The Megyn Kelly Show - Jon Stewart's Gender Hypocrisy, and an Arizona Deep Dive, with Andrew Sullivan and Jeremy Duda | Ep. 408

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Andrew Sullivan, editor of The Weekly Dish Substack, to talk about the latest lies and very real effects of "gender affirming care," what's happening with "gender affirming surgery" and cross-gender hormones in America, how to help kids with actual gender dysphoria and how many are actually trans, Jon Stewart's latest ridiculous entry into the "what is a woman" conversation, the new cultural push to limit what it means to be a boy or girl, Stewart's hypocrisy on gender and sex, Kardashians and Madonna and the culture of narcissism, the need for role models of aging and not panicking, the downsides of fame, Meghan Markle's finding a way to think a Vanity Fair cover is racist, and more. Then we take a deep dive on key Arizona races with Jeremy Duda, reporter for Axios Phoenix, to talk about changing demographics in Arizona, the key issues of immigration and abortion, the tough challenge Blake Masters has to beat Mark Kelly, Kari Lake emulating Trump's style, the challenges of Katie Hobbs' public comments, and more. Masters has to beat Mark Kelly, Kari Lake emulating Trump's style, the challenges of Katie Hobbs' public comments, 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 and happy Monday. Later today, we're going to take a deep dive into another key state for you in advance of the midterms, like we did on Pennsylvania last week. And today we will take a look at two hugely important races in Arizona. Mark Kelly, Blake Masters, Carrie Lake, some very interesting candidates. But what are the storylines to watch as we are less than one month away now from Election Day? That's another state in which we might potentially see a split in how the GOP does at the gubernatorial level versus how they do in the Senate race.

We'll go on a deep dive there in just a bit. But we begin today with the Megyn Kelly show favorite, Andrew Sullivan. Over the weekend, the Vanderbilt Transgender Health Clinic officially, quote, paused its, quote, gender affirming surgeries. That's how you have to refer to it now. They're trying to remove all controversy from even the name. This is just an affirmation of what this child already is and somehow knew from the time they were in their cradle that they had been mislabeled by some errant doctor when it came to their biological sex. So this is just a gender affirming surgery. It ain't but a thing, even if it's a minor sitting here asking for a sex change. Okay, this Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt, this used to be one of the most respected universities and facilities in the country. And God bless the Daily Wire and Matt

Walsh who exposed what they were doing. They had, as I understand it and Matt Walsh, who exposed what they were doing. They had, as I understand it from Matt Walsh, they had a leak provided to them by one of the medical providers who was sitting there as this lunatic doctor running the program or at least health care coordinator running the program was talking about how you've got to do it. And if you've got a problem with doing this on minors, you may not belong at Vanderbilt. We're going to do all these procedures because they raise a lot of money.

They're expensive. We'll get into that in one second. This is Jon Stewart's Apple show is back. Insert barf emoji. With a new episode asking, like Walsh did recently, what is a woman? And then the press dutifully applauding Stewart's quote, humiliation of a quote, anti-trans official, someone who wasn't on board with Stewart's version of

trans rights. Andrew is the founding editor of the Weekly Dish newsletter on Substack and host of the podcast The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan. Andrew, welcome back to the show. Great to have you. Thanks for having me, Megan. Always good to see you. So much to get to. I'm so grateful that Matt Walsh on The Daily Wire exposed Vanderbilt. Truly, this is one of those colleges that you, you know, most people would pray their child would get into this facility very well respected and he had the goods of them on camera pushing these surgeries for minors and threatening doctors who were

uncomfortable with doing them saying you might not belong here if you've got a problem with this and now they've had to quote pause all of this while they take a closer look at what their program is doing. The report today from Morning Wire, which is the Daily Wire's morning podcast, sort of the answer to NPR's morning podcast, is they believe it will likely start back up because they say they're reviewing these WPATH recommendations in the course of reevaluating their work. And I know you've done some reporting on this group. That's basically the transgender group and what they recommend. And if that's going to be the standard, they're going to open right back up for business again soon. Well, I think the thing that's interesting to me is that it didn't really take much exposure because these medical centers

are quite open. There's no hidden agenda here. They put out videos on their websites advertising for these procedures. There is nothing surreptitious about it, actually. All that Matt Walsh and others have done is simply give them a broader audience. And so what you have is really a consensus that's developed within this rather sequestered medical culture, which has led to the normalization of the idea that children, even prepubescent children, can and should be put on a drug that's called Lupron or puberty blockers, and then go on to cross-sex hormones and also have mastectomies, breast removal in their early teens, or even, of course, in fact, at some point, castration. Now, for me, the question is, how did it get to the point where this was regarded as completely banal?

Of course, this is just care for children. And I think it's partly because the medical world was not public or very open about the policies it was pursuing. People were not quite aware that this was going on to the extent that it has been. And so people are naturally a little shocked. But the truth is this therapy, which was developed in the late 90s in the Netherlands, which is the idea that you block children's puberty when they feel discomfort around puberty, and then you wait a little bit, and then you give them cross-sex hormones to become the other sex, was really an experimental regimen. There are no long-term clinical trials of puberty blockers on children, none that have been shown to look at the long-term

effects of these drugs on people. There are very few good studies that even show that there's even slight improvement in kids' mental health who are trans if they go through these procedures. So I think what's happening is we're finally, finally actually having a public debate about this. Like, is this the right thing to do for children, for a certain type of children? Is it not? And when you look at the data, and there have been serious reviews of this data now, of this particular new protocol, both in Britain, in Sweden, in the Netherlands, and other parts of Europe, they are fast coming to the conclusion this might have been a bit

over the top, that they may have been rushing children into decisions that they weren't actually in a position meaningfully to take, that in fact there is not good evidence behind this procedure that sometimes helping kids who do have what's called genital dysphoria grapple with it psychologically first, maybe even socially, before you take these irreversible steps to change a kid's life forever. I mean, if you are blocked, if your puberty is blocked, you will have long-term impact on your brain development and your bone development. If you are put on cross-sex hormones early, you will have to be on those cross-sex hormones for the rest of your life, decades and decades of treatment. And the question really is, as more and more of

this has become public, is do we really think that children, children, even before they have gone through puberty, are genuinely capable of making these kinds of drastic decisions? And have we made mistakes? Have we given these protocols to the wrong kids? And it seems to me that pausing is the least we can do and examine much more closely what these procedures are doing, whether there's really good evidence that they're working. Instead, what you've had is this shutdown of any speech, this view that anyone criticizing this, people like me who've long been an advocate for trans rights, who is concerned about children. It's a different question. That's right. I mean, what adults want to do, I have absolutely no objection to.

People want to change their sex or their sex appearance, and they want to become someone, a member of the opposite sex. I am fully in favor, tolerant of that. But when it comes to children, we have to have a higher standard. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well said. I saw you recently tweeted out numbers on this, that there had been 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from

2019 to 2021. I think that was domestically. And pointing out not many, not a huge number, but more than any activist group has admitted 56 genital surgeries among patients 13 to 17 over the past few years. And that's horrifying. That's on minors, on minors. As Abigail Schreier's book calls it, irreversible damage can happen just with hormones, nevermind surgeries. And you're talking about, I mean, if they perform a genital surgery going female to male, you basically lose your arm as a woman, as a girl, excuse me. They hack your forearm up to the point where all that's left is a couple of tendons and bone to create a penis. And even if you're short of that, you just do cross-gender hormones as a girl going to boy. Abigail pointed

out on our show two years ago, you can basically grow, forgive me, this is graphic, but you can basically grow a small penis as a woman out of the clitoris, one that no one would find visually appealing, that will not work the way a normal penis works, that would probably be horrific to most people. It's like something out of a horror film. None of this is understood by these girls being told, yeah, yeah, you're a boy, you're a boy. And by the way, gender dysphoria traditionally only affected males, people who were identified as male and thought, no, I think I'm actually a woman, not the other way around. So all of this is alarming. And I think I saw you tweeting out about a person online named Casey Miller, who's been documenting their regrets about transitioning.

This is somebody who was born female, who thought that she wanted to transition to male and has made the following. I'm just going to read Casey's tweets saying, if the current system is misdiagnosing people at all, nevertheless, at its current rate, it's broken. Generally speaking, when else has a model of care been allowed to misdiagnose people as frequently as quote gender affirming care does? She goes on. I don't hold it against the medical professionals personally. I believe they were acting in good faith, but they missed quite a few red flags, she's talking about in her

case, that would have indicated that more was at play than just simple gender dysphoria. We followed medical advice. It didn't fix much of anything. I continued to struggle. I continued to be suicidal, albeit for different reasons. And that was my reality. That is my reality. Here's Casey Miller online in a video showing what five years of cross-gender hormones from female to male has done to Casey. When I talk about being too far gone, I don't really know what else to call it. This is what I mean. This is how deep my voice is. It's gotten deeper over time and it's settled. This is what I mean by hair loss.

And it just keeps getting worse. It keeps thinning. It keeps receding backwards. You know, and I'm not exactly sure that's coming back. Those are the main things when I talk about being androgenized to a point of no return. I really don't see those being fixable. I don't really see me personally being able to come back from what's happened so far. So this is what happens when you give a woman testosterone for five years. This is what happens, essentially. So, you know, that's it. Stay safe.

Poor Casey. The system failed this person. I've met and talked to many kids, kids, young adults grappling with some of this. And the truth is that when you think of drugs, you tend to think of something that comes into your body and leaves it, does some purpose or other. But switching core hormones is not like a drug. It is reprogramming your entire body to regenerate itself in a different mode. And obviously, that will have profound effects that are not reversible. Like your deep voice as a woman, if you want to go back to being a woman, you will never get a higher voice again.

I would say one of the things that most concerns me, and this has been admitted in some of the workshops that we also have videos of, again, this is not secret, actually, is that if you take a little boy before puberty and you invert his little baby penis inside out so that it becomes the glands becomes the clitoris, you can ensure that he never grows up to have a real adult penis. You will also, however, remove the possibility of him or her, depending on what you want to call her, ever having an orgasm, ever. Now, it strikes me that a child told, you know you won't be able to have an orgasm after this, and the child says, well, what's an orgasm? Mm-hmm. says well what's an orgasm at that point you say we can't this kid cannot conceivably consent when they have no idea what's going to happen to them to me removing from a human any human

the ability to have an orgasm is such an invasion of someone's sexual being, someone's personal being. It's not something you would do lightly. And of course, the argument given is that, and this shows you how weak the positive arguments are, because essentially they eventually come down to, well, we accept all these problems. We accept all these difficulties. We're not going to deny these things. But if we don't do it, the kid will kill himself or herself. That's what Casey said, Andrew, just to interject quickly. Casey Miller said, we acted out of desperation. And she, I think Casey means Casey's mother, trusted highly trained professionals at a reputable children's hospital, children's hospital, that this was the right thing to do. She was told that if I didn't transition,

there was an almost 50% chance I would commit suicide. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, well, that's a low estimate given what most parents are told. They're told, do you want to have a live girl or a dead boy? And that's the kind of choice that parents are being presented with. Can you imagine what a family goes through when they are told that? I think, I mean, one of the things that I do think is important is that we don't lose sight of the human beings involved here. We don't get too caught up in rhetoric without recognizing there are children with gender dysphoria, acute gender dysphoria, who need help and who need treatment and I believe need thorough mental health examinations, not in an accusatory way, not in a hostile way, but in a way to fully understand why

this kid might be believing that he or she is the opposite sex, which can be adduced to many different factors apart from being actually transgender. For example, the correlation of autistic kids and kids who believe they're in the opposite sex is very high. The background of children who have gender dysphoria, who have serious issues with their parents or are in a household with extreme tension or drama, they too are highly correlated with this. In other words, the kids can get fixated in ways that are not healthy, are not true, but they're children. And especially when they are on the neurodiverse spectrum, in other words, they have very high levels of intelligence. They can become very, very adamant about things that

are not true, but they require through their mental health to insist are true. And that requires really sensitive and important mental health treatment and examination. And if at the end of that it is understood this kid is transgender, genuinely transgender, has nothing to do with other things, then I think you can talk about treatment. So I'm going to be called wishy-washy, but I don't want the government to come and ban all this stuff. Because I do think there are possibly a few cases in which it could be justified. And I'm trying to take into account the feelings of those children and parents involved in this. It isn't just invented. I know what you're saying. I know what you're saying. It's tricky because I too have known

and have met adults who they've told me, you know, that they knew from the time they were two. These are people born boys and who said, I think I'm actually a woman and said, you know, I knew it my entire life. What's happening right now is very different from that case. And they're just almost bastardizing those cases. You know, it's like those cases are getting lumped in with these other people who may have autism, who may be socially awkward, who may be looking to fit in. And there is a difference between those two groups. There is. And there's a very specific group that we have seen that has emerged in the last 10 to 15 years that we never saw before, which is young adolescent girls suddenly deciding that they are boys or men. Now, in early adolescence, this has been called by Abigail,

rapid onset gender dysphoria. But it certainly seems to be a phenomenon here. For example, you've seen stratospheric rises in the number of people who are being referred to gender clinics in the UK and throughout Europe and America. And you could argue, well, this is simply because we're becoming more tolerant of trans people and therefore it's possible to, this is just simply like when people were left-handed for the first time and suddenly it became less of a taboo to be left-handed, we suddenly saw there were many more left-handed people in society.

And that possibly is part of it. But what that doesn't explain and can't explain is why the rise in young girls is so much higher than among young boys. In other words, there seems to be this early adolescent rush among many teenage girls, many of whom are in the same social circles and dynamics, to suddenly transition to be men. And that is brand new. Haven't seen that before. And if that doesn't send up a red flag to be careful, because social contagion is not unknown among teenage girls in a whole variety of ways.

And, and when, when they come and tell you, you know, me and my five girlfriends are all becoming men next week, mom, you have every right to say, what? Hold on. Stop. The trouble is that in my view, having looked at this, the medical authorities have become politicized. Quick, wait. So before you make this point, can I ask you about this?

Because when we were talking about the genital mutilation, I mean, that is what it is, either by hormone or by surgery. And you were talking about the orgasm issue. It reminded me of genital mutilation that is done in the radical Islamic population to young girls in the name of religion. Andrew, this feels akin to that in some ways, where we are allowing parents to mutilate the genitals of their children. In these cases, the children are saying, OK, I want it, which is not always the case in the radical Islamic groups. Just ask Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But it's also a sort of form of religion, this like radical trans ideology of my child has said it, therefore it is true. And I'm a bigot if I don't take it to its extreme or even worse, the parents who start at ground zero, refusing to accept a label of boy or girl from a doctor in the nursery, instead actually

calling their child a baby and saying they'll figure out their gender as they age. It is a form of abuse. And then your child's like, yeah, I got labeled the wrong thing. And you're going to let them cut off their penis at age 10. And you're going to have a doctor affirming it. And then a surgery center at age 13 saying we'll do it I just see the two is now parallel lines go ahead well you have two separate things going on here one you do have the absolute verified existence of transgender people in every culture and time we know this is the case that a very small minority of people genuinely do feel inside their very being

that somehow they've been misaligned physically. That's real. It's always been there. It deserves treatment. Then there is an ideology that says, in fact, that the sex binary, the fact that there are only men and only women as the choices available to humans, is itself an aspect of white supremacist thought that the goal of liberation is to be liberated from the prison, as it were, of these binary choices. That, in fact, what we need to do in society is rid every institution and every word even from any understanding that there are just two sexes so that we liberate everyone from having to conform to sex stereotypes. And this is the political goal. And the trans people are a device, in my opinion. It may be, again, I don't want to get to the point,

the idea that people are badly intentioned. Many of them are well-intentioned. They've just drunk the Kool-Aid and think, in fact, for example, that there is a third sex somehow for humans. There is not. There are two sexes, but there are variations within them. There are. There are a small number of people who are intersex. It just happens in nature that people have slightly different genitalia appearance and certain combinations of different kind of chromosomes, which are slightly different

from everybody else. Less than half of 1% of humanity has this. It doesn't disprove that the rule is male and female. In fact, all they have are a mixture of male and female. There isn't some third entity in here. Mm-hmm, that's right. And so what they're doing is using the genuine feelings and needs of this clinical minority to facilitate the imposition of a much more thoroughgoing ideology in which sex itself, biological sex, is abolished, in which what your body is has no relationship to the sex you are, that everything is interchangeable, and that there are 54 plus different genders. Now, this is a function of critical gender theory, critical queer theory. It is separate from the genuine

medical needs and psychological needs of actual transgender children. Right. That's what's so offensive about it. And they have been fused. Yeah. That's what's so offensive about it, that this community has taken a legitimate problem that a very small percentage of the population suffers from and expanded it into this woke ideology and trying to bend the rest of society to their knees if they don't support it. And rational people understand this isn't real. You're bastardizing something to the detriment of everyone.

Okay, so enter Jon Stewart. I'm sorry to bring him back up. I know you had a negative experience on his show, which we talked about the last time. But this is making the rounds today. And I've had many negative experiences with Jon Stewart, for the record. So he decides to come in. By the way, he has a long history of bigoted comments, remarks, jokes, misogynistic comments, remarks, jokes. He is in no position to be lecturing any of us on issues like gender or race or misogyny. No position. But he comes out and here's the here's a bit of the open from his latest episode

on his Apple show that no one other than my producers apparently is watching. Here's a bit. It wasn't always like this, people. As recently as, let's say, the 1990s, early 2000s, people were making shitty, reductive jokes about this subject. What can I say? The joke rhymed. Shitty and reductive jokes are kind of my brand But as we know from history Any moment of progressive visibility Will be met with a vicious backlash There are two genders There are two genders and everyone knows it

There ain't but two genders That last guy sounded like it's an emergency And we're running out of genders everyone there ain't the two genders i don't want to have to start rationing genders then he went on to suggest that arnold schwarzenegger saying girly girl and people talking about you know man's man girly girl what was it steve whatever it was a girly girly girl, and people talking about, you know, man's man, girly girl, what was it, Steve? Whatever it was, a girly man, girly man, that all of these set the stage for an admission

by the rest of the world that gender is a spectrum. You see, that's what they were really acknowledging. And that any pushback now is artificial, like that you've already admitted it, you've given up the game by taking those those positions and then goes on to cross examine the Arkansas attorney general on on why states don't listen to the experts on what these children need. Here's how that went. All of those physicians, all of those experts, for every single one of them, there's an expert that says we don't need to allow children to be

able to take those medications. That there are many instances where- But you know that's not true. You know it's not for everyone, there's one. These are the established- Well, I don't know that that's not true. I don't know that- Then why would you pass a law then if you don't know that that's true? Wouldn't you have done something? Well, I know that there are doctors

and that we had plenty of people come and testify before our legislature who said that, we have 98% of the young people who have gender dysphoria that they are able to move past that. And once they have the help that they need, no longer suffer from gender dysphoria. 98% without that medical treatment. That's an incredibly made-up figure. I'm sorry, but that's such douchebaggery.

Well, here's the thing, Megan,'s such douchebaggery. He doesn't know anything. Well, here's the thing, Megan, just on that very last point. That figure is out of her head. That's not a correct figure. It's over 70%. Well, you don't know that that's over. It's about 80%. But she's saying she had experts come and testify before Congress, before the Arkansas State Legislature on it.

I haven't gone back and listened to that hearing. I don't know that that's not true. I wasn't somebody who voted on it, so I don't need to know. But it's very possible somebody came in and said we did a study at this at the following clinic and found that 98 percent will come out of it if left alone. Abigail Schreier, who we've talked about, her book said indicate nearly 70 percent of kids who experience childhood gender dysphoria and are not affirmed or socially transitioned eventually outgrow it well you and i've talked before about how a lot of these kids just wind up being gay they're not trans so the number is high it's very high it's probably upwards of 70 perhaps upwards of 88 but him saying the numbers 98 we don't know that did he did he listen to the hearing i guarantee you he didn't Well, there have been the trouble is the statistics on this are very hard to get. As you can imagine, it's very hard to have find these kids early and have large studies which have any kind of blind controls on them.

It's very different. But we do know this, that lots of kids have some sort of conflict with their sex. I mean, and mostly they're gay. Let me give you, let me tell you about myself because this might help. I, as I was approaching puberty and I could see that something, these things were going to happen to my body. And I tended not to be into team sports. I did not reflect the stereotypical rough housing boy. I was more withdrawn. I was quieter. I was interested in books. So I'm like, well, can I function as a male? Will I function as a male?

And at some point, it was like, I don't know. I'm slightly panicked. I don't know. A lot of kids before they go through puberty get these panics. But I went through it, partly because no one gave a shit anyway back in those days, excuse my language. And as I went through it, it resolved everything. Because as a human, that's what happens. When puberty happens, you are transformed.

You begin to understand what your sex is why it makes you different than the other sex you come to love it you come to embrace it um it doesn't have to become an obsession but it becomes very important to me for example and for many gay boys to be reminded that you are a boy just because you don't behave typically according to the way most boys behave it doesn't mean you're a girl it doesn't in fact you can have two sexes and a variety vast variety of ways to express being male or female. Much more interesting diversity of how you do that than simply this other thing that Jon Stewart brought up, which is that there is a spectrum that goes from G.I. Joe to Barbie, and you have to fit somewhere in the middle of that. What on

earth is that? What's strange is the progressive ideology is presenting us with the most hoary old stereotypes, telling gay children if they don't live up to certain stereotypes, they could be the other sex. Right. why I am particularly frustrated that the perspective of gay people has been subsumed within the LGBTQIA plus movement. Yes. Which seeks to essentially remove us. Yes. Yeah. So I think I've told you this before, but one of my good gay friends is like, why do we have to share letters with them? It's not working out. We're not in the same group with the same interests. But I will tell you, Stuart's whole bit was about taking aim at Matt Walsh, too, on what is a woman mocking Tucker for saying there are only two sexes and is evidence that they these are hypocrites who don't know what they're talking about is clips where, for example, you've got women from Fox saying I was a tomboy growing up. That's somehow an acknowledgement that there are more than two biological sexes, that there's more than two genders. No, it's not. As you said, and I've short formed it the following way. We're big tent. We women, we have a big tent. Guys, you have a big tent. You can be gender nonconforming and still be a man. You can be gender nonconforming

and still be a woman. It's not hypocritical to have said I'm a tomboy and then say there are only two sexes. And Jon Stewart is in no position to be lecturing anyone on this. I mean, you look honestly, look, go back and look at his history, because I was at Fox News when he was doing all of this. And I remember of all places, Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera wrote an article about him after he attacked yours truly while I was on my maternity leave with my baby um and their their headline at al jazeera was the daily show has a woman problem um women were constantly constantly belittled on his show for being women this piece points out valerie plame the cia uh you know spy who was outed he called her a fuckable blonde laura bush joked about her being

covered in horse semen condi rice suggested she may may have earned her secret service nickname ping pong ball uh you know the old-fashioned way they were accusing him of lazy sexist jibes and asking the following why does the show not hold itself to the feminist yardstick by which it measures the rest of the world this as he accuses you of being a bigot on his show and Bill Donahue of the Catholic League pointed out, this is a guy who defended a comedian who picked on black, a black couple in the audience in 2008, that a black writer for Jon Stewart came out and accused him of using racist voice impressions, which he did in imitating Herman Cain, which Herman Cain came out and said was an Amos and Andy impression,

not an impression of Herman Cain. Then the black writer raised it again with Stewart. Stewart again screamed at him, apparently reportedly to F off. The guy had an emotional breakdown after Stewart's treatment of him. This is all documented in the Bill Donahue piece and also in the Al Jazeera piece, not to mention the stuff he says about the Catholic Church. So he can take a seat on lecturing anybody about what a woman is or isn't and bigotry, because he's the expert. He should keep it quiet. Take a seat. That's it. Okay. Well, I'm not going to add to any of that or subtract from it. I will say this though, Megan, is that notice the way in which the words sex and gender are used. Now, this gender was introduced as an idea to say it's separate from sex. You have your biological sex, which is, are you male or female? Then your

gender, which is what kind of male or what kind of female are you, right? But notice that they now fuse the two, use them interchangeably. So to say there are two genders, I think is just not true. There are two sexes and many different genders, as it were. And the other point I would make is that without sex, there's no gender. If you don't have a core male identity, how can you play off it? How can you be a different kind of man unless you have the raw material of being a man? Go back to the 1970s, not a woke era, not an era in which transgenderism was, and go look at David Bowie. Go look at Freddie Mercury. Go look at all the glam rock guys. That was androgyny. That was experimentation. That was a way in which you could use the fact that you were a man, and God knows David Bowie was absolutely a man, but could play with it because he was a man. You can have a whole variety of different gender expression within a world of two sexes. And there are only two sexes. Our reproductive strategy as a species, Megan, is male and female.

I'm sorry, but it's true. We're not aliens from outer space. We're like every other species on this planet. And our reproductive strategy is binary, binary, binary. Now you can have a few variations on that theme, but does the few exceptions prove or disprove the rule? I think they prove the rule. It doesn't mean that you can't accommodate the tiny minority of people who need to be accommodated, but you don't have to invalidate the entire experience of the vast majority of human beings for all of human history. It's absurd. And you certainly don't have to start mutilating children because they affirm your own worldview, your own far. I don't even know if it is left, but just woke worldview that is off the reservation.

But there's a lot more to get to and why I have hope, why I have hope after seeing Kim Kardashian at the L.A. Rams game this weekend. I'll play you the SOT. so just to pick it up where we left it off i will say this having watched the stewart bit um he's lost it he's not only irrelevant i mean no one's talking about him we decided to do it just because we were having you on and i have a history with him too it's fucking annoying but anyway um he's lost it and even even the audience knew it. He could get no more than just a smattering of applause. They weren't with him. He's out of step. He will not run for president, as Politico suggested at one point. He has no more of a constituency now. And I think he knows it. Just no one cares. Well, I don't know what to make of it, really, to be honest with you, Megan.

Except he's not interested, it seems to me, in the truth. I mean, it's a really interesting story what's happening with transgender medicine right now. There is serious debate within transgender medical authorities about the best way to go forward. There have been reverse decisions in Europe. This is an open question. You could have had an expiration. You could have had, for example, when she said 98%, he should have said, well, it's 80%. Well, what does that mean about gay kids? You could have had someone on that panel who had a

slightly different point of view, someone reasonable. He didn't want that. They don't want debate. They don't want to raise the strongest points against them. They want to propagandize, and they don't just want to propagandize. They want to propagandize from the highest horse you can imagine, condemning others who might disagree with them for completely good, honest reasons, as somehow bigots, as somehow people who hate,

this is the word they say all the time, hate trans people. I am allegedly a trans hater, even though I've spent my entire life defending the rights of trans people, and I will defend them as adults until the day I die and will respect their dignity. But I'm concerned that children are a different matter and that we have to be very, very, very, very careful. Now, that's not big. I agree with your analysis. Yeah, I agree with you. You're right. It is an interesting debate. I mean, it's horrifying. But any honest broker would pause and say, yeah, we should talk about it. Like and let's say let's say Stewart was right that it's not 98 percent that the the AG was wrong. It's at least 70. It's it's hovering in the high 60s to low 70s. Worst case scenario uh for the side that doesn't want to see this you know be doled out

like candy to children these procedures um why wouldn't he deal with that that disease that deserves some reckoning he's not interested in the actual issue he's interested in dunking on a republican for yucks from his liberal audience that's what he's about. He's about proving that all these people are morons or bigots. That was the goal. And in fact, what you see with Chase Strangio, one of the people who was on his shows, the ACLU trans person, he congratulated Stewart on having learned, gone through a learning process before he did this show. In other words, that he directed the ideology and content of the show. And what Jon Stewart asked himself is, what is the most left-wing position on this? And how can I make it seem as if it's the only legitimate one,

and that any other position is bigoted and moronic? That's the game. And the truth is, it's boring. It's not interesting. It doesn't add to anything. All it does is heap self-righteousness upon self-righteousness, and is not in any way either comedy or journalism. And just to go back to the actual point with the Arkansas AG. So she says, for all the physicians that he was citing you know who think the children need to transition or they're going to self-harm etc she says for every single one of them there's an expert that says we don't need to allow children to take these medications there are instances

where he cuts her off no you don't know that's true you don't you you know it's not for everyone there's another one and she says no i don't know that and he does this gotcha like well why would you pass a bill if you don't know what she's saying? No, he's claiming, you know, what you're saying is false. And her response is, no, I do not know that. I know nothing of the kind. And his gotcha is, well, if you don't know, why would you pass a bill? The logic is faulty. He's lost a step. His mind isn't doing as well as it used to because the old Jon Stewart would never have caught himself in such a stupid failed trap. But even if he were right that there is not a physician to respond to every single one who's saying transition or they'll kill themselves, transition or they'll self-harm, there's a reason for that the entire medical community has decided to self-censor they've decided to tell doctors who have young people coming into their offices the standard of care is to affirm you could get in trouble if you choose to do anything like what you were saying andrew which is an honest exploration with the child of what's actually going on in his or her life so once, he misses the point entirely. And as you point out, it's for a reason because he was agenda driven.

Yep. Everything you say, Megan, I think I think you're correct. And look, the truth is the medical authorities are divided to some extent. That's why their recent guidelines removed any lower age limit and asked for much more caution. In other words, they asked for more caution because they realize something's going wrong here. And they want to... I'm sorry, I... Well, wait, let me ask you a question about that, because that group we talked about, WPATH, right? I'm trying to find, let me ask you a question about that, because that group we talked about WPATH, right? I'm trying to find the actual what that stands for. It's like World something of trans.

Professional Association for Transgender Health is the thing. Now, you will notice. So they got rid of the age limit. They want the age limit gone, but they want more caution. I thought they just wanted to have more caution. They want the lower age limit removed because, and they even say this explicitly, if they put a real age limit in there and a doctor did it below that,

then they will be vulnerable to lawsuits. In other words, they are hedging their guidance to protect doctors from lawsuits, which are going to come in large numbers in future years. That's what they're doing. This, by the way, in the same guidelines, chapter nine talks about why eunuch identity is just as valid as transgender identity. This is horrifying. And that people who are eunuch identified, I'm using their words, should have a right to

castrate themselves. And we need to actually facilitate this. So when people say medical authorities, they're talking about medical authorities in this particular niche. And within that niche, there are lots of people who are quite seriously bonkers and and and if you think that being a gender being a unique identified person is bizarre john stewart should understand that's the medical authority that you're relying on oh my lord that's the medical these are these these and the point is look i've been a long time with medical authorities. I'm HIV positive. The one thing I

know is you ask questions. You do not take things on authority. This is the gold standard for journalism. Do not take something simply because it's backed by an authority. He's not a journalist. He's not a journalist. He's a comedian who tries to act as a social commentator, arbiter of truth, but he's actually not tethered to the truth. And whenever he's caught, he falls back on his, I'm a comedian trope, which doesn't excuse his lack of diligence or adherence to the truth. All right, stand by, Andrew. Yeah, go ahead. I'll give you- You're getting older. I'm getting older. Yeah, one minute. Go ahead.

Jon Stewart's getting old. I don't really care. Jon Stewart is desperate to be loved by people coming out of Harvard and Ivy League schools today. He wants to win their applause. So he's sacrificing whatever he can to be as woke as he can to appeal to that particular demographic, because he's scared he's becoming irrelevant, which is sad. It's not going to work because nobody's watching his show and there are younger, more exciting people for them to watch now. So we'll see how I think season two is probably going to go the way season one went after he attacked you and showed his true colors. We have to get to the moment Kim Kardashian attended the L.A. Rams game. There's a good reason why I want to talk about it.

Andrew, you may not know you have thoughts on this, but you do. So I'm going to pause, come back to Andrew Sullivan in two minutes. 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 east. So if you want to listen to us live, it's always fun to do. You can catch the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly,

or you can download the audio podcast on anywhere you get your podcast for free. And I'm curious about your thoughts on all this. You can email me at megyn, at megynkelly.com now. Okay. Email me, megyn, M-E-G-Y-N

at megynkelly. com. Now, do you think Jon Stewart is still a relevant social commentator? If, as I feel you do not, why did we just spend all that time on him? Because he attacked Andrew in the most vicious and nasty way just a few months ago. And he has a long history of doing the same to me. And I just felt the need to remind the audience of who this is, who this moral arbiter of us all actually is. And there's a reason. No one's watching. Okay. MeganCalley.com with your thoughts. Send me an email and I may read them on the air. We're going to start doing that now at the end of the show. We'll be right back with much, much more on Kim K and others.

So, Andrew, I read you writing recently that narcissism is everywhere. And this is in the wake of the Queen's death. And you were juxtaposing the Queen to this new subset of England and America and the world that is just completely narcissistic and self-obsessed. And that is what leads me to Kim Kardashian. And I don't think that Kim Kardashian is at heart a bad person. I hate what she's come to stand for, what she represents, what kind of an influence she has over our society and in particular our little girls, of which I have one. And I've had it with her narcissism and her endless vanity. And I pointed this out before. Last week, it also came out that she's a rules don't apply to me kind of person because she got pursued for unpaid taxes. Like so many of these rich people, she decided the rules would not

apply to her. She didn't pay her taxes on a certain portion of income she had. And she was forced by the feds to pay over seven figures to make the bill correct. The rest of us don't get away with that, right? Neither should she. does to a an nfl football game she lives in california she goes to an la rams uh that dallas cowboys game out there and the giant jumbo cam found her what a shock and they booed her they booed kim kardashian is because the country's getting sick sick of narcissistic, vain, self-promotional, rules-do-not-apply-to-me type of people like her, like Meghan Markle. And I do think one of the reasons it's in the ether is because the death of the queen and the reminder of what used to be, what once was, what we used to once revere versus this false god of money and materialism and selfie culture and weird decisions on extreme plastic surgery that one refuses to acknowledge, infecting it into the bloodstream of our little ones, and so on. Your thoughts?

Oh, I don't even want to really add anything to that, except have you seen the latest photographs of Madonna? Oh, my God. What's going on with her? I don't know. I mean, I have to say, you know, I love Madonna back in the day. And she's an amazing artist. She's done extraordinary things. But I guess what happens is that you become

addicted to youth and fame and there are methods in which you can kind of look younger in which so many people now they're they're developing faces that really aren't faces at all they're masks and they become permanently fixed on their face. The sort of, you know, the Nancy Pelosi permanently startled look, where you are constantly, your eyes are constantly furiously open, and your skin is incredibly taut. And, and it comes a point at which, you know, I think of Jared and Ivanka, who, when you know i think of jared and ivanka who when you at a distance now you their two faces are becoming exactly indistinguishable because they're both strange human features in a white bland wrinkle-free shape-free soup um and yeah and then

you look at the queen you look at someone someone who had this incredible amount of exposure placed upon her very young. She wasn't even intending to be queen, this happened because of the abdication of her uncle. years, never said something that drew attention to herself, never engaged in some crass attempt to please people who kept every single public engagement she was supposed to keep, who lived up to every rule she was supposed to live up to, which is incredibly difficult to be that public and have not a single opinion of yours be known. Imagine that, 70 years of doing that, the discipline, the service, the humility actually to realize I'm just here because I happen to have the right genetics and I'm just plonked here on a huge, big throne, but I'm going to do my job and I'm going to do it well.

And I'll tell you when she died and you saw those scenes, it's because so many people deep down, yeah, they'll buy the tabloids and they'll love the celebrity stuff and they will gobble it all up because it's like candy, but they will respect and revere someone who chose a different path and as long as that exists and i i i think william and charles are hoping to do the same thing uh then we have a public realm that is not entirely despicable yes yes But also it tells you, these people aren't happy, are they? They're not happy.

The Queen's level of self-restraint was staggeringly rare. Yes, exactly right. And you wrote, you need only look at those around her, from her husband to her children, to see just how hard it is to lead a life that doesn't wind up in the tabloids or the headlines for the wrong reasons. Let alone Meghan Markle, who got there for 10 minutes and immediately tried to turn it into some celebrity Hollywood stardom, utterly, utterly misunderstanding the institution and rightly ejected from it. It would be lovely, wouldn't it, if more of our public figures accepted they get old and uglier. That's okay. It's good. We're all going to get there. We need role models of aging as opposed to these role models of panicking. And the other thing that strikes me is also that these people are not happy. If you're constantly changing your face, something inside is not at rest. And so I feel pity to some.

I feel pity for Madonna. I mean, in some ways, because she seems trapped. Let me show the video so the audience knows what we're talking about. You can watch it on YouTube if you're listening right now on Sirius XM. I'm going to show it now. This is Madonna in this bizarre video. And I don't think there's sound. It's her with a cat looking bizarre.

She looks people think she looks like Marilyn Manson in this video. She's the captions read something to the effect of if I'm if I'm gay, if I miss, I'm gay. And she has this big pair of hot pink panties that she tries to hit into a trash can and she misses by a mile. So people are wondering if she's coming out. Here's the video. She's got the panties. She's put on some weight. So she looks very different. We've never seen Madonna anything other than ripped and athletic bright pink wig and the her eyebrows are gone she does look a little like marilyn manson you know to your point andrew you can make yourself look a little younger you know like

i've talked openly i get botox and i like the botox i still get a i get a little so i can still do this with my eyebrows, you know. But like if I didn't get it, I'd have a lot more lines in my forehead than I do. I think where people go wrong is trying to look young. You can look a little younger. You know, you could shave off, I think, between five and seven years with like taking good care of your skin, staying out of the sun, getting the Botox. But you cannot take off 27 years or you start to look like a freak. Well, what I'm concerned about is people who get a face at age 30 and it's the same face when they're 80. There was a great line by George Orwell that said, by the age of 40, everyone

has the face they deserve. And because life has brought its painful path on your face, and that's what it means to be human. We're in a flight from mortality. We're in a flight from pain. We're in a flight for all the discomfort that actually makes you strong. And again, for me, the main thing is pity. Fame is the most overrated thing in our civilization. It is so massively overrated. It brings generally misery and isolation. And look, I have a mini, mini, mini insight into this because I used to be on TV a lot. I took myself off because I don't want to be in a place where suddenly everyone sees you in which you can't walk into

into a room and just be part of the background and observe things once you become too famous or too well known you every place you go into is altered so you never see reality so you get constantly shut off from reality you get constantly shut off from reality. You get constantly shut off from the human interactions you need. You get shut off from criticism. And you get shut off from the past. And you can develop, as Madonna has or as many other people have, into masks that are hiding misery, really.

Anyway, I hope she's okay. And she's done some wonderful stuff. And it's okay to retire and just go away and live your life. It's fine. Or just start to look like an older version of yourself, of the self that was so hugely popular and beloved and keep singing and just do the old, do the Tina Turner, you know, do the Tina Turner aging version. There's a lane for that.

When I was in my 20s, I had two big musical passions. One was Madonna and the other were the Pet Shop Boys. Now Pet Shop Boys just did a concert in the Hollywood Bowl just last night. They are doing concert after concert. They're putting out new albums all the time. They look as if they're in their 60s because they are in their 60s. But they are having a blast and they're actually creating things and they're putting out new material that's actually as good as anything they've ever done. That's, they are my role models. Can I ask you something as a guy from, as a guy from the UK originally, one thing I noticed when I go on GB news, which I love is you're allowed to be a woman who is aging on television in the UK. It's okay. You're not

kicked out here in America, different standard. I mean, I'm sorry, but there just is. And I don't know exactly why that is. Why are the British so normal? And I hate to use this weird term, but like forgiving of a, of an aging woman versus here in America where there's so much pressure put on, I mean, people like Madonna that she feels the need to make herself into Marilyn Manson and continue being this weird exhibitionist now America where there's so much pressure put on, I mean, people like Madonna that she feels the need to make herself into Marilyn Manson and continue being this weird exhibitionist now well into her 60s where she should be like, nailed life. Look at me now. Here come my lines. Boom. Yeah, I'm agreeing with you as well on this, Megan. I don't know. I find the examples of women who have not done this,

if you look at someone like Christine Lagarde, or if you look at someone like Margaret Thatcher, or if you look at people who grew older and didn't do this, Angela Merkel, there's a certain poise and gravitas for an older woman in power that I find very compelling. Maybe it's because the British have always had women leaders, whether it be the first Elizabeth or Victoria or Elizabeth II or Thatcher, in ways that they've aged and they've become icons.

And so you don't need them to be young. I'm just thinking out loud there but um i find with older women with gray hair and real faces they don't have to be completely as they were um to be incredibly compelling figures and uh and and because also it it it exudes confidence and self-confidence. And that's very attractive. Whereas this other stuff just seems to put forward insecurity, which is not attractive. If you rise to fame because of your beauty, I can understand being a little unsteady as that natural sort of youthful beauty fades. But it does require a reassessment of one's definition

of the term beauty. Does wisdom, does life's experience, does a more calm and interesting approach to issues make you more attractive? I think so. And I'll give you one other example. I actually just had to look up her name because I watched the first season of Ted Lasso, but I haven't seen beyond that. But this British actress named Hannah Waddingham, she is gorgeous. This woman is gorgeous. Wikipedia tells me she's 48 years old, which is not that's not that old. But I noticed her because she clearly isn't getting Botox. She's got the lines and she looks amazing. And, you know, I was saying to myself, like, as I get older now, I'm older than she is. As I get older, I want to look like that. I'm like, well, I could stop the

Botox right now and probably look like that. But I think I'm going to save that and I'm going to save that for like 10 years for 61 instead of 51. That's my own vanity at play. I'm guilty, too. OK, can we spend a minute? You mentioned Meghan Markle. I do want to spend one minute on her. There was a report out, you know, there's a British author named Valentin Roy, I think it is. And he just released a book in the UK called Valent who landed on the cover of Vanity Fair for no reason other than she was Harry's girlfriend. And if Vanity Fair doesn't put on the cover, you know, somebody who is the sixth lowest ranking person in the show Suits, which nobody's watching, that's not how she got it. She got it because she was dating Harry. And the caption under her picture is a beautiful picture is she's just wild about Harry. And it's a, you know, it's a take on that show on that song. I'm just wild about Harry. Harry's wild about me, whatever. thought it was racist she complained this one this person who's like out of nowhere gets featured on

vanity fair she was angry and she complained according to valentine valentine that uh it was a racist caption demanded that they change it because apparently judy garland in 1939 sang this song while in blackface okay so she suggested this was an attempt to diminish her as somebody who's mixed race. Meanwhile, this song goes back to like 1921. Excuse me. And has a long history. Apparently, it was written for an African-American show by an African-American songwriter. Anyway, everything, Andrew, everything is either racist

or sexist or wrong when it comes to Meghan Markle, despite all of the enormous gifts that have been given to her and adulation that's been given to her. It's just back to my comment about the Kim Kardashian booze. I am cheering the downfall in this woman's approval rating. I'm cheering the authors who are bringing these stories out so that people can see how petty and shallow and small these people are who have taken the national stage. Yeah, I increasingly, as I get older too, the theme I sort of grapple with is gratitude um in the west we have so much incredible advantages both over the rest of the world and in human history that to be this full of resentment this constant looking for offense or for harm is a sort of mental disorder. It's, it's the one, I mean, as a gay person, I could go through life every day looking for a slight,

when someone assumes I'm straight to feel offended, when they make some sort of joke or when they assume that no one gets, I mean, I could go crazy, but you decide not to. You decide so much has been given. I am so blessed in so many ways. I just let this stuff go and focus on the positive. It's as if, for example, it's as if the more equal we become, the more fanatical we become about the small inequalities that remain, that we lose perspective, that we are unable to take a deep breath and say, look, I just got to be nearly in the royal family on the cover of Abbey Fair. I have gazillions of dollars. I can just go and live my life.

I don't have to be constantly seeking the victim position or seeking to be the center of everyone's attention all the time. Just look around yourself one day and realize what you already have and be glad for it. I don't want to sound trite, but I do think that a lot of the problems in our world, a lot of the extraordinary anxieties, a lot of the roiling tensions on the web and on Twitter, all a function of our losing perspective that we actually do have it really good most of the time, certainly compared with anywhere else in history. And we should be more focused on being grateful for that than being constantly extremely angry at all the tiny little things we don't have.

It's so true. I love what you said. I wrote it down. The more equal we become, the more fanatical we become about the small inequalities that remain. Well said. It's always a pleasure talking to Andrew Sullivan.

Today was no exception. Thank you for being on. Cheers, Megan. It's lovely to pleasure talking to Andrew Sullivan. Today was no exception. Thank you for being on. Cheers, Megan. It's lovely to see you. All the best. Yeah, read the weekly dish, please. Yes, do. You can get all sorts of provocative, fun and well-researched thoughts from the one and only Andrew Sullivan. OK, coming up next, a deep dive into the Arizona Senate and gubernatorial races. We did it. We did Pennsylvania on Friday. We'll do Arizona today. And by the time we get to the midterms, we will have covered all of these. We'll put them all together on YouTube so you can just click on them and know the very latest on how it's likely to go and what the big issues are.

I'm looking forward to this talk. So it's Columbus Day or Indigenous People's Day or whatever. My kids don't have school today. I don't know about yours. It depends on where your kids go to school. A lot of kids are in school because Columbus is too offensive. Depends. Anyway, so I'm home.

My kids are running around and I just got a text from my nine-year-old that reads, It's going fine, Mom. Very fine. Should I be concerned? Because I am. What's going fine? Could you be more specific, sweetheart? I'll get back to you on how that goes. Before we hear back from Thatcher, however, we are shifting gears in the show to bring you a deep dive on the key midterm races in Arizona. Last week, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and Republican candidate Blake Masters faced off in a debate. We're going to bring you the highlights.

And Katie Hobbs, the Democrat and rising star Carrie Lake, the Republican, continued to be neck and neck in one of the most competitive races in the country. Carrie Lake was getting killed in this race, according to most of the polls a few months ago. But she has been slow and steady, slow and steady, slow and steady, and really has caught on. You may recall she was on our show a few months ago before she won the nomination. And this thing's gotten really interesting. Joining me now to take a deep dive into all this is Axios Phoenix reporter Jeremy Duda. Jeremy, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's my pleasure. All right, so let's start with the Senate, where you've got Mark Kelly and Blake Masters. And Mark Kelly is the brother, identical twin, of Scott Kelly, both of whom are former astronauts.

It's an interesting, you know, pair. The mother's, I'm sure she was very proud. And Mark Kelly is the twin who's married to Gabby Giffords and has been in politics. So Mark Kelly is holding the seat right now. It's the seat that was once held by John McCain. He's the incumbent. He's trying to fend off this challenge from a Peter Thiel backed Republican who is a big business guy who decided to try his hand at politics. And just set up the race for us before we play a couple of the debate clips on like how it's going so far between the two of them.

So far, I mean, all of the polling that we've seen so far has got Kelly ahead by anywhere from a point to six or seven points. So far, it looks like I mean, right now, Mark Kelly's race to lose. Obviously, anything could anything could change. And as we've seen from the last few election cycles, a lot of this polling does not always turn out to be as accurate as the pollsters would like. So I think the general perception right now is that Kelly is ahead and Masters is trying to catch up. Why is it that Masters, I mean, virtually everything I read about Masters is somebody bashing him on the right, on the left. It's just like, why is there this backlash to Masters who doesn't seem to even have much of a political record? I mean, on the left, obviously, they don't like him because he's the Republican nominee against Kelly. On the right, I think it was a pretty divisive primary. As we saw, you know, we had Mitch McConnell in D.C. spent a long time trying to recruit Governor Doug Ducey into the race. I think there's a lot of perception among, at least among some Republicans, that

they didn't have a great field out there. What we've seen since the primary is, you know, Masters trying to kind of, you know, do the classic pivot back, you know masters trying to kind of you know do the classic pivot back you know towards the center but he said he's had a number of things that he said in the primary that are really coming back to haunt him and uh you know kelly and uh you know the democrats are spending tens of millions of dollars to uh really make him pay for that on abortion on social security especially um okay so last night and you never know because we'll get to what's happening at the gubernatorial level um because the you mentioned doug ducey he's a sitting governor he's a republican he's got to go because of term limits so mitch mcconnell was like hey how about

running for senate you know you'd be a good candidate you're well liked in arizona didn't happen well and now it's it's masters who's running on the gop ticket um so you never know because Carrie Lake is doing well, which we'll get to in a minute. And like, does she have coattails? You know, are there are enough people going to go to the ballot box and say, you know what? I like her. I'm going Republican up and down the line. We had a similar we had that same question on Friday as of on Pennsylvania. And I got an interesting answer from Selena Zito. The audience has to go back and

listen to that if you want to hear it. So the Arizona debate takes place. Masters and Kelly get up there and they start going at it over immigration, which is a massive issue in the state of Arizona, both in fact and politically. And here's a little bit of how that went. I've been focused on the border since day one on this job. I'm down there all the time. I was on the phone this week just, you know, with Mayor Nichols of Yuma. This is Mark Kelly speaking. Mayor Danels of Cochise County talking about what more we need for Border Patrol and immigration. That, my friend, is called evasion.

We're working to raise Border Patrol pay by 18%. I've got legislation to do that. I've been focused on the border since day one. Okay. You know, we know great effects because we have a wide open southern border. So if that's the best you can do, I respectfully request you resign. Let's get someone in the seat who will actually secure our border. Just a little bit more.

This is soundbite 13. The debate continued. You know, if the Mexican drug cartels, these terrorist narcos, if they could vote in this election, every single one of them would vote for Senator Kelly because they get what they want from him, which is a complete wide open border, is complete free reign. And again, the fentanyl is killing our children. He's not doing a gosh darn thing to stop it. Love the self-edit on the swear. So how did that go over? Because this is a huge issue in Arizona. Sure, absolutely. We're a border state. We really bear the brunt of a lot of this problem. Obviously, a good issue for the Republicans. You know, you've seen Senator Kelly try to kind of, you know, lean more towards the center on this, you know, boasting of us, you know, supporting, I think, a billion dollars in funding for, you know, barriers, border patrol agents, stuff like that. He's got ads talking about border security. That's one of the areas where he's trying to put a little distance between

himself and President Biden on the Title 42 issue. But obviously, it's still an issue that's going to resonate with the voters and going to favor Republicans. And you saw, you know, Blake Massey was really trying to hit that hard. I think it was a debate that lacked a lot of, you know, notable one liners, but there were a couple, you know, two of the only ones we had were on that issue. And you just showed one of them where he talked about it, that's the best you can do, you could resign. And there's another question or another comment that Blake Masters made right before that where he said, you know, can you genuinely say that you've done everything you can to secure the southern border? This is after he's been hitting Mark Kelly on voting against this

Republican amendment to offer to fund 18,000 new border patrol positions. So you can see, so obviously, it's an issue where Kelly knows he has to kind of reach out to the center, reach out across to the right side of the aisle a little bit. You know, Blake Masson is certainly hoping that's not going to be enough for most voters. Yeah, he's that's this is an area in which he is vulnerable because he's a Democrat and the Democrats are vulnerable, even though I'm sure Mark Kelly is to the right of Joe Biden in general on most issues because he's, you know, he's in Arizona. The Arizona Democrats are different from the National Democrats as a rule because Arizona is used to be red. It's more purple now, but it's not blue. No, sure. And a lot of the Democrats you've seen over the past 10, 20 years who have had success at the statewide level are Democrats, folks like Kelly Sinema, Janet Napolitano, who have taken a little bit more of a centrist or conservative position on the border. Yeah. OK, so now I would give that point, Masters.

But then you got, of course, points on the other side. And this was Mark Kelly honing in on the issue that's been put a lot of Republicans in a vulnerable position, and that is abortion. And and maybe none more so than Blake Masters. I just hear this raised all the time with him, and we'll talk about why, but here's Mark Kelly calling out Blake Masters on past comments about abortion, Stop 14. He has said, and this isn't like years ago, he has said very recently that he wants to punish the doctors. He's called abortion demonic, a religious sacrifice. I don't even know what that means, folks. But what I'm doing is I am protecting your constitutional rights that you have lost because of rhetoric like this. Okay, so we did look it up. I believe he's referring there,

Jeremy, to a comment by Masters to Ali Beth Stuckey, a friend of ours, in September of 2021, where he said as follows, you see, Ali, how the abortion thing has turned into this religious totem for the left. In the 90s, they just wanted abortions to be safe, legal, and rare. Now you have activists wearing their shirts with tally marks of how many abortions they've had. And this is the cultural thrust of it. It's a religious sacrifice to these people it's demonic and we've got to put a stop to it i will say in his defense that is a context that changes the way he used the word demonic he's not saying abortion in general is demonic there he's saying to be proud of it to do a tally with how many you've had proudly wear it that's a different story but how did he respond live to that and how do you think

it went over well the way you responded i mean i think more the crux of uh senator kelly's argument obviously those are some very inflammatory comments that blake masters made especially if they're not uh put in that context but he also spoke earlier during the primary about you know possibility of enacting you know a federal personhood law that would ban abortions nationally, punishing doctors. And that's what Kelly's really hitting them on in particular. Because now what Blake Master was saying is, you know, the 15-week ban that we've enacted here in Arizona earlier in the year, which is kind of a ping pong ball going back and forth in the courts, due to a law that we have that predates pro-v-way and even predates statehood, that bans most abortions except to save the life of the mother.

Blake Masters, they came out and supported that, plus Lindsey Graham's proposal in the U.S. Senate for a kind of a nationwide 15-week ban. That's what he's supporting now. Kelly, of course, is trying to paint him as a flip-flopper. He's on video talking about you know possibly the possibility of banning abortions nationwide so it was definitely not a good look and uh you know definitely speaks volumes of blake masters is kind of uh pinning his hopes on the 15-week ban now and say no he doesn't support a nationwide ban at all i mean honestly it's the only smart position for republicans who want to win in states that are in any way purple.

It's like I see that, you know, he faced very little alternative other than to do that. But it did require abandoning earlier statements. What about the stolen election stuff? Because a lot of these Trump back candidates kind of had to say they thought it was stolen to get Trump's endorsement. And then once they got the nomination, we're like, who, what, huh? And is he one of those? Because I did hear him at this debate sounding like he was breaking with Trump. Here's the soundbite. And then you tell me whether this is a reversal. It's not 15. Was that election stolen? Was it rigged in any way, shape or form enough to keep Donald Trump out of the White House?

I suspect that if the FBI didn't work with big tech and big media to censor the Hunter Biden or the Hunter Biden crime story. Yeah, I suspect that changed a lot of people's votes. I suspect President Trump would be in the White House today if big tech and big media and the FBI didn't work together to put the thumb on the scale to get Joe Biden in there. But not vote counting, not election results. Yeah, I haven't seen evidence of that. So that last piece definitely has a divergence from where Trump stands on it. But is it a divergence from where Masters used to be? I would say so.

You know, during the primary, you saw him putting out videos saying things flat out like President Trump won the 2020 election. He was perhaps not quite as strident about it as, say, Kerry Lake or some of the other down ballot candidates, Mark Fincham for Secretary of State, Abe Hamada for Attorney General. But obviously, that was a big litmus test for Trump for his endorsements in the primaries this year. He was not going to back someone who doesn't say that the election was rigged, that he was cheated out of it. I think that is definitely Masters I think that that is definitely Masters, I think, kind of seeing the writing on the wall there and not wanting to, you know, tap himself to what's probably an unpopular position with the electorate in general.

Well, Arizona, of course, was one of the big states in 2020 that went for Biden that Trump was so angry about. And that's the man at Fox News for calling it too soon and all that. And now there's been like 25 different investigations by like Team Trump. And then the other, you know, like, see, it really did get stolen. No, it didn't. How do you think Arizonans see that issue? Forget Trump and Masters and Kelly. How do Arizonans see the issue of 2020? I think, I mean, there's obviously that base of hardcore believers in, you know, these election rigging claims. But I think for the most part, most Arizonans, especially the people that these statewide candidates need to win the general election, you know, I don't think they like that at

all. I don't think that's something that they buy at all. We've had, you know, this was the, you know, 2020 was the first time in 20 years that Arizona voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, only the second time since 48 when we went for Harry Truman. I think the fact that Masters is backing away from that more now kind of shows exactly where, you know, the kind of the independence, the persuadable voters are. Although, interestingly enough, you don't see that among the other statewide candidates. He's really the kind of the outlier there in terms of all the Trump endorsed candidates who won the primary.

And it was all in pretty much every race. It was the Trump endorsed candidates who won those Republican primaries. He's kind of the only one who's really made a point of backing away from that a little. I think a lot of us were kind of surprised to hear that last week during the debate. Well, and even before he backed away from it, he was losing all these polls. Like, we don't know if the polls are right or wrong, but he was not doing well in the poll. So it's not like sticking to the Trump was robbed. It was rigged. That wasn't helping him. So now he's trying a different tact of it was unfair. But no, I'm not going to say I saw anything that

would have changed the outcome of the election. And I don't know whether that'll change his polls. This debate was last Thursday. But Carrie Lake, who's running for governor as a Republican, is 100 percent Team Trump on stolen, stolen, stolen on all fronts, not just unfairness, but actually stolen. And she's doing much better. So why is she doing so much better with these same Republicans who you tell me may be turned off by what Blake Masters had said earlier? A couple of reasons. I mean, Carrie Lake is obviously a very charismatic candidate. She really caught fire in the primary in a way I've never really seen a candidate do. And, you know, the 14 years or so I've been covering elections in Arizonarizona um you know we've seen since you know since donald trump first got into the political scene in 2015 we've seen so many republican candidates try to emulate his style i don't know that i've ever really seen anyone kind of nail it

the way she has so she's got that going for plus you know mark kelly is a very difficult opponent he's uh some you know great resume you, somewhat moderate credentials. He's got his wife, Gabby Giffords. He has a lot going for him. Political consultants will wait their entire career to get a candidate with that kind of resume. Katie Hobbs is just not as strong an opponent for Terry Lake as Mark Kelly is for Blake Masters. And I think that's definitely a big part of her, part of what's helping out Lake right now too,

because she has some of the, you know, she's not trying to go towards the center in the same way that I think Masters has a bit since the primary, you know, a little bit in some areas, but not nearly as much, obviously. Like you said, she's still embracing the, still an election rhetoric. You don't see the same kind of pivot in there. You're so right though. I mean, if you spend any time with Mark Kelly or Scott Kelly,

they're likable guys. It's hard to dislike them. I just, you know, it's tough. And Mark Kelly's also got a personal story, as you mentioned, with Guy Giffords is his wife that will tug on your heartstrings and also isn't an extreme leftist. that would be a turnoff to the Arizonans. But Carrie Lake, who hasn't abandoned any of the hardcore MAGA Trump stolen election stuff, is also extremely charismatic. And so I've been saying since I had her on the show, I didn't know anything about her. I saw because she's saying all this election stuff. Let me talk to her. She was amazing. She was great. You listen to her, you're like, oh, this woman's got it. She's got it, the it factor. And as you point out, Katie Hobbs doesn Garrett, who was hosting, that she doesn't she doesn't see the need for any limits. Here it is, 17. So if an Arizona voter were to conclude from your previous answer that you do not favor any specific weak limit on abortion, would they be correct? I support leaving the decision between a woman and her doctor and

leaving politicians entirely out of it. So that's that's extreme, even within the Democratic, you know, party, I guess, at least at least in a reddish state. That's that's pretty extreme for Arizonans. No, am I wrong? I would imagine so. I would imagine that's not going to be, you know, no limits at any point in pregnancy is probably not a particularly popular position. No. I've spoken with the Hobbs campaign about it and got pretty much the same answer. You know, I think what they'll tell you, what most Democrats will tell you is that, you know, abortions in the third trimester are very rare and generally pretty much for, you know, severe health or, severe health or life of the mother issues.

But without putting that kind of qualifier on the issue, saying there should be no limit, again, there's a reason why Carrie Lake is going after Hobbs on that. And that's because that's probably not going to be a particularly popular issue. Is it going to be as damaging as, you know, for her as the more kind of unflinching, you know, anti-abortion rights position that Carrie Lake has taken? You know, probably not. I think the way one Republican consultant put it to me, you know, a few weeks ago was that going after the third trimester issue is it's more mitigation for Republicans, you know, something that's going to hurt the Republicans, but probably or the Democrats, sorry, but probably not as much as, you know, the repealing row in general hurt the Republican candidates. What is Carrie Lake's position on abortion in Arizona? bit lately. She was on a radio show, I believe, last week, and she said previously she'd been very unflinching, unyielding on supporting Roe v. Wade being overturned, supporting Arizona's pre-statehood law, banning any abortion except those needed to save the life of the mother. I believe she said if she were governor, she would sign a bill similar to the six-week

heartbeat law that was signed in Texas, I believe, last year. But last week, she said she wants abortion to be – kind of took the same position of, I believe, safe and legal, kind of echoing Bill Clinton's famous line about wanting abortion to be legal, safe, and rare. Within that interview, she kind of shifted and later on said, you know, rare and safe, and that's kind of the position her campaign took afterwards when reporters asked them about that. So still, you know, pretty stridently pro-life. I mean, you know, obviously that's the position she had for a long time. These are her personal beliefs. I think she said she would support basically whatever the courts decide, whether we have this 15-week ban or this pre-statehood ban

go into effect, and that'll take a little while to support out, to work out in the courts decide, whether we have this 15-week ban or this pre-statehood ban go into effect, and that'll take a little while to work out in the courts. She said that if the courts do decide it's the 15-week ban, that's what goes into effect, that she won't push for a stricter ban in the legislature. Now, obviously, I would imagine that lawmakers were still almost certainly going to have a Republican controlled legislature come January. And if the 15 week ban is what's in effect, I would imagine we'll see a push to enact, you know, a stricter ban, probably something, you know, closer to the, you know, the pre-Roe ban that's in the courts right now. Now, he really may not vote for Barack Obama. We talked about her political evolution when she came on. So I don't know whether she's always been pro-life or whether that's a new position she's recently come to. I mean, look, it's like Republicans, they're in a spot because there's zero chance Donald Trump was a pro-life person prior to running for political office or shortly, you know, as life is a, you know, playboy, New York City real estate tycoon did not suggest in any way that he was a pro lifer. And he was on Larry King defending partial King abortion, a partial King partial birth

abortion at one point. So but but they got in him a president who appointed three of the most conservative justices we've seen in a long time who effectively overturned versus wait so who the hell knows right like they all they're placing a bet on how the person's gonna vote not what their personal views are and um they'll have to figure that out i guess in arizona is it a pro-life state or is it a like how would you describe it i think it's a fairly i think think on the whole, Arizona's probably majority supportive of abortion rights at some level, whether it be a 15 week ban, whether it be kind of the 24 week mark, which I think is more closer, let people leave people to their own devices. And I think there I think there is a lot of support for abortion rights out in Arizona for that to be a winning issue for Democrats. And I think, you know, obviously, we've seen them hitting,

you know, Masters, Blake and others pretty hard on that. How can Arizona be so close geographically to California and be libertarian? And California, I would say, is the opposite of libertarian. They love big government. I know Arizona is kind of one of the last states, you know, in the lower 48 to be settled. You know, people came here because they were just trying to, I think, at least back in the day, it's a lot different now. But historically, this is a place where people came to because they kind of wanted to get away from where they were from. You know, it kind of started anew. No one was going to ask a lot of questions. You

could just be who you wanted to be. And I think, you know, kind of start anew. No one was going to ask a lot of questions. You could just be who you wanted to be. And I think, you know, back in the day of Barry Goldwater, you know, Barry Goldwater, that was very much kind of the ethos of Arizona. I think, you know, it's a little bit different now, but to historically kind of the Arizona that I was born into and grew up in, it was a lot more like that. I like that. So Katie Hobbs had a difficult moment when she was asked about the Latino community. Blake Masters tweeted out this video just this past Sunday, writing, Katie Hobbs is the Kamala Harris of Arizona.

And I guess I'm not sure if I need to set this up, but it was at her appearance at the Historic Chamber of Commerce Forum in Phoenix. A town hall moderator asked her to explain how the state's latino community had impacted her personally and here's how that went sat 16. what have you learned specifically learned from the latino community oh that's a great question. I don't necessarily think about it that way in those terms. I think I really value my relationships across the board with different folks. she is Latino and her family I love hanging out with them and practicing my Samuel It's one third of the state. Yes, absolutely. Is it over? Oh, my God. Jeremy. Jeremy.

That was not a good answer. It is over. Is it over? Do you think that's it? Like, is that I mean, it's a big Latino population, as the moderator pointed out, that that's not going to help her. Probably not. And you've seen, you know, here in Arizona and I think nationwide, we've seen Republicans making more inroads with Hispanic voters.

And we've seen that in the past. We've seen a lot of outreach here over the last, you know, I'd say decade or so. And I think it's starting to bear fruit. So what are the odds that Carrie Lake gets elected as governor and Blake Masters goes down as senator so that Republican voters would split their vote? I mean, right now, that's looking like the likeliest scenario. I mean, we've seen, you know, the polling in the governor's race. And, you know, again, with the caveat that for the last few cycles, you know, close races, we've seen polls wrong here and all over the country. It goes back and forth. Some

have, you know, Hobbs up by a few points and have Lake up by a few points. I mean, this is still, you know, for all the purplish tendencies voters out here have shown over the last three election cycles, this is still a Republican-leaning state, it's still a predominantly Republican state in what should be a Republican year with, you know, a Democratic White House, a very unpopular one at that. You know, and I think what we saw from Katie Hobbs there is kind of speaks to kind of a, you know, bigger problem for her campaign. She's not a great speaker. I think I've heard from voters who, you know, love her message, but hate the delivery. And that, you know, when you compare that to carrie lake very poised very polished you know

she was on you know tv for 27 years she was a news anchor for 27 years so she kind of exudes a lot of confidence and uh you know again charisma and lake does or hobbs uh there's a lot of hers a lot of ums that's uh style of speaking if you if you talk to supporters of hers i think even they'll tell you the same thing that uh that's kind of an Achilles heel for the campaign there. And then me and trying back on the Senate race that we started with, Masters has not led any single public poll after the primary or before it. I mean, it's just in my own experience sitting in the anchor desk on these big political nights that that's a better indicator than anything that the person's not going to win. I mean, when they've never led, pretty good bet that they're not going to win, though anything could happen.

And Peter Thiel was just saying he feels like he secured J.D. Vance in Ohio, even though the polling is questionable there. And now he's going to move his money to Arizona to help shore up Masters, who worked for him as a COO for a few years. So Peter Thiel's money is plentiful and there's still some time to go. A quick question before we go. Do you think it'll be enough? I don't know.

It's hard to say. Look, it's not looking good for Masters. I'm looking a lot better for Lake. You know, Peter Thiel can come in with a lot of money. There's still tons of money on the Democratic side, too. And early voting starts this week.

Jeremy, what a pleasure. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for having me. No word back from Thatcher on what on earth he meant. So I'll let you know tomorrow whether everything really was fine. Reminds me of my fake dialogue with my dog Strudwick. Who is a good boy? Then I do his fake voice back to me. Not me. Tomorrow, the fifth column. Don't miss that. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.