The Megyn Kelly Show - Free Speech Suppression, and a Culture Leading to Mass Shootings, with Keith Rabois and John Kass | Ep. 351

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Keith Rabois, entrepreneur, investor, and partner at Founders Fund, to talk about Twitter's suppression of free speech, what Elon Musk's management might be like, China's data collection through TikTok, the national security implications of TikTok, coming out the closet as a conservative, the decline of Silicon Valley, California as a "third world country" now and Gov. Gavin Newsom's political ambitions, Trump vs. DeSantis, whether Biden is too old, why Biden's policies have led to higher gas prices, making the jump from law into tech entrepreneurship, and more. Then, John Kass of JohnKassNews.com joins the show to talk about the July 4th shooting in Illinois, coverage of gun crime in Highland Park vs. gun crime in Chicago, what's in our culture that's leading to more mass shootings, the value of shame to inspire better behavior, the need for families to do more, 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. The Biden administration continues trying to spin bad economic news, while the shadow 2024 presidential campaign may already be underway. I don't know if you're going to like your choices. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who basically just survived a recall, now thinks he should be president. This is like de Blasio, the loser mayor of New York, who had like a 2% approval rating, thinking he could run for president. Anyway, now Governor Newsom is running ads against Ron DeSantis

in Florida over the weekend with the whole goal of getting people like me to talk about it. So I guess it's a win for him. But we do need to discuss whether this guy has a real political future because he was wanting to be president in his cradle. That's not that's never the kind of person you want, though. They're all egomaniacs to get into that that position. I mean, it's just the truth. Very few after George Washington didn't die for the job or die wanting it. OK, meantime, tech censorship continues as our pal Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson remain locked out of their Twitter accounts. They're not technically banned, but they cannot go back on Twitter until they delete their accounts

referring to the woman formerly known as Ellen Page, who now says she's a man and goes by Elliot Page as Ellen Page. That's what they did. OK, and so now they're locked out of their Twitter accounts. Jordan Peterson suggested

that she had she Ellen Page had her breasts removed by a criminal doctor and says he would sooner die rather than take down that tweet. All right. Elon Musk has just weighed in. And Elon Musk is a man our guest today knows pretty well. This our guest today is familiar with all of this. Actually, he's an investor. He's an entrepreneur and technology exec named Keith Raboy. He was a member of the so-called PayPal mafia.

That's where Elon started, too, and went on to serve in influential roles at LinkedIn, Square, Open Door, to name just a few. He's got a great eye for what's going to succeed when it comes to venture capital. He's a general partner at leading venture capitalist firm Founders Fund. He lived in San Francisco for many, many years, but not too long ago, he made the move, like so many, to Florida and in particular to Miami. On the politics of the tech industry and the pitfalls of tech censorship, there is so much to get to with Keith. Keith, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be with you. So first of all, I know Miami is better than San Francisco, but can you even say that now in July? In July, those of us who grew

up on the East Coast taking our cheaper than normal trips to Disney during July and August know the pain. So what are your feelings about Florida in the summer? Florida is amazing in the summer. I think this is one of those myths. It's like misinformation. It's like 85 degrees, but there's a natural breeze. Everybody wears relaxing clothes. It's much better than DC where I worked as a lawyer, New York where I grew up, where you sit in this middle, this concrete jungle and you just get baked in heat. So I think there's this like stereotypes. If the story is about Florida, like there's this conspiracy where it's not really true. We keep waiting. All my friends who moved here in the last two years keep waiting for

this unbearable Florida summer and we just enjoy it. It's coming. It's coming. I've spent enough time down there in the summer to know, but it's nice to hear that you're having a positive experience there because we may all need to move to Florida soon. The entire country may need to drive to Florida. I think it's a good idea. Yeah. I think everybody should escape Alcatraz and move to Florida. So take us back because as we pointed out in the intro, things did not begin for you in Miami, Florida. And so where were you raised? Where'd you grow up? I grew up in New Jersey and then I actually escaped New Jersey to go to Stanford for college and then spent time in law school on the East Coast, clerked on the Fifth Circuit, and then wound up basically

starting my professional career in both D.C. and New York. And then in 2000, at the height of the internet bubble, I moved to the Bay Area and started this journey with a bunch of misfits now known as Pimpel Blasio. Now, how did you, I'm in New Jersey now, we spent our summers on Jersey Shore. So how did you, forgive me, but like white kid from New Jersey, get into Stanford and Harvard Law? You're too polite to say you went to Harvard Law, but you did. Great question.

It probably wasn't quite as politically correct back then in terms of admissions. I don't know if I can get a minute today. But obviously, I optimized my resume pretty substantially, my GPA, all my activities in high school. I probably ran like seven different clubs and focused on getting perfect scores on all the standardized tests, which I guess are bad these days. That's right. You did the wrong thing by today's standards. Your number one thing today would be you're too pale and you have the wrong anatomy.

Yeah, but being Jewish doesn't count. And being gay, I guess, counts to some people, but not to other people. That's right. Oh, no, being Jewish definitely doesn't. I mean, if anything, that would be a strike against you. Same as being Asian. I mean, this is like our crazy admission standards today are so weird and wrong and discriminatory and in a new direction. OK, so so you you go, you get this white shoe education, amazing education. And then then you move out to Silicon Valley after

after you did a stint at Sullivan and Cromwell, great, great firm in Washington, and decided like most of us, because I did my stint at Jones Day, and said, well, this sucks. This is no way to go through life. But then unlike me, who went to the lowly profession of journalism,

you were really smart and decided to get into tech. Yeah, I got somewhat lucky. I had some friends from college at Stanford who had jumped into tech much earlier than me. And they kept lobbying me every year in the mid to late 90s to leave law and join this tech crusade.

They actually used the term, it was a gold rush, and they were right historically without even benefits of hindsight. And every year they would lobby me to come back and visit and try to convince me to drop the practice of law. Actually, I was a pretty proficient lawyer. For the most part, I enjoyed practicing law for the three and a half years I did after clerking. It took a long time. It took four years for them to persuade me.

But then in February of 2000, I just quit cold turkey and jumped completely into the practice of business and internet technologies. And they were right, actually. The timing was awful. It was miserable. It was very high risk, even if I didn't really understand the risk at the time. But it ultimately worked out. So forgive the indelicate question, but how did you make all your money? Was it PayPal?

What was the moment where you were like, oh, wow, I crossed a new Rubicon? Good question, because fortunately, I just kept doing more stuff. So PayPal, we both went public at one of the most difficult times in economic history in the United States. We went public in February 2002, which is a pretty difficult accomplishment, and then subsequently sold the company after Republic Company to eBay, which gave us the license to do more things. My friends, Peter, Teal, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Jeremy Stapleman, Chad Hurley, et cetera, all went on and created new companies. And so the next thing I did is I joined LinkedIn. But as I joined LinkedIn,

I became an angel investor. So I found a couple really interesting companies that seemed pretty crazy and radical, founded my friends of mine. Some of them did really well, YouTube being the first one, Palantir being another one. And that basically just kept compounding and gave me the license to invest in more companies, joined another company called Square before we launched. That obviously has gone well, founded a company that went public. So I never really broke down like money by the company. It just kept trying to do more ambitious things. So are you always, you know, what's the opposite of risk averse? It's not really risky risk taker. It's just more like open to risk because I would think if I made a big paycheck on the first sale, let's say the PayPal sale, I think I'd be tempted to take my ball and go home and just get my Jersey Beach shore house and kind of take it easy. But

it does take guts to keep reinvesting and keep taking risks. Yeah. Well, I mean, watch Elon on the global stage right now. He keeps doubling and tripling down probably in the most approximate manner ever. But I think some people who do have success kind of retire, kind of take things easy and other people become more ambitious and start to predict in advance. But for me, it's always like the license to do more stuff, to be more creative and take on more challenges. I actually believe that most people are either decaying or growing. And so if you stop growing, you're decaying by definition. Yes, I think that's a good point. So I was reading about your philosophy and who you invest in as a

venture capitalist. And this is the name of the game for so many people out there trying to get somebody like you to invest in their company so that they can be an entrepreneur and they can try to make their dream come true. And when I heard your description of what you look for, I couldn't help but think of Adam Newman because I just watched WeWork, you know, that documentary. It's not really a documentary. It's like a docudrama. It was actually quite good with Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto. And he seems exactly like the kind of guy you would back. I mean, forgive me for paraphrasing,

but it was something like, you know, you're looking for somebody who's a little, I don't know if it was unstable, but my paraphrase is big dreams, huge ambition, slightly unstable, and good idea. I don't know if I'd use the word unstable, but maybe synonymous or euphemistically. I basically believe that only

disruptive people create disruptive companies, that effectively you have to see things and believe things that the rest of the world doesn't really appreciate. And that tends to correlate with a personality characteristic. You have to be immune from other people's criticism for a while. You have to prove the world, you have to prove to the world that you're right. And normal conformist people tend not to be very good at that. And they actually tend to be terrified of it. And per your question about my own career, I used to be very risk averse. I was optimizing my whole resume to go to law school, to get into Harvard Law School

since I was probably in sixth grade. And so everything I did was calculated and very traditional. And then I don't know what actually snapped in my brain, but fundamentally I became very risk averse to risk seeking. And it really actually surprised some of my friends who I grew up with in college. I had one in a very pithy,

succinct way said to me, wait, Keith, you used to be the most conservative guy I know. And now you're the most risk, you know, like risk seeking guy. Like what happened? And so you do have to have a sea change.

But the people who succeed in tech tend to have that natural DNA. So that is one of the characteristics, one of the more important characteristics that I'm filtering people for. It's funny because just last week I had my friend Nancy Armstrong on. She's married to Tim Armstrong, who's early at Google and ran at AOL. And she's a filmmaker. She just made a film about very famous people and not so famous people with ADHD. And she called it the disruptors because a lot of these people go on to have very, very successful careers as entrepreneurs for some of

the reasons that you're stating. It may not make it so easy for them to get straight A's in school, but once they get free of the constraints of the eight to four school day and get out there and sort of mature a little bit into these energetic brains, they can, there's no limit to what they can do. Yeah. I'll reframe that. So euphemistically to call ADD intellectually curious. Um, but, uh, fundamentally the best, uh, certainly venture capitalists are intellectually curious. If you're ADD, it's a very, it's a feature, not a bug to be a VC because every meeting is different. Every company is different. Every stage is different. And you're going hour by hour switching context all the time. And so to be excellent as a VC, I think you have to actually be proficient at that and embrace it versus being challenged by the constant context switching.

As an entrepreneur, it's a little bit more complicated. Focus is pretty critical to being able to isolate a variable and master it and craft a solution can take hours of concentrated effort to take days, weeks of tenacious effort. So I don't know if pure ADHD works as a founder, but it definitely works as a VC. Wait a minute. And so just for those of us who aren't in your world, because my understanding is the VC is the person who funds the company. And then, of course, the CEO runs the company. But does the VC stay involved on the management level and is an advisor and is somebody who would be going focus, traditionally, a venture capitalist would be involved as a consigliere or a board member throughout the process of building a company from beginning to IPO. That has changed. There's now a more diverse set of styles of venture capital.

But my style is absolutely that way. When I invest in a company, I stay involved with the founder, meet with the founder weekly, biweekly, or monthly, and, you know, constantly giving feedback advice, sort of serving as that proverbial consigliere. So speaking of Elon, news today on just, we haven't, we don't have an update on whether he's going to close this Twitter deal, but we do have him weighing in on the censorship, as I mentioned in the intro of Jordan Peterson and then our friend Dave Rubin, who's got a very, very large following as well. Jordan's tweet, typical of Jordan Peterson, was provocative. And it's considered it's called, quote, dead naming somebody when you when they've sort of switched genders and you refer to them by their old name and um so that's what he did and he called the doctor who did the surgery on ellen page now elliot page criminal he can't get on twitter dave retweeted it to sort of expose the

controversy and then also use the name ellen page Now he's banned from Twitter. And so somebody asked Elon, are you going to be this censorious when you take over Twitter? And Elon responded saying, yeah, he said, meaning no, I'm not going to be. He said they're going way too far in squashing dissenting opinions, which I agree with wholeheartedly.

But do we think Elon really is going to be in a position to impose this new reform on Twitter? Because there's so much speculation about whether this deal will ever close? Well, I won't apply it on whether the deal actually closes. But insofar as it does close, I think Elon means what he says. He's going to implement what he says, or he'll find people who will implement it and replace these people on Twitter. So it's a great thing for society. We need a free speech platform that's global, and Twitter is it. There are alternatives, but they're not as good and not as important.

And so improving society really requires a vigorous free speech debate. The way you get better and smarter and faster at things is by debating them. This is the whole history of the world, history of science. And suppressing ideas is just a disastrous policy. And Twitter's been suppressing ideas from the origins of COVID. It's been suppressing ideas on anything critical to CCP. Twitter just is a disaster. And that employee base needs to be completely reoriented. But Elon has the ability, has the skill, has the credibility to pull that off. Now, why won't you all pine on whether it's going to close? Because two of your other pals from the All In podcast, Dave Sachs was on along with Jason Calacanis.

And they both had a lot of thoughts and shared them all. Well, my opinion is it probably will close. But I think it's a financially imprudent investment at this point. The market is just correcting a massive amount since that deal was negotiated. And so if the goal is to save the planet, closing the deal makes a lot of sense for Elon.

If the goal is to convert that into a lot of money, I'm not sure it makes that much sense. Do you think that they can renegotiate? There's probably some clever ways to do it, but it's like how much pain and friction, brain damage, you know, sort of you want to deal with. Elon's got a lot of other things on his plate.

He was running a few companies left and right. So there's a point in time where the friction and effort isn't worth the incremental $10 billion. Yeah, right. Exactly. Well, let's hope his goal is to save the planet because those of us who are living on it need a few more saviors.

He's created another planetary option for you. I'm afraid of getting on a 747. I'm certainly not getting on Elon's rocket ship. I'm going to be like, who is the one? It'll be more reliable than Boeing 787 or whatever that was. Probably so. I think it was Pete Davidson. Pete to be like, who was the one? It'll be more reliable than Boeing 787 or whatever that was.

Probably so. I think it was Pete Davidson. Pete Davidson was like, I'm actually busy, so I can't accept your offer of a ride. I'm like, this is my kind of guy. Like, you're too busy to accept the ride to outer space. I can't even remember if it was Bezos or Elon, but big, big move. Can we talk, you mentioned the Chinese, and that's a big story in the news right now. TikTok, which has been sketchy all along. I mean, the kids love it.

I believe me, I have an 11 year old daughter who would love to get TikTok, but I won't let her. But she sees it on her friend's phones. Yeah. And it's been in the news. Now, we all kind of knew that the Chinese, it's their app, that they were using it for something, you know, some sort of data gathering. But they denied it on the record over and over and over. And they sort of even in testimony before Congress, their U.S. reps have said, no, no, no, we're not calling U.S. that they are mining our data. They are sharing it with their Chinese counterparts. And now just today, it's the I want to get my committee correct. I think it's Senate Intelligence Committee. Yeah, they're jointly urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the app over the fact that it is letting Chinese employees access the data of Americans. So can I ask you that, first of all, I don't actually understand what data they can get. You know, if I were to let my daughter download TikTok, which I won't, she doesn't even have a phone. But if I were to allow all that, what could they find out about her? Well, it's unclear. and that's part of the problem. It also depends upon whether she uses an iPhone or Android device. So an iPhone is more

restrictive and probably more secure than maybe any Android phone. But fundamentally, they could certainly track her geo, track potentially contacts. But there are more nefarious things that one can probably do, and they probably have done. So I wouldn't take at a superficial level, just the standard data that people are inputting into TikTok, like what are they clicking on? There are ways to extract more private data. And I am sure the Chinese have at least thought about it and selectively done this. But the thing that's crazy in this whole TikTok debate is none of this should have been a surprise. Chinese law explicitly requires TikTok to collect this data and provide it to the Communist Party of China. And so there's no possibility of running a company in China without doing this. It's illegal.

And so it just absolutely mystifies me. You can read a great article by my husband in foreign policy where two years ago, three years ago, he explained this for everybody that there's no possibility of legally running a company in China that has to ban TikTok. And then he went out. He actually literally went out because of people complaining of whining. And it just really cost, you know, America, a lot of national security. Now we are in significant jeopardy because Trump was a complete whip. I mean, I, he was like standing up to TikTok in a way that he was standing up verbally. It was easy to say, Oh, TikTok took him up. And then as soon as the administration, the people in the administration who realized the national security implications wanted to ban TikTok, which is not that radical an idea, by the way. India has banned TikTok.

Nothing has happened to India. India's still got a very vibrant entrepreneurial culture. India set the precedent. India has banned, actually, 67 or so Chinese apps because they understand what the Chinese government is up to. The American people are being misled by representatives of the Chinese government. There's a lot of people on the CCP's payroll in the United States. And there are various forces in the Trump's administration that pushed back pretty aggressively with the initial instinct, which was absolutely to ban this.

The national security agencies collectively all realized, uniformly believed that TikTok needed to be banned. That's so scary. I mean, I'm trying to remember, I thought it was Trump tried to make them sell to Warner or Oracle. It was like a compromise solution. You know, it was like, we're not gonna ban them.

We'll just like make them sort you know, sort of sell, but that, that can, that basically requires you to partition data, which may or may not be possible. B, it's kind of a hack move by the government to sort of force the sale, especially choosing the buyer.

So that was, that was kind of like, unfortunately, somewhat forbertist, you know, kind of European, almost like a European policy. So not really a fan of that.

What about Biden? Is he doing anything to combat TikTok? Well, obviously not. He's not doing anything to combat the CCP. He wants to lower tariffs, which is the stupidest idea ever. I mean, the administration is torn, honestly. In the Biden world,

there are people who understand the threat posed by the CCP in China. And there's people who are the apologists for the last 40 years of history, which is basically allowing China to get stronger and the United States to get weaker. by the CCP in China. And there's people who are the apologists for the last 40 years of history, which is basically allowing China to get stronger and the United States to get weaker. Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, it was interesting.

Just today, they were doing a report on how the Hollywood movie industry has seen a great bounce back this past month, you know, thanks to Maverick. And what's the other movie with Gru? Minions. Minions, hugely successful. Not so much the Buzz Lightyear one that that has some vocification problems and also just maybe brand fatigue. But in any event, that's good news because the Chinese had been sort of taking over as the audience for these movies. And one of the things that Tom Cruise and the makers of Maverick did was refuse to take the knee

in response to Chinese demands about the flags represented on Maverick's jacket and so on. So it's good to see, you know, Americans buying this product again and sort of reclaiming the market. And it would be great to see TikTok lose market entirely or at least in part. But we don't seem to have a sound policy

with respect to the Chinese right now. And it does worry me as on the heels of Fourth of July celebrating our country and its greatness and its unique place in the world. Fifty years from now, will we have it? And in the one country you got to look at as a potential threat is China. And what are we doing? What's our long term plan? Does anybody talk about it? Does anybody in this administration even think about it? No, they don't really don't. But after the midterms, you'll see the Congress take leadership in investigating ties of American businesses to

China, how we're funding basically advantages, military and other dual use technologies for China. Possibly you'll see changes in legislation, which the president can try to veto. But fundamentally, I think it's gonna be very difficult for American businesses to do business in China after the midterms. Great. So, all right, let's talk about you a little bit more, because you mentioned that you have a husband, you're gay and you're conservative and you were living in San Francisco, which is it must have been very confusing to you and very confusing. In other places in the world, you would have been in a minority for different reasons. Out there, did you have to closet your Republicanism, your conservatism? success, I got more comfortable. I built a platform, mostly on Twitter. And so I felt like I would regret living at some point if I wasn't using my platform to proselytize for ideas I believed in. So I started to be more comfortable circulating ideas, not using my own. Usually, it's recirculating other people's ideas about how to make it a little better. It felt like,

as I have now 300,000 followers on Twitter, that if I can make a difference, you know, and change the views of 10 or 20 people, it's worth doing. Mm-hmm. And so you knew Peter, Peter Thiel, from PayPal, right? I knew Peter from the first day

of my freshman year of college, which I won't date myself. That's a while ago. Okay, so he's also out in both ways, right? And a conservative, too. So, like,'s also out in both ways, right? And a conservative too. So what was that like? Did you have sort of a camaraderie about this is this town, these people, tech? Because they, of course, surprise themselves on being so open and accepting.

But I've experienced firsthand that the line is drawn at conservatism. Well, Peter moved and escaped the Bay Area many years before me. I think it was 2015 or so when he basically said the Bay Area is like totally screwed and dysfunctional and ideologically bankrupt.

And so he moved. I actually felt that at the time he moved that professionally it would not be smart and savvy for either him or me to move.

I felt like there was too many network effects and technology and that the Bay Area was still the focal point. That probably was true up to at least 2017. I think after 2017, it might not have been true and it might have been safe for me to move professionally. But now there's nothing left in the Bay Area that's interesting in technology. The interesting people have left. The Bay Area looks more like the future of Detroit. I've told this story before, but I was at,

Sheryl Sandberg threw me a book party when I published my book in 2016. It was like November, October, what I can't remember, fall of 2016. And like every other person there pulled me aside to say, we can't stand Peter Thiel.

We threw him out of Silicon Valley. We completely banned him from all the parties, from all the invites. And it was it was very funny to me because, you know, half the room thought that I hated conservatives and I hated Trump because I'd asked him a tough debate question. And he came after me for several months. The other half watched my show every night and realized, you know, I just like to throw punches at everybody, especially if you're running for office. And I had nothing against him. And I definitely understood the world from a more center right perspective. So you'd get like half the room being like, we hate Peter Thiel and we hate Donald Trump. And I get the other half of the room being like, my God, it's hell living here.

I'm the only conservative at the end of the party. I was like, this is a confusing, confused place. Definitely a confused place. As you know, the world's seen now. There's so much evidence about the dysfunction of the Bay Area. It's like impossible to defend. But in 2015 and 16, people were still in this kind of altered state, you know, altered reality field. That's okay. Peter doesn't really like to attend parties,

so I'm sure he wasn't offended. He's like, cries himself to sleep on his bed full of money. Okay. We have much more to go over with Keith right over this quick break. So much to get to. Don't miss a moment. Not that often you get to talk to a guy with this much success in his personal and professional history. We'll continue it in two minutes. So, Keith, you did leave California.

It got bad enough. I mean, we've been covering the troubles there a lot. We had your your friends from all in on the podcast to talk about the recall effort of Chesa Boudin, somebody I've been covering for a long time after I interviewed his essentially adoptive father, Bill Ayers, in what remains my very favorite interview I've ever done. And that includes Vladimir Putin. And you can go down the list. OK, so San Francisco did the right thing and they got rid of this non-prosecutor, Chesa Boudin. And you did the right thing by just getting out of a town that wasn't aligned with you and wasn't heading anyplace good. And you ultimately came to think that was true professionally, too, because, you know, those are two different things, potentially. And so what do you make of your newfound state, your current governor, Ron DeSantis, and the latest attack on Florida and DeSantis from your old governor, Gavin Newsom, who clearly is trying to generate some buzz around himself for 2024 by saying California is the state of freedom and Florida is not. Florida is wonderful. Super happy to be in paradise in Miami every day. Couldn't be more thrilled with the decision.

Everybody we've moved here, helped move professionally, socially, from California or New York to Miami is extremely happy. Almost every single person that I know that's moved here has now purchased a home. Some of them started initially and rented, but they've all bought,

which means they're happy, thrilled, want to build a family here. Gavin's pretty desperate. As you might know, 200,000 people, a net 200,000 people left California for Florida last year. California's lost population for the first time since 1850s, losing congressional seats for the first time ever in history. Running a TV commercial is not going to help with that. It's a third world country being run by a third world dictator with third world policies. You can't gloss over that on TV. Nobody's going to move from Florida to California. All they're going to do is call up somebody they know professionally or socially and ask them what's it like to live in California. And they're

going to hear tales of, you know, unabated drug use, property crime, homelessness, impossibility of building commercial residential real estate, defunding police, like everything that's stupid, removing standardized tests, not teaching algebra. Every stupid policy in the world is being implemented in California. Mm hmm. I know he's he raises the issue of, you know, the alleged don't say gay bill down in Florida. This is what his side is all up in arms about, which is a lie of a name. It says you can't get into sexual identity or gender identity at a very young age in curriculum. That's what the bill said. The law, the law says in curriculum, all this like you cannot have the picture of your same sex spouse on your desk is a lie. And anybody who's implementing the policy that way ought to be held to account because

it's not consistent with the words of the law, which say in curriculum, you can't have that stuff. But meanwhile, California, we've done stories on how you can leave California during the school day to go get cross gender hormones on school time, and they will not tell your parents. They don't think the parents, they think the parents rights end at the schoolhouse door. Abigail Schreier has done a great job of documenting this. If that's their idea of freedom, they're going to lose a lot more votes than they're going to gain with this kind of campaign. Well, they're going to lose a lot more votes because people want their schools to be open.

California shut down all the schools, so nobody learned anything. Kids sacrificed two years of their education, all future, and that compounds. Unlike in other states, Miami, for example, people were back in school very fast. Kids learned, they're not falling behind. Sweden, they never shut down the classes and the kids in Sweden haven't shown any decay due to COVID. So California basically sentenced the whole generation of Californians to a life of misery, really, because if you fall two years behind in education, you're never going to catch up. And parents are just furious. And so you saw this in Virginia. The Virginia elections were all about people revolting against the

powers of the teacher union, conspiring with politicians to shut down schools. And so Gavin is the most guilty person on the planet in enabling this. Yeah. I mean, he was mayor of San Francisco. That's the town that not only recalled Chesa Boudin, but recalled three of their school board members for this nonsense, for worrying about renaming the Abraham Lincoln School instead of opening the damn classroom so children could learn. But meanwhile, I know you do like DeSantis. You are, as we discussed, a conservative. So what do you make of the we if we believe coming battle between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis for the next GOP nomination? Well, as you know, I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump.

I was, I think, the original funder for the Never Trump campaign. So I grew up in New Jersey, New York in the 80s, and Trump was this talk show host. And so I knew he was he was kind of sociopathic and very unreliable. And it was pretty obvious, like the personality traits, they don't change like after 50, 60 years, or in his case, 70.

And so what we saw as president was completely predictable. In fact, I had this tweet on July 4th, I believe, 2016. So before he was elected, that he was going to get impeached by the House of Representatives before he was elected, that he was going to get impeached by the House of Representatives. It was so obvious that that was going to happen. I actually thought, you know,

most of the stuff that happened was completely inevitable. But even you couldn't have foreseen two impeachments. I mean, that was a lot. Yeah, I only got one, sorry. But in any event, so I've never been a fan of his. I do think he actually had some policies

that were quite good, like moving the embassy in Israel was actually a wonderful policy. I believe strongly in a lot of his Supreme Court and judicial nominees. So I think there's a lot of things he did well. I think actually, unfortunately, he lowered corporate tax rates, which is probably a mistake at the expense of lowering individual tax rates. So I think that was a disaster politically and subsequently. So, you know, I think there's things that could be improved. I think that was a disaster politically and subsequently. So, you know, I think there's things that can be improved. I think Santos is a great politician. He's 43 years old, which I think America needs a younger politician, period, besides party. We just have too many old people running the country. You know, in technology, I'm getting old and towards the end of my career, and I would be extremely young by the standards of politics.

I have a classmate from law school who's in the U.S. Senate. And he mentioned, you know, as I say, I'm getting old in technology. He's in the bottom 20 percent in terms of age, you know, in the U.S. Senate. But that's absurd. We need people who have fresh leadership, fresh ideas, you know, more in tune with where the future is going. And so someone in their 40s would be much more exciting, I think, for either party to nominate. Do you think, what do you think, I mean, I realize none of us knows, but what do you think? Do you think Biden will just declare that he's a one-term president or get a primary challenger? I know that,

I mean, obviously, but Newsom is thinking about in launching this preemptive ad. He almost surely will get a primary challenger with his current approval rates. I mean, if you think about what drives through history, what drives a challenger to an incumbent president is really bad approval rates or the equivalent. And so this is why Jimmy Carter got challenged by Ted Kennedy, et cetera. This is almost inevitable. He stays at 36, 37, 38 percent approval. If he gets washed out in the midterms, that will just accelerate the pressure. And yeah, yesterday Monmouth had him for a moment. This is a record low at 36 percent approval.

A vast majority of Americans do not want him to run again. Many feel it is because he is too old. I mean, he would be as David Axelrod said, obviously not a fan of any incoming potential Republican, said he'll be closer to 90 than he will to 80 at the end of a second potential term. And that's just like, let's just be honest. No one near 90 should be president of the United States. It's absurd. It's not ageist. It's realist. My parents are exactly the same age as Biden, I believe. And, you know, I wouldn't want them to run for president. It's just not age is not your friend at a certain point. You saw the decay, you can even tell the decay with Reagan, who was a lot younger than Biden, actually.

But towards the second term, there was definitely, and partly it's not his fault he got shot. You know, it obviously has, you know, issues on your body and, you know, ages you prematurely. But fundamentally, I think you need people with vigor, intellectually, stamina, et cetera, to dispatch maybe the most difficult job in the world. Yeah. Yeah. Sixty four percent. I think it was Harvard Harris polls. I think that Biden is too old to run for president again. And, you know, there are signs of that every day, whether you want to see them is up to you. If the Democrats hold the Senate, he might be able to run again. If the Democrats get crushed in the House, which they will, and lose the Senate, I think there'll be a lot of pressure in the primary against him. They could lose the Senate. I mean, people think on the left that Dobbs, the decision that overruled, that reversed Roe and Casey is going to

be their, you know, sort of secret hat trick that's going to help them, you know, pull off some amazing victory come the midterms and maybe even 2024. It's not. I mean, even now in the latest poll that we saw, it said, let's see, it was a was it a Fox News? It was a mom of all that showed 33 percent by far say inflation is their biggest concern. We're not surprised to see that. The second on the list was gas prices. So it's kind of a sister at 15 percent. Nine percent say the economy is the biggest issue facing their family. Only five percent said abortion. Normally, that's around one percent. So there's a bit of an uptick within days of Dobbs. But you're telling me those numbers are going to be significant come November? I doubt it. No, the five percent includes abortion on both sides, actually, truthfully. So, you know, the 5%

isn't just pro-choice people. So I think you're probably talking at 2% or 3%. But more importantly, if you look at the polls about the abortion topic, roughly 80% of Americans believe that abortion on demand is a bad idea. And that's basically what Roe is kind of creating a regime of. And now we're going to have a regime that looks more like Western Europe. Yeah, exactly. And abortion is not going away in America. I mean, they really like you see the headlines. There was one yesterday or the day before about like 10 year old girl can't get abortion in her state after being raped or the subject of incest. And that's that's horrifying. Everything about that story is horrifying.

But it's a lie that this girl cannot get an abortion. Abortion is legal in in dozens and dozens of states in the union. It is not outlawed in all the states. In fact, so far, it's only about 13 and counting. It'll go up,

according to the state's plans, within the first 30 days after Dobbs to maybe potentially 22 could be as many as half. But it's that's that's as high as it's going to get, at least for the foreseeable future. And abortion is not illegal in America, and it is accessible.

It may not be as easy, but it's accessible to that girl and to others. Yeah, I think it'll be relatively easy up to the first 15 weeks. I just think that there's, I saw a poll this morning, with reasonably good methodology, that roughly 80% of Americans believe

that abortions should be curtailed at 15 weeks, which is probably where the American people are going to step. Yeah, I mean, it's still like, look, if you're at all pro-life and you look at what does a 15-year-old baby look like in my uterus, you'd be horrified. 15-week baby, you'd be horrified because they're extremely functional and very lifelike. And it's not just even arguably a clump of cells, but it is the European way. It's what Florida went with, you know, just sort of as a it's a more purple state than someplace like Mississippi. In any event, let me switch gears because we mentioned gas prices and that's on the minds of so many Americans right now coming off of the July 4th holiday. Everybody drives. You see it at

the pump. You feel it. It's painful. And Joe Biden seems to think that this is the this is the fault of the the gas station owners. He came out with a tweet saying basically lower your lower your prices consistent with your costs and tried to shame them. And in an not unprecedented but unusual move, Jeff Bezos, who has been behind the president, came out and basically suggested this is either willful misleading or ignorance. The gas station owners are like Ma and Paz, who get a license to use the brand Sunoco, hang out a number, have to keep their number at what everybody else on that same corner has it at, and really make their money on the sodas and the gum and the candy we buy. And we go inside of the little kiosk and not they don't have some huge margin that they're exploiting, you know, at our expense.

So what did you make of the president's prescription and Jeff Bezos taking a shot at him? This obviously is correct. I mean, anybody who's ever taken the first three pages of Econ 1 knows that that's correct. You know, maybe we should regulate the soda costs and the, you know, donut costs and stuff, because that's driving 70% of healthcare costs in the United States. It'd be better, actually,

if Biden tweeted about that than, you know, the fragmented industry of gasoline stations, which is super fragmented. But, like, literally, it's impossible to take Econ 1 and get through, like, the first midterm and believe anything associated with the president's tweet.

Hmm. I mean, to me, there's an added insult to it because it's like, all right, you always want to be punching up, right? Like once you punch up, if you want to take somebody on maybe the oil companies or the Saudis, but let's not take Ma and Pa on the street corner trying to keep their heads above water with this market and make them the villains. Yeah, well, he's tried putting together anybody. None of them are working. He's right on targets. Basically, blaming, and it's his own fault. We were an energy independent country under Donald Trump, literally energy independent. And we had less than $2 prices of gasoline. So when you're energy independent, it actually

doesn't even matter what the Saudis do and what the Russians do. But because of the stupid policies of shutting down certain things that were producing oil, we now are deprivative from the rest of the world's pricing. And that is going to affect the American people. This is like Jimmy Carter all over again. Every single policy is like replicating every dumb policy that Jimmy Carter had and trying it again, hoping it works better. Where do you think we're going? Because there were headlines this morning about, are we headed for layoffs? And I thought to myself, layoffs? I mean,

the big headline is people can't get employees, right? They did the great resignation and then they decided their couch was really comfy and the government checks kept coming and they just decided, I'm in my happy place, I'm good. And all these small business owners I know are like at their wits ends saying, I can't find good people to work for me. So I see a headline of our layoffs coming. But I know like the JP Morgans of the world, they laid people off. Some of the bigger corporations are laying people off. We are headed for a recession. That seems obvious.

So what do you make on financial prescription? And for people out there worried about my housing value is going to crash and I could lose my job, even though we have 3.4% unemployment or whatever it is, what do you think is going to happen? I think it's a kind of a tell-two cities. The large companies are typically bloated, and there's more attention to their cash flow, their ability to mint money at the end of the day.

And so there are going to be layoffs. And there's going to be higher increases at a minimum, which basically means it's harder to get a job in the first place. On the other hand, small businesses and those serving retail are struggling to find employees constantly. And they're raising the cost, their wages, which in some ways is a good thing, but also means you're going to have more inflation because baked into that cost of that product and service is actually the cost of the employees.

Inflation is going to go up. It's going to eat away everybody's paycheck and become the kind of vicious cycle. So all the data is sort of true. You're going to read these big announcements from large Fortune 500 companies about suppressing hiring. And then you're going to see interviews in the media with small business owners saying, I can't fill, I can't open, you know, because I don't have enough people on my ships. So this can be both true at the same time. Yeah. And of course, like the low man on the totem pole feels it acutely. All right. In the time we have left, there's something I really want to ask you, because I have three children. I have an intern sitting here with me who's more conservative leaning, who came from a very liberal school and had very limited options when she looked at her college options. You know, like she didn't really want to pay all this money, her and her family,

she and her family for a liberal indoctrination. But she's brilliant. And I think about it, too. And I wonder how a kid from New Jersey could go to the two institutions you did and be and call yourself conservative. Like, were you conservative then? Weren't they able to beat it out of you? And it didn't happen late in life. How did it happen? They tried pretty. Yeah. To give them credit, they tried pretty hard. But, you know, what actually happened was my parents were liberal, traditional liberal Democrats growing up. And I was surrounded by, you know, these like kind of anti-Nixon, anti-war, anti-nixon public interest types you know growing up and when reagan got elected in 1980 against the wishes of my parents and all their friends and then suddenly the world got better

it sort of exposed the lie and the myth behind all their views to me it was like oh my god these people have been wrong about everything and then so suddenly it's just snapped and then i got more and more comfortable with conservative views and just watching them being implemented. And then I was old enough to start reading on my own, develop my own sort of philosophy, and then apply that and brought that with me. It did get tested at both Stanford and Harvard, without a doubt. I had to do more work probably on my own initiative, which actually probably turned into having better skills and better ability to read and write and to find data and research because I didn't want to sacrifice my beliefs. But the base reading material wasn't quite as neutral.

So I had to do more work to be able to craft my arguments and achieve the grades I wanted to. Hmm. And so I did have to be fair. I had a few professors that if you just looked at their bios or read the read in the public domain about them, you would think they were very biased. But in fact, they were intellectually quite rigorous and disciplined. So a lot of it, I actually did have a lot of wonderful professors at both Stanford and Harvard, despite the atmosphere being really bad. It's funny because at the time I was raised a Democrat, know my parents were democrats but though they were not political you know

they weren't like pushing democrat ideas they just voted democrat because they said we're not rich and that the republicans are for the rich and so I remember getting exposed to these ideas and being like okay I'll take this I'll take that but law school was very I mean like I think back to my con law and now I look at the way you know

that you look at the alito opinion in Dobbs and I can just tell you exactly what my con law professor would have I look at the way, you know, you look at the Alito opinion in Dobbs and I can just tell you exactly what my con law professor would have been saying about all he would have been horrified by what Alito wrote, by what Dobbs wrote.

You know, the indoctrination sometimes seeps in there if you're not on guard. I had a better, I honestly had a better experience. I had like Kathleen Sullivan and Larry Tribe

and also Charles Fried as con law professors. And all of them would admit that Roe v. Wade is intellectually bankrupt. They liked the result, two of the three, liked the result, arguably even the third liked the result, but they absolutely understood

the intellectual weakness of the argument behind the opinion. You can even read, you know, Professor Tribe's old treatises actually have this explicitly stated. He was cited in Dobbs. Yep. So all this stuff is, you know, professional tribes, old treatises actually have this explicitly stated. He was cited in Dobbs. Yep. So all of,

all this stuff is, you know, they were very, um, upfront, um, in exposing the weakness and why, like it actually was a,

you know, a really good place to get an education. Um, I give them all credit for having, you know, an open mind in terms of how they were teaching a class. Now outside of the class, you know,

disagree with probably all their views, um, you know, most things mind in terms of how they're teaching a class. Now, outside of the class, you know, disagree with probably all their views on, you know, most things. But fundamentally, the reason why my brain is still pretty sharp in con law is because they trained it pretty well. Oh, that's amazing. And good to hear. There is hope. Listen, Keith, thank you so much. Please come back. What a pleasure talking to you, Keith Reboy. Pleasure to be with you. I'll come back anytime. Awesome. All right. coming up in just a bit, John Cass is back with us. Have you read his latest piece on what happened in Highland Park

and on the mayor and this country and our culture? Well, you're going to hear him deliver it essentially live. Don't miss the one and only and the unmissable John Cass. I read a column this morning. John Cass is such a beautiful writer. He's such a beautiful writer. He has a way of saying the things and writing the things that you know

you're feeling, but you haven't been able to articulate them. And today's piece was about the Highland Park shooting. It was incredible. He wrote exactly, exactly what I've been feeling, what so many of us have been. And we had to have him on today to talk about it. Just by way of background, John was a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune for 38 years. Then they tried to basically make his life a living hell there because they went woke and he wanted to be honest about what Chicago was going through. And now he is an independent journalist and posts his columns on his website. John Cass spelled K.A.S-S, news.com. John Kass news.com.

And even after you listen to him today, you should go there and read this piece. You won't be sorry. John, so good to have you here. You are so kind. I'm not. I'm just honest. I'm just absolutely honest, especially about you. And so are you.

And this piece, they're all good, John, but every once in a while you get one that's just like, you know, if there were an honest committee that hands out the awards, you'd be getting tons of them for these pieces. And this is what you said about Highland Park. What happened yesterday was right on. Let me let me tell people the first line. Immediately, the mass shooting at the Independence Day Parade at Highland Park was weaponized for its political value, even before the grief-stricken families of the victims could begin to process their loss. 100%. It is disgusting how quickly we go to that place, is it not? Yeah, it is disgusting. And at times like that,

social media becomes a sewer full of barking dogs. And everyone brought their agenda, and they were trying to twist it, weaponize the suffering of the dead and turned it into their weapons to beat up their enemies. And the suspect's family is saying, oh, we didn't know anything about this. How could this happen? We had no idea until it turns out that this young man had exhibited warning signs, dangerous and violent depictions on video. And it's all just a mess and it's all horrible. And meanwhile, we're all focused on Highland Park as we should be

because of the news value and the tragedy. And at the same time, just a few miles to the south in Chicago, people are being slaughtered every day. And no big fanfare there. Mass shootings every day, 60 shot in Chicago over the weekend. Police officers ambushed at least 10 dead. Well, that reminded me when you saw 60 shot 10 dead in Chicago over the weekend. Do you remember when Joy Reid came out and objected to all the news coverage of the war

in Ukraine saying the only reason we're doing that is because it involves white people. And it was like, OK, so I haven't gone back and looked at Joy Reid's programs because I need to keep my food inside of the stomach over the past couple of couple of nights. But I guarantee you she's not talking about the murder rate in Chicago. Right. I bet I bet she covered this, the mass shooting at Highland Park, and she didn't mention the shooting deaths in Chicago. Now, why is that? because she hates black people? She doesn't care about black people? She's given up on the crime stats there. She's interested in mass shooters,

but she's not interested in doing anything about the Chicago crime rate. If you talk about Chicago crime rate, you have to talk about the victims who mostly are overwhelmingly black and brown people poor people being shot down but also the alleged uh criminals who are charged with these crimes are mostly black and brown as well and no one wants to talk about it because that whole you know lefty nonsense and intersectionality and they'd much rather talk about what the male like yeah like this kid that was

fed this stuff all his life until he finally cracked well that's what I want to talk to you about like that that's where you go in this column that's so worthwhile, all of it is. But you're talking about our culture and how America is losing faith. And I'm just going to read part of it and then I'll let you take it from there. You write, I thought I could hear the devil laughing. Are there any serious doubts that as a culture, we've turned our faces from God? We infantilize our young people. We demand the right to kill the innocent unborn. We raise our young in a culture of death.

There are elementary school teachers who are regularly depicted on social media as being excited about exploring sexual themes and gender identity with young children. And you go from there about our lack of connection with God, with each other, the pushing of bizarre and damaging social, quote, values without parental consent on our young children, and the void of what matters in their lives. And we tell these young men every day at school, on the media, through popular culture, we tell them every day that they are toxically masculine, the sins of the world are on their

shoulders, and when that translates into personal interaction between teachers, classmates, so forth. What do you think we're creating? We're surprised that we've created monsters? This whole thing is just damning and sad. I wondered about that. You know, I went to church on Sunday, so it's July 3rd, and I was delighted to see it was jam packed. I was delighted. I know it's not the case for a lot of churches across America. And then, John, it turned out that this shooter, this shooter was also at his church, told it was non-denominational, though I know the mother, I think the mother is a Mormon, not to blame any of this on his faith, but it's crazy to me that he actually was in church

the day before he did this, the day before he did this. How can that be? I think this young man is lost in the, what was clear was the police reportedly, okay, I haven't seen the documents myself, but reportedly the police in Highland Park say that they've had interactions with this young man. They've known him. And that apparently, reportedly, he threatened to kill all the members of his family with knives. So they showed up and confiscated the knives. I'm told the family did not press charges. And what did the father reportedly do, according to what i've read and heard the father then helped his son get

a foid car i mean foi card firearm owner identification card that he's co-signed with with a kid if that's true well i i contrast it with what happened in Washington a few years ago. There was a young man adopted by his grandmother. He was in difficult circumstances, and he began. His name was Joshua Alexander O'Connor, and he threatened a mass shooting in Everett, Washington. And I wrote about it today. His grandmother read his journal. She realized he was a danger.

She took responsibility. She didn't pretend, I don't know. She actually called the police, got this done, and this was uh charged and this that's what should have happened i don't i don't want thought crimes charged but my god to give this kid a firearm owner identification card if that's true uh that's well, it got me thinking maybe, maybe we're putting, maybe we're too reluctant to take a hard look at the families who produce these mass shooters. You know, if, if you, if, if your son is a sociopath, that's one thing you can't therapize him out of it.

But if your son is somebody who was, you know, a well child in terms of, you know, his brain chemistry and got bullied or just didn't fit in and became reclusive and became obsessed with online sites like 4chan or whatever it is. And you, in this case, understood he was suicidal as recently as 2019. And then you assist him in getting a firearm. And the uncle who I guess reportedly may have lived with them, he's coming out. Yeah, he lives in the house. He comes out and says there were no signs that would make him bullshit. Be a better uncle. Be a better parent. Our society depends on you. Our free society can only do so much. And yes, we can do more. But there are limits to our powers. But you're in the home up now. Typical. Yes, pay attention. I think, isn't that important? And didn't we once have a feature in our culture in this country?

I know as a Greek American, a child of immigrants, shame was the overriding cudgel, you know, when I grew up. Like, what will they say in the village about you? You know, and that was, and shame was a real thing. And not only for Greeks, for everybody in this country, like what will the neighbors say? Right. It was the popular expression. I think we've forgotten that, you know, that the shame can inspire people to behave better. And judgment is required. I think about the, sorry, go ahead, John, you finish.

Being able to stand, find a place to stand and say, this is the place I'm standing and I'm not moving. Yeah, yeah. Find a place to stand and say, this is the place I'm standing and I'm not moving. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to sexualize my kindergarten so that you can applaud her on TikTok or whatever they do. That's because that's for them. That's what's so awful about it. Those teachers, they're doing that for them. They want the children to make them feel accepted

or good about their own life choices. And that's not the children's job. The children have no job of making the teacher feel good. It's the other way around. I think about this now. I've talked about how I was very badly bullied in seventh grade. I had a bad incident in third grade too.

And can I tell you what happened both times? I've actually never told this first story before. In the third grade, after I had a bullying incident, it was just a bad negative experience at a party where they sort of turned on me and they were flicking me, all the girls, like flicking with your finger. And they were saying the word flick. And I was the only girl they turned. It was terrible. Of course, I was in, um, I kind of got a little sullen at the time. And when I went back to school and I'm in class and you know what happened? Her name was Ms. Randall. Ms. Randall called my mom and said, is it okay if I take her out to lunch? Well, you want to make a third grade girl feel super special.

Have the teacher offer. And we, I don't remember what we talked about. I don't think it had anything to do with the girls at school. It was just, she made me feel special. Like she really liked me and she cared about me and I mattered. And then years later, years later, my teacher, Mr. Julian, after my dad died when I was a sophomore in high school, reached out and actually took me to go. My mom said that I could get a car.

She couldn't get me anywhere. You know, she was a single mom at this point with three kids. And she said I could get a car. She gave me like a thousand bucks. I got to use Subaru. I didn't know how to get a car. My mom didn't know how to get a car. I was a nurse at the VA. Mr. Julian took me and he helped me pick out the car

and he helped teach me how to drive a stick shift. And we got the car and he helped me negotiate the four new tires. That's the only thing we negotiated on it, which by the way, then I ruined because I had a car accident shortly thereafter. The one thing I did was ruin the four tires, but that's fine. But my point is just, I had people in my a car accident shortly thereafter. The one thing I did was ruin the four tires, but that's fine. But my point is just I had people in my life. I was lucky. And it wasn't just my family. It was also teachers who cared about me.

They weren't looking for me to care about them. This young man in Highland, you know, I'm so glad you told that story because teachers often save us i was saved by miss donna baio five four foot eleven wearing high heels and a high you know beehive haircut to to make her look taller and she saved my life but uh this young man that in highland park uh the the mayor of highland park was his cub scout master right yeah that's right this kid has been known for quite some time and uh and and all the kids like this when we throw them into this sewer of social media and subject them to attacks you You get attacked. I get attacked, but we're grownups. You know, I don't care. You want to attack me? Fine. Just click on my site. That's good. Thank

you. Thank you very much for your support. But the kids who get attacked, they wither and they get angry. And all this is bad bad news the media the media piles on by making stars out of these losers i'm sorry but these kids like they're they're they're sullen they're by themselves and yes they do need our help don't get me wrong they need our help but i i can't look at a kid who shoots up a highland park fourth of j July parade and say anything nice about him at this point. And Gavin DeBecker, I mean, the security expert of the world. There's not a more qualified security expert in the world, not just America. He's advised presidents and Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, every celebrity you could possibly name a list biggest stars in the world.

He was on my show last week and I asked him about what the media does with mass shooters, you know, the glorification of them. They don't even think about putting the picture on on repeat and running it over and over and over again. And I wanted to play in part what he said, John. Here's here's Gavin DeBecker. The lionization almost of these guys is playing a factor in the repeat nature of these crimes, is it not? Oh, very much. And I it's not done in every country there. You know, in England, you can't name the perpetrator until after a trial. And there are various reasons that's the case. But the the upshot of it is that you don't have what you have in America. I'll give you a good example of when President Reagan was shot by John Hinckley. From that point on, we saw Hinckley's boyhood home, interview with neighbors.

We obviously saw his name, all of his pictures through high school. We saw him being escorted by federal agents to a waiting helicopter. And the whole experience is almost an equalizing of the target, which is the president, and the assassin, who is the shooter. And I strongly oppose all forms of lionization or creating a star out of an assassin, and yet it's gone on forever. Turning that person into an enormous star is damaging because it encourages others. And we always saw and we tracked it in my company that within a few weeks of a mass shooting, you would have another. Well, now they're weekly anyway. So that issue has resolved itself. But the point being that you are encouraging others and you are saying among the large menu of choices that a young people can

choose in their lives of who to be, what to be. Now there's a new character. That was, I think, Thursday of last week, and yet another one happened on Monday. What a great interview and what a great point. The fellow Joshua Alexander O'Connor, the young man that I told you was turned in by his grandmother in Washington State. Here's what he said in his journal. I need to get the biggest fatality number I possibly can, he wrote. I need to make this count. I've been reviewing mass shootings, bombings, attempted bombings, And I'm learning from past shooter bombers' mistakes.

So I don't make the same mistakes. Thank God for his grandmother. I mean, we need more grandmothers and parents like that. I mean, I'm thinking of the grandfather in the Uvalde mass shooting at that hospital, at that school where the grandfather was on tape saying, oh, you know, he wouldn't go back to finish his senior year. What can you do? You know, kids today? No, no, you can't say that. You're his caregiver. You can make them. You can. You have an obligation to make them. And it's not OK to just shrug your shoulders and say he's sitting in the room. Right. It's like it's your obligation to society to raise someone who has at least the possibility of thriving. And you don't get to shrug your shoulders and make him our problem and make him the problem of little fourth graders who are just trying to learn. So I'm not saying there's that much we can do legally. There is a case where they're going after the parents of one mass shooter, one school shooter.

It would take a lot, but I do think societal pressure, like that shame you talked about, that can be turned on the family members as well. It's not just the shooter who turns a kid into a shooter. The Sandy Hook shooter, his mom was interviewed. And I remember reading, and his mom was interviewed. And the bartender, no, the mom wasn't interviewed, but the bartender was interviewed about him. And he said, she's a great mom. I'd see her every day.

She was a great mom i'd see her every day um she was a great mom and i'm thinking the mom's in the bar every day hanging out with you what's wrong with that picture yeah i'm sorry you got a kid no and he was completely sullen and obsessed with video games and in the basement all day in a house that had guns i'm not anti anti-gun, but you got a kid like that, get your damn guns out of your house. Sorry. You can't have them anymore. It's not a law. It's not the government seizing them. It's you as a responsible parent saying, I need to remove these from anywhere near my disturbed child. Everybody should be thinking that. That's what parenting is all about. You know,

you don't let a two year old lick a extension cord or a wall socket. Do you? Yeah. If you have a child who's disturbed, get the guns out of the house. Now. That's exactly right. I mean,

I know parents in New York who have sullen teenagers who would choose not to live in a high rise building. You know, they don't want to like they they understand there's a temptation there. Poor Anderson Cooper's are, what possible dangers are, and try to plan against them for your child's well-being, your family's well-being and for society's well-being. And it's not to say that parents could prevent all of these. I know the mother of one of the Columbine shooters wrote a heart-wrenching book about how, you know, what she saw and didn't see in her kid. It's not always preventable and always obvious. But I mean, Gavin DeBecker would tell you that the misery, the misery these shooters are driven by is, it is always there. If only we would keep our eyes open, we might do a better job of seeing it. It might be good to have God in our lives, Megan, like you went to church and saw that it was crowded. And maybe not mock people who believe in the Lord.

Maybe not mock people, Muslim people who believe in what they believe, and Jews who believe what they believe, and maybe understand that people of faith are trying to do good, and maybe we can learn something from that. That's so true, John. It's like you go to church, even if you've got questions, you know, you stand together, you sit together, you kneel together, you say peace and the Catholic ceremony together. You wait in line for communion together. You're together as a community. You feel like you're part of something. Like you matter.

You matter to them. They matter to you. Like Lucia, it's a gathering, right? A gathering. Yeah. That's what it is. That's right. And it's all part of the fabric of society i mean

i don't know anything about this mother again i i understand what i read is that she she was potentially a faithful person but i don't know um but she was reportedly arrested and charged with domestic battery back in 2015 don't have any other details. This woman works as a holistic health practitioner. I'm not about judging other people's faith, but I will tell you, you want to know someone, you know, you can hang out with someone all you want and not know them. You know, when you know them, when you see them with their family, when you see them with their kids, then you know someone or begin to know them. And I'm not questioning anyone's faith or lack of faith, whether it's an issue or not, but I think we're judged by our children.

And those of us who still feel shame and feel the concept of shame, maybe that helps our culture. Yeah. What is shame? But the flip side of, you know, it's falling down on morality, on your values. Right. It's well worth everyone's read, as I said. They won't be sorry. As always, it's an enrichment spending time with John Cass.

And so is our time today. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Megan. Love you. And thank you. I love you. You're the greatest. Isn't he amazing, guys?

Aren't you so glad we have access to a mind like John's? Tomorrow, Sammy the Bull Gravano will be here. This is the guy. He was John Gotti's number two. And then turned on him. He admits to participating in or committing the murder of 19 people. So you might say, why do you want to talk to him? Well, his experience was absolutely fascinating inside the mob. And I think the mafia is something that a lot of people remain very fascinated by. So

how is it that Sammy the Bull is still walking around? How is it that he's not, you know, that he's available? Believe it or not, the guy's got a podcast now. And I think it's going to be a fascinating interview. I'll never forget Diane Sawyer interviewing him years ago. It was riveting. And he's got a lot of insights about the mafia and that lifestyle and the ethical compromises that everyone, not just the Sam B. The Bulls of the world, has to make if they're going to go that route.

So we'll talk about all of it. That's our next episode. Don't miss it. Download the show. In the meantime, subscribe at YouTube.com slash Megyn Kelly. And thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.