The Megyn Kelly Show - Piers Morgan on Cancel Culture, Trump, and The War On Free Speech | Ep. 16

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

Megyn Kelly is joined by Piers Morgan, author of "Wake Up" and co-presenter of Good Morning Britain, to discuss cancel culture, his relationship with President Trump, the war on free speech and college campuses, parenting, successes and failures, Meghan and Harry and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. I'm Megyn Kelly. Today on the show, here's Morgan. He is an author, he is a TV presenter, that's what they call them over there across the pond, co-host of ITV's Good Morning Britain, which is hilarious. He and his co-host have a lot of fun banter. He's a columnist for the Daily Mail and I think editor at large. And he's done basically everything. I mean, he's America's Got Talent co-host. Britain's Got Talent co-host. He used to have a show on CNN. You know who the guy is. The way I know him is as a provocateur and a truth teller. And it's not

that I agree with him on everything, but I agree with him on enough that I admire his unafraid nature and approach to news and information. I think that's how you're going to feel too. We'll get to him in one second. But first, don't you love doing business with veterans? If I find out that a company is owned or operated by a U.S. veteran, I am at least 50% more likely to do business with them. And that is one of the many things I like about the company Pure Talk. Their CEO is a vet who understands what it means to serve his country, to sacrifice. And here's the thing about Pure Talk. So it's smaller and you might not know it as well as you know AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile, but it is on the exact same network as one of those big carriers.

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Pure Talk, simply smarter wireless. And now, Piers. Piers Morgan, thank you for being here. My pleasure, really. Okay, so now it's a real thrill for me because the audience has heard me say before, only half joking, that I want to be you when I grow up. And I realize you're only six years older than I am. But I just, I love, you don't give a flying fig. You will say how you feel and you really don't care if anyone gets offended. So

can we start with how did you get to be like that? Well, I come from a pretty combative Irish family. I'm one of the least opinionated members of that family. So when we get together, all hell tends to break loose. But the one rule we always have is however volatile the debate gets, at the end of it, we shake hands and go down the pub and have a pint together. And one of the main themes of my book is what happened to that? What happened to that sense of what a democracy is about? What happened to respecting each other's right to have different opinions, wanting to embrace

and debate conflicting opinions, and at the end of it, remain friends and go off and have a drink together? I think that's been lost in the whirlwind of social media in particular. And we're now very tribal. And it doesn't allow for that kind of nuanced debate anymore. Yep. No, you're totally right. Because you've written a book, it's called Wake Up, Why the Liberal War on Free Speech is Even More Dangerous than COVID-19. And you have been very outspoken about the dangers of COVID-19. So for you to say that is meaningful. I mean, we can get into your diagnosis on how you think we got that way.

I mean, I think you and I seem to be in agreement on one thing, which is all those years we spent looking at these morons on college campuses, like, you know, toughen up, buttercup. Those people are now starting to run the world. And sadly, they're winning. Yeah, well, that's the problem is that unfortunately, this sort of small, very vocal minority of woke activists have spread their tentacles into all sorts of places of influence, including college campuses. And what is happening is that universities and corporations and television networks and media companies and

newspapers, they're all bowing to this mob. And they constantly chuck people on the bonfire or no platform people or do all the things that go with woke and cancel culture. And they're doing it from a position of, in my opinion, just a pathetic weakness, because really what they should be doing is standing up and fighting. And I don't mean physically fighting. I mean, verbally and from a corporate point of view, saying that we're not going to have our entire world dictated to by a small, very noisy minority of people who have a very narrow prison of what is acceptable in life. Well, it used to be that these people would complain. It would be kind of an irritation. I would mock them, I mean, for being so weak and thin skinned.

But it was slightly amusing. Now that you've had all of media, all of Hollywood, all of corporate America bending the knee to this nonsense, it's gotten scary because people are getting fired. And I still think that your attitude and my attitude represent far more of, you know, here in the States, you know, we call it flyover country. I mean, real regular Americans, with the exception of like the established, quote, left, feel as you and I do, but they're afraid and they don't, they're starting to wonder because all of the incoming information from their news media, from their newspaper, from their television shows, from their bosses is saying something very different. Oh, there's no question. And it's got dangerous. You know, people are getting canceled if they retweet somebody, if the woke crowd decide

that person cannot be retweeted. You know, the best example of this recently was the J.K. Rowling debate, where J.K. Rowling has raised a big red flag over how far she believes transgender rights are now superseding women's rights. And she's been quite vocal about this. My view is I don't agree with everything she said, but I think a lot of it makes sense that we should have a very rational debate about transgender rights. And at what point, for example, in women's sport, do we say that there's a new inequality, a new unfairness,

if you allow people born to male biological bodies to compete with women born to female biological bodies. It doesn't make you transphobic to think that that's a concern when you see all the women's records being destroyed by people born to physically more powerful, faster, stronger bodies. So these things should be able to be discussed. But when J.K. Rowling tried to discuss them, she didn't just get cancelled in the sense of everyone wanting to get rid of her, but she literally became a hashtag on Twitter. The hashtag was

RIP J.K. Rowling. In other words, the woke crowd who professed to be so kind and caring and tolerant and wanting fairness and equality actually wanted J.K. Rowling dead because she wanted to preserve women's rights. And I find that a pretty terrifying escalation in this woke nonsense. And also, I asked one question. Where do they think this is going to get them? Do they really think they're going to achieve what they want to achieve by destroying everything that most people in America, in Britain, in most democratic countries hold dear, which is the democratic right to freedom of speech, the right to freedom of expression, the right to have an opinion?

I mean, I think a lot of them are confused. I've argued with some, including Chris Cuomo on your old network, CNN, who once tweeted out that he thought hate speech was banned by the Constitution. Well, hello, it isn't. One of the great things about living in a free society is you can engage in hate speech and somebody may not like it and they're allowed to respond with their argument in response to what they or someone might consider hate speech. But we're at this place now where I think one of the polls showed on college campuses, the vast majority want want a constitutional amendment to ban hate speech, they want it to be not covered by the First Amendment, which is so

absurd, because, of course, the the First Amendment is necessary not to protect speech you like, but speech you do not like. No one's trying to shut down speech everyone loves. Well, that's the whole point, isn't it, is that I regularly I follow lots of people on Twitter whose opinions I don't agree with precisely. So I hear something outside of my own kind of echo chamber. And I urge everybody else to do the same. When you only follow people on social media that agree with you, you start to develop this very tribal, entrenched view of things, which doesn't allow for any nuance or any movement. But it gets really insidious when universities, colleges around America, we're having the

same problem in this country. When they decide that even someone like Bill Maher is unacceptable and has to be no-platformed because he's held a shining light to wokery and all things around it. When that starts happening, you really think, well, hang on. Who are you going to allow to speak? And what kind of education are kids going to be getting in these universities? What are they going to be taught if they find everything offensive, if they're triggered by everything, and they can't even have a speaker like Bill Maher, who's a liberal, come and talk to them, let alone a bona fide conservative? I don't know where this takes education. I don't know where it takes students. I don't know where it takes democracy. But I do know it's taking it, as I say in the book, into a dangerous place

where coronavirus has been appalling. But it will be. Historically, pandemics tend to blow out in about two years. And then where are we left as a society? Because if we don't wake up, which is the title of my book, if we don't wake up to this problem, I think the attack on free speech over time after all this will end up being far more dangerous than any virus. It's already gotten to the point of absurdity. There was one college professor here who got in trouble for in one of his books or writings using the term urban. Somehow urban is now just code for racism. That's you being derogatory toward black people. And there was a push to fire him because he had used that term among other benign terms. And then there was that incident at Medill, which is Northwestern's

journalism school, one of the most respected journalism schools in the country where I think they were protesting because Jeff Sessions, the, you know, now fired attorney general here was booted and he was going to go speak on campus. And so the students decided he was terrible because of his immigration policies and he could not speak. You know, this is keep in mind a few years ago at Columbia in New York city, they had Ahmadinejad come and speak. OK, but Jeff Sessions, that's a bridge too far. So everyone was protesting. Long and the short of it is the school newspaper goes out and takes pictures of some of the protesters on campus, writes an article.

There were protests. Well, the little snowflakes got all upset because their picture was in the paper. They didn't consent to it. Well, you were on a quad. You were in a public place. You were trying to be heard on an issue that you claim was near and dear to your heart, which is Jeff Sessions and his appearance on your campus. So grow up. And instead of the journalism school and the newspaper turning around to them and saying, grow up, they apologized. They apologized to these little cupcakes leading to all these alumni,

thankfully, at Northwestern to turn around and say, what the hell are you doing? What kind of message is this? But they're being coddled peers at every turn, and sane people are turning around saying, wait, am I the nuts one? Am I the one who, like, what the hell is going on? Well, there's also a rank hypocrisy to all this. And I write about what happened to you in the book, where I watched it from afar here in London with utter horror. You made a perfectly reasonable observation that, you know, if you go back 20, 30 years, then the sort of stuff that went on on Halloween was deemed completely acceptable. And you ask the question, what changed? How has this changed? It was a really interesting debate how any form of Halloween costume now is deemed to be cultural, inappropriate, and so on and so on.

It's an interesting debate to have. But you got hounded, you got vilified, you got shamed, and you got effectively bounced out of your job for expressing, in my view, completely uncontentious opinion. But what was most interesting to me was it surrounded this issue of blackface. And you lost your job despite making a very fulsome apology to anybody who was offended. And yet, what happened then? We then saw the Prime Minister of Canada, one of the most woke liberal people in the world, Justin Trudeau, who it turns out has repeatedly blackened up his own face.

I think there were three different occasions when it happened. So many times he said he couldn't remember the number. And in one occasion, he's nearly 30. He's a teacher. He's 30. He's not a kid. And yet when it happened to him, he wasn't hounded out of his job. In fact, he got reelected. I didn't see any famous liberals leave him a charge for him to lose his job, for him to be destroyed, for him to have his opinion vilified. And yet, there was somebody actually blacking up his face multiple times. You were far removed from that. You were just talking about a cultural phenomenon, which has changed dramatically in America in 20, 30 years, which is a subject perfectly worthy of discussion. And I cite that as an example of this ludicrous double standard,

where actually, if they were to hold up Trudeau to the same standard they held you, there should be the same outrage and the same outcome. But there isn't. And can you imagine if they started, first of all, I should thank you. I've thanked you privately, but thank you for defending me because when that whole thing happened, there were very few people actually willing to defend me, which is one of the things that led to my confusion. It was like, wait, I don't understand exactly what I've said that's wrong. I know what I said is true that 30 years ago, this used to not provoke the same reaction as it does today. And so you almost feel like you're being gaslit when you don't get defended, you know, like, well, maybe, maybe I'm nuts. Maybe I didn't see this in

white Christmas and these other movies, but you did, But you did. You stood up. Back to the Piers Morgan does not give a flying fig what you think of him. He was one of the few voices. Ben Shapiro was another who stood up and said, this is bullshit. Let's get real. But can I say something about what you wrote in the book? Because it did jump out at me. And I wanted to talk to you about it for a minute because I know you've been fired from jobs. You've had highs and lows in your career. And you said something I have in front from jobs. You've had highs and lows in your career. Yeah. And you said something I have in front of me. You're pointing out the hypocrisy between the way they treated me and Justin Trudeau,

who actually has worn blackface unlike me. You said the way Megan was destroyed and Trudeau saved epitomizes the rank hypocrisy and deceit that lies at the heart of cancel culture. And I read that and I was like, okay, I'm stuck on destroyed. Was I? Like, what do I think? What does, what does that mean to me? And in the end, I think a phase of my career was indeed destroyed as a result of NBC's reaction to that event. But the more I But the more distance between me and the day and the more I think about it, Piers, I feel like it needed to happen.

You know, destruction in the moment can lead to new growth, right? It can lead to something better and more evolved, more informed, and certainly in my case, happier. And if I could go back and save myself, you know, sort of erase that conversation and just go on and fulfill the term of my contract at NBC, I don't, I don't know that I would do it because the biggest reaction I had when I was let out of that building was relief. Yeah.

You know, and now I'm now I'm in a great place. It was a very tough, I would say the first year and a half was maybe a year was really tough. And I wound up flourishing. And I know you did, too. too, but before we move on to the flourishing, can we just talk about, because I do think there is real pain in having something awful happen to you, whether it's through cancel culture or in your case, just losing a job that you thought you loved and needed. And I think too often we brush by it too fast. And you talk very openly in the book about how brutal your dismissal was from the Daily Mirror, which you worked at, I think, for 10 years in Great Britain. And how you were in all the newspapers and you were being ridiculed.

Can you just talk about what that was like? Well, yeah. I mean, I was the editor of The Daily Mirror, one of the biggest selling newspapers in Britain. And I had been for 10 years. I'd been running the entire paper, the newsroom, for many hundreds of journalists. And we'd won many awards. We were very successful. And I was having a very good time. I was only in my late 30s. I got the job when I was 30. And I got fired over pictures that we ran. It was just after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in America, where the pictures of American troops abusing Iraqis came out, which shocked America and shocked everybody, really. And about five or six days

later, we were offered, or had been offered before, and these were then pushed again to us, pictures of British troops apparently doing a similar kind of thing. And it was alleged that these pictures were faked. We never really got to the bottom of it. What we do know is that the people that we accused, some of them went to prison for the very crimes that we were accusing them of. So I've always had my doubt about exactly what these pictures were or whether they were genuine or not. But the truth is they depicted a wider truth. But putting all that to one side, I got literally frog-marched into the street by a security guy after 10 years of valued, loyal service to the company, to the paper.

Never got a chance to say goodbye didn't we get a chance to pick my jacket up or my phone uh and as i drove away i remember thinking a bit like you did i think almost a sense of relief as well that this was over this particular chapter it all turned very acrimonious for several weeks the pressure was enormous and ultimately i thought okay well if i'm gonna go actually I don't mind going on this. And maybe you felt the same way. I don't know. We can come to that. But I felt, you know what? I believe in this story. I believe we'll be vindicated over time about the Iraq war, which we had aggressively opposed as a newspaper.

Indeed, I believe we were. I thought we'd be vindicated over the abuse that was going on, which we were. It was proven later it had been happening, regardless of the rest of the pictures. Indeed, I believe we were. I thought we'd be vindicated over the abuse that was going on, which we were. It was proven later it had been happening, regardless of the rast of the pictures. But I remember driving back to my apartment on the river in West London and amassing a few good, loyal friends. And we got some Chinese food in, I remember. We got some nice bottles of French wine. And we got steadily drunk.

And I watched my own obituary on the television. It was a lead item on the television it was a lead item on the news uh for about three days it was huge story huge scandal yeah and it was a kind of weird out-of-body experience but I do remember this flooding sense of relief and I remember thinking if I'm gonna go I don't mind going over this because I think history will prove me right which it did and I also felt I learned so much from the whole experience. You can get very cosseted in these jobs, as you know. You get paid a huge amount of money.

You've got loads of people working for you. Your word is the bond, is the order. Out it goes. Things get done. Suddenly, I was put back into normal life without any support group I didn't even know for example that stamps have become self-adhesive postage stamps mail stamps I tried to link them and it stuck to my tongue I was like what's this I rang my old assistant I said what what's this weird thing with the stamps and she burst out laughing at you you haven't sent a

letter in 10 years you don't know that postage stamps are now self-adhesive. And then I discovered the joy of turning my phone off at night and getting a good night's sleep, not worrying about some bomb going off somewhere and being woken at 2am to run this daily paper machine. And then the joy of walking to my local supermarket on a Wednesday afternoon and buying a pork pie and then just calmly walking back and eating it. And I got back with friends I hadn't seen for a long time. I spent much more time with family. My kids were young, in particular, spent time with them. And the whole experience became extraordinarily cathartic. And I remember thinking then, wow,

what an amazing thing. This job that I thought I'd do till I was 60 is all over at 38. And I remember thinking then, wow, what an amazing thing. This job that I thought I'd do till I was 60 is all over at 38. And yet it's going to open up a whole new world, which is exactly what it did. I mean, I then go and judge, you know, piano playing pigs on America's Got Talent for six years. I do Celebrity Apprentice and win, chosen as a winner by the now president of the United States. I replaced Larry King at CNN for nearly four years. And then I come back and do breakfast TV in the UK. I never thought I'd do. None of that would have happened if I hadn't gone through what appeared to be at the time, this harrowing, life-changing, career-ending ordeal. Turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. We'll have more with Piers in a minute. We're going to talk to him about participation trophies and parents' completely misguided effort to,

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and then use code RADIO for 30 free days of protection. That's code RADIO at HomeTitleLock.com. And now, back to Piers. I knew that what I had said was factually correct, if not expressed in the perfect way. But I I didn't feel liberated initially. I was relieved to be out of there. But I was upset because, of course, everyone in the country here, not everyone, but the press was calling me a racist.

And it's like, OK, I I don't want that on every newspaper in the country. And I don't want my kids to see that. I know it isn't true. And I know that people who know me and see me clearly know it isn't true. But I do think it, for me, it made me feel acutely one of the dangers of this crazy cancel culture, which is it involves real pain for the people who are in the crosshairs. I mean, real pain. I know now, you know, you and I can say, oh, whatever people are going to say what they're going to say. And I've, I've gotten to that place, but it doesn't erase the actual tears and heartache in the moment. And I'll tell you for me, one of the, one of the moments I will never forget in the wake of that whole thing was I was in my apartment for 10 days where I did not leave my apartment.

All these photographers were outside, same as you were experiencing. And, um, my husband just, he did kid duty in the morning and took them to the schools. And finally, after 10 days, I'm like, I'm going outside. I'm taking my own children to school and, you know, we're in New York, so it's all on foot and you try to get a taxi and whatever. But so I walked outside, I get with my sons to their school and I'm walking up the stairs and a black man who I didn't know, obviously one of the dads was walking out of the school, having just dropped off, dropped off his son. And he looked at me and I looked at him and you know, everyone in the country,

all these newspapers have been saying, I'm a racist, I'm a racist, I'm a racist. And I was like, Oh my God, Jesus Christ. Right. So he looks at me and I look at him and I didn't know what he was going to communicate, but it was clear something. And he pointed his finger at me and he goes, you. And I was like, Oh God, he goes, are wonderful. I could still cry. You know, I could, it was like he had seen, he, he saw, this is definitely not a conservative guy. He just, it was just like a beacon of hope because I was like, you know what? People can see that this is bullshit, but it takes a while. At least it did for me to get past the actual event. I defended you because I used to watch you at Fox all the time and I knew you weren't a racist, you know, and I knew where you came from on these issues.

And I knew how you like to just explore and debate stuff that was sort of culturally interesting. And the changing nature of Halloween, to me, is a really interesting cultural phenomenon where even five years ago, pretty much you could wear anything to a Halloween night because anything went. And now almost everything is unacceptable, inappropriate. And then, of course, there's almost a comical irony, of course, of Lester Holt, NBC's number one news guy, who had turned out as white-faced. And you're like, well, what is the rule then? So if you have a black presenter who's white-faced, nobody cares. But if a white presenter like you talks about the changing nature of Halloween in relation to black-facing, then you have to go.

And again, I just simply say, is there not a double standard there? What is the standard? How, how much does it pertain to someone's politics or perceived political leanings? And at that stage, if it's politically motivated, then it's not, it's not actually anything other than a partisan ideological thing. And that raises all sorts of problems. I think you're right, because the way you get into this in your book is by saying that you've learned more from failing than succeeding. And I do think if you're smart, you take the time to reflect and consider what matters to you. Like you pointed out the friends who you got drunk with, you had your Chinese food with. I definitely had, I wouldn't say, you know,

nobody like turned on me, but over, you know, when, when I was no longer on the air, no longer in the prime time of Fox, certainly people who had expressed great amounts of interest in me prior to that were no longer calling. Yeah. A lot of people are not like openly hostile. They just disappear. It wasn't like, I don't want to be with you because you said something offensive. It was more like, you're no longer someone who, who star I want to hitch to. Like it was, you know, they sort of want to bathe in your reflective light. And when you're not shining, they're like, Oh, I'll go find somebody else. Great. Good. I'd rather know. Right. I'd rather actually have the real information about who my friends are. So that is a benefit. But I do think to your point,

it's one of the huge problems in the way we're raising our kids today is that not that I'd want my kids to go through what I went through or what you went through necessarily, but we never let them hurt. We don't let them fail. We don't even let them lose. Well, I just think that you can chart it back to when this ridiculous notion of participation prizes started in schools, both in America and Britain, where if you came last on sports day and something, you got a prize. Just think about that for a moment. I mean, what does that teach you? That teaches you there's no such thing as a loss in life. And then of course, these kids get a bit older and they discover in the real world when they become adults adults that life is full of losing.

You know, you're going to lose loved ones who are going to die. You're going to lose jobs that you like. You're going to lose, you know, a house. You're going to get gazumped. You're going to lose a car, whatever it may be. Life is about taking knocks and how you deal with it. It's the old Rocky Balboa quote, which I love so much, when Sylvester Stallone talks to his son in the sixth movie, and the son's whining away about being Rocky's son. And he suddenly loses it with him in the street and gives him this tour de force speech about life. And he said, life's not about how hard you can hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep getting up and moving on. And that it's no bowl of cherries out there. And it's so true. It's what I always say to my kids. And I always

say to them, look, you're going to find things you're good at and bad at. But the best lesson you'll get in life is when you lose. Because the pain of losing should drive you to want to not lose again. It's done that my entire life and whenever I've lost a job or I lost a or I failed in an exam or you know got out first ball at cricket whatever it may be it always it was the pain of the loss which drove me to then be successful in other ways in other areas uh or the next time I bat it. And you talk to any great sportsman, they'll tell you, it's all about how you deal with the bad stuff, the losing, the failures. It's that, I mean, whether it's Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky,

you go and check the quotes about winning, and they'll all tell you they learn more from the losing. And it's the terror and the horror of losing that drives the great sports men and women to great heights because they just don't want that taste again. And I think if you take that taste away from kids at school, what are you teaching them? What are you preparing them for? Do you think there's an, I don't know, there's a contradiction in this reticence to allow our kids to lose. I don't include myself in this because I definitely do not have that feeling. And I do let them lose.

And I throw away their participation trophies. And they understand now, not even to bring them home. But they won't. So parents don't want their kids to lose. They don't want them to suffer any pain, any hurt whatsoever. And then these kids wind up, you know, teenagers are in college and they're all about their victimhood. Have you ever seen a culture want to celebrate victimhood so much, whether they are in fact

victims or just imaginary victims? I mean, you look online and now you've got these sort of social influencers. I just pulled one quote and there's somebody out there going, I suffer from PTSD, anxiety, social anxiety, ADHD, depression, eating disorders, bulimia, orthorexia, autoimmune disease, panic attacks. I mean, it goes, okay. I understand we were at a place for a long time where you couldn't say any of that without shame, but man, have we crossed over to the other side. And so how do you go from like no hurt, no pain, no losing to let's celebrate what victims we all are.

It's being driven by celebrities, you know, because they've realized there's lots of money to be made from being professional victims. If they can talk about endless, terrible things have supposedly happened to them. They get huge amounts of sympathy, and that translates into popularity, which translates into media coverage, which translates into dollars. And it's a very cynical pattern that I see, not with everybody. Some of them I know, and they've gone through genuinely harrowing things. But just think about some people in the public eye who just are really, really unfortunate. You know, something bad happens to them all the time. I talk about one in the book, Jamila Jamil. She calls herself a body activist and she's an actress.

But she's had so many things go wrong with her. There was a conspiracy theory, which may or may not be true, that she suffers from Munchausen's by proxy where she just imagines all this stuff the list of stuff which she's talked about to gain empathy and sympathy is so gigantic including being attacked where a swarm of bees where one other witness said there was one bee and so on that there is a premium now in showing weakness in showing that you're a victim, in showing that you've had all these things go wrong. And if you try and go the other way and talk about being strong, mentally strong, you're now part of the problem. You're now not showing enough. You're showing enough empathy with the losers of the world, with the weak people. I'm like, well, why don't we try to work on helping the losers and the weak people

become stronger? Why don't we send people into schools to teach mental strength and resilience rather than wrap the kids in cotton wool and console them about their problems? So can I tell you, I actually had this conversation with the head of my daughter's school, who I love, but she said, you know, she was talking about all the diversity training they're doing. Of course, they're getting diversity training every other day from 50 different places that want to tell them about critical race theory and so on. And I said, you know, you might want to consider at some point talking to them about grit and resilience, because it's possible at some point they're going to meet someone who didn't have the training. And she said, well, why don't you teach that? You should come in and teach a class. And I said, I'll do it, but I'm going to do it in an inappropriate Halloween

costume. Like that's the point, like to offend, to shock, to unsettle. And then you know what those young women would find? They're fine. It's okay. You can handle it. How do they ever learn those lessons if they just are in their little sheltered tents, never having to deal with anything difficult until someone has an opposite viewpoint of theirs at college and then suddenly is on academic probation? Yeah. It's a very interesting story. A friend of mine is a guy called Ant Middleton. He was a special boat squadron troop, which is the special forces, like Navy SEALs in America. So he's one of the most elite guys of his military generation and very heavily decorated, but been in many wars. And he was telling me a story about he was on holiday somewhere with his kids and he's got four or five kids or five kids. And one of them was his young daughter.

He'd been teaching them all to swim over the years. And one was very young, like two or three. And he just threw her in the pool and made her try and get to the side. Now I've done that with all my kids. That's how they all learn to swim. Because apart from everything else, they're pretty buoyant at that age. So you just toss them around and then they work it out um and you know it's a bit of tough love you're not gonna let them drown you're standing there helping them

but you want them to fend for themselves to get that feeling of slightly struggling and then how do they get to the wall that's how they learn to swim and he said all these other parents were horrified about what they were witnessing and he couldn't believe that they would find this kind of thing so disturbing.-year-old into a pool even if you're standing right next to them to encourage them to get to the side of course that that to them is anathema it's like well you're killing your child no you're not you're teaching you're right there resilience right and there's the problem right there well one of the things you talk about in the book and i've heard you write about i, I've read your columns talking about this as well, is what we're doing to boys right now. And, you know, some of these traits, they're not all, obviously, young girls can be strong and

courageous and are, but in particular, boys are being shamed for those traits these days, because they're being dismissed now as toxic masculinity. And it's not just the woke scolds. I mean, the American Psychological Association, you point out in the book, has released a set of guidelines to try to help psychologists understand what traits are considered harmful in little boys, like competitiveness, achievement, stoicism, I mean, and the and the estuial of the appearance of weakness that that we shouldn't be teaching little boys that. And, you know, I am one of the women who you reference in the piece saying you said, I don't think most women actually want to date these men who have none of those characteristics.

And I couldn't agree more and i couldn't agree more i couldn't agree more well this is the whole point is that i don't know any women that want their men to be just these weak little doormats running around sobbing all the time and apologizing for everything when have you met a woman that wants to be with a guy like that they don't um i want a non-achiever. And I think this thing about masculinity is it really what's happened since the Me Too movement, which was incredibly laudable in so many ways. And obviously, I know about your involvement with that, with what happened at Fox and Rodger Ailes and, you know, made a movie, which is a powerful movie. But I just think that the problem with it that's come out is that it's now been decided by the more radical feminist movement that almost any form of masculinity, in fact, masculinity itself has become an ugly word and that all men are basically bad unless they can prove otherwise.

This was encapsulated. And I tell the story in the book about Gillette, who suddenly decided to reverse decades of advertising where they made men feel good about masculinity and made them feel good about being good fathers, good husbands, good people, but they were strong and they were masculine and all those things. And they replaced it with the most ghastly, woke campaign ever, which began with a whole kind of litany of terrible things involving men. And the premise became, you've got to prove that you're good. We're working from the premise. You're a bad person because you're a man. And I've had this conversation with female friends of mine. I said, you know, I know lots of very good men. I know lots of very bad men. I know lots of men hovering in the middle somewhere. But I also know lots of very good women. I know lots of very bad men I know lots of men hovering in the middle somewhere

but I also know lots of very good women I know some absolute horror stories of women I don't know women who are in the middle somewhere this is called human life and the idea that suddenly all men have to prove they're not awful because of a very laudable campaign to root out genuinely bad men, I think is a real problem. And the fact that you can't anymore. And of course, the eradication of James Bond played into that, because in many ways, James Bond, to these more radical feminists, he personifies

everything that's wrong about men. You know, he's hard drinking, he likes to smoke, he likes to womanize. You know, he's tough, he's ruthless, smoke. He likes to womanize. You know, he's tough. He's ruthless. He kills people. He's about as bad as it gets on the wokeometer. And yet, of course, if you ask most women, do they love James Bond? They love him. Of course. Well, I mean, it's these women have co-opted what was and I don't even know if I want to call it the Me Too movement. You know, I mean, what happened at Fox and I even think what happened with Harvey, this was about getting rid of somebody who's behaving illegally, you know, who's behaving unlawfully in the workplace setting. It wasn't about condemning manliness and manhood. I remain

somebody who stands up for female empowerment. But if you show me a man who is the opposite of all these traits that they now say are bad, who instead of being stoic is always emotional, instead of being competitive, has zero drive to compete, instead of having achievement is a lack of achievement, who instead of projecting strength, projects weakness is just fine and I love it, who won't take any risks. I mean, I don't want him on top of me. I think that's just, I'm just saying. You end up with just, everyone becomes Justin Trudeau.

A man who literally, a man who literally said to a bunch of students that one of them used the word mankind and he went, well, no, no, no, we don't say that here. We say people kind. And they all cheer.

In a moment, Piers and I talk about his relationship with Donald Trump, his very strong thoughts about Harry and Meghan, and my daughter Yardley makes a guest star appearance. But first, I want to talk to you about Super Beats soft chews. All of my girlfriends are getting these. They all love them. You know why? Because they want to feel to you about Super Beats Soft Chews. All of my girlfriends are getting these. They all love them. You know why? Because they want to feel a little bit more energized without having seven cups of coffee. One or two, good.

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when you buy two bags, they will throw in the third for free. That's getsuperbeats.com slash MK. Okay. Now, before we get back to Piers, I want to bring in Steve Krakauer. He is the executive producer of the Megyn Kelly Show, and he is going to help us get to a feature we call Asked and Answered, where we try to answer one or two listener questions that have been sent in to us via our email, which Steve has. Hey, Steve. Hey, Megyn. Yes, we have been getting a ton of questions at questions at devilmaycaremedia.com, so keep those coming. But actually, we're going to grab a question for Ask and Answer today from our Apple podcast reviews, which have also been great and have been really filling up as well. So here's a five-star rating from Lindsay Whalen-Draska,

but she also had a question. She wanted to know about balance and balancing being a working mom as she is. She says, do you have any advice for female career professionals who have strong career goals and also strong motherhood goals? Is there an end in finding the beautiful balance of both? It's a good question, Lindsay. I feel like every working mom asks herself this question. And I would say, look, in my own experience, you can have it all, but not necessarily at the same time. I was rising up my career at Fox and then I had three kids and realize one day they'd become more important to me, right? It's like, you're sitting around like, Oh wait, I had them and I love them and I want to see them. And, uh, you know, realize that the balance in my life wasn't good enough. So I think the challenge for working moms is to just keep reassessing. Are things okay? Are they balanced the way you need them? And I think, you know, there,

there's a certain sector of women who unfortunately can't make this choice. They have a job that doesn't pay enough for them to pay their bills. And so they cannot dial back. They, they, if anything, they need to double down. And I think kids can wind up just fine in those circumstances too. In fact, all the studies show they wind up respecting mom a ton when she works like that. So I don't think you ever have to worry about the way they see you or your relationship with them. I think the pain is in not being there for a lot of it, right? And it's a trade-off. It's a trade-off. I mean, we all have to do the responsible thing, pay our bills, support our kids. But if you have the luxury of dialing it back at all, and you're having anywhere like those feelings I was having, I recommend it. I have to say, I think the money

winds up settling. You wind up finding a way to get forward. And you only see those kids once, you only have them with you and in your house one time. So I would say, you know, maybe if you can lean a little bit more toward the mothering when they're little, and then when they get a little older and they don't want to be with you anymore, I think I've told it's going to happen soon when they hit the teenage years, you can rev it up again at work. I think that would be the ideal. But I think one thing to remember as you go through all of this analysis is societies, they tend to shame you no matter what you choose.

If you work a lot at the office, then you're a crappy mother. If you're a stay-at-home mother, then you're not ambitious and you suck as a woman. And none of that is true. That's all BS, right? You make your own choices, do what works for you. And in your own head, you'll figure out what balance makes the most sense for you and your family. And in your own head, you'll figure out what balance makes the most sense for you and your family. And once you've made that decision, go for it and tune out everyone else and know that I'm rooting for you. Good luck, Lindsay. And now back to Piers Morgan. I do have something to take up with you, with which I disagree. What is with the papoose shaming? Okay. Now here in the United

States, we call it the, like the baby carrier, like the baby Bjorn or Bjorn that, you know, you sort of have in the front. Um, it's like the front pack that you stick your little infant in it. And so you walk around and have your arms free. Now I am a hundred percent against you on this because I have a man who is strong and all those other things. And I never once looked at him and felt not turned on because he had a baby carrier on the front of him. Why are you so against them? I just don't like them. But more to the point, I would say this, the biggest selling poster in history was the Athena man, topless Athena man, clutching a baby without a baby carrier. That to me is what every man should aspire to.

But here's my real point about it. I don't really care about baby slings. What was fascinating to me was I saw, ironically, James Bond, Daniel Craig was wearing one, carrying his baby through, I think it was JFK. And I did a tweet say not youtube bonds for goodness sake something like that that created such a firestorm that one tweet with my just my personal opinion i don't like them i find them emasculating right now i totally respect your right to say i'm

being ridiculous however it's an honestly held opinion And it created such a firestorm that I was then bombarded on Twitter for two days with, I would say, 10, bulletins in the world about my tweet to 007 about a papoose. At which point I'm like, the world has gone completely nuts. But it really played back into my, the serious point about it was, I want to have the right to have that opinion. I absolutely think you should have the right to tell me I'm talking nonsense. But what people wanted was they wanted to remove my right to have that opinion. And that was being driven by the liberal Wokorati, who had decided it wasn't an opinion that they liked. And therefore, I had to be shamed and cancelled, preferably lose my job and never be heard of again, because I just happen to believe that they look a bit emasculating. Now, I asked those liberals, and I'm a liberal

myself to a large degree, I asked them, is that liberal behaviour, is cancelling somebody for having an honestly held opinion, even if you don't agree with it, is that actually what a liberal should be about? No, because liberalism is about tolerance and about respecting other people's opinions. You know how their response to that in all instances is, well, of course we want you to express your opinion until you say something that's sexist or transphobic or homophobic or racist, which you just did, and that's why you need to be canceled. That's how they get out of everything, just by saying they're on the side of the angels and everyone else is a devil. But when I watched them, cause they, they came after you on that. They came after you, which is ridiculous. I mean, I'm like, I'm just having fun with you, but

they came after you when you, you legitimately raised questions about whether we should be teaching children that there are a hundred different genders. And, um, my biggest takeaway was I love your boss because they're standing behind you. And my biggest takeaway was, I love your boss, because they're standing behind you. And my impression from over here in New York is, I could be wrong, but I feel like Britain's gone even farther left, even more woke, if that's possible, than the United States has. And so, how is your boss being so strong? How are they not bound to the law? We had a moment on air when the BBC, which is a publicly funded network. So it's the main British broadcasting corporation, but it's funded by the British taxpayer.

We ought to pay a license fee of about $200 each. And for that, we get the right to watch BBC. So we fund it public money and one of their departments produced an educational video for kids of about nine and ten years old in which they said there were a hundred plus genders now the official medical bodies in this country only recognize six genders okay some might some might say there are a lot less than that others would say there's a few more whatever i don't think the bbc should be telling young kids there are 100 plus genders because what that really means is that gender becomes limitless and can be anything that anybody

plucks out of the sky in fact in one case quite literally where there's a an official social media approved gender called astral gender which is an affinity with the stars in the galaxy so i decided to test this theory and i had a guy on who wanted he signed a petition to have me cancelled and fired and i said look you believe in limitless gender he said i do you should respect that's okay so you you want to respect anyone's right to have any gender and identify as any way they like yes okay in that case I identify right now as a two-spirit penguin. And there was a long pause, and he went, that's disgusting. I went, ah, so what you mean is it's limitless right to the moment. I said, by the way, I feel a genuine affinity with penguins. We both wobble a bit

when we walk. We're carrying a bit of extra poundage we both love eating fish you know we like to run around with our mates in packs i said i genuinely feel quite penguin like but what you're really telling me is it's limitless right to the point i say something you don't like then it's an outrage and then i have to be fired i said you see the problem here he didn't see the problem and they never see the problem which is do you see the problem here? He didn't see the problem. And they never see the problem, which is if you take the arguments to their logical extension, actually, they don't believe in freedom, or freedom of expression or freedom of opinion. They only believe in what they decide people should be doing, or thinking or acting or behaving or drinking or eating, or what

clothes they should wear. And it's that ridiculous double standard, again, which drives the theme of the book, which is if you genuinely believe this stuff, then you've got to accept that other people are allowed to also do what they want to do. But you don't. You don't think that at all. In fact, you think the complete opposite. As you know, we get lectured not only from people like that, but the media is complicit. I mean, the, thought it was amazing when they were first getting married. I thought this is great for the British royal family. They seem very much in love. I don't

know. I like the way they look at each other. And when I actually went over to London and covered the royal wedding and everyone loved her, everyone embraced her in Great Britain. They couldn't have been happier. And then those two got very woke and started leaking stories about what a victim she was and how we should all feel sorry for her because of the mean press. Meanwhile, if even from over here watching the British press over the decades, they're very mean. Like if you're going to be part of the royal family, you're going to get it. And saying it was racist. And now they're lecturing us about white privilege. I mean, Prince Harry is lecturing the rest of us about white privilege.

And I'm like, and peace out. And we're done. So what is it, like, what did it for you that turned you on them? I was just, I knew Meghan Markle quite well before she met Harry for about 18 months. I'd followed a few of the stars of Suits because I liked the show on Twitter. And she replied immediately, direct messaged me saying, oh, I'm such a fan. Thank you for following me.

Anyway, she and a guy called Rick Hoffman, who plays Lewis Lick in the show, for 18 months, we had a good laugh together, just swapping funny stories and messages. And she would email me early episodes of the show. Then she said she was coming to London and she'd love to meet up. We went to my local pub. We had a few drinks.

We got on famously. And she said, next time I'm in New York and you're there, we should go out with Rick and blah, blah, blah. All fantastic. And then I put her in a taxi that night. She went went to a dinner party Prince Harry's one of the people at the party uh the next night they have a date together on their own and I've never heard from her again and that's fine she can behave that way it's sort of ruthless social climbing of the most

awful kind but it was and it didn't stop me being perfectly nice about her when she announced the engagement and through the engagement. And when they got married, I wrote a piece on the wedding day, which is nearly two years later, praising her to the hill because I thought she actually liked it. But there were warning signs in the way she treated me. And then I watched the way she disowned her father, who was just thrown to the walls. I then saw the wedding where only one member of her entire family was there. Then I heard that she got rid of her ex-husband by sending the wedding rings back in the post when he thought they were happily married. Most of her ex-friends lined up to say

they'd been ghosted too. All her connections that she'd made in London, like me, she ghosted and got rid of. And then you realize, wow, she is a piece of work. And then within three years of meeting Harry, she's wrestled him out of the country, out of the royal family, got her $11 million mansion in California, where she now lectures us about equality, which just is stupefyingly ridiculous. And she's making Harry make pronouncements about the u.s election which is completely against anything the royal family can do they're supposed to be resolutely impartial for obvious reasons because the monarch is the head of our state and she has to deal with everybody

whoever they are whatever party they represent from any country uh causing untold damage to the monarchy to the queen who's har Harry's grandmother, for goodness sake. And then you have all the preaching about the environment, and then they get Elton John's private jet, like a taxi service. They preach about privacy for their son. They then call their new charitable foundation after him and put him into videos where this little kid is being used as a media tool by them, and so on and so on and so on.

Littered with hypocrisy, sort of vaguely ludicrous, damaging to the monarchy. And yet there they are, the king and queen of woke, signing a $150 million deal with Netflix to make woke documentaries. And I simply say to them, if you genuinely want freedom and you genuinely want independence, why are you using the titles duke and duchess of sussex given to you by the queen to do these deals and how much do you think netflix would pay you if you weren't the duke and duchess of sussex the answer is the square root of all and i think it's again a ridiculous situation with two people who want their royal cake and eat it. So I think they've exposed themselves.

She certainly is very duplicitous and a terrible hypocrite. And then playing the victim card every time they get called out for their hypocrisy, by saying it's all about racism or sexism or misogyny, I've had all that. Well, actually, it's much simpler. They just want to avoid any sense of royal duty. They don't want to do the wet Wednesdays at the flower shows and the charitable organizations in the north of England on a rainy, cold winter night. They want to be in California on their videos telling us all about equality. It is ridiculous.

Well, that's right. If it were about her color, her race, if it were about her gender, they just don't like women, then they would have hated her from the beginning. They would have just said, or her being an American, all that, then they would have hated her from the beginning. And they didn't. I mean, I was there. I saw firsthand how they loved her. For me, it was ironic because everyone was praising her as such a feminist. And I'm like, okay, I get that there's like the video of her when she's young and she's standing up for equal rights. But like, personally, I don't see a ton feminist about, you know, it's fine. You fall in love with somebody who's part of the Royal family. You got to make some sacrifices, but like she gave up her country, her citizenship, her religion, her career, you know, her job, all of it. And I'll, I, this is an

opportunity for me to play you a funny clip because right before I went over to cover the royal wedding, I was trying to talk to my then six-year-old daughter about what was happening. You know, it's an American woman. She's going to marry this Prince, blah, blah, blah. And you know, all the young children's lore writes about how that's your goal in life, Cinderella. And my daughter, to the surprise of no one, had a very different outlook on it. And I don't ever show clips or pictures of my kids, but I thought this is a good opportunity since we're audio only just to play you a very short clip of my daughter Yardley, then six, reacting in advance of the royal wedding. Here it is. Why would someone want to live in a royal family?

They boss you around. It's like you go to a whole different country and they have to boss you around. Like you have to eat with your left hand. You have no choice. You have to. And I don't think that's fair because they've planned out your whole life for you

and you already have your life perfectly in New York City and then you go to England and surprisingly you don't like your life because someone else makes your choices and it's not fair She saw it coming

She's going to be a TV star that one but secondly And it's not fair. She saw it coming. She's going to be a TV star, that one. But secondly, of course, it's a very interesting observation from afar. But what you need to explain is in return for giving up your life, you get to live in palaces with servants. And you get to be one of the biggest stars on planet Earth. You get to fly around in private planes. You get to go to all the premieres. Everybody sucks up to you. It's like you don't pay for anything. You get your house paid for by the British taxpayer for millions of dollars, and so on and so on. In other words,

you're basically buying up to a deal. And the idea Meghan Markle had no idea what she was getting into is fanciful nonsense. She knew exactly what she was getting into. And I think her game plan all along was to eventually go back to California as a royal, keep the title, milk it for all it's worth, as she's doing now. And I think the idea that she was the victim of this terrible racism from the British media and the terrible monarchy and the terrible royal family, I think it's a load of fanciful nonsense. Yeah. I mean, the press wrote a lot of bad things about Diana back in the day,

and it had nothing to do with the race. If you connect with the royal family and have any sort of a skirmish with them, things start to go downhill fast. To me, the moment was when she gave that interview to Tom Bradbury, Bradby, right?

Is that with ITV? And he asked how she was. And her response was, you know, thank you for asking because not that many people have asked if I'm okay. And by the way, Megan, where had she been that week? She'd been in South Africa and she'd been around some of the poorest, most vulnerable and abused people in the world hearing their harrowing stories. And rather than, and it had, had by the way a brilliantly positive press

all week in this country as a result and then right at the end when there should have been all these big wrap-up pieces about what a triumphant world tour she releases this thing in which she makes it all about herself and all about is she okay is she multi multimillionaire Princess Meghan okay, as she stands next to a shanty town in South Africa, full of some of the poorest people in the world? I mean, it was breathtaking for its tone deafness. This is why I love Piers Morgan. I mean, you put it in such great terms. Over here, I'm just like, shut up, you married a prince and you live in a castle. Nobody will feel sorry for you. Move on. Okay, now speaking of a prince in a castle, let's talk about Donald Trump. The two of you, you just made news on Donald Trump because you had a conversation with him this on Saturday,

just a couple of hours, a couple of days ago. And I thought, detente, because he clearly likes you. You've said you like him, even though you're a liberal, you like the guy. You won Celebrity Apprentice. You called him a friend. But then, and you were one of the only people he follows on Twitter. And he only follows like 50 people. And then you called his COVID policy batshit crazy. And he got mad.

He unfollowed you. But I feel like, has there been a thaw? He called you? What happened? Yes, it was interesting because I actually the headline on that piece or the intro to that piece was, shut the F up Mr. President. Your batshit crazy ideas about coronavirus

will get Americans killed. And so he unfollowed me overnight. And I didn't hear from him again. And then I got a call I appeared on Fox and Friends, actually, on Friday morning. And I directly talked to the president. I looked down at the camera and I said, if the president's watching, he probably is. I said, he really needs to re-follow me again on Twitter because he might, you know, get

some advice which will help him retain the White House. Anyway. You are shameless. He called me. It worked. You are shameless. He called me. It worked. My strategy worked. And I got a call from the White House saying, I'm going to put you through to the president.

Are you free? I went, yeah. And I thought, well, he's either going to give me full barrels, because I've been really whacking him all year about his, in my opinion, his woeful handling of the pandemic. And instead, he was very, from the front, he was very cordial. We had a, in the end, a 25-minute conversation.

And it was just before he went to vote in Florida. He literally, end of the conversation, was like, I've got to go, I've got to go and vote, which was, felt like part of history. But we had a very good conversation. And, you know, he knew I'd been hammering him, but he took on board why I'd done that. And I gave him some advice,

top of which was, I felt that what the country really needs right now is a leader that shows empathy about the fact that they're losing so many loved ones to this killer virus, and they're losing their livelihoods and their jobs, and they're worried about feeding their kids. And I said, you've got to show more empathy. It doesn't matter who the leader is, it doesn't matter what party you are, you must show more empathy. I don't know if he has that in him. And I said, you've got to show more empathy. It doesn't matter who the leader is. It doesn't matter what party you are. You must show more empathy. I don't know if he has that in him. Although I always tell people, you know,

one of the reasons I've stayed friendly with Donald Trump is when I left America and left CNN and came back to the UK, I can count on one hand the number of high-profile Americans who ever bothered to contact me again. Donald Trump regularly contacted me after that for no personal gain whatsoever. I was unemployed for a large part of that time just to check in, see how I was.

Could he help in any way? Could he put any calls in? I take people as I find them. He's always been very loyal to me. And funny enough, even after I've been beating him up all year, he said to me, I just wanted to call you because we've always got it well. And it's a shame we don't want to fall out. And I totally agree. I think you should be able to divorce your personal friendship with people from their politics. And some people will find that impossible. But I think that's part of

the problem. I've got lots of friends who are conservative, lots of friends who are liberals. I've got some woke friends. I've got some family members who make Donald Trump look like a liberal. It wouldn't cross my mind to sever a link with somebody unless they were really extreme in some way. But I've never thought Trump is like that. But we had a good conversation. And what struck me about it was that he genuinely thinks he's going to win. And he believes the polls have got it wrong again. He is out there doing three rallies a day now. He thinks there's a direct contrast between his style, which is very high energy, and Joe Biden's, which is pretty low energy by comparison. And I say to everybody who thinks they know what's going to happen in this election,

just remember how certain everybody was last time and how almost everybody came a cropper. Because the one thing I've learned about my time as a friend of Donald Trump's, never underestimate the guy. I would say in, you know, having known him for a long time as well, I don't think Trump is a particularly empathetic guy, but I agree with you that personally behind, you know, closed doors, he can be incredibly kind, generous, a caretaker. I have, I know so many people who felt very well taken care of by Trump at his golf club, where he reached out to the one guy who couldn't go out and do the course

that day. Cause he had a bad knee and he made sure that guy was putting the laps of luxury and the drinks came over and the meal came over. I mean, he's considerate in that way that makes people fall in love with him. But I, I don't think empathy is one of his strengths. And I think it's,

it's hurt him during the Corona virus. Cause it's not that he has it and he refuses to show it. He's just, he's not built that way. So what do you think is going to happen? Yeah, I thought it hurt him after the George Floyd killing and the protests as well, because he wasn't able again to sort of reach out to people in a way that they wanted. It may not have worked, but he could have tried. And I think he too often prefers to take a sledgehammer to these things because he thinks it makes him look tough. When in fact, sometimes the strongest thing you can do is put your metaphorical arm around people if you're a leader and tell them I hear what's going on. You know how it is, though. It's like he is authentic. And I don't

think he's got that in him. And I don't think he wants to pretend, but what do you think is going to happen, Pierre? Cause I was surprised to read that. I know you're a liberal on, on a lot of things, but like I read that you said you wouldn't vote for Trump if you were voting in the, in this election, would you vote for Joe Biden? Cause, cause I think a lot of people here who don't necessarily like Trump, the man are going to vote for him because that while they may not like him and he can be a bully and so on, they're more concerned with all this nonsense that's being stuck down the throats of our kids in school, the teachers, kids losing their college admissions over one false move, people getting fired over one stupid comment.

And they think that's what the Democrats want. Not normal Democrats, by the way, that's not true. But the far left, the established left, they do. So that's, I think, why Trump may get a lot of people like you who are liberal, but not woke, and kind of sick of this nonsense. Yeah, I've always been careful as a Brit not to say how I would vote in the US election, because I find it very annoying when Americans vote their nose like Obama did into our EU referendum and so on. So I think I have to be consistent there. The point I made about Trump was I'm not a natural Republican, nor am I hard left. I'm probably just slightly left of centre. That was the newspaper I ran. We were slightly to the liberal, but I'm more of a centrist journalist who likes to be fair minded about both sides. I've known Joe Biden a bit. I like him personally. I think he's been through some unbearable tragedy in his life, which has formed him and given know, his age, no question, he's showing his age.

And Trump has 10 times the energy. You have to look at the way Obama's been campaigning with far more energy than Biden this week. So I think that is a problem for him. And I think that a lot of the hard left in the Democratic Party are going to try and pull in. You know, the AOCs of this world are going to try and pull him to the left. And the question is, does he have the strength of character once he gets to the presidency, if he wins it, to deal with them? I think that's a legitimate concern. Again, I just don't know what's going to happen in this election. I think that it may come down to a simple equation by the British, simple equation by the American people, or calculation, which is Joe Biden, I suspect, would save more lives from coronavirus

because I think he takes it more seriously and he's shown more responsibility about it. But Donald Trump might be the person you would back to get the American economy back on its feet as America comes out of this pandemic. And that might well be a deciding calculation for many independent voters. Will they say, you know what, I don't like Trump necessarily. I don't like his tweets or his rhetoric. I don't like the way he's handled this crisis. I reckon we've lost lives because of it. And that's shameful. However, the US economy, if we don't get it back again, to where it was, if it's still tanking in two years' time,

we're going to have a lot of people dying because of the failed economy. A lot of people will be losing their jobs. There'll be a lot of people taking their own lives, a lot of people dying from other things because they're at home and all sorts of spinoffs we know from a failing economy. So the US economy is hugely important. And Trump has proven right up to the point of this pandemic that he knows how to run a good economy. So I think there are lots of calculations there which may not come through in polling, but might actually be a defining aspect in this election. You've been so generous with your time. Let me just ask you one other question, because there was a time when you were on CNN and I was on Fox and we were up against each other. And then CNN, in a completely dumb move, canceled your show. And now, you know, they're doing well because of Trump, right? All of cable news is doing well because of Trump. But I wonder how you feel about the media, the American media and CNN in particular these days.

Well, CNN has become, I think, as part of Zana's MSNBC. And I think that when they try and pretend they haven't, it's ridiculous. Everybody who watches it knows they have. They've gone all in anti-Trump. Not all the anchors, but certainly most of the primetime anchors make no secret of their disdain for Trump. And, you know, from the way they, for example, obsessed about Russian collusion for years, and then it ends up to be this huge nothing burger. And yet when we have the Biden laptop emails scandal, they ignore it because they say they don't have hard evidence. Well, it didn't stop them on Russian collusion. So I look at my old employers with a lot of

affection, the time I had there, made many friends. But I'm like, wow, you know, this has become partisan as a network, as much as MSNBC, as much as Fox for the other side. And they should just be more transparent about it. You know, I'd have more respect for them if they just say, yeah, we are. We don't like Trump. We don't want him to win. We're in the tank for the Democrats. Be honest. At least if you're honest, people can make their own calculation. But when you basically pretend that you're still completely impartial, but your output is clearly not, that's problematic. Is it true that Brian Stelter cancelled you from his show this past weekend? Brian Stelter, he cancelled me. His producer kept begging me to come on for weeks and weeks and weeks about the book.

Eventually, I agreed, made time for them. It was scheduled for Sunday. Yesterday, it's gone. And the moment I appeared on Fox and Friends and said I thought that the failure

of mainstream media to cover the Hunter Biden story properly and the fact that social media companies like Facebook and Twitter were deliberately suppressing it, I thought was completely alarming, and very partisan, and obviously skewed to the Democrats. And at that point, I was uninvited. Suddenly, they had a huge booking, which apparently meant I had to be cancelled. And the huge booking turned

out to be an executive editor from the Associated Press. Well, no offense to him or her, but that ain't a huge booking. No, that is not an eyeball draw, and they know it. And by the way, if it's not a lie, which it clearly is, then they'll be booking you again. They'll have you on CNN at some point this week or next Sunday, and you'll get the chance to say exactly what you want to say. We'll see.

Stupid, stupid people. Yeah, pigs will fly over my home first. Listen, it's been a pleasure. I love talking to you and now hopefully the audience can see if they weren't already enjoying the Daily Mail in your columns, why I enjoy them so much. It's just like you read it and I feel like, ah, someone who's saying all the things. And even if I don't agree with you all the time, I love the way you say the things and just your unabashed nature. We need more of that, not less. Piers, all the best.

Thank you, Megan. I've enjoyed it very much. Thank you. The book is called Wake Up. Wake Up. It should be called Wake Up America too. And I highly recommend it. The man speaks sense.

Our thanks again to Piers Morgan for that. Very much enjoyed that exchange. Listen, today's episode was brought to you in part by Home Title Lock. Put a barrier around your home to protect yourself from home title theft. Go to hometitlelock.com now to learn more. Later this week, we are going to have a really interesting political roundtable. This will be the last we have. Well, maybe second to last before the election on Tuesday. Hopefully we'll get one out on Monday. We'll see. But we're

going to be joined by, among others, Kim Klasick. Do you know that name? You know her? She is running for, I think it's Elijah Cummins' old seat in Baltimore. And she is the one who gave Joy Behar all that guff on The View that day, remember, about the blackface and then Sonny Hosting got all in her face. And Kim is strong, man. She is strong. She's like, bring it, ladies, which is always fun to see on The View, isn't it? She'll be here and we'll have some Democrats as well.

My old pal James Rosen from Fox News is going to join us. So don't miss Friday's episode. And listen, thank you all so much for listening. The numbers have been great. The podcast has consistently been in the top of all shows, nevermind news commentary, where it's been number one or two or three virtually every day. And that's thanks to you. We really do appreciate it. You can go now, if you haven't already, and subscribe to the show and review the show. And you got to download it too, subscribe and download, and then review the

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So until the next time. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.