apart as our politics continue to realign and change. And, you know, we'll see how long they can keep it up. But I mean, it was a close run thing the first

time. I don't know how they're going to do it a second time. You say the DNC is now given the order, you know, we got to get behind him. And by DNC, I assume that's some sort of euphemism for the ladies of The View, because this is the messaging on their program today. Democrats, I don't know why you're talking about who's the person to do the job is doing the job. Yeah. You get behind him and we won't have a problem. The minute you start making inroads

on maybe this person, maybe this person, we're done for. So make a decision, make a decision. Also, he needs another four years to finish the job. You can't fight fascism in four years only. You need eight years for that.

What? Yes, you can. How long before we're two? We literally fought fascism in three years. It's amazing. It's so fun. I see why that show actually is still on the air. It's fun. It's a comedy. If you take it in as a comedy, it gets much better. That's absurdist. It would serve Democratic partisans to explore perhaps why there is so

much dissatisfaction with Joe Biden's performance among Democrats. I was just surveying the results of this Harvard poll of young voters, 18-25, who are basket cases. They are beset by anxiety, which is understandable given the messages that they're bombarded with, which are anxiety-inducing. If you took it all to heart, it would be irrational not to be apprehensive. But they're very down on Joe Biden's performance, even though they have a lot of faith in their own economic prospects, not just in the future, but today. They're not down on their futures.

They're down on him. They don't think he's governed well. They don't think he's advanced or stewarded their interests. And the views form, as we just heard it, the framing of the issue is not an affirmative statement of support for Joe Biden. It is that Joe Biden just represents he is a formless, nameless, shapeless bulwark against Republicans. I'm sorry, that's begrudging support. And begrudging support is soft support. Democrats should be worried about that. Hmm. They do have Kamala Harris to make themselves feel better. You've got to see, you know, every once in a while she comes out with one of these just totally absurd soundbites that says absolutely nothing, but says it over and over again in the

same way. I'm going to show it to you right after this quick, quick break. Do not go away. So they have Kamala Harris to fall back on, guys fear not here she was at howard university all right now she's actually giving a speech believe it or not on reproductive rights listen so i think it's very important as you have heard from so many incredible leaders for us at every moment in time and certainly this one to see the moment in time in which we exist in our present and to be able to contextualize it to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future. Oh, my God.

Noah, you're good with the words. This is your thing, your fancy words. You should, you must be inspired by that. I mean, there's a thing that good litigators can do where, as you know, Megan, where they can say absolutely nothing, but say it in a way that makes you think something very profound was related. She's the opposite. She says a lot of nothing, and you just glaze over with the understanding that what you're hearing is pablum. And that was pablum. This is one of the reasons why she was such an ineffective legislator, why she would she would make accusations and insinuations when she was in the Senate that would go absolutely nowhere, would be dazzled Democrats.

Like the notion here that, you know, Brett Kavanaugh took this crazy meeting with Trump's lawyers, whatever happened to that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing ever happened to that. It let you down. She's a giant letdown. Very consistent in her part, though. There's nothing of substance there, MBD. I think we need to hear it again. Let's hear it again,

just to enjoy it one more time. So I think it's very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist in our present and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future. Oh, my God. It doesn't improve. I gave it another shot.

What was the quote from Billy Madison? At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you ever even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul. That is astonishing and utterly vacuous. And it actually, it does speak, it does speak to actually something bigger that is happening, right? There's the lack of Joeiden's accomplishments as president there's the lack of kamala harris's coherence as a speaker or human being uh a rational creature uh and it's part of the reason why the the

announcement of joe biden's re-election was the way it was it it was just we are a stand-in for liberal values that's's it, right? I'm not saying we've accomplished much, but we're for abortion. We're against the kind of cultural stuff that the Republicans are doing in schools and on trans issues. We're for diversity. And it's basically a giant bet, and it actually is going to be a gut check for the right going into 2024 democrats are betting that 2024 is a liberal values voters election and that this is fundamentally a center-left country in the way that 20 years ago all the pundits said this uh in 20 2004 this was a values voters election and america is a center-right country.

That's their bet. It is a huge bet. A lot follows from it. And it's a gut check for Republicans is can you offer something, a governing vision that is more compelling than just we're standing by center-left liberal values. We're standing by the Fauci statues, the Rochelle Walensky commemorative name plaques, and the other tchotchkes that you get on the Upper West Side. Can you offer something more compelling than that? We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. That's right. I've got to ask you about, in particular, Noah, given the new Puritans about Steven Spielberg, uh, he gave, he made a comment about regretting his woke-ification of ET. And it was a good comment. So I didn't even know he did this, but apparently he was at the time 100. And apparently he took ET.

I don't know what it was the original, like it was late seventies, early eighties. I can't remember the original pub date of 82 and said, I never should have edited it because he edited out guns several years back. The kids were holding, or these adults were coming after kids. You can see the on the screen here on YouTube, we've got the 2002 version and the 1982 version and the adults had guns in the actual version and he replaced them with walkie talkies in 20 years later. And he said, no film should be revised based on the lenses we now use, either voluntarily or because you're being forced.

He said, I never should have messed with the archives of my own work, and I don't recommend that anyone else do that. I really regret having that out there. So this seems to me like a big plus to come from a true Hollywood legend in the wake of what's happening with books in particular and films too. Peter Pan, that just got whitewashed. Now we have the lost girls and boys instead of boys and so on. Yeah, very good for him, albeit belatedly and far too late to avoid the damage. And this sort of dovetails with the Fauci segment insofar as that edit sprung from a perception of the public that's contemptuous of them, that they perceive you to be so easily manipulated by your external stimuli that if you see a gun, you'll go out there and you'll shoot people. distracts from our higher spiritual goals, that art generally should reflect the here and now, should impart our values, should be of instrumental utility. Because something that just

entertains for the sake of entertainment distracts you from the work of our time, the great work of our time in the progressive imagination, it is the advancement of the progressive project. In the puritanical mind, it was the development of a new Zion on earth. But there are similar projects insofar as they resent you, resent your outlook, resent your tastes, and don't think very highly of you, such to the point that they would deny you something as trite as just entertainment. And this clip is so benign, right? M.E.D., it's not like a grown-up trying to hurt a child with a gun. People are flying overhead, they're extraterrestrials, and there's one guy with a long gun, and they change into a walkie-talkie. I mean, talk about a low bar for, oh, God, can't have that out there.

Right. Well, the bar is ever lowered right so when the um the sensitivity readers are rewriting Roald Dahl's books right they're taking out lines like oh she was fat right that's it like the description of a character she was fat because somehow if you say a fictional character is fat you're going to inspire fat phobia and the ignorant mass hordes of uh third graders in kansas are going to begin a giant purge of the overweight or you know like i don't know what they're thinking but you know it's exactly what what uh noah said it is a kind of conspiracy theory about uh americans that we are like these suggestible morons on the edge of terrible violence and if if you just say the wrong thing uh we're going to we're going to tip over into you know a pogrom against whoever it is against uh kids who are chasing aliens against the

fat um you know against uh you know uh whoever you know james bond was shooting i mean the sensitivity readers are now rewriting the bond books um everything's too toxic it it is it is a suggestion that like we ourselves i mean i mean there's also like a make work aspect to this right like in in george orwell's 1984 the main character winston smith his employment is in rewriting news articles to fit with the the political line of the day and he talks about like he literally talks about like the spirit of the work and like getting caught up in it and feeling a kind of esprit de corps when they had to do a big project,

you know, when the war changes from East Asia to Eurasia and they have to rewrite basically all the news. It predicted everything. Sorry, MBD, we're running out of time, but it's always worth a 1984 reference. 1984 was the predictor of all. MBD, Noah, thank you both so much for coming on. Check out National Review and the Editors Podcast if you want more of these guys. Love the convo. And thank all of you for your feedback and your interest this week.

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