The Megyn Kelly Show - Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch on Woke Culture, Free Speech, and Identity Politics | Ep. 96

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch, the hosts of The Fifth Column podcast, to talk about President Biden's awkward address to Congress and Sen Tim Scott's speech in response (and the media reaction to it), the Chauvin verdict, woke culture in schools and workplaces, our culture's emphasis on race and identity, fighting for free speech and the state of the media, identity politics and whether it's catching on, racial propaganda, qualified immunity and police reform, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind 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. You're going to love today's episode. We just taped it and I am smiling ear to ear. I love these guys. Love these guys. These are the hosts of the very popular podcast called The Fifth Column, which if you're not downloading, you should. Camille Foster, Matt Welch, and Michael Moynihan. You may know some of these guys because they had a short-lived show on Fox Business for a couple of years. I don't mean that to sound insulting short-lived, but you're going to understand the publications that they're for and Reason, which is something that was started by Matt, which I absolutely love.

They're more libertarian in their approach to life, which I also like. And I think you'll find their views interesting and provocative. But we just had fun. We talked about everything, everything from Biden's remarks the other night, the attacks on Tim Scott, the crazy race stuff, the attempt to give qualified immunity or take it away from the cops where we had an interesting and fun disagreement. Drawing Muhammad, which one of these guys did. They did a contest. It goes on. It was awesome.

We went two hours. It could have been five. All I'm going to say is listen to this ad and then enjoy. Hey, guys. I'm Megan. Megan, how are you? How's it going? Spectacular. I'm Megan. Megan, how are you? How's it going? Spectacular.

Great. Yeah. Never been better. Delighted to be with you. So delighted. Same. We've never done an interview with three people at once like this. So this could be a hot shit storm, but let's try it.

This is going to be the hottest mess in the history of The Megan Kelley Show. No, we know sort of generally not the Megyn Kelly show. We know generally not to talk over each other. We try to do that. But oftentimes when we record the podcast, we're about eight drinks in. So it was very good to do it at 11 in the morning. We could have prepared that way. That would have been

fine. I'm totally up for a mimosa. You know, with the Irish last name of Moynihan, you'd probably expect that I would be about three drinks in now. You know what? Stereotypes do exist for a reason. And I embrace that and support it. A little bit of truth. Yes. Brought a lot of joy.

I indulge Irish stereotypes all the time. All right. So let's, first of all, before we get started, Matt Welsh, did I have dinner with you at John Stossel's house one night? Absolutely, yes. With the spectacular Peggy Noonan, who won that dinner. She's great. Yes, I knew it. Okay, it was years ago, but we recently had Stossel on the program, who I know you love and I love too. And I was joking with him about the Stossel, that Doug and I call it just the Stossel, where he just gets up and leaves. Oh, wow.

At 10 o'clock. He'll let you know beforehand, like, um, like, look, I'm, I'm going to leave at 10. I'm going to go upstairs. You can do what you want. My stossel impression is always the fake, like the fake incredulity. Oh yeah. He's like, so you're saying that higher taxes are bad. And it's like, John, you know what's crazy is like, I love him and I like his little online splainers that he does. You know, he puts out these little videos now on Stossel TV and he's killing it.

I think Stossel might be 72 now. He's killing it. Like younger viewers are watching those things in droves. Even our podcast with him did so well. And I love it because it's like, he's super smart and he's very relevant. And I, you know, the ageists out there who think there's no life past 70 and media are wrong. It's all that beach folly poly place. Stossel TV, by the way, and there is ageism, I think, because John has to do Stossel TV on

YouTube, but it has a half a million subscribers, which is a very good thing to do. It makes sense. That's enormous. Interesting. Even I will go there just, you know, as a media person for Splainers because he'll do it quickly. He doesn't waste your time. He has a lifetime of being like super to the point and user friendly, right? Like he's, you got to get up and down on a story when you're in media.

You don't have it like in podcasting, it's a different story. But when you work for ABC news, they're not going to give you 60 minutes to go through your story and why the consumers are getting screwed, which was his original beat. So he's come around to this place where he's really good at explaining stuff. And unlike most people, he doesn't have a left-wing bias. He doesn't have a right-wing bias. He's more like you guys. Libertarian. Yeah. He also does this thing for those of us who've been in the chair being interviewed by him on the show. He does the eye glaze.

If you're boring him. Yes. Oh, God. If you're using numbers or whatever. He trained so many dorky libertarians to speak English by the eye glaze. I can't remember who and i know i won't keep it because i know i have to start but there was somebody you might remember this matter in the green room at fox was waiting to go on and you know john comes in and says you

know what are you going to talk about here are the what we're going to talk about what is your answer to x y or z question and the guy was responding and he turned to his producer and he's like who invited this guy on? Literally on in the green room. And he just shrunk. Savage. He was rough. Savage. You know, my husband reminded me that Stossel, because he and Stossel are actually good friends.

And unlike Stossel and I, who are just mediocre, you know, he irritates me. No, I love him, but I love his wife even more. So Stossel came up to me one time at Fox. and I forgot to bring this up when he was on the show. And we didn't know each other very well. And Stossel says to me in the makeup room, out of the blue, right? We don't know each other. He goes, I owe you an apology. I'm like, oh, go on.

I'm like, what for? What did you do? And he said, I can't remember exactly how he put it, but he basically said, I used to think that you were an airhead, that you were an empty-headed bimbo, basically. Oh, no. Wow. And he goes, but that's before I listened to you. And he said, now that I've actually listened to you, I'm sorry, because you're actually

really smart. And I was like, no offense taken. He apologized for something that you would have no way of ever knowing. No, it was just in his head. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, God bless time. But I took it.

I don't care. I'm very, very hard to offend. Very hard to offend. So I decided to just wrap myself in the compliment that ended it. And a beautiful friendship was born that day. There you go. And by the way, challenge accepted.

Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about, because we're now taping right after Biden's fake State of the Union address. Yes. And let's just start. We just start with how awkward it was. It reminded me of the Biden campaign rallies, right?

Where like four people show up and they have like 20 feet between each one of them they can't get out of their cars everybody's quadruple masked it's like everyone in the room had been vaccinated everybody even just look at who was up on the dais right it's like biden and and harris and pelosi they've all been vaccinated even they like just they can't they take off their masks? It just to me was emblematic of where we are, especially the Democrats, though, as a country right now when it comes to we're never taking these things off. Yeah, I like I like Chuck Schumer in the front row, like no one sitting next to him. Whenever he stood up, he was just he was visibly confused.

Yeah. Where did the people go? Why are my glasses not on my nose he was just, he was visibly confused. Yeah. Where did the people go? Why are my glasses not on my nose? They're usually on my nose right there. Yeah. No, it's amazing because the whole thing is so condescending to the American people.

Because the idea of course, is that if we take these things off and we're on television, first of all, no one's watching. The people who you think are watching aren't watching. That they're going to see this and just fling the masks off and go out and create, you know, round eight of the pandemic. Right. And that is I mean, most people would presume that not only being elderly, but being the president, vice president, speaker that maybe they've been vaccinated, but they can't do that. The dynamic is incredibly strange. You're telling a story about every American having access to this vaccine. Imaginably, all of you have it, but you're not sure if you should be projecting confidence about how the future is going to go,

but where we are as a country or not. The place is half empty, not even half empty. It's barely a third full. Yeah. Right. And most of the people in the room, except for Joe Biden, who is stumbling through this speech, are masked. Completely bizarre situation. Doug and I were sitting there and I was, every time he paused or appeared to go off script, I was like, I feel for the speechwriters. Did you have that feeling? Like he's not going to be able to do it. Well, we watched it together and Camille very helpfully was following on with the prepared remarks and would periodically tell us, although we didn't need to be told because it was the meandering bits about how we found vaccines on Mars. And I was like, what is going on here? And it was just as bizarre. I mean, look,

we made fun and I think appropriately. So of, you know, George W. Bush gaffes, I mean, more Trump's, you know, gaffes too, which were a little, there were less gaffes. It was just kind of who he was. They weren't like malapropisms. And nobody did that about Joe Biden in the aftermath on Twitter anyway. And of course, Twitter is not the real world. But I didn't see people making fun of these bizarro tangents that I was just spent the time trying to figure out. Why does he keep saying that he flew 17,000 miles with she? And like nobody understands why it's not true. And he keeps saying it over and over. It's just he just makes stuff up. And then you're not sure if that's his like, you know, senility seeping in or he's just an old fashioned politician who lies.

I'm not sure. But it was like watching a guy on the high wire with no net. I'm thinking, oh, just stick to the prompter. You know, I may not support all the things you're saying, but I really don't want you to fall down and drool. Those of us who have parents of a certain age can recognize it. You know, like my dad, who's just a couple of years older, he will grab onto a number just like it's a life raft.

And whether or not that number has anything to do with the conversation, it likely does not, but just grabs onto it. And Biden's the same way. Like he will, he will, he, and he's been, he's been a politician for longer than Camille and perhaps Michael has been alive almost as long as I've been alive. And, and they just say the same stories and Neil Kinnick's stories, whoever's stories are around. And that's what he's holding on to at age 78 as president. It's awful. There are the Trumpian moments and the Trumpian little punctuations to the speech. And my favorite

one was there was one bit, and again, you have to correct me if I'm wrong, because it was very difficult to follow. There's one bit where he says, you know to correct me if I'm wrong, because it was very difficult to follow. There's one bit where he says, you know, I talk to leaders. I talk to all these world leaders. And I'm like, you know what? America, come back to the world. And that is the most Trumpian thing who, you know, Trump says, I talk to people. I'm talking to doctors. I'm talking to world leaders. The best people. No, you're not. You've not talked to anyone. You just woke up this morning, had a hamburger, and you're like, I'm just going to start. No. Yes, I talk to the best people in my family.

It reminds me of, you know, so Biden's he's 77 now. My mom's 79 with all due respect to my mom, who I adore. You know, she's not that much older than he is. And she says stuff like, you know, at one point we were talking about the pandemic and she was like, oh, you know, I was in Montana and I was telling her the bears were starting to come out during the shutdown. And she goes, oh, I'd be more worried about those bears than covert 12. Like what if your mom's an epidemiologist and she actually discovered covert 12 and you had no idea.

And she's like, oh, I'm sick and tired of Dr. Fawcett. Me too. Me too, mom. I had a similar feeling listening to him. She'd do fine with a prompter too. But, you know, the biggest problem was, and by the way, just one other point, if I may. I found like the most annoying, the most annoying part of the evening was Nancy Pelosi. It's like, sit down. If everything is a standing ovation, nothing is a standing ovation. This is so false. It's so manufactured and artificial. You I I hate your performance here tonight. I hate your performance. She was trying to do the opposite of when she ripped up Trump's speech. Every line was a standing O. And it was like the speech was long enough. You know,

John Pedortz had a piece in the poster. He was like, I felt it like they like let my people go. It was forever. She made it longer and longer. And it was just so false and artificial, like so much about her. Yeah. I try not to be too cynical about politics, really, genuinely, because it matters. There are things that happen here that affect all of our lives. But I'm always cynical about performances like this. And it's very odd at a moment where America has gone through so much over the course of the past 12 months or so, like we genuinely do need some things. We need some coming together. There needs to be some healing.

One would hope that at a moment like this, you get some of that from the president of the United States, some confidence, some certainty. And I, it just felt like a totally missed opportunity. Keep your speech short. Talk about what's,

what's important and what's good. Talk about getting kids back into school, the kind of things that are having an impact on people's lives. Don't tell me, you know, we could totally spend 50 trillion dollars and I've got a plan to do it. We'll just raise taxes, just raise taxes a little bit. It's going to be fine. No, just to set the record straight, Camille, you have kids. All three of you have kids, yes? But I'll start with you, Camille. I've got one child so far as I know. Yes.

Jamaican. This is a challenge. You can't be sure. Same for me. Unclear. I think I have three. Yeah. Okay.

And Matt, how many kids do you have and what age? I've got two, a 12-year-old and a six-year-old. And we've been enjoying the New York City public school system this year. And it's opening. Some sarcasm there. It's providing an enormous amount of fodder for our podcast because Matt is a terrible father. And the reason he's a terrible father, I mean, there's a number, but the one main reason is that he comes onto the podcast and talks about his daughter and talks about the things that his daughter is learning at the, you know, sugar plantation outside of Havana where they're cutting cane for the revolution.

It is totally bananas. And I'm like, no, that's not, that's not real. My daughter is a little bit younger. They are friends. My daughter's just turned 10 years old and at a private school. And usually those are worse in New York city. Yeah. Uh, in Brooklyn. And, and, um, it is, you know, it's some problems, shall we say, but she's been in school for a while and that's, I don't care. They honestly, they could, you know, give her a Che Guevara tattoo on her shoulder blade is great. She's in school and everybody else I know in public schools are absolutely suffering from this. So, so that's the positive thing. Yeah. The only drawback is they,

they going up at home calling you guys racist. 100% right. Like that's, I mean, hopefully everybody's counter-programming against the lunacy. And as I've made public, I'm pulling my kids from my schools, but, but it on and on it goes. And as I've made public, I'm pulling my kids from my schools. But but it on and on it goes. And it's it's I hate it because I actually love the schools from which in my boy's case, we've left and my daughter's case, we're leaving. I love them. I love the teachers. I love the administrators. I love the parents, the student body. It's the ideology they're thrusting on the

kids that I that I can't stand. Right. So it's like I feel very conflicted. It's like, you know, it's like when you find out your parent is a serial killer, like, but I love you, but I just, I hate the stuff you're doing. There's no escaping of it really. Like the, you know, I started writing about this maybe in the fall of 2019. And it was in the context of the middle school changing all of its admissions require the district changing its admissions requirements which they're now aping all throughout New York City and the language that they that they use to talk about the desegregation of the schools and all this I found it to be super odd and they're you know the sales pitches to parents involved like fire hoses

in Birmingham Alabama it's like we're in Park Slope. This is not the same. And when I was writing about it, initially, I was like, I know this all sounds crazy to you people reading this, but I fear that this might be happening around the country. I had no idea how fast it would happen everywhere around the country. We get emails from listeners all the time about not just schools, but like their human resource departments at wherever they work and all this diversity, equity and inclusion training stuff. And it sounds insane. And it's in a lot of places. Yeah. I mean, it's really overwhelmed the culture. And to Matt's point, it is outside the schools. It is in corporate culture and the

emails that we get journalism Journalism, of course, we'd expect that. But, you know, somebody at a bank in Tulsa is like, I just had to do an eight hour course on, you know, Franz Fanon's books. And it's just like, wait, what? You're a bank teller. And this is so, so this is everywhere. And I know Megan, you had Paul Rossi on your podcast. He was on, we let you take the lead on that. We did it a day later. We didn't want to step on your toes. But the response to that was incredible. I had people emailing me that listen to the podcast that aren't expressly political people saying, oh my God, is that stuff real? And it reminded me of something, the way the culture reacts to this. Because in 2010, some people might remember the brouhaha

in Texas over the Texas school board's curriculum changes. And when you go back and look at them, it was like this right-wing takeover, et cetera. And now I don't like this in any ideological direction if someone's trying to rewrite what kids are learning from some ideological perspective. But theirs was not as bad when I looked back. There was some stuff I was like, that's kind of crazy, but they were trying to bring some balance to it and redress some of the weird kind of, you know, left-leaning stuff.

So I get it. There were pieces on the Colbert Report. Jon Stewart did a long thing on it. Every late night show mocking these people every day. And it was just in the state of Texas. And of course, it was watered down considerably. We're now living in an era where, you know, nine-year-olds are getting like Ibram X. Kendi kids books in no one bats an eye. My hope, my aspiration would be that schools are interested in helping to cultivate like

critical thinking skills, the ability to deal with complex ideas, to find ways to navigate complicated issues. For the most part, it definitely seems like a circumstance where you just have to arrive at the right answer. We know what the right answer is, kind of like a jury that brings back a verdict in 10 hours without asking any questions to the judge, as if all of them are lawyers. They completely understand the instructions. All of this is fine. And it's a very strange situation to be in, to have seen the video, the footage of George Floyd and Derek Chauvin and the rest of the officers who were taking him into custody. Everyone has seen it. And virtually everyone in America has some problem with what happened there. It's difficult not to acknowledge that had things been done differently, it's possible this guy wouldn't have died. In which case,

you want there to be some repercussions. And you also hope that you're instituting some changes that might ensure that this doesn't happen again. And I don't know that making certain that you convict on all three of these things right away, put him in jail for 40 years, give people an opportunity to say, yeah, we got the guy. I don't know that that actually gets you that outcome. There's something about it that doesn't feel like justice. It feels insufficient. It feels inadequate. And I think that's because it is. Because the obsession with race in a case where there is no concrete evidence at all that makes it clear to me that if all of the circumstances were the same, but George Floyd had been a white man, he wouldn't have died in precisely the same way. Didn't Keith Ellison say something similar, which

kind of surprised me? He said there was no evidence of race. Yeah, that there was no evidence of racism on Derek Chauvin's. And you guys know, and I've heard you talk about this in the fifth column. If they had it, we would have heard it. I mean, there's zero chance they would have held that back. It did not come up. Yeah. And I made the Mark Furman analogy, I believe, in the podcast where, you know, obviously that was explicit on tape and it was played ad infinitum in the courtroom and that had an effect and that, you know, had an effect on the jury. Nothing at all. And to Camille's point about this feeling very political. And this is the thing. I can separate this from what I believe about Derek Chauvin and his, in what he did. And I don't think that was okay. And that's, that's an understatement, right?

But, you know, I see this morning in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that the feds were planning on if the, the jury came back with a not guilty verdict to arrest him in the courtroom on federal civil rights charges in Frog March. That strikes me that this has become exceptionally political being directed from the White House. Obviously, there's a task force coming to Minneapolis to investigate the police force there. I mean, the president is making comments on this. The vice president's making comments. This is, I mean, there's a, you know, award being given to the Floyd family from the city of Minneapolis. And, you know, jurors are

being sent away because they knew about it. And they're saying this prejudice is my opinion of the case. I mean, to say that this is something that was just, you know, done by the book and everything happened the way it should have been is absolute nonsense. It's not normal. The one thing that or the two things that I appreciated from Tim Scott last night in his rebuttal of the State of the Union. Tim Scott is the leader in the Senate on the Republican side of criminal justice reform. He's the one who's advancing the ball and that he's good and smart about it. And he made the needling point. But there's some truth behind it that sometimes it seems as though Democrats want the issue rather than the solution to the problem. And the way that we talk about it, in fact, by emphasizing race so much, that means you're actually not going to do it because you can't just solve racism by passing a law, right? It's going to be very difficult to do that. But if you talk about power relations, if you talk about qualified immunity, if you talk about mandatory minimum

sentences and the drug war, that's a bunch of policy you could do actionable. Maxine Waters could be doing that as opposed to telling Black Lives Matter that they need to be more confrontational if we don't get the right verdict. If we don't get the right verdict, we ought to get confrontational. Her rhetoric is utterly useless almost all of the time. You know, people like Maxine Waters are not the ones we should be listening to. There are honest brokers on the left who want police reform, who can make a good case for the elimination of, you know, some elimination of qualified immunity or so on. But she's not one of them. She's just an instigator.

You know, she's somebody who just goes out there for clicks and appease her base. And, you know, she's always gets reelected with something like 77 percent of the vote. So she she doesn't really have to be accountable to a more general base of the population. But she's constantly saying stuff like that. That's really utterly unhelpful. I hate to give her too much attention. But wait, Tim Scott is actually I think he's amazing. He's sort of there's a lot of talk about him possibly winding up on the GOP ticket next time around. You know, the hardcore MAGA crowd doesn't tend to love him. They don't tend to love Nikki Haley. They think they might be too milquetoasty. But I don't know if I'm milquetoasty, too. But I like those guys. I think moderation is a good thing. Here is just a bit of what he said last night in rebuttal to Biden. I've also experienced a different kind of intolerance. I get called Uncle Tom and the N-word by progressives, by liberals.

Just last week, a national newspaper suggested my family's poverty was actually privilege. Because a relative owned land generations before my time. Believe me, I know firsthand our healing is not finished. In 2015, after the shooting of Walter Scott, I wrote a bill to fund body cameras. Last year, after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, I built an even bigger police reform proposal. But my Democratic colleagues blocked it. I extended an olive branch. I offered amendments, but Democrats used a filibuster to block the debate from even happening. My friends across the aisle seem to want the issue more than they wanted a solution. But I'm still working.

I'm hopeful that this will be different. When America comes together, we've made tremendous progress, but powerful forces want to pull us apart. A hundred years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic. And if they looked a certain way, they were inferior. Today, cues are being taught that the color of their skin defines them again. And if they look a certain way, they're an oppressor. From colleges to corporations to our culture,

people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress at all. By doubling down on the divisions we've worked so hard to heal. You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly. America is not a racist country. Oh boy, he said it. He said the stuff you're not supposed to say, especially if you're a black man in America.

And of course, to disprove that America is racist, we saw a shit ton of racist stuff said about Tim Scott. And Uncle Tim was trending on Twitter for hours, for hours. Finally, Twitter shut it down. But I mean, please, if that had been trending about Barack Obama, you know, saying something that people didn't like, they would have had it done immediately. Oliver Willis, I is a very lucrative path, dishonest, but lucrative. And then there's Ture, the guy who got fired from MSNBC, saying Tim Scott gets called Uncle Tom by progressives, but he's an Uncle Tim. And then there's some lunatic who was tweeting a lot about Uncle Tom in response to Tim Scott. And he was like, OK, I shouldn't have done

that. And then Yashar Ali tweeted out like five other instances in which said guy had called other black conservatives like Ben Carson, Uncle Tom's. Somebody else tweeted out a picture of, forgive me, a raccoon. The play on words was obvious. It was it was this is the left, right? This is the left media pundits going after him with ferocity because of the clip we just played. It surprises you, Camille, doesn't it? Nothing like this has ever happened to you. All of the same treatment. And it's interesting because Tim Scott and I, we agree on some things.

We probably disagree on more things. But I would never think that the appropriate response to something Tim Scott says that I don't like is to denigrate him because he fails to meet the standards for what someone who's supposed to look for what someone who looks like him is supposed to think. That is the most objectionable nonsense in the world. And people who call themselves anti-racists, who imagine themselves crusading against white supremacy, find it completely fine to indulge in objectively racial slurs and to hurl them at a man who says things they don't like. And the things that apparently are

appeasing racists are to say things like, you know what? Your race doesn't define you. And we used to believe that in this country. And now we're telling kids in classrooms across America that your race is all important. And to the extent you look a particular way, you should either feel intense pride or intense shame on account of your race. It's deplorable. I believe this to my core. And I think lots of Americans do. And to the extent Tim Scott is able to get Klansmen to endorse a sentiment like that. He's a hero, a goddamn hero. And I can't I can't appreciate the way I mean, someone like Torrey, I saw that tweet as well. And I remember Torrey's book about post blackness. And in that same book, he has a moment where he's talking to Henry Louis Gates, who apparently was one of his professors at some point. And he he himself recalls Henry Louis Gates saying to him, you know, if there are 40 million black people, then there are 40 million ways to be black, which tells you something

pretty extraordinary that this notion of blackness, this notion of racial identity is pretty superfluous. It doesn't actually matter in a tangible way. And there's no way that Tim Scott, by holding positions that Torrey disagrees with or anyone else, can become a traitor to his race or a coon or a tom simply by being honest and transparent about what he believes. And again, I heard his speech yesterday. There were things that he said that I liked and things that he said that I cringed a little bit at. And that's fine. And it ought to be fine. And it ought to be appropriate for us to judge it on the basis of the quality of what he says

and not based on the color of his skin, which again, if that's what you people are doing, what are your values actually? It's racist. It's racist. It's not just the name calling. Name calling is horrible and awful. Sure.

And you shouldn't do it. But I do a little bit of it. It's fun sometimes. As long as you're not being racist. Have you listened to our podcast? But even if all the words were fine, the mental act of saying this person, because of the way that he looks, is not supposed to express certain things. That you are assigned a belief system based on how you look. That is never applied to me based on the way that I look. It is applied to Tim Scott. It's applied to Camille. That is racist. That is absolutely racist.

It's 100 percent racist. It is racism against Tim Scott and black people. But it is there is racism against white people in the same way right now, because, of course, in an effort to be, quote, anti-racist, you've got to believe that people born with white pigmentation are white supremacists. Up next, we're going to talk to the guys about Biden's remark the other night that the riot on January 6th on Capitol Hill was the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. Really? Really? Don't go away. That's next. First this. The assumption that we feel we have this inner superiority, even hatred, because we happen to have white skin is also racist. That's what's so infuriating, right? It's like, what do you think that's doing? Think that's opening up ears? Think that's making people want to listen to any actual concerns that are legit out there instead of these sweeping condemnations? No, right? Nobody's going to listen when you're

like, you can piss off. You're a white supremacist. You need to work harder. Go to Thanksgiving. Go to Fourth of July. Tell all your old relatives that they're racist to tell your husband, tell them all they're racists, or you're even more racist than I thought. Meanwhile, I'll tell your kids in school that they're racists. And if you disagree with any of this, you're even you're a terrible person, right? So it's like none of that opens up debate, opens up ears, makes people willing to listen. And yet this is the tactic that's being employed almost universally on the left right now. In a time in which we're constantly admonished for having cable news channels, you know, podcasts, talk radio that is divisive. The rhetoric is divisive. The Trump years brought us a new level of divisiveness. And I think there's some truth to that. But then again, in our schools, amongst very young kids, in our corporate boardrooms, you know, in media, this type of racial talk is never considered to be divisive when it is the most reductionist talk you can imagine. We're reducing people to their skin color only. And, you know, it's amazing at the end of that clip, Megan, you chuckled and said something that I completely understand.

You said, oh, he said it. Imagine that it is controversial in 2021 when the man standing behind the president, who was the vice president of a black president, and his vice president is a black woman, that it is controversial to say that we have made progress. We have made enormous amounts of progress. That doesn't say, and one shouldn't even have to do the throat clearing and say, well, that doesn't mean we're done. Well, of course, it doesn't mean we're done. No one said we're done, but we can acknowledge that there's been an enormous amount of progress to be made that has been made in maybe some that is to be made. And to say so is not reactionary. It's not white supremacist. It's not burying your head in the

sand. It's absolutely true. I mean, you see the Joe Biden speech last night. There is this total bastardization of recent history where Joe Biden gets up there and says, and then, you know, affirmed by the historian, historian Michael Bush laws that the January 6th MAGA riot was the worst domestic attack on our democracy since the Civil War, 2,400 people died at Pearl Harbor. 3,000 people died in 9-11. You know, one person died as a direct result of this, well, two if someone was trampled, of this thing. But this is how we treat history. This is ultra Jim Crow, the voting law changes in- It's Drew Magel. It's Drew Magel.

It's the biggest, I don't even know what that means, but it's possibly worse than Jim Crow. Right. All of this stuff allows, but our ignorance of history allows people to draw these utterly insane ideological points masquerading as historical truths. To your point, Megan, about persuasion. Hold that thought for just one second, because I think we have that soundbite from Biden. Listen. Hundred days since I took the oath of office and lifted my hand off our family Bible and inherited a nation, we all did, that was in crisis. The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. What are you talking about? Yeah. That is insane.

It's something we've talked about a few times because it becomes difficult for people to parse this. It is completely possible to find what happened on January 6th objectionable. The people who participated in it, deplorable. To think that this is bad and it is embarrassing for the country, for the entire polity, and to also think that it is hardly the worst thing that has ever happened to this country. In fact, I'm not even sure it's the worst thing that's happened in the past 20 months. Bad things have happened. And it's possible to believe two things. And I just don't think that the kind of hysteria that's been emanating from various corners, but certainly from the White House most recently on issues of race and identity, which even

January 6th has become primarily about, despite the fact that there were minorities represented there with MAGA hats proudly stomping through the Capitol or waving flags or doing other foolishness, maybe even bear spraying police officers. They call it an act of white supremacist violence in much the same way that Donald Trump's election was whitelashed. And I don't think all of this inaccurate condemnation on the basis of race, rather than dealing with specific issues, rather than dealing with the genuine deficiency of people, is actually helpful. And I think we have an opportunity. I think we all want to be compassionate to one another, and we could address ourselves to the genuine concern

of particular people in need. And instead, we found ourselves presuming that an entire race of people are in the most destitute state imaginable and that these are the people who we have to give all of our concern to. And we're ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of these people, Black people I'm talking about now, are not impoverished. Is that possible to say? Most of them aren't criminals. Most of them will never commit any sort of violent crime. Most of them will not be shot or murdered by police. In fact, an extraordinary percentage of them are thriving. They're incredibly

wealthy. I don't need your help. I don't need to be saved by anyone. In fact, I will say this. This is dangerous. I'm privileged. I live a privileged life. My life is extraordinary. I've borrowed money from you. I've borrowed a little bit of money from you. When we go out to eat,

I usually buy. The Irish guy is always like, Camille, can I get a little money? I'm starving here. So wait, so what you're saying is that when you guys sit down together in the morning, you, Matt, and Michael, don't look at Camille and say,

first, let me start with an apology. I apologize on behalf of myself, my race. I just start giving him things. it's fun. Yeah. Yeah. I only apologize for stepping on his like $8,000 sneakers. I mean, how crazy is that? Like the notion that you would be like ancestral guilt, perpetual ancestral guilt that never goes away, that you're always forced to apologize for by dint of your birth. What does that sound like? That's original sin. I mean, this is religious fervor. This is a kind of divisive, fundamentalist ideology that is permeating throughout the country and, quite frankly,

has become indistinguishable from the core tenets of a particular political party. And I know we're spending a lot of time beating up on the left and there are people who are going to be annoyed by that. But I'm telling the truth about things here. And it's not because I have some allegiance to conservatives or Republicans in general. This is just the way it is. We spent four years beating the hell out of those people, too. So but I'll give you the floor. But just just to just to offer a point, because I have actually a fair amount of Democrats listening to this show. I hear from them all the time.

And I have to say in their defense, the Democrats as a group are not with that rhetoric. They're not. Some portion are. Certainly Joe Biden offers it a lot. The leaders of the Democratic Party. Sure, they say they say those things. But I really, truly believe that many, many liberals are on our side on this, that they are not on board with this sweeping, untrue, racist rhetoric. Go ahead. Well, I would say that I would urge listeners to look up a study that I think was University of Pennsylvania. We've talked about it a few times.

Yasha Monk from the Atlantic wrote wonderfully about it called the Hidden Tribes Study. And basically, it breaks down the difference between people, you know, of all tribes. But I think that the stuff on the left was the most interesting. And even the New York Times did a great infographic on this when the report came out, showing that people on the left on Twitter were about seven clicks further to the left than the average Democratic voter. They put down to the number of people who actually agreed with the woke stuff, I think at 8%. Now, that's 92% of Americans that are either alienated, don't care about, or, you know, actively turned off by that kind of rhetoric, particularly, and this was done probably two, three years ago, something like that. Yeah. In where the rhetoric

has gotten so crazy that I had friends come to me and this was actually the most fascinating thing was after George Floyd was killed. There was, you know, the way that young people do this stuff is they campaign on Instagram. And everyone was posting a black square. And I had two people say to me within a day, and they come to me because they're like, oh, you're like a political guy. Is this normal? They were accused of, you know, harboring subterranean white supremacist instincts because of something they didn't do, which was post a black square. And it's like, oh God, this is getting a bit Maoist at this point. When you're saying you are not actually doing the thing, you have to be saluting the, the,

you know, the dear leader, et cetera, or following the tenants of the dealer. It has gotten so crazy that I believe that that 8% identified in the Hidden Tribes study has probably shrunk a little bit. I'm not so sure. I don't know. I'm not so sure. I've seen some polling recently that suggests to me that there's at least some degree to which a lot of these identitarian ideas have caught on, that there is a genuine strengthening

of racial fealty in certain circles. And the thing that I'm most concerned about is, I think a moment ago, Megan, you used the word us, that there are lots of people, Democrats who are with us here, is the us is somewhat undefined. Like we did such a good job. You raise a good point because this is something I wanted to yell at Matt Welsh for. Oh, great. That's awesome. Because I wanted to call my company Reason, and he stole it. And it was a brilliant, brilliant Matt Welsh. I love it because it was a really smart name. And it's where I think we, when I say us, that's where we are. I don't think any of this

shit is black, white, left, right. It's for sure. Reason versus unreason. And there's some fundamental values there, like a belief in this crazy idea of equality under the law, as opposed to equity being the basis of things. Equity as defined by the president of the United States and the vice president and various other people as starting from precisely the same place, a literal impossibility. This isn't a thing that you can actually do. And the one way you could do it is essentially by smashing everyone down to the same level. There's no limiting principle on this. So if we say that black people on average generally aren't doing so well and they don't start in the same place as white people,

why not start with the number of parents in your household or the number of books that you're allowed to own and read to your children? There are so many ways that we are. You can get rid of the parent. In all the two parent households, we have to get rid of one. To your point of squishing it down. It's not fairness. And to the point, I think there's actually, and to the point about whether people still believe this stuff or it's alienating, there is a bit of data that both shows that Americans are, you know, generically good people and that this stuff is alienating. If you look at the numbers, the approval ratings for Black Lives Matter right after the George Floyd killing, and then look at those numbers about three or four months later, they cratered. It was something like 70%. And,

you know, I mean, you know, the other 30% are people who are probably unaware of it, actually remember it and didn't like it from Ferguson, or maybe just racist. Still high among Black people, though. Still very high, very high in the 90s among Black people. Yes. And, you know, but it goes down to something like 30 odd percent. That is a collapse in that short period of time. And when you see people who say, you know, in this, by the way, it's not some sort of Glenn Beck conspiracy point to say, this is a woman who goes on, you know, live stream and says, I'm a trained Marxist. Another one of the BLM leaders shows up in Venezuela holding hands with Nicolas Maduro.

You think that I'm joking? I am not. These people are deeply ideological. So Marxist sitting in Malibu getting $26,000 per conference and owning four homes. You know what? I'm reevaluating Marxism. I might do it. It's the best advertisement she could have had for me joining what I was joking about the other night on Twitter was, is it boatloads of money? Is that what BLM stands for? I think it's instructive to point to remember that Joe Biden won the Democratic primary and he's the least woke candidate. He had there's a lot of different candidates who were fighting for the woke vote and they all collapsed.

Beto O'Rourke collapsed. Elizabeth Warren collapsed. Kamala Harris. They all went. Kirsten Gillibrand tried to do that. They all nobody wanted that. And Biden. I'm sorry, who? Exactly. And yet Biden literally on the first day in office signed a very sweeping executive order embracing equity, which he made sure to say it was equity, not equality. Right. Like he corrected himself in a press conference talking about it um so you i think it leads to an interesting thing which is how did this thing that he didn't campaign on which he has not lived his life that way that's not how he's been legislating it's not even how he's governing we're gonna outlaw menthol cigarettes what part about equity does that have to do anything but

like um yet it has captured institutions megan you asked a question earlier about or you made a comment about how it's as if these people don't want to persuade in their rhetoric. I think that's exactly right. They don't. I get and we all have kids in schools. At some point, all of the incessant emails about systemic racism, all the reactions, including to the Magarite on the Capitol, you know, the anguished chancellor of the

schools and the district superintendent, you know, the anguished chancellor of the schools and the district superintendent, you know, sending emails about white supremacy. You just tune it out. Yeah. At some point. So if there is a smaller, so to speak, it's white supremacy noise. If there are fewer people in any kind of like field or in the decision making body, then there's more people to elbow out the room and to set the

rules. I think I think there's a real kind of minority in terms of numbers of groups that are nonetheless taking over institutions because people like, OK, screw this. It's like the Oscars, right? Like, screw it. I don't want to watch it. I know what they're doing out. I'm out. I'm just going to tune it out. And so you're so so Biden biden correct he did not campaign like this but he's certainly governing just like an aoc would and and i was you know you're like he was um he wasn't supposed to be woke and i'm thinking you know oh we got a pig in a poke right which by the way means a bag i never understood that it's buying a pig in a bag without seeing the pig and you know i guess you want like the big fat juicy pig sorry sorry sorry vegans um anyway you're not supposed you don't want to buy a pig in a poke and i think we got a woke in a poke we should have checked inside the bag because

he is he's way more woke than we were assured he would be and you're right the rhetoric is sweeping and it's dishonest it and it's dishonest. And it comes from him. It comes from the news media. I mean, just this morning I was reading Newsweek, right? Which is actually, they've gotten a little better, I have to say, in terms of their variety of opinion. There's some no name, to be honest. Although her name is Maggie. Maybe I should have chosen Meggie. Meggie, Megan, anyway. Meggie Abenshine, founder of, quote, Moxie Mouth. That seems aptly

chosen. She goes on about how racist violence is on the rise in our country. She's lamenting the fact that 181 black people have been killed by police just since George Floyd's murder last year. OK, zero context. Did they shoot?

Did they fire on the police officer? Did they kill a cop? Did they kill somebody else? Did they was it like a Michaela Bryant case where they were out to kill somebody and were killed by a police? No context. It's just that the sheer numbers are meant to shock. And she mentions Michaela Bryant saying Daunte Wright and Michaela Bryant should be alive today, just like countless black people before them. And to not do anything as a white person is to perpetuate and remain complicit in violence against black people, indigenous people and people of color are often thrust into the work without a choice as a means of survival. So it's the LeBron James point, right?

That black people are being hunted in the street and being killed with impunity by police officers who don't care with no regard to facts of actual cases. Right. The McKay-Brian case is one I know. I've heard you guys talk about that. And with no regard to the dangers that police themselves face on the streets. You know, something that caught my eye this morning was a cop outside of Baltimore. His name was Corporal Keith Heacook, 54 years old, died after being brutally assaulted Sunday morning. He had to go to the hospital.

He was on the force for 22 years. He was brain dead and they had to disconnect him and he died. He had a kid, I think a 12 year old daughter. Some guy had assaulted an old couple like 70, 73 and 76 respectively, and then assaulted this cop and killed him. That's look, it's just one case. But I'm this is going to get no attention. Zero. No one's going to talk about a dead cop. This is what they face. And they have to make split second decisions. And this is why the McKay O'Brien case should never have been made a thing. that in an article talking about how, you know, black people are endangered every day of their life and that it's an existential question for them and that white people have to run around lecturing everybody. Otherwise, you're not doing your duty to protect your fellow man. There are so many dangers like layered on top of each other when it comes to this kind of hysteria. And the first problem is you make the problem seem intractable. There's nothing you can do

to fix this impossible, inevitable thing. It's thousands of Black people a year being murdered by the police in the streets. It's just absurd. And it's not true, but we make ourselves believe that it's true and that it can't be fixed. But then there's the kids, a generation of young people who are being inculcated with this knee-jerk paranoia. In every story that they see, or any story that they see, there's a lurch to conclude that race is what's motivating this, that race is going to prevent them from succeeding in life and getting ahead, or that their race makes them perpetually guilty and gives them this obligation to apologize for something that they have, or perhaps to feel insecure about talking about genuine needs that they have because of a difficult circumstance that they come out of personally, but they're

told that they're privileged despite that circumstance. The entire thing is incredibly poisonous. How do you fight that, Camille? I've got kids who are being told they're white supremacists because they have white skin and sins of the father and their oppressors and, you know, all that stuff. And you've got a black child being told she's the oppressed. I mean, like, well, how do you counter program? Well, the first thing is I've opted out of the race game altogether. I don't have a black daughter. I have a daughter and her name is Leah and she is her own person and she owns herself. And she will be able to forge whatever identity she likes for herself in precisely the same way her father and her mother have.

And the color that I happen to be, the way I happen to appear says literally nothing about who I am and what I believe and any presupposition associated with ideas of race, which is something that we've inherited. Race is an ideology. It isn't a biological or genetic reality. And as much as we imagine we see these differences when we see people who kind of look like us or kind of don't,

it is something that we've practiced. We ignore all of the ways that these concepts simply do not work in reality. And we affix for ourselves these definite properties to race. So speaking honestly about that is one thing, but also not letting anyone get away with being hysterical. Matt, I think you're right when you talk about this just kind of onslaught of ideological propaganda around these issues

and the degree to which people either, A, shut up because they're afraid to stick out like a sore thumb and say, I don't like that and they don't want want to get called racist or B, they shut up because they're just overwhelmed by it and they hope that it goes away. You can't do either of those things. These are ideals that matter. Equal protection under the law, that matters. That basic idea matters. The notion of the individual being sacrosanct and you demanding the dignity of your individuality above any notion of racial identity, that is sacrosanct. And you have to be able to say so, say it confidently and say it everywhere you go. You cannot allow someone like Ibram Kendi, a low rent, faux intellectual, to be able to make tautological arguments about how it's not enough to be not racist. You must be anti-racist. Says who?

What is an anti-racist? It is a contentless idea, totally baseless. And to the extent there is any ideal there, the actual idea is not neo-racism, it's racism. It's racism and explicit discrimination. A man who has publicly advocated for establishing a constitutionally unbounded new bureaucracy that would be responsible for striking down any law this unelected board saw fit if they deemed it quote unquote racist. It is a dangerous totalitarian idea. And people like him have incredibly too much power. And when the president of the United States and the Department

of Education are talking about grant programs wherein they cite people like Ibram Kendi, that is a dangerous threshold to be crossing. And for you to not say anything, dear American, is a real problem. So just before we go on, there's a little like gif. Is it gif or jif on Twitter? It's jif, but it's in both works. Because we know what you're talking about. And it's got a little girl. It's one of the first ones that comes up. And she's holding her little fists up by her face.

She's got this big smile. And she's like, yes, yes. That's me right now. That's everything you just said. Yes. I couldn't agree with that more. I love what you said about your daughter. It's one of the things that's so objectionable about what they're doing right now. You know, I've said before that I've got three kids and two out of my three, their best friends are black children. And between whom there was absolutely no division and no one telling them that they were different or one was sort of bad and one was sort of victimized. And then these

schools stuck their noses in it and changed the entire messaging. And I I'm angry about it. I'm I'm really angry. And you should be. And more people should be and more people should be willing to take take the fight to your school. You didn't ask for this battle. You did not ask for teachers unions and other pushy politicians to turn your schools into ideological battlegrounds, but here you are. And your responsibility is to say, you know what? No. Like my values are in line with the values of Martin Luther King. And I do believe that, you know, it's the color, it's the content of your character and not the color of your skin that ought to matter. And I believe in helping people who really need it. And I'm not going to pretend that every black person needs something from every white person. It is obscene. It is dishonest. It

is objectively false. And saying so is never a problem. Wait, gift Jif again. Gift Jif. Yeah, gift Jif. Matt and I have heard it a couple times so we we actually were just out having a cigarette he's done the thing right that's the part where he pounds the table yeah he's doing the table pounding stuff um the thing that bugs me i mean so many things about me but it's the fundamental dishonesty of it right if you look back at the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and you can cite King or Ralph Abernathy or any of these people, Bayard Rustin in particular, there's no one's lying about anything. No one's trying actively to deceive you because there's so much actual discrimination around you. And it's codified into law. This is particularly in the South. I mean, there is a elected official

standing in the way of James Meredith going to school. That is an abomination and it had to be stopped, right? Now, when you mention Ibram X. Kennedy, it is this abusive language when you say things like anti-racist. Well, who's not anti-racist? I hate racism. I'm not somebody who likes racism at all, but that's not what they're talking about. Anti-racism is a specific ideology. Black Lives Matter. Who could disagree with that? Right. I think Black Lives Matter. I think that's a proposition no one disagrees with. No one disagrees. Yeah. And if you do, you're a very small percentage of the population and you're not going to,

you're a piece of garbage, right? Uh-huh. Not helpful. Yeah. And then you go on to, you talked about Michaela Bryant. That one is amazing when you look at the headlines. Because if this is, you know, happening everywhere at all times, you should be able to talk about the actual facts of the case without having these misleading headlines. And, you know, huge credit to Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, who actually said, guys, this is kind of crazy. She was about an inch from Stein. Megan, this is hard for me to say, too. Come on.

It was like a teeny tiny little one of those red berries you see on the tree. It wasn't even a fig leaf. It was one of those teeny tiny red berries that go on the fig leaf. But bullshit. They have been such forces for evil in this whole discussion. I give them no credit. Zero. They tried to cover their asses by on the one most obvious case

throwing the piece of bone. I need to win people to my side. I need to win them to my side. I want to encourage them to get it right. Carrot and stick. Also, they should probably, you know, invite me on and stop canceling the invite. Yeah, you're not going to get on.

Are they? I'm just saying. Oh, yeah, that's not going to happen. I didn't say. Oh, I'm not surprised. It's disgusting. We've had so many guests on here from Glenn Greenwald and others talking about how they get. But they've gotten banned from places like MS or CNN because they're not saying the right stuff. And honestly, like I'll tell you, I was invited on CNN many times during my post NBC time on the couch to go talk about Trump. And it was always a woman issue because they are assuming she's going to bash on Trump. Trump's a sexist. Trump's a misogynist. Trump said another bad misogynistic thing. And I just kept declining. I like first of all, I am not going to say what you think I'm going to say. I am not an ideologue. I evaluate cases on a case by case basis. It's up to the viewers and the voters to decide whether he's

a sexist or not. I'm not your resident bash Trump, strong, empowered woman. And probably from you, Camille, they're looking for you to say that the stuff they think most black men would say about Trump or about this whole. And it's like once you realize they just want you to be their puppet it's really fucking insulting not wrong i feel i feel the need to say to say one thing briefly just based on what we were talking about before because i'm imagining a critic listening to the conversation and hearing me sort of get passionate and excited about things and saying you know he's always denying the significance of racism the the consequences of history in America. And I deny no such thing. I recognize that there has been a distinct and unique history of racial oppression in this country, that it almost certainly has profound consequences today.

I also go further and say, so societal outcomes are complicated because they are. And they're driven by a number of important and complex factors. And recognizing those factors and recognizing that complexity puts you in a better position to address meaningful problems. And it is possible to have a car accident, to break your femur, and to know that that femur needs help. And that talking about the car accident and who was driving and who was at fault is not going to help you learn to walk again. The actual remedy is distinct from the process and the circumstances of the

injury and even conversations about culpability. The only thing to address if you actually want to help people where they are is the specific need that they have and the ways in which that need can be directly remedied by circumstances, by people who can help. And most of the time for all of the talk about government getting in there and helping and leveling the playing field, that stuff hasn't worked. And there are places where it has actually been a net harm. So having honest conversations about that and acknowledging that these things are complicated as opposed to imagining you can flatten history and that all injustice in the world stems from whiteness, it's not just wrong, it's obscene. And it's a complete distraction

from having good, serious, tangible conversations about how we fix hugely complicated and really important problems. But who's trying to solve this? I mean, that's the thing that when I know that Twitter is not the world, and I've said that today already, but it is journalists and are people that are disproportionately, you know, in positions of power. And we don't see a lot of remedies here. And it's considered kind of gauche to point out after, you know, Adam Toledo, the 13-year-old kid who was shot and killed in Chicago, who had a gun on him about, you know, a nanosecond before he was shot, which is then of course framed as the kid didn't have a gun or was not armed at the time he was shot. No one steps back and says, okay, a thousand people have been shot in Chicago this year.

Crazy. So talking endlessly and doing the kind of Kremlinology and going through with a magnifying glass on how many nanoseconds happen between Adam Sluder throwing a gun at three in the morning after him and his cousin were just shooting at a car. What is that doing? Beyond trying to further a narrative that people of, you know, I would say people of color, he wasn't black, being shot by the police is a thing that is, you know, endemic. It never stops. It is the forward motion of the police bureaucracy

and hate machine. We must put a stop to that. Whereas a thousand people are being, I mean, Spike Lee made a movie called Shy Rack, a portmante. Whereas a thousand people are being, I mean, Spike Lee made a movie called Chirac, a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq, what, four or five years ago? It is, you know, it's not gotten better. It's gotten worse. And what has anyone done, including a series of Democratic mayors, to do something about that? Up next, are the feds about to take away qualified immunity from the cops who are out there? There's a reason that they have been given this sort of special privilege. And is it about to go away?

And is that a good thing? The guys and I have a bit of a disagreement, but it's a fun one. And you know what? It's okay. It's okay to disagree. You can talk all about it, at least here on this show and in America. We'll get to that in one second. But first, we're going to bring you a feature that we call From the Archives. This is a feature where we

look back at a previous episode we think you should check out from the Megyn Kelly Show Library, like maybe you missed it, you're busy people. Today, we're going back to episode 35, which is from December of 2020, when we interviewed Representative Dan Crenshaw. He's a Texas congressman from Houston. He spoke about some of the challenges that he has faced with the injuries he sustained as a Navy SEAL, the ramifications of which, by the way, he's dealing with to this day. Today, he's dealing with a new challenge to his eyesight, which we're going to get to that in one second, actually. But first, here's just a look back at our episode with him from last year. Are you kind of over that? Do you feel like you're over the trauma of that event yeah yeah i do um

yeah i think i'm blessed um in in that respect uh i i well my wife would probably have a different answer for that but but i don't feel like um i don't feel now like like I have any kind of remnants of PTSD from it. I think I did for a while. But no, I don't I don't dwell on it very much. I'm just I'm extremely grateful, frankly, for for what I can see. It's an absolute miracle that I can see it all out of my left eye. You know, there's a lot of adaptation that occurs. People just see me as I am right now. So they wrongfully assume that there's not serious vision issues. And it always strikes me as odd, like how willing people are in politics to always make fun of the eye. And it's like, you don't make fun of anybody else's missing body parts. Like if somebody loses a leg or, or a, or an arm,

you notice that's like off limits, but for some reason, the eye thing, and this is by the way, more again, this is, this happens more with conservatives, right? Again, that, that crazy right wing, that, that crazy wing that we talked about that pretends to be MAGA supporters, but they're not. Um, it just happens a lot more with them than it does the left. I would just, I would just point out, um, they're, they're, they're mocking. I mean, I remember the Pete Davidson thing on SNL, but that of course he was, he's no Republican, but what do you mean? People are mocking your, your missing an eye? They're vicious and disgusting about it. Um, you know, so it's just kind of odd. I guess

I'm noting it because what's interesting is that they'll never do it to somebody without a leg or an arm. Um, there's something about, uh, something about like, oh, it's fine. It's not, but anyway, um, maybe the other thing is I will say the eye patch is kind of cool. It could be a form of envy, you know, like there's something that it kind of takes you to the next level of badass when you have an eye patch. Well, well, I think I think I would say that a lot of these groipers are probably incels. So, yeah, they might be envious. Well, to your original question. No, I which was a serious one.

Yeah, I'm blessed to feel like like I've gotten over it, but you know, I'm still, I'm still constantly getting fitted for different glasses so I can see this computer that I'm looking at right now properly. Um, because I have a, I have a cataract in my eye that can't be fixed. Um, I have a, I have an Iris that cannot open and close. So like, I can't be outside in the sun without sunglasses. Um, when I take out my contact, which only one company makes properly in the world. Um, you know, I've got to wear the lenses that are a quarter inch thick to see anything at all. So, and then, you know, I've got like no, no field of view or depth perception. So it's, um, it just takes adaptation, but, but I've never, I've always felt, um, a real strong, um,

community support. The SEAL teams are very tightly knit and like that. And, you know, so it's, I don't dwell on it. Well, Crenshaw recently had retinal surgery and is facing an uphill battle as he fights to regain his vision. Following the surgery, he had to lay face down for two weeks. Think about that. But now he has been able to lift up his head, which is a step in the right direction.

He said on Friday that he can only see light and shadows, but he has retained his positive attitude that he displayed when we talked to him. I'm so sad to hear that though, aren't you? Shit. Like, hopefully this gets turned around. I mean, he obviously has the best attitude to handle any sort of a challenge, but just say a prayer for him, right? You tweet it out.

I'm not sure how my vision will be in a few weeks, but I am hopeful and confident it will return to normal. We've been through harder times before and we are going to get through this. We are definitely praying for Dan Crenshaw and we'll keep you posted on his condition as we get more and we will going to get through this. We are definitely praying for Dan Crenshaw and we'll keep you posted on his condition as we get more and we will keep bringing you episodes

from the archives. And now, back to our guest right after this. We have George Floyd Square, right. Do we have Jaslyn Adams Square now coming in Chicago? I know you guys have talked about her, the seven-year-old who was shot in the McDonald's drive-thru in Chicago. Forty-five shell casings found outside of the car. At least six bullets hit the little girl. Where's the protest? When is BLM swinging by that street and creating Jaslyn Adams Square, not the crime rate in Chicago and other inner cities. We've gone through the increase in the murder rate in several major cities not mentioned by Joe Biden last night. Where's the commission on that? Instead, we're going to get a commission talking about how to crack down on the police, how we got to start looking at the number of people police pull over and make sure that there's gender and racial parity.

So if we're going to look looking at the number of arrests. Yeah, yeah, gender is important. You're kidding me. No, no, no. What? Now, I mean, like all the ladies in the world, like all of our shitty driving, it's really going to come under the microscope now, ladies.

I hope they get after the parallel parking. Enough is enough. 95% of murders are committed by men. Are we going to start looking for parity there? Are we going to start arresting women on 50, 50 murder. The thing to keep in mind is that there are multiple ways to achieve parity.

We just get more women to commit murders and then we'll be fine. This is, this is also, you don't have to be worried anymore. It's fine. There are more dead people. All of this is, is pretty perverse.

I will say, cause we talk about this as well. We've been advocating for criminal justice reform and and for scrutiny of law enforcement way before it was cool, way before anyone else showed up to the party. And I continue to think that these are important issues when any civilian is is dead after an interaction with a law enforcement officer. That is a serious thing that needs to be looked at and investigated thoroughly, like impartially, transparently. We need to know what happened because it is absolutely imperative that citizens can trust the people who have the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That is the government, right? Full stop. It's just true. When we flatten them all and pretend that they're all indistinguishable from one another, that there is only one problem and that it's police killing black people because they're super duper racist.

It's harder to actually achieve that goal. In fact, it becomes a lot easier to avoid achieving that goal, to avoid doing the difficult work of trying to fix that problem when you've shifted gears and you're just talking about racism. It's what they're doing with public schools that have been failing kids that I could talk specifically about the demographics of the kids that they're failing, but I'll just leave it at that. They're failing kids in New York, San Francisco, all across the country. They're doing that. Sure. Let's talk about that because I think maybe we have a disagreement on that and that'd be fun. I don't totally have it figured out. I'm not going to claim that I can't really debate you cause I don't have a very strong feeling on it, but I lean toward leaving quality qualified immunity in place. And the reason is I think more people are going to get killed if we take it away because qualified immunity, it's a judicial created

doctrine that basically says, unless you can prove the police officer in question did exactly the thing that's already been deemed problematic by another court, he's going to have immunity to your lawsuit and you can't, you can't sue him for what he did to you. And the Democrats want to get rid of qualified immunity altogether. And Tim Scott's compromise is, well, why don't we just make it like super clear that you can sue. You're not going to be able to get your hands into the pocket of the police officer who hurt you or did something wrong to you. But you are going to get their their their department to pay if a court finds in your favor. So that's his compromise. Well, I will say what he's proposing is basically what we have now. It's kind of what we have. If you can prove that the police officer did the thing that's already been deemed illegal in another case, you can sue and you would get the department to pay. And even here in New York City in the past year, I looked it up. It was 2019, the most recent data. The city paid out $175 million in those claims.

So people are suing the cops for misdeeds, just like the cop himself is not paying it. And most cops themselves couldn't pay anyway, if you got a big judgment. They don't make a lot of money. Anyway, so my feeling is, while I like accountability and I realize cops do bad shit, it's not like they're human.

They're like us. They can do bad stuff. They can do it negligently. They can do it recklessly. They can do it intentionally. If we add yet another layer of danger for them out there because they're already overseen by the media, by, you know, remnants of Eric Holder's Department of Justice. Now Biden's Department of Justice is

going to put a bunch of layers in there where they seize control over all these municipalities and their police forces. They're going to hold back. I feel like that that that Micaiah Bryant would have been allowed to stab the girl in the pink jumpsuit if if qualified immunity were removed because cops, they don't get paid enough to take those risks, to put their family at risk, to put their job at risk. You know, the George Floyd, quote, Justice Act also wants to make it a lot easier to put cops in jail for misjudgments on the scene. Right. If they've if they've basically want to lower the standard of culpability for criminality against cops,

that's if I'm a cop, I'm like, go ahead, kill each other. I'm going to be over here. I'll make a showing of trying to protect you and let the chips fall where they may. That's what worries me. I'll let you guys take it. I don't think that like it's very easy to have an instrumental sort of consequentialist look at any given police reform. Right. If you, for instance, empty the prison of people serving drug sentences for stuff that would now be legal, that they wouldn't be arrested for. If you emptied all of the prisons with those people who are currently in jail, some of them are going to commit crimes.

So do we not do it because some of them are going to commit crimes tomorrow? No, I think we do it because that is the just thing to do. Similarly, in this case, I don't think that police or anybody should have a special, you know, judicially created carve out preventing them from being sued as an other person in that situation would be sued. So it just doesn't make sense. Let me challenge you on that and then I'll get and then I'll be quiet. But even even given the nature of what a police officer does, because that's why it came about, like they're looking at cops like the guy in McKay, O'Brien, who in one split second has got to make a judgment call and can't be worried

about qualified immunity. They're going to take it away. I'm going to get sued and lose my he can't. He's just got to make a split second judgment call life or death. Yeah, I don't think that anybody I don't think you're gonna qualified immunity is not gonna affect that case nobody's gonna look at that case and say oh that was a bad that was a bad shot really that's not gonna i don't take it up with maggie take it up with old maggie what's her name from moxie mount she's well maggie from like like a lot of people she's always screwing things up maggie for has a lot of ideas that don't really play out in the real world just as as camille was mentioning before in the uh derek chauvin trial every you know the media has portrayed this as a like a

race thing the trial didn't at all so like where the real stuff happens uh it's not like that megan you point out the um the kind of you know we're already getting the federal government too involved in these things that might be true might not true. Let's table that for a second. But the majority of all of this activity, just as it is with schools, happens in the local level. These are decisions made. These are local police forces, the Albuquerque, New Mexico police force. Actually, New Mexico just abolished qualified immunity, which I think will be a positive based on how bad the Albuquerque police force has been historically over the years, really has been involved in a horrific number of killings.

But I don't think that the federal government is going to suddenly go everywhere marauding into into local police forces. Most of the stuff happens locally. And they're doing it. They're starting, you know, they're starting. They are starting review, right? Like this is and camel's nose under the tent. Here they go.

They're already going to do pattern practice. They're going to they're going to do it. They're going to do it in Minneapolis. I mean, which will come as a surprise to Madaria Arredondo. Right. That was his name. That's the city's first black police chief. The guy was a star witness in the Chauvin trial for the prosecution. He was a guy who he was. He was

an Obama style progressive police officer who came onto that stand and said Chauvin did wrong. Chauvin wasn't taught to do that stuff. We're against Chauvin. And now he's going to have the feds breathing down his neck saying pattern and practice. You're going to have to answer. This guy's probably like, what? As you guys put it on your podcast if they had the evidence of that we would have heard it already they don't but this is what the obama biden administration and now biden harris administration wants to do they want to go in there they want to take policing out of the local control and give it give it a more federalized feel, which does not work. That is not going to end well. You can't police that way.

Sorry, go ahead. I don't think nationalizing policing is the answer. And I will say that there does seem to be, at least from a cultural standpoint, a bit of a pendulum that has swung in the other direction in terms of public opinion about encounters like this. I'm surprised to see so many people publicly effectively advocating for kids getting into knife fights and occasionally murdering one another and the police just not getting involved in firing their guns. And look, we are seeing places locally where qualified immunity has been done away with, and we will very soon see whether or not that leads to good or bad outcomes. My suspicion is that it's going to depend on the circumstances because all of these things are complex. And that is the reason not to try to take this broad brush,

you know, approach to trying to fix all of these things. But it does seem to me that before the pendulum swung, that the pendulum was probably too far in the other direction. There were too many such circumstances where law enforcement was effectively involved in making determinations about the legitimacy of its own actions. And no person in America can agree that when the police shoot someone and kill them, that they should be the actual ones making determinations about whether or not that's okay. But more than that, to bring us back to this same conversation we were having before, the conversation around qualified immunity is mostly about retribution.

It's about punishment. And it's not reform-oriented except to say, well, we're aligning incentives. We're trying to get it so that cops are a little more judicious and careful when they're out doing their jobs. Well, let's talk about the specific job they're being asked to do. Maybe there are ways that we can keep our society safe without getting armed agents of the state involved in everything. And those practical conversations, which I think require some deliberateness and some thoughtfulness, and again, a lot of involvement at the local level based on circumstance and need, to try to figure out what those things are. And again, we're not having those conversations because we're too busy screaming at one another, chasing after imaginary white supremacists who are likely to take over the country and kill everyone if we apparently stop talking about them. So I think there are lots of opportunities for reform here and probably lots of opportunities for reform here and probably lots of opportunities for actual compromise and progress on a lot of important issues. And I think it's fair to have some concerns about the possibility that qualified immunity

across the board might be too much. But it's also a circumstance where we're saying, well, the problem here, the danger that we're talking about is maybe there would be too much accountability. And I mean, I'd probably rather make that error than the error in the other direction. If I had to choose. Let me just ask you this. Let me ask you this. So let's say they let's say we're not going to get the sweeping qualified immunity that

the Democrats want. I think there's not enough. I don't think they've got the votes in the Senate for that. Tim Scott's version. I think. There's not enough. I don't think they've got the votes in the Senate for that. Tim Scott's version, I think that could happen. He actually said in the news the other day that he thinks that they may have a deal on this between one and two weeks. But the other stuff that's being layered on here by the Democrats and what they want to do to reform police, to your point, they're already looking at a lot. It's not just qualified immunity removal. It's the thing I was saying, like getting rid of any disparities based on your ethnicity, based on your gender, right?

Based on your sexual orientation. Like we need as many gay people pulled over as straight people. I don't know. Straight, whatever. That stuff disturbs me, right? Because it's 92% of the U.S. prison population is male. There's a reason for that. Like men are the ones committing most of the US prison population is male. There's a reason for that. Men are the ones committing most of the crime. Sorry, guys. That's just the truth.

It doesn't mean that, look, all cops are sexist. It's just, I don't know. There's probably a long, long reason for it. And if you watch as much as Dateline as I do, you know, women are the victims. Women are the victims. And it's always the husbands. Okay, I've taken a diversion. But this is the point I was trying to make, that this bill being proposed by Biden touted last night would also, I'm now quoting from National Review, funnel federal dollars to progressive organizations like the NAACP, the ACLU and the National Urban League, among others. And what for? Quote, to study management and operations standards for law enforcement agencies, including use of force, racial profiling, and much more. Then they're supposed to use these studies,

which we can safely assume will not be disinterested, still quoting, to create pilot programs for law enforcement that can be used to fulfill their accreditation standards. Cops seeking federal grants must pledge to spend at least 5% of the funds that they get on studying and implementing programs like those the NAACP, the ACLU, and et cetera are charged with coming up with. Can you imagine? To get their money, they've got to pledge 5% of what they're given on implementing plans they get from the NAACP and the ACLU, who if you look at some of the some of the police reform positions they push, I mean, it's like not that far afield from what we see from BLM. Like, who the hell is going to know how to police after this other than, excuse me, ma'am, did you

not want that knife pledged into you? How about you? Could I get you to stop? Oh, wait, the knife's already in. It's already in. You know, in. That's how it's going to go. Yeah. I mean, the risk of getting these people involved in this particular way is that you just end up with a circumstance where this is a rich opportunity for highly paid consultants. They're going to make a tremendous amount of money, whether or not there's any material progress made on these issues. In fact, it's in their interest that there isn't material progress made on these issues, that they perpetuated forever to maintain their stream of income. And again, that's not the way we get to progress, which is the reason why probably isn't even a good thing for Black Lives Matter to necessarily be up in arms about what's happening in Chicago. What really needs to happen is all of us need to be collectively a little less

inured to the carnage that's taking place in various parts of America and a bit more compassionate and a bit more thoughtful about the ways that we can get to solutions and stop thinking about this in terms of black and white. Conversations about black on black crime always make my skin crawl. Most black people aren't committing crime. People aren't committing crime on account of their blackness. They're not committing it on behalf of Black people. The fact that it's Black on Black doesn't interest me at all because I don't wish it were Black on white. The only issue I'm interested in is it's crime. It's criminality. And maybe there are commonalities amongst criminals of any background. And perhaps some of those commonalities might lead us to practical solutions,

which talking about those things narrowly is probably the best path forward. It's too rare that people think about the federal government of what it can and should do of like, well, let's create a thing and let's do a money. And what it can and should do, especially in the area of criminal justice reform, is undo the bad things that already happened. Right. Right. Like it's the federal government that, you know, basically created civil asset forfeiture, for example, legalized theft by local police or whatever police of goods that they presume are stolen and they can keep it. They don't have to charge anybody with a crime.

This is a federal government created thing. They could remove the thing that would be helpful. The federal government created the drug war, essentially. Right. You know, there, there were state and local marijuana laws and other things, but the federal government got in there. So like, let's get rid of those things that are there that will do so much more good than, than, you know, hiring a bunch of consultants. Well, yes. And why do we have to like,

they arrest so many people. Like, that's the thing about the George Floyd trial that always sort of stuck out at me. Like I realized he resisted arrest once they decided to arrest to arrest him but like it was a counterfeit 20 bill like okay he was sitting behind the wheel of a car and there were drugs in the car i get all of that but like could there be some some other version of handling that that wouldn't have resulted in handcuffs resisting knee on the neck. You know what I mean? Like it does seem when you have somebody who's in the course of committing what you believe is a nonviolent offense, that there, there should, we should be able to come up with other options because cops hands-on black suspects is risky. It just doesn't, it goes wrong too often. And if

you can decrease the number of times that happens, both by looking at the cops options and and yes, the black crime rate, then you should. You should. Yeah. Although I just warn again about making it about race in the context of these things, just only because we are here. Here's what I'll give you the floor with doing it. Here's here's where I want. Here's here's why I raised that. OK, I'll give you the floor of this. So and my audience knows like I am somebody who I don't tweet out random videos of black crime. I feel like there's something wrong about it. I just I don't do it. I see people do it all the time. I'm not trying to make a point about blacks, you know, committing black on black crime more than police do, although that that is an issue.

But I went to Chicago and I did some really tough interviews in inner city Chicago a couple of years ago and tried to get to the bottom of I met with a bunch of moms who had lost sons to gun violence or to, you know, prison sentences. And there there was such a sense of hopelessness. They didn't want to leave. They did not want to leave the inner city. This is their home. It's where all their friends are, their families, but they, they wanted things to be better. There weren't fathers in the homes. Most of the time, um, they were drive by shootings all the time. These kids were spending their entire days inside because it wasn't safe to go outside. They couldn't go across certain streets in the town because of the gang violence. And they understood like where they were supposed to stay

or if they crossed over to this other area that that was the most dangerous part because they weren't affiliated with the right gang. And, you know, these are moms. They're not in the gangs at all, but they just understand sort of territories have been carved out. The schools are nothing.

The schools suck. The schools do nothing for these kids. And they've been given a lot of federal money. I don't know where it goes, why it doesn't work, but it doesn't. The schools themselves are dilapidated, not far from inspirational. They're depressing. And the kids see no examples of a good future for them, right? It's like we have to get to these communities so much earlier than the point at which they meet the police. Charlie Cook was making this point the other day. And there just doesn't seem any appetite to do it. So it's not just like, well, the black people are killing the black. It was like these communities are ignored

or or there's something happening inside of them that needs to be addressed much, much earlier. And I feel like we don't hear that highlighted enough as something we need to dig into. I think I think you're. Yeah. So first, I'll begin by saying, I mean, I appreciate the genuine compassion on your part towards a community that you do not reside in. Right. Not that you're not a part of because you're you're too white, but you don't live there. You know, this is something that you see from afar. Your kids aren't exposed to it. Neither are mine. And the principal issue that I have with our descriptions of these things being rooted in our descriptions of things along racial lines is the universe of really complicated, interconnected problems that you talked about, race is just not consequential there. And it might be a common characteristic amongst the people who live in that particular region. But the actual sort of patterns of dysfunction, the institutions that are failing people, the ways in which they're failing them have nothing to do with race. And there is a universe of people who kind of look like them, who don't have their life experience, who don't share those particular risks. And there is literally no advantage in us sort of classifying and codifying things in a way that effectively like takes what is the characteristic of the victims in these

communities. People who live in high crime communities are the victims of the criminals who are operating around them, who are committing theft, who are committing vandalism, who are killing people. And the difficulty with Black-on-Black crime or even white-on-white crime in regions of the country where that is the particular problem, it is a weird way of kind of characterizing or categorizing the horrible circumstances they're dealing with, with respect to the physical attributes of the people who live in those neighborhoods, that doesn't actually give me anything actionable. There's nothing about it that helps me grab my hands around the circumstances. It gives us this veneer of understanding. I think it's a dangerous veneer of understanding.

Have you seen Shelby and Eli's deals, What Killed Michael Brown? I have, yeah. So they came on the show and they pos they're, they posited that in a city like Ferguson, Missouri, um, what created sort of a, a, an area that's got a lot of crime is the federal government that, that the black community, they were focused on the race of, you know, the dominant population in that city saying they were on the rise, like, um, the marriage rate, the home ownership rate, the job rate was on the rise. It comes up a lot.

Sure. Yeah. And then the feds got involved, the Great Society and so on. And they created what Eli said was a permanent black underclass there with federal housing that was awful, that fell apart and so on. And sort of went back to look at the root causes in a city like Ferguson of why there's so much poverty, which is directly linked to crime. Right. I don't I don't know. Maybe you're right. Maybe it's not relevant at all. What I took away from that conversation in that film was

the federal government's effort to, quote, help very often has the opposite effect. And then when things go wrong, now in today's day and age, people scream racism, but that's not necessarily an honest assessment of how we got to where we got. I mean, I think that race so often distorts rather than illuminates. And one kind of tangential point here and a related point is that when you tell people, I mean, the police are in certain neighborhoods because they're getting calls from those neighborhoods, but they want the police to come.

Because most, as Camille says, you know, most black people are not committing crime. Most black people are not X, Y, and Z that you would, would, would, you know, stereotypically racist people would suggest. So they don't want that in their neighborhood. And if you go back historically, and this is a major blind spot, and people become, you know, baffled by this when you say, so it was mentioned today that, you know, Joe Biden, you know, talks about mass incarceration and has some responsibility there, right? And he's been criticized for this too. And that is presumed

to be, well, you know, the old racist Joe Biden is now become the new woke Joe Biden. Well, no, because if you look back, particularly like the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, there's a fantastic book on this called The Black Silent Majority, about how those were pushed by Black people in those neighborhoods because they thought the liberal policies of, you know, John Lindsay in New York City in the 1960s failed them. And so we needed these laws because it's tearing apart our community and the presumption of a racial motive that you guys don't care. The second version of that is the crack cocaine disparity in sentencing. And that was pushed very heavily by people that were part of the Congressional Black Caucus because they said there is the crack. What was the word

always used afterward? Epidemic. It was the crack epidemic and you don't care. We need to get tough on people who are, you know, selling drugs in our neighborhood, taking drugs brazenly and openly in the street and to do something about it. And when we talk about, you know, over-incarceration, mass incarceration, you know, sentencing disparities, et cetera, and we talk about it through an explicitly racial lens, we miss the actual truth of what happened. And this is always obscuring things rather than enlightening things. Charlie Rangel was advocating for the death penalty for drug dealers in New York because they were destroying Black communities. So talk about tough on crime. Again, it's just that there are, I think I've seen Shelby's documentary. I can appreciate some of the arguments that are made there. A lot of the arguments that are made there. I think it's fair to have conversations about

cultural defects, cultural proclivities that might lead to bad outcomes. This is fair. I think it's fair to have conversations about the unintended consequences of government policy. What I think is unhelpful generally is to categorize it as, well, it's black culture that's deficient, or even to call it the poverty of culture. I just think these concepts are too imprecise. And quite frankly, because of our experience with them, they kind of overload our circuitry. We just get distracted by race in these contexts. And I think all it helps to do is compound error. When people presume that the bad things are only happening because of race or that the bad thing that's happening here is being perpetrated by people of a particular race. And I'm not saying that anyone here is involved in that sort of thinking, just in general, that binary exists in the world.

That's where on the we're having the conversation on the wrong plane. And we need to be about two or three levels deeper than that. If we to get hashtag part of the problem i i get that i like that i mean it's sort of falling into the same trap of seeing everything through that racial lens and i'm and it's i'm going back to sort of the um like the thomas chatterton williams unlearning race like unlearn it unlearn it absolutely unlearn it. Absolutely. Let me shift gears with you guys for a minute, because something that when I was studying up on you, I really wanted to ask Michael about this. One of the things that you get ready.

That's a bad preamble. One of the things that's been really bothering me lately is the erosions of free speech and how these young whippersnappers on college campuses don't seem to care about it at all. They they I recently spoke with some young college students and made very clear that I don't think words are violence at all. You know, they can be offensive. And if you hear them, you can teach yourself that you'll be fine, you know, that you may not have enjoyed the experience, but you'll be just fine hearing them. They're not violence. They're all, what about bullying?

You know, people can get cyber bullied. I understand. It's not pleasant. I'm not saying it's pleasant, but I think the answer to all that stuff is to shore up your own resilience and strength. That's me. Okay. But I am a nothing when it comes to free speech advocacy, when it comes to you, Michael, because I saw you actually participated in the quote, everybody draws, everybody draw Muhammad day protest.

Do you guys remember this audience? Remember this, uh, 2010. And it was a response to when South park, um, the, the, the censorship ship of South park for, for depicting Muhammad. Um, and this was so dicey. It was like, I will confess to you, it's scary even to talk about it now, right? After what happened at Charlie Hebdo, it's like, you draw Muhammad, you could draw the ire of ISIS, you could get beheaded, you could do, it's like crazy stuff can happen to you if you do anything that depicts Muhammad at all, never mind in a way that's unflattering.

So what made you participate in that and how did you find the spine to do it? I found it really depressing that this stuff was coming up again so many years after what happened to Salman Rushdie, which was 1989, which was obviously not drawing Muhammad, which is a depiction of Muhammad in his book, The Satanic Verses. And, you know, I was living in Sweden for a while where this became an actual issue of debate. There was a far-right newspaper in Sweden, it was associated with the far-right party, legitimate far-right people. I mean, they were, you know, not people that I enjoyed, but they published the cartoons that the Danish newspaper had initially published in, I think, 2005 or 2006. And the government intervened and I think shut down their server or, you know, took it offline, basically.

And I said, you know, this is kind of crazy. And in Denmark, at the same time, they were reanimating a blasphemy law, a blasphemy law in Denmark because of the power of particular lobbyists saying this stuff shouldn't happen. And so when it happened to the U.S. in a way that I found really disconcerting, which was initially a woman named Molly Norris, who has disappeared from the face of the earth. That's right. Disappeared. What do you mean? In her crime, she disappeared. I believe she changed her name. She was doing kind of cartooning or something. She was an alt-weekly cartoonist. For Seattle Strangers.

Pacific Northwest. So Pacific Northwest. And she does an everyone draw Muhammad thing. This is actually where the real Genesis came from. And she did this kind of wry, silly thing. And this was a woman who's not political at all. And it's a picture of a teacup. And the teacup says, I'm Muhammad.

And it's like an I Am Spartacus thing with like everyday household items saying, I'm Muhammad. The response was so brutal that she had to go into hiding. And she never came out of hiding. And I understand that. I understand being that terrified of people who don't, you know, I mean, not even kids say words are violence. These are people that, you know, create violence on because of words, right? And if you think of the Salman Rushdie thing, Salman survives, and I know Salman reasonably well. And I've talked to him about it a number of times, and it was a difficult thing in his life. But it was even more difficult for people

tangentially involved. His Norwegian translator was shot. His Japanese translator, I believe, was shot or stabbed. One of them died. So, I mean, this was their, you know, the Danish cartoons were published in thousands of people died because there were embassies burned all across the world. And it was, and I took a step back and I was like, these are cartoons. What the hell is going on? And what really worried me about it was the kind of jello-spined response from people in the West, in particular, like, you know, all of these people from PEN America, who when Charlie Hebdo was going to be celebrated by PEN, a free speech organization, which actually

did something today I didn't like, were going to honor the surviving members of a massacre. They were massacred during an editorial meeting by two Islamists with AK-47s, one of the most brutal things. They killed a Muslim cop outside, shot him in the head. I mean, there's photographs and videos of this. The most brutal attack on freedom and democracy

that France has seen in a very long time. And Penn was going to honor them. Hundreds of people from Penn objected because what is worse than murder? Well, Charlie Hebdo had been, had done some racist things. None of these people spoke French, of course, and they didn't understand the cartoons that they were criticizing. And Charlie Hebdo offends everybody, right? So there was all of this stuff that was swirling around. And it was like,

no, no, no, this is kind of basically who we are and what we're about. And for us to sort of back away from this, that we can't draw a silly cartoon. Well, no, it's blasphemous. Well, I'm not a Muslim. It's not blasphemous for me. I can do whatever the hell I want. And Muhammad lived. He was a person. He's been depicted. He's been depicted thousands of times in various, you know, Shia Islam, etc. But, you know, this is some new thing that has been created. And everyone was saying, well, yeah, it's very bad to offend people. And I found that to be a very puzzling and then worrying precedent that had been set so the logical thing was if molly norris was going to um go underground you know screw it but why don't we do it and this so this is the we did the reason magazine was that everybody draw a muhammad contest for the reader contest to do it and this was before the charlie hebdo massacre our our idea was that uh and i worked at the LA Times when the Danish cartoon thing happened.

No newspaper in the country with maybe like one exception. The New York Sun, I think. Wait a minute, Matt. Are you telling me you started? I didn't know that. You at Reason started the Everybody Draw Mohamed DeVotist? It was Moynihan's stupid idea. Don't blame

me. Come and get me. Michael C. Moynihan's stupid idea. Don't blame me. Come and get me. And Michael C. Moynihan. And Megan Kelly's podcast is huge amongst Islamists. Do you know that? We got visited. As a matter of fact, I have many Muslim friends who listen to this podcast. So there. I'm very sorry.

It wasn't comfortable. It's not the same as Islamist. It wasn't a comfortable couple of weeks. Yes, we were visited by the FBI. We were visited by the FBI and everything like that. But when when i was working the la times and the cartoon thing happened i argued i was in the opinion section the then executive editor guy named d back hey um uh refused to just like all the other newspapers in america refused to publish the the cartoons even as an illustration of what is this furor about and so i I tried to argue, let's do it on the opinion side. Um, and now it's vetoed. And, and the idea then in 2006 was if we create the

taboo in Western journalism that we can't depict this, then what, what happens when you, uh, you know, behavior that gets rewarded, gets repeated, you are now creating a taboo. You're making it so that if anyone breaks it it whoever's going to be lonely out there is going to have a target on their back and that's exactly what happened do you remember what happened when the charlie hebdo after the massacre they did a first cover after that and people said oh they put muhammad on the cover they actually didn't there was just a muslim guy on the cover of this cartoon and i can't remember the think bubble was like you know they they did this for me or some kind of thing. It was like, you know, criticizing from a Muslim

perspective, like we don't, we don't buy this stuff. And so there was a wire service and I can't remember which one, and I don't want to defame a wire services. And they, they said, we will not run that image. So you usually buy these images from a wire service, put them in your magazine, in your publication. And so what did I do? Because I'm a shit disturber. I went and logged into the wire service and I looked for Piss Christ, the Andres Serrano thing that caused all this. And there it was, a crucifix, a submerge in a jar of urine that was offensive to some people, not to me, but it was offensive to some people. So I tweeted it. And what did they do? They had the exact wrong response. They took that off the wire. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I'm saying.

We don't have to take more things off. We have to include more things. And that precedent was very, very bad. And it was starting to retroactively affect, you know, you see this in television, right? How many, you know, episodes like, you know, Joe Rogan's podcast is bought by Spotify. They purged 40 episodes. There's Gavin McGinnis on it. There's this person on this. We don't want that stuff. Old episodes.

I believe South Park, they do not air that episode on HBO Max, who has the rights, I think. Keep in mind, South Park was putting Mohammed in a bear suit. A bear suit. It was a joke. The whole joke. Mohammed's not a bear. What is wrong with these people? I know you're not an Islamic scholar, but the man wasn't a bear.

But isn't he, though? I mean, in some way, there's a bearishness to it. But this has happened all over. And now the new version of this, and this is the reason we have to be on our toes with this all the time. And I don't want to speak too much about this because I read it this morning while I was walking. And there was a number of groups, PEN America, Common Cause, Center for American Progress, et cetera, were petitioning the government of Joe Biden saying, hey, you know, we worry about free speech and everything, but we really need to do something about disinformation. Oh, no. This is the new version of this. Or let's say it's an adjunct

version of this, because disinformation, of course, is often in the eye of the beholder, because I can give you a lot of disinformation that exists every day in newspapers. I mean, particularly stuff on the Russia investigation, which was about disinformation and so much of it was disinformation, whether it was deliberate or whether they fell for it or whether they were just like, you know, letting ideology overwhelm their good sense. It did happen. So we are now at a point, and Megan, you pointed out talking to people and saying speech is violence. It is not violence. It came to me at one point when I was talking to a student for a piece that I was doing for the HBO show, the vice show on HBO, and I realized where it all came from in just the flash, and it should have been obvious to me, is that nobody likes and nobody wants to be the person that says, I don't agree with free speech. It's a fundamentally kind of un-American thing to do. We love free speech and we attack McCarthyism

because of free speech, et cetera. And that's a bad position to take. It's not a bad position to oppose violence. Violence hurts people. We don't want to hurt people. It's actually a big hearted motivation to oppose free speech because speech can be violence. And this is the, you know, disinformation is this thing. It, you know, undermines our democracy to have people out there believing things because these people don't have any historical perspective and they believe the conspiracy theory started with Donald Trump and that there was no Clinton death list and all this stuff. And there weren't Holocaust deniers before the internet. This stuff is a part of human nature. And there's a number of fantastic sociological books, historical books about the, you know,

sort of conspiratorial instinct in American politics and global politics. And we think that by suppressing speech, we can eliminate it and eliminate bad thoughts. And unfortunately, some people use violence and they say, well, we don't want that anymore. So we're going to submit to their demands. And it even happens with dopey people like Milo Yiannopoulos are going to speak at a university and they say, well, there's the potential of violence. We're going to cancel it. That's not why we're canceling it. Come on. You know that. But at the same time, we have submitted to threats of violence for so long under the guise of protecting people in speech that it's deeply alarming and become just sort of normal these

days. Just imagine, like, I don't like disinformation, so I'm going to appeal to Joe Biden. If you would have told that to teenage Matt, I would have. No, that's not possible. Joe Biden, the guy with the. The guy who had to, like, you know, drop out of the presidential race because of serial fabrications. And plagiarism. That's plagiarism. Okay.

Yeah. It's spreading. You know, I mean, obviously now we're in such a much bigger free speech crisis. I mean, the Charlie Hebdo thing and the Dharam Mohamed conduct, all that, like that is very charged, very charged. Now, far less charged things are being treated like that, like they're being given the same reaction. And the most recent one, it was just last week, I think it was, the cop who shot Breonna Taylor's boyfriend, the no-knock warrant, they went in, they wound up shooting her boyfriend and Breonna Taylor, sadly, to death. But they weren't indicted. The cop who got shot in the femoral artery, who fired the shot in return, he wasn't indicted because he got shot in the femoral artery.

So he shot back. He was going to write a book and he wasn't charged with anything. I mean, the law has said he is not a criminal. He's a police officer who was told to go in there and execute this warrant. He did it. And he didn't break the law. Simon & Schuster was going to publish the book, like an offshoot of Simon & Schuster, but under that top masthead.

Nope, not going to do it because the snowflakes over in the ranks are very upset that Simon & Schuster would publish this Louisville police officer's book. And then somebody was pointing out that this is the same organization that published – remember Henry Hill? Henry! That was my tweet. Oh, was it you? Okay. Yeah. Maybe that's why. Not only that, by the way. That's so brilliant. They actually, Henry Hill, who is a psychopathic killer that gave us Goodfellas, that's the book that he's based on. But not only that, it's actually worse that in 1991, Simon and Schuster sued the state of New York, who was trying to seize the profits from the book under the son

of Sam law, which made it illegal to profit from your crimes. And I think they took it to the Supreme court and they ruled nine to nothing in the favor of Simon and Schuster. They were willing to go to sue on behalf of a murderer so he could profit off of his crimes in the mafia. And now it's like, Oh, we're not gonna do that anymore. But, but the thing about it is that you say, and it's right to point that out. It's people in the ranks. And this happens in every company. You know, I've heard about internally at Spotify, you know, all of the objections and meetings they've had to have about Joe Rogan existing on their platform. And, you know, when these kids in university who believe this stuff graduate, they get jobs. And they bring some believe this stuff graduate they get jobs and they bring some of this stuff

a lot of them go to work at nbc just fyi in case you're wondering not saying anything more than that that's i mean i didn't realize that so that's that's hilarious first of all goodfellas is an amazing movie and henry henry um but it's the double same double standard i've talked about this before. I think one of you guys may have did you raise this on your podcast? But I felt the same wrath when it came to Alex Jones. I interviewed Alex Jones and it was like

all hell broke loose. But like many other people have interviewed Alex Jones. It was fine. But like the youngins are like, no, no one's ever interviewed Alex Jones. Platforming, platforming. I beat you by like two like, somebody sent me an email and they said, thank God you're not Megyn Kelly. And I was like, what?

And they're like, she's getting brutalized. And we have a piece that had, you know, a couple of million views of me, you know, arguing with Alex Jones. And I was like, oh, we platformed him? Because you know what we used to call that? Reporting. Platform has become reporting.

It used to be the job. Yeah. It used to be the job. Yeah, it used to be the job. I had to talk to the people who are influential. Yeah. Oh, my God. Good job now. It's so true. Analogy is the people in media want to work like bouncers.

They want to like, what's the goal of the velvet rope? Who gets in? Who gets out? What can they look like if they come in? Sure. And then you better report on that. Get the Pantone chart. And you better behave a certain way in the club or else you're going to be bounced i

mean that's what platforming is it's like we're with it's not an expansion of the public square it's a contraction of it and it's a policing of the boundaries which change on a whim uh depending on you know uh you know some kind of tweet storm or whatever, social media thing, and panic. And it's the panic of the 50-year-olds that I'm most disgusted with, the 60-year-olds. We're terrified of their 26-year-old younglings. No, fire them. The teachers were afraid of the people. Fire them.

Exactly. That's what you should do. That's 100%. I'm going to state right now, if anybody does this shit at my company, you're fired. You're fired. If you don't, and honestly, and I've told everybody who works here, if you're easily offended, you know, by, by tough discussions on third rail issues. And my team is texting me right now.

We know, we know. I'm sorry, Miss Kelly. Discussions on third rail issues. You shouldn't work here. If you don't like, you know, the free form discussion of ideas in print form, you shouldn't work at Simon and Schuster. Right. It's like and the Alex Jones thing. I laughed, you guys.

I was like, you know, I think it was Diane Sawyer who interviewed Jeffrey Dahmer. Like Alex Jones hasn't eaten anyone. He's accused Hillary Clinton. You know know michael there's spirit cooking he said that to me there was less blowback when i interviewed putin right like okay i mean i think he's probably done a lot more stuff that's controversial than alex jones but that's how soft people are now and of course it, it's our polarization. It's the wrong business. Get out of news. Get out of publishing. It's like someone working at a strip club and being like, you know, I'm really opposed

to all this nudity. I do find it slightly offensive. It's like, you know, that's what the club is about, right? That's what we do. But maybe it shouldn't be. Yeah, maybe it should be. Maybe it's just a knitting circle. It's just a shitty restaurant.

A knitting circle. Well, it's funny because I always used to say to my teams at Fox and NBC too, because sometimes you get sort of the young snowflakes who are like, I had to work a weekend. I had to work after five. I will say that happened far less often at Fox News. It's just cultural. But I used to say, listen, you know, you work in news, people work in news. You don't work here to make a fortune. You work because it's exciting. You get a say on the biggest issues of the day. You can drive the public narrative. You get instant feedback. You're on breaking stories, which is KeyBank. Go to KeyBank. It's wonderful. You stand in front of the teller machine. You give out the money.

You take in the money. You make the receipts. Nobody ever wants you to stay late. You don't have to work all-nighters. Buy. Don't let the door hit you. We're the good Lord split you. Is KeyBank a Megyn Kelly show advertiser?

It's wonderful to work there. It's one of the best places. It was my local bank growing up in little Del Mar, New York, and I loved it. But you know what I'm saying? The sort of softness of the next generation, they can't work too hard and they can't hear anything that upsets them. And words are violence. It's like, oh my God, shut up. Yeah. And by the way, I made a joke about knitting. And if people doubt that this lunacy has taken over the entire world, go to Google right now and Google knitting community controversy.

And I'm not joking. There is a woke controversy. Massive. Stop it. Yes. Knitting. The knitting community is up in arms about many things. But there's accusations of white supremacy,

all this stuff. And it's in knitting. There's been multiple pieces about this. In fact, expand the Google search and include the term purity spiral. It was an outstanding essay written about a year, a year and change ago from someone talking about what using the knitting community scandal.

is that really? Yeah, because it started the the ultimate uh victim of it was someone who launched it like the person who who started the wokeness thing um then became the target of it it's a spiral like you just like you set the thing in motion and now everyone's looking around okay who's next you know my god if when the purity spiral comes to the fifth column that's gonna oh yeah it will never never happen. It will never come. It can't come here. It's actually what makes this an enjoyable...

This is actually Megyn Kelly's show. Is that who we're talking to? But we're participating as well. She seems very nice. It's what makes programs like this rich and interesting. Notwithstanding what you've heard. Diversity of perspective. It's somewhat...

It's occasionally somewhat dangerous. Someone could get their feelings hurt. You say things to one another. You're not out to necessarily offend someone, but perhaps you may express an opinion openly and honestly in a society where everyone becomes completely terrified that the next thing they say might get them destroyed because the rules keep changing so quickly. Van Jones actually used a phrase once that has always like stuck in my mind, and maybe it originated with him, but maybe it didn't, that there was something about

young people who want the jungle paved over for them and just turning the entirety of the world into just this horrible parking lot of ubiquitousness where we're all able to avoid ever being offended or shocked or surprised or inspired or falling in love or laughing at something like it's all part of the same thing. We absolutely have to preserve that, which is the reason why all of these conversations around wokeness and PC culture, et cetera, et cetera, whatever you want to call it. It's the reason that they happen because the very basis of our process for discovering truth. And you know who I'm quoting there.

John. Jonathan Rauch. Yeah. The most important. It is rooted. It is rooted in these ideas. It is rooted in our ability to offend one another, to occasionally be to to to traffic and risque things. I don't want to see books canceled.

I may not think it's a good book. I want to have an opportunity to tell you all the reasons why. I hope you'll listen to me and not the asshole who wrote the book. But I don't want to see books get canceled. I don't want to live in a world where that's what we do. Yeah, we do live in the world, unfortunately. Yeah, Jif Gif. I looked it up, and this is amazing. First of all, very pretty knitting options, yarn options. And that the headline. Can I make a sexist comment? She's like, oh, the knitting is the easiest thing. It's such a female response. Also a bad driver and a cruel boss.

The knitting. I mean, I think people know me well enough to know I have never knitted in my life, though I would. I would if somebody would take the time to show me why. Why? And then. So the headline is, the knitting needle at one time.

The knitting community is reckoning with racism. Yes, finally. The knitting community, right? Yes.

Finally. And then, the subheading, fiber artists, fiber artists. I don't even know what that is, but continue.

Fiber artists of color, oh my God, how many subgroups can we get to are taking to instagram stories to call out instances of prejudice and to try to shape a more inclusive feature then they talk about karen templar's fringe association co oh get it cute fringe association little did you know karen um is kind of like goop for knitting there are tips and how to's for navigating knitting's trickier maneuvers there are there are knit alongs

for chunky cowls and cute fingerless gloves what i'm sorry i'm sorry okay there's an online store that sells the there's an online store that sells the fringe bag which has come to be known in some circles as the birkin of knitting bags. And then there's the blog where Karen Templar puts her personal thoughts. Wrapping up soon. On January 7th, she blogged excitedly about her upcoming trip to India. She wrote that 2019 would be her year of color. Karen.

Okay, Karen. She said that as a child, India had fascinated her and that when an Indian friend's parents offered to take her with them on a trip, it was, quote, like being offered a seat on a flight to Mars. She spoke of her trip as if it were the biggest hurdle anyone could jump. If I can go to India, I can do anything, I'm pretty sure. Templars should be noted. Is, hello, white. Yes. And that's the problem. Now, this Karenaren this literal karen has apologized umpteen times it's not like going to another planet how do you think that makes people from india feel they don't care there's a billion people there they do not care they don't give a shit about karen templar's knitting temple oh man i won't do an accent right now, by the way.

I want you so bad. No, but we did a game at like one time on the fifth column, and you guys should be listening if you haven't. I can't believe you haven't heard it, in which I think it was Matt said this, that we would take an activity, and it could be knitting or anything,

and then follow it on Google with white supremacy. And invariably, there will be multiple articles about it. You could do like mini golf and white supremacy. That's brilliant. Everything comes up. It's Mad Libs for white supremacy. And the knitting one was my favorite

because it was so earnest and no one fights back. So it's never a controversy. It's usually an inquisition, to quote Jonathan Radjig. But they go after it and people just apologize. And what we've always said, and this is the thing that I think that if you take away anything from

the Viv Collin podcast is never apologize. They don't want your apology. They want you to give it, but they don't forgive you. No one's ever been forgiven and be like, you know what? I actually believe that apology. You're back on the force. You're back in our club. It never happened. So don't apologize. It's worthless. It's just debasing yourself for their pleasure. And this is what happens in all these communities. Well, this is, this is actually your, that point is true. And it's one good thing of the year of woke or whatever we've been through this past year and sadly are still in. Because I will say this, when I apologized at NBC,

that knowledge was not well known. That was not a widespread belief that the apology shouldn't be offered. I still thought there were honest brokers out there and I had genuinely been convinced that I had hurt people and said something awful and that when you do that, you should apologize. I was in that headspace a hundred percent. And I, if that all happened to me today, I would see it much differently. And I do think that's one benefit of what we've been through. You know, when, when everyone's getting canceled for everything they've done and everyone's claiming, and I would say indeed feigning in many cases offense, then you have a better

perspective on it as the person who's being targeted. And I think Douglas Murray's advice on this is very good. If you are genuinely sorry, if you genuinely have good reason to believe and do believe you have done something wrong, then you should. But I would add an asterisk to that, which is, and make sure your belief is well-founded, right? Because in my case, I was talked into it by people who did not have my best interests at heart. You know what I mean? Like people who were already on the woke train. Did anyone respond positively to that? So if you said, you know, I apologize for my phrasing, I think it's acceptable

to say, I'm sorry that you took offense, which people think is a weaselly apology. I actually don't think it is. I think it's like, I don't want you to be upset by this, but you know what I said I meant, or I was, you know, a question I was actually curious by. But when you actually apologized, did anyone come to you and say, you know what? I knew that this wasn't your attention or I appreciate the apology or did it just land with a thud? I will tell you a story without naming names. So the answer overall is no, but there was one person who is connected to, but not working at NBC. And that person texted Doug, my husband saying she nailed it, that, you know, that was a great apology. And that'll be the end of it. And, you know, Doug was like, well,

that's nice. You know, it would be great if the person you're connected to could say something along that along those lines publicly. The answer was no. Okay. All right, fine. And then we later found out that that person was pushing the negative stories about me everywhere in the press. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Yeah. The call is coming from inside the house. Yeah. Media is a disgusting, toxic business. It's a disgusting, toxic business, which honestly, it's one of the reasons why I didn't enjoy it and why I decided to get out because it was killing my soul.

It was people like, you made all the money and you had all the... And, like, I look at people like Tucker now who I know well. And I think, oh, my God, I don't know how he's doing that. I don't know how people stay in it. It truly is like taking a bath in a vat of acid night after night. Over time, it's going to kill you. So I'm glad I got out. And by the way, broadcast is no better than cable.

No better than cable. Arguably a lot worse, except they put a pretty smile on it. And cable, they'll stab you in the front. In broadcast, it's all in the back while they're smiling in the camera. I'm so sweet. Anyway, I don't think the apology does help.

It didn't help me and it hasn't really helped anybody since then. the most we've seen is a begrudging like fuck off I kind of apologize because they're making me do this but I'm not really sorry like Jimmy Kimmel who wore a black face so many times we can't even count the number to survive those things

like Trey who was mentioned earlier who got like some hot water Stephen Colbert totally fine Stephen Colbert Asian accent. Stephen Colbert. Totally fine. Stephen Colbert. Cancel Colbert. Asian accent. Yeah. And cancel Colbert thing. Yeah.

Well, you only have a running chance if you're on the left. I mean, if you're on the right, forget it. If you're on the right at an organization that is not of the right, forget it. Yeah. Yeah. There's obviously something

incredibly opportunistic about it. It isn't about justice. It isn't about justice. It isn't about perpetuating a world where no one's feelings are ever hurt. It is a demonstration of power. It is for the people who are doing the canceling and they will do it again. And being loyal, being a part of that mob, it's only a matter of time before it's your turn. Worth keeping in mind when you're participating in the savagery, especially when you know,

when you just know, asking a question in the savagery, especially when you know, when you just know. Asking a question in a context like this, probably totally fine. It don't mean any offense. And even if it came out in an elegant way, the one thing that we probably need a hell of a lot more of is just a little grace. Well, a little grace and one other thing. And I'm going to promote Camille here. We do a Patreon episode every week for people that pay us. We keep selling our wares.

Yeah. And during one of those Patreons, a very grumpy Camille let something just fly out. I want to see that version. Oh, it's really, it's unsightly. You don't want to be around it. Grumpy Camille. So many speeds. Yeah. Sometimes I'm crooning. Come back for those. Very good. And he said something one time that will be, I think, adorning T-shirts that we're printing. And my headstone.

Yeah, and your headstone. That in the middle of a rant when somebody said, hey, I'm getting this education that I don't want at a bank or at a military facility or something. They were doing this anti-racist training and they had to read Ibram X. Kennedy or something. And he was saying, I don't know how to deal with this, Camille, what should I do? And Camille went on this thing and it was great. And then at the end, he paused and said, you know, be brave, call bullshit. And that was kind of had become our mantra since then is that, you know, the sort of submitting to it or trying to work within it or apologizing for it doesn't work.

So just be brave, call bullshit. And it's the I am Spartacus moment. If everyone's saying it, then maybe things will change. Only the real one. Not like the Cory Booker. But the odds are they probably won't cancel you. They literally can't cancel everyone. And once you do that, sometimes there's even a domino effect.

Other people say, you know what? He's right. He's right. $105 million to Joe Rogan from Spotify because people were like, we got to cancel. And they're like, man, there's too much money being left on the table. People like this stuff. So they won't cancel everybody. I'll add to that.

A friend of mine, he works at Ben Shapiro's operation. Jeremy Boring is his business partner. He's Ben's business partner. And he's a pal of mine. And I love the guy. And he put it to me once very well. And that is when you find yourself in the crosshairs, you know, they're coming for you. Don't show them your belly. So good. It really brings it home, right? Because like, that's what people do. They get in that position, like, show them the belly, show them the belly. They're going to take it easy on me. They're not going to, they're going to stick a knife in the belly. Like do not show the belly. Do not put your most vulnerable part upfront because it's not going to

end well for you. This however, has ended very well for the three of you. I think it went very well. What do you guys think? It's great. Thank you. It's great. I loved it. Yeah. We're doing this every week now, right? A hundred percent. You're booked. I want to thank all of you. And I really, I really want to, I want to, I want to thank, I mean, all of you have been very honest and I appreciate it. But Michael, I never understood how Beschloss was pronounced or malapropisms. So thank you for that too. So every week we'll do two hours and I'll say two words sprinkled in there that you don't know how to pronounce.

I really appreciated it. We will be your pips. We're willing to do that for you. It's like, those are words you read all the time, but you never say it's like, oh, somebody's smart. By the way, you're doing something wrong. If you're reading Beschloss all the time. Okay. I'll, I'll, I'll go back to Jonathan Rauch. You guys, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much. So don't miss the show on Monday because we have author Adam Grant. He's what we call an organizational psychologist. He teaches at Wharton. He's in the

belly of the beast when it comes to sort of liberal indoctrination, but he's not somebody who does that and actually somebody who pushes back against it as you'll hear when we talk to him. He's got blurbs on his book from Bill Gates. He's tight with Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. He's very well connected to sort of the glitterati of the tech world but for good reason. He's brilliant.

He's really thoughtful and he's not biased. I think it's fair to say he leans left but he's totally fair to the right. And we had a really good conversation on personality, intelligence, how you figure out what you actually are good at. And whether the things you think you're good at right now are actually the things you may be worst at. I don't know what to believe about myself after this conversation. But the name of his most recent book is Think Again.

And that's what he wants you to do. He's got great stories. This is actually not one that we got to with him, but it's worth reading his book just to find it. It's about the guy who invented the Blackberry and how his inability to think again, to sort of understand that his little keyboard wasn't going to be the be all and the end all all and that the iPhone might actually have a fighting chance to take down his business was the reason his business failed, right? That like he needed to think again to like reevaluate the thing that made him a star and made him all that money. Anyway, that's who Adam Grant is. That's how he views the world. I think you're going to learn from him, learn about yourself. We had sort of a profound exchange on systemic racism at the end, which I've been thinking about ever since. Anyway, I hope you love him and I hope you give him the time he deserves because he's somebody you're going to want in your head.

He's like an earworm whose thoughts are good for you and that you're going to want in your head. That's Monday. Adam Grant. Have a great weekend. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.