The Megyn Kelly Show - Racist Attacks on Clarence Thomas, and Our Culture Today, with Glenn Greenwald, Nancy Armstrong, and Suzy Weiss | Ep. 349

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald to talk about Biden mentioning the filibuster and abortion rights next steps, AOC and the "Congressional Kardashian," Hillary... Clinton's racist comment about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor's gracious comments about Thomas, Rex Chapman's racist attacks on Thomas over Twitter, the key problem with the January 6 committee hearing, another attempt to claim this is actually finally the issue that's going to take Trump down, the push to make corporations politically active in our society, and more. Then filmmaker Nancy Armstrong joins to discuss her film "The Disruptors," to discuss the challenges kids with ADHD face, the strengths those with ADHD have, society's misconceptions about ADHD, ADHD treatments, and more. And then journalist Suzy Weiss joins the show to discuss her "Common Sense" Substack on article David Sabatini, the weaponization of #MeToo, the takedown of the important scientist, the fallout that continued for years, the avenues outside the mainstream that don't exist in some cases, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Friday. We are headed into a long holiday weekend where we celebrate all that is great about this country of ours. And some people are already melting down on Twitter saying there's nothing to celebrate. Oh, well, wait until they see what I've got planned here in my little town in New Jersey. Can't wait to show them how patriotic we're going. And if you're not an America lover, well, on you. All right. You don't have to live here.
Starting point is 00:00:38 You don't have to sit around lamenting how terrible we are. Problems. Yes, sure. It's from the beginning. That's natural. And we can work on them. But to say this is not a great country is just oblivious and agenda driven. So we have much to be thankful for. However, there are many folks struggling. And you know that's true because we have record inflation, we have record gas prices. And a lot of Americans believe that right now our government is on the wrong track from our political discourse to those prices and the inflation and so on. President Biden, however, says, don't believe your lying eyes. You're happy.
Starting point is 00:01:16 You're fine. You're really happy. Seriously. He says no one believes that America is going backwards. Really? Well, I don't know. The only thing that's destabilizing, he says, is the U.S. Supreme Court. You see, all of our problems began last Friday with Dobbs. That's the problem he wants you to know. And of course, he believes that the answer is for you to vote. He wants now the Senate to change the filibuster rules, but just just on the issue of abortion and privacy. OK, now he knows that's not going to happen. So he's really proposing no solution at all. But it's such a precarious post, right, to suggest that we need to change the filibuster rules. The one thing preserving
Starting point is 00:01:56 minority rights in the Senate because he doesn't like the Dobbs decision. It's crazy talk. We're going to get to that and plenty more with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who now publishes on Substack and is with me now. Glenn, great to see you. How are you? Hey, Megan. Great to see you as well. OK, so there he goes. We're going to get. So this is when he said that. Let's get rid of the filibuster. In fact, we have this. I might as well play it. No, we do. We do. Let's listen to it. It's soundbite three. I believe we have to codify Roe v. Wade in the law. And the way to do that is to make sure the Congress votes to do that. And if the filibuster gets in the way, it's like voting rights. It should be. We provide an exception for this. So he's talking about getting rid of
Starting point is 00:02:45 the filibuster just for this. And then he went on to clarify he means for privacy rights. Isn't that how the Democrats got into this mess? They got rid of the filibuster for federal court judges, but they said not for the Supreme Court. And Mitch McConnell said to Harry Reid, you will rue the day you did that because you will not always be in charge of this chamber. Then the Republicans took control and they got rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court judges. And that is how we got Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett with votes that were far less than 60, which you would have needed in the past. Kavanaugh only got 50 votes. And that's how the Democrats got the Supreme Court majority, a conservative majority that they hate so much.
Starting point is 00:03:25 So now they want to go back to their same old tricks, which similarly will come back to haunt them again, because they even if they did all this stuff, will not always be in charge of the Senate chamber. And the Republicans will use the same tricks against them in the future. Your take on it? First of all, I mean, this is a kind of bizarre, confounding refusal to confront reality that repeats itself in so many other contexts. Whenever I try and get people to understand that censorship is actually quite dangerous, even if they're really happy about the particular individual who just got silenced, the argument I try and make is I know you're really happy with that person who just got banned or silenced because you don't like them. But this system that you're supporting one day will be used by other
Starting point is 00:04:10 people, including people who are your adversaries or enemies, and it will come to silence maybe yourself or your own allies. And that's a good reason not to cheer for it. And oftentimes, this is very difficult in this kind of very polarized and partisan culture that requires immediate gratification, especially with social media, to look past the next six seconds and think about the implications of the systemic values that you're cheering. The other thing, though, Megan, that I think is important to note is a lot of this is obviously about Democratic Party politics and Ternese and Democratic Party politics. The reality is Joe Biden has never really been particularly pro-choice as a politician. He obviously has always identified as someone whose Catholicism
Starting point is 00:04:58 guides his politics. He's been a longtime supporter, for example, of the Hyde Amendment, which is very controversial among liberals. It prohibits the use of federal funds to support abortion. He only abandoned that view in 2019 as he was gearing up to run for president. And what's really happening is after Dobbs, most liberal activists are screaming and yelling that the Biden administration isn't taking more radical steps in the wake of that decision. The Biden administration, however, doesn't want to do that because they realize the majority of Americans aren't liberal activists. And with the midterm elections coming up, won't look kindly upon that. So he gave them kind of one crumb, which is to say, look, okay, I'll be in favor of suspending
Starting point is 00:05:39 the filibuster knowing that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would never approve it. So it was kind of a meaningless crumb to hand the Democrats when in reality, all the things that they're demanding that he do, he really won't do because he wants to win the midterm election. Right. It's all such a legal sleight of hand. And so is AOC jumping up and down and saying we need abortion clinics on federal land and in federal parks. And Elizabeth Warren saying, you know, we've got to pack the court or AOC saying we've got to impeach sitting majority conservative justice. These are all lies. They know they're lies.
Starting point is 00:06:13 By the way, if AOC has the votes in the House to vote to impeach a Supreme Court justice, go for it, lady. Let's see you do your stuff. Be your influential self. Let's, because that's all you need to an actual impeachment, not for a conviction, which is how it would have to work.
Starting point is 00:06:26 But let's great. Make it. It's all a lie. Glenn, it's so annoying. If you talk to anyone in the House who has served with AOC, including or maybe have been especially members of the Democratic caucus, she's respected by almost nobody. They regard her as a joke. And I don't know if you remember this, but after the 2018 election, she wanted to serve on the Finance and Commerce Committee, which is a very powerful
Starting point is 00:06:54 committee. And she ran against somebody from the New York delegation. It's a seat reserved for New York, Kathleen Rice, who had opposed Nancy Pelosi's reelection in 2018. I guess this was 2020. And the Democrats who decide committee assignments voted overwhelmingly to put Kathleen Rice in that place and not AOC. She lost like 47 to 12 because they know that her social media celebrity or her cultural celebrity never translates into anything actually serious about policymaking or anything else like that. So she's on Colbert and she's getting retweeted, but it never goes anywhere. It's purely performative. And she knows that as well, that she's basically, her role is to take
Starting point is 00:07:35 disaffected liberals and leftists and pretend that the Democratic Party cares about them because there's at least one person, AOC, who gets to rant and rave in a way that's satisfying to them, even though there's no chance that the Democratic Party would ever follow her because they know down that path lies electoral destruction. And as you say, it's just all absurd theater in which all the participants know that. And it's just, as you say as well, kind of just annoying more than anything else to watch it. Yeah, she is a congressional Kardashian. That's what AOC is.
Starting point is 00:08:14 Reformative, platforming, using it just to get her face on TV because she loves attention. But there is no substance there. And if you go back, I am on record. When she first took office, I had an open mind. I said, OK, she's got an unusual background. I got an open mind. She's not exactly my cup of tea, but I'm not going to call her names. I'm going to say that she said a bunch of stupid stuff. I said, OK, she's got an unusual background. I got an open mind. She's not exactly my cup of tea, but I'm not going to call her names. I'm going to say that she said a bunch of stupid stuff. I said, OK, she's young. Maybe she's learning. No, she's dumb. I'm sorry. I'm there. She is not a smart person and she won't do the work that's required to get smart, which is
Starting point is 00:08:38 particularly galling. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I interviewed AOC during her primary run against Joe Crawley when barely anyone knew who she was because, you know, no's funny. I interviewed AOC during her primary run against Joe Crowley when barely anyone knew who she was because, you know, no one expected Joe Crowley, a very senior member of the Democratic House caucus, you know, in there for 10 terms. I don't think he had visited the Queens district he represented in like 15 years. I doubt he could even place it on a map, but that's how incumbents get reelected. He was a creature of Washington, raising tons of money, talked about as a replacement for Nancy Pelosi, a speaker when, if, and when she ever decides to finally retire. And I interviewed AOC and I was actually kind of, you know, I had the same reaction as you guys. I
Starting point is 00:09:16 was a little impressed. It was obvious to me that she had a political talent. I like when there are new people on the political scene who have more common experiences. I like Nancy Mace because she worked as a waitress in the Waffle House to support her family. You know, I like people who come from diverse backgrounds who don't have family connections. So I was open minded for that reason. But also, Megan, her whole argument was she wanted to get to Congress and challenge not the Republicans, but the Democratic establishment. That's how she convinced people to vote for her. And the minute she got there, you know, even in the interview, I asked her, would you vote for Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer for their like 110th term as it to be reelected as House leaders? And she said, no, no, absolutely not. I think we
Starting point is 00:09:59 need a new generation. The first vote she took when she won was voting for Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. So the whole thing has kind of been a fraud. And I think the reason is what you said, that she just doesn't have any of the discipline or follow through. All she wants is social media pause. And, you know, if that's all you care about, you'll never really do anything particularly disturbing or subversive or unpopular. It's it's heartening to know that people on Capitol Hill get it, too, even within her own party and see sort of the Kardashian esque nature. No offense to the Kardashians because they're very good at what they do, but there's not a whole ton of substance
Starting point is 00:10:34 there. They're all about at least Kim Kardashian got a law passed. She was vital to the criminal justice reform bill that the Trump administration passed working with the ACLU. AOC doesn't even have anything like that on her resume. So it's true. It's almost like an working with the ACLU. AOC doesn't even have anything like that on her resume. It's true. It's almost like an insult to the Kardashians. Kim got Alice Marie Johnson out of jail and Alice Marie Johnson is an amazing person.
Starting point is 00:10:52 That's exactly one of my favorite episodes that we've ever done. So I'll have to give her that. Okay. So speaking of people who have been elected 110 times, but still think this is their moment. This is their moment.
Starting point is 00:11:04 Hillary Clinton has weighed in. And I'm saying that because Chris Salizo, we still think this is their moment. This is their moment. Hillary Clinton has weighed in. And I'm saying that because Chris Salizo, we talked about this yesterday, actually said this is Hillary's moment. This is her moment. So she, as you may have seen, has taken a shot at Clarence Thomas and in a way that's really offensive to me, because if you if you know about Clarence Thomas's background, you know, he grew up in the very racist South and his dad was subjected to awful, awful, you know, racist South behavior. And so was Clarence Thomas. And he's if anything, this is a guy who's an example in how not to live a life of grievance. You know, he's a guy who ascended based on his own hard work. He's never been somebody to say, what was me? And now
Starting point is 00:11:42 Hillary Clinton comes out and says the following soundbite seven. I went to law school with him. He's been a person of grievance for as long as I've known him. Resentment, grievance, anger. And the thing that is, well, there's so many things about it that are deeply distressing. But women are going to die, Gail. Women will die. Hello, pot. It's like a life of grievance. Hello. Megan, there's so many amazing things about that quote. So first of all, I don't even believe Hillary Clinton. You know, you went to law school, as did I. It's very uncommon if somebody is in a different class than you, given how large law school classes are, for you to really know them in such an intimate and deep way that you can opine on what their personality was like to that degree of
Starting point is 00:12:36 detail from 50 years ago. On top of that, Clarence Thomas wasn't even a conservative in law school. It was kind of the beginning of his transition. He got there with fairly conventional views and became a conservative kind of along the way. But beyond that, the two points that I just want to note about that is, number one, needless to say, if some white conservative woman, white wealthy conservative woman spoke of any black politician the way Hillary Clinton just spoke of Clarence Thomas. He's an angry man driven by grievance and resentment. There'd be like a national day of crises over racism declared instantly because that's basically every trope that is used about African-American men for decades. You know, they're angry, they're complaining, they're whiny,
Starting point is 00:13:23 they're driven by grievance. And to say that about Clarence Thomas, who whatever else you want to think of him, like we were just saying about AOC or Nancy Mace or whoever, didn't come from wealth, he didn't come from family privileged. He worked his way up into Yale Law School and then a top government position and now a Supreme Court justice to say that about him of all people. It's just such basic, obvious, racist stereotypes about how liberals talk about members of marginalized groups that they believe they own who aren't sufficiently compliant and obedient. But the other thing about it, Megan, is I don't know if you saw this, but just last month, Sonia Sotomayor, who was working with Clarence Thomas. Yeah, go ahead.
Starting point is 00:14:05 Like side by side since 2009, talked about how there's no justice with whom she disagrees more. And yet she regards him as one of the most compassionate and empathetic people she's ever met. If you have that, definitely play it because it's the exact opposite of what Hillary Clinton said. This is a classy move by Sonia Sotomayor. And it's one of the reasons why I'm while I might criticize any one of their jurisprudence, I'm I'm pretty defensive of the Supreme Court justices as
Starting point is 00:14:28 human beings. They have a tough job. They tend to be very respectful of one another. Not always, but I have a lot of respect for them having covered them for a long time. And here she is being a very classy lady. Watch. But I suspect I have probably disagreed with him more than with any other justice. And yet, Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee's name, every one of them. And not only does he know their names he remembers their families names and histories he's the first one who will go up to someone when you're walking with him and say is your son okay how's your daughter doing in college he's the first one that when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida.
Starting point is 00:15:28 He is a man who keeps cares deeply about the court as an institution, about the people who work there, but about people. Speaker 1 She actually knows him. Speaker 2 And knows him very well. They worked side by side for 13 years. It'd be like, there's only nine of them. So imagine how closely they work together. So if you hear her saying that,
Starting point is 00:15:55 and she has no reason to say that unless it's true, exactly because of what she said. He's the person with whom she disagrees most on the court. What is it that we are to think about where Hillary Clinton got this caricature from, given that she doesn't actually know Clarence Thomas at all? I mean, even if they had some passing acquaintance 50 years ago in law school, to create this image of him that is based on pure caricatures and stereotypes. I mean, if any of, if it, if the ideology were inverted, that person would be banned from decent life forever. And I think, you know, there was a lot
Starting point is 00:16:32 of stories and Ruth Bader Ginsburg talked about it as well, that actually Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a very similar kind of friendship. They used to go hunting. They would dine out a lot. They often spoke very fondly of one another. And I actually really think that our politics so much is missing exactly that because I really do believe that most people, most people are fundamentally decent. And so often we're denied the opportunity to recognize in one another our common humanity because we're told that if we have political differences or ideological differences with somebody, we're required to regard them as evil. And very few people outside like sociopaths and psychopaths
Starting point is 00:17:14 are really that kind of cartoonishly evil. And yet we're always being encouraged to view one another in that way. So those examples are not just inspiring, but important. Well, I saw you tweeting about this. I hadn't seen it before your tweet on the negative list of what people do. Rex Chapman, who was he was very popular on Twitter for animal videos like that. Apparently he stole from other people. So I kind of thought when I first followed the guy, oh, sweet. He loves animals.
Starting point is 00:17:42 OK, yeah, me too. So you follow him and then he got more and more political. And then the next thing you knew, CNN Plus hired him and he had about two days of shows before CNN Plus went out of business. But this guy with the racist tropes last night on Twitter about Thomas, too. I mean, first of all, I find it quite notable and odd that there were five Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe and a sixth who voted to uphold the Mississippi law with Roberts who didn't vote to overturn Roe. The majority opinion was not written by Clarence Thomas. It was written by Samuel Alito. And yet I would say like 75 to 80 of 85 percent of the angry liberal commentary has focused for some reason on Clarence Thomas. Why is that? And then you look at what Rex Chapman said, and he has become,
Starting point is 00:18:33 you know, a very popular liberal social media influencer. He's far away from those neutral kind of animal videos that he stole that he caused him to be a popular Twitter figure. He basically has said that Clarence Thomas isn't really black because he doesn't seem to like the NBA since he doesn't show up at NBA games. I mean, I know that in order to be like genuine black, you have to like basketball.
Starting point is 00:18:58 But then for me, like the more offensive thing that he did was he said that Clarence Thomas is basically just like a dancing puppet of Mitch McConnell playing, obviously, with very racist stereotypes about how black men can't really think for themselves. There's basically a house slave of Mitch McConnell and then proceeded to post photos of not just Clarence Thomas, but him with Jenny Thomas, who's white. So the first two photos were of that interracial married couple. And then the second two photos were of a different interracial married couple who Rex Chapman has identified as kind of the next protege of Mitch McConnell.
Starting point is 00:19:37 Yeah, it's been on the show a bunch of times, the AG of Kentucky and potentially next governor. Exactly. So look at those. It's just like four pictures gratuitously of two different interracial couples claiming that they're kind of captive to Mitch McConnell, who also, by the way, is in an interracial marriage. And the idea that this has now become
Starting point is 00:20:00 an acceptable way to demean people, you know, as somebody in an interracial marriage myself, I did react with visceral disgust and contempt for that. I mean, that is the kind of like thing that you used to hear prior to Loving versus Virginia when miscegenation laws were still popular in many states. Like treating, like essentially saying Clarence Thomas is not a real black person. He's a race traitor because he not only doesn't like basketball, but is married to a white woman, just like the attorney general of Kentucky. This is repulsive, Megan. Yes. And, you know, this isn't the kind of like subtle racism, like I think Hillary Clinton did
Starting point is 00:20:36 describing Clarence Thomas that way. I mean, some black men are angry and driven by grievance and resentment. I don't think it should be banned to talk about black men that way, though. Again, I don't think she has any basis other than trop black men that way, though, again, I don't think she has any basis other than tropes to do that. But that's at least subtle. This is overt. This is the kind of thing that would get any conservative
Starting point is 00:20:51 instantly fired. And yet I don't see any liberal objective. Where's the Twitter censor machine, right? Like Jordan Peterson can't be on Twitter because he said something controversial about Elliot Page. But so he's off.
Starting point is 00:21:02 But how is this allowed? How's Rex Chapman allowed to post memes like that or posts like that about a sitting AG, a sitting Supreme Court justice? And it's a OK, it's no problem. Yeah, I mean, if you go into Twitter and you, you know, dispute the extremely controversial and tendentious core assertion of the new trans movement, that trans women are women. If you assert that there are differences, and especially if you are somebody who is resistant to the idea of using proper pronouns, now I do use pronouns that people choose for themselves because I respect
Starting point is 00:21:36 their autonomy. But for people who don't believe in that practice, I think that although I don't agree with it, it should be permitted. But if you do any of that, you're instantly banned. This is way worse. This is, you know, like a kind of violation of a settled norm in the United States for decades that there's nothing shameful or or race traitorous about being an interracial marriage. And he is being very blunt about the fact that he doesn't think that. It's so upsetting. And he takes it. He never complains. He doesn't come out. Contrary to what Hillary Clinton suggests, he's not a man of grievance. You never see him even leaking to the press saying, you know, like, oh, you know, behind the scenes, Justice Thomas was wounded or really doesn't appreciate the attacks on his wife. Never. He doesn't do it. She just can't understand that because that's her life. That's how she's lived her life. And, you know, I think they call it projection in the psychological sphere, though. I don't care to analyze her in that way. We'll be here all day. OK, let's talk
Starting point is 00:22:35 about January 6th and the quote star witness and the fallout from her testimony. Now, I know that the media reaction continues to roll in and I have to say it's almost getting entertaining. Woodward and Bernstein. Remember when we all loved Woodward and Bernstein, all the president's men, we all watched it. I watched it as a sophomore in high school. And one of the things that made me think I might want to become a journalist someday. It's amazing. And it's a great film. It's a great story. Boy, oh, boy, has the same thing that sort of happened to Rudy Giuliani happened to those two guys. They used to be held so high in most people's estimation. And then the more exposure and the older they get, you're like, reassess. This was their take on the testimony of Cassidy
Starting point is 00:23:18 Hutchinson, who went before the January 6th committee the other day and told a bunch of stories, some of which have already been severely challenged and seem to be falling apart, some of which haven't. Here's their take. This is Sot9. She pictured a mad king, the stability of the president of the United States, which incidentally, Republicans have been in the Senate and some in the House questioning his stability since the first days of his presidency. I think in a way what happened today may mean that the January 6th committee has written
Starting point is 00:23:59 Donald Trump's political obituary. Really? Yes. I think it's that devastating. The portrait that was painted today of the President of the United States leaping from the back seat, trying
Starting point is 00:24:16 to grab the steering wheel. And allegedly choking his top Secret Service agent. I mean, it's pretty dramatic. Where is that skepticism in official stories that served them so very well five plus decades ago? I mean, it is pretty dramatic, that story.
Starting point is 00:24:39 Unfortunately, it also probably is pretty false. You know, first of all, this entire January 6th committee, right? You know, again, as a lawyer, if you ask any lawyer, they will tell you that you can essentially, if you're the only side that's present, if there's no adversarial component to the process, if you don't have someone cross-examining your witnesses, questioning what it is you're saying, examining the evidence, presenting other evidence, pointing out the deficiencies in your claims, you can basically convince a jury of anything. If you're like, you're looking good for the W. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the reason why prosecutors have so little difficulty getting
Starting point is 00:25:16 indictments in a grand jury because there's no one there to contest what they're saying or getting FISA warrants where the justice department goes and there's no adversarial proceeding. They always win. Now you can blame whoever you want. Kevin McCarthy nominated five members to serve on the committee. Nancy Pelosi rejected two of them. Unprecedented for Speaker of the House to reject the appointment by the House Minority Leader, the people he wanted on the committee. You can blame her. You can blame Kevin McCarthy for then not filling those two spots and pulling out all the Republicans. But whatever else is true, this is a committee that has zero dissent. Obviously, they have Adam Kidd and journalist Cheney, but for purposes of this proceeding,
Starting point is 00:25:54 they're completely Democrats. They have zero divergence at all from the other five Democrats on the committee. So there's no adversarial component to this proceeding at all, which means that everything that we hear from that committee should be treated with enormous amounts of skepticism for that reason. The story that Cassidy Hutchinson told, which they, you just saw, people just jumped on and assumed was true, was one that by her own reasoning was a story for which she was not present. This was something she claims to have heard in the midst of very tumultuous and intense and highly paced days following January 6th or on January 6th, which again by itself should have prompted immense skepticism, on top of which the
Starting point is 00:26:39 story that she told was almost physically impossible. If you look at the design of the presidential limo, which is called The Beast, it's almost physically impossible. If you look at the design of the presidential limo, which is called the beast, it's almost physically impossible for Trump to have done what she alleged that he did. And yet the fact that they all ratified it and talked about it as though it had been dispositively proven,
Starting point is 00:26:58 you know, it illustrates what the media has basically been doing since Trump descended down that escalator, which is viewing itself as not journalists, but warriors in partisan warfare against Trump and saying and doing anything, regardless of whether it has any connection to journalistic ethics or the truth, if they perceive that it will undermine or harm him. And that is such a vivid and perfect example, given who it is that's doing it. Yeah. Meanwhile, both the head of security and the driver of the beast reportedly already gave testimony to the January 6th committee. And so either they didn't ask these
Starting point is 00:27:31 guys about the alleged incident because now they're reportedly ready to dispute this account on the record and under oath. This is what the reporting is. These two guys are ready to come forward and say it didn't happen. He was angry. He did. He did want to go to the Capitol. We knew that he said it in his own speech. But this business about allegedly trying to grab the steering wheel and laying hands on the Secret Service agent, the Secret Service agent having to stop him from strangling the Secret Service. It didn't happen. So these two guys are ready to come forward and they've already given testimony. So either they already gave testimony and they weren't asked about any of this and then they put on this witness without going back to them who to whom they had access. These are not two people who are not cooperating. Right. So it's like they've interviewed them.
Starting point is 00:28:12 So now she comes forward with her incredible testimony, Cassidy. And what do you do if you're a real investigator? You call up the other two guys and say, hey, we just had this explosive testimony. Is it true? You guys are the ones she's saying told her this and experienced this. Clearly, they did not do that or they did do that. And the two guys, you know, crapped on it and they did and they did it anyway, which would be the biggest problem. And I suppose it's also possible that you guys said, yes, it's 100 percent true. And now just under the heat of the of the spotlight are ready to change their testimony. But that seems unlikely. Meanwhile, another Secret Service agent. This is not the one involved, but he's a former agent, went on record with the Washington Examiner and said, this is kind of interesting, quote, there's not a chance in hell a Secret
Starting point is 00:28:54 Service agent would put their hands on a protectee. Never. We would not touch them. If they decided to lunge at us or hit us, there is no retaliation. That actually has a ring of truth to it. And that story didn't write about Trump lunging and the Wolf Blitzer tried to strangle him. And, you know, like it was on its face absurd, Glenn. And then just to add, to expand on Carl Bernstein, he said she has if she's not contradicted she has nailed the greatest conspiracy criminal and seditious against the republic of the united states since the civil war and jefferson davis you know what's so funny megan they uh this idea that i go this is the final straw they wrote his political obituary this has really been going on since 2015. The funniest article I've ever read was by like the Dean of the Washington political core, whatever Dan Balz, who,
Starting point is 00:29:52 who, when Trump criticized John McCain and mocked him for, uh, having been, you know, a POW saying I like soldiers, you know, I wasn't a fan of those comments to put that mildly.
Starting point is 00:30:06 But the idea that like Republican primary voters were going to rise up in indignation, given all the problems they have in their lives and all the things they're angry about and all the things they're concerned with, that as if they have the same protective love that the Washington press corps had for John McCain, as if that was going to end Donald Trump's political career is something you would think only if you're drowning in this extremely insular world of Washington media. Yet you can go read the article in the Washington Post in 2015 when Trump was leading the polls against his GOP rivals, saying that this seems to me to be a bridge too far that's finally going to take Trump down. Obviously, during Russiagate,
Starting point is 00:30:43 every two months, you know, it was the walls were closing in. This is the last straw. He looks like this is going to go to prison. They've been doing this forever and they're shedding credibility or they've shed all their credibility so rapidly because of this. But they can't stop because the model of liberal corporate journalism that they settled on was that they were going to cultivate an exclusively liberal audience. And they know that audience doesn't care if what they're saying is true or false. They just want to have their presuppositions appeased and flattered. And even if you lie about Trump, they actually don't want you to retract it. They get angry if you retract it, which is why, Megan, to this day, all of those media outlets that right before the election spread the CIA lie that the Hunter Biden
Starting point is 00:31:29 laptop was Russian disinformation, even though we all now know it, I knew then, but everybody now knows it was authentic and confirmed because even the Post and the Times confirmed it, never once retracted those claims they spread before the election because they know their liberal readers care about partisan effect and not journalistic truth. And that is what is such a corrupting force here. That was on on display the other day when Peter Alexander of NBC was the first to tweet out my sources, the White House correspondent for NBC, my sources telling me Secret Service agents involved in this alleged story are disputing this and ready to say this did not happen. And if you looked at the comments and the responses from the mostly liberal left to his tweet, it was like, oh, are the clicks worth it?
Starting point is 00:32:13 You're so desperate to get new followers. It's like it's news. It's directly on point to the very thing that you're reporting today. Oh, you that reminds me you had a great response to this, which I liked and retweeted. Oh, my God, I have to find it because it was so perfect about how all day long left was like bombshell. I'm trying to find it. This is amazing. This is huge. And then Peter Alexander writes that and then a bunch of people come out and say, no, this isn't true. I have it as well. They're going to dispute it. And they were like, well, that wasn't at the crux of the story. Yeah, here it is. I found it. Glenn, journalists all day yesterday. Trump assaulted his Secret Service
Starting point is 00:32:49 agents and grabbed the wheel of the presidential limo. Headline news, smoking gun. Secret Service agents, colon. That never happened. Journalists, colon. That was never an important part of the testimony. I mean, we just watch both. And I remember people saying, no, it really not. We just watch Wolf Blitzer who called in, you know, they do that when they really think something momentous has happened. They called in not just Carl Bernstein, who's always there, but Bob Woodward, because, of course, the idea is, you know, where these are the people who are the authorities to say this isn't Watergate. It's worse than Watergate. And they seized on the most dramatic part of the story, which is that Trump, who is not exactly known for his like agility or athleticism, somehow was able to like fly across the limo like only
Starting point is 00:33:37 Superman could and like overpower these extremely strong and well, you know, trained Secret Service agents by grabbing the wheel of the car and lunging at their throat. And clearly, that was the thing about which they were most excited, because if that were true, that is a pretty dramatic story. And then soon as it got debunked, they were saying, oh, conservatives are just debunking this kind of ancillary detail that nobody cares about in order to distract from the really important part of Cassidy Hutchinson's story, which was what? That like there was ketchup on the wall. So, you know, this, this, that is like the real kind of, um, you know, attempt to prevent people from realizing that what they saw didn't actually happen. Um, that's gaslighting in its purest form, like watching journalists all day focus on that one
Starting point is 00:34:25 part of the story. And then when it gets debunked, turn around and say, oh, well, that was just a small detail that never really mattered. Immaterial. Same with the January 6th committee. When she got caught, she was contradicted because she said she she wrote this handwritten note that was dictated to her by her boss, the chief of staff, that was essentially going to go out saying anybody not invited onto the Capitol needs to leave right now. of staff, that was essentially going to go out saying anybody not invited onto the Capitol needs to leave right now. And she said that was her. She looked at it and said, that's that's mine. That's my handwriting. And then White House counsel, one of the lawyers came out and said, that's a lie. That's that is my handwriting. I am the one who wrote that.
Starting point is 00:34:59 Now, I mean, that's deeply problematic because you do know your own handwriting. And if she's trying to self aggrandize or make herself seem more important than she was, we need to know that. But instead of actually looking into it, what we got was a note from the January 6th committee saying that's immaterial. We believe her that she's that she's credible. Her testimony was credible. Well, talk about being judge, jury, executioner. You're like, oh, it's great when you get to present the case, present all the witnesses, then tell us whether the witness is believable, then ultimately pronounce the final judgment, which is where this is going. I mean, the whole thing is just so unnerving to anybody who has a semblance of fairness, never mind justice under their belt. But what? Oh, go ahead. No, no, no. I just want to have one point about that,
Starting point is 00:35:38 which is for me, this really underscores a important question that has really gotten ignored, which is why does the January 6 investigative committee even exist when it comes to alleged crimes? The branch of government that is charged with investigating criminality is not the Congress, but the Justice Department and the FBI, because they have all kinds of protection safeguards that citizens enjoy against what it is that they can do. Congress has very limited power to investigate. They can only investigate if it's in connection with some lawmaking purpose they want to have. They want to enact pollution regulations.
Starting point is 00:36:17 They get to summon the chairs of various polluting corporations or experts in pollution, or if they're exercising oversight over the executive branch. You can make the argument maybe that it falls into the latter camp. But what this really is, is the kind of thing that the McCarthy era Supreme Court twice said is inappropriate, which is conducting a political show trial that is really designed to be a parallel investigation to the Justice Department that enables you to do things the Justice Department can't do in order to kind of pressure the Justice Department to bring charges when you think they're not acting quickly enough.
Starting point is 00:36:54 And that's exactly what this is about, Megan. They're angry that Merrick Garland didn't charge sedition for over a year. They finally got him to do that. And now they want Donald Trump prosecuted. So all this is is a parallel Justice Department investigation designed to create criminal charges without any of the safeguards people are supposed to have, including basic adversarial scrutiny over what's being said. I find the whole show trial pernicious for that reason. I agree. And I also think if that's their goal, they're undermining it because they're damaging the witnesses Merrick Garland would need
Starting point is 00:37:25 by being so shoddy as investigators, by not calling up the two Secret Service agents to make sure, hey, Cassidy Hutchinson's about to say this. Did it happen? And then presenting her to us as though she would be an uncontradicted witness and that everybody would support her version. So, I mean, if I were Merrick Garland and determined to prosecute you, I would be angry at what they're doing right now. All right. I'm going to pause it there. Squeeze in a quick break. So much more to go over with Glenn, including the president saying we're we are happy with the direction of the country. Eighty five percent say they're not. And his response is, yes, you are. You are too. Glenn's up next.
Starting point is 00:38:04 Before we leave the subject of January 6th, can we just talk about this? Ben Shapiro was raging about this yesterday and was so good on it. Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC has got this piece out there talking about here. Here's what he writes. I think it was in The New York Times. The CEO silence on the January 6th hearings. He's pissed off corporate America is not coming out and taking a stance on the January 6th hearings. Andrew here. I want to speak with you directly this morning, much as I did after the
Starting point is 00:38:36 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Who wants to hear from him? OK. After January 6th, corporations across this nation rates to put out news releases condemning the insurrection, as well as the Republican members of Congress who tried to overturn the election results. Many companies pledged to end or pause donating to these politicians. Fast forward to today, whatever your politics, yesterday's testimony by a former White House aide
Starting point is 00:38:58 about President Donald Trump's actions on January 6th was deeply disturbing. Whatever your politics, it had to be deeply disturbing to you, Glenn, got it? And yet you will most likely hear only one thing from the business community in the coming days. Silence. Why? I've been spending the past several days at the Aspen Ideas Festival asking chief executives and other leaders that very question. What I hear again and again is that the business community and perhaps the public at large has outrage, fatigue. But there is something else happening, too.
Starting point is 00:39:28 Those who do want to speak out are concerned about retaliation from political officials and a significant portion of the public in ways they weren't a year and a half ago. He goes on to talk about various polls that show Trump remains popular. In many cases, brace yourselves, more popular than even President Biden. Others fear being labeled woke. And he goes on to talk about DeSantis. And then he says, but here's my question for business leaders. After years of talking about moral courage, where is yours? It's unbelievable. I don't even know where to start there. But I think, you know, I think it's unbelievable. I don't even know where to start there, but I think, you know, I think it's so hilarious. Like how he says Trump's not just still popular, but even more popular than Joe Biden is if Joe Biden is like the, you know, Nero or like on Mount Rushmore. And so the idea that
Starting point is 00:40:18 anyone could be more popular than him, let alone Trump is something that's shocking. But I, the thing that this is actually something that is actually something that I've been looking at for a while now is for decades, it was a staple of the liberal left that corporations have too much power in the United States. And the idea of opposing, especially the political power that corporations wield through things like donations and lobbyists was foundational to all kinds of liberal politics. And now suddenly, ever since I think you can really trace it back to George Floyd, but even kind of before that, with a lot of LGBT issues and the like, what has happened is as a result of Democrats becoming the party of the affluent, which is the dirty little secret of our politics,
Starting point is 00:41:03 that Joe Biden didn't win because minorities rose up and voted for him in record number to eject the white nationalists from the presidency. Quite the opposite happened. Trump attracted more Latino voters and African-American voters, Asian voters than any Republican in a decade, whereas Biden won because affluent white suburbanites voted for him who had long for a long time voted Republican. As affluent people become more and more liberal, corporations feel more and more comfortable espousing liberal political ideals, whereas they used to be steadfastly neutral. And seeing that liberals are increasingly calling for corporations to throw their weight around when it comes to the democratic process, the way that they demanded that Disney,
Starting point is 00:41:45 for example, get involved in the enactment of that law in Florida that was enacted by a democratically constituted state legislature and then signed into law by the democratically elected governor about what second graders and under can be taught about gender ideology,
Starting point is 00:42:02 demanding that Disney denounce this. This is a constant refrain now that corporations, which we always wanted to make sure their power, their corporate power was confined to just doing what was in their business self-interest, are now suddenly supposed to be ideological and partisan actors on the side of one side. That's incredibly dangerous. That's called, you could call it like the literal definition of fascism when corporate and state powers start to create a union. But at the very least, that's called oligarchy. And yet there's unabashedly an increasing desire
Starting point is 00:42:35 on the part of the liberal left for corporations to become heavily involved political actors in a way that's obviously very dangerous. Yeah, what are we gonna have? We're gonna go down the street and it's gonna be all the red corporations and the blue corporations. And you've got to go in depending on what your number says on your wrist, you know, or your, your color of your shirt says the, um, one of the stories that, that Ben was talking
Starting point is 00:42:57 about yesterday related to this UK bank, this Halifax bank, which is doing exactly what Aaron Ross Sorkin wants them to do. They tweeted out some photo showing an employee wearing, you know, her name tag. And it said, you know, pronouns, she, her, hers. And it was roundly mocked online, you know, that this bank is bragging about how it mandates pronouns on its employees name tags. And in response to the mocking, the bank tweets out in response, they double down and tweet and tweeted out, we strive for inclusion, equity, and quite simply in doing what's right. If you disagree with our values, you're welcome to close your account. A social media spokesperson identified as Andy decided to tell their their bankers. I mean, so basically, I can't keep my money at your bank if I think your name tags are stupid.
Starting point is 00:43:49 This is our future. You know, this is this. I think this touches a little bit of what we're describing earlier about this ability of the Supreme Court justices Ginsburg and Scalia. Sotomayor and Thomas to maintain genuine friendships, respectful, even kind of affectionate interactions with one another across ideological divides, which used to be very normal and very common. And now the idea is that if you have an ideological difference with somebody, especially liberals believe this, that if someone supports Donald Trump or someone supports the conservative movement, they're not just misguided politically. They're bad people. They're racist. They're white nationalists. They're all those other things such that maintaining any interaction with them
Starting point is 00:44:31 is itself immoral. There's been op-eds even demanding that people renounce their own families if their families are bound to be supporters of Donald Trump or the conservative movement or hold these certain views. And the reason that's so dangerous is because that does generate this vulcanization of society. You know, you had the kind of like pillow companies where there were two pillow companies, one that was supposed to be on the left and one that was supposed to be on the right. So now where we buy our pillows is supposed to be determined by, you know, there's the red pillow store and the blue pillow store. This is begging for a kind of fracturing of our society that is remarkably inflammatory and volatile.
Starting point is 00:45:11 And I'm amazed that people want to flirt with that. Yeah, I don't know what registered independents like me and I think you, what are we supposed to do? Where do we go? Are there going to be like a little line of purple stores like down the middle where we can shop and keep our money and stuff? All right. Last question, because I've teased it. President Biden speaking over in Spain decided to talk about in response to questions, the fact that 85 percent of the U.S. public thinks the country is going in the wrong direction.
Starting point is 00:45:40 And the question that was asked to him was, how do you explain to these people who feel the country is going in the wrong direction, including some of the leaders you've been meeting with this week, part of the G7, who think that when you put all this together, it amounts to an America that's going backward. His response was positioned to lead the world than we ever have been. We have the strongest economy in the world. Our inflation rates are lower than other nations in the world. And then he goes on to say the one thing that's been destabilizing is the outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court on Roe v. Wade. That's the thing. Glenn, your thoughts on it in the minute we have left. I mean, like if Democrats want to continue to live in this very delusional insular bubble where the only information they get, the only things they hear are things that they get from progressive activists and progressive media employees on Twitter increasingly becoming the same thing.
Starting point is 00:46:38 They can do that. And they're going to march right into complete destruction in November. All polling data shows that for very good reason, Americans feel suffocated economically. And if your strategy is really going to be to send politicians and rich celebrities out to tell them that that's unwarranted or that they need to suffer for good cause, good luck with that. But I think that they're just digging their own grave with it. Yeah, it's not going to work. It didn't work on inflation is transitory. It didn't work on we're not having a crime surge and it's not going to work on this either.
Starting point is 00:47:09 Glenn, always a pleasure. Always happy to be with you, Megan. Thanks. Talk to you soon. You as well. OK, so up next, if you have a kid who misbehaves, a kid who drives you crazy, a kid who constantly gets in trouble in school, Well, wait until you hear what it might be when my friend and filmmaker Nancy Armstrong joins us right after this break. Does your child struggle with problems at school, with getting booted out of the classroom, with behavioral issues?
Starting point is 00:47:41 At home, do they drive you nuts? Can they not sit still at the dinner table? So on and so forth. Well, then this next segment may be for you. My pal Nancy Armstrong is with me now. She's an Emmy nominated producer and the executive producer at Happy Warrior Media, and she executive produced a game changing documentary called The Disruptors. I love this film. She was inspired to make the film as a result of her family's experiences navigating life with ADHD,
Starting point is 00:48:15 which someone in your life may have and you might not even know it. She joins us now. Hey, great to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Hey, Megan. Thanks so much for having me on. Oh, the pleasure is all mine. Okay. So I love that you, you use celebrities at the beginning of this documentary to sort of show people that extremely accomplished household
Starting point is 00:48:36 names have ADHD and have used its upsides to achieve great heights. But the film itself is really about regular people. It profiles regular families who are struggling with all of this. And to me, the place I want to start with is your own. Because you have a regular family. Your husband is featured in the film a bit. But you talk about your son, Jack, who I also know who's delightful. But when he was little, maybe less delightful. And you noticed some behaviors that you were struggling to sort of understand. Yeah, I mean, it was really a struggle. Pretty early on, we knew something was definitely going on with him.
Starting point is 00:49:18 Something was definitely different, but we didn't know what. And I mean, we got kicked out of mommy and me class when he was a toddler. All the kids were sitting very calmly in their mother's laps in the room. And Jack was running around the circle and turning off the music. And she just asked us to leave. And we cried all the way home. And I really didn't understand what was going on, particularly, particularly being a first time parent. And then it took years to get diagnosed and no one ever mentioned ADHD. Oddly, he had all of the symptoms that are the sort of the classic hallmark symptoms of ADHD, distractibility, hyperactivity and impulsivity on a pretty high scale. But it wasn't until he was eight years
Starting point is 00:49:56 old that we finally got, you know, a real diagnosis. And at least then we knew what was going on and that we could get help. Now, your husband, Tim Armstrong, is featured in the film as well, and he has ADHD. So at the time that you were wondering about Jack, did you know that Tim had it? No, not at all. In fact, Tim was basically diagnosed in the room when the diagnostician was telling us about Jack's symptoms. He was running off the list of all the symptoms of ADHD and Tim's hand kind of goes up. And I looked at him like, what now? What, you know, what's happening? He said, I have all those symptoms. And the diagnostician said, well, it's hereditary, which it is highly heritable trait.
Starting point is 00:50:34 So that was kind of the beginning of his diagnosis journey and finding out that he had ADHD. And then our girls were also diagnosed, but we kind of missed their diagnosis for a long time because girls present so differently than boys. They're, They're not as hyperactive. They're more inattentive type. They can also be hyperactive, but they don't present the same way as boys. And oftentimes, we miss it. And they misdiagnose girls with anxiety or depression. And they can kind of white knuckle it through K through five. And then when they get to middle school, a couple of things happen. Their hormones kick up, which can really exacerbate symptoms of ADHD. And also they're going from one class, one teacher to six classes, six teachers, six
Starting point is 00:51:16 binders. Oh, my God, the binders. I fought very hard for my daughters to have one binder because there was no way they could be successful with all those binders. Right, because you make a good point in the school setting. These schools are not set up for children with this challenge. In fact, it's to the contrary. And so the frustration that these kids are feeling and they don't know why they're feeling it must be immense. What they wind up thinking most of the time is, I'm not smart. I can't do it.
Starting point is 00:51:48 Yeah, that's what was happening in school. And it's really sad. Actually, everyone is set up to fail in a school environment. The kids are set up to fail because it's kind of this assembly line approach to education, which is deadening to kids with ADHD. And teachers are also kind of set up to fail because they don't have the requisite amount of education to really help kids with ADHD. And it's 10% of the students they're going to have in every class. So I hope this film goes, you know, a long way toward a first step in education for teachers who really don't understand ADHD and inspiring further education, because it's so important. Teachers can have a profound effect on your child's life in a super positive way if they understand what your child is dealing with. And we showed that in one instance with Will.i.am in the film where Mr. Wright understood his talent
Starting point is 00:52:30 and gave him a lot of positive feedback. And that was a formative moment for him. What most kids experience is a ton of negative feedback. And that is really demoralizing. And they end up thinking that they're stupid and not capable. And that's really a tragedy. There's one doctor in the film. This jumped out at me when I watched it. He says, these kids are misunderstood. He said, it breaks my heart because they receive such negative feedback from their world. And it's really not their fault.
Starting point is 00:53:05 I mean, I was just saying in the tease, ants in the pants, can't sit down at dinner, can't stay still, can't focus on the lesson plan, constantly getting thrown out of the class. That's part of the problem, constantly getting booted from the class. Then they're behind. Then it exacerbates everything. But their day-to-day experience is frustration, being told they're bad. They hear it from their parents, loving parents, but who are frustrated. They hear it from their teachers. They hear it from their band leaders. They hear it in every circumstance to the point where they wind up believing it, that there's just something wrong with them. Well, the manifestation of ADHD oftentimes is behavioral. So otherwise they look like normal kids, but their behavior is very outside the norm and disruptive, which is, you know, kind of gives way to the title of the film.
Starting point is 00:53:45 But they end up thinking that they are incapable and they and they get such negative feedback. And it's it's really not. These are their formative years. So they're going into adulthood with this very negative view of themselves. And so it's very important to get diagnosis and treatment, I think, so that they know what they're dealing with. They can work, you know, they can find treatments and solutions that help them along the way. And also that people in their environment understand that this is neurological. That's kind of the biggest problem we face as a society with ADHD right now is that there's a deep disconnect between what the public thinks about ADHD, which is that it's just bad parenting and
Starting point is 00:54:22 bad kids. And what we know from decades of research and hundreds, if not thousands of studies, we know it's neurological 100%. We know what parts of the brain it affects. We know it's highly heritable. And now we know from experts all over the country that even though ADHD does have challenges that need to be managed, it also has some pretty impressive strengths. And if you can find a path in life to activate and accelerate those strengths, it can be a big asset, but you have to be diagnosed and treated and you have to find ways to manage the challenges. Oh, I mean, after I watched the film, I remember emailing you like, I kind of want it. I wish I had it, you know, in some ways,
Starting point is 00:55:01 because like a lot of these things, there's a great flip to the flop. You know, there's there are definite upsides to these same, quote unquote, negative characteristics. And one of the points you make in the film is that you've got somebody in there saying it's it's got the word disorder in it. There's a there's a deficit in it. You know, there's something wrong with you. You're sick. But the film, you know, presents another option.
Starting point is 00:55:23 It doesn't it doesn't ignore the downsides of having ADHD, the challenges of it, but also gives hope because it's like I think a lot of parents like you are probably frustrated at getting kicked out of the mommy and me and all the things that follow with behavioral instances. But it could mean your child is facing enormous upside once you get a handle on this and learn to channel the gifts that come with this into the right lanes. And that'll never happen without diagnosis and treatment. I mean, what, what all of the superstars in the film had in common was parents that stood behind them a hundred percent and never gave up on them. And they also had education to, to get on that path that they wanted to get on to be successful. Um, but we find, you know, people that are entrepreneurs have ADHD. It's, they have creativity, curiosity, energy. They're not risk. Um, they're not risk averse. So they
Starting point is 00:56:16 take big swings at things and they're good in high stimulation environments like ER rooms or as surgeons or firefighters, they, they will not do well in a cubicle. That's not a path for them. But if they can find a path that stimulates them, that's very exciting to them, they can really have an incredible trajectory. Okay. So speaking of some of the celebrities, we pulled just a small clip that shows some of the better known names explaining what it's like to have it. Because I think now we have a lot of people out there wondering, do I have it? Do I have high energy? I can be distracted. So this is a clip of some folks describing what it's like.
Starting point is 00:56:55 I spend my every waking moment trying to get outside of my own head because it's a mess in there. It's very busy. Your brain is always firing. You're firing at a thousand miles an hour. You're eight cylinders by eight cylinders, 24-7, 365. It is like I'm juggling 20 balls, but I don't remember where they were in the air. I'm just there trying to kind of catch all these balls. And I remember nothing. Imagine somebody sitting on the keys of the computer. That's what your brain is like.
Starting point is 00:57:26 That's ADHD. That last what your brain is like. That's ADHD. That last one was Steve Madden. That's such a great descriptor that helped me, right? Like just constant, constant, constant info. And you can't mute it. You can't, it's like, there's no muting it, I guess, without medication. Well, there's ways to focus. I mean, they have, they also have this hyper focus, which is the ability to really go very deeply into a topic for a long period of time, longer than someone without ADHD. And I think, you know, the, the, the misnomer about ADHD is that they have a deficit of attention. They really don't, they have too much attention while we, while a normal neurotypical person can just focus on what they're supposed to focus on.
Starting point is 00:58:04 Someone with ADHD is finding exactly the same amount of attention to something over here that has nothing to do with this moment. So it's like they have the difficulty focusing their attention, but they have too much attention is really what it is. So how do you know, right? How do you get that diagnosis? Because now we've got a lot of parents out there saying, I have it and all my kids have it too. Like, yeah, this describes everyone I know. The pandemic did not help in terms of ADHD. I mean, there was a real uptick in ADHD, partly because I think that the pandemic and the shutdown and being online schooling that really exacerbated symptoms of ADHD, you know, online learning isn't really good for anyone,
Starting point is 00:58:42 but it's especially horrible for kids with ADHD. They just they don't learn anything. And so that was really probably horrible for parents with kids who have ADHD. But that's you know, that's really the the the diagnosis is so important so that they can understand really what's going on with them. And it's so hard right now because you can't get in to see physicians or somebody who would be in a position. I guess you go to a neurologist. So you can't get in and the wait lists are long. And so it's like it exacerbated it. And it also made it harder to get it diagnosed and treated the pandemic. Yeah. I mean, well, that's the problem initially is that there are a dearth of clinicians in ADHD. So what needs to happen is that primary care physicians and pediatricians need to become an accredited first line of defense because there aren't enough clinicians on ADHD. And in Australia, I'm speaking to people all over the world
Starting point is 00:59:37 and there's this woman in Australia that says she knows she has ADHD, but it's an eight month wait to get in to see someone. So people are turning to social media or online sites, which may or may not be the right way to go. And so that's really a huge problem is that we really do not have enough people to help. The doctor TikTok is, is never, never a good idea. So can you just expand though, because I'm going to show a clip of sweet Hogan, who is his experience is indicative of so many kids and parents. But
Starting point is 01:00:06 can you expand a little bit on the differences between how it manifests in boys and girls? Because when we get to Hogan, you'll see, you know, he's big and there are confrontations, you know, in terms of his physicality and so on. That's not going to happen with ADHD girls. Yeah. I mean, with girls, it is exquisite sensitivity to rejection. It's hypersensitivity. It's emotional impulsivity. That's very problematic when you are in friendships. So where girls really struggle is in friendships sometimes because they're highly emotional. And it's all psychological with girls. So that's an area that's really different with girls. And also, again, they just don't present the same amount of hyperactivity as boys.
Starting point is 01:00:49 Well, that's fascinating because it's like, as you say, if it really manifests in middle school, when the school challenges change, how are you supposed to discern that from the normal hormone surge and kind of difficult behavior we all expect to get from our tweens and teens? Well, it's the degree to which it causes an impairment. Like you said, everyone is distracted every once in a while, or everyone is hypersensitive every now and then, but it's the degree to which it is an impairment in multiple settings. And it's kind of becoming chronic and really interfering with their life. That's a good point. I remember talking to my own therapist when my kids were little and I was trying to figure out whether everything was right and was anything normal or abnormal and so on.
Starting point is 01:01:33 And he used to say, if there's a problem with your child, you don't have to go looking for it. You will know. And that has proven to be true in my own life. Okay. So one of the families featured in the documentary is the family of Hogan. And this is a clip that shows this is not unusual that this child, 13 years old, had an incident at school that led to some very bad results. That won't be totally unfamiliar to parents of kids with ADHD. Watch this week. I got suspended from school for some stuff that I did. I was just kind of messing around in class. I got a call from a police officer Friday afternoon, 3.30. What happened was that he was walking down the hall playing with a friend. They were kind of
Starting point is 01:02:20 pushing each other, horseplay, and that kid, like, pushes Hogan against the wall. And Hogan comes back and pushes him because it hurt. And then that kid just popped him in the face. And Hogan is about to start crying. He's in the middle of the hallway. And he's embarrassed. Like, his thought is, I'm going to go to the bathroom and cool off. And I'm going to go to class.
Starting point is 01:02:44 But the teacher says, no, you can't go. He keeps walking in with his head down and then she blocks the door. Yeah, or holds out her hand and he just keeps walking through. And she pressed charges on him. He basically went to, you know, sort of school jail after that. And it's so hard to get them right tracked after an incident like that. Yeah. I mean, that was really an awful thing to happen to Hogan. He's such a sweet kid and I have no doubt he's going to go great places in life, but you can see how you can get on the wrong track. You know,
Starting point is 01:03:25 one thing happens, you end up in the special school. Now you've got this thing hanging over your head and you can see that snowballing, you know, if kids don't, and they know that Hogan's diagnosed and the teachers know he's diagnosed, which seems particularly unfair about this particular incident. But if you kids are not undiagnosed and the teacher just thinks they're willful or badly behaved, then they get put in a special classroom. From there, they get, you know, you know, start acting out and get into the juvenile detention system. And then from there, you can get into the criminal justice system. And they, you know, there's anywhere from 25 to 40% of prison inmates have ADHD, which is which is undiagnosed or has recently been diagnosed. So if we could have caught those
Starting point is 01:04:06 kids earlier, if we can catch everyone earlier that has it, just think of how many more amazing people we could have being super productive in the world and using their talent instead of ending up in a bad situation. Well, and in that situation, as you point out, the teacher knew, so it's especially bad. But where the teachers don't know, it's got to be something in the back of their heads. But I have sympathy for them because the documentary shows us how even some of the moms, I feel so bad for these moms, they beat themselves up once they get the diagnosis. It was Zara's mom. She's one of the girls featured.
Starting point is 01:04:42 And she was so sad when she looked back on how she'd been interpreting her child's behavior. And I mean, I feel like we've all been there where she she talked about how she felt like there was an intention to like upset her or disobey her or antagonize her. I think maybe then the word she used that the daughter was intentionally doing that. And only once she sort of started to understand what her daughter was actually going through and how it affects a girl's mind, did she start to get tougher on her own self as the mom? Like, oh my God, there was a better, different way I could have handled that.
Starting point is 01:05:20 Yeah. I mean, that's one of the saddest things is so much parental guilt. You know, parenting is hard anyway, but raising a child with ADHD is like parenting on steroids. And parents have so much guilt about getting it wrong and about losing their patience. I mean, I've had that myself. I'm not a naturally super patient person, but I've had to kind of really learn. And it's a growth journey for parents. And if you can just hang in there and really try to understand where your child is coming from and support them as best you can, and never stop believing in them, the rewards of that can be, you know, really wonderful. It's very, it's a high intensity, but highly rewarding thing to parent a child with ADHD. But
Starting point is 01:06:00 the parents have so much guilt and I get all these letters, you know, now that the film is out from all over the world, from parents who are just so relieved to see themselves in the intention to make the film for parents, for children, for families, because they didn't have a film like this before. And we really wanted this to be kind of the first step towards really opening the door to understanding this a little bit better. So one mom is talking about how she would go to the school and drop off apology notes for her child. She felt bad about how she dealt with his refusal to get his stuff together and get into the car. And we got to go. And the time is what the time is. And you have other children, too.
Starting point is 01:06:52 The family can't cater to the one child at all times. And I mean, I feel like we can all relate to that. But this is a good sort of reminder for people that it may be more than just your child behaving in an annoying way. It's worth looking into because if it is ADHD, there are real coping mechanisms that you can use. And yes, therapy could be one, different parental reactions and behaviors and approaches could be one, and medication is one. And this is where we get to the, you know, Tom Cruise, these parents who are medicating their children and they don't know anything about the drugs. And now we've sort of flipped
Starting point is 01:07:30 because people started using things like Adderall, you know, because they want to stay awake and active and thin that those drugs get a bad name. Whereas they, I know have been very helpful in your own family and in these families that you feature. And you say it's basically a game of trial and error by parents. But you try to destigmatize the meds. Well, we really tried to be agnostic when it comes to medication. It's a very personal choice whether or not to try medication for your child. And, you know, there's a toolbox of things you can use to help mitigate the symptoms of ADHD. And medication is one of them.
Starting point is 01:08:05 And it's just important to know the research behind it. There are, you know, 22 longitudinal studies that show that kids who use these medications are not predisposing themselves to use drugs, which is one of the concerns. There are 35 studies that show that using these medications over time leads to the brain kind of wiring up more normally, more neurotypically over time. So those are really positive. And they've done more studies on these medications for ADHD than any other drug you will ever take because we use them with children. And I think they are abused, but they're not really abused by people with ADHD. They're abused by non ADHD people, because when you take a stimulant and you have a
Starting point is 01:08:45 neurotypical brain, it does give you a high. When you take stimulants as an ADHD person, it calms you down. So it's, you know, usually kids don't even really want to take medication. They don't love the idea of it, but they want to be able to focus in class. They don't want to be impulsive and, and get in trouble with their friends and get in trouble with their teachers. So that's their motivation to take medication if it works for them. And like you said, it's trial and error, or we call it trial and examination, because you may have to try one type of drug. And then if that doesn't work, you have to tweak the dosage or try a different one. And that's a very, very uncomfortable process. And I've been through that and it's really, really awful. But when you then finally find the one that works, it's this tremendous relief because they can have target symptom relief without any downsides. And that's really, you know, it's a tremendous lift for those kids. Well, and I think that's, that's a nice thing to know too, is that you could be using the drug to get yourself off the drug. I mean, it really could help solve the brain problem to where you don't need anything eventually. I want to end with
Starting point is 01:09:51 the upsides because, you know, you're talking about the kids who, and the sort of the feedback that they get as children, that they're problematic, that there's something wrong with them. And, you know, it can be very damaging. That plus these great gifts that are there as well. Maybe they're not being called that or identified as that yet of like great creativity and great energy and ability to do super focusing explains to me why there are so many super successful people with ADHD. Because you tend like if you have all those gifts, you know, the creativity and the drive and the focus and all that, and then people crap on you for years and years, you probably will be a big success because you're driven. You have issues you need to overcome.
Starting point is 01:10:32 I always worry that I need to create more issues with my children if I want them to be very successful. I need to damage them more. I mean, I'm doing my part, but I think I need to do more. I used to do more. the one thing that you said, which is that kids with ADHD tend to have to try so much harder to be good at what they're doing, because they're particularly if they've been undiagnosed, and even if they have, even if they're undiagnosed and unmedicated, even if they are diagnosed, they still have to work harder. And so their pedal speed is very fast. And when they go into
Starting point is 01:11:23 adulthood, and their brain matures and things get a little easier, they still sort of have this very fast pedaling speed. So they're working on a higher frequency and then they're, you know, they're, they're able to leverage the skills of their brain. So they go like this. And, um, I think that's really fascinating. And I think we saw that with so many people on the documentary that felt terrible. Yeah. Scott Kelly, the astronaut, I interviewed him when I was on NBC and he talked about how he was a straight C student. He just, he did not do well in school. And you have this image of astronauts like, oh, I could never be an astronaut. You'd have to get straight A's and A pluses in every scientific course you ever took. Nope, not necessarily. And he's a great example
Starting point is 01:12:04 of this. He's a great example of this. He's a great example. And he, you know, his grandmother told him he was stupid and he would never learn to read. And, you know, but that whole thing with getting C's, it's very interesting. David Nealman, who's the founder of JetBlue and many other jet companies, he only got C's and he felt really dumb growing up. And even when JetBlue went public many years ago, he said he just drove home still feeling like the loser from high school because it was so ingrained in his head that he wasn't good enough and wasn't as good as everyone else. And so I think that is kind of an internal motivator if you can flip it to that. If you're negatively motivated, not everyone is. But that's
Starting point is 01:12:40 interesting that so many people had that struggle. I am because I'm Irish. So we respond to just being insulted. And, you know, it doesn't upset us. It just, you know, we're like, I knew it. Yeah, you're right. Good things can happen if you try to turn it around. Nancy, such a pleasure. I really, really love the film. It's already won a bunch of awards.
Starting point is 01:12:58 It's called The Disruptors. It's available now on Apple TV and iTunes and YouTube, Google Play, Amazon and more. Promise you, you will love it. I promise you. The Disruptors. Check it out. All the best, my friend. Thank you so much, Megan.
Starting point is 01:13:11 Okay, coming up after this break, we are going to meet somebody who I've wanted to meet and who you may know, whose name you may know. Her name is Susie Weiss. You recognize the last name. You probably know of her sister. Why is Susie here? I have to stay tuned to find out. Joining me now, Susie Weiss. Susie is a former New York Post reporter and a contributor to Common Sense on Substack. She is also the younger sister of Common Sense's founder,
Starting point is 01:13:44 Barry Weiss. Susie, I am so excited to meet you and to have you here. Thanks for coming on. Me too, Megan. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, you look a little like Barry. I've read so much of what you've written, but I've never seen you. That's fun. This is so fun. We have the same face and voice. It's terrifying. Talent must run in the family because I read your stuff i'm like how's this girl 27 this is crazy your writing is beautiful your thoughts on tuesday again i'm 26 still oh my god sister don't even get me started okay i'm in my what fifth decade now 51 i always i hate to do the math is that considered your fifth or sixth decade i don't know whatever i didn't go to the fancy schools like you did
Starting point is 01:14:23 all right so suzy writes for barry weiss uh her common sense. And you should never miss a Susie Weiss piece because they're very insightful, way beyond the wisdom any self-respecting 26 year old should have. You should have been out partying more and not developing that beautiful brain. But we'll get to that later in life. So the piece that really got our attention, they're all good. But the one I really wanted to talk to you about was the piece you did on David Sabatini. And just to set it up for our audience, we've been covering on this show the weaponization of Me Too. And it's happened to Roland Fryer, this brilliant Harvard professor, happens to be a black professor there, I think the youngest tenured black professor in Harvard's history who's been completely railroaded out of his prestigious opportunities there over trumped up me to charges.
Starting point is 01:15:11 Joshua Katz. This just happened to him at Princeton, a similar situation. And Ilya Shapiro was not me to out of his Georgetown law position, but he did send out just a poorly worded tweet about Katonji Brown Jackson that basically wound up costing him his opportunity there. And when they finally gave him a like, well, we guess we'll let you start to his credit. He said, forget you. This is doomed and didn't go. And that brings us to David Sabatini, who I think might be the worst case of all. I'm horrified by what you wrote. Not only did I read it, I then listened to it, the audio of it, and then I shared it with everybody I knew. I want everybody to go to Barry Weiss's Substack
Starting point is 01:15:51 and read this, but Susie's going to walk us through the basics of the story here. So who is David Sabatini? Right. Thanks, Megan, for that setup. David Sabatini is the most important scientist you've never heard of, right? So he studied something called the mTOR pathway. He discovered it when he was a graduate student. I don't really know about the mTOR pathway. I think it would take a PhD to explain. The important thing to understand is that the mTOR pathway, which Sabatini and his team of 39 researchers worked on, is essential to understanding cells and eventually the cure for cancer. Okay. So I think when we talk about overreach in the Me Too movement, we tend to think of producers or comedians or whoever it is, but I think it's a different story. And I think it requires a big magnifying glass when you're
Starting point is 01:16:37 talking about someone who could potentially save the lives of millions of people with his research. So David Sabatini had a consensual relationship with a colleague. It didn't end well. She later claimed that he harassed her. And now one of the country's most important scientists who was getting something like $4 million in funding from places like the American Cancer Society and the Pentagon, and he had won every science prize under the book. He was expected to win the Nobel as well. He's collecting unemployment. So he's unemployed and unemployable. And it's just a kind of crazy story. And it goes from MIT to NYU, who was thinking of hiring him.
Starting point is 01:17:19 And it's a piece of what's happening in our whole culture. And it shows who has the power. Is it the people at the top? Is it the Robert Grossmans who run NYU's medical school? Or is it a graduate student who claims that they'd be unsafe if David Sabatini were to continue doing his research in New York? My gosh. All right. So let's walk through it till people understand the slow murder of David Sabatini's professional career. I mean, this guy who had a takedown, it really is. And we need this guy. And so like I look, you know, of course, I'm very open minded to somebody's me to claim. I don't think I have to prove that to anybody. But this is horrific. And what it sounds like to me, this is my opinion, is an affair that didn't work out. And somebody who decided she'd been jilted and wanted to get him. And boy, she did. And in this
Starting point is 01:18:06 environment, you know, somebody like this woman who's very well credentialed saying the things she was saying about him, she's going to have a lot of power. So this woman had a consensual affair with him. There was an age difference. He was 50. She was 29. He had split with his wife. There was no allegation of like extramarital stuff or whatever. And he ran a lab at MIT and she was coming in to run her own lab at 29. Is that correct? That's right. So David was a principal investigator at his lab at MIT. And Kristen Knauss, who he had an affair with, was also an incoming principal investigator. Usually you don't get that position when you're so young. MIT has this sort of special program through the Whitehead Institute. So I won't deny that David Sabatini, as a rock star in his field, had more power than her. But technically,
Starting point is 01:18:50 according to the Whitehead Institute, where they both worked, the only rule he broke was not disclosing that he had a consensual relationship, which violated their consensual relationship policy. So as much as this is about maybe a jilted lover, maybe someone who wanted to take another person down, I think it's also about what happens when we litigate sex to this degree, when an affair becomes so procedural and your boss is involved in it. I mean, we're trying to like, can I can I say for the record, I will distinguish this from, for example, Jeff Zucker at CNN, who had a consensual affair with a colleague who was his underling, who he continued to promote up the ranks over other young women who worked at CNN. That's a deep problem. That's an ethical problem. This was not that situation. She had already gotten this position of running her own lab. And the policy against consensual affairs amongst the people in these positions didn't even kick in until after they'd already begun it. So, you know, whatever.
Starting point is 01:19:53 He basically got hung up on a technicality. Right. So there's that technical aspect of it. according to this 250-page report that I reviewed, where they brought in these criminal investigators, including a DA, to investigate David Sabatini, a former state attorney. He violated their consent for relationship policy, which is the technicality. And then there was a lot of mushy language about how he violated the anti-harassment policy because his behavior created a sexual undercurrent in the lab. They said his relationship exacerbated things because of his, quote, indirect influence over her and ran afoul of the spirit, if not the
Starting point is 01:20:34 letter of the policy. So because you have these like bricks of legalese, you can find a way so that if you swore in the lab, that could count as harassment because it could make someone uncomfortable. So we have the technicality aspect of it. And then the bad behavior in the lab, which is what they really needed to get him kicked out. Because if that's what makes it about the whitehead itself. And everyone I spoke to about, you know, a dozen and a half people who worked with David Sabatini say that his lab is the gold standard. That women there weren't uncomfortable, that it just wasn't in the air. So that's where I think the white had really overstepped. Well, this was one of the conclusions in their report. This is from your reporting
Starting point is 01:21:14 that they found Sabatini's propensity to praise or gravitate toward those in the lab that mirror his desired personality traits, scientific success, or view of science above all else, creates additional obstacles for female lab members. OMG. Because a woman can't believe that science above all else is the correct way to approach work at a science lab. They're just way too concerned with having babies. I have no idea. I think that really jumped out at me too. Yeah, it was absurd. The absurdity of this.
Starting point is 01:21:49 So they come out with this report, all these people brought in to investigate him and he was, forgive me, dismembered. I mean, piece by piece. He lost everything. I mean, some of those guys I mentioned had like a year suspension or like
Starting point is 01:22:05 Roland lost control of his lab at Harvard where they did all these great studies on like police officers and, you know, black men and so on. Roland is a black man. So that happened. But he wasn't totally fired. Ultimately, the guy at Princeton was. But David, I mean, it was swift and it wasn't just the lab, the professorship at MIT. Talk to us about what happened to him. go start a sub stack and do something else. You know what I mean? If they, if they have to leave the mainstream. So David, um, got his, got his funding taken away, got his prizes taken away. He was on the board of a ton of startups in the Boston area that were biotech startups with, you know, missions like looking for the cure for cancer. Uh, and he tells me he wasn't living in his house because he couldn't stand the sound of the FedEx envelopes dropping into his mail slot, which was invariably another institution or startup or whatever it was cutting ties with him. He lost about 35 pounds. He doesn't sleep anymore. And the real loss,
Starting point is 01:23:19 I think, is to all of us. I mean, this was a guy at the prime of his life, and now he's shuffling around taking care of his 11-year-old whom he shares custody of with his ex-wife and really doing nothing. And I think that is,'s thing. You know, she's been saying that Ben Shapiro says, I believe in it as well. Like, don't let them cancel you, you know, build your own thing. Like Barry started a whole new university because just to try to create an alternate. But this is not really an area in which that's all that possible. He you can't cure cancer from your living room. Yeah. And you need the influx of students at prestigious places who want to go to the prestigious places because they're more likely to get published at those
Starting point is 01:24:12 prestigious places. So it's this like sort of crazy ecosystem. And when NYU thought, you know, maybe we could try and pick this guy up, they learned the hard way that a vocal minority of their postdocs and graduate students were not going to let that happen. This is a horrifying piece of the story, too. Let's talk about this. So David's there avoiding the FedExes, losing 35 pounds, losing his hair. He can't sleep. He had a consensual affair, which they said violated the policy. And, you know, that's about it. I mean, maybe some sort of a bro culture, they said, was in the lab because he used to have whiskey tastings. That's it. That's it.
Starting point is 01:24:55 So he lost everything because of that. And so he reaches out to a friend at NYU and she was open-minded to him and then take it from there. Right. Daphne Barce, a guy who runs science at NYU, called up her friend David Sabatini to check in on him. And he was sort of saying, I'll never work again. And she was saying, you're David Sabatini. You're going to work again like you're the man. And he was like, well, would you hire me? And she was like, oh, OK. So then that started NYU going through the process of vetting this guy. And Daphna said something really beautiful, I think, to me, which was, it was incumbent upon us to check out these allegations for ourselves
Starting point is 01:25:35 at the risk of depriving generations of his scientific discoveries. And what they did was they obtained the Whitehead report, which hasn't been made public, but which I've read. And they sent it to three other lawyers who all said that David Sabatini was completely denied due process here. They thought it was just kind of a sham investigation, frankly, so that when it leaked that NYU was considering hiring Sabatini, it leaked to Science magazine. A huge protest erupted at NYU. I went to the protest and I spoke to one student and I said, you know, if David's where should a David Sabatini go, this brilliant scientist? And she goes, prison?
Starting point is 01:26:15 Like, they just want nothing to do with him. And they think by NYU hiring them, it just shows that all they care about is prestige and research dollars and that they don't care about their, you know, the safety of their postdoc. So after NYU students protested, NYU stopped the process of vetting Sabatini to potentially hire him. And then, you know, before you get to that, because I know where you're going, but before we get there, this is from your piece. NYU shared the Whitehead report with several outside lawyers who all concluded he was not afforded due process, as you mentioned. Postdocs at the medical school were threatening to retract papers. Faculty had been ostracized
Starting point is 01:26:55 for not publicly blasting Sabatini. Andrew Hamilton, NYU's president, sent a letter, quote, strongly advising that the medical school not go through with hiring Sabatini, writing, quote, faculty at the university and elsewhere have been told not to work with us. And also speakers are being told not to come here. And then it goes on to say that on May 3rd, NYU announced after careful and thorough consideration, it will not be possible for him to become a member of our faculty. And then let's talk about the NIH. Right. So NYU gets about four hundred seventy million dollars. No, excuse me. It's five hundred million dollars in grant money.
Starting point is 01:27:40 Four hundred seventy of that is for a study on long covid. And Daphne Bar-Sagai is sort of like the arbiter of all of this money. And this is a person who's never had a complaint against her in her entire career. A lot of anonymous complaints are filed to the NIH about Daphne Bar-Sagai, who is now being audited for her involvement in all the NIH money because of the potential that she creates an unsafe environment in her lab. So I think going back to your original point, Megan, about the overreach of Me Too, what we have here is a lot of policies that were enacted, a lot of anonymous complaint boxes, a lot of avenues that you could lodge a complaint if something happened to you. I think there's a potential, and maybe we're seeing it here in the Sabatini case, that those avenues are being taken advantage of. I mean, the fact that not only does he get booted from MIT and every single organization that he was associated with, including some of the organizations he founded, they all severed ties with him.
Starting point is 01:28:40 But then the university that considers hiring him, the person there gets investigated by the NIH herself. People start writing in complaints against her, which was totally out of the blue. And now the NIH is looking at possibly withdrawing that funding. That's next level. I mean, that's mafia shit. That's scary. And if you really think about it, the NIH funding, they changed their policies around Me Too because basically before, historically, there was a game of pass the harasser. So if a researcher brought in a lot of money, the institution wouldn't be as likely to investigate them for doing something wrong in their lab. But now with the change of policy, the institution is almost incentivized
Starting point is 01:29:25 to prove that something untoward happened in the lab so that they could kick out the harasser, in this case, David Sabatini, and keep the grant money for themselves. They're more likely to be able to transfer the name of the grantee if they're able to prove sexual harassment. So it's sort of like watching. So we're laying in the bed that we made, I think, in a big sense. But the NIH money part of it is really fascinating to me. And frankly, I think while we were all talking about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, this was the Me Too story that really should have gotten our attention. And if the NIH turns on you as an academic institution, you're dead. You're dead. That's where your funding comes. Sabatini, he was already in his professional coffin.
Starting point is 01:30:13 This was the nail because no one will look at him now, not just because NYU got scared and got away, but because the NIH basically came in and said, we will ruin you if you even consider him. And it's not just that. It's not just Sabatini. It's his lab members who loved him, who were told by the Whitehead brass, including Ruth Lehman, who runs the Whitehead, that if they went against the Whitehead's ask not to contact David Sabatini, not to help him, not to be communicate with him in any way, they wouldn't want to jeopardize their NIH funding, basically. So I talked to all of these people who say David Sabatini changed their life. He's the most brilliant scientist. He's a pillar. None of
Starting point is 01:30:52 them would go on the record with me. Why do you think that is? It's because they're afraid of going where he is and not being able to get NIH funding, which one of them described to me exactly as you said, as a death sentence. Well, if they're going to do it to this woman who runs the NYU program, who didn't have a blemish on her record and all she did was sort of recommend him, who wouldn't they do it to? Exactly. And it's interesting because on one hand, you have Whitehead publicly saying, we're just trying to protect trainees from this monster. But then on the inside, you have them saying, we're going to we're going to make your life very difficult if you try and save your your old boss. Right. Because didn't they they said that they couldn't
Starting point is 01:31:36 right. Didn't they mandate that the people in his labs not speak even if they wanted to, even if they wanted to offer a positive testimonial and not to be in touch with him? That's right. They were told not to be in touch with him. And I mean, they were in the middle of multimillion dollar experiments on ovarian cancer. There were half used reagents in the lab. I mean, this guy was just kicked out, told not to enter the building. And this lab, which was, you know, publishing more papers than, you know, any other lab in the building was just dismantled. And another fold of this is that a lot of these trainees are immigrants and they don't want
Starting point is 01:32:12 to jeopardize their visas. So they're even less likely to speak out because they just want to be in America doing their work. Does he know what happened to his lab or any of the projects he was working on? He really doesn't know. Another scientist, I think his name is Jonathan Weissman, but I would need to double check. He got put on a few of the grants and I think they were they were wound down. But, you know, the papers are still coming out that he worked on, but he has no idea what became of the lab in short. So now, I mean, the only thing that's available to him realistically is the law. And I understand he he has filed a lawsuit. So how's where are we with that? That is like in pre-discovery, I believe. And David knows it's going to take probably a minimum of five years to get his day in court with this. But he fired filed a defamation lawsuit against his accuser, the whitehead and Ruth Lehman. And then, of course, she filed a counterclaim. And, you know, those those claims are online and you could read them and they're pretty they're pretty incredible documents.
Starting point is 01:33:21 He should go hire Camille Vasquez, the Johnny Depp lawyer. That's who it's a defamation case. I know. I don't I. That's what I would do for him. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm thinking like, how can we help him? And I'm thinking like maybe Vivek Ramaswamy can help like he's been amazing and he's in this field of, you know, medical technology. That's how he made his money. And he wrote, you know, was his book. It was like anti woke, whatever. Well, I think that's how he made his money and he wrote you know was in his book it was like anti-woke whatever woke ink that's what it was like somebody like that we need a we need a guardian angel to step in and help fund him and make this an independent lane available to him yeah i agree but it you know it goes back to building whole new worlds and building um incentive systems that would make the best and brightest minds in
Starting point is 01:34:06 the country want to work under David Sabatini in a lab, maybe funded by a billionaire and not by Harvard or the Koch Institute or whoever it is. And I think that that is the wheels of that are slowly turning, but unfortunately, probably not as fast as David Sabatini needs them to. All right. Last question before I let you go. How I think you're one of four in your in your family. That's right. How did how are you all this way? And how did your parents raise daughters like this? Oh, my God, Megan. No, me and Barry have two middle sisters who are totally normal and aren't doing crazy articles that get them in trouble all the time. They're awesome. They're both new moms.
Starting point is 01:34:47 They live in Pittsburgh with my parents. And yeah, me and Barry are just either something good happened or something very, very bad happened. We're still trying to figure it out. Something very, very good. I know I remember reading something you'd written when you were much younger
Starting point is 01:35:01 and it was something to the effect of, I was, it was very different as I was the youngest. And instead of my parents waiting up all night to make sure I made it home by curfew, it was more like, don't wake us up when you sneak in in the middle of the night. We need our sleep. Yes, yes. That story from a million years ago. Oh, wow. I'm still really proud of that story, but it was great. Yes, yes. I guess we were moths to a flame. We just can't stop. My dad also writes a lot of columns for The Wall Street Journal that I think are really fabulous. But if everything had gone according to plan, me and Barry would be selling carpet in Squirrel Hill where we to meet you. Thank you so much, Megan. It was a pleasure to be here. OMG, next week, you've got to listen. Download now. Sammy the Bull admits to being part of 19 murders, turned on John Gotti and the Gambino crime family, and he's here. See you then.
Starting point is 01:35:57 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda agenda and no fear.

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