The Megyn Kelly Show - Free Speech Under Attack and Crime Wave in American Cities, with Greg Lukianoff and Ray Kelly | Ep. 243

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), to talk about free speech under attack on college campuses, the push to make words "violence," free speech as an antidote to authoritarianism, the Supreme Court deciding in favor of speech this week, a professor being punished for an expletive-filled joking video, the way social media has changed speech, the real, damaging effect of "defund the police" policies, the rising crime wave in American cities, New York City's newest DA, how America failed to vet terrorist in Texas synagogue, the FBI's tip-toeing around anti-Semitism, what might happen next with crime in America, 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. America in disarray as criminal justice reforms lead to violence and our constitutional protections take a hit. A little later in the show, we're going to be joined by former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly about the spike in violence and these soft on crime DAs, which are becoming a real problem. Recall efforts in cities already underway. The guy here in New York City, just two weeks in office. We don't have a recall provision, but the citizens are now asking themselves what their other options are as some

dozen DAs underneath him, ADAs, leave the office. There have been something like 70 leaving, I think it's the San Francisco office, 50 leaving an office in LA. And I could go on and I will in just a bit. But first, free speech is also under siege. And it has been for quite some time but it's it's reaching peak concern students shout down professors or anyone else who dares to disagree with them administrators threaten to take action against professors and students for sometimes unspecified misconduct they just know it when they see it they know you're wrong when they when they see it one of the latest examples involves a mich professor. He's a professor at a school in Michigan whose attempt at humor apparently did not sit well with the powers that

be. Well, it sat well with me. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, you need to know about this group if you don't. FIRE is how we all refer to them, is defending this guy as they do with so many free speech cases on college campuses for any and all issues. Greg Lukianoff is its president and CEO, and he joins me now. Greg, what a pleasure. I haven't spoken to you since you came on The Kelly File years ago, but thank God for you. Thank God, because you're fighting the good fight. It's great to chat with you again. I really loved last time we talked. Yeah, same. And everybody knows in general that there's a problem with free speech on college campuses these days, which is now morphed out into our society. But I don't know that they know just how bad it's gotten, but step in and help those who are under attack for

speaking their mind fight back as they get fired, as they get censored, as they potentially get kicked off of university campuses. So let's just start with a broad base. How bad is it now compared to, let's say, where it was 10 years ago? Well, I'd say it's reached the point where people who say there's nothing to see there and there's no threat to free speech or academic freedom on campus, you probably don't need to listen to them anymore because it's just so overwhelming. I mean, people have been warning about this since the late 1980s. Speech codes actually increased since the 1980s. It took like 150 lawsuits to get them to decrease. and when it comes to threats to professors that we've seen over the past couple of years,

we've seen 508 attempts to get professors punished for their research or pedagogy or speech. The very thing that tenure is supposed to protect, we've seen 508 examples of that just since 2015. And that includes, by the way, like 20 just at Stanford, my law school alma mater as well. I think Harvard has like a dozen. And the worst year I've ever seen, and I've been doing this since 2001, the worst year I've ever seen for free speech on campus and academic freedom was last year. And second worst was this year. We saw there was something like 120 attempts to get professors fired in 2020. They were mostly successful. And this includes, by the way, nearly 30 examples of tenured professors, something that was unthinkable for that even to happen once. We've seen about 30, close to 30 of them. You did a survey.

Your group FIRE did a survey that tells the story. It showed that 69 percent, I should mention, this was apparently the largest survey of student attitudes about free speech on 160 campuses, over 37,000 students surveyed. And you found that 69% of the students agreed that if a professor says something the students find offensive, he or she should be reported to the university. They should be reported. And 60% agreed the same for if a student says something that other students find offensive, they ought to be reported. What? Yeah, no. And that's something that I remember when we first started seeing that stat come up when we did smaller surveys even 10 years ago. And for the older people in my organization, like me, for example, when we first saw students say, you know, like, I don't speak up in class because I'm afraid I'll get reported. And I remember having younger employees. And it was like something like 9% of them were saying that they don't speak up in class

because they're afraid of actually getting reported to the university. And we're like, that's unheard of. Like, we never thought about stuff like that when we were in school. That's nuts. And this is so it's gotten even worse since then. when we were in school. That's nuts. And this is so it's gotten even worse since then. And students get in trouble. People, students were already getting in trouble for pretty tame speech back in back when I started back in 2001. But it has gotten so much worse. We even have a case at UC, University of Chicago, Illinois, where a professor was actually taught in an anti-discrimination case. He was talking about a scenario that involved the use of racial epithets.

And if you're doing anti-discrimination law, a lot of the cases involve racial epithets. But in order to be nice to his students and not to offend anybody, he actually used euphemisms. He just put B blank and N blank and then explain that referring to epithets for students. They threw the book at this guy as as if he had really broken a rule, even though he was trying to be as inoffensive as possible to his students. How are you supposed to communicate what the offensive word was without doing like N blank? I mean, you know what? What are you supposed to say? And up until very recently, like we made this very sensible decision for in academia that if you're referring to a word, saying it is not the same thing as, for example, calling someone. that it took a lot of temerity because there was a book called Not Your Negro. There was a movie

called Not Your Negro about the life of James Baldwin. And the professor pointed out accurately that that's not what James Baldwin said. And it takes a lot of temerity to correct someone as great as James Baldwin. And they threw the book at her as well. We defended her successfully in that case. Larry Elder was on the show not long ago talking about his great movie, Uncle Tom. And he talked about his dad who grew up in Jim Crow South and had been called the N-word. And and Larry said the N-word in saying what had been, you know, thrown at his dad. And we actually had this debate internally on my show. I'm like, can we air that? It's a black man talking about how his black father was called that word. And in the end, I said, it is not my place to censor Larry Elder's story about the racism his

own dad was subjected to. We didn't have any trouble as a result, but I'm not on a college campus. If Larry himself, a black man, had stood up and said that in front of a class as a professor, he would have gotten in trouble. Race doesn't save you. Gender doesn't save you. There are certain words and it's not just the N word. That's the most extreme example. There's a lot of other things. Yeah. And one of the things that's also so stunning about this, I wrote like a very long piece for Reason magazine. It was only something like 3% of the entire faculty at Harvard self-identify as any kind of conservative. So it's like there's already incredibly low viewpoint diversity among professors. It's even lower among administrators. Yet nonetheless, you are still on a regular basis trying to get professors in trouble, students in trouble. It really has

gotten much worse than I ever feared it would get, much faster than I ever feared it would get. My gosh, right. Because I remember reading the FIRE survey and it said four out of five students, 83% self-censor their own viewpoints. They're like, no way, I know what not to say. One in five censor themselves often. And I thought, God, that's awful. And then when I read the next paragraph about how, well, they're the ones reporting each other and reporting on their professors, I'm like, well, they created this bed. Now they have to lie in it. It's like, you should at least be taking a stand for the ability to express your own opinion,

even though some might find it offensive. If you want us to care about these oppressive college environments, but they're not. They're kind of on board with the censorship. Well, to be fair, that's what they're being taught. One of the things that I do is I always give this list of five things that everybody should run to their alma mater, ask their president to do the following things. And one of the most basic ones on that five list is, of course, stand up for professors, get rid of your speech codes, pull your students. But one of them is just explain freedom of speech in the orientation. They explain things like the bias-related incident program, which is one of the main

tools for students reporting on each other and reporting on professors. A lot of times, they'll explain the speech code, but they don't explain this kind of sophisticated democratic idea of freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech, even when it's offensive. And so I have some sympathy for these students because they're doing what they have been told and they can't know things that they've never been taught. And in K through 12, and in higher education, there's a much greater sense that you have something much more like a right not to be offended than explaining the deep wisdom of freedom of speech. You're not wrong. I want to stay on college campuses, but I'll give you a story as an aside. I told this once before about my daughter, who's now 10. And we've since pulled our kids from these New York City private schools, which are just around the bend on all these issues. So we found

better places to raise them and place them in terms of education. But anyway, last year, she was in fourth grade in the city, and they were discussing the of education. But anyway, last year she was in fourth grade in the city and they were discussing the Derek Chauvin verdict, you know, the police officer who had killed George Floyd. And these are fourth grade girls. It was an all-girls school. They handed out a Newzilla article to the girls saying, read the article about what happened in the case and then let's discuss. And so my daughter's information came from the article and so did all the other girls' information. And apparently it was a pretty balanced piece because I guess they were saying the teacher stood up and said there's a massive problem in America with police killing unarmed black men. Now, that's not true. That's an overstatement of the problem. It is a problem. And whenever a cop kills an unarmed black man, that's not good, black or white. But to state it's a massive problem is not true in any event. She stated it. And one of the other little girls said, well, wasn't George Floyd resisting arrest? And the teacher said they always blame the victim.

OK, as if that's not an OK factor race. Right. So then my daughter said, wasn't George Floyd on a lot of drugs at the time he died? And that, of course, was a factor that the defense argued a lot, you know, that the drugs actually were the cause of the death and so on. So great. Let's debate it. Right. Let's get into it. The teacher said to the girls, this conversation is making me uncomfortable and I'm shutting it down right now. So that's what's happening. That's just one story in our little school, but in the K through 12 education system, before they even get to the college now, Greg, you know, they're not teaching critical thinking. They're not teaching the full

fledged debate of ideas, the excitement of hearing disagreement with your own points of view and learning and defending and exploring. They're teaching, I'm uncomfortable with your opinion. So you have to be quiet and the conversation's over. And that's why I'm worried that this is not going to be a problem that's going to go away fast. But essentially, what we're teaching kids in K through 12 with regards to freedom of speech and sort of democratic norms is, and what we started teaching them even 20 years ago, is what we're seeing now. And I'm not seeing a big move to reform. I'm not seeing, I see a push sometimes from Republicans to reform what's going on in K through 12. And sometimes those are unconstitutional too. So it's been a tough discussion. But I do think that our expectations,

you know, like creating an expectation that if you bring up a political topic that isn't going to be healthy back, quote unquote, an adult when you have these kind of problems. And when you get to corporations, people go to HR, for example. Now, the problem with that is that's not teaching people the habits of living in a democratic society. That's making them go to power all the time. And that's just fundamentally it should be antithetical to the way we teach. Yet we're training young people in this way of always having intermediated discussions. You write about this a lot, and I have been subjected to this line. I've spoken at many universities, Stanford, Yale, I could go on. But the students do now believe, and I've seen this

just myself, I say to them every time, words are not violence. They're not violence. And you've written basically, right, they're a tool to avoid violence. That's sort of why we have the First Amendment. And I'd love to get you to expand on that because we hear that all the time from young people. Speech is violence. The thing that I think is amazing is I've seen students come up with this and I've watched professors make this argument as if it's a sophisticated cutting edge argument, but we now understand that words can be hurtful and that could be traumatic and therefore words are the same things as violence. And it's just like, so you live in a world where you seriously think that John Stuart Mill was incapable of thinking of the fact that words can sometimes hurt. Like what do you think sticks and stones was about? Sticks and stones would make no sense

if words never hurt. It's something you teach children to make them hurt less. And so the way I open up all of my talks now is I talk about the bad rap that free speech has gotten and about how people will argue that speech is violence and that speech is only the bully, the bigot, and the robber bearer in care about freedom of speech are my three Bs. In a democratic society, 50% plus gets to decide who gets to talk. And before there were democratic societies, the rich and powerful who are always protected because they're rich and powerful. So this argument that only the rich and powerful and only the bigots and the bullies are protected by freedom of speech is nonsense. You only need freedom of speech under First Amendment to protect things that aren't popular with the majority because the majority has majority rule. And this is civics 101. The fact that students are like, wow, I never really thought of it that way is mind-blowing to me. And the idea that they're making the argument that speech is violence, I'm like, yes, that is an ancient idea. It's an ancient, very bad idea baked into the whole idea of freedom of speech is that we now settle our disputes through

argumentation. And given it's about like how we rule our society, of course, it's going to be ugly. It's literally replacing the way we have dealt with conflict in the past, which was usually through violence and coercion. So of course, it's intense. It's a replacement for violence. But freedom of speech is one of the best inventions in human history for innovation, for peace, which is very badly underappreciated, and of course, absolutely essential to having a democracy in the first place. This, I should have mentioned this up top, but you are also co-author of Cuddling of the American Mind with Jonathan Haidt, which is one of the most famous books in the past 10, 15 years. I mean, it's just everybody talks about it now because it was prescient.

It was spot on. And there's actually now an update to it, which you can get. They've published it online. But if you haven't read it, read it and read the update the afterward. But this this is from the book. I've been reading so much of your stuff that forgive me if this isn't from the actual book or the afterward, but I think it's from the actual principal work. The idea that we should campaign against hurtful speech among adults arises from a failure to understand that free speech is our chosen method of resolving disagreements using words rather than weapons. Open debate is our enlightened means of determining nothing less than how we order our society,

what is true and what is false, what wars we should fight, what policies we should pass, and you go on and you write this. I love this part. This is profound. Being a citizen in a Democratic Republic is supposed to be challenging. It's supposed to ask something of its citizens. It requires a certain minimal toughness and commitment to self-governing, to become informed about difficult issues and to argue, organize and vote accordingly. Oh, my God. Yes, I'm putting that out of putting it over my desk. And you'll make a great argument, which is the only other model is authoritarianism. So explain that. Well, that essentially like this, this idea that, you know, speech is violence is essentially forgetting the fact that this is a tool for exalting conflict. And this is something that Jonathan Rauch wrote a lot about, that the normal model for human society is what he calls the fundamentalist model. And he doesn't mean religious fundamentalists. He means there's someone in charge who gets to decide what is true

and what is not. The Enlightenment to a degree, and this is one of the reasons why I think it gets a little bit of a bad rap, was the discovery of ignorance, of actually going, wait a second, all this stuff that we thought was absolutely true and all the shamans and chiefs had told us was true, when you start to test it, it actually, it's completely false. And it's one of the things that I do think is funny, is that sometimes we free speech defenders can get sort of like labeled as paternalistic or arrogant. And while that might be true individually, ultimately, the freedom of speech is about a very humble idea that we are all wrong all the time. Our individual biases

are going to get us in some cases nowhere, in some cases worse than nowhere. There's a humility to being in favor of freedom of speech, which is that you always take seriously the possibility you might be wrong. And there's an arrogance to anyone who thinks that they can be the perfect censor. Because when you're saying, like, I can actually eliminate discussion on this topic if I don't like it, you are putting yourself in the position of the final arbiter of truth, which is a position that no person should ever take on entirely themselves. That's exactly right. And if you want that, what you really are asking for is authoritarianism over you because you won't be the ultimate arbiter. Somebody will be more powerful than you

are. And why should they get to decide what capital T truth is? You might like it, for example, to get political in the Joe Biden era and not so much during the Trump era. Like that's generally why we don't want our leaders telling us what's OK to say and what's not OK to say subversive things and to hear other people's controversial views and debate them openly and have controversial figures come on campus and sit and listen and then tear them apart. Great, let's do that. But just to have that intellectual stimulation and figure out how you feel about it. Yeah, I used what I used to say, and it sounds very old fashioned now, but being offended is what happens when you have your deepest beliefs challenged.

And if you make it through four years or five years, in this case, of college without that happening, you should demand your money back. I like that. I hadn't heard that, but I like there's so much to go over with you. My God, I could spend all day doing this. There's so many fun cases. Sorry, they're fun to talk about, but they're not fun for the people involved. And I do want to get to that case out of Detroit at Ferris University, because that poor professor is getting it. And the audience needs to know what's being done to this guy. Greg, by the way, was the guy.

He was on the Yale campus. Remember when the students were shouting down the professor over the Halloween costumes? He was there. He's the one who took that video that we've all seen. We're going to get into that. We're going to get into really what the causes are and how overprotective parenting is in part to blame for this problem. Don't miss any of today's discussion. So excited to be bringing you Greg.

Don't go away. Free speech and religion at the center of supreme court arguments yesterday as the justices considered whether boston the city of boston violated the first amendment when it refused a request to temporarily raise a christian flag outside of city hall greg lukianoff of fire is back with us so Greg, this was a free speech case that went up to the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday in which I didn't listen to the arguments, but according to what I read, they did the impossible. They managed to unite the left wings and right wing of the Supreme Court. It sounds like this could wind up being being a nine zero decision, possibly in favor of free speech.

In other words, you got to let the Christian flag fly. Yeah. And that would be consistent with previous decisions that essentially and this goes back to cases going back decades that it's considered to be viewpoint discrimination, which is the highest sin you can commit in First Amendment land. If you allow every other viewpoint, but you don't allow a religious viewpoint. And this is something that goes back to cases on campus as well. It's not the biggest sin you can commit if you're part of big tech, however. They love viewpoint discrimination. And I actually want to get to that with you later because you have the exact same philosophy that I do, which is there's the First Amendment, which protects us from the government interfering with our ability to speak freely. But there's also just the concept of free speech. And it matters outside of the government setting.

It matters in big tech. It matters in the rest of our lives. And the more we crack down on people's speech, the more into these deep rabbit holes they go. I think it explains a lot of what we're seeing right now. I've been talking about it a lot. And I know you believe this, so we'll get to that too. But let's just start with this poor, poor guy at Ferris University. Okay. This poor guy, I love him. I want the audience to get to know him. And I ideally would like for them to write in and help him. His name is Barry. Is it Meller? Meller. Yeah. Meller. Okay. He's a history professor. He's 74 years old. Okay. The guy had tenure and he did the unthinkable. He went, he opened up his class. I guess it was this, was it, when was it? Fall semester? It was just in the recent past. Yeah. Oh,

okay. Just in the past couple weeks. He opened up his class. Okay, no, it just happened. Okay, so it just happened. And instead of being a normal, boring professor who stands up there and says, Welcome to history. We're going to start this day. We're going to go forward.

Here's what I expect of you. Be honest. Don't copy other people's work. Hand in your own assignment. Whatever. He decided to make it interesting he's dealing with adults you're in college you're an adult at this point they're young adults but they're adults and what he did in order to prove the point of don't plagiarize

while you're in this class was he took a scene from the the show deadwood and he he would let he would show the scene in a minute but he started by sort of reenacting it in his own words. He changed the words to have more of a professor to student message. And it was irreverent and it was vulgar and it was hilarious. And then he showed the students the actual clip from Deadwood, which is almost exactly the same, but for a few words. And he said, did I plagiarize from Deadwood? And he said, no, I didn't. If I had just done this little bit in it, like in a paper or for you guys without crediting the original source, that'd be plagiarism. That was, that would cause you a

problem in this class, but that's not what happened. Okay. So that's a fun way of teaching an ethics rule right up off the top of class. I'm going to show you the video. Our audience is, there are no strangers to profanity. So they, it's not that I use it every day. It's just when I really need to. So here's soundbite one with the professor, sort of his own, again, it's got some R-rated words in here, take on this scene out of Deadwood. Listen. I may have fucked up my life flatter than hammered shit, but I stand before you today beholden to no human cocksucker and working a paying fucking union job. And no limber dick cocksucker of an administrator is going to tell me how to teach my classes because I'm a fucking

tenured professor. So if you want to go complain to your dean, fuck you. Go ahead. I'm retiring at the end of this year and I couldn't give a flying fuck any longer. You people are just vectors of disease to me and I don't want to be anywhere near you. So keep your fucking distance. If you want to talk to me, come to my Zoom. I love him. It's funny. He was trying to make them laugh and make a point and tell us what happened to him as a result of all this. Oh, they're going they're going after him. They're going after his tenure. The university is planning to discipline him.

We've actually we have a faculty legal defense fund at FIRE and we're defending him in court if need be. And what's funny, Megan, is that that's one of the cases that like is on the less sympathetic sort of spectrum from what I do all the time. It's amazing how tame speech can get you in trouble. You're not all that surprised sometimes when, you know, people are funny about swears, Megan, like I'm not. But it's amazing how often if something involves like vulgar language, you'll have even people right or left go like, well, that's pushing it too far. And I like to remind them that one of the most important cases regarding campus free speech is a case called Papish, which is a student with the Supreme Court saying you cannot expel a student for printing a cartoon, mocking the police by showing them raping the Statue of Liberty.

And if stuff that offensive is protected, obviously this joking tirade that he went on is protected. And to be clear, he sets it up with him in a spacesuit, essentially. He talks about being from Rigel 7. There's no way the university could actually say with a straight face that they didn't understand. He was kidding for the whole thing. Of course, right, exactly.

And the students apparently, well, at least some of them, thought it was hilarious. It's been posted online now. It has at least, my last check, half a million views. Tons of former students are writing to him saying,

this is absurd. You were the funniest, best professor I ever had. You don't deserve this. You know, God forbid the guy try to make it something that'll catch their attention, something that they'll remember, something that isn't mind numbingly boring and utterly forgettable. This is the thanks he gets. They've placed him on leave. They're coming for his job. And I am 100 percent team Barry Mailer, Meller. And if you are to find a way to email into this school, this Ferris State, Michigan, northwest of Detroit, andous. They have some sort of a discrimination policy, I guess, that allows the, quote, equal opportunity and access office, already I'm concerned that that's so broad, to, quote, take action against conduct that is inconsistent with the university's values. And apparently they can take action, take action against you if you're the

student or your child if he or she's the student um even if they haven't actually done an investigation and there are no appeals so the university just gets a report that some kid did something stupid based on the allegation they can discipline the student. And by the way, they say the action could include increased monitoring, supervision, or security at various locations where the conduct occurred. Of course, training and education for the students. They got to re-educate you into their thinking. But like monitoring and supervision and security and so on. For what?

How is this? What? Yeah. Now, it goes back to the free speech movement. 1964 starts at Berkeley. 1974, suddenly the Supreme Court really recognizes that free speech rights include even highly offensive speech. And then by 1984 of the actual year, you start having universities passing speech codes to ban offensive speech, whether it's on the basis of race or sex. And these all get shot down. These get shot down by the court of public opinion. This is something

that brought actually a lot of liberals and conservatives together in the 80s and 90s. It was defeated in court. And amazingly, as I mentioned before, even though it was consistent, even though every time these were brought in front of courts, they were shot down. Universities actually had 79% of them had crazy speech codes. So what happens next is that we help with lawsuits all over the country, always defeating the speech codes. And what they've replaced them with are these things called bias-related incident programs or procedures that are as vague as the one you just read, that basically they try to just barely be constitutional, just barely squeak by, but they nonetheless enforce orthodoxy. They mean that students really should be scared about what they say, and professors should be

because they can be reported and, as you saw, punished without even being found guilty of anything other than free speech. So how are these bearing in the courts? Because, you know, one thing we've been noticing on the show as we cover, you know, woke culture and all this stuff is that the courts overall, in my view, have been doing a pretty good job of not becoming woke and just following the law. You know, it's been my one comfort as a recovering lawyer that we still have. Yes, we have more and more woke jurists and so on. And certainly law schools are woke. But so far, the law has pretty much held. So how are these cases faring? So so far, it's a little bit of a mixed bag, partially because they were constructed in order to in order to be found just barely constitutional. And that's kind of outrageous. We've also seen after winning every single speech code lawsuit that had been

brought in the past five years, we've seen a couple of cases where judges are saying that students don't have standing to challenge these speech codes, even in cases where it's very clear the speech code had been applied. We saw this at University of South Carolina, for example, easy case as far as I was concerned. And they investigated a student for two weeks under the speech code. And then when this got in front of court, believe it or not, they actually tried to argue and they succeeded on this argument that because they decided not to find the students guilty at the very end, this wasn't a speech violation. Now, this is going against decades, decades of law. So for the first time, I actually have some worries. Now, of course, Megan, the good news is

when things get to get in front of a court on the substance, free speech always wins. There's no right not to be offended. That's very clearly established. First Amendment law is very strong. But I'm afraid with these sort of technical outs, more courts are going to be not striking down speech codes, not defending student rights because of a even if it is offensive, even if it's disgustingly offensive. Right. I know you've defended people, speakers and speech that you don't agree with and that you find offensive. So have I. I mean, I was on the air at Fox defending those lunatics at the Westboro Baptist Church for their signs at the funerals of fallen military men and women. Did I like what they were doing? No, but I like the First Amendment that that's how we all used to be. We most of us used to be in that camp. It's a more recent phenomenon that with these young people that it's like somehow free speech itself is the problem. Yeah. No, that's

a change that happened very fast. And it's the whole reason why I wrote the book, Coddling the American Mind with my friend Jonathan Haidt is because it wasn't a subtle shift on campus. It was 2014, bam, suddenly students were showing up. And to be clear, for the previous 15 years of my career, students had been the best constituencies for free speech. They understood offensive comedy, they understood offensive lyrics, they had each other's backs to a degree, and like lightning struck in 2014, suddenly that all that all changed. And the whole book really is trying to figure out what was so different about these students who started hitting campus around 2014. And so much of what we're seeing today is closely tied to that major shift.

And we do think that social media is actually a leading reason why we had this dramatic shift. But also K through 12 education is a big part of it as well. Well, you do have it diagnosed. And I think that's fascinating because everyone wants to know like how, where did they come from? Why are these kids like this? My feeling is who the hell gave birth to these kids? Are these Gen Xers children? Because I know you're a Gen Xer, so am I. We're tougher than that. Our generation takes everything. We never complained. So are we the ones raising these coddled little children? late 90s and grew up in the zeros, you were growing up at a time that was way safer by basically every single measure than when we were kids or when our parents were kids, etc., etc., going back in time. But for whatever reason, a lot of these parents were extra paranoid, that essentially the idea of always keeping your kids safe took on a sort of unbounded sense.

And this is why we call it in the book safetyism. This is actually something that Pamela Paretsky came up with the name, and I think it's fantastic. But this idea that safety is the ultimate goal, no matter how absurd it gets, there are no trade offs, as long as you can argue that kids are, that even if it's the tiniest increase in safety, everything else goes out the window. And we think that this obsession with safety, particularly as it morphed into something that also means emotional safety, it's very harmful to people's ability to talk across lines of difference or for that matter, say anything provocative at all. That's, I mean, I don't understand it because I really think that I, like my generation,

I think, you know, I just saw this thing online. I don't know if you saw this meme, but it was showed this one guy and he was walking through a doorway. Maybe he's, he's probably around our age, like,

you know, late forties, young fifties. And, um, he's walking through a doorway and he, his shoulder hits the doorway and he just keeps going. It's like,

it didn't even happen. And it says born in 1970. Right. And then have you seen this and then then um he hits it and he kind of gets like slightly irritated kind of yells at the doorway as born in 1980 and then uh they showed 1990 where he like acts hurt like it hurt him 1990 and then it gets to the 2000s and and the person's like falling down on the ground is like oh my god my shoulder ow ow and then takes a selfie.

So I just don't like I'm trying to figure out how people like us born in that general era where we were dealing with the Cold War, who lived through 9-11 and all that are raising these wussy little children. All I can think is that somehow, you know, like something happened in a window there because my kids, I'm 51 and I had my kids late, you know, late 30s, early 40s. Like, who are these parents? And why are they so scared? Is it because we're ours is the first generation where that's really the second generation where we were we were both parents outside of the house? Is that way got what you got upset with safety ism? And like, oh, my God, nothing had happened to junior and there can be no independent conflict resolution. And then they go off into life that way. And this is the result. Yeah, well, we call it problems of progress in the book. And in my earlier book, Freedom from Speech, I called it problems of comfort. That essentially, the kind of problems that we're currently facing with regards to overprotection are the kind of

problems that you'd probably want to have throughout most of human history. That essentially, if you're less concerned about the saber-toothed tiger eating you or the commissars or the Nazis coming to arrest you, then it's nice that you get to a stage where you can worry about smaller and smaller things. But that was usually met with some amount of like, but, you know, it's good to be challenged. It's actually even good to be offended. It's good to engage. You don't like all of these kind of aspects of wisdom that we used to teach younger people have been largely sort of dismissed. And so I feel like, once again, I don't think it's a student's fault that they're being raised

in an environment where they're being told you have a right not to be offended in some cases, that words are violence, as we mentioned before, that they're permanently harmful to people and that people will never recover. And the reason why this angers me so much, though, is it's telling students that, and this is the major takeaway of coddling the American mind. We are teaching a generation of young people the habits of anxious and depressed people, but everything they're always under threat. They're always under harm and they won't bounce back if they are harmed by words or thoughts. And it's leading to incredibly bad mental health outcomes. And that's on us. Like, why on earth would we be whispering into students' ears? It's like, by the way, if you hear something that

really bothers you, it might permanently damage you. And you definitely shouldn't do that to someone else. Then, of course, they're going to be anxious and depressed. Right, right. I've said this before, but at my daughter's old school, I said to the head of school, hey, you know, you do all this diversity training for the girls, for the faculty, for everybody. You know, at some point you might consider spending some time on grit because at some point in life they may meet somebody who hasn't had the training. And they may actually say something offensive to these girls. And she said, will you teach the class? I said, well, first of all, it's more than just one class.

But second of all, I will do it, but I'm going to show up in an inappropriate Halloween costume. That's how it goes. I'm going to offend everyone. I'm going to say swears. I'm going to call them names. And you know what they're going to learn? They're fine. They can handle it.

They're strong enough. And that's the thing that happens naturally psychologically if you basically say like this is the worst thing that could ever happen to you it's always going to be in your head a million times worse than when it actually happens and you're like okay that was fine like it would be so he gave a you know a popular opinion among people who don't go to don't go to elite colleges and that's one thing that i i do get frustrated with as, Megan, is so much of this is classism. So much of this is upper class, elite educated people. They have a really hard time distinguishing the ideas and political ideas that they're born with or raised in as being the same thing as truth. When I started Stanford Law School in 1997, I was constantly pointing out, it's like,

listen, my dad's a Russian refugee. My mom's a British immigrant. I was probably the only one in my class who was working when I was 11. And constantly you are saying things that you think are the God's honest truth that any working class kid would come in and say, well, you'd be kind of horrified by how we actually talk. Right, exactly. Some of these families are actually more worried about getting food on the table for dinner that night than they are about, you know, the girl in the Argyle sweater with her cute little pleated skirt sitting there gazing at her navel and then feeling, oh, what color is my skin? Oh, it's white. Maybe that's important. Oh, look, there's my lady parts. Maybe I should focus on those. Oh, that's what I stand for. It's like, oh, my God, you

get a real problem. Get a real problem. All right. Stand by, Greg. There's so much more to go over with. And I think what you said about social media is really important. Why Greg revised his original condemnation of screen time in his addendum and is now more focused on social media and why he thinks that's actually the villain we need to keep our kids away from. Don't go away. And remember, folks, you can find the Megyn Kelly show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel. YouTube dot com slash Megyn Kelly. If you prefer an audio podcast, subscribe, download for free on Apple, Spotify,ify pandora stitcher or wherever you get

your podcasts and there you will find our full archives with more than 240 shows we get so many downloads in the archives every day love seeing all of you find our library a stat from 2019 from our then-surgeon general. One in three, this is before the pandemic, one in three high school students and half of female students report persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness. An increase of 40% since 10 years earlier, saying technology is largely to blame. Research done during the pandemic of 80,000 students worldwide found depressive and anxiety symptoms doubled during the pandemic on a worldwide basis. Back in the United States, in early 2021, ER visits for suspected suicide attempts were 51% higher for adolescent girls, 4% higher, a much lower rate, but still higher for boys than the same period back in 2019.

We're going in the wrong direction. And technology is not the only thing, but it's a huge factor. And you have zeroed in, in particular, on not the cell phone, not the screen, the social media. Explain. Yeah. Initially, when we were trying to figure out what was so different about the kids hitting campus around 2014 and why they were so much more anxious and depressed and all this kind of stuff, the obvious candidate was the cell phone. Because that basically it being the iPhone being released, you know, changing the world forever, lined up in terms of time perfectly. And the only data we had when we were working in 2018,

we were wondering if maybe it was screen time. But it's since become much clearer that the thing that is the most harmful, particularly young girls, is social media and particularly websites like Instagram. So we talked in the book about how Instagram is harmful to the mental health of teenage girls, partially because it's this constant social comparison thing, which is kind of like taking the existing nasty behavior from adolescence and giving it

superpowers, making it a thousand times worse so that you're dealing with the mean girls 24 hours a day for the rest of your life, which even just saying it makes me depressed and sad just thinking about it. And it turns out Facebook, as we fairly recently discovered, had some of this research itself. So I don't have daughters. I have two little boys. But if I had if I had daughters, I would keep them off social media as long as possible. Yep. Same. There's zero chance my kids are going to be allowed on social media. I just don't care. I don't care how many of their friends are on it. That's where I draw the line. You write about things like overprotective parenting, loss of unstructured playtime that allows children to learn how to

get along. Some of these, all of this feeding into the intolerance that we're seeing left and right in our society today. Yeah. Yeah. That was a genuine surprise. When we were writing the book, we didn't think that the lack of free time would play such a big role, but free time and free play, that's when you learn how to interact with each other. That's how you learn how to take a joke. That's how you get over yourself to a degree. And then I realized that all of the parents my age, they schedule their kids from 6 o'clock in the morning until they go to bed at night. And that's bad for you. It's so true.

Last but not least, we have such a short time. There's so much I wanted to cover. You've got to come back. Censorship, censorship by big tech and others. It doesn't change people's opinions. You right you know, you have to let people say hateful things because it will drive it underground. It will get worse. It's actually much worse than that. It will lead them to talk to people they only agree with. And when that starts happening, you start spiraling off into crazy land. And this happens on the right and the left, as we've seen. It's really good to know what people really think so you can know the world as it is.

And if you don't, they're just going to talk to the people who are either as radical as they are or more, and it's just going to get worse. So expose them to dissenting opinions, expose everyone to opinions that sound different from the way they think, and that might lead them to moderate their own views. Yeah. Well, teach people also, also to listen as far, if I could wave a magic wand, like one of the things I'd love to do is have people from different, you know, polarized communities,

not go, not automatically go and debate each other, but hear what they're coming from. We've, we've, we've seemed to fundamentally lost curiosity about each other in the culture war. That's so true.

This is, I mean, like this is why after January 6th, when people asked, like, how did it happen? How these people actually believe that Mike Pence was going to become president that day? And I tried to say, look, all the censorship and all of the, you know, sanctimonious broadcasting where these people felt judged made them turn you off and find their own information sites. And that wasn't necessarily a good thing. You know, that really wasn't and remains a serious problem

on so many levels. Thank you for being one of the warriors on the side of the angels, Greg. It's a pleasure. I love your organization. I love FAIR. That's a different one. And I love FIRE,

which is equally important. All right, to be continued. Coming up, we're going to take a deep dive into the crime wave in America right now. The latest statistics on murders in our major cities are far worse than even I understood. But now I've taken a hard look at it. And Ray Kelly, former NYPD commissioner, will be here with his take on these soft on crime DAs popping up in city after city after city, often thanks to George Soros. Don't go away. We are taking an in-depth look now at how left-wing criminal justice reform policies are getting young women in particular this week killed in America. Over the past two weeks, we saw three high profile murders of young

women killed by men who police say have extensive criminal records. Joining me now is Ray Kelly, former New York City police commissioner and CEO of the global security firm, The Guardian Group. Commissioner, it's great to have you here. I'm so disturbed by all of this. And I just want to sort of give people an overview, because for a while there after George Floyd, we saw defund the police, defund the police. And then the cities started to realize that was a disaster and the money started to get replaced for police departments. like Bill Bratton, Commissioner Bratton and others had been saying, it's so far beyond this. You've got to go after the soft on crime DAs who have been placed in office by these far left wingers. And a lot of other things are going to have to happen to shore up the safety in these communities. And now we're living that. So we've got this one woman out, a UCLA grad student, 24 years old, working in a furniture store who was gunned down this past weekend. We've got a woman on the New York City subway, 40 years old, shoved to her death as an oncoming subway train came with absolutely no possibility of saving her own life. And in East Harlem, you've got a 19 year old girl killed at a Burger King as she was totally complying with this guy's demands to hand over the cash from the cash register. And he still

shot her in the head and she was killed. That's just the latest your thoughts on where we're going and how we got here. Well, I'm pretty pessimistic, quite frankly, Megan, the future, at least for New York City, and probably in the short term, because New York will always survive, is bleak. We see Alvin Bragg, a George Soros promoted district attorney who took the radical step of putting out a memo that said, you know, we're just not going to prosecute a lot of crimes, a lot of felony crimes, robbery, for instance, that sort of thing. We're going to make the transit system free. We won't prosecute anybody for fare evasion. We won't prosecute anybody for resisting arrest. And this is emblematic of what these other so-called progressive district attorneys have done and are doing in 25 cities throughout America. Supported, promoted, funded to a large degree by George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. He's been doing things like this for years, but this is really an insidious plot

that he's foisted upon us. And it has resulted in criminals knowing that they're going to work free. It resulted also to a large degree in bail reform, which has not worked well, certainly not in New York City. So another thing that has to be factored in is that in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, cities, counties, states throughout America overreacted and put all sorts of unreasonable rules and regulations upon the police. Now, there's a lot of discretion in policing. Cops can make a decision to act or not to act. So police are reacting by pulling back, by not engaging in the proactive strategies that

have been so successful, certainly in the 90 strategies that have been so successful in the, certainly in the nineties and in 2000. So the Ferguson effect. Well, that's right. Exactly. Ferguson effect, which is 2014. And we've seen a Ferguson effect to a certain degree up until George Floyd death. But then there was a sea change, a major sea change. Cops have gotten the message, don't do anything.

We don't want you to do anything. And they don't want to do very much because it jeopardizes their job, it jeopardizes their family's well-being. So unless we can remove or alter some of these restrictions, police understandably are going to be hesitant to engage, certainly in the way they were engaging prior to Ferguson. You can see it. I mean, if you're a cop out there right now, you see somebody like Kim Potter, who made the mistake of pulling her gun instead of her taser. And she's about to face a sentence that could be 15 years for a mistake.

Think how you're feeling about willingly intervening in a situation that may result in violence where the defendants in New York are now being told, don't worry about resisting arrest. We won't charge you with that. Resist all you want. Go for it. If you can get away, good on you, because according to this DA, we'll no longer be pursuing that crime. And by the way, it's in several cities now that we're seeing this so-called Ferguson effect where the cops pull back because they've been unfairly demonized by the press, by some of our leaders. And so they're thinking, why am I going to risk my life, my relationship with my family for this? Here are some of the stats. Chicago, 797 homicides in 2021.

That's 25 more than the previous year. It's almost 300 more than the year before that. Most since 1996 in Chicago. Philly, 559 people murdered last year. Most in the city's history. Los Angeles, 392 homicides as of the end of 2021, most of any year since 2007. Houston, 18% rise in murders over the last year. Austin, highest murder total since 1984. Portland, Oregon, highest murder total since 87. Rochester, New York, highest since 1991. I could go on. The murders are spiking in all of our major cities. And you know what's not spiking? Police killings of suspects. And the experts say that is an anomaly. Normally, when the murder rate goes up, the police killing of suspects goes up just because there's more interactions,

things can go south faster. It's not happening. And this expert was saying in one of the pieces I read, Ferguson effect, these cops are like, I'm not I'm not getting engaged. Yeah. Not getting out of the radio car like they used to. They're delaying their they're holding back because they are concerned, concerned that they're going to do something wrong or something perceived to be wrong, and their job is at risk. You know, 12 cities in the U.S. in 2021 had record-high murders, and the country had a 30% increase in murder in 2020, which we've never had before, never close to that. So I attribute so much to the abuse that cops have taken of these regulations and rules.

For instance, in New York City, the city council removed a qualified immunity defense, which is basically a good effort defense. So cops cannot use that in cases in the city, not federal cases, but cases brought in New York City. Now the city may or may not indemnify it. So that is a clear signal to hold back. In know, in many ways, the advocates for the funding of the police have gotten what they wanted because cops are leaving. New York City lost, I think it's about 5,500 police officers in a year and a half, about half the retirements and half to just leaving, to resigning. We've never seen anything like that before. So this is why I'm pessimistic. I think you're going to have to show a lot more support to police officers and perhaps

even remove some of these restrictions before we're going to see a major change. It would be nice if we had a DA in our city, in L.A., in San Francisco, in several of these cities that are seeing these crime rates who actually wanted to prosecute crime. Because while we elected a former cop as our new mayor, Eric Adams, and anybody's got to be better than de Blasio. But I mean, that's a low bar. And so he's he has the tough on crime rhetoric, the new mayor. But he doesn't make he doesn't bring the cases. The D.A. brings the cases who is elected separately. Alvin Bragg. And they think it's one of those things where it's like everybody in New York. It's when 87 percent for Joe Biden, they just do down ticket Democrat.

Dem, dem, dem, dem, dem. That's how we got Alvin Bragg, a guy who is much more fitted for the legal aid society, where I think he used to work for a time, than he is to run the Manhattan DA's office. They've had at least 12 DA's quit already, including one of the most famous that they had, the woman who prosecuted Harvey Weinstein, the woman who put poor little Eton Patz's killer in jail. She was great. They don't want to work for this guy because he's no longer going to be prosecuting several felonies. He doesn't believe in bail, of course. So people go right back out on the streets. Several crimes now are being treated as misdemeanors that aren't. He's rewriting the law with his own pen.

Right. Who does he think he is, an emperor? I mean, that is some nerve to go against the will of the people, to go against the legislation on the books, laws that are on the books, because he thinks it's somehow not fair. He had a gun held to his head, you know, as a kid. So what? That's not a rationale. You'd think that'd be a reason to be tougher on crime. But no, the memo follows a ridiculous path, saying that, as you just said, virtually is not going to enforce any felonies unless it's a murder. The whole tenor of the memo is to reduce crime to misdemeanors and absolutely consider incarceration as the last resort. So it's a pretty tough environment to try to reduce crime in a city that's had a very tough experience during the pandemic with crime. Exactly. try to try to reduce crime in the in the city that's had a you know very tough uh uh experience during the pandemic with crime exactly so he he also says we're not gonna i don't want anybody

in this office to seek a carceral sentence in other words jail time uh except with homicides and a handful of other cases like some domestic violence, felony, some sex crimes. So just a handful. Where are we going to seek jail time? Right. That's crazy. And when when bringing a case, you have to keep in mind the impacts of incarceration and so on and so forth. And then he says, you cannot if you're going to put a convict behind bars, you cannot request that they go behind bars for more than 20 years for any sentence that can't be reviewed or changed by a parole board. Meanwhile,

oh, and they say, and we shall not seek a sentence of life without parole, no seeking life sentences without parole. Meanwhile, those had only been used by the DAs in the worst of the worst cases. I mean, it's like serial killers, terrorists, cop killers, and people who kill children under the age of 14 in connection with sex crimes or torture. They were already reserved for the worst of the worst. And now he's saying, nope, we'll not be seeking any life without parole because he has concerns even about those guys. Yeah. It's a firecracker from Bob Morgenthaual and he was the da for 40 years and that office was the model for the rest of the country they used to come from overseas to observe the new york

county district attorney's office well that's uh that's long gone uh so we're in for a rough ride i know people are talking about the governor governor having the ability to remove a district attorney. That's never going to happen. This governor, you know, was not elected, appointed, wants to run again. She's not going to take on the Brad constituency. So we're going to have to see if he if he modifies position at all. But the question is whether the question is whether Eric Adams can lean on him sufficiently. He doesn't have the power to make him make these arrests, but can he lean on him sufficiently? But when you listen to Eric Adams, you know, the past week, it doesn't sound like

he has the motivation. I mean, that woman, that 40 year old poor woman who was shoved in front of the oncoming subway. It's disgusting. It's so disturbing that today there were pictures of New Yorkers refusing to go through the turnstiles to wait for the subway. They wouldn't get onto the subway platform. They were waiting behind the turnstiles where you slide your little card because they're worried about some lunatic shoving them on the tracks. Here she is, this poor woman, shoved and died. And what we hear from the mayor is, these are quotes, New Yorkers are safe on the subway system. Cases like this aggravate the perception of fear. The perception of fear. My husband just read Bill Bratton's book. He just came out with his biography, his autobiography. And Bill Bratton, of course, helped clean up New York City. And Bill Bratton talks in his book about how he went down to the subways and rode the subways and said to New Yorkers, the subways are safe. It's just a perception of fear, basically, is what he had deduced, that they were safe, but people felt like they weren't. And at that point in time, that was true. So it worked. He just needed to show them, right? But it's not true today. He can't just copy what Bill Bratton did and hope for the best. It is not safe down there. That's why this poor 40-year-old woman is dead. Yeah, well, you know, some practical things can be done. The cops have to be deployed onto the platforms. They were focused on fair evasion.

But here's a district attorney telling you he's not prosecuting any fair evasion cases. So those cops have to be visible on the platforms. There's not enough cops, obviously, to do every station, but that would be an important message. And they have to look at building barriers, which you see in other subway systems. I think there's actually barriers on the Union Square subway station in Manhattan. Yeah, it's expensive? Absolutely. But something has got to be done to get the

ridership confident about being in the subway system because New York will never come back. There's only 28% of the workers back in the offices in New York City. There's less than 50% ridership riding the subways now than it was pre-pandemic. And it's the key. It's the lifeblood of the city. And if people are not comfortable, people are not using it, the city is going to have a very rough road to hope. Yep. And you're right. They need more law enforcement down there. Transit crimes alone have soared 65%, more than 65% in the first two weeks of the year compared to 2021. Crimes in general are up more than a third in the first two weeks of this year compared to the same period in 2021.

Car thefts have doubled over the first two weeks. Grand larcenies are up 61 percent. Robberies are up 25 percent. Felony assaults up. I could go on. Murders, too. Felony assaults up. I could go on murders, too. That's just our city. And that's before we had the weird D.A. memo saying I'm not going to be prosecuting all these crimes. Right. So like that's New York in in San Francisco, in L.A.

They've got George Soros backed D.A.'s. The guy in San Francisco was raised by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, that Chesa Boudin San Francisco was raised by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, that Chesa Boudin. He was raised by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, who was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. I remember asking Bill Ayers about this. I'm like, oh, your wife, you know, I said she was on the 10 Most Wanted list. He goes, a lot of good people are on that list. I'm sure she's a peach. All right. So this is who's running the crime enforcement in San Francisco. There's a there's an effort to recall him. They want to recall Beverly Hills, the city council in Beverly Hills that just voted to recall. They want to recall

the L.A. prosecutor because he's another Soros guy, Gaston. He's not he's not prosecuting crime there. And the crime rates are so soaring it's what haven't we seen enough to know that this isn't working when you have the london i'm sorry the san francisco mayor london breed come out and be like holy we got to get on this this is insane we see the chips falling one by one it makes me wonder whether even the left is going to see your experiment is failing it doesn't work well we hope so But I think we're going to have to go lower, quite frankly, and down deeper before we get perhaps Bragg got only 86,000 votes in New York County. The borough has 1.6 million people in it. And same thing with de Blasio.

He had a very small voter turnout. So people have other things on their mind. I don't know why, because it certainly is a major issue and should be a major issue. But, you know, George Soros gave Alvin Bragg a million dollars. Now, that may not be, you know, a lot of money in today's political world, but it is a lot for a district attorney's race. And it made a big difference. I saw Alvin Bragg. I didn't vote for him.

I live in Manhattan. I saw a lot of ads for him and effective organizing and going on. So people are going to have to wake of people in office because there are organizations that are focused on getting these people into positions of power. It is just something that cries out for more attention. And I think, unfortunately, the crime situation will have to get worse before people really wake up. All right, let me ask you a question about two of the cases that I mentioned at the top with the young women, because the men who have been arrested in those cases seem, they have long criminal histories, and they seem not totally there, not all there. And we've had

a massive problem with homelessness, with criminals, with convicted criminals out on the streets who have mental disorders in Manhattan, free to roam, free to commit crime, and now, you know, free to avoid prosecution thanks to this DA. But I just want to show you in the audience a clip of these two guys, two of the guys, again, two of the cases I mentioned were in New York, one was in L.A. But here is this the man who is suspected of murdering this 40 year old woman in the subway is named Simon Marshall. I'm going to play you the tape. You can't really understand what he's saying. So forgive me. I'll tell you in advance. But I want you to see him. He yells, go F yourself. Only he says the word. The reporter says, why'd you do it? And he yells, yeah, because I'm God. Yes, I did. I'm God. I can do it. So let's watch him first. Oh my God. I mean, honestly, I mean, how many times have you been down the subway and seen somebody like that yelling crazy stuff and you just get your kids and you huddle against the wall so they can't do it i mean this is crazy then there's the burger king murder suspect

um who again took the life of this young girl who complied with his insane demands and gave over the cash register money and he knew about a second cash register and she was trying to get it open for him she didn't want to disobey anything the guy said he had a gun and he shot her to death anyway um his name is Winston Glynn. Again, I'm going to translate for you because you can't quite hear. He yells out, you know, they charge N-words every day. Where's our reparations for 400 years of effing slavery? America's going to burn. Listen. Oh, my gosh. So how does it factor in the number of people on the streets of Manhattan that are mentally ill, the number of people who are homeless, who have long

rap sheets and so on. You can't walk down the street in New York City for any length of time without seeing somebody who appears to have significant mental problems. Now it goes back to the 70s when the beds, when the hospital beds for people with serious mental problems were started to be removed and drugs were the answer. In other words, people had to take a certain amount of medication and that would be in place of being in an institution. But we're going to have to rethink that. We need to get people who are obviously a danger to the public and a danger to themselves,

we have to get them back into the institutions. And that's not politically popular, or at least it hasn't been. But we can't go on like this. And they seem to me to be a lot more aggressive. The aggressive panhandling is tantamount in some instances to a robbery. Demanding money and of course you see crimes committed like this. They all have a combination of mental

treatment and a criminal record. It's a major problem that I don't think the political superstructure is going to respond to this very well. But we have to get them off the streets. Again, it's critical to New York coming back. And you go to Midtown, you don't see people on the streets. Not just New York, right? You got L.A., this guy, there's a recall effort to get that guy out in L.A. There's a recall effort to get the guy out, as I mentioned, in San Fran. In San Francisco, 50-plus attorneys have resigned since Chesa Boudin took office in January 2020.

In Philadelphia, similar thing. George Soros backed D.A DA Krasner is his name, took office in 2018. Apparently he set about to Ivy League law schools and historically black universities when he took office inviting top grads to help him on this progressive prosecutor mission. About 70 of these recruits,

according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, have already left as part of an exodus that has included these young idealists and veteran prosecutors who realize this guy has no interest in prosecuting crime. they arrested the guy and he's 31. He they, they believe he's homeless, career criminal, lengthy rap sheet has arrested Charlotte, South Carolina, California. The cops are saying now he should be considered arms,

armed and dangerous. Okay. They didn't arrest him, but they identified him. And we have the video of this guy on camera as he, as he just calmly purchase a vape, a va-Eleven 30 minutes after he murdered allegedly Brianna Kupfer. This guy was free on a thousand dollar bond from a misdemeanor arrest in Los Angeles County. This is a this is a DA who has said he's going to he ran for office vowing to stop prosecuting many misdemeanors. All right. And this guy was free after having committed one. He hadn't he had failed to appear in court repeatedly, had a bunch of bench warrants out for him. Serious crimes do not just that. That one crime assault with a deadly weapon, carrying concealed weapon assault on a police officer, trespassing. I could go on. And when they asked this D.A. Gascon, a soros back guy for, for comment on this guy? Why was he out? No comment. No comment. They don't want to weigh in when their policies go south. They want to stay quiet. They want to skulk away. And they want to tell us that they're standing up for things like racial

justice and overcrowded prisons and keeping in mind the life of the defendant post-incarceration and so on. Does any of that matter? Should it be a factor? Go ahead, Ray. Go ahead. I'm sorry. No, you go. No, what I'm concerned about is, well, the same thing will happen in New York County, I'm sure, where competent, qualified attorneys will leave. But I'm concerned that they'll be replaced by individuals of a like mind to these district attorneys. So in a way, I don't think that these DAs are that upset about people leaving because I think there is a sort of a stream of like-minded people to take some of these positions

because it's an ideological fight for them. That's a very good point. In New York, you can't recall out in San Francisco to the DAs who left recently joined the recall effort. They're now actively campaigning to get this guy Chesa Boudin out of there. In New York, we don't have that mechanism. So we're stuck with this guy. I agree. I agree because the governor apparently can, Boudin out of there. In New York, we don't have that mechanism. So we're stuck with this guy. I agree. I agree. Because the governor apparently can remove and extenuating circumstances, but she's not going to touch it. We can get rid of her to be elected herself.

Yeah, we can get rid of her because she's she took over for Cuomo. But her time in office is limited, too. So she's going to face a challenge and we'll see what New Yorkers decide to do. Ray Kelly staying with us. We have much more to discuss, including what happened at that Texas synagogue. He's got thoughts on how. Don't forget, after 9-11, he was a big counterterrorism guy for our country. So we'll ask him about what happened there. And there is an update in that case.

OK, so we'll get to the terrorism situation in texas in just one second one thing i wanted to mention to you is there was an update um out of chicago about and of course they're facing record murder rates there which is saying something um nearly 100 murder suspects in the chicago area are at home right now, Commissioner. They are enjoying the comfort of their homes thanks to these soft on crime judges and the criminal justice reforms there. The sheriff of Cook County, his name is Tom Dart. He said twenty six hundred defendants are under home confinement and electronic monitoring right now. But he said he never wanted judges to use

that program for people charged with violent offenses. He's saying 75 to 80 percent of my people on home monitoring right now are charged with a violent offense. I didn't want that. I have about 100 people on home monitoring who are charged with murder, including at least one of them is accused of shooting and killing. Remember the shooting and killing of little seven-year-old Jocelyn Adams at a Westside McDonald's in April of last year? That made tons of news. That guy, that guy sitting at home, I'm sure he's going to be respectful of the ankle bracelet, but it's come to that. Yeah, well, they're using the pandemic as an excuse to do this, but it's happening for reasons more than just a pandemic.

It's a philosophical thing that a lot of people don't want to see anybody incarcerated. It's happened here at Rikers Island. Rikers Island has been pretty much empty. There's still prisons there, but so much of it has to do with the pandemic so it it's another issue because you can do things with an ankle bracelet too you know crimes of uh emotion uh you know domestic violence that that sort of thing uh will not be stopped by uh an ankle brace but it's a it's the world in which we live now. This permissiveness has got to, the pendulum has got to swing back,

but it's not going to happen anytime soon, I'm afraid. Well, what about the concerns that the people behind these softer on crime approaches say? They say, look, you know, prison can make a criminal like somebody who goes to prison over a crime, let's say they get a year sentence or something. They they they got prosecuted for an armed robbery, but the the gun didn't really go off. And, you know, he only brandished it for a minute and hadn't been in a lot of trouble before. Okay, if you send that kid to jail for a year, you make him a career criminal. He's surrounded by criminals.

There's obviously a lot of sexual assault in prisons and so on. So they say anytime you can reasonably divert somebody from prison, you should, because that will ultimately keep society more protected, more safe. What do you make of it? Yeah, that's what Alfred Bragg said in his memo. It's going to make us safer. Yes, that young man, though, cannot commit a crime against you or me for a year. And that is a valuable aspect of putting people away, incarcerating them, is they're not able to commit a crime. I want to be safe tonight. I can't concern myself as a citizen too much with what may happen a year or two years down the road.

I want those people to be separated from society. If it's for a year, fine. That means he's not committing crime. So you have to factor that that reality in making these decisions. What about the number of people who commit crimes because of drugs? Right. They're high on drugs. They're you know, they're out of their mind on drugs. every district attorney's office has a diversion program these days. So they're looking at that very closely. And there's merit in that. I think you have to look at each case individually. But if someone is just a user and maybe committed a crime to get money to use drugs. I think an argument can be made for people in that status to be diverted from the criminal justice system. But if they keep committing crime, then they have to pay the consequences in my journey. Yeah. Well, that's the problem is that we're not looking at individuals in New York and these other

cities. We're just looking at the offenses. And we're not looking at individuals in new york and these other cities we're just looking at the offenses and we're saying entire categories of crimes will not be charged will not be treated as the felonies they are will be treated as misdemeanors we're not looking at the individual circumstances so like we're missing opportunities to lock up serial criminals um who ought to be in jail i mean that that they were making a distinction the mayor uh i mean um d.a alvin brag was saying something like look the problem with you know the armed robbery is you got these cops arresting somebody from going in there you know it's like a pork chop the guy is that a dangerous instrumentality he whipped a pork chop pork chop at somebody that guy doesn't belong in jail and like okay but you know these guys we're talking about today they didn't use a pork chop at somebody, that guy doesn't belong in jail. And I'm like, okay, but, you know,

these guys we're talking about today, they didn't use a pork chop. They used a gun and they shot a young woman and they shoved a woman in front of the subway. And you never know if somebody pulls out a knife, a fake gun, a gun that's not loaded. These are the distinctions he's trying to make, whether that's going to lead another person to pull a gun on him, somebody to get shot in the crossfire. You know, why would we be telegraphing anything other than than strict law enforcement and you're going to jail if you try to rob or burglarize a store? Yeah, it makes no sense. And in the memo, he talks specifically about Section 160 of the penal law, one, two, and 3 that deal with guns specifically. And he still says in a memo that it can be reduced to misdemeanors.

So, you know, his message, I think his message is confusing his own head. You've got to look at specifically what he said in that memo. Yeah, you're saying he's saying he's going to reduce to misdemeanors, think crimes that the law says have to be treated as felonies. So he may be confused or he's just flouting law. We'll find out. You know what? What's of concern, too, is the fact that in the last couple of days, he's turned to a public relations firm to help his image, to get him to better perform on television or whatever. He's not looking at the substance. He's seeing it as a public relations matter, which I find to be concerning as well.

Yeah. No, he used to work for Preet Bharara. He was, I think he was at legal aid for a while, but he also worked in the U.S. Attorney's office under Preet Bharara. And now he's leaning on Preet for some sort of messaging. Apparently, he's going to give some speech saying the last two weeks have been a challenge. But no one cares. No one cares how it's been a challenge for you. You know, people are dying. Get it together. Start enforcing the law. That's why they put you in office. Nobody knew about your soft on crime policies. They just hit D. I don't believe New Yorkers want no law enforcement. I don't believe they want to say OK to resisting arrest and jumping the subway turnstile and, you know, armed robbery. I just I don't believe it. So you better watch it. He's about to give

a speech. I don't think he's going to dial it back. We'll see what New Yorkers do because they don't think so either. Quiet crowd. Yeah. OK, let's talk about what happened in Texas, because you, in addition to being one of our most respected police officers and commissioners ever, are a true counterterrorism expert. And that's where your career took you after 2002. Or you really spent a lot of time on that after 911. So what's happened down in Texas this past weekend appears to be an attempted terror attack by a guy from the UK who took four people hostage at a Jewish synagogue, including the rabbi. And there are real questions about what the heck this guy was doing in our country. He made clear he was there to protest. She was known as Lady Al Qaeda, who was in a nearby jail sentenced to 86 years or 87 years in prison after she shot or tried to shoot uh our military and uh police officers and had been

caught with the ingredients for um how to make a dirty bomb and all sorts of things anyway he wanted her gone she's a raving anti-semite and so is he so he comes over here he takes these guys hostage thankfully he got shot and he was the only one. But it turns out he does have a into custody over in the UK are his sons. So you tell me whether you think this guy should have been let in the country with a criminal history, terrorism sympathies and possibly also mental illness. Yeah. Well, what does it take have been on the no-fly list or at least questioned before getting on a plane to come to this country. I did a study of anti-Semitism in Europe for two years, so I'm pretty familiar with the issue. And in Europe, anti-Semitism is as high as it's ever been since World War II. But clearly, anti-Semitism is as high as it's ever been since World War II. But clearly, anti-Semitism played a role in him taking the hostages.

And I was disappointed in the FBI trying to characterize it as just his effort to free a Sidiqi. Anti-Semitism is a big problem. It's a big problem in this country. We have to continue to focus on it. And the FBI should very much be focused on it as well and not putting out statements that sort of poo-poo the threat. They have been overly sensitive to somehow besmirching or denigrating the Muslim

community in this country. And believe me, they are very, very quick to complain about it. But this was obviously had an anti-Semitic aspect to it. They corrected their position, but kind of too late. It showed that that's the default position, trying not to involve any ethnic group, God forbid. Yeah, you clearly have a radical Muslim in there who hates Jews. I mean, he made that pretty clear right from

the start and there's a real question about whether we have the appetite to go after such suspects uh in this administration i mean andy mccarthy over at national review wrote as follows how and he said the question naturally arises how energetic is our counterterrorism vetting of aliens seeking entry into the united states now that Biden has countermanded Trump's heightened vetting? You know, because Biden's first day he got rid of those executive orders by Trump seeking heightened vetting of guys like this. And Andy said, quote, When it comes to Western governments and jihadism, willful blindness is never fully cured. The pressing question, though, is whether it is back with a vengeance. What do you think?

Well, you never hear discussions of Islamic terrorism. They haven't heard it in the last year from the government. All you hear about is the threat of domestic terrorism, white supremacists, that sort of thing. I haven't seen cases brought against white supremacists. Where are the cases? Where are the leaks? Where are the arrests of these so-called domestic terrorists?

And I certainly hope that it's not the case that they're taking their eye off the external terrorist spread or the Islamic spread. Because that's real. That's ongoing. It's not going away. It's going to be fairly consistent. And, you know, all we have nationally to do these investigations is the FBI. So I hope that they haven't taken their attention away from international terrorism and domestic terrorism as far as radical Islam is concerned. Well, here's the reality. You have the FBI now saying this guy was not on their radar,

and people want to know why. Why not? Why he should have been, right? Like there's no way he should have been given a visa. And our partners over in the UK should have alerted us to him and we should have been on it as well. So the FBI says not on our radar. And meanwhile, the FBI is ready to go in case any parent at a school board meeting in America decides to continue speaking without his or her mask, because they've been identified by this group as possible domestic terrorists. Merrick Garland refused to stand down on sicking the FBI potentially on these parents, even after that school board association withdrew its letter and said, never mind, sorry. Now we know the whole thing was generated by the education

secretary Cardona anyway. And so that's what the FBI is doing. They're looking at the school board meetings for people who are not so nice in their rhetoric. They may say things to the school board that the school board members may not like, but they don't have this guy on their radar and they don't recognize anti-Semitism when they see it. Right. Exactly. And they have become, unfortunately, very political in the last few years. They're trying to read those tea leaves. And that was not the way it was. FBI has been a great institution throughout its history. But lately, they look so sensitive to the politics of a particular situation. That's not what they should be doing.

That's not what we want the Justice Department to be doing. But it looks certainly in the recent past like they've shifted to being hypersensitive to the politics of the particular administration that's in power. Well, Ray Kelly, you put in a lot of years of service. I think it's 45 years in the NYPD. You're a police commissioner, served honorably and revamped our police department into a world class counterterrorism organization. And for that, the city and yours truly, we remain very grateful. Great to speak with you. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Megan. Great to be with you. Want to tell you tomorrow, Tristan Harris, household name, thanks to the alarming documentary, The Social Dilemma on Tech. Don't miss it. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.