The Megyn Kelly Show - Media Covers for Fetterman's Impairment, and Left Turns on Islam Film, with Victor Davis Hanson and Meg Smaker | Ep. 411

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, outrageous new details about what the White House knew regarding the migrant "whipping" story, the real effect of America's immigration crisis, the racism and hypocrisy of the Los Angeles city council progressives, Biden's long history of racial comments, Herschel Walker's controversies, Kanye West's victimhood, media covering for John Fetterman's obvious impairment, President Biden lying again, Kamala Harris struggling to make sense, and more. Then filmmaker Meg Smaker joins to discuss her documentary The UnRedacted ("Jihad Rehab") on reformed Islamic terrorists, the progressive left turning on the documentary and accusing it of "Islamophobia," her life as a firefighter and how 9/11 changed her perspective, living in Yemen and Afghanistan, getting to know terrorists who were trying to reform themselves, the skills the former terrorists learned at this "rehab" facility, vitriol against the film without ever even seeing it, the truth about the movie and who is attacking it, and more. Find out more about the film at https://jihadrehab.com/.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We have a great show for you today. Later, we're going to be joined by a documentary filmmaker who we told you about last week. She was recently profiled by the New York Times, and now she is speaking out because her film about accused Islamic terrorists who were held at Gitmo, she thought it was going to be a darling of the left. It started out being a darling of the left until they decided, actually, we hate it. It's racist. They had to look around the room to see who said it was racist after they said it was amazing, including people like Abigail Disney,

absolutely loved it. Executive produced it. Yes, it's brilliant. Then everybody was like, it's racist. Oh yes, it's racist. I hate it. God, they're weak. She's now been essentially blacklisted

by the industry and worse. And we talked about this when it happened with Matt Taibbi. Now Meg Smaker joins me to dive into the story. I've watched the entire film and I'm actually really excited to bring clips of it and get into this with her for you guys. But we begin today with the new reporting about the border. Oh, this story and that whipping migrant controversy. Some outrageous details. Details are coming to light that point to the Biden administration, Secretary Mayorkas of DHS, knowing we knew that he threw those border agents under the bus.

We thought it was before he had the facts. Now we find out it's even worse. He had facts showing him that they did not whip anyone. And not only did he ignore those facts, he went out publicly, misrepresented them, and condemned these agents as though it were otherwise. I mean, it's really kind of stunning, the cynicism of his behavior. We're going to get into that. We're going to get into the inflation numbers, which are terrible. And there's no better person to talk about all of it than one of our favorites, Victor Davis Hanson, is here, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Victor, this Mayorkas situation is dark.

We only know that he was told the truth, that there was no whipping of migrants, because the Heritage Foundation filed a FOIA request on documents and they got the documents showing that one of Mallorca's staffers had sent him before two two and a half hours before he publicly addressed the nation um the report from the photographer from Reuters who said there was no whipping that that isn't true some of the angles on the on the shots may look at may make it look that way, but it's not what happened. He saw who we aspire to be, or the integrity and values of our truly heroic personnel in the Department of Homeland Security. The investigation into what occurred has not yet concluded. We know that those images painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation's ongoing battle against systemic racism. Wow. Again, the account of the photographer, Paul Rachi, who took the viral photographs,

said, quote, I've never seen them whip anyone. He, the Border Patrol agent, was swinging it, meaning the reins, but it can be misconstrued when you're looking at that picture two and a half hours later mallorca sounded very different and at the same time said the agents are being placed on administrative leave and and they were then investigated by u.s customs and border protection um and just for extra good measure victor he he said at the time that they had ceased the use of horse patrol units in the area and that those agents would be on administrative desk duty, not working with migrants for the foreseeable future, knowing that it was a lie. So what do we make of it? Well, I think in the short term, in a cost benefit analysis, he asked himself, where are the rewards and punishments? If I come out and say what I know to be true, what's the result of it?

And that is the popular culture, the illegal immigration lobby, you know, entertainment, social media, that whole group will attack me. And more importantly, my employers will attack me. But if I go on and lie and sort of praise the people I'm attacking by saying they're, you know, most of them are pretty good, then I'm going to be fine. In fact, I'm going to be lauded and I'm going to be either praised or promoted someday. And then if anybody finds out that I was lying, that'll be way in the future and people will forget about it. But right now I'm going to be echoing or resonating what the president is saying. So that's one thing.

And the second is this is a systematic, using his word, systematic or systemic. This is a policy where they want open borders. So anything that contributes to that by deprecating the enforcement by their own employees or stopping the wall or anything, it fuels this three, three and a half million influx. And that's what they want. It's not that the border is porous. It doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't mean that they pick and choose which laws to enforce or reject. There is no immigration law. They destroyed it. And I don't know what else to say about it. I don't think it's ever going to change until the people who are coming across turn out to be conservatives or they're fleeing.

The majority of them are fleeing communism in Cuba or Venezuela or something. And the Democratic Party thinks, wow, we don't want to import these people. That will stop it. But anything else won't as long as they're in power. You're exactly right. It depends on where they're coming from and how they're going to wind up voting if they ever get the right to vote and wind up at the ballot box. I agree with you. If all these immigrants come from Venezuela or Cuba and wind up voting in any anti-dictatorial way, they're going to fix the border problem really fast. Yeah, you can see it. You can see already with the Mexican-American voting,

that's starting to really flip and not just gradually, but suddenly. And you can see how they deprecate people down by the Rio Grande Valley. We're running for office or where I live in the San Joaquin Valley. And when they look at Latino activists on the left, as we saw in the L.A. City Council, they're kind of mute. Joe Biden and the administration and the Democratic hierarchy didn't weigh in at all. But had they been anybody else, they would have. Had they been conservative Latinos and they were talking about O'Hawkins and the way that they talk about or blacks or whites or gays, they would have blasted them. So it's not that they're pro or, you know, that's not.

I think we've got to get beyond the idea that they're pro-minority or they're pro any particular tribal or ethnic or racial group. They're just pro people who are leftist that promote their agenda. And they can turn on people that were their former allies in a heartbeat. Well, the push to bring immigrants to these more blue sanctuary cities has really made a difference. I mean, the newspapers here in the New York area are really focusing in on this. Governor Hochul of New York said on Wednesday that she wants a federal response to what's happening in New York,

which has received some 18,600 asylum seekers. That's how we let people in now. We just say everybody's seeking asylum. So we've gotten almost 19,000 asylum seekers here. And she says, we want a federal response. We want the feds to take ownership of this crisis and we'll help. But this belongs to the federal government. But Joe Biden's not taking that that bait. Mayor Eric Adams has declared an emergency over it. And he says every community should expect migrants after city homeless shelters have hit record numbers. These kids are going into the schools. There are no Spanish speaking teachers, but maybe one here or there. They don't know what to do with all these kids. So, I mean, it's working out brilliantly. I understand this is pain being felt by the communities and the kids and so on. But welcome to your world. Welcome to the world of the people who live in border states. Yeah. I mean, the same subtext is there that the wealthy white and the wealthy diverse populations have been theoretically for open borders, but they're segregationists. They don't

want anything to do with them. And I can tell you that on my avenue where I live, there are more people living in one residence than went to Martha's Vineyard in total. And I can tell you that on my avenue where I live, there are more people living in one residence than went to Martha's Vineyard in total. And I can tell you down the whole avenue in southwestern Fresno County, there's probably more thousands that have gone into New York City and no one cares. Nobody said a word. Nobody cares about Central California schools, the impact they've had. Nobody cares about M13. Nobody cares about the resulting crime. Nobody cares about hit and run where half the accidents in Fresno County, the driver leaves the scene of the accident. Nobody cares, Megan.

But once this particular protected cadre is affected, then you really see something. I think it's important to realize that their outrage is kind of symmetrical to their advocacy. They're very loud. They put signs, you know, this house honors immigrants. And they get furious when anybody uses the word alien. And then they get furious when they actually see someone. And you get the impression that the entire edifice that they have of promoting the illegal immigration is some kind of projection. It's some kind of way of squaring the circle that they don't feel comfortable with people outside their class or maybe even their race. And so I think it's a way of squaring their own guilt because they just get hysterical when they come to Martha's Vineyard or New York. But they're also hysterical and demanding that these people be allowed to come to other communities that are very poor and don't have their resources. Remember how they wouldn't use the word crisis when the illegal immigrants were only along the southern border?

It's only once they show up in Martha's Vineyard in New York, in D.C., that now they say it's a crisis, a humanitarian crisis. One must be declared and must be treated accordingly. OK, what's changed? Just the location of the immigrants. But that is what you just said is the perfect segue into what's happening. I find this fascinating with the L.A. City Council. OK, the L.A. City Council president is named Nuri Martinez. She's a Democrat, and she's all over the news today and yesterday because she made some racist comments about another board member's son. The board member is a white man who has a husband. I don't know his race, but they have a black son. And Nury Martinez, again, Democrat, head of the council, was caught on tape making racist comments

about that man's black child. We have the audio in which she uses, forgive me, it's a Hispanic slur that I'd never heard, but apparently it means, and forgive me for this too, she calls him a, quote, little monkey. So here she is in SOT 11. And then there's this white guy with a little black kid who misbehaves. Este niño has no, he's, they're not doing a, yeah, no, they're not doing leadership position but is still maintaining her spot on the council. She says she's taking a leave of absence. Oh, now she's just resigned.

Okay. And the other two who sat there and listened to it, they're under fire as well. Joe Biden wants them all gone. This is the same woman, Victor, the same woman, Nuri Martinez, who in July of 2020 called trump's policies on immigration absolutely racist and said once again his racist policies against immigrants people of color and

the constitution come to light we'll see him in court again where he's not doing so well as of late she was the big sponsor of defunding the racist cops and LAPD, according to her, wanting to slash up to one hundred and fifty million dollars from their budget. You know, the communities be damned. She was going to virtue signal and talked about how we cannot talk about change. We have to be about change. Then it came out that the LAPD had been providing 24 hours security outside of her accusations of racism and so on. And I've got something I want to cover up about myself, just like these Democrats on their immigration policies. Yeah, I think it's in her case, when you heard Mr. Cedillo

and De Leon and the union organizer, you really get into the rot of tribal politics, because what prompted all those racist outbursts were they were furious that their particular group, i.e. elite Latinos, did not have as much power commensurate with their population as Blacks did, especially, and to a lesser extent, white. They were trying to organize a solid front so they could oppose the Blacks. So, what the point was that they don't represent people. They only represent people who look like them. And that's the ultimate manifestation of the left-wing diversity and woke movement,

is each person is supposed to identify by their superficial appearance. That's essential, not incidental to who they are. In their case, I went back and looked at that whole transcript. There wasn't any group that they didn't attack. They attacked Blacks, they attacked gays, they attacked whites, they attacked Jews. And the other thing was, these are not minor people. Martinez was heralded as the first Latina ahead of the Future of Los Angeles. Cedillo was an old Democratic politician. I've heard of him for years. De Leon ran against Dianne Feinstein for Senate.

So this was the creme de creme of the Latino movement. And they even made fun of Oaxacan Native Indigenous peoples, who was the primary group that has immigrated where I was, they said they didn't even wear shoes. And so you get this idea that this whole diversity monstrosity that there's these 67% white, solid white races, and then there's all of these groups that are victimized by it is just absurd. People are people. And as someone who's lived in my entire life in the Latino community, I can tell you that the Latino community is no more exempt than any other community in terms of racist outbursts. And the funny thing was the left doesn't really know what to do with it. And they first, Megan, did you notice that the first thing she did,

she didn't resign from being a city council member, only her rotating chairmanship. And then she tried the diversity out where she said, I was frustrated because of my advocacy of marginalized communities or people of color. And she's almost saying, look, I'm Latino. And as a victim, I can never be a victimizer. And that's the sort of the subtext of the whole thing. It really does make you wonder, because how many stories have we done where the people preaching loudest, most loudly about Trump's racism or the immigration policies, racism or whoever's racism turns out to be a raging bigot behind the scenes. As you point out, she she rips on everybody. She she was talking about going through Koreatown saying, you know, who's really in Koreatown? I see a lot of little

short, dark people. She insults the looks of the people. She goes after the Jews, as you point out. And then she comes out and basically just says, oh, my record speaks for itself. Like defund the police. Is that supposed to save you from referring to a black child as a little monkey? You think that's going to save you? And now the White House comes out and they go on offense, right? They say, oh, yes, she should be. She should resign.

And the two people who sat there saying nothing, also Democrats, should resign. But listen to the tag on from Karine Jean-Pierre Sambit 14. The president is glad to see that one of the participants in that conversation has resigned, but they all should. He believes that they all should resign. Here's the difference between Democrats and MAGA Republicans. When a Democrat says something racist or anti-Semitic, we hold them, we hold Democrats accountable. When a MAGA Republican says something racist or anti-Semitic, they are embraced by cheering crowds and become celebrated and sought after endorsements. Oh, my God. I think she meant to exclude the sitting president of the United States, Victor. Yeah, that's where you start. I was thinking when I heard that, that's where you start because Joe Biden became infamous for saying that Barack Obama was the first Black

presidential candidate that was articulate and basically could finish the sentence. Then he went before a very esteemed group of Black professionals and said Mitt Romney was going to put you all in change as if they were still in a slave mentality. Then he went in, and those two podcast hosts, he called one of them a junkie, and he said the other was, you ain't Black. And then just not too long ago, he said to a high-ranking assistant down, I think it was in Louisiana, he said, this is my assistant, this is my boy here. And so he can't help it. And of course, he used to brag on James O. Eastland, the segregationist that he said nurtured him. And he said at one point, he's never called me a boy,

as if that was something in his honor. But Joe Biden has a long history, and we didn't get into the donut shop stuff he did. And one of the reasons he withdrew from the 2008 campaign, beyond his mediocrity, was that he couldn't stop talking about race. And then we get into the, gosh, Megan, the corn pop stories about how he got a particular six-foot custom-made chain. He took on corn pop in the black gang. And then he went back and all these black children looked at his little golden hairs and touched him on his leg.

It was right out of something out of uncle Remus. I mean, it was really embarrassing. I mean, you look, you need look no further than our sitting vice president to find out what the Democrats think about Democrats who are racist. She called him racist during a

presidential debate. And then he made her his running mate to buy her silence and get a woman of color on the ticket. And she was so outraged about his racism. She promptly forgot that opinion and said, oh, me, I get to have my name in the lights and I get to have this amazing title. I'll do it. Never mind. She doesn't care about his alleged racism or she didn't mean it when she said it. Either way, she's not a sincere person. These are the people lecturing us at every turn about how we need to behave. That leads me to something in the news this week that I'm genuinely curious on your take on and that is herschel walker right when she she's he's become everybody's favorite punching bag on the

left he and now kanye west i believe her anti-semitic reference was to kanye west because he's in the news for making those comments about i'm gonna go defcon he said death con but i think he meant def def with an f con whatever on jewish people so there's kanye in the news being called an anti-semite and there's um herschel walker with his long history of not behaving very well when it comes to the women and the children in his life how are you thinking about those two situations well i mean, Herschel Walker was always a problematic candidate. He'd never run for office. He hadn't been vetted. He was unacquainted with politics. And he had a lot of, as you said, he was a star and a hero in the Georgia politics, young, handsome, wealthy.

And he didn't show good judgment. He did a lot of things that he regrets and he should regret. And so then he runs for office. And, you know, as one person said to me, it's our guy with a flawed record versus their guy, because Warnick has his own whole past, as we know about his ex-wife and her allegations that he mistreated her, or he was even violent with her or his camp counseling problem. So it's a mess. And I guess we're at this point, we're down to two candidates that are flawed, that have personal problems. And one of them is an experienced, savvy politician of the left. And one of them is a fresh face that's pretty honest guy, but he's not nearly as acquainted with politics. And we'll see who wins.

But they're both flawed candidates. And then as far as Kenya West, I listened to that. I listened to Tucker's interview. And there were elements that I thought were noble, his religiosity and all of that. But when he he did say things about the Jews and he keeps talking about people in shady corners that are hurting him. And then at some point you have to just stop and say, wait a minute, you you, by your own admission, are the wealthiest African-American person in the history of civilization. And you have enormous influence. You grew up in a middle-class family. Your mother was highly educated. Your father was an entrepreneurial sort. And life has been very good to you. And yet,

he kept, I don't know how to put it. It's like Meghan Markle talking from her Montecito estate to OPA at her Montecito estate about their shared racism. At some point, the wealthy, wealthy, wealthy billionaire African-American class, they're not convincing when they try to suggest there's a whole array of enemies that are out to get them as kenya west did so i i i didn't get on the conservative bandwagon to the same degree because he sounded at moments conservative because he kept saying that you know when you heard that interview even without knowing that some of the anti-semitic comments had been pruned you know that following up he was going to say something moreuned, you know that following up, he was going to say something more overt, which he did when he said he was going to go on DEFCON 3 against the Jews. And that's DEFCON or any Armageddon imagery in association with a Jewish community is not a wise thing to do. You know, I think it was Meghan McCain, who she had a good point, which is conservatives are

constantly saying that they eschew the celebrity of Hollywood, and they have no use for these stars until one of them deigns to say, I'm a Republican, or I'm a conservative. And then you see all these people rush to celebrate this person and say, Oh, look, see this man or this woman's on our team, and then forgive all their, you know, sins or their comments or what it's like be consistent either you're pro right or you're anti-celebrity and i think trump got in when he was getting near the re-election cycle and candace owens and kanya and all these african american advocates and the kardashians went to him to decriminalize this and decriminalize this and unfair incarceration. A lot of that was true, but a lot of the people that were released, it wasn't just that they had used drugs or sold, they had a long record. And whether Trump knew

it or not, he was endorsing some of the protocols that have resulted in this revolving door. He lowered the bar on incarceration and started really in an effort to redress a grievance, but it went way too far. And now the logical manifestation of that under the left is you commit a felony or you threaten somebody with an ax or you break up something or you throw somebody in the subway and you're out the same day. And so when he I all of this that we're watching right now, Megan, is censored speech because when we look at the crime statistics of the last two years, we and the conservative side rightly point out that the vast majority are victims, are people of color. And I think interracial crime is only about six to eight percent, although it's five times more

inordinate of people of color versus whites and vice versa. But that being said, we don't talk about the race of the victimizer or the assailants. And it's been overwhelmingly asymmetric when we have about 4 or 5 percent of the population are African-Americans from 14 to 50. And yet 55 percent of all the violent crime is committed by that very small percentage. And we don't talk about it. And yet we just say to ourselves, well, this is a crisis because the victims are all African-American. It doesn't matter what color people are, who are the victims. They're victimizing that particular group. If you could reach them or you had a paradigm or you had

some policy that they committed crimes commiserate with their population, you wouldn't really have a violent crime problem in the United States. It would be comparable to some of the safest cities in the world. But we can't say that. And that's what's very frustrating because what we're doing is when you look at these crime stories in major newspapers or major media outlets that have the comments below them and they're uncensored, it's amazing. They're almost absolutely racist. And what people are reacting is if you're not going to mention the race of the assailant and yet the assailant is vastly overrepresented, I'm going to get angry.

And we're creating, I think, a dangerous situation when you can't talk about something rationally and you mainly and you you put it into the shadows of commentary people are very angry and and uh i just looked at the fbi hate crime statistics so late they're not even posting them for uh 2021 or 20 they have to go back to 2019 but even then these are hate crimes the african american community is double their numbers in the general population as assailants and when so when joe biden says or mark milley or lloyd austin white rage and everything and you look at the so-called white population and hate crimes 67 to 70% of the population is committing 50% of the hate crimes, but that's not the narrative they're advancing. So then the public knows that and you create the

cynicism that's not healthy. Six or seven, six or 7% of the population is committing the hate crimes. Yeah. And this is something that Glenn Lowry has been talking about for quite some time now, saying, be careful with this. White cops are killing black men with impunity and on the hunt for black men. And he's been saying, do we really want to get to a situation where we start to take a hard look at the racial makeup of the felons who commit violent crimes in this country? Because it's not going to end well, right, for these people who want to do that. And he's been really open about that in the same way that you just were. I want to make two points and then I got to squeeze in a break. One on Herschel Walker.

I did think it was an interesting point that the left seems to think they're going to outrage or call hypocrisy on the right if they vote for Herschel Walker, despite the fact that he may have, he denies it, paid for an abortion for a woman that he was seeing. And so many conservatives I've been reading have been pointing out, OK, not ideal. But do you have any idea how many more abortions there will be if Raphael Warnock maintains this Senate seat? Like this abortion may or may not have happened at Herschel Walker's, you know, on his dime, but it's in the past. And this is a guy who's really

openly pro-abortion rafael warnock or the democrats are and we don't want to help that thought that was an interesting point i think that's a good point right and then secondly yeah i mean i i agree that their personal liabilities i think balance each other off and then it's just a question of who do you want to exercise power? And I'm terrified of warning. So I would I would vote for Herschel Walker in a second. On the subject of Trump and criminal justice reform, there have been some reports that he may regret that, that he thinks that was pushed on him by Jared. And he's not he doesn't he doesn't feel good about having done it anymore. And that is in part, I'm sure, because now a couple years later, we have the numbers on the recidivism rate of those who got out of jail, you know, went back and committed more crime. And time after time, we have seen criminals let out, thanks to that legislation committing violent felonies. So, you know, when you actually take a hard look at that attempt at appeasing some on the left with criminal justice reform, it gets uncomfortable quickly. It does. It does. And it didn't even achieve its purpose of appeasing

them because they looked at that weakness or that concession as weakness to be exploited, not as magnanimity to be reciprocated. Well said. All right. Pause there. Victor Davis Hanson stays with us when we come back after a very, very quick break. So we talked a little bit about the Georgia Senate race. Let's talk a little bit about the one in Pennsylvania and John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate, giving his first sit down since his stroke, though other other reporters are coming out now saying, I talked to him, I talked to him. As far as I understand, this is his first real interview since he had a stroke with NBC News. And it's been fascinating to watch what's happening

to this reporter, Dasha Burns at NBC. I never knew her when I was there. But she comes out and explains what happened when she sat with him. Didn't reflect particularly well on him, but it was factual. She was, as a reporter, telling us what the circumstances were like around the interview. And when she sat with him, he had to use closed captions. Her questions had to be translated onto a computer screen where they would pop up so he could read them as opposed to process them auditorily. Here she is talking about that. The screen that he was looking at was transcribing my questions so he could read them in real time. Because of that auditory processing issue, he has a hard time understanding what people are saying. Once he can read it, though, he can

understand. But I'll say even those small moments, as you know, Peter, behind the scenes, you know, when you're having some of that small talk before an interview during some of those conversations before the closed captioning was rolling, it wasn't clear that he could understand what we were saying. Okay, so now she's gotten all this pushback from reporters universally on the left. Here's one for a reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Ryan Detto. What if a deaf person was elected or a senator became deaf as if she's this is an example of Dasha's ableism in pointing out the fact that he couldn't process well without this computer translation? Then you've got New York

Magazine reporter saying he's not at all. He's not at all impaired. She interviewed him for the print magazine. Kara Swisher wrote on Twitter, sorry to say, I talked to John Fetterman for over an hour without stop or any aids. This is just nonsense. Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk. On and on it goes.

But, Victor, you get to the actual interview and it's very clear he was struggling even with the closed captioning. Listen to soundbite nine. Are you committed to showing up on October 25th to debate your opponent no matter what happens? No, I'm not. I'm not concerned. I believe that's another opportunity to be transparent and people can make their own decisions during the debate. Sorry to clarify, are you committed to showing up on October 25th and no matter what, no matter what your opponent says or does? Well, yeah, of course, I'm going to show up on the 25th. What do you make of it i don't understand their analogies if you vote for somebody that has

an incapacity such as mayor the new york patterson i think was blind you know what you know that and you factor that in but he has he wants it both ways he says he's not impaired at all so then all of a sudden when he gets into the public realm and people wonder if he's going to be in a caucus you'll be able to understand things or the give and take in a heated Senate exchange where you can't have captioning, then all of a sudden he says he needs captions. So he says he's not disabled, but he is disabled. If he's disabled, then the voters can make the necessary adjustments. They can adjudicate whether that's something they should think about. But when you deny it and you say you're perfectly fine, which he's done for most of the campaign,

and then all of a sudden you need an aide and then somebody comes back and says you're trashing disabled people, it doesn't make it's incoherent. And remember, this is the same left that told us that Donald Trump was in need of an intervention, that he was so non-composmentes. I remember Rod Rosenstein was going to wear a wire with Andrew McCabe to show the cabinet that he needed a 25th Amendment intervention. We had a Yale psychiatrist, I think her name was Bandy Lee, that went before Congress, and they just lauded her. And she said that there needed to be an intervention with a straitjacket because Trump was not coherent.

We had Mark Milley saying, you know, that at some point this erratic and not sane president might necessitate him contacting the head of the People's Liberation Army in China to warn him. So they're perfectly capable of making telediagnosis of some people and impugning that they're cognitively challenged, except when it's in their case. But I think if he had just said, look, I had a stroke and from now on, I'm going to need some aids, but I think eventually I'm going to get over it, but there's going to be a rough patch and this is what I can do and not do. I think he wouldn't have had the trouble, but it was denial, denial, denial. No, I'm not going to release my medical records. No, no, no.

And then how dare you suggest that I'm impaired? That's not going to work. Somebody was pointing out this same empathetic media treated Senator Mark Kirk very differently after he had a stroke. Chicago Tribune coming out saying we will not be endorsing him because he had a stroke, right? Because of his stroke. It's in the headline.

When you watch this interview with Fetterman, I have to tell you, just as a lay person and I'm not a doctor, I'm concerned. I've been watching him repeatedly on the campaign trail and the highlights. And he constantly, it's not just about the auditory processing. He constantly messes up his words. He can't say the words properly. He doesn't seem to have an understanding of where the conversation has gone. We showed a clip of him on Chris Hayes, completely misunderstanding, garbling his answer entirely, even after he understood the question. His answer made no sense. Here's another soundbite from his interview with the NBC where he's struggling on the word pronunciation. It's sound by eight. And I always thought I was pretty empathetic. Empathetic. I think I was very, excuse me, empathetic. I don't know. And he refuses to release his medical records. If he's so fine, why wouldn't he release his medical records?

We know why. He's had AFib. He's got heart issues. He's had high blood pressure. He's had a stroke. He's cognitively impaired. And he's not going to release those medical records because any neurologist would be honest and say that he's got cognitive issues that make communication difficult. But in a weird way, what they've done is they have juxtaposed him versus Dr. Oz. So Dr. Oz is supposed to be an all-knowing empathetic, to use his word, doctor. And they've almost said, how dare Dr. Oz, a doctor of all people, suggest that he's cognitively impaired rather than saying maybe he would really know that he's cognitively impaired. but they've turned, they flipped it upside down that Oz of

all people shouldn't dare suggest that he has a physical impediment because doctors are supposed to be so understanding. And the other subtext of it is we're not listening to any, we're not hearing anything about his record, but he's probably the most radical of all the left-wing Senate candidates this cycle. I mean, by what he says about crime and letting people out and second chances, even in the case of violent crime. And you go back and look at his record as a small town mayor and it's disaster. And he hasn't done anything other than destroy things that he's come in contact with. And yet nobody's talking about that. Not to mention as a parole board member.

Yeah. Yeah. We're focusing on Fetterman, the victim. Yeah. It's not unlike what's happening at the presidential level when it comes to Joe Biden's mental health and the gaslighting that we get every day, right? That there's nothing wrong and they're not going to submit him to a cognitive test and that we shouldn't believe our lying eyes. Even the latest poll shows 65% of Americans, including a growing number of Democrats, have real concerns about his mental health. He sat with Jake Tapper of CNN. Tapper asked him about it.

And his answer was basically, just look, look at what I've accomplished. Nobody's accomplished what I've accomplished my first two years. But as the interview went on, you know, there were questions. And then he took to the campaign trail. And well, it wasn't the campaign trail. He's in Colorado. So perhaps I can't remember whether this was actually a campaign speech or not. In any event, he made the following gaffe just yesterday speaking about his son, Beau. Listen here, Sat 6.

Just imagine, I mean it sincerely. I say this as a father of a man who won the broad star, the conspicuous service medal and lost his life in Iraq. I says about some monument he was out there. In any event, Beau Biden did not die in Iraq. I mean, this happens all the time with him. Yeah, you know, it's very strange that The New York Times wrote about it, but it's almost eerie because he has such a record. But when he was young of lying, I mean, he was disqualified or dropped out of the 1988 primary election because he made up his resume. He made up his speech. He lied about his credentials. He's lied about everything. It's just a habit of him. And so now when he does it,

people, instead of saying that he's cognitively impaired, which has accentuated that streak within him, they just say, that's old Joe, just old Joe, the story. I think they said the storyteller, the storyteller. And it kind of disguises the fact that he's cognitively challenged. And it's a larger issue, you know, because when you look at this hierarchy of the party of youth and vigor and diction and rhetoric, that's what we're told, the educated intellectuals that run the left. You look at Nancy Pelosi, she said, you know, bring them immigrants. They need to come down here. We need people to pick the crops. And then when she got into Taiwan, I think she got confused.

She said China is one of the freest societies in the world. I don't think she meant communist China. She said a lot of crazy things. And then you've got Kamala Harris, who is not cognitively challenged, but she's got a vocabulary that's very limited, and she just repeats herself. It makes no sense. And you add into the mixture Fetterman, and you start to see that they have a gerontocracy at the top, a Dianne Feinstein, James Clyburn, Joe Biden, and then they haven't developed younger politicians

because they've just stayed there so long. And the younger ones they have developed tend to be not advancing on the basis of merit because Kamala Harris, by any reasonable meritocratic standard, shouldn't have been a vice president candidate. And you looked at that field that ran and you either had an aged person, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren, I think it was 73, or you had somebody like Julian Castro or Beto or Spartacus that was not up to stats. No, that's right.

And it's to your to your point about Kamala Harris. She was on late night with Seth Meyers taking the tough questions in a very difficult setting the other night. And I mean, this is one of her classic word salad empty vessel answers. Here it is, SOT 15. But I mean, truly, when you, you know, when you see our kids, and I truly believe that they are our children, they are the children of our country, of our communities. I mean, our future is really bright if we prioritize them and therefore prioritize the climate crisis and the need to address oh my god victor she believes the children are our future teach them right let them lead the

way yeah also all we have to do is to ask the left to apply their old dan quayle standard because remember when dan quayle who who sounded like, you know, Cicero compared to her. But every time he made a gaffe, they were, you know, he should be taken off the ticket. He should be removed from office because he can't finish the sentence. But it's the same old asymmetric thing. And I guess it gets back to the fundamental truth of the left. They feel that they're so morally superior because they're for egalitarianism of result, that any means necessary or contradictions are allowable in pursuit of that goal. But it gets pretty flagrant when you see how they don't talk about her inability to communicate.

Well, last but not least, you've been sounding the alarm for a while now about how this woke ideology should not make its way into certain industries like the pilot industry, the medical industry. And yet we have this per Chris Ruffo out of the University of Minnesota as the medical students graduated. They've changed the Hippocratic oath quite a bit. Listen to this soundbite 16. We commit to uprooting the legacy and perpetuation of structural violence

deeply embedded within the healthcare system. We recognize inequities built by past and present traumas rooted in white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary, ableism, and all forms of oppression. As we enter this profession with opportunity for growth, we commit to promoting a culture of anti-racism, listening, and amplifying voices for positive change. We pledge to honor all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine. Break out the peyote. I wonder if that includes hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.

No. I don't think so. That lets me get Elizabeth Warren to endorse it. Then they're going to reevaluate indigenous healing. It's funny, but it's kind of scary when you have a sophisticated society that depends on all of these skilled professions. And now you're systematically destroying meritocracy and you're substituting it with tribal concerns. systemic impediments in medicine, they don't really mean it because what was about 2%, 0.2% of the population is now about 3% in the case of transgendered individuals that want surgery, many of them below the age of 16, and some of them in some states advocating to be able to have

very dangerous drugs that have a lot of long-term effects or irreversible surgeries that the left used to say was part of big pharma or the medical malpractice industry. They're green-lighted. And why are they green-lighted? Because they're the flip side of what he was just talking about. He's saying, we don't want these things in medicine, but by inference, but we do want these things that aren't going to be examined empirically. And that's what's really scary about it. And so you get the impression if, you know, I had a bad case of COVID and I've had it for about six months. And as he's saying to me that I shouldn't go to a university center, I should just get on the internet and take a bunch of what indigenous stuff because it's all over the internet.

Then you wouldn't be a bigot, just like the University of Minnesota. No, I wouldn't be a bigot. It's the incoming class, I should say. They're going to graduate in 2026. So this is the, and their defense is this came from the students. Well, there should have been some grownups in the room to remind them that there is a gender binary. It's really scary. And their focus is on the wrong thing there's a long history of how this is insidious you know when in the soviet union when stalin wanted to build you know drain uh the caspian sea or something they always said he's a brilliant architect and communist architects because they serve the people should be listened to and they

were all incompetent and anytime you have an ideology that starts to intrude into science, and you and I have always said, well, they'll always do it with a comp lit teacher because they have content for comparative literature, but they'll never do it with airline piets or nuclear reactor operators, but I'm afraid that they will. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It seems to be going in the wrong direction. We got to pay attention and we have to fight.

Victor Davis Hanson, so good to see you. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me. Up next, we will be back with the filmmaker behind this new documentary about accused terrorists at Gitmo who went to terrorist rehab and why the left is now trying to cancel her. Filmmaker Meg Smaker was ecstatic when her film Jihad Rehab, now titled The Unredacted, was invited to screen at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in January. A month later, the festival

was apologizing for, quote, hurting members of the community by deigning to show the film. The documentary has since been blacklisted. I saw it and it's spectacular. Meg joins me now to discuss the controversy and her incredible movie. Meg Smaker, welcome to the show. Hi. Let's just help the audience get to know you, because I think it's fascinating. You're a chick firefighter, which is pretty cool. And you're the daughter of a firefighter. I don't think I'd say a chick firefighter. Firefighter is okay. I said it. I said it. Listen, we talk all the time on this show about how

it's not that easy. I know the standards are designed mostly for male firefighters, and it can be hard for some women to meet them. You did. You've been doing it. You've been training others on how to do it. And you got firefighting in your blood, which winds up being kind of relevant to what to you coming to this movie. But how did you become a firefighter? Yeah. So I really when my dad's a firefighter, but that's not why I became a firefighter. I grew up in the firehouse and all that stuff. uh when I moved out I I moved in with uh five guys in this small apartment and one of them was a seasonal firefighter and he would talk about it and the way you describe it is every day is different you get to work in a team it's like you're constantly

learning new things and um yeah I really that really appealed to me. And so how old were you? 18. Wow. Really young. Yeah. And what was it hard incidentally to meet like the standards? Was it, or did, you know, did they accommodate you in any way or did you have to meet the ones that were there's, there's certain things you should accommodate for, but like when you're on to a Bernie building, you need to be able to pick up a 230 pound man if you can't do that then you then you shouldn't there's no that you shouldn't be dropping the standards in a job like that um especially because people's lives are on the line so uh in the beginning when i was in the fire academy um i started training and we were doing the physical agility and i was like the bot at the bottom um i was

still making the bare minimum but i was at the bottom. Um, I was still making the bare minimum, but I was at the bottom. And then, um, I hired this, uh, personal trainer. I took all my savings and hired a personal trainer. And just before the fire Academy every day, I would get up at like 4.00 AM and train with him for like two hours and then, um, do that every day. And then I would go to the, do the PT at the fire Academy. And so I was probably working out like around four hours every day, except for the, you know, one day a week. And then, um, as it went on, I, I became, uh, probably I was in the top third of the physical agility. So I was in the top third of the people, um, in my, in my class. So I beat out, you know, a lot of the other guys, which was, which was good and bad. A lot of people were, a lot of the guys were angry at that and they accused me of like doing steroids and stuff cool okay i mean you know you're getting good results when people are accusing you of being on steroids yeah all right so good for you so you make it

you make it and then what year was that that you were 18 oh man you're gonna age age me. Let's see. I'm 42 now. God. 1998. That was a good year. So this is relevant because just a few years after that was 9-11. And, you know, the firefighters were the ones who took it worse than any other professional group rushing in to save, worse than the cops, worse than the MTA authorities. It was firefighters who were killed when those buildings collapsed on them running toward the danger. And you really wrestled with what's happening. Why did this happen?

Can I believe what I'm being told about this story by the media and so on? And unlike virtually everybody else in our country, you took some extraordinary actions to go figure it out. Tell us what you did. Yeah. So I was a firefighter in California during 9-11. And after it happened, there was such a huge shift, both in my firehouse and in the American society in terms of just how people were reacting. And nothing that I saw on like mainstream media kind of answered the burning questions generated from that day. So my dad always said there's only three types of people in the world. Those that when you hit them, they hit you right back. Those when you hit them, they run away.

And those that when you hit them, they ask, why did you hit me? And I've always kind of been in that third camp. So I started reading books about Islam and the history of the Middle East and everything that I was reading about the Middle East and Islam directly contradicted what I was seeing on TV. And I realized that both of those sources of information were someone else's's through someone else's filter and so in order for me to truly understand I needed to remove the filter which meant I had to go and try to figure it out for myself and so about it was a little over six months after 9-11 I went to Afghanistan to try to figure you know answer some of those questions and I was just

immediately humbled by my own ignorance of the world. And I don't, I don't know, like, I don't know if you remember what you were like when you were in your early 20s, but I was very self-assured and thought I knew everything. And then, you know, going to a place like Afghanistan and spending time with people there and, you know, I, family there took me in and housed me and fed me and clothed me and treated me as one of their own. Meanwhile, my country is bombing their country. And I had been told like, these people hate you because your freedom and these people, you know, want you dead. And they treated me with nothing but kindness and hospitality and grace. And I think that was a kind

of a come to, for lack of a better word, come to Jesus moment for me. But can I ask you, were you staying with Taliban? Were you staying with Al Qaeda? No, not that. The Afghan people. Yeah, because, you know, it's like the Afghan people were not demonized. I mean, some corners, yes, but they fought with us. Yeah. But I mean, on the news back then, I don't know if you remember the coverage right after 9-11. There was pretty painting in broad strokes. For what I mean by that is, right after 9-11 happened, we were told who did this, right? Al-Qaeda it was like Afghans and it was like Muslims and then we have to be scared of all Muslims and it kind of kept on growing in terms of who um the enemy was and I think that uh even though the people who you know took care of me while I was in Afghanistan the families who helped me out like they weren't involved in any of this their country was still quite devastated like i stayed in a village um near masharif once and uh it in that village there literally just been like a week before a huge uh american bomb drone strike whatever and it had taken out an entire house on the block that

i was staying and the whole entire family had been killed and so what was really interesting from it was a realization for me to realize at because of that the kind of cycle of violence of fair enough these people were living in their homes and their and in their in their village and everyone in the neighborhood was going about their day and then the bomb hit and this entire family was killed. And then everyone in the whole village kind of knew who did it. And so you had these people killed and now the people in the village are very upset with the people who dropped the bomb, which was us, which is America. And so some of those people then probably became radicalized because of that. And it was just like, we hit them, they hit us, we hit them,

they hit us. And it was just like this cycle of violence and hate. And I think that- Can I ask you a question about that? Because I do. I get it. You know, as somebody who's definitely been more pro military for most of my adult life, I feel like were they outraged that they were harboring Osama bin Laden who brought down our twin towers and 3000 Americans were killed because like that's why that house got bombed you know military strikes aren't always precise but there's no i'm not like here's the thing war war is like war i don't care who you are the war is not clean there's opposite there's not like people aren't intending to kill innocent people but what i'm saying is is that basically um when when you're you're assuming that people in afghanistan all have like tvs in their house and they're watching cnn they realize what's going on a lot of people who i met had no idea about this political game of bringership that had developed and had no association with al-qaeda and didn't even know that like i think that the i'm sorry i did not wake up i didn't sleep a lot it's nice so my brain's kind of fried today but what i'm trying to say is that when you're talking

about um people living in a small village in afghanistan and i think your question is like they well they knew what was going on in their country. And so they were. Is that what you're saying? It's just I'm sorry that somebody in a house that was innocent died in the war. But it's I'm just trying to demonstrate that like there is violence. I realize the cycle of violence. Right. Like I get it. That's a fair point. And I should point out to the audience that, you found it extraordinary, was they say they didn't actually even realize what 9-11 did until they were shown video of it at Gitmo. It's like you picture bin Laden there with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others planning and plotting and then celebrating as the video came in. That's not how it went. These guys were recruited in a much different way and weren't connected with 9-11 in the way's not how it went. These guys were recruited in a much different way and weren't connected with 9-11 in the way that we would have assumed.

So let me just keep moving it forward because I want to make sure we get to the film. So you have this experience in Afghanistan where they treat you beautifully. You're defended by this Afghan family when some people have questions about you. And then you do something extraordinary, even more extraordinary.

You move to Yemen. All I could think of was Chandler Bing on Friends when he was trying to get away from that needy girlfriend. And he's like, I'm moving to Yemen. No one moves to Yemen. No American moves to Yemen. So you did. How did that? Like, why? I think most people's association with Yemen is pretty limited to either obviously friends or the USS Cole bombing. I think these are the two things that people say that they usually bring up about Yemen. So for me, the whole kind of wanting to understand thing, my time in Afghanistan made me realize how ignorant I was of the world. And the way that I wanted to remedy that is to kind of educate myself through trying to understand different people's cultures and see the world the way they did and their language. And so I moved to Yemen to study Arabic and was there for almost five years. And

for me, the reason I chose Yemen is because I'm very lazy when it comes to learning languages. And I knew if I moved to somewhere like Syria or Egypt, there'd be a big population of expats there that I would just be lazy to speak English with. But there wasn't really in Yemen. And so I went there to learn the language and the culture and, yeah, try to basically understand this, someone else's perspective, someone else's kind of culture and view of the world and to try to just educate myself because I do think that it's really until I learned Arabic and right now my Arabic is absolute shit because I've been you know if you don't use it you lose it so it's been it's been a while but oh can I I can swear I can swear. You're good. Yeah. So I think for me, the way I describe me learning this language is, you know, I traveled a lot before. And when you travel to a place, it's kind of like going into a house and being in the foyer of a house. And you're allowed to see, you know, the pictures on the wall and, you the family photos but when you learn a language you then can like invite it in to the rest of the house where you can go to the living room and you know the bedroom and

you can look in the sock door and you're you're given more of like an intimate access to a people and a culture and and a place and for me learning the language and I never got to the level where I could read the Quran in Arabic I I that was just way too hard for me I got to the I never got to the level where I could read the Quran in Arabic. I, I, that was just way too hard for me. I got to the, I was able to read that Da Vinci code in Arabic. That's how, that's how good, that's all the extent of my Arabic. You, you like a challenge, Meg. That's so far, that's the theme of our discussion. This is a woman who likes a challenge. You, um, I know you said at one point I wrote it at one point after, I mean, we don't even have time to get into the fact that you were kidnapped in Colombia for 10 days. I mean, your life has been so crazy. You've done so many amazing things. But you said something effective. This is part of the catalyst that pushed me on this lifelong journey of trying to understand the world's evildoers, pirates in Somalia, warlords in Afghanistan, and terrorists in Saudi Arabia. Somehow it's like a safety blanket. Like if I can understand a thing,

then it's no longer so scary to me. That completely clicks with me. That explains a lot. And you really immersed yourself. And all of this would become hugely helpful to you in getting access to this facility originally called Jihad Rehab, colloquially, that would be the basis of this film. So you, I understand, were in Yemen and you heard mention of this place in Saudi Arabia where they were essentially rehabbing terrorists. Saudi Arabia had created this facility. You were like, I got to know more. Now the audience knows enough about you to know like, yes, when you say you got to know more, you really got to know more and you do something about it.

So you go to Saudi Arabia. Now you decide to make a documentary film. And amazingly, while the New York Times had done a story on this facility and some other publications, no one got the kind of access you did, probably because of your familiarity with the language and so on. Over a year, you have access to this facility on a very intimate level and wind up following four guys in particular for the course of 12 to 16 months, the Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center in Riyadh. And so that must have been extraordinary for you just to be given that kind of access. So how did that come about? Did the guys agree to be the subjects of the documentary? Because I'm sure a lot of them were like, oh, no. Yeah. So it's a bit of I'll try to cliff note version that. So it took me a year to

get the access that I got. It was a lot of back channeling back and forth between people at the Ministry of Interior. And just it took really, really long time. And what you have to understand about places like Saudi Arabia is they never tell you, no, they just throw hurdle after hurdle, after hurdle, after hurdle, after hurdle in front of you until, uh, you kind of just give up. And, um, you know, I like, I was talking to somebody the other day, I'm like, I, I am very bad at a lot of things. I can't spell. I'm horrible at like fixing a car, but I got tenacity for days. So I was like up to the challenge and um got to the point where um I emailed them and then they emailed me back and I think in the exchange was like you know we asked everyone in the El Hire prison which is this uh prison that's exclusively for terrorists um and

then we asked everyone the rehab center and no one wants to talk to you and no one wants to be a part of your film and then I emailed them back I'm like well let me let me just can i just meet with them like i'll just meet with them and if they you know let's just let me let me ask them and so uh basically they we went back and forth for a while and then finally they acquiesced and then and then came the hurdle which was you can go to the El Jair and you can go to the rehab center, but you're not allowed to film one frame unless these men agree to film with you from the jump. Meaning that I couldn't spend weeks trying to gain their trust in order to see if they wanted to be on this project, they had to agree from day one, which they knew was never going to happen because most of these guys have either just come back from Guantanamo and after being tortured from the country that I belong to, or they just came back from Syria fighting with ISIS. And they were right. When I sat down with a bunch of these different groups, I sat down with a group

of older Al-Qaeda guys and started speaking to them in Arabic, and they wouldn't to be from Yemen and so when I sat down with them and I started talking I put on my thickest you know Yemeni accent I could muster um their heads popped up and they're like why why do you speak our mother tongue and I told them I used to live in Yemen and they're like where and I said the old city near the sila and then they're like we went near this place and I was like yeah the best fasa restaurant all of the Yemen sorry I should have muted that um but yeah I think that like there began this immediate rapport and we started talking and we talked for hours and you know talked about Yemen because they hadn't been back in over 15 years to their home country and um the very end of it i said you know does anyone

like would let anyone like to speak to me one-on-one and i would love to hear more about your individual stories and a couple hands went up and then uh i talked to those guys and then word spread spread to a rehab center um that you know meg wasn't a like a like a normal journalist she was like a white yemeni and kind of doors opened up. And I wound up interviewing over 150 of these guys. Of that 150, only 30 were interested in doing the project. Of that 30, only 12 were interested in doing the project without having their face blurred or being disguised.

And for me, it was imperative to be able to have the audience look these men in the eyes to have that kind of like understanding and human connection. So, yeah, it was a myriad of like slumdog millionaire moments all put together and then luck, if that makes sense, of getting access to this place. It's amazing. Like the footage, my jaw dropped as I was watching it. Like, it's incredible what goes on at this facility, right? Because it's like, well, how do you rehab someone who's an accused terrorist or even in some cases an admitted terrorist? How do these guys came from Gitmo? And they'd been fighting on the battlefield Qaeda, somebody who's like a trained pit bull trained to hurt others and get the dog to no longer attack. Right. And it's honestly a lot of what I would say in terms of the rehab program. And this is something that surprised me and I think surprised a lot of people when they watch it. So I was expecting to go there and it just be religious classes but a lot of these guys who are coming from guantanamo um went in when they were like you know went to guantanamo when they were like teenagers or

early 20s and they'd been there for 15 years and so a lot of these classes are not like yes there's classes to teach them about the religion and de-radicalize them but there are also classes on like counseling to treat their ptsd from guantanamo or other things like teaching them how to survive in the world we have now. Like what is the internet? Because when these guys went into Guantanamo, there was no Facebook, there was no Google. And so they don't realize like the change that the world has had. So it's not just rehabilitating their idea of what Islam is and what jihad is. It's also kind of giving them life skills so when they leave the center they can actually function in the in the current world in terms of you know they

teach there's classes there that where they kind of teach them how to find a wife right because a lot of these guys are quite old for being single in their world and i don't know if there's there's a clip i think i sent you where um there's a class and in this class standby let me show it let me show you this is one of my favorites like this is the the teacher uh speaking to the those who are in the therapy they're the would-be reformed jihadists about um how one this is the woman studies class just fyi oh this is woman studies okay here let's play it 17. oh no this is not it this is that's a different one this is a sorry about that do we have that one cut you guys no we didn't have that one cut all right but i'm going to tell you what this guy said because actually it's an arabic and the clip we do have

and he he says as follows and meg does captions on the screen during the movie, so you won't need me when you actually watch the film. He says, these three parts are what Sigmund Freud talked about in his psychoanalysis. This is a long lecture, so focus on this. Maybe there's a topic that Muhammad and I will differ on. It's not like if your opinion was different than my opinion, that I would grab a gun and shoot you, because your opinion isn't right. I respect your opinion and you respect my opinion. There must be respect and acknowledgement between people. I have to tell you, Meg, I absolutely love that clip. That's the it. Like, okay. So they do color there. They do art therapy. They do. They get the guys swimming. They

take them camping. They play charades. They talk about how to treat women. But they also say if there's a disagreement, you don't take out your gun and not going to ascribe to the same beliefs that you do. And just because if I'm going to disagree with you, does that mean I'm going to pull out a gun and shoot you? And so it's teaching them how to have conversations with people that they disagree with and teaching them critical thinking skills. And the marriage class, the other clip, is him trying to give them advice on how to find a wife and what to look for when you're when you're finding when you're looking for a wife and it's things that you really wouldn't expect to see in a rehab center and again these these say he says like dress nicely for her he's teaching these guys like dress nice make yourself look good make yourself smell good i wish you had that i thought i said it to you i wish you had that i might have been in arabic some of the ones in arabic we didn't cut because it's you know hard on radio um. Yeah. So basically the marriage class and the interpersonal skills class, and there's a class where they teach them how to make a budget.

So some of the guys, so I should back up here. The reason why there's four characters in the film is after interviewing about 150 of these guys, I started to see a pattern. And they would, not all of them, but the majority of them would fall into one of four categories, right, in terms of the motivation. The first one, I think, that most Americans are familiar with is the cause, right? So that would be Abu Ghanim in the film where he talks about seeing Muslims being persecuted and killed in Bosnia. And he felt compelled to go and protect Muslims and defend his fellow Muslims. So he left Yemen and went to go fight in Bosnia.

And that is the main kind of idea that most people have about why people join this group. It's like they think it's a religious duty. But when I talked to them, a lot of them had nothing to do with the religion. So for example, Nader, um he was having hard time finding work and making a living and someone offered him to basically and he basically became a career jihadist where he would get like al-qaeda and these groups they actually pay and they give you a stipend and they give you houses and stuff like that and so for him it was economic necessity and the next motivation that i found a pattern for was peer pressure. So that was Ali, where his brother was in this. His brother,

one of the characters in the film, their brother was an instructor at Al-Farouk training camp and then became a leader in Al-Qaeda. And he kind of pressured his brother into going to this training camp. And then the last motivation is mostly age dependent dependent of the younger guys sense of adventure and that's muhammad where he you know says you know i was young and i was bored and i didn't want to go to school and this guy offered me a ticket to go to yemen and shoot rockets and so like yeah like i was 19 years old and um so all those four different causes you know the car the or four motivations the cause um economic necessity peer pressure and sense of adventure and um i mean there's exceptions but those are most of the reasons why you know guys

talked about joining these groups and there was also a definitely undertone of like wanting a sense of belonging and wanting to find a sense of purpose but what's really interesting to me is when you know i have a lot of friends in the military, and I had a lot of friends tell me that they joined up after 9-11, which that's the same thing as joining for the cause. You want to defend your country. I had a lot of friends who live in states and places where the military is a really good job with benefits and whatnot. That's economic necessity. A lot of friends of mine went into the military to help pay for college. Again, economic necessity. And then I had friends of mine-

Not everybody is thinking holy war and fight the infidel. Some are like, I need three meals a day and my brother's in it and saying it's a good organization. And you point out in the film that they intentionally go after the 15 to 25-year-old set because they're young and influential, easily influenced, I should say. And it starts to make sense. Here's a question I have for you. I think I shared with you that one of my friends was over and watching part of it with me. And she was like, and this is hardcore Trump supporter, you know, MAGA. And her response was, am I supposed to feel sorry for them? Because I'm starting to feel sorry for them. I don't want to feel sorry for them, but I am starting to feel sorry for them.

And it raised an interesting point, right? Because it's like, you definitely humanize these guys. And you point out on the screen what they were accused of doing at Gitmo, also that they were never actually tried or convicted of said things. But you sort of catch yourself saying, wait a minute, I feel sorry for him until I remember that this guy was captured on the battlefield trying to kill our guys and maybe did kill our guys. And then the charades and the art therapy and all that other stuff starts to seem far less cute. Right. So how do you reconcile those two things? Yeah, when we were talking before, and I was talking to different motivations, when I had those conversations with guys, and I like saw the kind of commonalities between the men that joined this armed group of terrorists and men that wanted to go and join the military to

see the world for the adventure or pay for school or because they thought that wanted to go and join the military to see the world for the adventure or pay for school or because they thought they wanted to defend their country or because they're come from a military family right and everyone else in their family is is part of this and what i realized that it wasn't about good and evil but it was about time and circumstance right and so i think when you're talking about watching the film and being very conflicted, at times you feel very empathetic for the guys. And at times they say things that really piss you off and that really, you really like, like take you in a place where you're just like, no, that's not right. And I think for me, it was imperative to show the complexity of their situation and the complexity of who they are. Right. Because at the same time, you know, there's this very famous Dostoevsky quote that says,

the easiest thing in the world is to denounce the evildoer. The most difficult thing in the world is to try to understand him. And for me, that's what this film was trying to do because, you know, we, as I was making this film, it reminded me of this story my dad told me when I was younger about starfish. And he said there was this fishing village that had a problem with invasive starfish. And one day, all the fishermen got together and decided to, like, kill all the starfish. So they collected them up, cut them up into three, four, five pieces, not thinking they were dead. They threw those pieces back into the ocean. And what inevitably happened is the starfish,

because starfish regenerate, the starfish population exploded. There was one starfish before, now there are five, and it just devastated the local fishing economy. The moral of the story being, when you try to fix a problem you do not understand, you usually make it worse. And the day after 9-11, most experts put the number of Al-Qaeda members around 400. And when I started making this film, 2016, 17, those same experts

put the number at around 100,000, if you include a lot of the Al Qaeda affiliate groups. And so basically, the United States have starfished the shit out of the Middle East the last two decades, because we don't understand these men and we don't understand their motivation. And I think that what I was trying to do with this film is just be able to create a piece of work where we can really understand these men on a human level and all their complexities with all their different it's not about creating empathy it's about creating understanding and so that we don't keep making the same mistakes and yeah and even if you're like here or elsewhere yeah and even if you're like a even if you're a person who is very kind of um like i have friends of mine who are in the military who watched this film.

And it was a really well-known vet had watched this film and messaged me and said that he would never admit this to anyone, but he missed war. And he missed, he didn't miss the fighting or anything like that. He missed the camaraderie and the brotherhood and the sense of purpose. And he said, since he got back to the United States, he hadn't found that. And then until he saw my film, he hadn't seen that. And what was really disarming for him is that he saw the thing that he said. He's like, I realized after watching your film that I had way more in common with the men in your film and the people that I was fighting and the people who actually sent me to war. And what I mean by that is like, he was saying that like, when you saw the film,

it was very healing for him because he'd always kind of like wondered who these men were and who these men were that he was sent to kill and seeing this film and the impact on him. And also I would say like the impact on the Yemeni community who've been able to like both help with the film and watch it because my executive producer is yemeni and he kept on saying you know one of the reasons i got involved in this project is because you talk about things that are really important to the yemeni community and people you know being from yemen being thrown in guantanamo mass yemen being bombed and he's like i look at the mainstream media and people are talking about syria and people are talking about

Syria and they're talking about the Ukraine, but no one ever talks about Yemen. Everyone always ignores Yemen. And so it's really interesting for me to have those two groups, the Yemeni community and the vet community watch this film and both respond to it in very positive, very different ways. We had Dakota Meyer on the program. We've had've had him on a couple times but we did an in-depth piece on him that we aired on memorial day and um he talked about the moment where he was saving all those guys uh our afghan brothers in arms and his own um american troops that he was serving with and he talked about this moment where he got into this sort of one-on-one fight with uh one of the bad guys with a gun and it was dakota or this guy and he got into this sort of one-on-one fight with one of the bad guys with a gun and it was Dakota or this guy and he had the thought like this may not be an evil guy you know

like this guy's doing what I'm doing he's here kind of for the reasons I'm here um but it was a him or me situation and you know he he fought for his life But it was a very it was a it was a great startling and very telling admission from one of our most respected and decorated veterans next in terms of getting this film out there and getting people to actually see it since it's been blackballed by those in charge. the father, my wife. Then he asked me, do you have the wife? I say no. He said, okay, I have the female. I have my daughters. She cute, you know, and talk to her. She didn't know about censor. center. You know it's a different age, I'm 35, 19. I'm kind of looking for my new life. So I can see my children in school, I can take care about my new family. This is what I think now, you

know. Would it be okay to film your wife? No, no, no, no. Never. Never. For me. It's not good to take the picture of the women. The arc of the storyline for Mohammed and others is somewhat heartbreaking. They changed leadership. They had a change of leadership in Saudi Arabia and the center, which was rehabbing terrorists from Saudi Arabia, accused terrorists from Yemen. Now, suddenly, Yemenis were not allowed to work in Saudi Arabia. And so these guys who went through the whole rehab and they all talk in the film about how the importance of staying busy, how they understand how important it is to stay busy, to get a job, to get a wife, to have a full life so you don't

get pulled back into this other life. And now effectively, they can't, because they're Yemenis, and they can't leave Saudi Arabia. So they have to stay in Saudi Arabia, they can't work. And we can see even in our own country, how that doesn't lead to good things. You know, young men who aren't allowed to get jobs or can't get jobs, it doesn't lead to anything good here, it would be crime there, it could be terrorism. And so anyway anyway meg does a great job of bringing you the personal stories of these guys and shows you of course we don't know the end result but shows you the struggles that they face because of their own backgrounds and

because of where they live and because of the lives that they're living um i thought it was very it was heart-wrenching the whole story story, my God, you feel anger, you feel empathy, you feel conflicted, you wrestle with your own feelings, as I said before. And when it showed at Sundance, people were floored by it, floored by it. Your executive producer, one of them, Abigail Disney, I know sent you an email saying it's freaking brilliant, freaking brilliant. And that was before the left wing started to freak out and say, not freaking brilliant. This is about, quote, white savior tendencies, yours, I guess, saying that it's Islamophobic, that it pushes American propaganda, and that they, this is Abigail Disney's description of the backlash. I failed, failed, and absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists the Muslim people are. That was a failure of empathy and respect on my part and therefore the gravest of failures. So in no way does this film suggest all Muslim people are terrorists or potential terrorists. It takes a look at one group that was accused of being terrorists that was at Gitmo

and talks about the rehab center and the way forward. That's what this film does. Were you stunned by how this Islamophobic narrative started to take over as soon as the film hit? Yes and no. And what I mean by that is, so you have to understand that the attacks on the film

didn't start at the actual festival. After people saw the film, the attacks on the film started before anyone had seen it. And so for example, the announcement went on, I think December 9th of last year, and the film didn't play until like six weeks, almost two months later. I think it was January 22nd. And so in that time, you know, the amount of vitriol and anger that was directed this film that no one had seen and no one had met me. And it was really, really shocking because we'd done so many screenings before Sundance. And we with the Muslim community, we had guards at Guantanamo. We had MAGA people. And it was really, really shocking because we'd done so many screenings before Sundance. And we, with the Muslim community, we had guards at Guantanamo, we had MAGA people, we had really liberal people.

We really did a lot of test screenings because we knew that this was such an important topic to get right. But also that the film was going to be probably attacked, but we thought from the alt-right. And so we're preparing for that. But when the attacks initially came, I actually understood it at first because no one had seen the film and they saw that there was this non-Muslim white woman who made a film about terrorism. And they thought probably that it was like every other film about terrorism. That is very sensationalistic. That is very fear mongering. That does reinforce negative stereotypes. And I think that they, because they hadn't seen it they assumed that this was the the case and so those initial you know accusations of film were from a place that i

actually understood because what you have to realize is when when someone has that much hate and that much anger and vitriol uh for a piece of work as a film that they've never seen or a person like me that they've never met. One thing that I learned in the fire service is, so for example, I went on a call once and this kid had really seriously injured his hand and we showed up and the mom was crying and the kid was bleeding out, but the father was irately mad. And we show up and he starts yelling at us like, where the fuck have you been? You're so fucking incompetent. I'm like, whoa, dude. And he was just really hammering into this the entire time we were trying to help this kid. We finally got the kid patched up and we put him in the ambulance. And when they were out of earshot, one of the firefighters said, you know, that guy's fucking lucky I didn't deck him. And then my captain, because he was an older and wiser man than we were, turned around and had this, this is about to be a teachable moment, look on his face. And he said, listen, you have to understand in this job, you're exposed to people who are going

through the worst traumatic moment of their lives. And even though this man was angry at you and he was yelling at you and he was furious at you and he was furious at you it wasn't about you and what he said it's like everyone processes trauma differently everyone um you know some people cry some people laugh and some people get angry and this man was angry and that's how he was processing trauma and so to your point what i mean by that to your point i just want to tell the audience that more than 200 230 filmmakers signed a letter denouncing the documentary. A majority had not seen it. So, I mean, that's the point you're making.

Yeah. And I think that the reason why there was so much vitriol is, I will say for this, like, you know, a person I consider my sister is Muslim. And she's told me over the years about her experience in the United States being a Muslim woman who wears the hijab. And having that experience over the last 20 years is a type of trauma. And so when these people lashed out at me, at first, I was actually quite, I understood it. So I was like, oh, like, if you're a Muslim in this country and have experienced this kind of bigotry for the last 20 years, and then you see a film about terrorism at Sundance, it's supposed to be this progressive liberal place. You assume it's like all the other films about terrorism at Sundance. It's supposed to be this progressive liberal place. You assume

it's like all the other films about terrorism. Of course, that makes sense that people would lash out at this film. But they stayed mad even after they saw it. It's not like they saw it and said we've changed everything. They did see it, but that's what I will say. That's what I originally thought. I changed my mind later when I found out more information. But what I wanted to say, because I know we don't have that much time left, is two things. One is that the reason we're talking right now and the reason why people in the States are even aware of this film, just other than the New York Times articles, because there's been a group that has helped. They helped me make a screening in the United States.

They paid for me to screen the film in la and from that screening a lot of words spread about the film and what it was and what it wasn't and that was a group called fair for all and um i think you're familiar with them i just want to give them a shout out because i have done two interviews i keep on forgetting to do it no no no fair is awesome and they stood up for you but what's been so disheartening is how even after people have seen this now they're accusing you i mean the woman who ran sundance she came up with all sorts of roadblocks for you saying i need to see the consent forms from the detainees i need to see your plan to protect them now they've come out and said that two of the four um men featured were not aware that the film was being released.

There's been a lot of false misleading information put out into the world, especially from this one group called CAGE. And you could Google them and see who they are. It's like CARE, only with former... No, no. So CAGE is a group in the united in the uk um and how it was described to me is it's a group of former guantanamo detainees and it's an activist group and um i didn't know who cage was and so how they were described to me when i met uh when i talked with people who knew about them they said this group attacks any they're trying to push a narrative

that everyone in guantanamo was innocent and never did anything wrong and yeah no one was charged but there were people not one time who did do stuff and obviously you can see that in my film yeah um but like they will attack any book or any film that challenges yeah so it's no surprise that they're mad they'll yeah they'll what about what about the specific allegation mag that is it true for just for the record that two of the four were not aware the film was being released publicly and they said one said one they all they claim one told you he didn't want to be featured in the film at all that's what that's the allegation no no one ever told me they they wanted me to take them out of the film we had one guy stop filming with us and that was abu ghanim in the film and basically

i he was the most of all the four guys he was one that was most eager to join the project because he wanted to send a message. When he talks in the film, the whole reason he did the film is because he wanted to let people know what happened to him with Guantanamo, how horrible the American government was to them and how hypocritical they were. And once he finished delivering that message, he didn't want to talk about anything else. And so all these other questions I kept on asking him, he was like, I don't want to talk about anything else and so all these other questions i kept on asking him he's like i don't want to talk about that and then he's like all right i've said what i need to say i'm done he left the project yeah like never well why exactly were they so terrible to you let's what what got them so angry let's let's go back to that but i but i but i wanted to say that like you know this film i think the what i will say about all the accusations

being thrown at this film the best weapon against those accusations is just to watch the fucking film. The best defense is the film itself, because when you see it, you realize that 99% of these accusations are not true. where all this misinformation is coming from they're not good actors they're they're a group of people who said that jihadi john was a beautiful person and a nice man and and they um have a lot of uh assorted kind of history and so i think that when you're talking about the accusations on this film i would encourage people to do their due diligence and see where all this all originated from and it was a group called cage and they have an open letter about the film where they just straight up lie about it. Let's move on. Cause I only have a couple minutes left. What do you make of things like this from Jude Chahab,

a Lebanese American filmmaker who writes, um, when I, a practicing Muslim woman say that this film is problematic, my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn't point blank. Like your opinion that it isn't. Point blank. Like, your opinion that it's fine isn't worth much because you're not Muslim, notwithstanding

the fact that your executive producer, one of them, may be. Yeah, I think that, you know, when you make a film and you put it out into the world, part of the process is you're going to get criticism and people are going to go on Twitter and disagree with you. And that's fine. And I think that I'm okay with. But there's a difference between tweeting something like that and then hiring lawyers to intimidate investors and executive producers off the project and intimidating and bullying people and things like that. And I think for me, like, I'm okay. Like if Jude believes that, then that's, that's her right to believe in her right to express. And I encourage people to have those kinds of dialogues. I would love to sit down with her and say like, Hey, like

having, I'm, you know, having never been to this rehab center and having never been to Saudi Arabia and have me having been there for three years, making this film and having experts on this film who is a Pulitzer Prize winning bestselling author. He watched the film. And I think that, to my knowledge, he's not Muslim. And I think the conversation is something that I would love to have with Jude. I think that criticism is something that I welcome. People without an agenda have given it rave reviews. Zaid Jelani, who we know and like and has been on the show, said this is about compassion, not bigotry. RogerEbert.com, incredible. IndieWire, an undeniably vital film. Film Companion, nothing less than extraordinary. Atlantic Journal Constitution points out number one film at Sundance this year. Variety calls it thought provoking, miracle, and an interrogative act of defiance. I could go on. Even Lorraine Ali, a television critic for the LA Times who is Muslim, says this is a humanizing journey through a complex emotional process of self-reckoning

and accountability. Last thing before I let you go, how can people help you if they want to support your film? Make if they want to see the film, because I know you have no money. You don't come from family dough. You're trying to get it distributed since everybody's canceled you. How can they do that, Meg? Yeah. So I, like I said, don't come from money and I'm trying to self-distribute the film now, but that takes resources. So I made a GoFundMe page. And if you go to my website, jihadrehab.com and hit donate, that will take you to the GoFundMe page. And hopefully we're going to get money together to make a trailer and get a poster and hopefully put it in a couple of theaters so people can go and see the film and make up their own mind. And yeah,

I really looking forward to hopefully getting the film out into the world. Can they see it yet? Can they see it? Like if they go to jihadrehab.com is their way to see it online yet or no, not yet. No, not, not yet, but it will be playing this month, October, because we were able to, FAIR helped me out and they were able to sponsor a screening in LA, actually in Glendale this coming month. So for the week of October 28th, starting October 28th, for one week, it will be playing at the Lemley in Glendale. And it's like the only place you're going to

be able to see it in the entire world. Cause that's all we can afford. Only place for now. I feel like this film will see the light of day. It will get distributed, distributed once people given an honest look and thank you for coming on and talking about it and for taking the deep dive. I learned a lot and I appreciate it. Thank you,

Megan. Appreciate it. All the best. Don't forget to find out more at jihad rehab.com. This film is fascinating and will definitely be a conversation starter. Thanks for joining us today. Tomorrow, Tulsi Gabbard is here. She has left the Democratic Party, but she is back right here.

She has not left us. You're not going to want to miss that. In the meantime, oh, and by the way, Kelly's Court. We've got a lot to go over. Meantime, download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, or Stitcher at youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. You can watch if you would like. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.