The Megyn Kelly Show - Matt Taibbi on the Media, Cancel Culture, and the Democratic Establishment | Ep. 23

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

Megyn Kelly is joined by journalist and host of "Useful Idiots," Matt Taibbi, to discuss the legacy media and the rise of independents, cancel culture, the Democratic establishment, why "White Fragility" is "the dumbest book ever written," the stories the media has gotten wrong in the Trump Era, his journalism background 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. Today we've got Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and also Substack where he is making a killing. We'll get into how and why he's over there as well. But I've been looking forward to talking to him forever. We've never met. And yet I have huge respect for him. He is brave and bold and taking on cancel culture in a way very few journalists from the quote mainstream are. So we'll get to him in one second. But first, let's talk about Super Beats soft chews. They really are delicious. If you haven't tried these things, you are missing

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So go there now. Get your three bags at getsuperbeats.com slash MK. And now, Matt Taibbi. Matt Taibbi, thank you so much for being here. How are you? I'm good. Thank you, Megan, for having me. My pleasure. I'm looking forward to this conversation because I think, I feel like your politics, I know you're a liberal, I feel like you're sort of center left. I don't think you're far left. And I'm a little bit more center right. And that's, I feel like we're in the same tent these

days. You know, there's so much in common between our groups, as opposed to these lunatics on the far extremes, you know, who have the loudest voices, but don't represent the most people. So let me just get you a little bit of background on you, since I don't know whether the audience will know you, they certainly read about you. But you grew up in Boston. You now live in New Jersey. Are you married? I am. And I have three little boys. Ah, how old are they? Uh, they're six, uh, five and two. Oh, wow. You're in the thick of it. Good luck with that.

You're, you're a writer. You're a journalist. Your dad was a TV reporter. So that must have been back in the day. Like what was he doing? Local news or helicopter stuff? What was he doing? So yeah, my father was a reporter at Channel 5 and Channel 7 in Boston. So my childhood was basically like the movie Anchorman. A lot of bad facial hair, a lot of standups, but he ended up working at the network. You know, he did, he was on Dateline for a long time at NBC. Very sort of classic, down the middle, sort of traditional news reporter, investigative reporter. That was at a time when you could look at a reporter and say, I aspire to that. I don't feel like the kids today are looking at us this way. No, they certainly are not. No, he came from a different generation. And actually, I think my

father's case is interesting because obviously media has changed a lot in a lot of positive ways. But one of the ways that I think is negative is that, you know, back in the 60s and 70s, when he got into the business, a person who was a journalist was more likely to be the son or daughter of a plumber or an electrician than, you know, an Ivy League educated person. And he belonged to kind of the last the last wave of that sort of reporter, I would say. I have to tell you, I get it. I understand exactly what you mean. And I feel like having worked at, I was at ABC for a very short time when I first started my career, but most of the time I was at Fox and then a little at NBC. And I saw that difference there. I mean, Fox, Roger Ailes hired middle class people, people from middle class backgrounds and no one from elite universities.

I mean, I can't think of I would say like O'Reilly said he went to Harvard, but he went to the fake Harvard. You know, we're like you go to the Kennedy School for one year. Right. Exactly. That's not real Harvard. And then NBC, there's a ton of Ivy Leaguers running around. And man, you can feel the difference. You can feel the difference in sort of their attitudes toward the audience, toward themselves, toward understanding the news. You know, our goal at Fox was always to keep it simple. And so it

wasn't because we disrespected our audience. It's because we respected them. We wanted to make it effortless to consume the news and not try to use a bunch of big words to impress anybody. Just keep it real. Yeah. And obviously my politics aren't the same as Fox's, but I think that that approach was successful for a reason. You're fundamentally changing your approach when you start bringing in a whole bunch of Ivy League people to cover the news. Because what ends up happening is, you know, the old kind of Seymour Hersh class of reporter, they saw it as their job to challenge people who are in power. And this new group of people who are now in the media,

they see themselves as being on the other side of the rope line. And they view their mission as basically to explain the point of view of people in power to the kind of unwashed masses and apologize for them. And so I think you saw the change with movies like Primary Colors. I don't know if you remember that film about the clintons but the premise of that film was okay here's here's the inside look on a presidential campaign you know as told to a friendly reporter who heard these stories uh you know over a bar uh throughout the course of a campaign as as opposed to you you know, like the blazing hit job that it would have been from an outsider. It was kind of, it was a more sympathetic portrait. And that's

what you get these days. So you decide to become a journalist and you moved to Russia? I did. Yeah. There was really, I didn't want to be a journalist. I wanted to be a comic novelist when I was growing up. My favorite writers were all Russians. People like Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote books like The Master and Margarita. So I wanted to learn Russian, learn how to read those books in Russian. And I moved over there after doing a little bit of study in the Soviet Union. And I just, I loved it over there so much that I stayed for like 11 years, basically. But I didn't have any, I didn't have any skills apart from the family business,

which was journalism. So I ended up doing that as a job while I was over there. And that's how I got into journalism. Okay, so 2004, Rolling Stone, as I, as I looked it up, Almost Famous came out just a couple of years before that. How many times have you seen that movie? Uh, to be honest, I've never seen that movie because I was still living in Russia when it came out. And, um, just, uh, I think I've seen the first half of it uh but i've never seen it all the way through oh my god it's like it's it's like about a young guy who dreams of writing for rolling stone and goes out on the road covering this band you know what it's about you've got to watch that i know it's about cameron crowe and and uh and it's got some some people in there who i worked

with and i have seen the other big Rolling Stone movie, where the buffalo roam, which has Bruno Kirby as my former boss, Jan Wenner. He was great. Yeah, he was really good in that movie. But yeah, I missed about 11, 12 years of American culture. So I've had to catch up a little bit. Like I didn't know who Pearl Jam was when I came home, like that kind of thing.

Oh, wow. Wow. So was there in you're still at Rolling Stone. Is that correct? I am sort of. Yep. I still have a podcast there. I occasionally will contribute some stuff, but mostly I write for a site called Substack.

Yeah, that's where I'm reading you now. And we'll get to that too, because there's a reason you're doing that. I mean, you weren't really on the music beat, right? You did news, you've been on the financial beat, politics. So it's not like you know everything about the Rolling Stones. This is where you honed your craft of journalism, real journalism on hard news subjects. Yeah. I mean, I'm basically a traditional investigative reporter, but I worked at a magazine. So I was kind of trained in doing the kind of feature length investigative story where you take a complicated subject and try to make it digestible for ordinary people. Classic example was like after the financial crisis where

they asked me to explain what had happened, what things like credit default swaps were, what a subprime mortgage was, how it worked, that kind of stuff. And I did that for a long, long time. Well, I love your writings on the financial industry. You really brought it home for me. And the one that, I don't know if this is famous, but you labeled Goldman Sachs, quote, a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. It's so good. It's funny.

Apparently the Goldman guys actually enjoyed that. And there's a legend, I hope it's true, that their communications person actually has a brass squid on his desk now. Thanks to you. That would be great. That's how that industry works, right? They would take that as a compliment. Their response to that would be, thank you. Exactly, industry works, right? They would take that as a compliment. Their response to that would be thank you.

Exactly. Yes, that is the way they take it. All right. So you obviously have the background to have a lot of thoughts on media, and you've been pretty outspoken about what's happened to us as an industry. I want to get to that in a second, but let's just talk about the election first because you've been covering it as well. You're not a Trump fan. You think that you called him a clown who seems determined to talk us into a civil war. And you're not really a fan of the Democrats either. You're

kind of, you're politically homeless a bit, given the way these parties have gone. But I read you say that you think Trump, by losing, may have given the Republicans a future? How so? Well, I think the Democratic Party, the modern Democratic Party, has been for decades now trending in a direction towards marketing themselves essentially as a professional class party for the urban wealthy. And they have ceded basically the entire rest of the electorate to anybody who's smart enough to collect those votes. And I think what we saw in this last election is that Donald Trump not only got his base, but he started to make inroads among voters who traditionally voted Democratic overwhelmingly. He did well.

The only place where he lost support was with white men, ironically, and he did better with black men, black women, LGBTQ voters, Latino voters significantly better. And so there's a kind of a working class, there's an opening for a working class party to arise because the Democrats have rejected that as their profile. Even though they claim it, they have done nothing to earn it. And so Trump is kind of a populist hero. And if somebody is smart, they will be able to harness the coalition that he just put together. You said you think this is by design, that the Democrats, they wanted Wall Street money. Bill Clinton made the Democrats, you said, the party of Gordon Gekko. How so? Well, the Democrats, after losing in 1984,

there was a huge sort of internal discussion within the party. You know, what are we going to do to compete? We never raise enough money to compete with the Republicans. They're killing us according to basically every metric. So the Democrats made a strategic decision after their landslide loss in the Mondale-Reagan election, which was basically, we're going to stop relying on union money to fund our elections. And we're going to start taking money from wall street from insurance companies from big pharma from heavy industry from um and and that fundamentally changed their platform they became if you remember uh a party that they started using words like the pro-growth party we're going to run the government like a business. And they started bringing in a lot of

Wall Street people. And they started to change their policies. If you remember NAFTA, which had been opposed by the union-backed version of the Democratic Party, was pushed through by Bill Clinton. And they made this transformation to a party that was socially liberal on issues like, you know, abortion. But when it came to economics, they were more or less indistinguishable from the Republicans on on a lot of key issues. And that stuff eventually, I think, had a lot of success with free trade agreements. They've had a lot of success with, you know, sort of corporate tax holiday type packages. They haven't pushed through the kinds of things that unions wanted over the years. And they've resisted things like a rise in the minimum wage,

greater workplace protections, that sort of thing, traditionally that they would have supported in the past. So it's a new Democratic Party. They're really a party for kind of upscale, urban, college educated, and typically white voters. And they don't really have a platform for working class people. Yeah, for, quote, regular people, although they did get Biden got 90 percent of the black vote, even though Trump did raise the number of black voters he got on his side. But it is interesting to see with the surge in Latino voters going for Trump, whether that might carve a path that someday blacks will follow. Because with people like Candace Owens, even some of the black support we saw, like 50 Cent go for Trump, or at least talk about it

towards the end there. I think there is more of a push right now to encourage black voters to take a hard look. Just don't have a knee jerk instinct to vote Democrat because you've been told for all these years they're better for you. They might not be better for you. And that's how most people are explaining what happened for Trump with the Latinos and some increase in the black voters, that people were voting their pocketbook and not identity politics. Yeah. And this has a lot to do with the way the Democrats view the electorate. A lot of the consultants on K Street and within the Beltway, they make a lot of kind of blanket assumptions about how people are going to vote based on identity, first and foremost.

So they, I mean, you heard Joe Biden say during the race, you know, if you're not voting for me, you ain't black, right? And this is like a thing where I think a lot of the Democratic Party people assume that anybody who's black must vote Democratic. Anybody who's college educated must vote Democratic. And they've stopped coming up with a real rationale in many cases for why that has to be true. Also, they just reject the idea that some people think about other criteria beyond race and identity. I mean, there are a lot of people who might see themselves more as, you know, working class than the member of an ethnic group. But that's just not part of the Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, they have become super focused on identity politics, on cancel culture.

I mean, they're working together, I think, to push to push cancel culture. And this is one of the things you've been such an astute observer of. It's I encourage everybody to read you go to Substack and subscribe and you can read. It's like, you know, the, God, what's his name? His name is escaping me right now. He wrote Angela's Ashes. It's like chewing rubies in your mouth, reading Matt Taibbi. Because really, because you have a way of putting this cancel culture BS into words that make us all feel good. And I think it is one thing that's bringing people who aren't that hardly partisan together. I have so many center left friends who are like,

they're, they're agonizing over this. They're disgusted by it. And they feel like we're destroying each other that we're, we're actively trying to bring each other down. And I know you've written about how it seems like that the new mission now of this sort of new movement is to search out thought crime, to search out thought crime, and anything can be an offense. You cite the UCLA professor who got in trouble for reading an MLK letter out loud, right? Right. Yep. Yeah. Cause it had the N word in it, uh, which, you know, the context should matter, but apparently it doesn't. Um, there was, there was another professor who was actually speaking Chinese and a Chinese word that he used sounded like the N word and he got in trouble, uh, for, for using that. Uh, so yeah, it's, it's a, it's a problem. There's a kind of hunt for unorthodoxy that's going on

right now within the Democratic Party and in the media. And that's a major problem. You know, I grew up, you know, at a time when being a liberal meant being the person who accepted uh you know all different points of view and welcomed the debate right so the the the card-carrying member of the aclu was the person who was who was proud of the fact that the aclu defended the nazis at skokie uh we were the people who were against um you know tipper gore trying to put labels on, you know, record albums and that sort of thing. Or Ed Meese censoring things that he thought were pornography. Always the idea was like it was frightening because the traditional defense of speech, there just isn't that group anymore. More with Matt in one second, but first, let me tell you about Blinds Galore. Have you ever been sitting in like a sunny room and you haven't gotten the proper blinds up on your window and it turns what could be a delightful experience into an awful one?

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it feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It's become a cowardly mob of upper class social media addicts, torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness. Why? How did the left get here? How did they switch from that old sort of liberal group that fought for free speech to this group that just wants a scalp. Some of it has to do with some fashionable trends in academia, critical theory, post-modernism. But a lot of it, I think, has to do with the internet and the way that young people talk to each other and organize these days. And these days, there is a kind of a shortcut to believing that you're making a difference, which is by getting somebody fired or getting somebody disinvited to your school or costing somebody a book deal or a prominent position. And all it takes is like a whole bunch of people on Twitter or

on Instagram or whatever it is, sort of ganging up on somebody for a couple hours. And that could be it. I mean, you could cost somebody a job that quickly. And I think people have the illusion that this is what political action is. It's really not that at all. It's, you know, politics is actually, when you're doing it right, is a, you know, is a deeply boring, grinded out, you know, a grueling kind of organization heavy process. It's not something you can just flick on your phone and do in two minutes, But they've sold a generation of people on the idea that this is progress. And it's become this dangerous weapon, right? A lot of people are getting caught up in it. And it's also had an effect on our business because now people are

terrified to say anything they think might get them in trouble. Yeah. Now, I see these guys as bullies. That's what they are. They're just bullies. And it's ironic because we've spent years now in wake of these school shootings and the awfulness we've seen there running these anti-bullying campaigns and trying to make people more sensitive to what the mob ganging up on somebody can do and to paying attention to those feelings. And now the very people who have been pushing those campaigns and trying to educate us on what happens turn around and they're like the amoeba. They swarm together and it's kill, kill, kill. And they they get a high off of it. They get a high off of getting somebody fired. It's so sick when you think about it. Oh, it's repulsive. And it's also breeding this whole new mentality where people think that it's politically a virtue somehow to always be in the in-group, right? Like, in other words, if you're, if you're the, you know, on the outside, if you're all by yourself and taking a position that nobody else is taking, then there must be something wrong with you. It's only virtuous to be in,

in, you know, in the herd. And that, and they, and. And they hammer home that idea relentlessly. And especially with people like myself, but to a lesser, to a greater degree, like people like Glenn Greenwald, you'll see that what they say most often is, look at how willing he is to stand outside the crowd and not go along with what everybody else is saying. How dare he? That's what we love about him. Yeah, exactly. That used to be the mark of an intellectual who had deeply felt beliefs and was courageous. And now we don't value that at all. And now we think that that's a bad thing. And I think that's a very, very dangerous mentality. And again, I went to school in the Soviet Union. It was at the end of that tenure,

but I'm very familiar with that mindset of the cowardly mob and the individual who ends up in trouble for kind of saying the wrong thing and being honest. And that's not a good dynamic. Now, to your point about Glenn, who just resigned from the organization, he started The Intercept saying, this has gotten out of control. We created it to be a hands off journalism enterprise where we didn't have pressure from above. And now I and other journalists here are getting censored and pushed to support the Democratic Party. And I'm not doing

it. I'm out. He peaced out of there. But one of the things that separated him from Democrats and liberals was he did not buy Russiagate at all. And neither did you, for that matter, and thought it knew it was bull right from the beginning. And he, he used to work for, was it Salon? Because Joan Walsh came out and commented on this. And can you just tell folks, like, so he gets in trouble with the left because he didn't support Russiagate. He thought it was bullshit. And he was so he was accused of being like a Russian stooge. OK, so this is where the left went. OK, you don't support it. So you must be a Russian stooge.

You're basically working for Putin. And then Joan Walsh, who sees everything, everything through identity politics, weighs in as somebody who used to work with Glenn saying what? Yeah, she said that Glenn's views on Russiagate were tainted by his distaste for where the Democratic Party had gone. And she said that part of that was the rise and influence of women and people of color. So essentially, she's saying that he doesn't believe in Russiagate because he's a racist and misogynist. And it got worse than that. The New Yorker did a story, a big feature called The Bane of Their Resistance about Glenn that hypothesized essentially that he was not buying the Russiagate story because he had a tortured pathology growing up as a confused young gay man in America with

daddy issues. So, you know, you're a racist, a misogynist, sexually confused, pathological case if you don't go along with Russiagate. And that's like the starting point of what you get if you cross the herd on issues like this. It's amazing. It really pisses me off. I'm laughing, but it actually pisses me off. It makes me angry. And I think people like Glenn, like you, and like me for that matter, catch it in a particular way because they don't go after Sean Hannity like this because they expect that from him. But if you're somebody who they thought was on their side, there's a particular ire right there. Betrayed that you would ever break the party line, which, of course, is what a journalist is supposed to do.

There isn't supposed to be a party line. You're supposed to challenge stories, challenge politicians. Your fealty should be to no one but the truth. And if you happen to be one of the lucky ones who can see it through all the massive dark clouds, like Russiagate, et cetera, it's a gift, not something to be shamed because you had daddy issues allegedly. This is what's happening. Yeah. Again, I grew up in the media at a time when it was valued and I've actually worked very hard in my career not to really let people know where I stand politically or what my actual inner political feelings are. I think that should be a little bit of a mystery to readers. But in this period, that's totally unacceptable. And they went after everybody. And it's interesting

that you bring that up about Hannity, because the same people who are going after uh you know heretics like glenn and myself and you um are the same people they're the exact same people who cried foul when the dixie chicks uh had you know had all their albums burned in the bush era they're like oh my god look at those people they're anti-thought they're they're thugs and bullies and they don't want to let people express themselves and they're turning around doing exactly the same thing. It's just that the politics are different this time. Right. It's so frustrating to watch.

I'm seeing a lot of it just now because, you know, I said on Twitter, I wrote on Twitter that I thought Trump won the third presidential debate. Some of these Democrats felt betrayed. Like, what's happened to you? And then this weekend I was tweeting about, you know, this is kind of a BS call for unity by Biden. It wasn't even a call for unity. He had announced that it had happened. He got, he won the election and we are unified. We are strengthened. We are healed. Right? So no, we're not. And we're not going to be. And the only people who are calling for that are the people on the winning side. They want unity because they don't want opposition to their agenda. This is the point I was trying to

make, which is 100 percent correct. And you know what I got? And I can understand whatever criticism. I don't I don't really care. Best people know about getting criticized. But I got a lot, a lot of how could you how could you say that? Like you are supposed to be anti-Trump. He attacked you. He called you a bimbo. He said you had blood coming out of your wherever. He went after you for months and months and months. How could you? They felt betrayed. By the way, Joan Walsh was one of them, but one of many. And honestly, Matt, I don't think they can understand how some of us are able to separate our personal views, our personal experiences from our analysis of the news. Right. And it's amazing that they can't recognize that because what all you're doing is your job, right? Like your job is to separate that out. Yeah.

Trump was horrible to you. I think we all know, we all saw that happen. But that doesn't mean that you're automatically required to push a narrative on command just because you might have personal feelings about Donald Trump. That's not how it works. The job requires that you take a step back and honestly call things as you see them. Other, otherwise, what are we doing? We're not providing any extra service if we're not doing that. Right. So it's so true. Right. No, I looked at it and it happens on both sides, right? Because I think for a while there, the left loved me because they thought I challenged Trump and he came after me. And so I must be anti-Trump. So they're like, okay, great. You're your team

Democrat, which I never was. And then the right got mad too, because I asked Trump a very tough debate question. I asked them all very tough debate questions. Just Trump made a thing out of his. And then the right was like, you, you crossed us. You crossed him. You're a never Trumper. It's like, I was never a Trumper. Like I was, I'm not a never Trumper. I'm not a pro Trumper. I'm a journalist. And, you know, you look back at my history. I punched Dick Cheney in the face rhetorically. I went after Karl Rove when he talked nonsense on election night.

I had a big dust up with Newt Gingrich. I could go on. I've always challenged people on both sides. And it's almost like the viewers just develop an expectation because you're fair that you're always just going to lean to their side. And I do think people like you, people like Glenn, and especially in today's day and age, that's just no longer okay. You got to pick a team. And if you don't, you're out, you're out of the circle. Yeah. No, they've made it very explicit now. I think it's worse on the quote unquote left than it is on the right. Yeah, it was amazing for me watching Fox News on election night and seeing people disagreeing with Donald Trump and criticizing him.

I mean, there wasn't a ton of it, but there was some of it. And you won't see any of that on MSNBC or CNN. But look what's happening to Fox right now. I mean, are you following what's happening to them? They're losing viewers by the thousands. And they're going over to Newsmax and other places. They're pissed. People are angry at Fox News right now for calling Arizona early in many people's view for pronoun pronouncing Joe Biden the president elect. And, you know, I think Brett and Martha are at the middle of it like we're trying to do journalism. The decision desk says he's won. You know, we're going to announce it. But that's how divided we are. It's like you've got to be all in for one guy or the other or you're going to get your head

chopped off. Yeah. And it's so unfortunate because once upon a time, you know, I think if you go back and look at like the, the Walter Cronkite, Jessica Savage type anchor person, nobody would have looked to those people with the expectation that they'd be endorsers of, of political views. They value was that you believe them when they said something. And that was the entire point of the commercial enterprise that was the news back in the day, was that you trusted the information that came over those. And now, who trusts anything that comes out over any of these networks? Because they've all- That's why I really think the future is, it's individual. It's people like going to subscribe

to Matt Taibbi, right? It's people listening to this podcast saying, I trust her, I trust him. I don't think the future is going to be news organizations and individuals. I think it's going to be much more specific than that. But two things. Number one, Jessica Savage is pretty much the reason I became a journalist. I saw I was kind of interested in doing and I'd made a resume tape when I was an unhappy lawyer. And I was home one day from my law job. I was still practicing law. And I was lazing around on the couch. I wasn't feeling well. And Lifetime Television, Matt, I'm not afraid to admit it. On came the Jessica Savage story. And it was so good. It wasn't it was not a reenactment.

It was a documentary. And it was so good. And I was inspired. I was like, this woman came up during an age where there were no women in journalism. And if she could do it, what am I sitting here on my couch feeling sorry for myself for? Like, get off your ass, go do it. And that was the day I started cold calling news directors. It ended hideously with a drug problem and she went off a bridge and died. But let's just table that for now. The second thing I wanted to ask you about was you raised and have been, you know, you seem as moved by the, I think this is the worst story in cancel culture and it's hard to pick one. It really is. Uh, and, but like, I'm terrified by the story of what happened to Lee Fang, speaking of the intercept, which Glenn just left his organization.

Can you just tell me? I don't think most people understand who the hell Lee Fang is or what happened to him, but it is the worst story I've heard so far on cancel culture. Yeah, it's complicated. So Lee is an investigative reporter at The Intercept, a very talented kind of old school investigative reporter, the kind of person who's really comfortable with like documents and FOIA searches and that sort of thing. And he just occasionally comments on Twitter. He's Chinese American. He's from, he grew up in the Baltimore area. And he had, I guess, tweeted a few things over the course of the last year or so, including an interview with an African-American man during the protests over the summer. And the person that he was interviewing said, you know, why is it that people only go out in the streets when a cop kills a black man? Why aren't there protests when, you know, we kill our own, right? Essentially,

I forget what the exact quote was, but it was just an interview of this person. It was, why does a black life matter only when a white man takes it that's what the black man he interviewed said and then talked about someone he knew who'd been killed a black man by another black man yeah it was a it was a family member actually he i ended up talking to the guy uh very smart guy very thoughtful and and, it's, it's not an uncommon thing to hear. I mean, I wrote a book about the death of Eric Garner. And so, uh, and you do hear that sentiment, like, you know, how come there's, there's only this press attention when this, this kind of thing happens and not when other things happen. Um, so he just, he, he ran a clip of that interview

and one of his colleagues, uh, essentially said, why are you publishing this racist point of view? And before you knew it, there were like 30,000 people hitting the like button. Lee had to go to HR. He had to write a formal apology, basically, to keep his job. And he published that and there was a little public mending of fences. But the, you know, the message there is basically like if other journalists decide that something you say is racist or misogynist or whatever it is, it doesn't take much for your job to be on the line

like within 10 minutes. I mean, that's basically what happened. Tell me about it. And he is a, this is a, one of the better young reporters that we have in the business, I would say. And he doesn't particularly do a lot of editorial commenting. That's the other thing that's interesting about this. Which he, which he didn't hear. Yeah. Right. Uh, and, uh, you know, and, and also, you know, he grew up in a, in kind of a tough neighborhood.

He, he had, it's informed by, in part by his own experience. Um, you know, I was a, as a chinese american and yet none of it mattered you know like it's it's just the the whole episode kind of demonstrated how how the herd mentality works in this business now like if you if you step out of line like you're you could be out in like by the end of the day that's how fast And it doesn't have to be somebody like me with a history at Fox News. It can be somebody who's a lifelong Democrat who actually is part of a minority group who has been sympathetic to the cause.

Doesn't matter. One false move and F you, you're out. And what his, he had committed an earlier thought crime, which was he had tweeted out a tweet questioning the logic of protesters attacking immigrant owned businesses that had no connection to any police brutality or anything. And that got him in trouble first. So he was on probation, right? Like,

why would you question the rioters burning down businesses owned by immigrants? That says something about you. And then the second offense was this one, you know, interviewing a black man who wanted to raise awareness about there is a black-on-black crime problem. And that led to his colleague. Her name was Akilah Lacey. I'm just going to read what she tweeted.

At the time, I was like, oh, you've got to be kidding me. She tweeted out, tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker lee fang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to this isn't about me and him it's about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness i am so fucking tired stop being being racist, Lee. And then all these other people, instead of saying, Lee's not racist, he's trying to report the news, jumped on the bandwagon. You pointed out in one of your articles, a former Elizabeth Warren staffer actually tweeted, get No one defended him. Very few people jumped to his defense because that can be fatal too, right?

That's the other thing. It's part of this new mechanism is if you come to the defense of a person who is deemed unorthodox, you yourself can quickly fall under suspicion. So people just tend not to do that either. Nellie's league kept his job. But you know, that it's, it's a tough thing to have for people to have to go through. And a lot of people don't keep their jobs in these situations.

So it's, it's a, and what ends up happening is, is that all the reporters and I hear from them all the time. And it's not, it's not even just about the race issue. It's about all kinds of issues. They all see where the line is. They all see what the narrative is and what they're supposed to be saying and what they, what they maybe want to say. But they just stay far away from where the line is because they don't want to have to deal with that, that problem. So to just take an example of another reporter I heard from just last week,

there was somebody who wanted to do a little piece on if Trump loses, the media might have to do a little bit of a reckoning and re-examine why we've lost so much trust in the last four years. And, you know, the idea was rejected. But there's lots of people who are going through that silently, like, do I say something? Do I not say something? And most people just don't say anything. If you do say something, like, you know, you're talking, you're writing about it. I'm talking about it. You get so many messages. I'm sure you do. I know I do from people thanking you, people in our industry and outside of it saying, thank God, you know, I wish I could say what you're saying. And, but they're afraid to even like a tweet. Is it you really, you can be fired

for liking a tweet. It happened to some guy who liked a Trump tweet. So it's like people are afraid to make any false move. And to your point about how people won't come out and defend you, you know, I didn't know this piece of the story, but you had written in the in the Lee Fang case when his accuser, Akilah Lacey, was questioned about, wow, this guy's gotten a lot of fallout. You know, he had to he had to issue a public apology for, quote, insensitivity to the lived experience of others, you know, sort of saying to her, like, what do you think about this? She said, look, there is more concern about naming racism than letting it persist. That's what you get hit with if you try to defend anybody who's been accused. You're focused on the wrong thing.

It's not that I may have falsely accused him. It's that he did it, right? Just trust me, he did it. Right, yeah, yeah. And that is what you'll get. And most people just don't want the hassle. So they just go along, you know, and- Well, the reporters are so afraid. Everyone's afraid.

But you would expect journalists who used to be used to be known as kind of tough back in the day in your dad's day. You would expect them to take just to adhere to the facts. That's all. You don't even have to. I guess I would like them to defend people who are defensible, but like just stick to the facts and they won't. They won't report facts, report facts now that they find troubling. That's what Glenn was saying. He had to leave the intercept because they wouldn't let him report facts that may have reflected poorly on Biden and well on Trump. And so I you tell me whether we get out of this.

Let's just stick to journalism for a minute. Do we get out of this? Because most of our industry has surrendered to the woke mob and surrendered to their own progressive biases separate and apart from the woke mob. You know, they're no longer interested in reporting the news straight. They only want to report stuff that's good for the left. And as I look at the landscape, I say they don't come back from this. The journalism industry does not come back from this. Yeah, I don't think the legacy media organizations, unless they reform themselves considerably, can come back from the direction that they've chosen because people just don't believe them anymore. They don't see them as anything other than representatives of a political line. And that's not where the value is in the news business. I mean, Glenn talks about this all the time. The interview that Joe Rogan gave with Edward Snowden had like 15.5 million views, which is like 12 times the size of a typical cable news audience. The MSNBC, CNN audience has been massively displaced. And there's a gigantic audience of people who can speak out about anything and

challenge power and look in all directions, or else they're going to become irrelevant. More with Matt in one second. I'm going to ask him about Robin DiAngelo's white fragility, which he has said, quote, may be the dumbest book ever written. You're going to want to hear him on that. But first, who's your wireless provider? AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, maybe? Well, what if I told you you could be saving over 400 bucks a year without having to sacrifice any of your service or coverage? Pure Talk is on the exact same network as one of those big carriers. And it gives you the same bars, the same service, but for half the price. This is a no-brainer. You got to do this.

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So go ahead and make the switch. It'll be the easiest decision you make all day. Do it now. Get unlimited talk, text, plus two gigs of data all for just 20 bucks a month. From your cell phone, you dial pound 250 and say, Megan Kelly. I don't know why. Just do it. And you will save an additional 50% off your first month. That's pound 250. Say, Megan Kelly. You are on your way to a delightful experience. Pure Talk, simply smarter wireless. Okay, now before we get back to Matt and the dumbest book ever written, we're going to bring you a feature that we do on the show sometimes called Asked and Answered. And this is when we bring in the executive producer of The Megan Kelly Show, Steve Krakauer,

who's been pouring through the questions to find some goodies. What do we got, Steve? Yeah, Megan, we've been getting a lot of questions and you can continue to email your questions into questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. These are two that came in that were both sort of about the media. So I'll put them together. First, John Gabertoglio asks, we all know the mainstream media despised President Trump. We also know that the mainstream media benefits from him financially. So the one thing I can't figure out is why do they want him out of office so bad if it actually would hurt them financially? Good question. Also, Jason Goldstein wants to know if editorial boards should pledge to have a certain number of people from divergent political backgrounds, particularly in the results of this election. That's a good one. So, John, I think it's

ideological. That's the bottom line. They don't care. They'd rather, you know, that they sort of see it as a higher calling to get him out because they they I don't think they're just calling him racist and all those things. I think they genuinely believe it. I mean, you know, they believe everyone's a racist who's a Republican. so they really believe he's a racist. So I think it's easy. They're like, yeah, he's got to go because he doesn't make me feel good about myself and getting rid of him would. And if it has to cost ratings, so be it. I think the question Jason raised about editorial boards is really interesting and I would I would love to see it. Even if you got like a token Republican on some of these boards, I think it would help, but I'll bet you they'd fire them soon thereafter. You know, they, they say they want to hear what, you know, the other side of the country thinks,

but then as soon as somebody speaks up and tells them they get fired or they pull their editorial, or you remember the, the, the New York times fired that editor who let Tom Cotton's editorial run. They had to be fired because an editorial on whether we needed a military presence to control the civil unrest this past summer was endangered black New York Times employees. So that's how that goes. That's why, you know, anybody that guy was a liberal, the editor who got fired. Can you imagine if you'd been a Republican, how fast he would have gone? But I'd love to see it. And I'll tell you where else I'd like to see it on school boards. Right. Like, what are you doing, school board, to ensure yourselves that you are representative of,

if not half the student body and their family politics, then at least some significant percentage, even here in New York City? I've had to say to our school so many times, you know, you have Republicans at this school, right? You know, after Trump won 2016, all the letters that went out, like, we understand how difficult this time is. And they had support groups. You understand that not everybody is crazy left in this town, mostly, but not everyone. Like, calm down. I mean, on that subject, isn't it so interesting how quickly the boards came off all the windows, the storefront windows everywhere where they tried to tell us it was both sides. They were worried about both sides rioting. Sure. Okay. As soon as Joe Biden was announced the winner, suddenly no more fear

of looting. Um, so I'd love to see more balance at the corporate level, at the academic level, certainly at the university level where they've got something like 4% conservatives in the incoming classes. But I confess, I think it's just a pipe dream. I don't think they really have any interest in understanding half of the country. And it's a shame. What do you think, Steve? Yeah, I would tend to agree with you. I mean, I think that your point about the editorial boards, I mean, you look at the

idea. I think that there's certainly political biases that are happening within the media, but there's also geographic bias. And if you've got a media that is, you know, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, even certainly ABC, CNN, CBS, you know, you could walk within an hour and visit the headquarters of all those places in New York City and hit them all. I mean, that's a big problem also. And until you start to look outside of that, you're going to have a lot of similarities

in the thinking that goes into the executive ranks of these organizations. Well, and you know what's been funny during the Trump era is these organizations are like, we have Republicans. We've got Steve Schmidt. He works for we have Republicans. We've got Steve Schmidt. He works for the Bush administration. We've got Nicole Wallace. She shepherded through Sarah and Sarah Palin, you know, the Washington most. We've got Jennifer Rubin, who hates conservatives with every fiber of her being.

Maybe it wasn't always thus, but that's how they get away with it. They get some diehard never Trumper who's got some geo used to have some GOP street cred and say like, we're diverse, we're ideologically diverse. And, you know, people are onto that now. But I do think when I look around at who gets chosen for those roles, that it's okay to be a Republican so long as you loathe Donald Trump. Just make sure. Exactly. And that's, that's the thing. That should be the question. Find someone who makes decisions that at least knows someone who who they like and respect who voted for Donald Trump. That like start there.

I don't know. I think people should start saying it loud and proud. If you like him, don't be embarrassed about it. As you saw, 71 million people feel the same. It's like Dennis Prager was saying yesterday, this half of the country, they're not alone. They're not, no matter how many of the people who control the media and Hollywood and academia and big tech and corporate America tell you, you're not alone. Half the country is with you. So you remember that the next time you try to get shamed out of your POV. All right. So questions, plural, at Devil May Care Media, if you would like to weigh in. We love hearing from you guys. And we'll do this again soon. Part of the problem, of course, is there's no accountability.

The media has pursued so many storylines that they told us were awful, awful for Donald Trump. Gotten gotten them totally wrong and then never even acknowledged how wrong they were. Matt, it's like the list of so-called bombshells that weren't and that they never went back to clean up is as long as Santa's scroll at this point, right? Yeah, I'm actually putting out a little movie about that soon. I actually went back and made a list of all the bombshells that had to be walked back or retracted. What are a couple of your favorites? Just to take a couple of examples, like remember all the stories about George Papadopoulos and how he was he was the beginning of the of the FBI investigation. And that was that was where it all started. I mean, almost every news organization did these big features about Papadopoulos and his secret contacts with the Russians. Well, about a year

ago, there was testimony that was declassified where the FBI, the former deputy head of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, said that they knew by August of 2016 that the evidence, quote, didn't particularly indicate that Papadopoulos had had contact with the Russians. So in other words, the entire predicate for the Trump-Russia investigation, they knew was bogus within about a month of starting that investigation. And nobody went back and reported that. I mean, that's hundreds of stories that were out there. You know, the Carter Page stories, right? Where they were reporting constantly that there was probable cause that he was an agent of a foreign power. He was asked about that on

television. Now it turns out that the court ruled based on a fraudulent FISA application. So where were the retractitzer for writing this thing, but it's replete with lies. The very foundation of the piece, which is that America was founded on slavery and to preserve it, is a lie. You just take out your eraser and you erase those lines from your piece and you don't disclose that you've done that. You just have to have reporters watching the reporters all the time to do comparisons between the original piece and the piece every day thereafter online to try to catch them taking out their lies so that it doesn't become a bigger deal. the way back machine now to compare and contrast the old version of the story with a new version of the story, because they, they are,

they're doing this kind of silent editing technique. Now, sometimes you'll see at the bottom of the story, a note that says, you know, an early, an earlier version of this story said X, Y,

and Z, but they're, they, they leave it out a lot too. And they'll fundamentally change what, what the story says just by changing a few words. And you won't know. Right. Right. I believe often it's willful. I mean, there's no question that Nicole Hannah-Jones' 1619 piece was willfully fraudulent. They're just the fact that she still got that Pulitzer, even though a group of very esteemed academics, professors like Glenn Lowry, who is also Black, but a contrarian, as he calls

himself, he doesn't buy sort of the blacks are victims and they need the white people to bend the knee and all the rest of it. Well, by the way, he's coming on the show soon. So I'm looking forward to that. Anyway, they've called for that Pulitzer Prize to be pulled. And if it doesn't get pulled, it will have no more meaning for the future.

But anyway, so the goal is, I mean, the message is that you can willfully or negligently misreport reality so long as what? like the New York Times or the Washington Post, and you get something wrong about Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani or whatever it is, who cares? Your audience isn't going to care. And they're not, so they're not going to see those corrections and they're not going to demand them either. Like it's not important to them. So what there's this drift has taken place in the business where we just don't worry about making sure that we're right in the same way that we used to. Like it used to be, I don't know about you, you know, but I used to, every time I did a story, I couldn't sleep the day before it was published because I was so worried

that I got something wrong in there because it would stick to you forever if you made a bad mistake. I don't think the young people in the business feel that way anymore. It's not quite the same, uh, approach. It doesn't feel like. And now the question is, what do we expect from these folks going into what appears to be a Biden administration? Right. Like the CNN's Brian Stelter. I mean, I hate citing this guy. He's never practiced journalism. So he's going to sit there and actually be a critic. Of course, it's interesting how his criticisms are only of Fox News. Really? Never, never of anybody else. He's come out, right? He's come out and said, coming soon, a restoration of normal relations between the president and the press. the media's adversarial approach that you've seen during the Trump years, demanding truth from power, calling out lies, criticizing indecency. That approach serves us well no matter who holds

high office. If Biden says the blue sky is red, the media must call it out. Of course, different degrees of deception deserve to be treated differently. A slip of the tongue must not be equated with a smear campaign. But in all cases, the media stay on the side of truth. I'm feeling it. Are you feeling it? I'm feeling it. I got the chill. Yeah, I mean... Who does he think he's kidding? I know. The pomposity is pretty impressive, actually, I got to give him an A plus for that one. He's he's he's he's pretty good when it when it comes to, you know, that sort of highfalutin prose. But no, it's look, it's ridiculous. this started even before Trump was president. What I worry about going forward with Biden is that the press is going to collectively decide we're not going to report on stuff that gives the Republicans any ammunition to go after this administration because that would be bad and

that might risk another Trump or whatever it is. And we're going to see pretty quickly how critical they will or won't be. My guess is they'll be very, very docile. Absolutely. They're going to be defending most of what he does and not criticizing 99% of it. That's, I feel like that's clear. So we'll see, Brian. Tucker calls him the hall monitor, also the eunuch, which is mean, but hall monitor is funny. I've got to ask you, it was the most brilliant column ever that you wrote on white fragility, this absurd book that has been making the rounds since the summer and making Robin DiAngelo, its author, rich as she peddles not only her book, but classes based on her book along with the message

that you can never get over your white supremacy you have to work on it for the rest of your life which is very convenient for the person who offers the classes and how you must deal with your white supremacy on an ongoing basis um you call it the dumbest book ever written. And I love you say it's part of this new sort of anti-rac, I think, you know, Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. And it was based on the idea that people are people and that even if we have differences, even if we belong to different races, we're all people. And that our goal should be to try to get along, you know, and, and to, uh, you know, even if imperfectly, even if we're not there yet, that should be the goal as a society is for all of us to live together in harmony and, and not to worry about our racial differences.

This new, uh, anti-racism movement takes a completely opposite approach where it says, actually, the problem is that we are not spending enough time thinking about race. We should heighten awareness of our differences. And people who are white should ponder their whiteness all the time. And we should be constantly thinking about all the invisible ways in which race and racial perception affects our lives, which is exactly the opposite of what the Kingian approach to racial relations was. So I think that this, it's remarkable. People like Robin DiAngelo actually have a lot in common

their writings with uh with people like richard spencer um they they are hyper focused on white supremacist on on yeah on race on what the different races and how are and and how they how they behave um and as opposed to just seeing all people as people. And I think that's that's the thing that's crazy. Yeah, well, the difference is, Spencer believes that there's something inherently deficient about blacks and inherently superior about whites. And D'Angelo thinks it's exactly the opposite. It's it's no better. It's no less racist. She just switched the races and i know you called it tricked up pseudo-intellectual horse shit disguised as corporate wisdom um and pointed out this is hitlerian it's hitlerian race theory that says and this is a quote from the book a positive

white identity is an impossible goal there's nothing to be done except, quote, strive to be less white. Okay, I'll work on that. I guess I'll work on that somehow. I'm not sure what to do, but Robin's going to tell me how I can be less white, I guess. Well, right. Look, it's a grift, basically, right? I mean, these people who go to, they come out of certain universities, and then they go to big companies, who go to, they come out of, you know, certain universities and then they go to big companies and they say, we're going to clean up your, your workplace toxicity issue. Uh, and all you have to do to, to, to get there is buy our $6,000 an hour, um, you know, speaking program and have each of your, of your employees go through a an endless series of exercises to

work on being less white whatever that means which is it's it's preposterous on so many levels and insulting and it leads to some pretty crazy places you know like there are lawsuits in in New York City where some of these programs have said things like, you know, white teachers shouldn't be teaching non-white kids. You know, like if you extrapolate this kind of thinking out all the way, it leads to some really, really lunatic kind of thinking. So, yeah, it's nuts. Blatantly racist.

And she is a racist. But she's been celebrated like she's the second coming. You know, Jimmy Fallon fawning over her. She's been on all, you know, CNN, all over there. They all love her because I think they're trying to assuage their white guilt and put some money into the hostage fund just in case they do something that's considered racist or say something that's considered racist. I had a Robin DiAngelo on. I was ready. I was ready to confess how bad I was because I was striving to be less white. You know, this woman, not only is she dishonest, Matt, she's an anti-intellectual. You wrote a great line, which was, she writes like a person who was put in timeout as a

child for speaking clearly. And here's the quote you wrote of her book. When there is disequilibrium in the habitus, when social cues are unfamiliar and or when they challenge our capital, we use strategies to regain our balance. Yeah, I think what she means in human language is like, you know, people find ways to deal. I think that's what she's trying to say. But she just used too many words to get there. Yeah, no, the irony of this is incredible, right? Like America is going through this massive national discussion about racism.

And what's the first thing that happens uh a white uh clearly uh disturbed author races to the top of the bestseller list because you have all these sort of uh suburban and upper class white people who are who are full of white guilt and the way they assuage that guilt is going and buying Robin DiAngelo's book, right? I love it. She really wants you to walk into every room as a white person and apologize for the racism that you've perpetrated and that's been perpetrated by your race. And then if you say anything mildly offensive, and God knows what that is in today's day and age, basically anything, anything said by a white person, you're just

offensive, just you're walking around offensive. She wants you to say, and I quote, would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you? Can you imagine if people actually behave like this? I mean, this is the shit that like Jonathan Capehart was saying. You made him cry. It finally acknowledged his lifetime experience of being a victim over and over and over. And you've got conservative black people saying you've got to be fucking kidding me. I just did the divide.

And yet it's working. It's working. She has scared the daylights out of the media. Corporate America has taken the knee on this. I mean, like they're giving out free copies of this book and also ibram x kendi's how to be an anti-racist yeah and look i i actually agree that there are a lot of these companies do have racial issues and they they some of them really need to do uh do some things to fix you know there aren't enough black executives at some of these companies, right? Like I agree with that. Or in Hollywood. Or in Hollywood. And there are issues that have

to be dealt with here. But this is not the way to get there is to hire these high priced consultants who probably in their day to day lives never interact with black people. And I think that's abundantly clear from these books. That's not the way that we're going to get to the promised land, I don't think, is by buying property. Well, but it's scary because not only might your corporation make you read this book, but as you point out, it reflects the orthodoxy of academia. It's certainly at the college level, but also before then. And I just think we're raising, we're trying to create racists

where they don't exist. You, you know, if you, right now the messaging is basically, if you're white and you have a black friend and you're enjoying each other and you're getting along, that's because you're a racist. Right. If you're just thinking you're having a good time with your friend, that's your racism speaking. That's where we are. Yeah. There's a lot of very strange messaging. I don't understand that. I worry about my kids. It's so funny because having kids really disabuses you of a lot of notions about race because you see little children playing with each other and they have no conception of race. It's just not important to them at all. But as they get older, we're the people who are filling their heads with negative ideas about race.

And that's what I worry about is that we're taking away that natural joy that kids have around each other and replacing it with something that's worse. Yeah. Now, me too. I worry about it because it's like, I don't want my kids shamed while they're still in the single digits, mind you, for being white. But then when you start to have a conversation about,

you know, the other side to that conversation, you know, like you're not bad just because you're white. You and your black friends are equal and you should be like, then you're on a subject that you just didn't want to discuss with your kid at this age. You know, it's like suddenly you are, you're part be like, then you're on a subject that you just didn't want to discuss with your kid at this age. You know, it's like suddenly you're you are you're part of the problem because you're making it an issue when it wasn't otherwise.

You see your kids come up. They they'll describe they'll say, like, she has brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair. They don't even know that racist that race is a thing that might be extra sensitive versus eye color. But we we make them know the schools make them know. And then it places parents in this position to have very nuanced, complex discussions on race that I just don't think these kids need when they're seven. Yeah. And kids are incredibly perceptive and they they pick up on things like people becoming nervous or tensing up when they have to talk about an issue like race, which is not the message I think you would hope that they would send.

And, you know, I always think about when I was growing up watching Sesame Street, right, which presented this image of kind of racial harmony and equality that I thought was really beautiful and positive. And, but without, you know, kind of shoving it in your face, you know, and I think that's, that's the kind of thing that's not, we're not seeing so much anymore. Like we're, we're trying to get the kids to think about things that maybe they don't need to when they're that young. Well, that's just your racism talking, but thank you for trying to weigh in. You don't like cancel culture. Obviously, we've talked about that. I wondered, what did you think about, you must have been at Rolling Stone when they had the whole

Virginia fake gang rape scandal. Yes? I actually wasn't there. I had briefly left the company for like eight months. So I missed that whole thing. Although a lot of my friends were involved with that story. So, you know, I came back. I'm just curious your thoughts.

I'm curious your thoughts. So just I'm sure the audience generally remembers this, but Rolling Stone had this big exclusive on UVA, University to question, like, why are we doing this? Why are we running with any story in which somebody, a woman says she's been victimized by a man or a black person says they've been victimized by a white person? Hello, Jussie Smollett. Like, we keep making the same mistake over and over. And do you think it's all tied in? Like the need, the need to affirm the alleged victimization of anyone in a protected class? So it's a difficult question.

What happened at Rolling Stone was, and just to preface it so that people understand, I worked there for probably a decade before that happened. And I had actually become exhausted by the fact checking process. I was probably spending more time fact checking on my articles about Wall Street than I was writing those pieces. We were one of the last news organizations in New York that had a pretty sizable fact-checking department that went through every single line. And so when this happened, I was really shocked because it seemed impossible to me that it could have gotten through the department. But what it turns out what happened was the source in the story didn't want to be fact checked in the traditional way, didn't want to have to answer those questions.

And for a variety of reasons that I think a lot of those editors, you know, regret looking back on on the situation, they kind of turned off the usual fact-checking process. And I think they thought they were being sensitive to the victim in the case or the ostensible victim. But in reality, you're not being sensitive and you're not helping people in that position by not vigorously fact-checking them. Because you end up putting them in an even worse position by publishing something that's not true and they become and for the rest of their lives it follows them around and it becomes it becomes this thing that's that's going to define their lives so i i think there's a there's a little problem in the journalism business where, um, you know, you're in, in the, in this new culture, we're kind of trained to believe the victim, right. And, and I understand that, but you, you, you can't take away the rigorous fact-checking process because that

actually doesn't help them in addition to being, um obviously, for the person who's accused. It doesn't help anybody to turn off that process. No, it's one thing if you do an interview with someone who says they're a victim and you ask tough questions and you probe the story and you present it to the audience as saying, this is this person's allegation. And here is what the defendant has said, or the person being accused has said. If you are open about the fact that you've gotten this interview, you're going to tell the audience what the person has to say, that you reach out to the other side to give them a chance to respond. That's one thing. But to do an in-depth expose of a story, which is presented very clearly as the story, this is what happened, is a totally different ballgame. And geez, you have to be so careful, you know. And even now, you know, the news media has a way of reporting these things and telegraphing their belief. That's what happened with Jussie Smollett before they know what's happened. You know, you look back on the initial reports about him, you guys know who he is. He's the guy who made up the fact that he had been

attacked by two, two guys who, uh, with a rope that they attacked. They, I can't remember the details of how he said he was attacked, but it was a racial attack by two MAGA hat wearing guys. And at 2 AM in Chicago, in the middle of the, the cold storm, you know, the the deep freeze that they went through. It was baloney. And the police came out very clearly and said not only did he hurt himself, but he hurt every real victim of racial attacks of hate crimes because now people are they're less likely to believe them. And that's that that's the woman's real crime in the UVA case. It's I don't really care that she has to deal with this following her around for the rest of her life. But I do care that now legitimate victims of sexual assault are going to have to overcome her lies in being believed.

No one deserves a presumption of the truth. No one. Some women lie. Some black people lie. Every person on earth lies sometimes. And our job as journalists is just try to get to the facts straight. Yeah, you're right. Ultimately, the people who are going to suffer most from an error like that are the people who have real stories to tell and who are not going to be believed the next time. I mean, another example of that phenomenon that was really amazing was the Caliphate podcast by the New York Times. Oh, yeah.

This was recent. It was based around a guy who claimed that he, you know, he joined the ISIS army in Syria and was doing all these crazy things like crucifying people and stabbing them to death. And it turned out to be, you know, he was arrested for hoaxing in Canada. And the Times just didn't check the story enough, you know, which a while ago would have been a significant scandal in the media business. But now it's like a two-minute story because this happens so often now. All right. A couple more questions with you about where you are. So you are still writing for Rolling Stone, but you're on Substack now. So why? Why go there? And is it a question of Rolling Stone not wanting you to express your full opinions like we saw with Andrew Sullivan? No, I've always had a lot of freedom at Rolling Stone.

And I've always had a good relationship with the people there. That's really not it so much as I kind of saw the direction of where the business was heading. I was a huge fan of IF Stone growing up. And I, he was a reporter who basically put out a newsletter out of his basement and reached a lot of people. And I just thought that this kind of subscriber based journalistic model might be a little liberating in some way and might and and also um you know because rolling stone i i obviously i get along with them but they

um you know if you read their their content now uh it's it was very very heavily like pro-biden and pro-democrat during the last couple of years. And I did feel a little bit of tension there, maybe, because I'm more or less apolitical in my approach to the job. So I thought this would be a better choice. And you've done very well there, right? I mean, people use you as an example of the future of media, because what I read in the papers is you tripled your income just by going direct to consumer. Is that true? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's probably true. Yes. Um, and I think people like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald will, will tell you the same thing that, um, that Substack is a model that can work for certain people.

I think you have to have some profile already before you make that move. And so I don't know that it's going to be a solution to support the entire independent media, but it definitely works. And there's a huge audience out there of people who are just kind of tired of the old thing. So I strongly encourage anyone who's thinking about making this move to not be afraid to do it because it does work. Do you worry about big tech cracking down?

There's some musings right now publicly that that's going to be the next place they go. That suddenly you are, quote, accountable because big tech is going to say i didn't like that article and you're you're deplatformed yeah i'm very worried about that i mean substack is a service that is kind of designed to circumvent that because the your primary means of getting the material to your audience is by email so once you have a list of stuff, a list of subscribers, you're just sending them personal notes, basically. So even if they, even if I were to be taken off, you know, say Twitter or Facebook, I could still reach my audience. But I am really worried about that because clearly the things that I write could easily be censored in the same way that a lot of other people are being censored these days. It's like you got to own it.

That's why I wanted to own Devil May Care Media. I didn't want anybody else's money. I didn't want to partner with anybody. I use Red Seat Ventures just to sort of get the show on the air because I don't know how to do that. But I'm the boss and it's my dough and no one can fire me. And honestly, like if somebody cancels you out, I'll publish you. I just I feel like that's my dream is just like, I hate I hate what's happening and screw big tech and screw all these people who are trying to censor legitimate journalists and thought leaders from having a contrarian viewpoint.

It has to stop. And if we don't stand up and fight, then no one will. And the audience is so ill-served by this monolithic voice, which, by the way, we just saw that the country split right down the middle. You know, it's 74 million, 71 million to, you know, Biden, Trump. It's split right down the middle. And there is not uniformity of viewpoint in the United States and the media should reflect that. Absolutely. And, you know, the media also should be very, very worried about speech

restrictions. And they're not at all, which really, really freaks me out. You know, I wrote an article before the election talking about how I didn't particularly feel like voting for either candidate. And the original headline I had for that might be seen as suppressing the vote. So there's all these new rules that you have to worry about when you off their site or to suspend you or to block your content or to do what they did to the New York Post and lock your Twitter account. I mean, that stuff is scary. It's very Orwellian. You said earlier that you normally never said what your political leanings were and tried to just keep the vest up on that and that now you don't think that's realistic and your approach is changing. How so and why? Well, I still try to do that. But the problem is in the

modern landscape, they're pushing you to be more and more open about what your political leanings are. So there, you don't see very many people in the traditional mainstream media who, about whose politics you don't have an idea. Like you pretty much know who everybody's voting for, right? I mean, can you think of a major journalistic figure whose vote was a mystery in the recent cycle? There aren't that many. And it used to be not true. It used to be considered a virtue if the audience didn't know anything about your personal life or your personal politics. you want to stay a little bit of a mystery to your readers is because it may at some point become necessary to criticize this or that political party. And if you've already publicly

declared yourself to be on their side about things, it makes it harder to do that. So I always try to stay a little bit coy about that. And if I have to say something nasty about a politician, well, that's okay because I haven't already announced myself. And to the contrary point, if you say I'm for Biden and I'm against Trump or I'm for Trump and I'm against Biden or whatever. If you say something nasty about the other side, it means less, right? Because you've already declared yourself to be a partisan. So I think there's a lot of value in trying to hide a little bit from the audience and just make observations and have people judge them on the merits. I mean, I find it interesting, of course, because this is about my own history.

I'll challenge anyone you put in front of me. I don't really care whether they have a D or an R next to their name. And I have a proven history of that. But what I found in my past is that I will say it's more with the left. They find it very frustrating. They really want you to tell them that you're on their team. And I'm not on their team. I'm not on the Republicans team either. And I never have been. You know, I'm not a registered Republican, nor am I rooting for anybody because they're a Republican. I've been pretty open about the fact that I have I have center right leadings, but I have some things on the center left that I'm more aligned with as well. And that is as much as I'll say, because that's what's true. For me, being fair is easy because it's just my natural ideology. I'm open minded and I want to be convinced either way. But I do think about it. I know, for example,

Lester Holt is a Republican, but I have no problem with seeing him anchor a debate involving a Republican because I think he's fair. But I know, of course, that like Don Lemon is a is a it's just a, you know, diehard progressive. He's a leftist. And I would never want to see him anchor a presidential debate because there's zero chance he would be fair to the Republican. And I feel like, I don't know. I mean, I obviously have anchored five presidential debates. They're all Republican primaries. But I've, of course, got no problem throwing punches at Republicans. I just wonder what the future of the of the industry looks like now that I because I think I agree with you. More and more people are having to declare where they stand. And does it disqualify more and more journalists from staying in the fray? I hope not.

Because I think with more of us having columns, having podcasts like I have here, you have to have that authentic connection with your audience and you have to be honest about how you see the news. That's why they're coming to you for news commentary more and more. And I don't think it should disqualify you from journalism, from hard-hitting journalism. Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with you. And the last thing I'll say about that is the press derives all of its institutional power from the perception that it's separate from politicians. And every time it announces itself as being in the fold with a political party, it loses power.

So I don't know why people do that voluntarily. You know, you should try to retain as much influence as you can. And in order to do that, you have to be above the fray and fair and willing to go after both groups. They can't help themselves. They don't mean to openly declare it. It's just their news coverage betrays them. They're not above the fray. They are the fray, in the fray. That could be the name of Brian Stalter's next book. Matt, it's a pleasure. I hope I get to meet you in person sometime soon. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, after the pandemic, we should do that. That's right. Well, thank you for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Megan person sometime soon. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, after the pandemic, we should do that. That's right.

Well, thank you for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Megan. Take care. All the best. Our thanks again to Matt Taibbi, who is a great guest with great insights. Before we go, I want to tell you that today's episode was brought to you in part by Superbeats Soft Chews. Take two delicious chews a day for the health support and energy you need.

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My old pal from Jones Day, where I used to practice law, Patty Carroll, saw your note. Thank you, lady. Miss you. And a guy I used to have on the Kelly file all the time, Dennis Michael Lynch wrote in. Does anybody remember him from the Kelly file?

He was so good. He'd have his camera. He'd go out there. Any sort of happenings at the border, he was on it. He was fearless. And he was riveting television. Every time he was on, the ratings would go up because just the way he tells stories.

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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.