The Megyn Kelly Show - Matt Taibbi on Fighting Cancel Culture, Biden Media Coverage, and COVID Hypocrisy | Ep. 110

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Matt Taibbi, TK News founder and co-host of the "Useful Idiots" podcast, to discuss Biden media coverage, COVID and Wuhan lab hypocrisy from the media and Dr. Fauci, the rise of "safetyism" in American society, cancel culture and Chrissy Teigen, "Slack-ized" office culture, Naomi Osaka and the decline of perseverance, VP Kamala Harris and the future of the Democratic party, the potential for a 1/6 commission and a domestic war on terror, 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. Hope you've listened to our Monday offering with Rob O'Neill because it literally was one of my favorite shows ever. You're going to love it. If you were too busy with your family, don't forget to go hit that one because it's awesome. And so is today's. We have Matt Taibbi, who is just so funny and so talented. He's a journalist. He's a host of the podcast called Useful Idiots. He's a longtime investigative reporter for Rolling Stone, and he's not afraid of anyone or anything and super smart. And we're going to get into all the latest news with him, including Fauci's many reversals. I mean, just the latest this week, you could go on,

of course, with Fauci. Naomi Osaka, this incredibly successful tennis player, one of the most talented and most successful in the world, not just among female athletes, but among male or female in terms of the money she brings in and so on. Playing the victim now because the press apparently said she didn't play well on clay now she can't deal with the media anymore and the first grade advertisement or video being played here in new york city and probably soon to a school near you talking about little children's private parts in great detail and biological description and whether our country is losing its mind. Okay, so we're going to get to all that with Matt in one second, but first this.

Matt Taibbi, great to have you back. How are you? I'm great. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. I have so much to talk to you about. At first, I was like, it's kind of a slow news weekend. And then I'm like, oh my gosh, like my cup runneth over. There's so much that I want to go over with you. Let's get right into it. All right. Let's talk COVID and Wuhan lab. It's, it's, the dogs are chasing their tails now, Matt, starting with chief misinformer, Dr. Fauci, who, you know, goes right up to the top as Fauci appears to reverse himself on whether this thing could indeed have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, which is a theory that we were told, no, no, no, only the crackpots are saying that for the entire year until now when, like magic,

poof, out of the hat, people are starting to take it seriously, despite the fact that serious journalists have been trying to sound the alarm on this, like Josh Rogin at the Washington Post, for a while. So here's Fauci, a soundbite, before and after. This is him saying, no, no, never. It's not in a lab versus now. Take a listen. If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now is very, very strongly leaning towards this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated. So I wanted to ask, are you still confident

that it developed naturally? No, actually, that's the point that I said. No, I'm not convinced about that. I think that we should continue to investigate what went on in China. All right. So it's May 2020 versus May 2021. No, he's not still convinced. No, now he wants an investigation. And before I get you to react, let's just listen to the media elites embarrassing themselves on this, trying to pretend that there's been some watershed moment that now, as you'll hear in the last little bit, these are all sort of mainstream reporters and commentators on here now is leading them, as John Karl says of ABC, quote, Serious people are now saying it, Matt. Serious

people are now saying it. That's why we need to pay attention. Listen. This question about the Wuhan lab, we know that it's been debunked. Those same agencies now have been tapped with investigating one of Trump world's most favorite conspiracy theories. This week, Donald Trump is still pushing the debunked bunkum, despite his own intelligence community's findings that that is simply not true. And there is simply no reason to believe that that is the case. There is no empirical evidence to verify that. We don't need to invoke conspiracy theories. This is just another example of the president trying to change the narrative from his own failings. The problem for President Trump is that he's running for reelection, is looking for ways

to deflect blame for the performance of the administration. And yes, I think a lot of people have egg on their face. This was an idea that was first put forward by Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, Donald Trump. And look, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them. But now serious people are saying it needs a serious inquiry. A lot of people on the political left and a lot of people in the media made this mistake. They said, wow, if Tom Cotton is saying something, it can't be true, or they assumed that. And that's not right. Tom Cotton does deal in misinformation about things like election fraud. He said some things that are just wrong. But that doesn't mean that everything he says is wrong. Oh, it's a great, great button soundbites there of the befores and afters for Fauci and the media. Serious people are now saying it, Matt. And not everything Tom Cotton says is wrong. That was David Leonhard of The New York Times at the endoynter Institute's Festival of Fact-Checking,

among other things, because the media sort of elevated him as kind of the soul of rectitude during the COVID crisis as the unassailable arbiter of truth. And then he comes out at that event and says, oh, by the way, that thing we've been insisting on for a year, we're going to rethink that. And it's in the same way that I think the 2008 financial crisis, which I covered for almost 10 years, was catastrophic for the public's faith in Wall Street. You know, this episode could really deal a very serious blow to both the media and to science in general because of the way they were scolded in the last year. If it turns out, you know, that there's more validity to this hypothesis.

I mean, could the media be dealt any greater a blow than it's already suffered over the four years of the Trump presidency? I guess, you know, the National Institute of Health, yes. I mean, I feel like we've already watched the CDC and the WHO and the NIH go down, down, down in public opinion. And Fauci, you know, our fearless leader has now been exposed as either a fool or corrupt or just interminably wrong. And people need only just to take off the rose colored glasses to see it. I mean, he's wrong about a lot. And the dishonesty in covering it, you know, just because Trump said it or Pompeo said it or Tom Cotton said it is staring us right in the face. The media couldn't handle it when it came from the Trump administration. And now, magically, they're ready to talk about it without really owning what they've done, how they've misled us.

I mean, it's important how this virus started. Over 500,000 Americans are dead. How did it start? We need an honest press to keep pushing. There was a Washington Post correction. Here was their headline in February 2020. Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked. That was that it came out of a Wuhan lab. May 2021. Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that

scientists have disputed. And the correction at the bottom of the article right now reads, earlier versions of this story in its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Senator Tom Cotton regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term debunked and the post's use of conspiracy theory have been removed because then, as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus. So why'd you print that? And switching to fringe that's been disputed doesn't actually get it done either. No, it doesn't. And again, they continue to not get that the most offensive part of this whole thing is not just that they're wrong and backtracking, but it's the sanctimony with which they deliver the sort of initial diagnosis of, oh, well, this is debunked.

This is a conspiracy theory. You're an idiot if you think this. And then to turn around and say, oh, by the way, yeah, now we're going to rethink this and you still should listen to us. They don't see the problem with that and what what that does for the reputation. It's again, it's catastrophic that this one there have been a lot of bad ones, but this one is is particularly bad. The CNN Crystal is a headline in February 2020. Tom Cotton is playing a dangerous game with his coronavirus speculation. You're playing the dangerous game, sir. Why don't you ask more questions as follow up on

what he's saying because as it turns out it looks very much like it's true you know and now you've got of course just for good measure new york times reporter apura mandavilli who covers covid for the paper in a tweet uh dated may 26th someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not today. Then she got criticized and deleted that tweet. And her fix it tweet reads as follows. A theory can have racist roots and still gather reasonable supporters along the way. Doesn't make the roots any less racist. I can't even parse how you end up having those thoughts in public. Again, the really humorous thing about all this is that a lot of these reporters, in scolding everybody about their lack of devotion to science and fact,

were basically confessing that they don't really understand science, which is not a series of inflexible dictates, but it's a process by which the whole world converses about their findings and evolves over time. So this idea that you can start at the beginning of a pandemic and just pronounce, this is it. This is the solution. These other solutions are not true, is a total misunderstanding of how scientists would approach something like this. They would leave all their options open until everything had been excluded. And that's been the complaint of a lot of scientists throughout this entire thing.

But the journalists want to believe that you can just tell people X is true, Y is false. That's the end of it. Listen to us. And that just reveals their ignorance, not ours. Right, and why were they so unwilling to entertain it? Why was there such a knee jerk? Nope, not in a lab. Nope, wet market.

Say, we believe what the Chinese tell us. Well, I think this is a progression of a phenomenon that's gone on for the entire since Trump was elected in 2016, which is that basically anything that Trump says automatically must be wrong. I mean, you talked about Tom Cotton, you know, anything Tom Cotton says must be wrong. This is this is an extension of the same thing. And the problem with that is, yes, Donald Trump is wrong about a lot of things. But that's you can't work backwards from that to do reporting like, you know, occasionally, even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then you have to allow for the possibility that things can be true, irrespective of politics. And it's just not the way you do the job. But that is the way they reported this. They reported the same way about hydroxychloroquine, about ivermectin, about every other thing that they interpreted as a culture war issue when it was a science issue, which was a mistake. Isn't it a blind squirrel?

That's right. I'm sorry. Yeah, it could be. That's probably. Yeah, that's right. There's a knee jerk reaction to anything Trump says, of course, back then and probably still now. The other side, the left, the established left and the woke certainly are in the press are more

worried about identity and whether we're in line with what where we're supposed to be on woke issues. And, you know, saying it came from the Wuhan lab was somehow, you know, going to put us up against the Chinese in a way that was confrontational and is, I guess, as well, racist, according to the New York Times. So you can't. How about just what's true? What's true? Right back to my point of we actually need to know that this one matters. Some of the stuff you can shrug your shoulders and say, whatever. This one we need to know because millions of people are dead. So if this was a mismanaged virus, an intentionally manipulated virus, or God forbid, even a virus manipulated to potentially be a weapon, which isn't seriously out there, but is a possibility. We need to right? So they have not yet identified. As virologists usually do in a relatively timely fashion, like where the outbreak started, they haven't found the

intermediary host. So all options are still on the table. What are the options? Well, you can list them. There's only a few of them. There's zoonotic origin, there's a lab accident, there's an intentional leak, or there's a leak of some kind of weaponized project. The last two are very unlikely, but you have to leave those other options open. And the notion that this is a racist theory, first of all, it's incorrect because many of the proponents of the lab leak hypothesis are looking at a scenario that involves Chinese-American cooperation, that involves research that was partially funded by the United States Department of Defense, and involves other American institutions and American scientists. So it's not putting it all on the Chinese, necessarily, if this turns out to be what happens. But also, again, as you said,

that's irrelevant. First, you have to figure out what happened and then worry about what the consequences are in terms of the impact of the story. You can't just say, well, this is going to arouse anti-Chinese sentiment and avoid it. If it's true, you have to go there. That's right. Too bad if it arouses anti-Chinese sentiment in some people who want to blame those doing it, right? I mean, that doesn't cover all Chinese people. But those who actually did it, if this was in any way intentional or grossly negligent, yes, they ought to be held accountable. And that's, I mean, this is what, again, Josh Rogin, who came on the show not long ago,

prior actually to this all blowing up, to his credit, he wrote this book saying, I've been taking a hard look at this and I'm telling you, the odds are this came out of a Wuhan lab and it was in a cave and a bunch of bats who weren't bothering anybody. And they went and they got those bats and they took them to the lab and they researched them and they did gain a function research. And then we had the virus. And if they want us to believe that one of those bats wound up in a Wuhan market, wet market, they have yet to show us how that happened, how they traveled all that distance. You know, who was the, who was patient zero, who brought it from A to B? Anyway, so he makes a very compelling

case and he tweeted out as follows. Most of the mainstream reporters didn't ignore this lab leak theory. They actively crapped all over it for over a year while pretending to be objective at a toxic mix of confirmation bias, source bias. Their scientist sources lied to them. Groupthink, Trump derangement syndrome and general incompetence. And he went on to say, also, the lab leak theory did not change. It didn't suddenly become credible. It didn't jump from crazy to reasonable. The theory has always been the same. The people who got it wrong changed their minds. They're writing about themselves now with zero self-awareness. He's exactly right. There's no honest showing of the cards. I got this wrong. Tom Cotton was onto something.

Mike Pompeo was onto something. The State Department investigation into whether this was out of a lab should have been allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion. And those who are investigating this for the WHO are not honest brokers because they get paid by the Chinese in large part. They're not saying that. They're just pretending that it's an evolving theory that's now got new evidence that's making them take a second look. Yeah. And that incidentally also misreports another story, because I think even separately, the development that all of these establishment figures who were saying something else last year have suddenly changed their minds. That's a journalistic story in itself that has to be

understood and investigated. Why the change of heart? I don't have a good explanation for that yet. And the reason for that is what you're talking about is because they're pretending that just suddenly the theory became credible. Because serious people are now saying it, Matt. Serious people, says Jonathan Karl. Right. They're suddenly reexamining it or something. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Something must have happened to force all these people to come out in public and start saying this. Now, what is that? It feels to me a little bit like a bunch of people trying to get out ahead of a story, which is something you see frequently with sort of a damage control type of situation where they know something's going to come out. So they all start planting the seed of a change in direction. Or it could be something else. Who knows? But we haven't had any reporting on that score to really explain what that is

either. And that's another failing. They want to look smart. We're smart. You mentioned the Fauci thing. So here's another reversal by him. He was claiming that the National Institute of Health never funded gain of function research. That's where they take the virus and try to up the ante of the virus, try to make it more dangerous, ostensibly to protect us against that if it were to happen. He says we never funded gain of function research at that Wuhan lab. Now he is admitting under pressure that in fact, the NIH gave the Wuhan lab $600,000, and indeed it could have been used for gain-of-function. Listen.

Gain-of-function research, as you know, is juicing up naturally occurring animal viruses to infect humans. To arrive at the truth, the U.S. government should admit that the Wuhan Virology Institute was experimenting to enhance the coronavirus' ability to infect humans. Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan? Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Do they fund Dr. Barrett?

How do you know they didn't lie to you and use the money for gain-of-function research anyway? There's no way of guaranteeing that. I know the scientists that we've dealt with have been trustworthy. Have you ever had a grantee lie to you? I cannot guarantee that a grantee has not lied to us because you never know. So yet another reversal by Fauci. He doesn't know. He has no idea whether they took our $600,000 and used it to up the dangerousness of this virus.

And he doesn't seem particularly inclined to do a deep dive on it. No, he doesn't. And again, that makes me wonder a little bit about this sudden change of heart with all these officials. Why have they suddenly changed their minds? Is it because news is going to come out that actually there was American money that led to some of these behaviors and irresponsible research, and they know that, that's a consideration. I mean, there's a little group that I did a story on called the U.S. Right to Know that filed a series of FOIA requests of research scientists who were funded by the Department of Defense and their relationship to the Wuhan Institute and what they were doing there. And it's been steadily coming out that, you know, there was all sorts of cooperation between the United States and the Wuhan Institute about this kind of research. So it's a legitimate story. And it's

not just coming from Mike Pompeo and people like that. It's coming from all sorts of places. And we have to pay attention to it. Now, meantime, in other COVID news, you've got, there was a great article in the Washington Post put out there by four very smart doctors, one of whom had been on our program last week, and Lucy McBride, saying the masks need to come off the children. And these women actually do advise the CDC. So that's good news. Saying the masks need to come off the children. They need to come off the children at the schools, at the camps, inside too, not just outside. Let's get real. I mean, within 24 hours, the American Academy of Pediatrics,

which honestly, I think it's run by far left people. Everything that they have put out from the beginning on this has been near hysterical. Children, they say, ages two and up who are not fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, you can't vaccinate your kid under the age of 12, not that I would. But so you have no option to. They say any child who's not fully vaccinated should continue to wear face masks

when they're playing with friends, when they go with you to the grocery store, when they attend school, when they attend camp, in any situation in which they are around groups of people,

some of whom may not be fully vaccinated in response, which all I could think was F you. They're so out of touch, Matt. You know, it's like what parent is going to keep their kid? They're little masked. Let's say they don't come up with a vaccine for the parents who actually want to vaccinate their kids at this young age. What if what if they don't manage to get enough tested from from two to age 12?

So then what your two year olds got to wear a mask for the next 10 years or until somebody somewhere finally pronounces the pandemic over? Yeah. And what's the data on kids that young actually getting the disease? I mean, like, you know, they're not really operating from a place that of certainty here. I mean, I think one of the frustrating things about the way COVID has been reported is that it's turned into, again, a culture war issue, like the whole issue of masks from the very beginning, because people like Donald Trump, you know, scoffed at mask use at various times, it became sort of a virtue signaling issue for a lot of people on the other side. So even after the CDC said, you know, a vaccinated person can go outside without a mask,

you had scenes with high profile politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, you know, wearing masks for Zoom calls, you know, in rooms full of people who are vaccinated. Like, why are they doing that? Why are they going against CDC guidelines? It's not scientific. It's political. And it's cut off discussion. You know, that should be a normal, natural thing with people. Like, you know, it makes sense that we should wear masks in some situations and maybe not in others. But for some people, it's all or nothing. We should wear them all the time. And anybody who says otherwise is crazy. And it's just ridiculous. The whole thing is, again, it's not grounded in science. It's grounded in in this political culture war. And you have them justifying this ongoing call for big government to mandate masks, not just for our kids, but for us, too. But I'm very focused on the kids who need us to help them based on the new variant. A new variant could come.

You know, we don't we don't we don't know. And indeed, the New York Times has a piece out trying to create more fear. And I quote, this is the tweet accompanying the article, there is troubling new evidence that coronavirus variant first identified in India could be far more transmissible than the one first identified in Britain. For much of the world, quote, this new variant could be catastrophic. Okay, way to put the news out there in a nice measured way. This is what they've been doing from the beginning. They said the Britain variant was going to be catastrophic. Well, you know what? It turns out that the vaccines are handling the Britain variant just fine. They have this knee-jerk instinct to run deep to the fear.

Yeah. And again, that's been a feature of the COVID coverage from the very start, which is let's exact not not not even just exaggerate, but let's just play up every negative, terrifying angle as much as we can. And then any angle that suggests that we might, you know, be getting out from under the the worst of it. Let's downplay that. Let's not write stories about how the vaccines work. You know, let's not highlight any of the good news. And again, I hate to keep going back to this, but it's just because to me, I think it just has everything to do with the fact that looking on the bright side of it was associated with Trumpism, and the opposite was associated with those who believe in science and all those other things. And so the catastrophizing became a sort of standardized feature of the mainstream journalism on this subject.

Now, look, it's been a catastrophe. There's no question about it. It's a massive world event that will be remembered forever. But that doesn't mean you have to tell people that there are going to be bodies stacked in the street or that 3.5% of all people are going to die or whatever the numbers were at the beginning. You don't have to exaggerate a story that's that big. But they're doing it anyway. Coming up next, we are going to get into Naomi Osaka,

this incredibly accomplished, talented tennis player ruling the female tennis world who is so tough. She's beaten the likes of Serena Williams and on and on it goes, but is not tough enough to take a couple of tough questions from the tennis press corps. They're not exactly known for their nastiness, but she's now playing the mental health card saying her depression, her social anxiety, she can't handle it. And she can go out there and she can win four grand slams, but she can't sit in front of the media because they keep asking the same questions over and over,

she says. So what's going on with the wussification of these American women from Meghan Markle to Naomi Osaka, who then use mental health as a shield, even though they'll use the reporters from whom they're shielding themselves as a weapon to get out their message when it comes to Black Lives Matter, you know, women's empowerment, according to Markle, and how racist the royal family is. It's an interesting dynamic. And that's up next. Even New Jersey, where I know you live and where I spend the summers, I was so ticked off because the governor there, he was proud of the fact that his was one of the only two states. It was New Jersey and Hawaii that were holding firm on their order to wear masks in indoor spaces, period. You know, this is as recently as May 30th, a few days ago. And then starting just this past Friday, he reversed himself and said, OK, you can go

into restaurant stores and other indoor spaces in New Jersey without your face coverings. Why? Because finally, the business industry stood up and said, yo, Governor Murphy, this is insane. The default existence is not us with masks. It's us without masks. We have to admit the truth. It's been good news in the United States. We are at or right next to herd immunity in virtually all, if not most, or at least most of the states, including New Jersey. And it was only that pressure that led him to reverse himself. Yeah, and again, I'm married to a doctor. I have friends who work in emergency medicine. And I understand the idea of continuing to wear a mask even after you've been vaccinated for a little while, right?

Like there's some logic to that. But it's the anger and the sanctimony that comes with these pronouncements about masks that is the part that I don't get. I can understand being excessively cautious. But it's this implication that if you think another way, there's something wrong with you or that you're an inferior person. That's the part I don't get. Uh, and is that, which seems unnecessary to me? Like what? I understand being excessively cautious. If you have a comorbidity, if you have a risk, but the rest of society is done being overly cautious for you. We did it.

We did it for a year and we're done doing it. There are all sorts of things that can hurt you out there. My car, me drinking a bottle of booze, me breathing flu particles on you. It's not the law. The government doesn't get to say to me, don't drive, don't drink ever and stay inside when you have the flu. I can still live my life. And that's, we've gotten to that point now with COVID. It's not my job to protect you when the numbers are this low. You get a vaccine. That's how you protect yourself. You take care of you. I'll take care of me. Yeah. And there's and this goes along with this whole sort of trend towards safety ism. That's kind of infected everything like, you know, our tolerance for risk of any kind is plummeting and has been for a while now. And this this has been kind of the ultimate expression of that phenomenon. This idea that

we can't have any, there isn't such a thing as an acceptable level of risk, right? So that's what they've been operating from. So this brings me to the story I've been dying to discuss all weekend. And that's, I want to talk about Naomi Osaka. She's an incredible tennis player. She's the first Asian woman to become number one in the world. She's got four Grand Slam singles titles. She's the highest paid female athlete in the world. She made $55.2 million in the past 12 months. She's behind only Federer, LeBron, James, and Tiger Woods in terms of her. She makes it all in advertising, really not, not as much in, in just the winning of the tennis, um, you know, matches. So this woman's on fire professionally, and you're a great person to ask about this because

you yourself are a recovering professional baseball and basketball player. I remember that from our last interview. So you know what it's like to be in the professional sports arena. I grant you perhaps not necessarily at the same exact level as Naomi, but you tell me if that, whether she is a petulant princess or a mental health warrior, because the story is that she's come out. She has said,

she started by saying, I'm, I'm at Roland Garros. I'm at the French open. And I am not going to participate in the press conferences after the matches because I will not subject myself to people who doubt me. It's not good for my mental health gets in my head and I'm not going to do it.

And if these organizations think they can just keep saying do press and you're or you're going to be fined and continue to ignore the mental health of the athletes, then I just got to laugh. And she got a pile on from a lot of athletes. And the four Grand Slam organization said, oh, no, you will do the press or the fines will continue. You're not special. Everyone has to do it. It's part of the whole process is part of generating public interest in this. It's part of what pays the winnings that you receive, right? They get the advertisers, they get money that comes in thanks to the press putting the word out and so on. And now it's turning, of course, to she's a mental health warrior.

Thank God for Naomi's bravery and speaking about her safety, her crippling anxiety and dealing. Meanwhile, can we just start with this? The tennis press corps is not exactly known for being,'s say the british tabloid press right like i gotta give megan markle this one at least she could actually show really mean nasty press that she'd been subjected to not that i was on her side but this woman said like hey she doesn't play well on clay get over it yeah the tennis press is not exactly like the German Panzer Corps or whatever it is. You know, look, I suffered from depression when I was when I was a kid. But I and I do kind of understand, you know, her attitude that, yes, it's very, very difficult for somebody who has anxiety about being in public to talk to the press.

Like, I get that. But she's a professional athlete who's made $55 million, and the money comes from the media. Like, there's no way to break up that relationship. If you want the money, you've got to talk to the press or you have to communicate with them somehow. And, yes, there are probably – Because the press is there for the people.

The press is really the people. Right, exactly. And if you're not talking to the news media, what you're basically saying is I want, I want the money that comes from the fans, but I don't want to have to communicate with the fans or give anything back to them, um, except for my play. And that's, that's been the stance that a lot of athletes have taken over the years. I mean, we had Marshawn Lynch do it in the NFL. There are plenty of athletes who have been dismissive and uncommunicative with the media. I've been in locker rooms where athletes have just told me to go take a hike. But look, they have rules about this because this is this is how the money model works in professional sports and um you know there are there are going to be outliers who are going

to have who are going to struggle with the media but but once you start celebrating people for making this decision uh you know that that's the part i don't get is this whole like, oh, thank you, you know, for being so brave in, you know, refusing to talk to the news media. And this is coming from the news media like that. That's the part I don't get. It's that's right. The Guardian had a piece out that was that was licking her boots. And in the mornings, I try to listen. I like National Review, the editors in terms of podcasting.ing. I like you guys listening at Useful Idiots. I like USA NPR. I mean, I listen to them. I hate their music and I really don't like their hosts, but I feel like I need to listen to what the left is saying. I heard a USA Today columnist

being featured on NPR who was saying, and I quote, wait, hold on, let me get it. They asked her, what did you think about her? Her name was Christine Brennan. What did you think about it? She said, well, she's telling us about her long bounce of depression, about her social anxiety and how she uses her headphones to dull it. And what we are seeing is a young person who made great statements about Black Lives Matter and honoring the victims of police brutality and just painting her as this heroine because she went out there with BLM masks and so on and Ahmaud Arbery masks when she was clearly using the press to make a statement, a political statement

that you need reporters to write about what you're putting on that mask, who now didn't come out and say, I have depression. I have massive social anxiety. She came out and said, I don't want the haters to get into my head. That was her first statement. She's like, I don't, I've felt people have no regard for athletes' mental health. And this rings true when I see press conferences. We're sat there and we're asked questions that we've been asked multiple times before, or we're asked questions that bring doubt into our minds. And I'm just not going to subject myself to people that doubt me. Is she kidding me? I mean, what she's saying is you can ask me questions so long

as I come out as a badass. But if you ask me anything about my shitty play on clay, I'm out. No, yeah, it's ridiculous. I remember a baseball player player once he was complaining about um you know he had a bad game and and he was he lashed out at the press basically saying uh what do you want me to say i missed a hanging slider you know like you know that that happens in sports but you have to be part of the reason we admire athletes is because they're tough and toughness is what separates is what separates people who are just sort of very talented from the great champions, right? From the Federer's and the Nadal's and, you know, those sorts of people. It's the determination and the ability to fight through adversity.

This is part of the thing that we're teaching young people when we teach them to admire these champions is that you have to persevere you have to get through those tough times when you're down two sets and a couple of games maybe a break or two like you you got to fight through you got to keep playing uh and and that's what we that's why they get the big money that's why we we we admire them um and suddenly now you know the message is a little bit different it's um you know we want to we want to lionize people for for something else entirely which seems to run counter to to the the prior ethos of the sport which i don't really understand she seems to be misleading i mean if she had come out and said i i suffer from depression and i have high anxiety and this has been a nightmare for me from the beginning which is where she wound up after so much criticism. That's now her

line. But her opening statement was not about that. It was, we're subjected to these questions that we have to answer over and over again. She wasn't talking about what she's now saying. And the person who really put the lie to her now reliance on the greater mental health and depression and anxiety message is her own sister. Her sister Marie came out and said, so many people are picky on this term, mental health, thinking you need to have depression or some sort of disorder to be able to use the term mental health. But she said, look, she's just trying to block everything out because people's remarks get into her head. And I quote, tennis players don't get paid to do press conferences. They only get paid when they win matches. And then when people were like, OK, Marie's speaking the truth.

She wants to win. She doesn't want any negativity in her head. We understand it. But hey, it's part of the game. Everybody has to do it. Marie quickly deleted that, walked it back, said I screwed up. We get it. She doesn't want to walked it back, said I screwed up. It'd be like, we get it. She doesn't want to hear negativity. You think Federer does? You think Nadal does?

I mean, Rafa Nadal came out and said, without the press, without the people who travel, who are writing the news and the achievements we're having around the world, we wouldn't be the athletes we are today. We're not going to have the recognition that we have around the world and we will not be that popular. Right. Exactly right. That's just the way it works. And so you can't have the glowing magazine covers and fifty five million dollar endorsement deals without dealing with the people. Right. Yeah. You could have you could have sports the way they were once once upon a time when they weren't heavily attended. There was no television. The media didn't travel everywhere and and athletes made twelve thousand dollars a year and had to sell insurance in the off season it's like playing in the wnba right i mean if if that's what you want then then then you can go

that way but if you want you want to make 55 million dollars you can't do it without the media it's just it doesn't work that way. So yeah, it's a frustrating story. Boo, boo, boo, effing boo. That's how I felt like, come on, just, just get tougher. I mean, I understand. Finally, now she pulled herself from the tournament, which is what you should do. If you can't handle it, don't play. Don't play.

It's part of the, it's part of the game. We all understand that. There is a reason a lot of people don't, don't want that job. Can't make it to that point. Right. And just the same reason with Meghan Markle. There's a reason that those other people don't want that job, can't make it to that point, right? And just the same reason with Meghan Markle. There's a reason those other women didn't want to marry Prince Harry. They knew it was coming their way in terms of the scrutiny of themselves and their lives. You willingly jump into it. Don't expect us to feel sorry for you when the press does what the press is going to do. And at least in Markle's case, the press was mean.

This woman hasn't had some avalanche of bad press, and I really think she needs to toughen up. Okay. That's my two cents on it. It was really irritating me, so sorry. Let's talk about the latest in cancel culture, because I saw you did a really interesting piece on Antonio Garza Martinez, and I don't think that this is getting enough coverage. Tell us who he is and what happened to him. Yeah. Antonio Garcia Martinez, he's an author. Well, first of all, he's had many careers. He worked at Goldman Sachs once upon a time. Then he went to Facebook and he was a fairly high ranking executive there. He essentially ran Facebook ads for a little while uh then he uh dropped out and wrote a book called chaos monkeys which is a it's a terrific book uh he's just one of these rare people who

drops out of a profession turns out to be a born writer it's very much like um like liar's poker if you've ever read that that book about wall street it's a Michael Lewis book. It was a very funny, revealing, damaging look at what the tech business is like. And after a while, he did the writer thing for a while and he wanted to go back into working in tech. So he got a job at Apple. And some people inside Apple went through the passages in his book. And there's a section in the book where is a brief section where he's talking about his personal life. And he's talking about how he fell in love with this one woman who he's describing as a strong woman uh and to contrast her with all the other women he dated he says something along the lines of all the women in the bay area are soft and full of shit

uh and that line ends up basically getting him fired they they they a cabal within the company that leads to a letter writing campaign and Garcia Martinez gets fired and the company basically caves and additionally pours gasoline in the fire by issuing a public statement saying we're not the kind of place where misogynistic behavior is tolerated which to me is defamatory because it's it's it implies that he did something in the office um but you know the whole thing was absurd it's a book if you want people to write books that are good you have to expect them to make observations that are that are not guarded and it it wasn't i don't think a misogynistic observation it was it was actually he was praising somebody but uh but it was the whole thing was

absurd and um you know just sort of another example of how uh there's been this kind of movement towards uh like a sort of slack-eyed union culture where in place of traditional unions, there are these Slack chats who decide who gets to work at places and who doesn't. And there's been a lot of that in media and now some of it in tech too. You had a great piece on this just talking about how it's these hypocrites at Apple fired this guy after he had barely been hired. And by the way, there'd been no controversy really about this book. He'd been on stage with Kara Swisher at her recode conference. The book had been favorably reviewed repeatedly. Nobody was saying, oh, my God, this raging misogynist, which his writings do not support, to your point.

If he so what? So he has a diss for the women in Silicon Valley, finding them not to be the strongest personalities in the world. He's entitled to feel that way. And by the way, he wasn't saying all tech women. He was just saying women in the area. But now we have to pretend that he's a sexist pig because some people within Apple wrote a letter saying, and I quote, given Mr. Garcia Martinez's history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks, we're concerned that his presence at Apple will contribute to, cue the words, an unsafe working environment for our colleagues who are at risk of public harassment and private bullying. How? He's the one getting harassed and bullied right here right now. And you raised a great point about Apple's hypocrisy when it comes to, let's let's say, for example, Dr. Dre. and has ever since apple acquired beats by dre uh and owns a massive amount of apple stock and uh

and yet is also the author of songs like bitches ain't shit and and and some others that we could get into but and i like dr dre let me i don't want to uh point a finger at him uh i look i think his music is is cool there's some other stuff going on there but um but the hypocrisy is ridiculous right like they're they're certainly not going to get rid of dr dray and there and there hasn't been any workplace movement to oust him but they will go after somebody who's low profile enough that they can they can get away with uh flexing a little bit of muscle and that's what happened in this case so well and you pointed out in your piece that the verge this publication the verge says silicon

valley has consistently had a white male workforce and you you go on to say it's classic matt taibbi apparently not bothered by antonio's not whiteness right yeah he's he's cuban uh you know it's it's you know he's he's i guess you know lat Latinx or whatever people would want to call it. Oh God, don't say that. I know, I know. I hate, I hate going there, but, but, but yeah, no, it's ridiculous. He's, he's not a, he's not a white male and it's, the whole, the whole thing is absurd. In fact, there was a, there was a huge debate about that, whether, you know, he was, whether, whether or not or not they could call him white on Twitter, even though he was Cuban. He's white adjacent. Right, yeah, exactly. When you're Latin and you make money, you're white adjacent.

And I didn't know all this stuff about Dr. Dre, I confess. Your article got me sort of going down the rabbit hole on him. This is you saying author – he's author of such classics as, as you pointed out, bitches ain't shit, lyrical gangbang, the subject of such articles as here's what's missing from straight out of Compton, me and the other women, Dr. Dre beat up. So I actually went and pulled that article that you referenced. Here's what's missing from the movie straight out of Compton. And it's written by this woman, Dee Barnes.

And Dee Barnes was the host of a well-known Fox show about hip hop culture, hip hop called Pump It Up. And she says in this piece that you referenced, it's out there. She's on the record with this. Dr. Dre attempted to throw me down the stairs, slam my head against the wall, kicked me, stomped on me. And Dr. Dre admitted, quote, it ain't no big thing. I just threw her through a door. He pleaded no contest to assault. Multiple women have come forward to say he beat the hell out of me. And they're cited in this piece as his girlfriend, Michelle, who came out and said, I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and was told to sit down and shut up. He punched his label mate, Terry B, twice at a Grammys party in 1990.

Black eyes and scars he gave to his collaborator, Michelle. On and on it goes. And then this article points out that when he was in the group NWA, they were doing songs like A Bitch is a Bitch, Find Em, F Em and Flee, One Less Bitch, and I quote, perhaps most offensively, She Swallowed It. On that track, one of his bandmates brags of them and flee. One less bitch. And and I quote, perhaps most offensively, she swallowed it.

On that track, one of his bandmates brags about violating a 14 year old girl, 14 year old girl. Oh, shit. It's the preacher's daughter. And she's only 14 and a hoe. But the bitch blank D like a specialized pro. I mean, no problem with Dr. Dre. Welcome to Apple. He he's been, I didn't know he'd been given an executive role there. He can come aboard, but this guy who says, yeah, Silicon Valley has a type of woman that I don't find all that impressive. He's got to go. Right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, it's ridiculous. The, it just, I mean, again, it just shows you that there's not a moral thing behind this. This is just about flexing a little bit of muscle. And, you know, if they really had a problem, they would have raised it with Dr. Dre.

But they didn't. They went after, you know, somebody they felt was toppleable. Let's put it that way. Right. And that's been a consistent feature of a lot of these episodes, which is that, you know, especially in the media, you'll find in newsrooms, it's almost always somebody who's not, that doesn't have a lot of protection among the higher ranking executives in the company. It's usually somebody who's a little bit of an outsider or a free thinker. And those are the people who are

vulnerable in these campaigns. Laura Logan and I were just talking about that exact thing. You know, she felt that that happened to her at CBS. I could say the same in my history. Meanwhile, all these people at Apple who are so horrified at, you know, the hiring of this one guy based on a passage in his book, their salaries are being paid by the company using Uyghur labor, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, if you want to go down that road, like if you're really going to get morally upset about some guy's you know jokey memoir about the tech business but you're not worried about how exactly you're you're making ipads and iphones at that at that low low cost using essentially conscripted labor and in you know a number of different countries with horrific working conditions um that's been denounced by human rights organizations for decades.

That doesn't bother you. It doesn't bother you that the company doesn't pay taxes the way it should. It's just all very selective. This is one of the things that's bothering me these days about James Murdoch, who keeps he never misses an opportunity to rip on his brother Lachlan. He lost the battle to Lachlan. He wound up the heir apparent and James isn't. And now he loves to come out and criticize Fox News and his family's platforms. It's like, so you make these statements after you fly on your private jet from your penthouse to your yacht that all of those properties paid for.

Please spare me your sanctimony when you're living off of the rewards from all of those media products. Right. Yeah, exactly. If you want to make a statement about, you want to get somebody from Apple fired for writing a book, maybe you shouldn't be taking the profits that they got from all these other practices. And I guess the same thing you could say about James Murdoch, too. That's right. Go work someplace else. This is a lovely solution. There are a lot of companies out there in the world right now. They really need they need people to work because they're sitting at home collecting their unemployment checks under the auspices of COVID relief. Up next, we're going to get into Matt's thoughts on a debate our friend Candace Owens had with Nicole Arbor, who's going to come on the show as well. She's a comedian, very funny, right leaning.

So you'd think these two had a lot in common and would like each other. But it kind of went south over debate on cancel culture. Candace tried to get Chrissy Teigen canceled successfully. And I think Target and some other places because she'd been bullying young girls on the download 10 years ago and seemed to have a repeated pattern of behavior when it came to really going after young women, which is contrary to her public image, right? Although she loves to have people canceled. And Nicole's feeling was the right shouldn't be engaging in that, right? So they had a spirited debate. It raised some questions for me too. We're going to get into that right after this, but first I want to bring you a feature we

have here on the MK show called real talk, where we just get into something that's on my mind or what have you, um, from recent days. And I wanted to talk to you about Memorial day this weekend, um, that we just all shared and my experience, because for me, it was a lesson of how it's good to get out of your native surroundings every so often. And there's a reason that we go to Montana a few times a year, right? There's a reason why we've been spending our Memorial Days past few years down in Texas. You got to get out of your liberal bubbles. More of the press should do this in particular and see how the rest of the country lives.

And we have some friends down there outside of Dallas on a big ranch out about an hour outside of Dallas. And we went to visit them again this year. And it, it's just a transformational experience. It's so good for us, for me, for, for my family, for my kids. You know, we, we got off the plane and we, we got to the ranch and my daughter had her mask on because she, she just, you know, it's habit now living in New York. And she was thinking, walking into this house, I should be masked. And our host, who was just a doll, said, oh, honey, you're in Texas now. We don't wear those. You don't need that. So we took it off. And it was the beginning of a wonderful mask-free weekend, indoor and out. You know, you know you're not in New York City anymore when you're driving from the plane to the ranch and you see a big,

big sign six months after Trump leaves office that reads Trump country, right? You don't see that in New York City. You see him in like handcuffs in the pictures here. You got, you know, you drive past the horses and the cattle and you see ranchers with the cowboy hats and the boots on the horses doing their things. And even just the way we lived while there, right? We went on canoe rides and saw a tarantula and we ran into a water moccasin, which was scary, but cool since we didn't get hurt. But it's good for my kids to be around that, right? Get your hands dirty. Understand what does that feel like, right? It's not just all about the rats and the subways in New York City. There's real wildlife out there that you might have to contend with.

We went to a crab bake where they had to crack open the crab legs and eat them. And, you know, I don't like seafood, so they never get that from me. We spent actual Memorial Day and the night before looking at fireworks and waving flags and having our moment of silence and talking about America and how much we love it

and what the sacrifice of our troops meant and means, you know, what the flag means to us and what the media is doing to us. We rode bikes in the woods and through the fields and the dirt and got dirty the way you need to and kids need to. We played some pickle and drank ranch water. Do you know ranch water?

This is my new favorite drink. We kept calling it swamp drank ranch water. Do you know ranch water? This is my new favorite drink. We kept calling it swamp water, which is not the right name at all. It's ranch water. It's a drink that has some sort of Blanco tequila. It could be Casamigos or whatever, lime juice, and this thing called Topo Chico, which is a Mexican sparkling mineral water. It's all the rage down there that is 100% going to be my summer drink. But we came home just feeling more connected to our country, to each other, to our troops, our veterans, those who died and served. And it's just a great perspective setter to get out of this place called Manhattan that has values that are starting more and more to look totally unfamiliar to me.

And sometimes I wonder whether it's my age, I'm starting to lose my mind. Then you get out there in other parts of the country and you realize it's not. It's not. It's this town. And I'm sure a lot of our listeners are living in towns just like it and wondering the same. It's not us. It's them. Some people are losing their minds, but it's not us.

Loving your country, loving your countrymen, believing in the flag and the sacrifices that have been made for the privilege of living here and the rights that we share. That's what it's about. That's one of the reasons for existing and spending some time in good old places like Texas helps bring that home. So my thanks to our hosts, to all the beautiful, wonderful friends that we met while down there, a lot of our listeners. I met a lot of fans of the show, which was fun. I invited them to give me feedback. And I encourage all of you to do something similar your next chance to get out of Dodge

if you live in a town like Portland or L.A. or San Fran or even Austin, Texas. Get out of there for a little bit and figure it out like I did. Hope you enjoyed your long weekend and took some time on Memorial Day to think about what really matters. All right, back to our guest Matt Taibbi right after this. I want to ask you about an interesting debate that happened recently on, you know, Candace Owens has got this once a week show now and online is over at The Daily Wire. And she had on Nicole Arbor, who is a comedian. She's she's a Republican. She's a she's a Trump voter.

So you'd think these two gals would kind of get along. Not so. So they got into a debate. You don't need to know the specifics, but I'll just get you up to speed in case you hadn't seen it about Chrissy Teigen, who is she's never seen a right leading person. She doesn't want to cancel. Chrissy Teigen wants every she wants you to shut up. She wants me to shut up. She wants everybody other than her and John Legend, her husband, to shut up.

And it's annoying, right? It's like, why am I listening to you? What are you like? You're some model. Like, I'm sorry, but have you really earned the right to be this judgmental of everybody? You know, talk to Mother Teresa. Go talk to her in your prayers and come back and then maybe I'll listen to you. But Chrissy Teigen loves to cancel people.

And Candace called her out because it turns out Chrissy Teigen is not a very nice person behind the scenes and was really going after this one woman named Courtney Stoddard, who when she was 15, married a guy in his 50s, clearly inappropriate, a grooming situation. And instead of expressing empathy or concern about this young woman, who now is non-binary and uses the they pronoun, she slipped into the woman, the young girl's DMs and told her to go kill herself and said she should take a dirt nap. And there were repeated harassing texts or DMs from Chrissy Teigen, this star, to this young 15-year-old who was clearly going through a thing. And apparently it wasn't just Courtney Stoddard. She did it to quite a few young people. It was 10 years ago. And Courtney Stoddard saved all the Stodden, I guess. Courtney has now come out to say, this is a bully. Chrissy

Teigen shouldn't have a deal with Target or Walmart or any reputable store because she harasses young girls who are struggling and is totally unsympathetic about it. Okay. That leads to Candace sort of trying to rally her followers to get Chrissy Teigen's deals canceled at these stores. And Nicole Arbor goes on Candace's show to say, I disagree with what you did. I think if you're against cancel culture, then you're against cancel culture. And Candace was trying to argue, no, this is about accountability for somebody who harassed young women. That's different than cancel culture. Here's a little bit of their exchange. Listen.

It is when you put cancel Chrissy and make your audience go after her with vitriol, saying the same disgusting things that you stand against. Your audience is now doing it. Nicole, you can use the word cancel. My audience is now sliding at the DMs of teenagers threatening to kill them? They're sliding at her.

She has said that she's having mental health issues. Have they threatened to kill her? I don't know, probably. So now she's having mental health issues after her. So now my audience is to blame because they're saying that her product shouldn't be. You have directed your audience to be as nasty as Chrissy. That is not true. I don't believe that.

That is so untrue. I directed my audience specifically to Target and asked them to tell them to drop her product. I never told them to go on Chrissy's wall. Not once. This is the problem. No, I agree with what he said. Chrissy Teigen should be held accountable for poor actions. But canceling her is an accountability. No, no, no. We do not participate in cancel culture. What do you consider cancel culture is? I'm saying to target MBCs, drop her

products so that she can be held accountable for what she's done. Her products got dropped. I didn't ask for her to be erased from the internet. I think that's stupid. I'm going to politely decline to be on the rest of the show. Yeah. And that followed a discussion about some legal matter she had that she wasn't at liberty to discuss. So I think that was sort of a one-off, but it did raise an interesting debate and one I've been struggling with myself, which is you hear that story about Chrissy Teigen and she's been so hateful that you kind of want to say F Chrissy Teigen. I have no, no empathy for her whatsoever. But is that just joining in on this cancel culture it's not intimidation it's just accountability so i don't like yeah i don't like that that excuse that much i mean i i get the idea

that you know what's good for the good should be good for the gander right if somebody is doing this to um to other people and they have their own past that they should be reckoning with um that hypocrisy should probably be exposed. But I'm just generally not in favor of getting people fired or campaigning to get people fired because of something they may have written or said a long time ago. Like, even if it was bad, like, you know, that everybody in their life has something that they're probably not proud of. And this is an exercise that you could repeat with basically anybody on the planet if you look hard enough. And that's what I worry is that this is all turning into is just this enormous tit for tat kind of exercise that will just result in a lot of a, uh, you know, aggravation and destruction. But do we make an exception for those who are canceled culture warriors?

No, but I mean, I guess, I guess my sympathy would more go in the direction of let's just stop doing this, you know? Um, but we tried that and they won't. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I don't know. It's you're right. It's, it's a tough issue. Um, I, I just can't imagine myself ever being, uh, moved to use any of the time I have on earth to try to organize a campaign, to get anybody fired from a job. Like, I just don't understand that mentality, right? Like that's, that's part of what I don't get is, you know, worry about your

own situation and, and try to make your own contribution the best you can. I get that. And I think probably the Matt Taibbi article or the Megyn Kelly commentary would have been something along the lines of she's a hypocrite. Nobody should be listening to Chrissy Teigen on any of her cancel this one or this one's bad or that other one's bad because look at her history as opposed to targeting the stores to cancel her deal. But I also see the point that Candace was making, which is live by the sword, die by the sword. And since these cancel culture warriors won't listen to reason, it's been going on now for years. They continue to collect scalps. This is the only way of making them listen. They've got

to have skin in the game. You know, I really think that the way we stop these weak corporations, like Apple, from just summarily ruining somebody's career is we should be saying, go for it. You want to get rid of, you know, Antonio Garcia, Martinez, that's fine. But we we've got our own cabal over here or the Matt Taibbi's of the world or the Glenn Greenwald's or me who are going to look into everything you cancelator, canceler, you know, in chief have done. We're going to scrub your record and we're going to make sure that you've held yourself to those same high standards that you now seek to impose on somebody else. And that I really think is the only thing that's going to make them stop.

Right. Because just shaming them into how cruel and unnecessary this is, isn't working. You're probably right. I just, uh, and yeah, and that's, that's, that's probably true. And, and, uh, and we've already had a couple of incidents where, where some of these people who have been the most aggressive in hunting down other people have have themselves been exposed um you know it's it's almost like the those stories from soviet times where the uh interrogator ends up in the same cell in the gulag with the person that they um that they interrogated right like we've we've had a couple of cancellation episodes where that's happened. You never have clean hands. Right. Yeah, exactly.

But this process of hunting through people's backgrounds for sins, it's a little bit too NKVD for me. I get it, and I probably wouldn't stand in its way, but it's all ugly to me. What's NKVD, North Korea? Oh, that's the KGB. It's the old name for the KGB. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. So this woman hasn't yet been canceled, but she's in the news. Here in New York, there's this crazy far left school called Dalton. It's a great school. It's got a very good academic reputation, but this is the school where over a hundred teachers signed a letter a year ago, demanding all sorts of crazy stuff. And it was just like, it was so far across the line that even the Dalton parents said, this has to stop. We can't have race in every single class, in gym, in art, in health, in math.

We can't have they wanted 50 percent of the parents donations to go to inner city kids in New York. And it's like, well, who do you think is going to fund all the scholarships to Dalton? It's that money that does it. It's just I could go on. But the latest set of Dalton is they have this person who is I gather she she's somehow in charge of health and wellness there. Her name is Justine Ang Fonte. And she was in the news a month ago for going to do a lecture over at another school and called Columbia Prep. And at Columbia, she decided to teach the high schoolers about porn by showing a bunch of porn and getting really specific on porn. And if you think of these teenagers, they're like, whoa, this is inappropriate.

Yeah, she got really specific and it made the news. Well, the follow on story is apparently this woman, Justine, has been doing her little education at Dalton on first graders. And we have a clip of the video she thought was appropriate for the six and seven year olds. Listen. Hey, how come my penis gets big sometimes and points up in the air? That's called an erection. Sometimes I touch my penis because it feels good. Sometimes when I'm in my bath or when mom puts me to bed i like to touch my vulva too you have a clitoris there kayla that probably feels good to touch the same way keith's penis feels good when he touches it but have you ever noticed that older kids and grown-ups don't touch their private parts in public they don't that's right keith it's okay to touch yourself and see how different body parts feel, but it's best to only do it in private.

Boy, I'm glad I didn't get high for this interview. Oh my goodness. I'm bringing you a natural high, Taibbi. That's intense. Wow. Can you imagine? I mean, then they have a big lesson about consent. And one of the parents apparently, according to the New York Post, said the message was parents, parents are supposed to say to their own children before they hug them, may I hug you? And one parent came out and said, I'm paying $50,000 a year to these assholes to tell my kid not to let her grandfather hug her when he sees her. And then she got to slip away to the bathtub to touch her vulva. I'm concerned about where our country's going. Yeah. I mean, I guess what that's $54,000 a year you're paying so that your six year old can learn the word vulva. I mean, I don't know. Maybe math first.

I don't know. It feels a little bit like they could have gotten around to some other things before they went there. But that is crazy. This is what we're dealing with in New York City and one of the reasons why I pulled my kids. But it is not just Dalton saying inappropriate things to little children. It is the president of the United States who made news the other day. It happened on Friday. He was I think he was in an Air Force base in

Virginia and making a speech. There was a girl who appeared to be in elementary school. She had joined her parents and two older brothers on the podium when her mother introduced the president. And Joe Biden said as follows. Listen. I'm especially honored to share the stage with Brittany and Jordan and Nathan and Margaret Catherine. I love those barrettes in her hair, man. I'll tell you what. Look at her. She looks like she's 19 years old sitting there. Like a little lady with legs crossed.

Oh, my God. That guy is the gift who keeps on giving. He's amazing. Why did you say that? I mean, he's obviously past the point where they're of coachability or otherwise you know he would have stopped doing that stuff a while ago but he's he reminds me of that character in hot shots that lloyd benson played you know that lloyd bridges played the admiral b Benson character. He's just completely nutty. And, you know, that's who he is.

Yeah. And is he all there? Right. Is he all there? This clip made a lot of headlines over the weekend. And I loved it, too. I confess. Where he got his ice cream and he came out.

And as soon as he said the flavor, all the people in the crowd, which apparently included the press, started oohing and aahing. It was, oh God, who was it? Molly Hemingway, who came out and said, this is the way you speak to your three-year-old when you're trying to teach them that they won Candyland. But you can hear. So two things. I'm going to play the clip. Listen to the reaction of the crowd and listen to the way he speaks. He speaks like a three-year-old. Listen to this clip. Mr. President, what did you order? Chocochocochip. Mr. President, what is your message to Republicans who are prepared to block the January 6th commission? Can we hear that again? I need to hear that one more time. Can you re-rack that, Natasha? Let's hear that one more time. Mr. President, what do you order? Chocochocochip.

What is your message to Republicans who are prepared to block the January 6th? Oh, my God. Oh, you're a big boy, aren't you? Can you believe? Pants on all by yourself. It's amazing. You know, right. Well, you Well, the sycophancy that they've been bringing to the coverage of Biden, it's so embarrassing at this point. They don't even try to disguise it anymore. No, they really aren't that enamored with him. Yeah, I mean, it's such a polar opposite of what happened with Trump. Like, you know, Trump would do the tiniest little thing and it would generate headlines for, you know, four or five days as, you know, the second coming of Beelzebub or something like that. Oh, they would have found a way to say his chocolate chocolate chip was racist and that he was covering up something he had done inside the ice cream shop. I mean. Right. Or Putin chose the flavor or something like that right there'd be

in-depth pieces on how that had always been putin's favorite from the time he was a child in st petersburg exactly yeah no it's it's ridiculous and then you know which is it's it's it's funny most of the time but it does actually matter because what ends up happening is they end up just not going and doing any reporting at all on, you know, things like major changes of mind that the president or whoever is actually running the country, you know, has about things. You know, they they said for months that they were planning on doing this massive sort of rescue, open-ended rescue program that would be transformational. And then, you know, they sort of abruptly came out a couple of weeks ago and said, no, we're actually, you know, we're planning on cutting back on all these programs. And we're not going to forgive student debt. We're not going to do all this stuff. And there was just nothing in the press about it.

We're not, we're not, there's not going to be a public health care option. We're not going to do all this stuff. And there was just nothing in the press about it. We're not, we're not, there's not going to be a public healthcare option. We're not going to, we're not going to raise the real estate tax. We're not going to do any of these things. No one seems to care because to your point, he's transformational, Matt. He's transformational.

That's their narrative. Even chocolate, chocolate chip is transformational. And they have, they've committed to it and they can. That's the lens through which I think they're genuinely seeing this guy. We have a fun butted soundbite of the press using that term. Listen, first of all, Biden is a transformative president. Joe Biden as a transformational president.

It looks like he does want to be a transformational president. Portraying himself as a potentially transformational figure. I mean, he may be turning into a really a transformational president. She called him a transformative president. Are we witnessing a transformational moment? Channeling Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A transformational president. Barely being progressive.

Using the word transformation. Transformational is what Joe Biden is setting out to do. It could be transformational. This is a transformational agenda. You know, Bernie Sanders is supposed to be the transformational guy. Yeah. Oh, Hardy Har Har. Forgive me.

I credit where credit's due. That's from your YouTube channel. Yeah. You're the one who put that together. But you nailed it. Yeah. It's so funny because, I mean, my favorite one in that whole clip is Joe Scarborough, who's saying, you know, he could be transformational as though it just occurred to him.

And it wasn't that the Biden administration has been telling reporters for a year that this is the word we want you to use. And we want you to compare them to Roosevelt. That's our new theme. Now, for people who don't know how campaign, I mean, you obviously have done this, Megan, like, when you go out in the campaign trail, and you meet with the aides, after the events, they said, they'll go over the themes that they're trying to push, you know, with you, they'll say, you know, our guys, our, our candidate is trying to do X, Y, and Z.

And we think that this is reminiscent of Roosevelt. And we think that this is transformational, blah, blah, blah. So they're feeding you the lines and it's bad enough that they're repeating them, but it gets really embarrassing when they pretend it's their own idea. Right. Like, like they, they thought of it like that that shows you how how paper trained the press is when when that starts it reminds me of that that scene in devil wears prada where andy the assistant to miranda who's really the anna wintour type mean character who runs the magazine the assistant andy played by anne hathaway, comes in

and Meryl Streep's character is like, I don't know, they're both so similar. They're looking at these two blues that are, the difference is imperceptible to the average lay person. You know, I'm still learning about this stuff and... This stuff? Oh, Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously

to care about what you put on your back, but what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets?

I think we need a jacket here. Mm. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.

The manipulation starts deep and works its way out to the point where somebody like Joe Scarborough is pawning it off like it's his idea. Meanwhile, he's just parroting talking points. Joe Scarborough, the only man in media to have loved both Trump and Biden. Now, in excusing his Trump sycophants, he just says, well, I have no influence over anybody who votes on the right. OK, that's one excuse for what you did. But yeah, so talk about that. Why does it matter? Because little by little, the transformational message is falling apart. Well, it matters because you should, first of all, when these aides talk, you should do a little digging. Like, is it true? You know, like, does the candidate actually have a record of doing what they're saying, what they say they're going to do. And in Biden's case, they began the campaign, whispering to reporters, and I covered them a little at the beginning. Basically, their message behind the scenes was, we're not the big ideas campaign, we're the stability campaign.

And so don't use that kind of language with us when you're talking about us, because we want to get credit for being the unthreatening, the safe date in the field. Right. And they went and they did that. And I mean, if you look if you go back and look at the coverage of Biden in the early according to the polls, to start describing yourself as transformational because that's what Democratic voters apparently wanted, they started selling that. And that's when reporters started pushing that word. And again, like it's not our job to do PR. Like politicians have money to buy commercials. If they, if they want to sell people on the idea that they're transformational, they're, they're free to buy ads and, and, and tell you that, like, it's not, it's not our job to do it for free. You know, that's the problem that I have. And it's this, it's this instinct to try to get closer to people in power by doing them a favor, you know, a PR favor, which is which is dangerous, because in a pinch, what will happen is the reporters won't go against the politician, and they won't write something negative. And that's, that's where it's dangerous.

That's absolutely where they are. Although you say that the Biden's message was on the safe date, tell it to a little girl in the elementary school at the Air Force Base. With the bar Force Base. I'm not sure she's looking at him that way. So often they can't get out of their own way. It's like, how has he not learned to not comment on girls or get near girls? And why did that family, for that matter, put her anywhere near him on a podium? Yeah. How do you get to be all the way to the White House if you're the kind of person who says you look like you could be 19, you know, on TV? Like it is amazing that that that he made it that far. It's even and look at Kamala Harris. I mean, what do you think about her? Because she's obviously the presumptive nominee. I mean, this party that is so, so devoted to diversity and identity, there ain't no way they're getting rid of Kamala Harris as the nominee. She's a terrible candidate, too. She's just a terrible politician. I mean, I don't know what she's like as a person, but she is a terrible politician. And going into the Memorial Day weekend, which is the one holiday, even unlike Veterans Day or July 4th, where we are meant to remember those who died for our country. And her message, her message for the people to consider going in to that weekend was, and I quote, enjoy the long weekend.

With a picture of herself. Right, a picture of herself. And there's so much blowback that then she kept trying to undo it. Like, oh, remember the fallen troops? It's like too late. Too late. We know what you stand for. Rob Lowe had a better message.

I saw a split screen online of what he said versus what she said. He worked in a fake White House when he started in the West Wing, and he seemed to get the message better from Aaron Sorkin than she got from her boss because she was way off message. Yeah. And it's funny, at the beginning of the primary cycle in, I guess it was 2019, all of the sort of think tanks and Democratic strategists were telling all the reporters like, oh, the candidate you have to watch is Kamala Harris. Like that's who's going to end up winning this thing. That's who we want to win this thing. And, you know, she got very favorable treatment in the press. There were loads of these sort of hagiographic portraits of her on covers of magazines. And she was a complete dud, you know, as a candidate, the voters just overwhelmingly rejected her over and over and over again. She had that one bounce after the debate where she went after

Biden on the busing issue. And she had those t-shirts pre-printed, that little girl is me t-shirts, which you could buy for 27 bucks as soon as the debate was over. But she was never viable as a, as a candidate in that primary. And yet, you know, I, I think the democratic party establishment really does believe, um, you know, that if, if she had to run in the next term that, that she would win. And I, you know, maybe so. I don't know. But there hasn't been any evidence of that. OK, the conclusion to our episode is right after this. Don't go away. The other thing I wanted to ask you about was this whole they want, you know, the Democrats push to have a commission study what happened on January 6th. And in particular, the attempt to compare it to 9-11,

saying the reason we need a commission to study what happened in this capital siege is because it's a 9-11 style event. And I think you'd sense something out about this. And I saw the most powerful piece in the journal, Deborah Burlingame, who I've been interviewing since after it happened, since after 9-11, I first started at Fox. And she is, she's been such a fearless warrior for her brother, Charles Burlingame, who was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77. As she described it, murdered in his cockpit at age 51 in a six and a half minute struggle for control of the airplane. And she came out with a piece on May 27 saying, look, these democratic lawmakers want to establish this commission, this 9-11 style commission to

investigate the siege. And she quotes George Will, commentator George Will, who's really, she's filled with such anger. And he says, and I quote, I would like to see January 6th burned into the American mind as firmly as 9-11, because it was that scale of a shock to the system. And she says, I'll just give you a couple of thoughts from Deborah. She goes by Deb. She calls it profoundly disheartening. She says, these two events are fundamentally different in nature, scope, and consequence. Mentioning them in the same breath not only diminishes the horror of what happened on 9-11, it tells a false story to the generation of Americans who are too young to remember that day nearly 20 years ago. She says, members of Congress may have had a frightening day on January 6th. We keep hearing

about AOC and her therapy she's needed as a result. But on 9-11, Dev goes on, some 200 people in the World Trade Center towers chose to jump from 80 to 100 floors above the ground rather than be consumed by fire. A woman waiting at a lobby elevator bank was burned. Over 82% of her body went jet fuel from the first plane sent a ball of fire down the elevator shaft and into the lobby. I know this woman, her name's Lauren Manning. I interviewed her. She spent three months in a hospital burn unit and was permanently disfigured. Countless harrowing stories like this of death, destruction, heartbreaking loss, more than 3,000 children lost parents, eight young children were killed on the planes. Recovery personnel found 19,000 human remains scattered all over lower Manhattan from river

to river, including on rooftops and window ledges. She says some families received so many notifications of remains they couldn't take it anymore and asked for them to stop. More than 1100 families received nothing. Their loved ones went to work that morning and disappeared. Finishing up here, she says the attack brought down our nationwide aviation system. It shut down the New York Stock Exchange for days. It destroyed or rendered uninhabitable 16 acres of lower Manhattan, including the underground subway and commuter train lines, and destroyed a section of the Pentagon. Rebuilding at ground zero is still incomplete, and the U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan. On January 6th, Congress resumed its session that evening. It's deeply offensive and sad, she says,

that the brutal and harrowing memories of the worst terrorist attack in American history are being deployed by political partisans. They're using 9-11, not as an example of what the American people endured and overcame together, but explicitly to divide, to stoke hatred, and to further a political agenda aimed at stigmatizing the other party and marginalizing ordinary Americans. What do you make of it? I actually think it goes even further than that. I think this effort to compare January 6th to 9-11 has a lot to do with the desire on the part of some politicians to sort of remake the domestic security apparatus in the same way that we remade

the international security apparatus after 9-11. I mean, this whole concept, we had news stories just a couple of weeks ago that the Biden administration was considering sort of a policy of having the Department of Homeland Security cooperate with private investigators to look into the, you know, the communications of certain people, certain political groups, because it would be illegal for the government to do it themselves, you know, without, without probable cause. That's scary. Yeah. That's what I worry about is that they're looking for a domestic war on terror. They, they want, they want the capability to, to go through those, those kinds of investigations, to use tools like FISA to go after people within the United States. And there's already an extensive record of those programs being abused. And what happens when they allegedly have a domestic justification,

a legal window to start using those powers on the population? That's the big fear for me, is on the population. Like that, that's the big fear for me is that the end game is that. So you, you see the attempt to establish this commission as tied. It's sort of the camel's nose under the tent. Like we've got to crack down on these people. We have to do, it's all hands on deck. The same sacrifice of civil liberties we saw after nine 11, an actual terrorist attack on our country need to be made now. Those same sacrifices in our civil liberties need to be made now to protect against white supremacists and so on, all the bad guys that the left claims are responsible for what happened on January 6th.

Yeah. I mean, we've already seen some pretty remarkable behaviors where, you know, they're stopping people at airports, they're searching their computers, their phones. You know, if we have even like a theoretical tie to, you know, to anybody who was traveling to Washington that day. Yeah, that's what I worry about is basically they're going to have a commission that's going to come to some kind of conclusion about how there's a gap in the domestic security apparatus that has to be closed by means of programs X, Y, and Z, right? And that's what they'll come up with recommendations

and probably it will just be legalizing things they're already doing, but that's what I worry about. Yeah, her closing line in that piece was that the world-changing attack of September 11th, 2001 shouldn't be used either as a precedent or moral authority to create a commission whose sole purpose is to turn a straightforward law enforcement failure into destructive political theater. And your point is it's far more nefarious than just destructive political theater. And your point is it's far more nefarious than just destructive political theater. It's an excuse to gain even more control over our lives, to increase what's becoming the new surveillance state. This is what Glenn Greenwald's been jumping up and down about his old place that he founded, The Intercept, which seems to have done

a complete 180 on the protection of privacy and civil liberties. They sound more like Fox News right after 9-11. Yeah, and they're doing a new series of stories that's basically going through a hacked archive of files that they got from Gab. And I wrote about this, Glenda's commented about this, that this is kind of contrary to the original mission of the Intercept, which was, you know, they were the tenders of the Edward Snowden archive, and they were dedicated to kind of exposing the excesses of the federal surveillance state and conversely to protecting the privacy rights of individuals because that was the whole the whole idea of the snowden revelations was look they're they're spying on us right illegally they've they've they've assumed authority that

they don't really have to listen into and catalog our communications. And now here, here, basically the intercept is doing the same kind of work that law enforcement would like to do, which is go through the private communications of private citizens and look for evidence of sort of political unorthodoxy. Now there are circumstances under which that kind of reporting could be legitimate. But, you know, the irony of the intercept doing it, I think, to me is pretty strong. They have lost their way. All right, I want to end with this, because I heard you mentioned on one of your podcasts recently that you have a new approach to the news. And I thought, this is interesting. And I can kind of relate. You said, I only really

read what I'm interested in. I'm not doing the wide swath approach to journalism in the mornings. How does that work? And how's it going? Yeah, not really all that well. I mean, you backslide into reading everything again, but- They get you. Yeah. But I think the problem for me and for a lot of other people, you know, even just people not in the media business is just, there's just too much stuff out there. And if you, if you follow it, you will go crazy. Like it, it, it, it's designed to make you upset. Um, yes, constantly. And I think there's only a limited amount of, you know, of mental attention

that any one person has that they can use. For my purposes, if I focus on more than one or two topics at a time, I get overwhelmed. But beyond that, it's just so aggravating to read the stuff that's in the news now that I think it's not good for your mental health. I think probably we have to ration that somehow in the future. And it is like the, you know, the economics theory of garbage in, garbage out. You have to be so careful who you choose to let in. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. What you should think about what's going into your brain in the same way you think about what's going in, you know, what you eat, right? You don't just eat everything you see. Like you have to have some lettuce sometimes. And, you know, like I think that's it's the same thing with news. You just you just can't keep eating like rage and division like all day long. It's just not good news were a were a meal. What would it be? Red meat, like hardcore alcohol, some sort of increased, you know, improve alcohol.

Like, you know, the stuff you used to drink when you're in college when you couldn't afford anything. Right. Bacardi 151, right? Or yeah, something like that. Yeah. I can't remember the name. I had some encounters. I don't remember them. There's a reason for that. I think we all did. Yep. Matt Taibbi, such a great time catching up. I always love getting your take on the news. Thank you for being here. Thanks so much, Megan. Take care. Don't forget to subscribe to the show, download the show and go on there. Give me a five star rating and a comment, would you? I've read every single one of the reviews. We're now

18,000 some odd reviews. I've read every single one. Even those of you who say you say you read these like you don't believe me. I read you. I read them. I see you. And I love, I love feedback. And I love, I love comments on Monday's show in particular because I just thought that was gangbusters.

Rob O'Neill just hit the ball out of the park and made me proud to be an American. Wonder what you thought of that, of Matt, of everything. So get on there and let me know and subscribe now because if you do, we'll give you a tap on the shoulder on Friday to remind you to listen to Dennis Prager, the soothing bomb of Dennis Prager. Love this man.

He's up next. Don't miss it. See you then. 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.