The Megyn Kelly Show - NPR Whistleblower Resigns, Smug Elites, and Sports Pay Disparity Reality, with Andrew Klavan | Ep. 769

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Megyn Kelly is joined by Andrew Klavan, host of The Daily Wire's Andrew Klavan Show, to talk about the NPR whistleblower resigning after his Free Press piece, new details revealed about NPR's woke CEO, the new NPR CEO questioning what "truth" actually is, her lamenting that the First Amendment gives so much freedom and makes policing disinformation harder, Katie Couric’s claims that Trump voters are “anti-intellectuals,” actress Molly Ringwald bashing the movies she starred in, smug entertainers and media members, Caitlin Clark not making much money in the WNBA, the decline of sports as money in professional sports rises, the truth about biological differences between men and women and pay disparities, TikTok’s use of a nun and a veteran in their new ads as a way to try to sway conservative support, the dangers of TikTok and social media more broadly, and more. Klavan- https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com/ Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. I'm Megyn Kelly. The fallout continues from the NPR whistleblower's expose about his media company as he announced he's resigning. But the new CEO, Catherine Mayer, oh, she's not going anywhere. She continues to be a focus of what's being uncovered now, including her crazy take on truth, truth. This woman is unbelievable. Joining me now, one of our favorites, Andrew Klavan.

He's host of The Daily Wire's The Andrew Klavan Show. And you can also find him on Substack at thenewjerusalem.substack.com. Andrew, welcome back. Good to see you, Megan. Thanks for having me. Okay. So this poor guy, Uri Berliner is out. He's like, I'm sorry. You know, I respect NPR and all the years I've spent here, but I just, I can't be a part of this anymore and left. Meanwhile, this kook who's running NPR continues to hold her perch with not a word said by NPR about her incendiary tweets over the past 15 years. She wasn't the CEO for most of these. She was running Wikipedia and we'll get to what

that tells us about this other site and just who is atop the American media complex. But it just feels wrong. And it seems like they got rid of the one guy who, yes, was admittedly liberal, but at least could understand the damage that doing only liberal bents on every aspect of the news would have to this news organization. What do you think of it? Well, first of all, it goes beyond a liberal bias. It was absolute dishonesty and not never taking responsibility for the times you got the story wrong because you were so busy trying to bring down Donald Trump. What really was striking was Uri Berliner's original talk, which was to Barry Weiss's free press, was so specific in his attacks. It was not just a sort of broad, you guys are biased,

you slant a little here. It was this story, that story, that story. So for instance, the Russian collusion story, which was a complete hoax, a complete passage of Hillary Clinton's campaign dirt to the FBI, to the press, through the FBI, and then this completely bogus years-long investigation. When it died out with the Mueller report, when it turned out there was no Russian collusion, which was always ridiculous, they never said, oh, you know what? For the last two years, we've been selling this nonsense. The attempt to destroy Donald Trump was so intense that it justified anything. So now he brings out this very specific series of charges. And Catherine Marr responds with this typical emotional, you know, I don't even know what to call it.

It's this kind of emotional reaction. Oh, that's hurtful. That's mean. It's degrading, never addressing the obvious truth, the provable truth of the charges. And so then he's suspended on a technicality, which is that he didn't ask permission to go to the free press before he did, which was apparently, again, some in-house rule. He's suspended for five days, and she unleashes on him all this time about what a terrible guy he is. And finally, of course, of course, he has to resign. He has to walk away from that. Meanwhile, with the help of Chris Rufo, who's always doing

great work, Catherine Marr is exposed as an absolute fruitcake. I mean, she has no journalistic background. Her commitment to wokeism is intense. So she completely believes that any kind of attack on her, who's a white person, is somehow an attack on black people. It's somehow racist, it's somehow implying that, you know, DEI is a bad thing, which of course it is. But also she's on a tech talk, on a video, declaring basically that there's no such thing as truth, which is a great thing for a journalist to believe because then you're no longer a journalistic operation. You're basically Disney World. So the thing about this is NPR has always had this certain power over a huge number of people for the simple reason that it covered elite cultural stories in a way no right-wing

site did. So someone like me, who is a conservative politically, but is very culturally oriented, who loves the arts, who wants to hear about the arts, could actually turn on NPR and hear about a jazz musician or a painter or something that you weren't going to hear about anywhere else and hear interviews with people like that, that basically weren't all that political and basically just discuss the kind of cultural things that were going on. So even I would listen to NPR, but after a while, every single story that they did was geared toward attacking people like me. And so we started to drop away. And another one of Berliner's provable charges was that they no longer had any reporters who were anything but Democrats, but any listeners who were anything

but Democrats. Their listenership had solidified, had congealed around their point of view, as of course it does. And that creates this destructive cycle. The same thing has happened to the New York Times. When you're only pitching to those people, you have to get stray a little bit from the left-wing line for people to suddenly get upset and say, why are you moving away from the great truths of wokeism and socialism? And so basically, this station that was supposed to be for all of us, publicly funded, gets a lot of public funds, that was speaking to a sizable number of elite conservatives, the kind of conservatives who care about the arts, who care about the culture, basically just ditched us. It just said, we don't want you. The culture doesn't belong to you. Beauty doesn't belong to you. Art doesn't belong to you. Nothing that has to do with the truth belongs to you.

You're gone. And we left. And this is the same thing that's happened politically to the Democrat Party. It's the same thing that's happened to the mainstream media. And now it's happening to NPR. And the fact that no one besides Ted Cruz is talking about pulling their funding is absolutely embarrassing. It's true. Why? Why are you and I and everyone listening to us right now? Why are we paying this woman's salary? I object. I don't want her in my employee at all. She's a nutcase. As you point out,

fruitcake is a very nice way of saying it. Chris Ruffo's latest, just a couple of samples from her agenda for the day. This is June 20th, 2012. Put on a dress, meet some senior officials, boss it in a man's world, critique the politics of representation, scotch. Oh, you go girl. You go. I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed for her. Um, okay. Then October 14th, 2016 for the record, I don't usually fly business class, just board past it on the way to the back of the bus. As Chris pointed out, Oh, you're a regular Rosa parks, madam. Look at you not getting a business class ticket. Oh, thank you for your sacrifice. She goes on May 31st, 2019. Anyone else love watching the credits at the end of a movie or a show?

Just to marvel at the diversity of names and surnames involved always gives me a happy goosebumps to see the world scroll by. And then there was this one from June of 2020, getting a COVID test and love this little prompt of inclusion re-referenced to the wifi password at the testing site being he, she, they. And you know, she scolded Hillary for using the terms boy and girl because they're not inclusive. She's not well, this person. She's out. She's in. Yuri's out. And NPR has shown zero self-reflection or desire to make this like, you know what, this could be a moment where we could try to work on bringing conservatives back into the fold. Remember,

like CNN tried when they changed ownership and they brought in Chris Licht. And, you know, that didn't go well for various other reasons. but at least they had the moment where they're like, oh, gee, hey, oh, all the conservatives are gone. They're all gone. What should we do? No, nothing. Yeah. They can't fix it because now their audience is all one thing. So in order to fix it, they have to, you know, withstand the slings and arrows that are going to be brought down on them by a very vocal left-wing audience and that just a vocal slice of that audience. But the one thing about this is I can't help feeling there's a little bit of pride go with before the fall here because the domination, the left's domination of the news

media, the entertainment media, and the academy has essentially cut them off from a large swath of the American people, which is why they were so taken aback, so shocked by Donald Trump's original presidential victory, because they had no idea that people of goodwill, people who really care about the country, people who are not racist, would vote for a man like this when they thought they had this basically under control. And what we're seeing in, for instance, these absurd prosecutions of Donald Trump, given air cover by places like the New York Times, which treats them as if they have any seriousness whatsoever. What we're seeing is a kind of pride that they believe that their hold on the press is so complete that it can't be gotten through.

We're not going to be able to see the truth because they're going to make it invisible, as they did during the last election when the Hunter Biden laptop story was, for instance, silenced before it could have any effect on the electorate. They think they can do that again, and they think they can do it forever. And I'm not sure because what I'm seeing is I'm seeing a real shift in the way news is ingested by the public at large, especially by people under the age of, let's say, 50. They're now taking it in from various sites. They don't trust the mainstream. The COVID lies have completely alienated Gen Z. I mean, they're looking at this and saying, oh, you know, when you tell us that riots are mostly peaceful, that,

you know, this COVID came, didn't come from a Chinese lab when you lie and lie and lie and then silence people who try to get the truth out, We don't trust you anymore. That shift is happening without the left really seeing it. Because for now, and politicians only think in terms of the next election, for now, their grip is still very tough. But just things like The Daily Wire, The Megyn Kelly Show, Elon Musk on X, all of these things are bringing out a lot of different information from a lot of different places. And I think they're going to be surprised when they find that everybody sees that they are actually lying to us all the time and covering up all the time. So, you know, I think this is a dangerous situation for the left to be in, which is all to the good. But it's a kind of pridefulness that they have so much power, so much control over the flow of information that nobody can hear anything.

But I don't think they're right. I think that the Internet has changed all of that. And slowly people are waking up to what's going on. And when they hear the concerns expressed by the right half of the country about the policies that have gotten us here, the culture wars that have completely changed children's existence, their safety, and so on, they respond with just disdain. I mean, just dripping, oozing disdain for these people who might object to their view of how America must be. And that, unfortunately, leads me to Katie Couric, who sat down with Bill Maher and said the following. Take a listen to this. And I feel like, to your point, Bill, the socioeconomic disparities are a lot and class resentment is a lot. what anti-intellectualism and elitism is what is driving many of these anti-establishment,

which are Trump voters, anti-establishment voters. So I think that is a huge problem that we have to address. I mean, globalization and, you know, the transition from an industrial to a technological society. I mean, and I don't know if you've ever been jealous of what someone else has or resentful. It is such a corroding and bitter, almost bile feeling. Wow. Anti-intellectuals who are bitter, jealous,

and corrosive over their envy for her half. You know, I used to call these people elites without mirrors because they couldn't see how awful they were. But I'm beginning to think that they're elite without windows because they can't look outside and see that Trump, for all his flaws, gave us four years without a new war where this guy has set the world on fire. Biden has, in his weakness and his dithering and his complete constant misunderstanding of the world stage, has brought us very, very close to a widely extended war, not just in the Middle East, but in Ukraine

and with Ukraine and Russia. He has his economics. They keep telling us that his economics are great. We just don't know it yet. They keep saying, oh, you know, like inflation is under control. Well, first of all, it's not under control. But their idea of it's being under control is that after, you know, years of it's being extremely high, it's a little less high than it was. But eggs are still, you know, what is it? I don't know, 65% higher than what they were. People see their bills. You know, they see that things are going badly. We see that our cities, you know, they keep telling us how crime is down in our cities. I don't believe it. It's possible that murder is down because they've kind of been policing that. But I don't believe that crime is down in cities where all you have to do is talk to people.

No, we're actually going to do a show on this soon. It's a lie. It's truly just a lie because crime spiked. And then in some instances, it fell a little from this enormous spike. It's still above normal. And on top of that, they're not prosecuting anymore. So the cops, many instances, they just don't even arrest the people because they know it's going to be a revolving door out the police station with a note with a DA who doesn't want to prosecute it. Why fill out the paperwork? Why do it anyway? That's another thing. But I'm amazed to hear the disdain, like the drip. That was like another bitter clingers. It was another basket of deplorables, these anti-intellectual, you know, bitter, envious people who are Trump supporters. That's, that's the problem. They're, they're bitter. I mean, talk about not getting it, not,

not even close to getting it. Um, I want to ask you about Molly Ringwald because before you became a star on the daily wire, you were a star in Hollywood, uh, screenwriting for many big movies and very well celebrated in your writing as an author as well. And Molly Ringwald, who was, you know, the star of the day when I was a kid, you know, Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink and all these amazing movies, 16 Candles, has now spent most of her adult life, as far as I can tell, bashing them, bashing the movies. She came out in 18 and talked about John Hughes and how the movies were too, I can't remember her word, but it was something like too misogynistic and too me too. And, um, she should have spoken out. And now she adds this to her latest running commentary at the Miami film festival last weekend. Take a listen.

Those movies, the movies that, you know, are, I'm so well known for, they were very much of a time, you know, and, and if you were to remake that now, I think it would have to be much more diverse and it would have to be, um, you know, you couldn't make a movie that white. Now those movies are really, really very white and, and they don't really represent, um, you know, what it is to be a teenager in a school in America today. I don't think. I'm so sick of this nonsense. So what? You're sorry that you were in a film where white people were the dominant characters. Just stop. Let us enjoy it. Shut up for that matter.

Go away so that we can just enjoy the acting version of you instead of the real. Who gives a shit what Molly Ringwald thinks about anything? Just be quiet. Let your art speak for itself. We enjoyed it and you're making us enjoy it less with your political commentary. You know, this is a real problem. First of all, I have to say it back in the day when she was in her prime, I was madly in love with Molly Ringwald.

So my heart is breaking just a little bit. I'm you know, I may have to recover from this. But there is this thing going on, if you like movies, stories, where everything you watch is an act of preachment, where they're telling you not just what the world is like, which is what art is supposed to do. They're telling you what they believe the world should be. And if you don't like it, there's something wrong with you. So everybody has noticed this. There's no such thing as a white person married to another white person. There's no such thing as a male hero. I recently watched The Three-Body Problem, an adaptation on Netflix of a science fiction novel, a novel of which I kind of enjoyed. And it was really interesting because the heroes were

hard-driving physicists, all of whom were women. And the men were all these kind of slightly neurotic, passive support staff. And I was watching this and going, I guess this is why they call it fantasy in science fiction, because that's not really what the world looks like. And it becomes kind of offensive after a while, because I don't care if you want to make a woman a hero. I don't care about who, you know, what color the person is. I care about being preached to by people I happen to know are some of the worst people in America. You know, people who are working on their fourth wife, you know, they're driving to their, from divorce court and they have to pick up their kid at rehab because they never took care of them. And they're going to stand up and preach to me about what my

life should be like and what the world should look like, even though it doesn't look like this. So even when Molly Ringwald is saying this, she is essentially just kowtowing to an elite cabal of mostly white people who are imposing this on artists. So artists are being told what to say. And I'm telling you, Megan, I experienced this only a little bit because I'm so ornery at this point. I just won't change anything. But all I have to do, in my last novel, I had a couple of remarks about transgenderism, a girl going through a phase of transgenderism before returning to sanity. And they wanted me to cut that out. And I said, you know, I'll pull this book before I cut anything out that is true simply to appease this establishment. It is the establishment. It's the powers that be. So my question is this, if the academy,

if Hollywood, if publishing, if the news industry, if the deep state are all telling us one thing, how is we supposed to think that they are serving the powerless, that they are serving the weak? They are the power. They are the elites. And so when Katie Couric says we're anti-elite, what she's talking about is, yeah, we're the people. We're in an uprising against a series of lies where they butchered children, where they forced us to wear masks. They forced us to take medicines we didn't want.

Of course, we're anti-elite. Our elites stink. Our elites just went through years of screwing things up because a little flu passed through town. We get it. You don't like us. We don't like you either. And yeah, she's right. We are anti-elite, but only because our elites are so bad. It doesn't mean that the people who are voting for Trump aren't elites in themselves. That anti-elite, she's not wrong about that, but the anti-intellectual like, okay. Right. Cause there's just a bunch of dumb asses. Okay. Tell it to Victor Davis Hanson.

Yeah. Like, okay. But to your point, Melissa Chen, who's a great follow on Twitter was tweeting out about this NPR lady, the new CEO and, and talking about how, you know, she, she, there's a sound bite you referenced. It's too long to play right now, but she basically says you can't find truth anymore. Just have to make a good faith effort. Basically, you can't really find real truth. And Wikipedia considers sites reliable under her when she was at the helm, like Vox, Slate, Mother Jones, The Nation. You know, it's not what's considered reliable. The Daily Wire, Fox News, The New York Post, the Federalist, the Daily Caller. That's her world of, we're just doing our best. We can't get to actual

truth, but we're doing our best. If you think it's just the head of Wikipedia or the head of NPR or these other organizations, you're not paying attention. They're everywhere. And they're really trying to program how our children grow up and what their values are and how we live and speak. So good for you for pushing back on your book. I'll give you the last word. Well, I think this is one of the reasons why one thing that I strongly believe is any idea that you're going to transform Hollywood, transform the news media, transform the networks is absolutely absurd.

The only right way for us to go now is to build a parallel media. And the fear there, of course, is that everybody sections off and goes into their little niche and only takes the news that they want. And that's a legitimate fear. But the more likely thing is that the people who tell the truth, the people whose predictions turn out to be true, the people whose ideas are founded in reality and therefore make reality better, are going to attract a larger audience. And then we become the competition like a Phoenix. I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly show on

Sirius XM. It's your home for open, honest and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal and cultural figures today. You can catch the Megan Kelly show on Triumph, a Sirius XM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love. Great people like Dr. Laura, Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey, and yours truly, Megyn Kelly. You can stream The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM at home or anywhere you are. No car required. I do it all the time.

I love the SiriusXM app. It has ad-free music coverage of every major sport, comedy, talk, podcast, and more. Subscribe now. Get your first three months for free. Go to SiriusXM.com slash MK show to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com slash MK show and get three months free offer details apply. Let's talk about the Catherine Mayer soundbite that we've been referencing. So there's a couple of soundbites that have been surfaced of her. The first one is from this Ted talk when she was running Wikipedia. And this is how she described truth and her relationship to it. Watch.

The hard things, the places where we are prone to disagreement, say politics and religion. Well, as it turns out, not only does Wikipedia's model work there, it actually works really well. Because in our normal lives, these contentious conversations tend to erupt over disagreement about what the truth actually is. But the people who write these articles, they're not focused on the truth. They're focused on something else, which is the best of what we can know right now. I've come to believe that they are onto something, that perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start. In fact, a reference for the truth might be a distraction that's getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done. It is because the truth of the matter

is very often for many people, what happens when we merge facts about the world with our beliefs about the world. So we all have different truths. Okay, let me tell you my problem with that. If she actually meant that, if what she meant was when we have a dispute over the COVID origins,

we do our best to say, some people believe it's natural origin and here's the evidence for that. And many people believe it's lab leak and here's the evidence for that. And hear what the leading scientists on both sides say. That'd be one thing. That's not at all what Wikipedia or NPR have done at all.

They have her version of the truth, the left's version. That's what gets shoved down our throats. And only when that version is proven wrong do they start saying, well, there's another side. And then you get like one quarter of the page showing some people think it's lab leak. There's a little bit of evidence for lab leak. That's it. That's what she's actually talking about. And anybody who spent a lot of time on Wikipedia, nevermind NPR, knows that. That's absolutely right. I mean, that's the first thing. They censor people who talk against the party line. They push the party line as if it were somehow wholly writ. It really is amazing when you go back and look at the COVID lies. I mean, not to get mired in the past, but to look at the COVID lines and

how anybody who stood up against them, even if the guy was a doctor and really knew what he was talking about, was not just silenced, but demonized, threatened with being canceled, threatened with losing his job. The other thing is this. Searching for the truth is difficult. We all have to do it. We search for moral truth, not just physical truth, not just factual truth, but also spiritual truth. All of us have to do this. The truth has a certain aspects about it that are universal to it. One is it makes sense. You know, when you walk north from here, you get to Canada. When you walk south, you get to Mexico. That will never change. It's never going to happen the other way around. You're never going to walk south and get to Canada because life actually on a human level makes perfect sense. It all fits together. So when somebody says, for instance, that bigotry is wrong and therefore we have to hate white people and deprive them of their jobs in order to have more black people in their jobs, we have a right to stop and say, well, wait a

minute, if racial bigotry is wrong, how is punishing white people for things that they never did right? That's the kind of thing that doesn't make sense. And you have to be held accountable for that. And it doesn't change when you call someone's name. The fact that you're not making any sense doesn't magically change when you call somebody phobic or racist or sexist or hated. So when, for instance, Yuri Berliner comes out and says, these things happened and here's the proof and here are the receipts. And you can listen to the stories here, here and here. And here are the numbers of Democrats that work for NPR and the number of Republicans, which is zero. The answer that you're hurting my feelings and you're mean and you stink, that's actually not a search for truth. That's a silencing of someone who is

offering a version of the truth that holds together and makes sense. So they're not really talking about their various different truths, which has some kind of reality to it. We have different opinions and we use those opinions. We argue those opinions. They're actually eliminating the means by which we reach the truth. Megyn Kelly says A and Andrew Klavan says B. We discuss it and you hold your reason up to my reason. You hold your information up to my information. And eventually, if we're two people of goodwill, we kind of settle on where things make the most sense and where the facts point.

They don't do that at all. They ever, you know, if you take climate change. I've got to play you the next soundbite. Please. Her next soundbite makes your point exactly. You're exactly right. You're on to her. This is from June 2021, an interview that she gave with the Atlantic Council on exactly First Amendment in the United States is a fairly robust protection of rights. And that is a protection of rights both for platforms, which I actually think is very important that platforms have those rights to be able to regulate what kind of content they want on their sites. But it also means that it is a little bit tricky to really address some of the real challenges of where does bad

information come from and sort of the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it. It's tricky. So that was courtesy of Chris Ruffo who found this. It's tricky. You see, the first amendment is the number one challenge in her fight against disinformation, because it allows people, checks notes, to say things that challenge, again, her version of the truth. Right. And the thing is, you know, when you take over major outlets like the New York Times, like Yale, like NPR, you do have this sort of cultural weight that is based on the fact that you used to tell the truth, that these institutions, the fact that you used to tell the truth, that these institutions, the New York Times was always a liberal institution, but it had

a good reporting staff and it wasn't all dedicated to selling left-wing lies as it is now. NPR, the same thing. They used to give you stories that were slanted to the left, but they were actually factual and actually kind of held together if you were looking for that kind of point of view. Now, they're using the weight of that without the actual basis and truth and factual journalism that they used to have. They're like the guy in Men in Black, where the alien takes over the human being and dresses in a human suit, but he's really a bug inside. That's what NPR is like now. They're using the NPR name and the NPR reputation to sell this nonsense. They're just using the weight of their reputation without the reason they have

that reputation in the first place. And that is exactly what Yuri Beluner was complaining about. And so, look, I love the First Amendment. I want to hear from everybody and believe me, I hear from people who hate my guts all the time and say horrible, horrible, dishonest things about me. Well, they're wrong. What's that? They're wrong. They are. I mean, look at me.

I'm so charming. How could they possibly feel that way about me? But I believe they have that right. It's just that in the end, you do have to have this discussion about what the facts are. And you have to be able to let the facts get out. And she is a person who is clearly not doing that. Simply, we know this because of the suspension of Yuri Belinor on a technicality and the fact that he had to quit simply to keep his reputation intact from this really, I mean,

narrow minded, I think, loopy woman. And that's being kind. I really think much worse about her than that. I think she is not being a moral person in this exchange and she should be removed. Really. Rosa Parks, what are you saying? I know you're back there. Business class. Normally, I want to assure you. I do wave it.

Let's shift gears because today we had a statement from the Biden White House. It's a tweet from Biden, the at POTUS account as follows. Women in sports continue to push new boundaries and inspire us all. But right now we're seeing that even if you're the best, women are not paid their fair share. It's time that we give our daughters the same opportunities as our sons and ensure women are paid what they deserve. So first of all, who the hell wants to hear from this White House, which is allowing and trying to make it more expansive for boys to play against girls in women's sports about fairness, right? Please spare me, right? No one believes you. You have no moral authority on this issue. Second of all, I believe this is a reference to Caitlin Clark, who is, you know, this women's basketball star from Iowa, who's now going to the WNBA

and for a relative pittance versus what the men get going into the NBA. And I can't tell you the number of people who have tried to get me upset over this, Andrew, you know, because they know I'm pro women, I'm pro women's rights. But my reaction to everybody's been the same. Nobody watches the NBA. Nobody watches the WNBA. I'm pro women's rights. But my reaction to everybody's been the same. Nobody watches the NBA. Nobody watches the WNBA. Nobody watches the WNBA. Like, you know, if she brings more eyeballs to it, then her second deal is going to be amazing.

That would be great. She can say, look what I did. I mean, she did it already at the college level. They didn't think that that was worth building into her first contract. I get that. I think she probably should have had a better agent to say, look what she did. There should be a premium built in. Apparently there wasn't. But the pay disparity that he's probably talking about is as follows. She was the number one pick

in the WNBA. She's going to earn $338,000 over four years. $76,000 the first, $78,000, $85,000 over four years, 76 grand. The first 78, 85, 97. The number one overall pick in the NBA in 2023 was Victor Wimbanyama. And he has a four year, $55 million contract, 12 million in year one, 12.7 year two, 13, and then almost 17 million in year four. So am I a sexist pig? Where am I going wrong? I mean, they're not paying these guys in the NBA that much money because they love throwing their money away. They're paying it because that's how much money they're bringing in. That's how capitalism works. If you bring in the money, you get paid for what you do. And listen, Kaitlin Clark is a wonderful athlete. In fact, her college championship game was watched more than the men's championship game. And if she can do that in the WNBA, believe me, she'll be earning that kind of money when she renegotiates her contract. But the power to renegotiate a contract is the power of what you get and what you bring in is what you bring in is what you get. You know, that's the way it works. It's the only way, talking about things that make sense, it's the only way to make sense

of any kind of economic distribution. Otherwise, you put companies out of business and you have these empty seats and you're paying somebody for bringing in gate that's not coming in. So listen, the thing is, men are better at sports and they bring sports to a higher level and they're more interested in sports. Men are more interested in sports and they're more interested in watching other men play sports, except in tennis, where the women's game is an actual different game. So it's actually kind of interesting in and of itself.

But if you're not bringing those people in, you're not getting the pay. And that's all there is to it. And why do we have to pretend? This is the other thing. You know, you start out, the left started out by saying to us, there's no difference between men and women. We have to treat them exactly equally. And now they're saying there's so little difference that a man can be a woman. And if you say that a man can't be a woman and play sports at another level in the women's game, you're being somehow bigoted. The entire

thing is genuinely an attack on women. It genuinely is a hatred of women. And I really do believe this, by the way. I believe the left despises women at their core for the simple reason that the things that women do occur in a different moral structure than the things that men do. Men enjoy competition. They enjoy hierarchy. They enjoy power, they enjoy the competitive earning edge. Women, when they take care of families, are actually dealing with something that's much more spiritual, that's not based on power politics, it's not based on competition. And the left hates that and always has. It started with Marx and Engels saying, we've got to get women out of the home if we're going to have socialism. And a lot of the early

feminists in America certainly were, in fact, socialists trying to accomplish that goal. The destruction of the home that's taken place is, in fact, an assault on women as well. And by the way, I hear some of this disrespectful talk about women from the right as well. It's absolutely infuriating because what I'm looking for is I'm looking to elevate the things that women do in the respect of the general public, the things that women do in a home, in a family, in giving birth, not just in giving birth, but in also nurturing children into their individual humanity. All of these things have

been denigrated by the feminist movement and has made women miserable. I keep reading stories that say, hmm, somehow in spite of feminism, women are more and more miserable. It ain't in spite of feminism. It's because of feminism. And this is obviously not the feminism that gives every woman a choice to do what it is she wants to do with her life. This is the feminism that has been denigrating what women normally like to do for now 50 and 60 years. And it is basically, it's unfortunate because the women who benefit from that kind of feminism are women who make it into the public eye like yourself. I mean, that's a wonderful thing. You're obviously a highly talented commentator, but that means that the only people talking in public are the people who benefited from feminism and the people who have been destroyed by it, which is the vast majority of women, don't have a voice at all. And I just think it is,

this upturning of these men pretending to be women is to me the final step in that kind of leftist feminism, is the erasure of women altogether. And it's absolutely offensive. So listen, Caitlin Clark, great athlete. Most women not as interested in athletics as men obviously don't play as high a level as men who are stronger, faster and care and more competitive, more aggressive. You know, that's what sports is like. And the money just reflects that. I mean, the finals game at the college level for the women crushed everything. I mean, it was like number one by far from any game that we had seen. It was exciting. The problem is it's just not there yet. I mean, I think maybe it'll get there. Who knows? I don't really follow sports a lot, so I don't have any

expert commentary on this. My only understanding is I see people tuning into the NFL and droves and to the NBA and, you know, some of these other male sports league. And it's just not there yet for women. If she can bring it, she'll get paid. But she has no right to make what her equal over there in the men's league makes in being number one in a far more competitive league. That's part of why he's getting so much more than she's getting that league. This guy would crush her in a one-on-one he's number one. She's number one, right? But these are not apples to apples comparisons. So clearly she was content to take the deal. And I think she should do it. And can I just say one other thing?

I really think if we're going anywhere on sports, it should be going more toward the Cleveland Clark salaries and not to this guy's salary. Remember back in the day when like our athletes had to have second jobs and they, you know, like the NBA sucks. Now I know this from every male friend I have, they all want to watch the NCAA because these guys want it. They put their heart on the court. You know, they give it their all the NBA. They're all worried about their careers and getting hurt. And, you know, like don't touch me. And everybody knows you're not supposed to hurt this guy or touch this guy. They're phoning it in. Even I, as a casual observer, can see it. And it's like it's for them. It's all about the paycheck. It's not about the love game. I'm kind of sick of it. I wish what they really had to sing for their

supper and they played for the love of the game. You know, you know, this is a real problem. They once asked Babe Ruth why he made more money than the president. You know, this is a real problem. They once asked Babe Ruth why he made more money than the president. Ruth said, because I had a better year than he did. And I think that, you know, the problem is they really are bringing in that kind of money, and they really are that much better than the next level down. And I don't know how you solve this, because I agree with you, Megan. I watch, I mean, I love football. I love professional football. I used to love football. I love professional football. I used to love baseball. Money ruins the game. There's no question about it. This level of money ruins the game. But then how can you treat these guys unfairly when they're the reason people show

up? When you go to just one level down and watch a baseball game, these guys are like gods. They're like minor small G gods, but they are incredible athletes. And I just above everybody else, you got to pay them for what they're worth because they're going to bring in money that people have never seen before. But on the other hand, you're absolutely right about this. I would now rather watch college football than I would watch professional football because money ruins the game. It's sad, but that's the way capitalism works. You really need an entirely different system to have it work out differently. We make everything and then ruin it. That's our thing. That's our special thing. That's exactly right. That is exactly right.

Okay. Speaking of capitalism, the Chinese, said no one one ever have decided to dip a toe into our world and that they've done that through TikTok, which, as you know, is owned by ByteDance. And now there's a push to get it banned. The U.S. Senate is going to have to take up the question of whether TikTok should be banned in the United States. And there's a lot of public animosity growing toward TikTok because as people start to understand more and more how it's used for propaganda, I was pushing the bin Laden letter. It's been elevating like Hitler. I was like, then they take it down when there's a backlash. But I think particularly on the right, we've learned this is not a source for reliable information and actually is very corrosive. They're fighting back with their own ad campaign. And much like the Biden White House for some time went to these moronic influencers to try to get them to go on

the social media apps and be like, oh, Biden's crushing it. That didn't work. Now, so too is ByteDance turning to, I guess, TikTokers, influencers who it thinks will shore up its reputation amongst those on the right who have been critical of it. And so I give you, I'm going to show you two. First, they went to a nun, Sister Monica Clare. And here is that. My name is Sister Monica Clare. Because of TikTok, I've created a community where people can feel safe asking questions about spirituality. I try to provide a really accessible way of them learning about religion and spirituality that's not intimidating. Somebody in the comments said, I have no idea how I got on Nuntalk, but I'm not mad about it. I'm going to teach you how to pray. I'm going to teach you how to meditate, how to connect with a higher power, because we need that. We need strength and comfort. Okay. So this is going to get, I guess, Christians, because you can watch Sister Monica, who's got 200,000 followers on TikTok, nothing to shake a stick at. And don't forget about, is it truckers? No,

it's veterans. Okay. Truckers, yes, but also veterans. Here's that one. I didn't know nothing about TikTok. And once I got involved with TikTok, I loved it. One day I had texted and texted and hadn't heard back from him. And I got really worried. My scooter broke down. I went into a depression. Pretty sad. And I posted it to show that Kenny's not always happy. Within 24 hours, people had donated over $5,000.

And within a week, people had donated $110,000. And Kenny hit a million followers. That moment was like, whoa. It only felt right to give back some mobility scooters to veterans. Okay. Kenny has 2.7 million followers on TikTok. So you can see what they're doing. And I love Kenny and Sister Monica, but there are some serious problems with this app and this company that Sister Kenny or Sister that Kenny and Sister Monica, but there are some serious problems with this app and this company that Sister Kenny or Sister that Kenny and Sister Monica are not going to be able to solve. What do you make of it? Well, I couldn't help thinking, you know,

Congress has killed Kenny, but it's like you're going to kill this poor old guy if you get rid of TikTok. I want to just clarify one thing you said. You said that Congress is trying to ban TikTok. But as I understand it said that Congress is trying to ban TikTok. But as I understand it, what they're trying to do is get TikTok to break from their Chinese owners. Yeah, yeah, correct. Yeah. And they're trying to force them to do that. And I have absolutely no problem with that.

I don't understand why a malignant power who is dedicated to destroying this country should have this incredibly powerful social media tool piping garbage into the minds of the young, which the Wall Street Journal has done ample investigation to show that they, in fact, are doing that. That a young person who goes on TikTok is going to be ultimately guided to sexual perversion, pedophilia, all kinds of suicidal ideation. And it works. It really is making people depressed.

This is coming from a country, China, which won't even allow a celebrity who is effeminate to appear on TV because they don't want to undermine the strength and masculinity of their population. But they're selling this to us in a purposely malignant way. I have absolutely no problem with Congress forcing them to detach from their Chinese overlords and make, you know, let let the nuns and the old fellows have their way on TikTok. Yeah. Let Kenny live, you know. It is really I mean, it is dangerous. The amount of disinformation that they put out on a daily basis on every topic. And it's always the leftist POV. I mean, it's always pushing the leftist POV. There's not,

I respect the fact that the sister's on there and Kenny's on there, but these are the exceptions, not the rule. These are being amplified right now by TikTok in order to win a PR battle. This is not what TikTok is actually like. I mean, just ask the students for the justice in Palestine, protesters who are out there every day with their TikTok. That's they're living on that. They're getting all their information on that. I mean, it's terrifying to me that half these Trump jurors who got voir dired are saying TikTok is one of their main forms of news. Can you imagine what they've been served about Donald Trump? And well, meanwhile, there's a site you've probably heard of, Libs of TikTok, where all she does is put out things that are actually on TikTok. And she keeps getting banned

from social media for showing what's on TikTok. So they're silencing her, not for what she says, but for actually showing what the left says. So they're calling her hateful because she is showing what the left actually says. And yeah, you know, this is part and parcel of this kind of sexual deviance that is being sold to us very aggressively by the left. I mean, I don't actually believe, and I'm as close to being a First Amendment purist as you can get, I don't actually believe that pornography is covered by the First Amendment. I believe the First Amendment is there to protect political and philosophical opinions, the kinds of opinions that we have about the things that are going on in the country, the realities of life,

what somebody is doing. I don't necessarily think that watching somebody beat the living hell out of a woman for sexual pleasure, I don't necessarily feel that that is actually covered by the First Amendment. So a lot of this stuff is really ugly. And then when they try to sell, for instance, pornography to little children as they're trying to do, and we try to stop them, they call that book banning. I don't think that is book banning. free speech is investigating Elon Musk because he lets all other political sides have their say. I think what's damaging free speech is HR departments threatening to fire you if you have an untoward opinion. I think those are the things that are threatening free speech. It is not making this company break ties with China, which it should do. Yeah. Like the New York Times reporter who just came out with his story about having to grab the pink Starburst out of the jar on his opening day at the New York Times and saying, oh, that means I have to say something

about myself. I'll just tell you that I recently had a Chick-fil-A sandwich and it was delicious and was pulled aside by HR saying, we don't do that here. We don't Chick-fil-A. No, sorry. No. Okay. Andrew Klavan, it's so fun talking to you. Thank you so much for being here. And until the next time, sir. It's always a pleasure. Thanks a lot, Megan. Okay. Go find more from Andrew and his son, Spencer Klavan, perhaps the lesser known Klavan, but not for long because Spencer is incredibly gifted in his own right. And you can check them both out at thenewjerusalem.substack.com. Talk to you all again soon. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.