The Megyn Kelly Show - Meghan Markle's Rise and Lies, and Stacey Abrams' Vulnerabilities, with Mike Rowe and Greg Bluestein | Ep. 415

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Megyn Kelly begins the show with a monologue detailing the many lies of the "Duchess of Duplicity" Meghan Markle. Then Mike Rowe, host and producer of "Dirty Jobs" and "How America Works," to talk about how our culture is to blame for Meghan Markle's rise and current persona, her combination of narcissism and victimhood, the value of hard work, MSNBC saying January 6 was worse than 9/11, the obsession with college over learning a trade, the alarming number of young men not working today, technology hurting our culture, bathroom stories and bathroom humor, and more. Then Greg Bluestein, reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and co-host of the "Politically Georgia" podcast, joins to take a deep dive into Georgia's senate and gubernatorial races, how Black and Latino voters are turning toward the GOP and away from the Dems, Stacey Abrams' vulnerabilities, Herschel Walker's name recognition and power in Georgia, Walker's policy credentials being questioned, the very real possibility of a runoff, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. The many lies of Megyn Markle. That is the subject of today's Talking Points. Megyn Markle lies, regularly. More than most people, about a lot. Yes, you can go back to the Oprah interview for many examples. She and Harry secretly married three days before their actual wedding. No. Her baby wasn't going to be a prince because of his race. No. She had her passport taken away by the palace. False. Palace HR dismissed her suicidal pleas for help on and on and on it goes remember how she swore she had absolutely no contact with the writers of that fawning book finding freedom

about mexit compare those statements with her statements to the british courts where she was forced to admit to the judge that whoops she, she forgot she 100% was in contact with the authors of Finding Freedom, a fact obvious to anyone who read that boot-looking embarrassment of a publication. She lies so often she's had to hire a new publicity team now to help work on her image and a fact checker for her Spotify podcast, which is rather amusing when you consider the falsehoods broadcast there so far have all been about her. What's the fact checker going to do? I'm sorry, madam. It's appeared that you've lied about yourself again.

Best of luck to the fact checker working for the Duchess of Duplicity. No, Duchess, the South African actor in the British Lion King production did not tell you that he celebrated your wedding with others in the streets in the way they celebrated Nelson Mandela being freed. No, madam, your baby did not almost die in a fire while you were on an overseas trip. There was some smoke from a heater and your son was nowhere near the room. Markle's latest lie came from her podcast that she did with Paris Hilton yesterday. It relates to Markle's time on the game show Deal or No Deal back when she was about 25 years old and an aspiring actress in Hollywood. Now, any normal person who was on that show and later married a prince would probably say, oh, it was super fun and it opened up a lot of doors for me and I'm very grateful.

Not Meghan Miss the Markle, now that she's in her $15 million mansion in Montecito, which, despite her claiming that Harry saw the place and its intertwined palm trees out front and said to her, they're us, my love. Thus resulting in the purchase, the lovebirds have now reportedly decided is utterly insufficient to their needs and they're getting a new one. But anyway, now sitting with those palm trees blowing in the breeze in front of them with the benefit, I guess, of 2020 hindsight, I suppose, she now sees her time on that show as exploitative. Specifically, she claims that she now objects to how she was objectified on the show. Before the tapings of the show, all the girls, we would line up and there were different stations for having your lashes put on or your extensions put in or the padding in your bra. We were even given spray tan vouchers each week because there was a very cookie cutter

idea of precisely what we should look like. It was solely about beauty and not necessarily about brains. And when I look back at that time, I will never, I'll never forget this one detail because moments before we'd get on stage, there was a woman who ran the show and she would be there backstage and I can still hear her. She couldn't properly pronounce my last name at the time and I knew who she was talking to because she would go, Markel, suck it in. Markel, suck it in. I was thankful for the job, but not for how it made me feel, which was not smart. And by the way, I was surrounded by smart women on that stage with me, but that wasn't the focus of why we were there. And I would end up leaving with this pit in my stomach, knowing that I was so much more than what was being objectified on the stage. I didn't like feeling forced to be all looks and little substance. Oh my God. So much to dissect here. First, the laughable notion that she did not know what she was getting herself into when she took a job in which one's only mission is to look

tan, wear false eyelashes, and wear a skimpy shiny dress while opening a suitcase. As if she was shocked, shocked to find out that suitcase number 24 did not actually have the nuclear codes in it, which needed her deciphering. That she wasn't going to be discussing Alzheimer's and the chromosomal missegregation caused by the amyloid beta peptide. She knew exactly what she was getting herself into on that job. And it was no surprise to her that they wanted her to look as good as possible while doing it. What she is trying to con us on now is whether she enjoyed it. She loved every minute of it. She wanted to be objectified. She wanted the adulation just like she still wants it to this day. Miss I Just Want My Privacy now has a podcast, a Netflix show about her in production, a bio coming out by her spouse that's about to hit the shelves.

She gave a lengthy interview to The Cut of New York Magazine just the other week, worked with the authors of that book, as I just mentioned, and just today was on the cover of Variety. The princess of privacy is actually desperate, desperate for publicity to be noticed, to matter in a way she never did while suitcase girl number 24 or while acting on the cable show Suits. And the way you know, the way you know she never really minded the objectification that now makes her such a victim is by what she did after Deal or No Deal. In her podcast, she stoically says, I quit after a year. Things were so rough. All the opening and closing and opening and closing. Sometimes a little suitcase latch must have gotten stuck. Can you imagine? Mike Rowe is coming up in a minute. Talk about dirty jobs. The horror this poor woman suffered as they put the mascara on her. Anyway, what did she do after she fled this

horrible objectifying job? Did she run for Senate, go to law school, volunteer at a senior citizen facility? No. She started a website in which she posted half naked pictures of herself to celebrate her before then going to work on suits in which she regularly appeared in her underwear. Was that objectification? Maybe it's only objectification like if you're carrying a suitcase. Flight attendants of the world, beware. Suitcase in hand and approving looks come your way. Bimbo, slut. Once you stow the bag, hike the skirt and enjoy the leering. Why is she lying about this? Why? Why can't she just say, I'm so grateful to those producers who helped make me look amazing night

after night and gave me my start in acting? Because it's more important to her to be a victim. The same theme of every single one of her podcasts and of her life. Find successful, empowered women, reduce them to their lowest moments, and then claim to have taught a lesson about how terrible and especially sexist America is. See, I can relate too, because the evil woman at Deal or No Deal told me to suck my stomach in. The job was to be a model. If you don't want to be told to suck in your stomach at the office, go work at a bank, get a law degree, do something else, but don't join the beauty business and then claim you were exploited by people who didn't care for your thoughts on inflation.

It's the same thing she did to the royal family. Same thing. Sign up for a job you know damn well is going to require certain things of you. And then play the victim when they do require those things. I had to walk behind Kate. I lost my voice. In both cases, she knew exactly what she was getting herself into. But rather than just be honest about it, she's always morally superior. This is one of the most privileged women on the planet. She was building a career as an actress. It was a middling career, but she was getting a

steady paycheck. She seemed to be enjoying it. She then set her sights on several rich, famous British men to marry as a means of taking her D-list fame to the next level. They all rejected her. This is all laid out in Tom Bauer's book, Revenge and Other Books. Then she landed the motherlode, Prince Harry. She moved onto the palace grounds, was given a staff and security. She wore crown jewels at her wedding, at which George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey and the Queen sat supportively looking at her. And she still, still wants to play the poor me card. The royal family was racist toward me. Mariah Carey called me a diva. Me. I was treated like a bimbo by deal or no deal. You see, I can still be your embattled survivor, a feminist icon, a triumphant queen. Except she's not. And she knows she's not. She's not

special. She's not a feminist icon. She gave up everything for a man, her country, her religion, her career, her family, her friends. She did it because she's a social climber. That was more important to her. And when she was outed for the conniving, manipulative, empty suit she is, she lashed out, claimed she wanted privacy and moved to Montecito, dragging the prince out of the royal family with her. This woman is a fraud and people get it. A poll this past summer showed the majority of Americans now disapprove of Meghan Markle. Another poll showed just 26% of Brits approve of her. It's not something a new publicity team can solve, nor can any fact checker. Only Meghan Markle can solve it. Stop the nonsense. Stop with the obsessive

image crafting. We don't feel sorry for you. Take a step back. Be quiet for a while and do something meaningful that is not about you. Then maybe we will feel inspired to do something other than mock you. Mike Rowe is an executive producer and an Emmy award-winning host. So happy to have him back on the program. Mike Rowe, welcome back. Megan, that was awesome. I'm just sitting here wondering if you have any thoughts on Megan Markle. You are the perfect guest out of this segment. You've spent your life immersing yourself in, quote, dirty jobs and amongst the great Americans who happily, willingly, patriotically perform them, with nary a complaint, usually, about having to do them. This woman is on television back in these

tough, tough 25-year-old days in front of millions of people, with people adorning her with accoutrements to make her look special and fabulous. And even now as a princess wants us to feel sorry for her. You poor thing. Oh my God. And you walk through a storm, keep your head held high. Right? I get it.

You know what? You should have taken it one click further. I mean, she's really close, I think, to seeing her name sort of turned into a verb. And you could do it, right? To commit a Markle, to be guilty of a Markle, right, needs to become something. I don't know what exactly it is. about her like that it i was struck by the the one thing that 95 of all effective liars have in common is an audience who really wants to believe them and so you know i i really i don't know what to say in the wake of her ascendancy other than she was ordained.

You know, to some degree, she was ordained by George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey. And to a larger extent, she was ordained by us. We watched. We looked. We bared witness. And now we're just wondering wondering what exactly did we witness? Right. Right. What did we buy exactly? What is it we signed on for? You know, there was a moment where the Brits and we saw Megan and Harry and she seemed demure.

That was what she was playing. She was projecting demure and the faithful partner. And it was like, oh, that's so sweet good for harry you know we all loved harry it's like the forgotten heir or spare and um then all hell broke loose you know then like her incessant narcissism and need for attention and need to cause drama all of it started to manifest and people started to see the real her and i do wonder like i don't think anybody's really listening to the podcast. People talk about how it's number one on Spotify. That just shows the number of people who are signing up, like new people have clicked on it. People like me who are just going to

talk about it in the news. I don't know who her fan base is, but I do wonder what makes someone with all of her many gifts so in love with victimhood, so adherent to it, so incapable of moving past it, or just simply inventing it where it doesn't exist? You know, I mean, I'm not a shrink, but if I were to put it on the couch, I would just say that for whatever reason, the synapses fire in a sequence that allows that feeling to feel good. It feels good. We can train ourselves to feel good about virtually any activity. And you mentioned dirty jobs, and that was a big lesson from that show. Job satisfaction really doesn't have a whole lot to do with the job, or at least not nearly as much as we ascribe to it. People can be miserable in any line of work. People can be happy in any line of work. And the amount of grace you

find in a septic tank technician is really no different than the amount of grace you might find with any given celebrity or any given royal or any given politician. We have it within our purview to control that which makes us happy. And a lot of people feel happy when, not just when the light is shown on them. It's not just narcissism, although that's certainly a thing. It's a combination of narcissism and victimhood and I think just the speed with which the cycle unfolds. Every day, we need to see something new. Every day. And she serves it up. She's part of the cobble that serves up that stuff on the menu that some people find appetizing. But what can you say? There's no accounting for taste. There are plenty of people out there who can't believe Dirty Jobs has been on the air for 20 years. And some days I'm among them too. But I know if I said to you, Mike, give me your top five. You give me five off the top of your head, I'm sure.

Five guys doing jobs that aren't necessarily doing a podcast from a palace out in Montecito who have had to overcome a lot in their lives and have an attitude of being grateful, of being glad to be here, being thankful for the opportunity. You could do it in a second, in a second, right? It's like, that's what's inspirational to Americans. That's what people get moved by. Well, a lot do, right? But look, here's the trap for you and me and everybody in a position that has some kind

of platform and has some measure of, of influence. It's, it's so tempting to paint with a broad brush, right? It's so tempting to, to make a proclamation. I, if I've learned anything at this point in my life, it's that two, three, sometimes four things are all true at the same time. And the fact is, there are many people in this country who are still inspired by an attitude of gratitude. And there are many people in this country who are inspired by other attitudes. And so I never really know who's listening. I'm rarely sure exactly to whom I'm speaking, but you and I are on the same page. My foundation awards work ethic scholarships. I have a 12-point sweat pledge that you have to

sign in order to apply for money to be trained. And the very first tenant on that sweat pledge says, I believe I have hit the greatest lottery of all time. I live in the United States. I am free. I am grateful above all things. And if you can't agree to that, then I personally can't help you. We talked about this two years ago. I get in arguments every year. Parents usually call and say, wait a minute, why does my kid have to sign this thing in order to get a scholarship from your foundation? And I said, because I said so. And they say, well, what do you mean because you said so? And I'm like, look, no harm, no foul. It's just that if your kid's not grateful, if your kid isn't interested in having a conversation about basic work ethic, delayed gratification, a decent attitude, then madam, this particular pile of free money is probably not for you. Right.

But that's all there is to it it's like that the the her pretending that oh my god this job is solely about beauty it's like so false like like it's like christy turlington in victoria's secret like oh my god i'm just now realizing they want to look at my body. Like, what is she talking about? Right. I guess, you know, you want to eat your cake and you still want to have it. You want to be able to elevate certain principles, certain virtues, but at the same time, you want to embrace certain vices. You know, it's part of the human time, you you want to embrace certain vices. You know, it's it's part of the human condition.

You know, I actually don't think virtue and vice are or as opposite as we think. You know, I think the two sides of the same coin. Right. Nor is there any shame in being a model or being in the beauty business, like doing something that, you know, self promotional in that way or, you know, where you're open about wanting people to look at you for a living? I look at most of these models and I'm like, if I looked like that, I'd want people to pay to look at me too. I did the same thing, but in oppositeville. The first season of Dirty Jobs 20 years ago, we labeled feces from every species because we went through this giant scatological romp where I was just literally either crawling through a sewer or in a septic tank or covered with some matter of effluvium.

And, you know, people were like, gosh, this is so exploitative. I'm like, what are you talking about? Exploitative. You're like, well, it's just, I mean, you just seem obsessed with this one thing. I'm like, well, you're watching, right? Millions and millions of people are watching a B-list celebrity crawl through a river of crap with a guy who makes his living in that very river. And we're learning some things about who this guy is and what's important to him. And we're learning about his job. But, you know, I did what I had to do in that first season. I had to embrace something that frankly was the opposite of fashion, but it was still a construct. It was still a thing. And on Dirty Jot, you know,

by the time we got to season two, feces from every species gave way to this incredible obsession with animal husbandry, wherein I coaxed the sperm from virtually all creatures great and small and then artificially inseminated them on camera and this oh god you know horrified people it's like some sort of i don't even want to i should we pause at coaxed the sperm from all the species you know megan it we all have to approach the task in our own way. I like to think of it as coaxing, you know, didn't always work. Sometimes you have to light a candle. Sometimes tell them a story. How high do you pull the dress up there, Mike?

You know, look, you do what you have to do. Sometimes you have to show a little leg, right? Sometimes you do. Yeah. But, but it's, you know, our industry, we, we all have to decide what's authentic. We all have to decide what we're selling, right? And if we, if we can at least latch on to something that's, that's, that's steadfast, something that we know is going to be, like you said, gratitude, that will come in and out of favor, but we're going to live long enough to see it come back into favor. I'm sure of it. Fashion has its moments. Victimhood is having a pretty good run right now. Narcissism, right there, neck and neck with it. So all these things, I think, are constantly at war, right? They're always out there and society is always free to glom on to this, that, or the other. And we're just in a time right now where there's a lot of gloaming,

a lot of coaxing, as you would say. Many people committing Markles right and left. Yeah. Markle to Markle to be a Markle or to Markle some. Like he pulled a Markle is from the height of privilege to claim victimhood. That's what it is. It's done. That smells like a Markle. Do you smell that?

That was definitely season one. Dirty Jones. I smell a Markle. Can I tell you? I'm desperate to connect Meghan Markle. Do you smell that? That was definitely season one, Dirty Jobs. I smell a Markle. Can I tell you? I'm desperate to connect Meghan Markle with my stepfather. My stepfather worked a dirty job for his entire life. He was a plumber. And he never graduated from high school.

Never mind go to college. But he has more wisdom than Meghan Markle will ever have in the course of her, I hope, long life. And this is what I know he would tell her because he uses this line sometimes. When you're born, God gives you a shit pie. And every once in a while, you got to eat a piece of it. All right. Boom. Done. I need to talk to this guy. I mean, I've been saying a version of that. It's also in the sweat pledge. Like life, you know, somebody is going to hand you a shit sandwich at some point, maybe every day, maybe once a week, maybe once a month, whatever. And when that happens, you're either going to bite it or you're going to go, ew, that's not for me. And that is going to inform a whole lot of things that happen in your life after that. You know, there are people who still volunteer for every crappy job there is. They come in early, they stay light, they stay late, they take a bite of the poop sandwich when it's their turn.

Those people are having a pretty good run right now. Those people are in demand like never before. And I think it's because they are fewer than they've ever been in number. So again, you get to choose. Work ethic is important to me because unlike your eye color or your basic looks or your ethnicity or your star sign or your blood type or any other thing, this is something you can control. You can choose to be Meghan Markle. You can choose to be your dad or your stepdad or whoever you're talking about. You can make, these are conscious choices and they will inform everything that happens to you. They really will. And they will predict what kind of life you have.

I mean, really, you can be somebody who's in the dirty job, who's literally surrounded in shit for a living, who chooses to look on the bright side and find pearls of wisdom when they come to you. Or you can be somebody who's living in a palace and never learn anything. All right, stand by. The wonderful Mike Rowe is staying with us. Very thrilled to have him for the show today. Don't go away. Plenty more pearls of wisdom coming your way. Mike, one of my producers found this clip from your podcast and thought it was important,

especially given what was discussed in the A Block, that you and I spent some time on it. That's the only intro I'm going to give to what we're about to listen to. Here's Mike Rowe on his airplane bathroom story. I walk into the bathroom and I swear it looked like a crap balloon had exploded. This was shameful. I mean, there was crap on the mirror. How did this happen? What happened?

Anyway, I'm standing appalled in this restroom in first class on this flight to the point where I was like obviously i'm not touching it's not none of this is my problem what i should have done is immediately left told the flight attendant that something criminal had gone down at 37 000 feet all right in the first class foul crime scene yes but i. Instead, I flushed the toilet.

There's toilet paper stuck to the back of the commode, partially used. Come on. I swear. It was awful, Chuck. There's no need to... Trust me, it was awful. Anyway, I opened the door

and standing there is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. And two things happen. Really, three things happen. The first thing is, I think she recognized me. Or if she didn't recognize me, she knew that she had seen me somewhere before. Gotcha. So you see that look of acknowledgement and awareness splashashed across her face.

And it's a beautiful face, right? And then she smiles as if to say, hey, aren't you that guy? No idea what she's in store for. Just no idea. The second thing that happens is the funk, the indescribable stench of that awful bathroom comes wafting by me

and hits her right smack in the right, right in the face. So now she's got it on her lips, too. Right now, she's dealing with this thing. Right. So that all happens in the same second. So we're going through her brain. Hey, I know that guy. Oh, my God.

That smells like the end of days. And then then then the worst thing. She cranes her head slightly to the right just to look beyond me. And she takes in everything I've just described. That's horrifying. Horrible. I know. It's so stupid.

But we just went. It was Thomas Crapper's birthday last month. The guy who many people believe invented the toilet, but actually didn't. And to celebrate it, I read a story by David Sedaris called Big Boy about a giant turd that he couldn't get down the toilet. Very funny stories in the New York decades ago. And then I told this story that just happened to me a couple of months back. And it's just, and I've gotten thousands, Megan, thousands of people writing in to tell me about some misadventure in the bathroom, some horrible failure of the O-ring upon which so much of our dignity depends. Like every adult I

know has a story about some time where they crap their pants. And my story was just the unfairness of being able to deal with somebody else's nightmare and suddenly having to take the blame. This woman, by the way, she looked like one of the Wrigley's Doublemint twins. Remember? Double your pleasure. She was so pretty. I couldn't believe how pretty she was.

I'm sitting there looking at her and thinking, gosh, you're pretty. And she's thinking, huh, I didn't think a man could make a stink like that and live. Knowing full well that some son of a bitch, somebody in first class had gone in there and done that. And so the rest of the trip is really just about me looking around for suspects. I understand. Didn't you say to her before she walked in, beware, it's awful in there. It wasn't me. Yeah, but I was, forget it, Mae.

I mean, I tried. My last words to her when she looked over my shoulder and saw that crime scene, I said, that wasn't me, right? But if you put yourself in her place, she said, that wasn't me. Right. But you have to put, but, but if you put yourself in her place, she's standing outside of the door. She hears the toilet flush. Cause like a dummy, I flushed the toilet, but I, but, but I don't clean up the rest of the place. I can't get rid of the stink. So, you know, if a guy opens the door and comes out of the bathroom, after you hear a flush, you might assume, you know, that it's on him. Here's the difference though.

Anyhow. Here's the difference between men and women. Like men can, they can pee standing up. So it's like you walk into that crime scene and you're like, I'm good. I can aim it. I don't really have to touch anything in here. I'll use my hand sanitizer and get back to my seat. A woman, it's like, especially on an airplane, you don't want to do the squat. I don't like the squat anyway. The squat ruins the toilet seat for the

rest of us. It gets the pee all over there. I've been sitting on toilet seats my whole life, even public toilet seats. I've never gotten any weird diseases. So I'm just saying it's safe and you won't fall. You don't fall in the toilet. You don't fall on somebody else's pee. Sit on the seat, but clean the seat first. But anyway, that's not an option for somebody like me. So somebody like you can stand and aim. Somebody like me, I got to clean it up. I got no choice. I go into a situation like that. You know, I had a flight attendant tell me, it's like the reason we put this thing on during turbulence isn't really because it's dangerous. It's because men who go into the restroom during turbulence don't

have a hope. I mean, you're standing there like this. You know what I mean? You're standing there and it's just like a shotgun. It's going everywhere. And guys, they just, you know, look. That actually makes sense. It's like a weapon in there, like a fire hose if we get a little turbulent. At least we're safe. We know exactly where it's going to go there's no real risk if you're sitting you're anchored it'd be a good rule actually everybody should be forced to sit when they're uh taking care of business at 37 you were also talking forgive me for staying on the toilet humor but it's just so dead on you're also talking about how on the airplane when somebody lets out some gas bomb and then the suspects start to get identified, like you look around, like who looks like slightly uncomfortable, whose stomach

is growling, you know? Right. It's like an elevator, only worse. You're, you know, because you're just completely at the mercy of your circumstance. I'll tell you what a child I am about this. Again, this is like the early seasons of Dirty Job. This is where my mind was. I found, have you seen those little fart machines? Like you can press a button. Of course, I have three children, including two boys. All right. Well, somebody had come out with one that was really portable and had a pretty good range on it. So it was a little Velcro behind it. So what I did was, I can't believe I'm telling you this. I'm on a flight coming back, I think from Cleveland and I stuck it under seat 2A. I just stuck it under there and I'm sitting back in like 5D. Okay. And I've got the remote.

This guy sits down in 2A and I wait until we're, you know, we're at altitude and everybody's kind of settled in. And I hit the little button on the remote and this thing goes and everybody snaps their head around and looks at this poor guy. He's looking around going, Hey, Hey, I don't, uh, you know, and I just, I, for whatever reason, I just tortured him the whole flight. Every 10 or 15 minutes, I hit that button. Eventually, he just got up and moved. I was going to say, you'd have to stand up and be like, somebody's messing with me. But you can't. Nobody's going to believe you.

No, right. And you're not thinking, someone put an imaginary fart machine underneath my remote control fart machine. I don't know. Who would do that? Certainly not Mike Rowe sitting back. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

I got it. That's the Markle. That's the Markle. That's the, the Markle is the thing that happened. It doesn't make any sense, but it's just a funny thing to describe. If,

if you get blamed for somebody else's mess, then somebody just, just tagged you with a Markle. He pulled a Markle. Let me tell you this. So we have a friend of the family who we know from the beach and she's older now. I don't know. I think she's in her early 80s, but she's always been one of those prim and proper ladies, like just together. She's always got the perfect sweater set on. She's beautiful. She's fit. And I think this is more when she was in her maybe mid-70s, but she went on an airplane and the woman next to her kept blowing off. That's what Nana used to call it, my Nana. Blowing off. And so she presses the overhead call button. The flight

attendant comes over and our friend says, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to move me. This woman here has terrible flatulence. Oh, my God. I mean, that's a boss move. That is. Yeah. Yeah, look. How do you respond?

What do you say if you're the accused yeah i mean and what do you do if you're just one of the people in the kill zone like in proximity like do you raise your hand and go you know what i'd like to be moved too and and and you know what i i'd like to move too please and then just like that first class is empty don't leave me don't leave me here and then there's the one person going i'm fine i'm fine i don't know i'm good you know what i like it keeping it real up here oh my god life i got one more funny story about this um back in my fox news days i was on the air. I was anchoring America's Newsroom with Hammer.

And I know you were just on the show. Now it's Dana Perino. But Hammer and I launched that. It was a new show back in 1997. First anchor gig ever. And I was hosting a debate between a right-wing radio host and a left-wing radio host. And the righty was accusing the lefty of being soft on terror. You know, this is again, this is a yeah, we not not 97 2007. And yeah, 97 I was practicing law. Anyway, so 2007 in the Iraq war is going on in the lefty

was feeling defensive of the Democrats. And we were about to go to break and he goes, we're going to fight the terrorists no matter where they are, no matter where they're farting, fighting. Well, I died. We had to go to break. I couldn't get it back together. And as soon as we go to break, my phone lights up. And of course, it's my mom. She can't even speak.

She's laughing so hard because we all have toilet humor in our family. I always say I have a sense of humor of a 12 year old boy. Still at this age, I still do. I'm so glad I'm in such good company, Mike. Do you think Dana Perino talks about this stuff? Definitely not. I don't think so. I mean, Dana is one of the few people I can think of who probably really has never farted.

And if she has, I don't know that I really want to know about it. She and Melania, the Trump claim she's never even gone. Number two, it's like, nope, didn't happen. Got her her own bathroom. And if she just doesn't do it, I don't know. She's this freak of nature. Oh, my God. Well, look, somewhere in here, if there's a if there's a shred of intellect we can glom onto to justify this this scatological dissent. You know, I mean, you know, for Meghan Markle to talk about the indignity of being asked to suck in her gut versus being able to laugh hysterically about the fact that all of us at some point in time are going to lose control over the one thing we desperately want to control. And we're going to have to pay the cost for it to be able to laugh. You know, I mean, that's the fundamental thing. You can you can laugh at the fact that that somebody told you to suck in your gut or you can complain about it. You can laugh at the fact that you just walked into a bathroom

at thirty seven thousand feet that had been destroyed, not your fault, but you're still going to get tagged for it. That's either, you know, in that moment, I'm either a victim and I did feel like one. I was like, damn it. This is not my problem. Right. And yet it was, or, or you can take the 37,000 foot view, if you will, and say, you know, something that's fr know something? That's freaking funny. That's just funny. That happens. It happens all the time. It's even funnier because you're famous. I mean, it's even better that people know you. And now there are people who didn't hear your podcast. They didn't hear this podcast. They're out there at this moment being like, Mike Rowe dropped a bomb on my airplane. In first class, it was

disgusting. The man, he's been doing the dirty jobs too long. Like he's decided to just immerse himself in dirt. It was too perfect, Megan. It was like of all, it's not like Brad Pitt walked out of there or Tom Hanks, the dirty jobs guy, you know, at the, the, the, the guy known for feces from every species. Of course he smells like that. Now you look hypocritical too. Cause it's like, get in there and clean it for God's sake. You're always preaching to the rest of us. What's the matter with you? I don't know. I'm one of

those people who I don't wipe down the whole airplane seat when I sit on it. They're always giving you the wipes now when you get on the plane. Maybe I should. Maybe I should, because that person came back to his or her seat and touched everything. And then maybe I sat there and put my pretzels on it. I don't know. But I still kind of feel like the more- You'd be better off eating off that toilet, Megan, than eating off the tray at this point. Well, that's the thing.

But the more you ingest that's bad for you, the better off you are, like your microbiome and all that. This whole week, we've been talking about eating shit and how it's the wave of the future. There's going to be a pill where you eat somebody else's shit, and it completely changes your life for the better. Don't try this at home. I swear to God, I'm just thinking back 10 years ago. I'm watching Fox. I'm watching you on America's Newsroom.

This put-together former lawyer sitting there in her Armani suit, reading the prompter, absolutely killing it. And now I'm talking to you and I'm actually worried where you're going to take the conversation next. I honestly don't know where we go. I can't believe that Megyn Kelly, of all people, is literally dragged me through my own lower GI tract. Look at this beautiful work that my producer Kelly put together for us to discuss. We completely blown it. She literally wiped your own ass with Kelly's hard-fought notes. She wants us to talk about student loans and the election. And, oh, there's all sorts of fun thoughts on here.

Oh, MSNBC, they compared January 6th to 9-11. I actually do want to talk about those nimrods over there on MSNBC. Let's go there. We don't have to talk politics exactly, but this comparison is beyond. It's Nicole Wallace, fake Republican Nicole Wallace, sought 10.

You know, that Mueller ethos emanated, I'm sure, from his own personal code, but also post 9-11. And I worked in the administration in which he served as FBI director. And what he sort of gave birth to in the lexicon was the FBI would never again, first of all, fail to sync up with the CIA and all sorts of artificial and real walls were torn down and they would never again fail to connect the dots. I've not heard one utterance of connecting the dots from Christopher Wray in the days after the deadliest attack on the U.S. Capitol in our, you know, in history. Nicole, I think that's right. And I think if you look at the scale in terms of a threat to democracy, I mean, 9-11 was a tragedy. We lost thousands of lives in a horrific way. We still mourn to this day. But when you look at something

that is an attack on democracy, something that could actually bring about a fundamental change to American governance as we understand it, 9-11 is nothing compared to January 6th. And the fact that the FBI and the rest of the government, if they are not on the same sort of war footing that we were on in the weeks and months and years after 9-11, shame on everyone. That was disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok responding. The worst. It was worse than 9-11. Worse of more of a threat to democracy. Worse than the war of 1812 when the capital was oh what's the word burned i think not to mention the the faln attack back in the late 70s i think it was where they attacked they actually shot five congressmen worse than that okay look you know what if if if we don't want to politicize it um then why don't we just return to the last topic briefly and let

me ask you this, because somebody asked me this question the other day, and I loved it. They said, if you could have any power like a superhero, what would it be? And I said, I would like to be able to know that when I'm watching television, that with a flick of my fingers or a wiggle of my nose, like Elizabeth Montgomery on Bewitched, right? I would like to be able to make anybody I'm watching at any time poop their pants. That's my superpower. And as I was sitting there watching that clip that you played, I thought that'd be a great time. Right in the middle of such an outrageous statement, I just kind of give my nose a wrinkle and Peter Strzok poops his pants on live TV.

And he has to deal with it. Right. He has to stand there as he's saying this ridiculous thing and his trousers fill up with his own scat. He has to deal with it. And everybody around him gets to smell it, too. And the other one over there that was asking the question, she, too. She poops right up her back, right as she's asking the question. That's my superpower.

I sit at home and I watch TV. And when I hear stuff like that, I wiggle my nose and people poop their pants. I honestly think, I honestly think, I think word would spread that, you know, something,

something's, something's going on in the universe, people. And when we say stupid things on the air, when we lie we poop our pants we don't know why it's happening but you know a theory starts to emerge that the dirty jobs guy is sitting home with this new superpower and he's wielding it like an axe and horrifying that's the last thing you want is to find out that mike rowe is a fan of your show i'm watching i'm watching and you know i have a finely tuned bs meter and if i hear something that doesn't line up things are gonna get real poopy real fast megan i'd rather see the shit

coming out of his bottom than out of his mouth the way we had to there it's constant imagine during sweeps how much fun this would be during sweeps oh my god i have to say i am sick of people making that comparison it really is shit i'm sick of people but just don't use 9-11 just stop it you know the way we kind of have a rule in journalism don't use the holocaust you know like don't compare this to the holocaust i actually had this discussion with my ep steve crack hour because we were talking about um mark cuban and how he was blowing off the uyghur genocide over in china he has no problem with you know doing business with china and uh i was having this discussion with steve about like it's does he care about the holocaust and

there's just kind of a rule in journalism just don't compare anything to the holocaust period same thing with 9-11 as far as i'm concerned just stop you don't compare don't compare anything to the Holocaust period. Same thing with 9-11, as far as I'm concerned. Just stop. You don't compare. Don't compare January 6th. Don't compare anything. It's still too soon, right? We've got 3,000 dead Americans, children, innocents. We all lived through it. You know, there's only the youngest amongst us has no active memory of this. So just stop it. So what I said before, It's you don't know who's listening, right? It's really easy for you and me to have whatever conversation we want to have. And because we both kind of, you know, enjoy what we're doing, it gets smaller and smaller. It's easy to forget who's listening.

And I remember about this would have been 2006, probably. I was sitting around a campfire with a bunch of people and we were arguing about 9-11. We were arguing about something, something to do, probably some crazy conspiracy nonsense, right? And everybody had their own say and things got really heated. And then one of the guys who was sitting there, who I had just met a couple of nights ago, said, well, my wife was on flight 93. And let me tell you what I think. And in that moment, everything changes. The conversation changes.

The tenor and tone changes. The air is sucked out of the space. And we all feel like idiots because our opinions are garbage compared to the man whose wife was on one of those planes. I don't think either one of these clowns were thinking, who's watching? Who's listening? Who was there? You gave me the chills with that. Well said. All right, much more to go over with Mike Rowe. We're going to get to Kelly's outline because we love Kelly. It's just sad. Kelly's also in Canada. She's up there with Canadian Debbie.

She also married a damn Canadian, moved away. These are my friends and longtime colleagues from Fox News who I just can't let go of, even if they move to another country. So we'll get to Kelly's good work next and talk more with Mike Rowe as he stays with us for another block. And remember, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel, 111, every weekday at noon east. The full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly, or the audio podcast is available on Apple, Spotify,

Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free. And there you'll find our full archives, including the first time Mike was on, as he mentioned, episode 45, way back in January of 2021. This is before we had video. We had a great, great conversation. And I just fell in love with the guy. You can see why. I mean, I don't think I can do a better hour of programming than the one we just did. We covered everything. The Markle, the shit pie, the magical shitting power you can unleash on your enemies. Would love to know your thoughts on all of it. You can email me now. Megan, M-E-G-Y-N, at megankelly.com. Something you said on Hannity recently jumped out at me, Mike, because you were talking about the importance of blue collar workers and how, you know, we sort of enjoy the fruits of their labor without understanding all that's gone into this thing that we wind up enjoying. And it reminded me of something I mentioned, my Nana in the first hour. She lived to 101. She died in 2016 and she was born in 1915 and she was poor. And she

remembered the day they got electricity. She remembered sitting there next to the light switch, turning it on and off and on and off and saying, it's a miracle. It's a miracle. And her father said, that costs money. Stop that. Like he's saying to the kids, what are you doing? But you've been kind of making that point. Like we do sort of take advantage, whether it's the phone or the light switch or turning on the automobile of these jobs, that all the jobs that led into that moment for us, we kind of forget about the importance of these blue collar workers at our own peril. Yeah, it's a curious flaw in our,

well, it's a fault in the stars, right? This way that we grow to resent the very thing we depend on. And I think it's because it scares us. I think because when we flip on the switch and the lights don't come on, we don't know what to do. You know, when I hop onto the Zoom call to do the interview with Megan, but the connection is weak, I don't know how to fix it. When I flush the toilet, but the crap doesn't go away like it's supposed to, you know, I'm at the mercy of

the plumber. And right now, Megan, a plumber can't get out here for three or four days. That's how lopsided the workforce is. And that's why this issue really matters. It's not a question of, oh, the poor employees or the poor employers, right? This thing always gets ground down into some kind of labor dispute. My point has always been what's happening in the country is 300 million people or so are no longer sufficiently gobsmacked by the miracles that surround us. Like your Nana, we've lost our wonder for these things we rely upon. And that makes us anxious. And that anxiety leads us to actually devalue and sometimes resent the very people upon whom we rely. And so it's a weird circle. And you can see how it plays out in policy. You can see, for instance, that

shop class was removed from high school, just out and out removed in the 70s and 80s. It's not a coincidence today that those vocations are the very jobs currently lacking in the market, nor is it a coincidence, in my opinion, that student debt is now at $1.7 trillion. We're still telling a whole generation of kids that they're screwed if they don't go get their four-year paper. In the meantime, and this is my new thing. It's not a new thing, but I'm obsessed not with the unemployment rate, but with the labor participation rate. And the thing I was talking to Hannity about was the same thing I talked to Nick Eberstadt about who came on my podcast just last week to talk about the existence of 11 million jobs that virtually nobody wants juxtaposed with 7 million able-bodied men between

the ages of 25 and 54 who are not only not working, that's not the problem. They are affirmatively not looking for jobs. So you push all of that together, it really does make for a very disappointing kind of a bully base, right? And I'm not sure precisely what it says about our country, but your Nana was onto something. As a people, we're either impressed and gobsmacked by the miracles around us, or we're bored. We are so materialistic now that we hold up the college degree and whatever white collar job might come after it as the holy grail. You could be a hedge fund manager and make $60 million a year easily, $100 million a year. You could. It's happening even right now.

And then you'll be successful. You know, Kanye West was giving an interview, one of his, you know, many the other day. And he was like, why didn't you introduce me as a billionaire? I'm a billionaire. I want to be introduced as a billionaire. It's like not as an artist, not as an entrepreneur, but like I'm a billionaire.

It's all about the money, the money. And I don't know, is it that we're just no longer holding up blue collar jobs as something of value, something of respect, something meaningful. And so people aren't going into those jobs or that we're just, we've abandoned all training. We've abandoned the pathways. This, that, and about five or six other things as well. Look, part of it too is the varsity blues routine. I mean, think about the pressure of raising your three kids, right? Think about what it feels like to not want to screw them up. That's so hardwired into our DNA that as parents, you know, we look around and say, well, is there a playbook? Is there just a short list,

a rudimentary list of things I can do so as to not screw my kids up? And yeah, I think there is, but somehow get them to college wound up on that list. And so parents are under enormous pressure. Guidance counselors, in many cases, are getting bonused out on their ability to transition kids into four-year schools, not apprenticeships, not trade schools, not community colleges. We've got our thumb on the scale in a very real way, and it's created more pressure than I think I can understand. I mean, to be 17 years old and to be given a chance to sign on the dotted line, borrow 30, 50, 80, $100,000. I mean, we don't put that kind of pressure on people to buy a house or really anything. It's really amazing. And I don't say any of that because I favor

some sort of forgiveness of student loans. I don't. But I am mindful of the incredible pressure that trickles down and the unbelievable PR. College needed a PR campaign back in the 70s and 80s. We genuinely needed more people to go in pursuit of some of this thing we call higher education. But we bitched it all up. You know, we didn't just make the case for a four-year school. We made the case at the expense of all other forms of education. So now there's stigmas and stereotypes and myths and misperceptions and all kinds of bull crap that keep people from pursuing many of these 11 million open jobs right now that paradoxically are the very jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us. So let's talk about that. Why? Why are those 7 million guys, able-bodied and young, 25 to 54, sitting on the sidelines? Well, to be fair, my friends on the left, when I ask them that question, will tell me reflexively and instinctively that it's because the jobs suck, the pay is lousy, and those greedy and rapacious corporate overlords could fix this problem if they simply were more generous vis-a-vis their remuneration. The other side, my friends on the right, will say, because people are freaking lazy. That's why.

There's no work ethic. Now, there's some truth, maybe, to some degree in both, but this is how work ethic gets politicized. This is how the skills gap gets politicized. By the way, I'm not so sure there's a skills gap anymore. There's a will gap for sure. But if Nick Eberstadt were here, he would say, you can't just look at why they're not working. You've got to look at what they're doing instead and what the research indicates. And these are surveys that people take in their own words. A majority of that cohort of people we're describing right now, these men spend between 2,000 and 2,400 hours a year on screens. That's what they're doing. Now, the average work week extrapolated over a year is two thousand eighty hours. Right. Forty hours a week times 50 weeks or so. Fifty two weeks. That's their full time job. They're on their screens. Many are collecting disability, which is another story. Right. You can be able bodied and collecting disability. I'm not saying that that, I'm not

talking about the legitimate cohort who cannot work. I'm talking very specifically about this chunk of men. And Nick's point is, look, that's never happened in a peacetime environment before. And you could maybe argue that this is not exactly peacetime, but, you know, he's looking at wars, right? And he's looking at what happens to the workforce during a war. And he's looking at our obsession with the unemployment number, which really is just an artifact from a depression era level of trying to make sense of what's going on in the economy. Because in those days, the number of people who were unemployed usually reflected a dearth of opportunity. But that's all gone now. There are 11 million open jobs. You can't walk down any street in any town and not see the help wanted signs. And that means something else. There's something else going on in the country. It's unpleasant. It's

troubling. It's important. And we have to talk about it. We have to find a way to stop looking at the workforce in terms of the number of people who are unemployed and see it instead through the lens of the number of people who have affirmatively chosen not to work. I mean, I can't help, but I'm stuck on the, on the internet and the screens and I have to ask, you know, back in our day before there was an iPhone, was there anything like this? You know, is it's back to the age old technology question of, you know, more, more good or not as a result of these phones like have they helped or hurt more i think personally i remember a professor in college talked about the uh displacement theory

basically saying that there was a belief that um movies would displace newspapers, and TV would displace movies, and the internet would displace TV, and so forth and so on. And of course, what really happens is they're not displaced, they just change. And something like that, I think, is happening here. There are a litany, an endless litany of ways to screw off. There always have been. There are lots of things you can do instead of working. But I don't think we've seen anything like this because there is something truly addictive. And going back to your monologue, you know, if you think we're living in a self-obsessed, narcissistic world driven by some weird relationship with victimhood, and then you look at what all that means to people who are now indoors all the time, looking at their screens on TikTok, on Reels. I literally, not to bring it back to the bowl, but there I was this morning, waking up, sitting down, getting my day started. And I grabbed my stupid phone and like 10 minutes

later, I'm still sitting there scrolling through reels, just watching, watching this thing. I'm a grown man. I have a big day. I have an interview scheduled with Megyn Kelly, for God's sakes. But there I am on the bowl, 60 years old, looking at some guy show me some freaking magic trick. And then the next and the next and the next. Something's happening. Something's happening here. And again, I was talking to your producer earlier, too. Do you remember Faith Popcorn? Does that name ring any bells? She published for years in the eighties, a thing called the Popcorn Report. And it was a look at trends. She was an excellent predictor of what people were going to be doing in large numbers in advance. And she talked about two things. The first thing she talked about was something she called cocooning,

where she predicted people were going to be spending more time at home thanks to better TVs and the ability to watch movies thanks to HBO. And she said this cocooning thing is going to be exacerbated by more and more takeout services. People are going to start ordering food at home and they're going to start spending more time at home watching TV. Well, of course she was right on steroids, but then she came out with another report and she said, screw, screw that. Nevermind cocooning. We're talking about burrowing. We're talking about people going way, way deep, like really, really staying at home, radically changing the degree to which they would go outside, radically changing the way they'd think about work. All that was still pre-internet.

I don't know if she's around anymore. And pre-COVID. Yeah. What would she say now? We can create virtual anonymous identities online. We can say anything we want anonymously. We're so brave, right? Online, so bold, so empowered. But to do what? Build little monuments to ourselves, really. Your Nana was right. There's nothing impressive. There's nothing impressive about this. What's impressive is the same things that have always been impressive. The infrastructure, our grid, the pipes that connect civilized life as we understand it, and the people who maintain those things. I'll tell you, Mike, I asked her before she passed,

what was the most amazing invention you've seen in your many, many years on Earth? And the number one thing wasn't electricity, wasn't the computer. It was the garage door opener. Yes. Game changer. She wasn't wrong. Number two was the microwave. I love it.

Micro. How about the remote control? I don't know if you have Nana's genius, but you have your own special brand of genius. And that's one of the many reasons why I love talking to you. Thanks so much for coming back on. You owe me one. You're going to come on my little podcast sometime next year? Anytime. I'd be glad to do it. Because we're going to take this to another level, Megan. I've got plenty of shit stories to share with you. I look forward to it. You are a deep well, my friend. Thank you for having me on.

Mike Rowe, see you soon. All right. We're going to be right back with a deep dive on Georgia as part of our continuing series on these critical swing states that we're watching the elections so carefully in. And there's a lot to discuss. Georgia had a debate recently and I heard my pals over at National Review saying, my God, the debate moderators, they were amazing. They were so fair. They were tough. Guess what? We got one. And this is a reporter who's been covering the whole situation down there very carefully and closely. That's next. Everything you need to know about Georgia at the gubernatorial and Senate level. We are 20 days away from Election Day and all eyes are on the state of Georgia and how in the governor's race, Democrat Stacey Abrams is now hoping former President

Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey can help her energize black voters. And incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock is hoping that Hamilton star creator Lin-Manuel Miranda will help him with Latino voters, which has many Republicans asking, where's Joe Biden? Who might he help you with? He is not on the invite list, apparently. Joining me now to get into all of it is Gregreg blustein he's a political reporter for the atlanta journal constitution and co-host of the politically georgia podcast welcome greg great to have you here hey thanks so much for having me so just to tell the audience you you were a moderator of the gubernatorial debate between abrams and kemp just a couple days and not long how long was it

all these days run together megan uh it was uh monday night mondayemp, just a couple of days. Not long. How long was it? All these days run together, Megan. It was Monday night, Monday night. Yeah, I was going to say it was a couple of days ago. You did a great job. And I heard my pals over on National Review really praising you, saying the moderator was just tough and fair and, you know, asked all the questions that the left would want to ask and that the right would want to ask. And that's great.

That's not easy to achieve. So good on you. Let's start with this. Stacey Abrams is behind in this race. She's running for her second term as Georgia governor. I'm just kidding. Brian Kemp beat her and she's never really conceded that election. And so people joke. But she made she's about 10 points behind and she just made a comment on MSNBC this morning that's going viral. And here's here's that exchange. You're running for governor of Georgia. Incorrectly. But while abortion is an issue, it nowhere reaches the level of interest of voters in terms of the cost of gas, food, bread, milk, things like that. What can a governor what could you do as governor to alleviate the concerns of Georgia voters about those livability daily hourly issues that they're confronted with? But let's be clear. having children is why you're worried about your price for gas. It's why you're concerned about how much food costs. For women,

this is not a reductive issue. You can't divorce being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy from the economic realities of having a child. And so it's important for us to have both and conversations. We don't have the luxury of reducing it or separating them out. But let's not pretend that women, half the population, especially those of childbearing age, they understand that having a child is absolutely an economic issue. It is only politicians who see it as simply another cultural conversation. It is a real biological and economic imperative conversation that women need to have. I mean, it's I think a lot of people find that a shocking place to go when asked, what are you going to do about inflation? And, you know, it's to bring it

to abortion. I'll just give you a flavor, Greg, on what's happening online amongst conservatives. Mark Thiessen, my old pal, he's at AEI. Abrams says the answer to inflation is abortion. If you kill your baby, you won't have to feed it or drive it to school. You can't make this up. National Review. Stacey Abrams floats abortion as inflation fix. Having children is why you're worried about rising prices. The Federalists, Stacey Abrams, inflation wouldn't be so bad if you would just let us kill more babies. You get the general feel for where this is going to go amongst Republicans and probably Kemp and her opponents. Yeah, I think Governor Kemp is going to lean into this in a major way. I mean, there's a minor setback for him if he does, because he's not wanted to focus this election

on abortion. He'd rather talk about the economy. But when you have an opportunity like this, in his view, right, a chance to quote unquote pounce, they're going to take it. And look, this also speaks to a difference between the governor and Stacey Abrams when it comes to messaging. If I ask the governor the same question over and over again, he'll usually give the same answer. He's very scripted. He's very on message. He faced this during the primary when we asked him about Donald Trump and he'd give the same answer over and over again. Hey, you know, I'm not focused on Donald Trump, but I'll take all the help I can get, so on and so forth. If you ask Stacey Abrams the same question,

she might answer it, you know, 10 different ways. And every so often an answer comes out like this, where it's not perfect by any means. Even a lot of Democrats are very upset with the way that she answered this question. She's been in generally trying to tie all three of the biggest issues on the ballot in Georgia together, the economy, guns, and abortion. She's trying to make Governor Kemp's stances on guns and abortion an economic issue, saying that Georgia's losing business. Its pro-business reputation is being dinged. But when she answers questions like this, it really digs a hole for her. And now the next few days of the campaign, if not more, are going to be focused on these comments. And if you're Governor Kemp's camp, you're going to put money behind it. You might want to put this on air.

You might want to do everything you can to amplify them. To me, this is a microcosm of what's happening to the Democrats in a lot of these bigger races that we're watching across the country from Georgia and beyond. And that is the Democrats got to, you know, they got some wind at their back after Dobbs, after Roe versus Wade was overturned. And they said to their base, my God, these crazy Republicans, they're going to outlaw abortion in all 50 states. We've got to band together. You've got to elect Democrats. And that worked for them for a while. But the inflation numbers stayed so astronomically high month after month. And it's not just a number on a piece of paper. People feel it everywhere.

Every time money comes out of their wallet or goes into their bank account, they feel it such that it took over. The inflationary numbers took over. And so that myopic focus on an issue that affects, yes, some people, but not the vast majority of Americans, now is almost a liability. You know, now you need to be able to speak to the thing that is really upsetting folks. And that's money. That's inflation. That's what's happening in the economy. That's just more evidence. She can't do it. She's so tied to her Democratic pet issues that people aren't the top issue. And I think, look, Democrats, Senator Warnock, Stacey Abrams, they acknowledge that the economy is the top issue. And as I said, they're trying to kind of, especially in Abrams' case, trying to blend those

issues together. But if you're here in Georgia and you can't turn on a TV without an ad attacking the Abrams-Biden inflation or attacking the Biden administration or tying Biden administration to these high prices. And as you mentioned, folks are feeling those issues every single day. Democrats have tried to pivot back by citing the Inflation Reduction Act, but our polls show that there's mixed feelings about the impact of that legislation. And so, and it's still so soon, no one's really felt any, you know, it's hard, it's hard to point to any positive effects this, this close to that legislation being passed. I'm going to go back to the governor's debate that you moderated in

one second, but just while we're on the subject of Biden and trying to tie Abrams to Biden and trying to tie Warnock to Biden, we saw some of that in the senatorial debate, too, between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, where the question was to the Democrat Warnock. Do you want Biden to run for a second term? Some news was made there. This is SOT 15. Senator Warnock, a simple yes or no here. You will have a chance to explain, but I'd like a simple yes or no. Would you support President Biden running for a second term in 2024? I've not spent a minute thinking about what politicians should run for what in 2024. Is that a yes or no? The answer is I have not.

And maybe this is difficult. Maybe this is difficult for people to understand because that's how politicians think. I think that part of the problem with our politics right now is that it's become too much about the politicians. You're asking me who's going to run in 24? The people of Georgia get to decide who's going to be their senator in three days. You haven't thought about it. If you can think about it now in 2024, the president will turn 82 years old. Are you concerned about his physical and his mental fitness at that time? You have 30 seconds.

The people of Georgia hired me to represent them regardless of who's in the White House. Now, you and I know as political reporters, that was all intentional. There's a very good and real reason why he was answering that the way he was. Yeah. And look, I can tell you he's thought about it because I've asked him that question on the campaign trail and so many other reporters. And he's given generally that same answer, which is, hey, I'm not focused on that. I'm not thinking about Joe Biden. I'm thinking about November. I'm thinking about my own case. And the reason why is as clear as the polls. Joe Biden's approval rating here in Georgia, the last Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll was at 37%.

A poll that came out a few weeks later from a news consortium put it at 38%. So he is struggling. And Raphael Warnock is moving to keep Joe Biden at arm's length, right? He speaks more about working with Ted Cruz and Tommy Tuberville on the campaign trail than he does working with Joe Biden. It's his plea for those sort of middle of the road, disaffected Republican voters who might not be comfortable with Hershel Walker. That's his way of getting them in his camp. And it's a very different strategy than Stacey Abrams, who has openly encouraged Joe Biden to run for a second term, said that she wants him to campaign for him down here, and even campaigned with Jill Biden, the first lady, just a few days ago. So now they want Oprah to come down there and campaign for the Dems.

And they want, as I mentioned, Lin-Manuel Miranda. So they're trying to get out the black vote. They're trying to get the Hispanic vote. Do we believe? I mean, obviously, these two groups historically have tended to vote more Democrat, Hispanics, less and less. So that's been an ongoing story over the past couple of years. And even the black vote in the New York Times Siena poll that we saw recently, it was growing for Republicans, I think it was up at 19%, 18 or 19%. Whereas, you know,

about 10 years ago, it was down to eight for Republicans. So it's certainly growing in strength for the GOP, but you know, not a majority. So what's happening with the Black vote and Latino vote in Georgia? Yeah, well, right now, Republicans are trying to expand the battleground map. Governor Kemp, as you mentioned, is ahead in the polls between five to six, seven, even some polls show him at 10 points above Stacey Abrams. And so he feels like he can go make a play for the suburbs. He feels like he can go reach out to African-American voters in a way that he frankly, and he'll admit it, he did not in 2018. He hardly campaigned in Atlanta's suburbs, and in the cities that are geared specifically towards voters of color, Hispanic voters, Asian American voters, Black voters. And so they're trying to put Democrats on the defensive. And Stacey Abr African-American voters, but in particular to black men, because she knows that the polls show her numbers with African-Americans soft right now. Some polls show her at 80 percent of support among black voters. That sounds like a lot, but she needs to be closer to 90, 95.

And she lags behind Senator Warnock, the state's first black U.S. senator, who's more like closer to 90% when it comes to black voters. So no one thinks that Governor Kemp will get 20% of the African-American vote. But what Democrats worry about is a sort of a suppressed or a lower than expected turnout among black voters. And so far, it's very early, but early voting so far, there's been a surge of not just overall voting, but black voters so far in the first two days. Fascinating. Yeah, because you've got like never ending voting in Georgia like we have in Pennsylvania and other states now just goes on and on. shifting gears, showing Stacey Abrams has 49 percent of their support. Kemp has 48 percent. That's well within the polls margin of error of five point six percentage points, which is surprising, right, that it's that tight that, yes, she's got a one point advantage, maybe if you factor out the margin of error. But it's surprising that it's that tight. And secondly, Walker versus Warnock, the Republican versus the Dem. Walker's got a six point advantage with Hispanic voters, 47 over 41. Is that also surprising? Yeah, to say the least. A lot of Democrats are surprised. Now, it's a small sample size. It's

about 300 folks who were polled. The poll was in English. So that could have an effect. But yes, it's about 5% margin of error. So a little higher than we usually see with polls. But to say the Democrats were surprised is probably an understatement. The Latino voting bloc, the Hispanic voting bloc in Georgia is small, but it's growing. And in a state as closely divided as Georgia is, we're just fewer than 12,000 votes divided Joe Biden and Donald Trump back in 2020 that even small fluctuations, even small changes in voting behavior can make big, big differences in the November outcome. That's why both parties are really increasingly focusing

on Hispanic voters and driving up turnout. And as I mentioned earlier, there's a tremendous number of Hispanic voters in the Atlanta suburbs, particularly in Gwinnett County, which was a Republican stronghold until 2016, flipped blue during the Trump era, and is now basically a cornerstone of the Democratic coalition. So if Republicans, they're not going to win Gwinnett County, but if Republicans can kind of keep Democratic margins down in Gwinnett County and other suburban areas, then they can grow their elites. And that's the angle right now. So I have a question for you, because I have a theory that they don't usually poll for this, but I have a theory about what's happening with these voters. And as Republican support grows amongst Black voters and Hispanic voters, it occurs to me that both of these groups traditionally are churchgoers, high Christian population. And I do think that there's a backlash

to the crazy trans ideology that's, you know, coming into all the schools and the over sexualization of school educations and all the woke ism when it comes to race essentialism and so on, which I think, you know, even groups that are supposed to be benefiting from some of those race essentialism policies have had it with everything reducing to skin color. I think, you know, even groups that are supposed to be benefiting from some of those race essentialism policies have had it with everything reducing to skin color. I mean, we've heard a lot of Latinos who are now running for office saying this is one of their inspirations. So I just wonder to what extent you think that's factoring. And I know I get economy, economy, economy. But as somebody who covers Georgia politics and follows the news cycle down there, has this been a factor? Yeah, I would say it's fair to say it's a, in general, transgender politics is a factor

because you can't, it's hard to turn on the radio right now and not hear ads aimed at African American voters from, from the conservative standpoint, attacking transgender policies, right? But, you know, you mentioned it, you hit the nail on the head. It still goes back to the economy. I mean, that same poll that you just mentioned showed that very few, it was only about 6%. So even with the giant margin of error, 6%, it shows if only 6% of Latino voters are confident in the direction of the country, there's a problem there. And a majority disapprove of Joe Biden's performance in office. So I think the real biggest factor boils down to the economy. Oh my goodness. right direction in Georgia. I mean, that is that's stunning. And that is probably the worst fact for the Democrats running there right now. And that's that's the reason why Joe Biden's not going to

Georgia. That has nothing to do with schedules or anything else. That's the reason why. All right. So let's talk about the debate the other night, because we there was this viral clip all over the Internet yesterday of another race out in Arizona. And that's Carrie Lake, who's the Republican running for governor there. She's going to win. I mean, she's ahead right now and her opponent won't debate her and isn't a particularly compelling character. I really think Carrie Lake is going to win. And it's saying something because she kind of came out of nowhere. She was a news anchor. It was the Republican she was challenging for the nomination was much better known and much better funded. And Carrie Lake comes up and she she gets it. And now she's running in the general and looks to win. The viral clip was of Carrie Lake pushing back on reporters in the way only

a reporter would know how to do. Right. Like she was like, oh, because she's one of those Trump didn't lose people. And she's like, oh, you want to talk election denial? Let's do that. And she goes through the long list of Hillary Clinton denying the elections, Stacey Abrams denying elections, the LA Times saying that it was stolen from Hillary and so on. It was good stuff. Great stuff, right? She went on offense. Well, one of the people on that list was Stacey Abrams.

And you kind of raised something similar in that debate that the governor candidates had the other night, on Monday night, where you asked her about her election denialism in a great exchange. Here's part of it. This election, do you commit to accept the outcome of the vote regardless of what it shows? And do you stand by your use of words like rigged four years ago to describe the state's election system? In 2018, I began my speech on November 16th, acknowledging that Governor Kemp had won the election. I then proceeded to lay out in grave detail the challenges faced by voters under his leadership. Just today, a homeless woman was denied the right to vote in Forsyth

County because she could not, she did not receive a provisional ballot because she had been challenged. As governor, I intend to stand up for the right to vote. I will always acknowledge the outcome of elections, but I will never deny access to every voter because that is the responsibility of every American to defend the right to vote. In 2018, in the governor's race, we had the largest African-American turnout in the country. She said that Senate Bill 202, our recent elections integrity act, what we passed two years ago would be suppressive in Jim Crow 2.0. Just this past May in our primaries, we again had record turnout in the Republican primary

and the Democratic primary. In Georgia, it's easy to vote and hard to cheat. Good for you for asking this question. But the bottom line is she was an election denier. She may claim otherwise now, but we've played the sound bites before. I have one very affirmative statement to make, she said after the election. We won. This was a stolen election. They stole it from the voters of Georgia. She filed a whole lawsuit claiming that the whole system was unfair. It got thrown out in harsh terms by an Obama appointed judge just recently. It was an embarrassing decision for her. There's been absolutely no evidence to support her claims that that election was stolen from her in any way. He beat her by 54,000 votes. And yet to me, she still was kind of hanging on a little like I'm still the champion of the downtrodden and the forgotten and the people who can't get to the to the polls. What did you make of the whole thing? You know, sometimes in these debates too, you have to ask questions that you've heard the answer to before, but a broader audience. And so she's talked about this with me

before she's talked about this with other reporters and even on the campaign trail. She gave a slightly different answer than she usually does because she usually says, look, you know, did I refuse to concede that I used that language? Yes. But did I try to undermine, did I try to overturn the election results like Donald Trump did? No. And so she makes that distinction between her and Donald Trump. But in this case, we weren't talking about Donald Trump. We were talking about this election. And there were Republicans who noted that she said she would acknowledge the results, but that she didn't say that she would accept them, right?

And so there's a little bit of a nuance there. Afterwards, her campaign said that it would indeed accept the results no matter what they show. But that 10 days of – we call it kind of purgatory. There was 10 days between the election and her non-concession speech. And it was a moment, it was 10 days of very great uncertainty in Georgia because we had never, at least in modern, recent Georgia history, been through anything like that since the three governors scandal 60 years ago that we don't need to get into here. But it was a very big, you know, big question mark over our election system. And in the days following, you know, at the time Democrats were putting an asterisk by Governor Kemp's name, right?

He won by default or he won by whatever. And there was a concern even among Democrats, hardcore Democrats, that by doing that, undermining his legitimacy, that you call into question the entire election system. And then when there is a disaster, when there is a moment where the state needs to unify and around a state leader and you're putting an asterisk by his name, then that's a problem. And the Democrats stopped doing that. But clearly that rhetoric from 2018 still continues to become an issue in this race. Yes. I mean, that is the thing. It's like I've said on the air, and many of my listeners and viewers don't agree with me,

but I don't believe that there was theft of the election from Donald Trump. I don't think it was fair, but I do not think this was a stolen election. You can't you can't even talk about it without talking about how we even got to the point where someone would think about doing such a. Where did Trump get that kind of an idea from Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams? And it's I I'm sure it's hurting her. I mean, I'm sure that people look at her and understand she was one of the first to start etching away at this principle that we used to consider inviolate, that you would not touch, that we were proud of as Americans, you know, the peaceful and accepted transfer of power.

Our elections have never been perfect and they've always been slightly unfair one way or another. And yet we accept the results and we move on. We try to do better, even against a system that's stacked against us. The next time she was one of the first to really try to change that. I'm really glad you asked her about it. OK, so let's talk about Senate, because I think it's pretty clear Kemp's going to win at the governor's level. This question about whether he has enough coattails to take Herschel Walker, who's more embattled, over the finish line with him. Or whether even without Kemp, Herschel could do it. Because even though he's never led in a poll, it's getting tighter.

And he seems to have withstood this personal scandal pretty well. Or like you've been watching the polls closely. Has he? Is that true? You know, we still aren't sure if there is any major impact, but certainly the polls still show a very tight race. And then the reason why I don't think it will have this profound impact on the polls is that you got to remember here in Georgia, you know, for really since Herschel Walker got in the race, even before he got in the race, there were reports about violence against women, including his ex-wife, threats to police officers, erratic behavior, blunders on the campaign trail, exaggerations about his business record and his academic experience, all that. add these these reports that he paid for a girlfriend's abortion in 2009 i think it cemented

and solidified you know his his opponents you know support for rafael warnock but it's hard to say that that could that's going to change a lot of minds because there's already so much other evidence for his critics not to support him that they were already they already had other reasons to right um and and generally to, at least it broke down in three different camps to Republicans. There was Republicans, a big group of Republicans who didn't believe it, who just say, this close to an election, don't believe anything. There's other Republicans who might believe it, who say they could see those reports being accurate, but Republican control of the Senate is paramount to them. And they know he, or they at least are

confident he would be a solid vote for Mitch McConnell. And then there's that group of Republicans, those swing voters, who are voting for Kemp too. We've picked this up in polls for months now, but 8% in our last poll of Kemp supporters, 9% of Kemp supporters say they're voting for Raphael Warnock and another 5% or 6% are saying they're voting for the third party candidate. Those are the, in a close race like this, those are the types of voters that could either put, you know, one camp over the other, over the top, or a more likely possibility, force this race into a runoff by giving the Libertarians- Oh wait, stand by.

I'm going to get out of the runoff. The Georgia runoff is so annoying. But can you just explain why? Why would a Republican voter in Georgia, even before these scandals broke, say, I want Kemp, but I don't want Walker? I'm actually going to vote for Raphael Warnock and for Brian Kemp. Or in some cases, just undervote, just not vote. I've talked to voters like that. Well, it's because there's a skepticism towards whether Hershel Walker is fit for office. His ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, is being aired in TV ads on footage of an interview about 15 years ago where she's talking about his threats to choke and point a gun at her head and choke her.

There have been a lot of blunders on the campaign trail that even Herschel Walker's camp has acknowledged. Just statements, strange meanderings around policies, quotes about bad air, things like that that have made national news and that have seeped into the consciousness of the electorate here. That even his biggest supporters have heard of and know about. And there's been reports about business exaggerations, about his false claims of graduating from college and things like that. You also have to remember, he's not just seen as a great athlete here. He's seen as a legendary athlete. So he entered that race with an almost 100% name recognition, or at least very, very high, close to 100%. Because even folks like me, whose parents didn't watch, didn't care about college football growing up. And now, of course, I'm a huge Georgia football fan, but they weren't.

I still grew up hearing stories of Herschel Walker. I have Democratic friends who named their dogs Herschel Walker, or whose garage codes were 3434, his number. So he is part of the social fabric here in Georgia. And there's Democrats who said if he had run as a Democrat, he would have wiped the floor clean with whoever he was going against. And so that's the advantage he came with. But there are those voters who are still concerned about where he stands on issues and about his past and about the future of a US Senate if he's a member of that body. All right. Can you explain the Georgia runoff? This is how we got Raphael worn out to begin with, right? So why is Georgia so much different than most? Is it all other states? Who else does

runoffs? I don't know. There's a few other states, but it certainly is a headache down here because that just means extra weeks of TV ads. I guess it's good for the TV stations. But in Georgia, the state law requires a candidate to win more than 50% of the vote. So 50% plus one. And when you have a third party candidate, it makes it a lot less likely. And so in 2018, what Stacey Abrams was really gunning for was not an outright victory, because as you mentioned earlier, it was 55,000 or so votes between her and Governor Kemp. but she wanted to close that gap to force a runoff because in a runoff, there's a sense that basically there's a reset of the race. And runoffs in Georgia used to be nine weeks long. The new state law changed them to four weeks. So that's why in 2020 slash 2021, a runoff wasn't until January 5th. In fact, David Perdue technically wasn't a member of the Senate

for three days because his term expired a few days earlier before that election. So it's a very bizarre law. Thankfully, they shortened that window, but it's still a lot more, still an extra round. And in a race like this one, if Senate control is back up for hanging in the balance, then we'll see. We saw almost a billion dollars in 2020 campaigns spent on our races. We've already seen more than $300 million.

It could easily exceed half a billion dollars if Senate control is back on the line. Do we think it's likely going to go to a runoff? Does that seem probable? That's my hunch right now, Megan, because if you seen the polls? Even the ones that are favorable to Warnock or Walker, rarely, if ever, either of the candidates above 50%. Only a few outliers show either one of them above 50%. They continue to show the libertarian polling stronger than libertarians usually do. Libertarians in Georgia usually get at 1%, 2%. In this case, Chase Oliver is more like three or 4%. And we think that's because of Republican protest votes. Republicans who don't want to vote for Raphael Warnock

don't want to skip it altogether and are voting for the Libertarian, who held his own in a debate on Sunday with Raphael Warnock. Hershel Walker was a no-show at that debate, but the Libertarian didn't do much to damage his causes with any of those up-in- in the air voters.

So if he goes away and it's a runoff between Warnock and Walker, do we presume that the Libertarians will vote Republican? We presume, or in some cases, they just stay home because they're disgusted with the two-party system, right? We've talked to plenty like that. But in a runoff situation, of course, turnout's lower than normal. But again, all bets are off because usually Republicans have But in a runoff situation, of course, turnout's lower than normal. But again, all bets are off because usually Republicans have won every statewide runoff in Georgia's history

until the 2021 runoff, until Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff both swept their runoffs. And that's because usually we see an older, whiter, less diverse electorate that shows up for these lower turnout affairs. But in a race like this, it is not going to be, you know, it's not going to catch anyone off guard. It'll be hard to, to, you know, be an infant in Georgia without knowing that there's a runoff coming up, if that's the case. Well, what happened? I mean, Georgia, I know, you know, like Virginia turned blue, kind of when I was living there back in 2003. It was all these rich people from Washington, D.C. and the Beltway saying, oh, Virginia is really pretty. Let's move there. And so while it had been more rural and more Republican, it got all these sort of liberals moving out there and it became blue, that it was Stacey Abrams. While she didn't win, she did a great job of registering new Democratic voters who recently. But the biggest shift has been in the suburbs. The fact that suburban voters, and as I mentioned earlier, becoming more diverse, they've shifted back to the Democratic Party. That has changed the ballgame here. And of course, Stacey Abrams' efforts to energize minority voters by embracing progressive issues that Democrats used to not

talk about in Georgia, that has also changed the ballgame here. Well, we'll see if they respond to abortion is the answer to inflation, which they're going to be hearing a lot of over the next month. Greg, what a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me, Megan. So last night I'm sitting in my family room and I'm eating Haagen-Dazs chocolate chocolate chip right out of the container. It was amazing. And my little strudwick comes over to me. And you know, most dogs, they look at you with a sad eyes. He came, he walked right up. He put his paws up and started licking my bowl. He was licking my ice cream right.

I'm like, get down, you bad boy. He's not even sorry. You know, he's just like, what? What's your problem? Share. If you would like more Strudwick stories, you can sign up for our American News Minute at megankelly.com. And don't miss tomorrow because we've got Dave Burke rumored to be the inspiration for Tom Cruise and Top Gun. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

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