The Megyn Kelly Show - Rise of Alternative Media as Corporate Press Implodes, with Glenn Greenwald, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski, and Entrepreneur Omeed Malik

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Megyn Kelly is joined by Glenn Greenwald, host of Rumble's "System Update,” to discuss Donald Trump ordered to pay $83 million more to E. Jean Carroll over an alleged sexual assault and defamation, the lack of evidence against Trump, bias in the media and in our judicial system, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow's past softball interview with Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll, how the corporate press is all “partnering” with Carroll against Donald Trump, why there's an erosion in trust in the legacy media when there are clear political motives, the difference the ways many corporate media journalists have become political activists, the failure of journalists to separate facts from their own opinions, Karine Jean-Pierre's embarrassing answer about the U.S. troops killed overseas, Moderna targeting journalists like Megyn, and more. Then Chris Pavlovski, founder and CEO of Rumble, to discuss how Rumble became a leader in allowing free speech and free expression, the ways other tech platforms censor and suppress content, Rumble choosing to fight France and Brazil after the country's tried to get content suppressed, censorship under the guise of "misinformation" and "disinformation," the effort to get Russell Brand de-platformed after recent allegations, and more. Then Omeed Malik, founder and president of 1789 Capital, joins to discuss how major companies like Amazon and Google are suppressing free speech, the need for conservative alternatives and spending money with companies that share your values, why Malik started “financing freedom” after years as a NYC Democrat, Big Tech colluding to shut down Parler, Saturday Night Live not knowing that “de-banking” is a real thing, how this “joke” proves they're living in a liberal bubble, and more.

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday. Former President Trump has been ordered to pay a gigantic amount to E. Jean Carroll, the woman accusing him of having sexually assaulted her 30 years ago. Can't quite be sure on when or even the year, but a jury found in her favor. And now the only thing at issue in this trial was the amount of damages. And it's a whopper, a whopper. Now she's spiking the ball on a softball media tour where she's getting approximately zero tough questions. We'll play

you some of that. While our struggling White House press secretary has another embarrassing moment, this time related to fallen troops. And we get new information today about Moderna targeting journalists who dare to report the truth about vaccine problems, including yours truly. Just a short time ago, the corporate press had a monopoly on the truth, and you wouldn't even hear about some of these stories. They were able to suppress and spin stories that didn't go along with the official corporate narratives beloved by big money and big Democrats who control the media. But now, thanks to the rise of alternative media platforms, you can get the truth. You can hear debates on important issues. You can get various points of

view and make up your own mind. And today we have guests at the forefront of this push, leading the charge for free speech. We begin with one of the most fearless journalists working today who has moved over to Rumble and Locals to continue his important work. Our friend Glenn Greenwald, host of System Update, is here with me. Glenn, welcome back. Great to have you. Great to be here, Megan. Always good to see you. Thanks for asking. My pleasure. Okay, so let's just start with the E. Jean Carroll verdict, $83.3 million. Most of it impunitive damages against Donald Trump. The sole question was how much he owed her for allegedly defaming her by saying she was a liar on this claim that he sexually assaulted her 30 years ago.

So the judge did not allow Trump to even take the stand to deny the sexual assault in this trial because a jury had already found that he had sexually assaulted her. And as a result, this jury, not tempered at all by the fact that they were getting to punish him by saying, hey, you did it, decided to just throw the hardball punch with just a damages number. And now she's on, as I say, a softball media tour where she is just getting arms thrown around the neck and hugged by Rachel Maddow tonight, by CNN, by George Stephanopoulos. I'll show you some of that in a minute. But first, what do you make as a lawyer of this damages award? Yeah, you know, I sometimes forget that I worked as a lawyer and I always forget that you

did as well, which I think is a favorite of both of us. But I know from that experience that this is an extraordinarily severe penalty, especially given even the allegations in the case. I mean, this is not some case alleging some enduring sexual assault or some kind of a power exchange or something brutal or violent. I mean, I don't want to downplay that the jury found that it actually happened, although it does seem extremely bizarre to be able to dredge up a case like this from decades ago. And that's one of the reasons why they will relay the statute of limitations when it came to allegations like this. But at the same time, we are clearly seeing the weaponization of the judicial system against

people who have the wrong political ideology. We saw in the case of Alex Jones with this, you know, now almost close to multi-billion dollar verdict. We're seeing it, you know, you follow every one of these cases with Donald Trump. The judges are just so unabashedly anti-Trump in a way that they barely try and disguise it. It seems very clear to me that overall there is this attempt to destroy political enemies. And one of those weapons is the judicial system. The case that E. Jean Carroll brought against Trump was, I mean, it had a ton of holes in it. As I said, she couldn't even remember when it happened. She didn't have a police report.

She didn't have a medical report. She had nothing other than two friends who said, yeah, she mentioned it at the time. These are friends of hers. And even their memories being tested now, 30 years after the fact, Trump or any man accused like this, if it had happened a week, a year later within the criminal statute

of limitations, they'd have the chance to defend themselves. They'd be able to go back and look at their date book and say, I wasn't even in Bergdorf, Goodman, when you allege I threw you into a dressing room and committed a near public sexual assault. 30 years after the fact, good luck. What man, especially as busy as Donald Trump, is gonna be able to defend against this? However, Trump didn't bother to try to defend at all. And that was a mistake. He didn't even show up at the trial

that asked whether he should be found liable. And not surprisingly, the jury went against him. So I think he was like kind of not caring. Like they're not going to believe me. The jury's going to hate me. It's New York City. And he didn't do much to defend. But then she filed this request for defamation damages.

And the judge didn't let him relitigate the sexual assault at all. It was just how much does E. Jean get paid? And her lawyer told the jury, he's super rich. You've got to punish him. You've got to make it big in order for him to feel it so he can stop saying that she's a liar. You know, the thing about this has been bothering me all along, Glenn, is he does think she's a liar. You know, maybe. Maybe he knows she's telling the truth and he's falsely saying she's a liar. Or maybe he just denies the charges and says she's a liar. If you get accused of sexually assaulting somebody and you didn't do it,

they're basically saying all you can say is I deny the charges. It is not true. I did not sexually assault anyone. But if you say she's a liar, you can get sued like this. If a jury finds it's 51% more likely than not that you committed the assault. I mean, that's the position Trump was placed in here. This is why I just refuse to believe that there's not a political and ideological component, not just a component, but arguably the driving factor, because that's what I was alluding to earlier, I mean, it is almost unimaginable in my experience as a lawyer, you know, doing civil litigation, to imagine a case like this producing consequences of this kind in terms of the punitive damages, in terms of the way that it's been

treated. I think Trump's mentality from the start was exactly what you said, which is, I don't even know this woman. You know, it was obviously something that if it had happened would be very important to her, but I think it would was obviously something that if it had happened would be very important to her. But I think it would also be something that he would be aware of, too. But the fact that he took this approach, I think, was understandable, given that the kind of allegation it was is the exact kind you want to avoid in court systems. That's the reason we have statutes of limitation, because memories fade, they get distorted,

evidence becomes unavailable. And yet they've really purposely removed statute of limitations barriers in the case of sexual assault for reasons that sometimes might even be commendable in terms of the motive. But in terms of the justice system, it makes it extremely difficult to get to the truth. And so to end up with a kind of double verdict, one where he's being punished both for having done it and then also for denying it and have it be this amount is something that is extraordinary. It's very much similar to the way he, you know, the judge in the Washington case, the case brought by Jack Smith, tried to impose a gag order on him. There's clearly a political motive to these cases. They're trying to say that he led some sort of insurrection or violated the law in response to the 2020 election. It's obviously intended to impact the presidential race. They're all but admitting they want this

case to come to trial before the election happens. And then at the same time, this judge says, you're not allowed to discuss it publicly. You're not allowed to deny it. It just it seems so clear that this is a weapon that of the judicial system. And that is what is so concerning. The judicial system is very powerful. It can do all sorts of things to you. It can take your money away. It can put you in a cage. It can even kill you. It's vital that it not be contaminated with political motives. And I think in this case and so many others like it that we've seen, that's exactly what's happening. That's the thing. So E. Jean Carroll wrote this book in 2019 claiming this happened to her. She said she was inspired by the Me Too movement to finally tell her story. Trump was the sitting president at the time, and he said, the woman's a whack job.

This never happened. That was the first alleged case of defamation. Then he continued saying that after he left office and these incidents became the basis for her defamation claim, saying, you know, you said more than I deny it. You called me a liar. You call me a whack job. Just put yourself the media's already run to say it's true because a jury, a civil jury found it 51 percent more likely than not that he did it. Based on that, 51 percent, they've declared him a sexual pervert, basically. And they want us all to go along with it. They want us all to say it's horrible how Trump keeps dismissing this woman, as opposed to, let's just entertain for a minute the possibility that Trump is the truth teller here, that Trump actually has no memory of this person and certainly didn't sexually assault her, and that she really is some sort of a kook who decided to make up a story about him

to get her name in the headlines, to potentially get money from a deep-pocketed guy. The media has zero appetite for entertaining that possibility, and therefore they take umbrage at his, she's a whack job. What's he supposed to say if somebody came out against you, Glenn, from when, you know, 20 years ago when you were 20, right? You'd be like, this person's a nutcase. I don't know them. And so that's really what Trump has been saying. And for that now, he's going to have to pay almost a hundred million million maybe. Meanwhile, I'll just give you a flavor on this. She can go out all over the media and talk about him like this. Listen to what she said. This is just the latest taste. I could give you a lot of these. This hadn't seen him since he assaulted me in the dressing

room. And preparing to see him was terrifying. I hadn't slept. I hadn't eaten. I couldn't think. I lost my language when she was trying to prepare me to go to do testimony in front of Donald Trump. And there he was. And he was nothing. He was just no power. He had he was zero. He's an emperor without clothes. It's like looking at nothing. It was like nothing. If he starts talking about her that way, she's going to slap him with another defamation suit, Glenn.

No, if he continues, for sure. And not only will she slap him with another defamation suit, but these courts will be very receptive to it. You know, I don't know about you, Megan, but, you know, when I went to law school and I embarked on my legal career, I had this very idealistic image of what the law was like. You know, I didn't I don't think I was super naive, but I basically thought that the legal system was this well-constructed process for getting to the truth that judges took seriously their obligation to be neutral. And one of the things that, I guess, disillusioned me about the work more than anything was to see how easily judges could kind of tinker with the process to tell things in one direction or another based on whatever motives they had for doing so. And I don't think we can ignore the fact that Donald Trump is probably the single most polarizing figure in the United States. All

of these judges who are part of the federal judiciary or state courts have very strong political opinions. They're people who are politically engaged. If they're in New York, they're overwhelmingly likely to be ideologically opposed to Trump. And as we know, people ideologically opposed to Trump aren't just opposed to him, but they hate him viscerally. So I think what we're seeing in all of these cases, just watching, you know, from a distance, I'm not in the courtroom, but I'm following pretty closely. It's just these gratuitous rulings constantly against him. The way in which these judges are speaking is designed to kind of show that they don't respect Trump, that they don't,

they're not intimidated in any way of a Trump, similar to what she was just sort of saying, that he's powerless to show that he's powerless there. None of it really feels like justice to me. And so to allow her to go around hurling every accusation against him, and then to have him basically constrained because you say like a jury in New York decided 51% more likely that she was telling the truth. And now every time he opens his mouth, he's liable to pay millions more, is just so viscerally unjust. And then you add on top of that the media, which has the same bias, and you're exactly right. Like, I want to thank you, by the way, for how generous you were in your math about when I was 20 years old.

But it would be. I hope anybody should think about that. Like, if you go back and someone just from your distant past emerges with this very sketchy allegation, of course you're going to want to defend yourself publicly. And he's basically barred from doing so. It's perverse. Yeah, he has to if he does so, he has to do so in exactly the forensic terminology defined by E. Jean Carroll and the court.

He can't just say she's a lunatic. This didn't happen or she's going to keep getting tens and tens of millions of dollars against him. So, okay. There are tons of problems with Eugene Carroll's allegations against him, as I outlined a second ago. And just think about it. If somebody said the allegation is that she worked, she was in Bergdorf Goodman. He went into Bergdorf Goodman and she, he was asking her a question about lingerie before she knew it. He had her in a dressing room and was sexually assaulting her. The jury found him liable, again, not a criminal case. The statute has expired on that, of sexual assault, not of rape, and then of defamation. And here we go on the damages. If that had happened to him and she had filed the suit within a timely basis,

he could have pulled surveillance tapes, let's say, at anything. There would have been some record even on the street to see whether Donald Trump was walking into Bergdorf government. None of that was possible for him. Then the reason she was able to bring that case now for sexual assault all these years after the criminal statute had expired is because a Democrat who hates Trump pushed to change the law here in New York State to allow these so-called survivors of these old sexual assaults to bring civil cases long past the date when the statute had expired. There's a real question about whether she did this with Donald Trump in mind in particular. And then you have people like George Conway online celebrating that this was an idea he had

to connect her with this lawyer. And it was Democrat funded by big donor Democrats to make sure that she could bring the case. I mean, all of this has the stench of politics all over it. So now she wins this 83 million. Will it be reversed on appeal? I don't know. Her lawyer says she doesn't think so. She's a smart woman. The lawyer is very smart, says she thinks the punitive damages award is within line if you compare it to the compensatory damages, which I think were 11 million. She said she thinks it's in line with what the Federal Court of Appeals, the Second Circuit, has upheld in the past. And so if that's true, then Trump could be actually looking at paying it in that event. This leads me to the media. You would think the media at some point might ask E. Jean Carroll some tough questions like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Why didn't you? You only had two friends. Why isn't there

a surveillance tape? Why isn't there a contemporaneous witness? Why didn't you write all the stuff like you could you could set it up just to be fair, even if you didn't believe these were good points, just to be fair. Instead, we get this. Here's George Stephanopoulos this morning interviewing her. Has it settled in yet? It's been reported the exchange smiles with the jurors on the way out. Is that true? You said you want to do great things with this $83 million settlement. Give us an idea about that. What was it like being in the courtroom with Donald Trump? What was it like to be with Donald Trump in that courtroom? Did you make eye contact with him?

A little bit of a CNN in the back end there. Really tough, Glenn, really hard hitting. I mean, so predictable. You put together Donald Trump and a woman claiming to be a survivor of sexual assault. And obviously the media is going to fall on the ground and prostrate itself in front of her. You know, I think the broader point here, though, to Megan is, and I think this is something that American elites are really not coming to grips with in a way that I think is quite dangerous, which is it is an extraordinary state of affairs that Donald Trump has been indicted four separate times in felony cases throughout the country on top of civil suits like this. And yet he is still not just winning Republican primaries and is all but the inevitable GOP

frontrunner, but also leading the incumbent president in most polls as well. And how can that possibly be? You know, it used to be the case 20, 30 years ago that if a politician got anywhere near a serious indictment for anything, you know, felonious, that they would be instantly removed from consideration for high office. What we have here is a country in which the vast bulk of the population has lost its trust and faith in all of the leading institutions of power that we have, the judicial system, obviously everybody hates the media, the government, all these institutions, centers of finance that have essentially made a no coalition against Donald Trump, willing to do and say anything over the past seven years and getting increasingly desperate

to prevent him from being in power, to sabotaging him when he is. The fact that we have a country where people just don't trust the justice system, they're willing to send back to the White House somebody accused four times of being a felony. I doubt this case will have the slightest impact on the population. People have an intuitive sense that institutions of authority

are being not just politicized, but corrupted. And that of course begins with the media, but it encompasses so many other institutions. And this case is such a perfect illustration of why. It's so true. Just as a refresher, here's Rachel Maddow back in May of 2023 with E. Jean Carroll again. And by the way, Maddow was billing her interview with E. Jean Carroll, which happens tonight as an exclusive. And as E. Jean Carroll's very first sit down, um, post her, her verdict word, E. Jean Carroll was all over the news. Sorry, Rachel. It didn't work out. I love it. I'm sorry, but I love it. This woman, Rachel Maddow is getting paid $30 million a year for one show a week. And this is the kind of journalism we get during that

one hour of work she does. Watch this from me. E. Jean Carroll and her lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, have proven in a court of law that Trump cannot tell lies with impunity. They have done that for the country. I just want to stand up and give you a standing ovation. Did things go the way that you thought they would? I wasn't doing it for myself. I was doing it for the women in the country. But Robbie, you have sued this former president a lot, and I wonder how that's changed your life. Well, he doesn't like me very much, that's for sure. I'm sorry to put it in these terms, because I feel like I'm a little like casting a movie

about it or something. But you saying that it's a disadvantage that he lies so much. I feel like it's the first time I've heard that in seven years. The ability to lie without shame and without any sort of tell, without any sort of remorse about it whatsoever. And about even the most important things has always seemed like a political superpower to him. You've turned it into the opposite. No self-awareness, the ability to lie with impunity without any tell. It's a superpower. Yes. And you have it, madam. You exercised it for four years while he was in the White House. Rachel Maddow is, I think, probably the, I guess if you want to call her a TV journalist, you can, but let's do that to be generous. Like the TV journalist who probably has the largest record of making and China was the byproduct of Russian disinformation. Everything that she's been doing and saying for

the last seven years, everything about how it was proven that COVID came from natural origins and that only lying conspiracy theorists believe that it came from a lab in Wuhan. There is almost nobody that you can find who has to handle disinformation more flagrantly and aggressively than she. And as you say, there's zero self-reflection. I don't know if you tried to reach out to E. Jean Carroll to ask for an interview, but I seriously doubt that she would be willing to grant interviews to outlets that she knew would be adversarial. And there you see her saying, I want to give you a standing ovation. Clearly, there's a huge amount of political sympathy between Rachel Maddow and E. Jean Carroll, just like there is between all these anchors to whom she's giving interviews.

And that political ideology is the one that we easily recognize as being monomaniacally devoted to destroying Donald Trump. This is a political person engaged in a political project. And the media barely tries anymore at this pretense that their job is to ask hard questions. I don't even think if you ask them, they would say they see their job as that. I think they see their job and would admit it as being this kind of overarching duty to do everything possible to stop Donald Trump from returning to power. And if the media's primary allegiance, primary mission is one that is nakedly political like that. And that's what explains all these interviews. There's no wonder that the country hates the

media, no longer trust it. At least that part of the media. I think it's giving rise to independent media that obviously benefits both you and me, and I think benefits the country. But these people in the media are held in complete contempt. And all the things you're showing explain the reason for that. It's amazing. You know, when I was on NBC, I interviewed three Trump accusers. Like, I really feel like I'm the only one who's done both accusers and the accused. I'm very open minded on these claims. I'm not somebody who's a knee jerk. No, it didn't happen. You know, I'm not a, I'm certainly not a believe all woman person, all women, but I'm not a believe no women person either. And you know what I did? I had one of the women who testified at Trump's first trial,

because not only did they have E. Jean Carroll testify, they brought in two others who claimed that they had been sexually assaulted by Trump to tell the jury, me too, because New York state is allowing that too. That's what happened to Harvey Weinstein. And I had one of them on my show at NBC, the woman who claims he groped her on an airplane. And you know, I asked her, they say that that you were in the first class and that middle section doesn't come up and how could he have gotten across to you? Whatever. You don't have to make it uncomfortable and painful when you've got somebody who's claiming they were sexually assaulted. I get that there needs to be some a ginger approach, but you don't have to be completely derelict in your duties as a journalist. Right. You can ask some tough questions like,

gee, why didn't you go to the police? Gee, you know, whatever. It's just they have no interest in it. And the reason is there's no interest. His name is Donald Trump. They want to get him. And by the way, when I was interviewing those women while I was at NBC, I wasn't some huge fan of Trump. I understood like I was very open minded to the fact that he might have done it. But I had to ask those those tough questions of the women because it's our job. This is the problem, Glenn, is that when when it's Trump, all ethics go out the window. Rachel Maddow doesn't care. George Stephanopoulos doesn't care. CNN doesn't care. And not only that, their organizations don't care because normally NBC or ABC or CBS or ABC morning, there'd be

somebody there to say you must ask some tough questions here in order to be fair to the other side. Zero Zippo Stephanopoulos. Gee, gee, like a schoolgirl. What was it like? What are you planning on doing with the money, all the good things you're going to do with money? And look, we have a counterexample. You know, ordinarily in these cases, we would have to say, like, oh, imagine if a woman were accusing a leading Democrat of this. Imagine how different they would be acting. We don't have to engage in that hypothetical. There was a woman who accused Joe Biden of having engaged in a similar sexual assault. There were actually a string of women alleging that he had

done things to make them uncomfortable in the workplace, but one in particular who alleged that she was the victim of violent assault, Tara Reid. I know you had her on your show, and you interviewed her in the way that you're suggesting that E. Jean Carroll should be interviewed. But the media treated her much, much differently than they're treating E.J. Carroll or any Trump accusers. They talked about her like she was just a psychopath. It was like discourse from 70 years ago from any female sexual assault accuser, you know, and no one in media wanted to take her claim seriously. They did everything to debunk it. And you just look at the contrast. And this is what I mean.

It's, you know, most Americans are not political junkies. They're not spending all their time focused on politics. But the corruption of the media has become so glaring that you don't even need to spend that much time looking at it. People notice these things. They observe these things. And the hatred that the media has earned, I think, is just that very well earned because of this kind of behavior. I mean, we all have political biases. We all are subjective.

But part of the job is supposed to be to be even minded, to confront everybody with hard questions. As you say, you want to be sensitive with electorate survivors and victims, but you still have to ask hard questions, especially if they're putting themselves in the media and there's a political impact in their case. They did it when there was an accuser against Joe Biden. They're doing the opposite when it's someone accusing Donald Trump and that kind of meat says it all. That's exactly right. I mean, I remember speaking to this leads, this woman, NBC saying, you know, there was a man there. There was a British man on board the plane who said he saw nothing improper. There are real questions about whether Trump could have gotten over the armrest to you in the first class cabin.

And with Tara Reid, same thing. I came out of my couch when I didn't even have a show, Glenn. It was like the first thing. Go back and look at my YouTube feed. It was like the launch of my YouTube feed to put her on because nobody was talking to her. It was ridiculous. And I asked her tough questions too. Like, come on, you're saying this happened in a hallway in the Senate building. Nobody saw you. And by the way, you said nice things about him years later. It's not fucking hard. Just grow a pair. Ask a couple of tough questions to do your basic job. They won't.

They're too motivated by the end result. And it's just an abomination. Okay, having said that, it's wonderful now that there are new avenues so that these people don't control the narrative the way they used to. MSNBC doesn't control the narrative. NBC doesn't control the narrative. CNN doesn't control the narrative because you do have alternative media places and thank God for them because we now thankfully get our, our,

our queen Taylor Lorenz to stick up for us when things go wrong in the digital lane. The giant of American journalism. She's very upset about the layoffs at mainstream outlets like WAPO, LA Times, and so on, but also what's happening in the digital lane. and given her long and historic and important journalism career, she's out there trying to sort of be everyone's spokesperson on how important journalists are. I don't know. You tell me, Glenn, whether we need a new spokesperson. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I've looked far and wide to find accomplishments in Taylor Lawrence's journalistic career that justify this perception of hers that he's floating in to advise all of us about how to save journalism and the media.

And it's very hard pressed to find anything that would warrant this kind of lofty idea that she has of herself. But the diagnosis she made is actually correct. What she's essentially saying is the digital media, the digital liberal media in which I tailor ends emerged and grew up in has been basically completely destroyed. Like there's really no more BuzzFeed. There's no more vice. There's kind of like the Huffington Post, but not really. All of these digital outlets are failing. And at the same time, even the larger media outlets that have the same ideology as them,

especially in the era of Trump, are failing as well. You basically have two or three major media outlets, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and a couple others. Obviously, Fox still is doing okay in the ratings, but you have a couple of big media outlets that are still thriving and everybody else is failing. And there's some macroeconomic factors or some influence of big tech. The reality is, though, and the strength of independent media proves this, is that if you offer somebody things that they are interested in hearing, if you are willing to tell the truth to people, even if they don't always agree with you. If you're willing to find different ways of looking at things that the major mainstream media outlets don't permit, you will find an audience, really often a large audience. I mean, probably the single most influential media figure in the country is Joe Rogan. And the thing that characterizes him more

than anything is it's very hard to pin him to a political party or to a political ideology. He just kind of found a gigantic audience in a way that these major media corporations could only dream of. And there's been this big independent media that has arisen that's very similar. You're obviously a part of it. I'm obviously a part of it. And there is no self-reflection on the part of the Taylorenses of the world and all these other people losing their jobs, which I don't necessarily celebrate. I try not to take pleasure in the suffering of others, but I do take pleasure when harmful, toxic, destructive industries lose influence and lose power. And there's no attempt on the part of any of these people to ask, why is it that people don't trust us? What have we done that have caused people to turn away from us to the point where our work is irrelevant, can't be monetized, there's no way

to even sustain it. And they blame everybody else. And the last thing that they ever do is look in the mirror. Here she is, we played a soundbite of her last week, she was upset about the media layoffs, which you know, it's a meritocracy, do better, do better journalism, and the companies will do better. I mean, I can only speak for my own show, my own media company, but we're thriving. We're adding people. We're hiring right now because there's a market for actual facts, like true journalism. Here she is on Friday, doubling down on her criticisms and trying to defend her new profession. That doesn't mean that all journalism is inherently good. A huge part of the resentment a lot of people are feeling towards the press these days is due to the harm corporate media

has caused various communities. The ways that many reporters stoke outrage, feed extremist ideology, and use their platforms irresponsibly is reprehensible. Local and national media have inflicted enormous harm over the years on black people, trans people, and other marginalized groups. I would love to see the rise of a robust worker-owned news journalism landscape. You see, that's the problem, Glenn. That's the reason we're having layoffs and the MSM is cratering because they've been stoking outrage, feeding extremist ideologies and using their platforms irresponsibly and reprehensibly and inflicting harms on black people, trans people and other marginalized groups. That's that's the problem. Right. That's the that's the diagnosis that she gave for why media is feeling that they're insufficiently left wing, that they're insufficiently woke on culture war issues. I mean, how completely delusional and blind do you have to be to think that's the reason

that media is failing? In fact, all of these outlets that she began that video by naming, which was part of the milieu in which she emerged, you know, are all left-wing, left-liberal outlets, particularly on culture war issues. You know, everything was America is structurally racist with George Floyd. Everything was the Me Too movement. Everything is LGBT heavy. I mean, you can't get away from it. And I think I actually, I think the main reason that media outlets fail, as you say, it is a meritocracy. They're just boring because if you are ideologically banal and predictable, and if you don't allow any vibrancy

and debate and discussion, and if everybody is doing to the same script, you can get that from the New York Times. No one needs these other outlets. And that's what they all became. The other reason is they lost the trust of people because they were willing to lie. But a major reason is because they became so intensely focused on these kinds of issues, harm to black people, harm to LGBT people and the trans community, that all these other issues that actually people care most about in their confronting powerful institutions and exposing the secrets of like the rich and the powerful and government institutions not you know just babbling on forever about the culture war and so many of them decided that that's where their nobility lay and people just that is not what determines the happiness

of people's lives that is not their priority it's's so true. It makes me laugh. I remember when Jim McGreevy went down, the governor of New Jersey, and they did some parody of him, like jumping into the air going, I'm gay, I'm gay. And it was it was perfect. It was a perfect clip because this is how the mainstream sees LGBTQ people or black people or women. Like we're all about, I have a vagina, a vagina. And they cover the news accordingly. Here, here are just the past couple of articles, Taylor Lorenz. I should have told this to the audience because no one knows who she is, but she's a ridiculous reporter for the Washington Post. She was at the New York times and she made a name for herself targeting 17-year-old boys

who wanted to remain anonymous on the internet, but she wouldn't have it. Here's one. Substack wanted to be neutral. Its tolerance of Nazis proved divisive. Next, if you didn't share a recap video, did 2023 even happen? Next, how a toilet themed youtube series became the biggest thing online and then there's anti-semitism was rising online then elon musk's ex supercharged it so we can see what taylor lorenz cares about i saw your tweet your tweets glenn um i don't know if there were tweets actually but you were saying that uh her biggest story actually, but you were saying that her biggest story. Yeah, it was on your show. Her biggest story was uncovering the private citizen who ran the Libs of TikTok account, who is amazing. And the second biggest story you said is that one time she was in the app Clubhouse and she heard someone use the word retarded.

Great job. Not only did she run to Twitter to tell them, but she misattributed it. She claimed it was Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley financier who had said that, and it wasn't him. So on top of this childish act of tattling to the teacher about somebody using a bad word, which she thinks is journalism, she even got the whole story wrong. I mean, I think that is really the point. It's a little bit elusive to understand, but, you know, I think people turn to media and to journalism in order to tell them the things they need to understand about the world around them that's most affecting their lives, like their cost of living and their security and,

you know, all the things that everyone thinks about. And, you know, if you're Black, if you're LGBTQ, if you're a woman, those are all the things that everyone thinks about. And, you know, if you're black, if you're LGBTQ, if you're a woman, those are all the things you think about too. You don't wake up every day thinking about like, oh, a new day as an LGBTQ person. Like you think about all the things that everybody else thinks about. And so this demand constantly that there be this endless amount of like catering with this language that nobody uses i mean it's so obviously a reason why people have turned away from journalism they don't confront anyone in power they kind of serve power they dig up the identity of private citizens i mean

like the daily beast actually spent resources to find out who it was who posted some meme of nancy pelosi that she had that apparently had enraged her. And they like dragged out this person who was just a private citizen and patted themselves on the back. It's just, it's, it's not even journalism like in terms of the ethos, as I understand it. And that's why I say it deserves to fail. And it is failing, you know, in a very serious way. Like it's unraveling. These institutions are, I mean, sports illustrated, you know,

a mainstay of American culture for decades basically doesn't exist any longer. And you go one by one and you're seeing the same thing. And like I said, you know, if all of a sudden I started losing my audience and nobody cared anymore about what I was saying or what I was doing, of course, the first thing I would do is look at myself and say, like, what am I doing wrong? But they have a long list of everybody else that they blame. And I mean, I'm telling you, go look for it. Anytime they're lamenting the collapse of media,

they will never, ever, ever ask, what is it that we have done to contribute to our own failures? No, never. Absolutely. That's absolutely right. There was an amazing, let me see if I can find it, but an amazing piece. It was by Sebastian Younger. It's posted on National Review today. It's leading National Review, and it was so powerful, and it was so good. And he was talking about, you know, the real, the true call of a journalist and what it actually means and holding the powerful to account, just exactly as you've always done, Glenn, irrespective of party. I mean, you left your own media organization that you founded

because they had lost the mission to, you know, what was afflict the powerful and however the saying goes. So Sebastian Younger, people may know him from, um, authoring the perfect storm, which became a very popular movie, but he's, he's a, he's a war correspondent. He's a, he's a journalist and he covered the war in Afghanistan for 10 years, among other things. Um, and he wrote this, I love this. Love, love, love this. A journalist is a person who is willing to destroy his own opinions with facts. A journalist is a person who is willing to report the truth regardless of consequences to herself or others. A journalist is a person who is focused on reality rather than outcome. I love that. And I'm not just saying that because he called me out in this piece by name favorably. I appreciated it. But a journalist is a person who is willing to destroy his own opinions with facts. There it is right there, Glenn. We've gotten so far afield of that in the mainstream. Yeah, you know, I remember, you know, not to be super complimentary, but like, I think it was 2013 or 14 or something, when I was very much considered

to be on the left, you were at Fox, and people assumed you were on the right. I remember like, Politico did a profile of you or some outlet like that. And they talked to me about it, because I had recently seen an interview that you had conducted with a Republican conservative senator that was incredibly adversarial. And I said something like, you would never ever see a Democratic Party politician interviewed this way on MSNBC or CNN. And if you go and look at the earliest writings that I would publish about Donald Trump's candidacy in 2015 and 2016, it was extremely negative. But in 2016, in mid-2016, when this narrative emerged of Russiagate, and for me, it was like a rejuvenation of McCarthyite, you know, scripts from the CIA, like, what is Donald Trump and Moscow? What is this allegiance,

this secret loyalty that Trump has to the Kremlin? You know, I was repulsed by it in part because it did resonate for me, this kind of 1950s attack on people's loyalties based on nothing, but also just as a journalist, evident from an evidentiary perspective, there was never any substantiation to these allegations that Trump had collaborated with or conspired with the Kremlin in the hacking of the DNC email and John Podesta's email, which was the central conspiracy that led to everything, let alone things like the Steele dossier. And it just offended me journalistically, you know, that I would watch these leaks every day from the CIA and the FBI be trumpeted by the New York Times and the Washington Post, for which they showered themselves with Pulitzers, even though there was so clearly never any evidence to it.

And so it just became, you know, an obsession of mine to say that every day. And of course, the perception emerged, well, I must love Donald Trump. And think about what that perception says, that journalists can't, you know, go against a certain narrative or question the evidentiary basis for it unless they somehow secretly love the party or the candidate that they're questioning helps. And for me, that was never the case. I was never a fan of Trump, to put that mildly. But at the same time, Russiagate, to me, was so journalistically offensive. And if you can't do that as a journalist, if you can't question a narrative that might be politically helpful to you or reject one, or if you aren't willing to affirm a narrative that might be politically harmful to you, there's no point in calling yourself a journalist. You're just a political

operative or an activist. That's the difference. Yeah, that's exactly right. And there's there's there's just no interest whatsoever to hold the powerful to account anymore if it's their party. It's only Donald Trump that the journalists will be very, very quick to unfairly hold him to account for everything. But when it's their party, it's a different story. And it really like when we have possibility of wars breaking out, it's more important now than ever, now than ever to to not let party dictate your coverage, right, to not let your own political affiliations and desires prevent good coverage and objective coverage. This is one of the things Sebastian Younger was writing about in this piece, When Journalism Dies, on National

Review. He was saying, when I was out there covering the Afghanistan war, he writes, my belief in the mission was complete. Like he was completely on our side. He thought it was just, and so on. He was outraged after 9-11. He says, my belief in the mission, however, did not prevent me from calling out American missteps and failures. I was a journalist after all, not a Pentagon press spokesperson. And he goes on from this, well worth everyone's time to give it a read. But it reminds me of today. Today we have terrible news out of the Mideast, out of Jordan, where three U.S. service members, members of the army, were killed. New York Times says at least 34 others injured. Some have said it's more like 25 injured. It's still undetermined.

Killed after a drone attack carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq was unleashed. Iran is denying that it had anything to do with it, but the hit happened near the outpost living quarters and three of our guys are dead. All right. So these are three army members who are dead today and some number of dozens injured. goes on the Today Show to talk about it. I mean, this is the number one. If you are the White House, this is number one. So she goes on MSNBC. She knows this question is going to be coming. My God. And listen to her.

What I will say, our deepest, obviously our deepest condolences go out and our heartfelt condolences go out to the families who lost three brave, three brave, three brave, three folks who are who are military folks who are brave, who are always fighting, who are fighting on behalf of this administration, of the American people, obviously, more so, more importantly. She doesn't she doesn't know what she's saying three folks three folks it's disrespectful

the lack of preparation is disrespectful and she clearly doesn't understand the news that she's been appointed to speak about she's the white house spokesperson and she is not a bright person i mean megan her job is to communicate, right? So you have some very smart people who might not be verbally articulate. We all have our strengths, you know? So that's understandable. You can be smart, but not very good at expressing yourself verbally. But her job, that's her only job is to communicate on behalf of the White House to the public. And she is incapable of forming a sentence.

That was the easiest sentence. What she was trying to say was these are three brave patriots who have lost their lives. Her brain broke, like, in the middle. And she couldn't reconstruct the sentence by just figuring out how to call them brave and patriotic at the same time. She worked her way around this with the word folks that's like a very just like informal leftist way of calling people to avoid gendering them and i don't i know what you can make too big of a deal out of like one clip but this is something we've seen over and over with her i i'm always amazed you know if you ask her any question i don't mean like an obscure question but like the two or top three topics of the news each day he cannot answer until she like flips that book and then finds like exactly

the phraseology that she's supposed to read you know i mean jen saki was somebody who was willing to lie all the time but she was good at her job in the sense that like i thought she was like an effective spokesperson korean john pair just can't speak without a script in front of her even on the issues that you know that she knows they're going to she's going to be asked about and it's embarrassing especially when it is an issue as grave and serious as what the united states is going to do now yes in retaliating because of these three dead soldiers there's a lot of important questions here about our involvement in the Middle East, about why we're there, about how much we can let Iran get away with this, whether we should hold the person responsible, whether we should attack

targets of theirs outside Iran or inside of Iran. These are all serious, serious questions. And to have somebody who can't form a complete sentence speaking on behalf of the White House, and by the way, her boss can't either, is just not something that inspires a lot of confidence. And neither can her boss's number two. Lastly, on the subject of misinformation and platforms silencing people, it comes out that thanks to Lee very, very upset, among other things, about the fact that I said on this show that after I had gotten my third COVID shot, my booster, which you needed in order to operate in New York to do anything, I developed a positive on an autoimmune test that my general practitioner gave me. And then I had to go to a rheumatologist and all this stuff. I reveal it on the show.

And I got targeted by Moderna, who was very worried that this would add to the growing concern around autoimmune disorders following COVID-19 vaccinations. That's your problem. Yes, it should add to that, Moderna. And apparently they attached internally a National Institutes of Health report highlighting a link between the COVID vaccines

and autoimmune issues. So they're admitting internally that it's a problem, but they're upset that I am talking about it and Alex Berenson and Russell Brand and Michael Schellenberger and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya are talking about it, Glenn, because they don't want it discussed. And the mainstream media outlets were only too happy to comply.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, Lee Fong is, I think, one of the best journalists in the country. He's a friend of mine, but he's my former colleague at The Intercept. That's somebody I worked hard to recruit there because he does exactly the kind of journalism that we were just saying earlier, way too much the press doesn't do. And of course, he ended up having to leave the intercept. And now he writes a sub stack, which is generally what happens to people who want to do real journalism and find they can't. And this is a perfect example of the kind of story that people

ought to know, which is that you have these gigantic corporations, extreme amounts of financial power. They had, in this case, a serious interest in constraining and restricting the range of debate that could be expressed. And they succeeded for a long time. They had Dr. Fauci pressuring a lot of the world's immunologists to change their minds in what they originally said, that this was almost certainly a lab leak and got them to sign on to a letter in The Lancet saying this is a crazy conspiracy theory and anyone who suggests it should be banished. And then obviously questions about the vaccine, its efficacy and its safety were something that was all but banished from mainstream media. People got banned from YouTube, from Facebook

for saying it. And this is evidence that the whole time Moderna was playing a huge role in surveilling people questioning their product. Without caring whether there was truth to it, they just didn't like it. Well, that's that's what's led in part to the power and strength of outlets like ours. Glenn, all the best. We'll be right back with the CEO of Rumble. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show. The battle for free speech in America

is increasingly taking place online and on social media. Until recently, a small handful of powerful tech giants had complete control over what you could say online. And if you said the wrong thing, they might very well shut you up. Hi, Parler. Remember them? Apparently they're coming back,

but they got completely screwed by Amazon and others because they were alleged to have been a hotbed for the planning of J6. Forget Facebook. Facebook got a pass, even though most of it took place over there because it's owned by Mark Zuckerberg, who got Joe Biden elected. next guest, this is all starting to change. Chris Pavlosky is the founder and CEO of Rumble, where you can watch the Megyn Kelly show at rumble.com slash Megyn Kelly every weekday. Chris, so great to have you. How are you? Megyn, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be on with you. No, the pleasure is all mine. So you guys are growing by leaps and bounds over at Rumble. And I mean, it's like what I read was in 2020, the revenue was like a million. And by a couple of years later, it was already at 20 million. And now you've gone public and you're worth billions of dollars. So it's going very well for you.

Why is that? Yeah, it's been an unbelievable ride. So I'll kind of step back and give you a little history. I started Rumble in 2013, late 2013. But the genesis of how it all happened was about over a decade ago, like 2010, 2011. I started to notice that the incumbent tech platforms, think YouTube, in particular YouTube, they were starting to prioritize big influencers, corporations, big brands, and really started to deprioritize the small creator, our friends, families, aunts, uncles. So we stepped in in 2013 to really try to help that small creator, bring them the tools of distribution and monetization that they were struggling to get on the large tech platforms. And that's kind of

the premise of how Rumble started in 2013. Fast forward to 2020. And it was the late summer, summer of 2020, when I got a phone call. I'm Canadian, by the way. So getting a phone call from the, I think at the time, the chairman of the House Intel Committee of the United States Congress, Congressman Devin Nunes calls me. I was like, oh, wow, am I under some kind of investigation? But he had a really simple question though. And his question was, if I bring my podcast and my content to Rumble and Whereas on YouTube, after being on for over four years and having road signs in his congressional district, promoting his podcast, only had 10,000 subscribers. So once people saw that,

the floodgates completely opened up. We had people like Dan Bongino join the platform. And by early 2021, I would say Rumble became like one of the leaders in the video space, especially in the conservative sphere. So yeah, in the first few years, you had just over 1 million users as of July 2020. Less than a year later, in early 2021, Rumble had grown to over 30 million users. And it's far higher than that now with all the big names that you guys have gotten. The big difference between you guys and YouTube is censorship and putting your thumb on the scale when a conservative says something that doesn't flow with the mainstream

narrative. You and I have talked before. This isn't about promoting conservatives. It's about promoting free speech. have a congressman create an account on Rumble and be able to get a significantly bigger yield during an election year prior to a general election, that's something very shocking. It's something that shouldn't happen, but it did happen and it is happening. And Rumble grew on the backs of basically treating everybody fairly, whether you're conservative or liberal or whatever you may be, it doesn't really matter to us. The point is that we weren't tipping the scales and preferencing content unlike the other platforms. How were they doing it?

That's up in the air. Some were getting banned. Some were getting shadow banned. The game that they can play can be very deep and can be very difficult to see. But at the end of the day, we stood on the grounds of allowing people to, you know, speak on the platform and not tilting the scale one way, shape or another for our own political beliefs. And that's the foundation of this business now. And it's something that has continually continuously been one of the hallmarks of Rumble.

Thank God for Rumble, because it's happening on platform after platform. When Elon Musk did not own Twitter, when it was Twitter and not X, they were suppressing all kinds of discussions. You just weren't allowed to say certain things, whether it was about the COVID vaccines or the trans insanity. Now that's changed thanks to him. And before Rumble came along, YouTube was the only real game in town. And they have all sorts of wacky ways of punishing you on YouTube. You can be demonetized, like we saw happen to Steven Crowder and I think Dan Bongino too. Or you can just have a video suppressed where it doesn't get as much of a circulation because it's not one of their favorite topics. They just don't really like you talking about something. Or they can add their little YouTube warning on your COVID speech,

even if what you're saying is 100% true. Somebody you've never seen who probably doesn't know Jack gets to decide whether you get the warning. Or I'll give you another example, and there's plenty of them. We actually have been fortunate because we are a journalistic operation and we stick to hard facts. I give my opinions too, but we stick to hard facts. And the only time we've actually been demonetized is when we interviewed President Trump, former President Donald Trump, and we had a discussion about the transgender thing. And he said, we use the term mutilation. And YouTube didn't like that. And so the former president of the United States wasn't allowed to say that we were going to be penalized for that. And a discussion about, of course, the 26, the 2020 election, which you're just not allowed to

say anything about that unless you talk about it the way YouTube wants you to. You guys just don't operate like that on Rumble. Why? Well, I actually think being authentic creates the best type of content. It's something that you don't really see on the internet anymore, the authenticity in content, because there are platforms like YouTube that are dictating what you can and cannot say and what people can and cannot, you know, listen to or watch. Um, Rumble is the complete opposite. Uh, I think the authenticity and content is what, uh, is what's really important. And as a viewer and as, you know, even myself, like I want to watch authentic content,

I don't want to watch someone that is like, you know, oh, I can't say this. Oh, I can't say that. I want to watch something that where I'm listening that person, I know they're being honest, and they're truthful. And I know they're independent, and someone's not, you know, manipulating what they say. I think that's, that's, that's the cornerstone to great content. And I don't think any platform should be influencing content. And if they are, everyone should know. And everyone should know what they're listening to because they're not getting the true authenticity of the character behind the screen. So for us, obviously, it's a pillar of ours to stand for free expression, to not influence

and to not preference. And that's something that we will continue to stand for free expression, to not influence and to not preference. And that's something that we will continue to stand for. I think that in the test of time, we've been the one that's been doing it the longest. I see us as being the tip of the spear. We've gone as far as shutting off countries like Brazil and shutting off countries like France when they came to us to try to turn content off on Rumble, not based on like illegal content or any content that violates our terms of service. But because they did not like the creator on the platform that that was on our platform, it didn't violate any of our terms of services. They just said, hey, we want this creator removed. We don't want to tell you why. France wanted you. You mentioned France. They wanted you to take off Russia today, RT,

right, from your from Rumble as a punishment to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. You know what? There may be people in America who find that interesting content. Maybe they're persuaded by it. Maybe they just want to see what Russia is saying about it. Maybe they view it as propaganda and it's interesting. Well, I don't know what their reasons are. Who cares? France comes to rumble to say, take that channel off of rumble. And you said, I'll do you one better. I'll take you off of rumble, France. You're done. Our relationship with you is done. That's exactly what happened. And a very similar thing happened in Brazil as well. It was, you know, creators that were opposing the current Supreme Court, I believe. And they asked to remove and we said, basically, no. And we left Brazil as well. So like, I think like when it comes to fighting for free expression, Rumble is the tip of the spear. We're the only company that I know of at our scale, that's actually turning off

countries and following us law rather than, you know, following, let's say another jurisdictions law. Like we're not a company that operates in China. We're not going to fall Chinese, Chinese law. Um, then the same thing goes for France and Brazil. And if they want to be in the same bucket as China, that's their prerogative. But Rumble is going to stand strong and we're going to stand really strong when it comes to our values. And I enjoy being the tip of the spear. It's something that I take a lot of pride in.

And hopefully more countries don't follow that. But definitely, if they do, they all know how we'll react. Yeah, no, I applaud your strength. I'm thinking about just the two issues that I just touched on, COVID and the trans insanity that's sweeping the nation. On both of those issues on YouTube, you weren't for a time allowed to say that the vaccines can cause heart damage, myocarditis, especially in young men. And we actually had people dying as a result of this. And you weren't allowed to discuss it on YouTube. It was deemed because of interference from Moderna and Pfizer along the lines of what I just said.

It's one thing to say, oh, I along the lines of what I just said. It's one thing to say, oh, I don't like what Megyn Kelly said. It's quite another to say, I object to what Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford Medical is saying. That's somebody who knows very well what he's talking about. So that's the vaccine example. And on the trans stuff, why can't I say on YouTube that cutting off genitals of minor children is a mutilation and it cannot be done consensually because they are too young to consent? That is true. And if you keep stopping me from saying that, more children are going to get hurt because you're stifling an important discussion that puts information out there to people to make up their own minds. On Rumble,

you can say all of that. You always could say all of that. And the business model is rewarding you for these decisions. I mean, I suppose where you sit, it's not such a bad thing that YouTube has these policies. Yeah. Megan, you touched on something that's I think so key. And that's like when you when you're mentioning the COVID stuff, we were demonized as like the worst place on the Internet because people were talking about their experiences with the vaccine and saying things that at the time people thought were horrible to say. And you're not to be saying these things. Rumble was like the only place, one of the only places, at least with the scale that we had, the biggest place where people were actually having conversations about these things.

And looking back now, you know, I see that as like one of the greatest achievements because of all the issues that we are seeing coming up with that. And, you know, the fact that we held the line in that, in that period of time, it ultimately could have saved a lot of people and helped a lot of people in a lot of different ways. Like you can't shut off conversation with people that are, that want to, you can't shut off anybody from expressing themselves. And the fact that we were doing that is like, is like the worst thing. It's like, you don't have freedom and you don't have democracy without like freedom of speech. You don't have that ability. You're not going to have the civil rights movements without freedom of speech. You're not going to have women's rights movements without freedom of speech. You need the ability to speak. And anybody that upholds that at any point in time

when it's hardest to uphold it, I think does a great service. And during COVID, I think that was like a major service that Rumble did is allowing people and allowing doctors to speak on the platform and be able to give their side of the story. And it looks like a lot of people that were speaking on the other side of the story had a lot of good things to say. And people should have been listening a lot earlier. Right. Let it play out. It won't always work out that way. On some, you'll be wrong. Not you, but, you know, the people you're allowing to speak who are being silenced elsewhere. But you've got a pretty good track record. These people who have been silenced time and time again have got a pretty good track record of raising some good points.

Ukraine's another example. But we're living in a whole new world. And I do wonder whether you were afraid at all, because like on the COVID thing, the crackdown was pretty massive. And the pressure, for lack of a better term, peer pressure to go along was enormous. They, the narrative from everyone else was you're costing lives. You're endangering people by allowing this dangerous misinformation to be peddled. So if you're in the place where everyone's telling you that, and you as a non-doctor don't know what the truth is, you're hearing the one side, you're hearing the other. Is there, were you worried at all? You know, like, what if I, what if we are doing, how do you make those decisions? Yeah, it's, uh, it actually, it was Glenn Greenwald when he came to the platform, uh,

the Washington Post wrote an article about him joining the platform. And in that article, you know, they were accusing rumumble creators of all this misinformation, disinformation around COVID. And in particular, the thing they called out was that the COVID vaccine wasn't durable. And because that's what creators on the on the Rumble platform were saying. And looking, you know, back at that fact, obviously, you have to take more than one, more than two. The durability of the vaccine clearly wasn't exactly durable. But it's funny because at the time, it was looked on and perceived as like, we're doing so wrong by allowing people to say that. People should say it's durable.

And then now when you look back, obviously, the durability of the vaccine, is not really there. Um, yeah, it was, it was scary. It was tough. It was like, it really hardened me though, going through those moments, uh, makes it a lot easier to go through them now today than, than ever. Um, so it, it was scary at the time. Um, and it was tough, but, uh, you know, we have, we have an incredible team an incredible team here and we all believed in the mission. And I always go back to the fact that, you know, the civil rights movements, the women's rights movements, all these great movements over time were all brought on because of freedom of speech. Like freedom of speech allowed us always to make society better. And giving up on that principle is something you just can't do no matter what the circumstances. I think that's in the

Constitution. It's the First Amendment. It's Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. It's a human right according to the UN. It's something we just cannot give up and we have to stand for at all costs. And that's kind of what you stick to. Yeah, it gets scary. And, you know, it was scary when you're first approaching it. But, you know, looking back now and seeing how we are today, I think it's only made us stronger and allows us to to run harder and stronger. What lets you stay in your lane? You're not, you never promised to be anyone's fact checker or God, the ultimate authority on these debates that are playing out. That's what Mark Zuckerberg tried to do. And it's where he started to go south on Facebook.

I remember distinctly the few years ago when he decided we're going to now fact check political ads as if that's his job. That's the other candidate's job. That's not your job. You're a platform. You should not get out there trying to correct what somebody's political ad says or doesn't say. It was a dangerous spigot to open and he did it at his own peril. And now here we are in 2024 America and Facebook is basically moving away from news. It's just gotten so overwhelming and toxic and just uncontrollable for them that they're like, this isn't a good business model for us. Forget it. And the way they want to do it, they're right. It's not a good business model.

You're just a platform. Just let people have the debate. I myself, my audience knows I do not believe the 2020 election was, quote, stolen. I don't think it was fair, but I don't think it was, quote, stolen with votes being switched. A lot of my audience disagrees with me. That's fine. They disagree with me. They can still hear me say it. I can disagree with them after having heard that from many people I know. Just hearing the idea has not been toxic to me. It hasn't plagued my mind with misinformation. I'm able as a thinking human to make up my own mind as is my audience. The disrespect that the other model shows to the audience is palpable and rumble goes a different way. So one of the best things you guys did was with Russell Brand. And this is another area in which I think I diverged from my audience because I believed some of the accusations that were made against him and I found them very troubling.

I did not, however, want to see him deplatformed. I don't much like the Andrew Tate guy either. He's on Rumble. But I don't want to see him deplatformed either. There's an audience for it. There are people who feel differently than I do. That's fine. Why should they be punished? Because they don't have this view that's blessed by the gods at Rumble, the gods at YouTube. So what tell us what happened when Russell Brand got in trouble? The BBC, the other media in Great Britain did a huge Me Too hit piece on the guy. And literally governments were asking you to pull his channel. Yeah. So, you know, I never thought I'd live a day to see where, uh, well, I've seen, I've seen it so many times now, but

like, I never thought I would see these days where, you know, you'd have MPs or government, uh, I think it was an MP from the UK send send us a letter to remove Russell Brand from Rumble and demonetize Russell Brand on Rumble. And the thing that was most shocking to me is that here we are having an MP ask us to remove somebody for an allegation that happened off platform. So this has like absolutely nothing to do with Rumble. Um, Rumble is a video platform where people can express their viewpoints,

defend themselves if they're in trouble, um, talk about topics. Um, and Russell Brand uses Rumble. He also used YouTube and he used, uh, he uses Twitter and he uses a whole bunch of different platforms, but, uh, he, he has a show, his exclusive show is on Rumble, and they asked us to remove him. And, you know, we responded back saying this is absolutely abhorrent for an MP, a government official, to be asking us to remove somebody based on an allegation on behavior that has nothing to do with our platform and our terms of service.

We were judging, if we were to judge every single creator based on their off-platform behavior, if YouTube were to do that, I'm telling you, there would be a lot of creators on there that should not be on there. And that's just not something- And in his case, just allegations. Just allegations. That's all they were. These are not even, exactly. These are allegations. These aren't even charges. These aren't, there's no, there's no proof. Like this, these are just allegations right now. And it's not the business of a platform, especially not Rumbles to get involved in deciding whether or not Russell Brand should be able to have a voice to speak or not. That's the,

that, that, that's the, that's the law side. That's the law's side. That's the society's side. It's not Rumble's place to do that. And that's what we said. We said, no, absolutely, this is abhorrent a whole war over here so that we didn't have to listen to you people over in the UK and what you tell us to do. It was some great it was definitely a moment though, because I never once did, did we, did I think that they would be asking us to remove somebody on a platform based on an allegation? Like there's people that have like criminal behavior that are on YouTube that have gone to jail, that done things. And I don't think they should be removed from YouTube either. Like that's, that's not YouTube's job. YouTube's, if they're going to violate YouTube's policies or Rumble's policies on the platform, that's when we take action. But like, if they've done, if they're using Rumble for good purposes and they're using Rumble to, if they want to defend themselves, like that's, that's the whole point of it.

And, uh, you know, it's, it was absolutely imperative that we stuck up for that and the ability to, to speak, um, and allow him to speak. And, uh, I'm very proud that we did that and continue to be proud about that. What do you do about, oh, so my team, I just asked my team checks. Sammy, the bull, Sammy with the bull Gravano who killed 19 people. I interviewed him myself. They allow him on YouTube. How can he be on YouTube? And Russell Brand cannot be on YouTube. It's insane because one is sort of catering to the woke crowd that's decided all the allegations are true. Look, I got my own beliefs, but that doesn't make him so. And I don't want to see anybody punished. And even honestly, even if Russell Brand were found

liable in a court of law for these acts, I don't know that I know. I do know that I would not want to see him deplatformed. Like it is up to the audience to decide whether he's got something valuable to say, not up to our corporate gods. It's just wrong what people are doing. What are you going to do now over in the UK, though? Because I know, OK, so you said middle finger to France after they tried to crack down. But the UK just passed this new law that's pretty draconian when it comes to the disinformation on their television. And they've got Ofcom that now oversees like every lane. It's going to be digital, too. Right. So there's a problem unfolding in the UK that I guess potentially could affect you and everyone. Yeah. And, you know, I think there's a lot of differing opinions on how that will play out and what, what, like what will amount to, but yeah, the, what we're seeing in a lot of jurisdictions around the world is, uh, this encroachment,

like just this ever moving, um, line of, uh, inability to, to try to censor and take away, you know, the human rights of freedom of expression. And it's it's sad to see, like, I, I don't, I don't know if the people though, I, I, I do, I do start to feel though in the last year with X and Elon, the scales are starting to tip a little bit the opposite way. There is now a real pushback. And will they actually get rid of freedom of expression in a lot of these other jurisdictions is questionable. If they do, are you going to

pull rumble from the UK? I mean, because if they start saying, no, that violates our content, no, you're penalized for that. You owe fines. We're boycotting you. I don't know how they'll do it. Will they ban Rumble or do you think they'll just pull it? Yeah. If we can't operate under the principles that we currently operate under, then there's no reason for us to operate in any jurisdiction. We're not going to abide by any jurisdiction because they say that you have to do, you can't say this or that. We're an American company and we are going to follow the laws of the United States and we're not going to be pushed around by any jurisdiction that tells us otherwise. I think that would be a huge disservice to, you know, the majority of users on Rumble, which are in the United States.

And it's something that we'll fight and we are fighting. We're fighting in France and we're feeling confident that we could prevail there in the long run. We're also fighting in Brazil and we'll fight for freedom of expression all around the world, including the UK, if it gets to that. I don't think it will personally, but it is looking like it's going in a bad direction, but I have a feeling, I'm hoping that it doesn't continue down that bad path. Just with all the pressure that I'm starting to see, it seems like it is starting to turn and people are starting to wake up and our you know, our numbers are, that are for, um, freedom of expression are, are growing, um, a lot, you know, three years ago, freedom of expression was free speech was like,

people were scared to even say that word. Um, now everyone is really for it. So I think that, uh, um, I think in the long run, it will, it will out on our end and people that smart minds will prevail here. Like, how is how is the UK going to stand and do something like that when Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights says that it's, you know, a human right? Like, how can they'll find a way? They're they're very pro censorship there, as they are in Canada. I mean, there's a certain irony that it took a Canadian to come down here and form a company that would stand up for American free speech and tell everybody to pound sand. You got to go home and you got to talk to your friends who are letting the 50-year-old dude swim against the

12-year-olds. Tell them they need to find their inner voice, just like Chris Pavlosky did. Thank you so much for starting Rumble, for pushing it, for not giving up during the lean years and for keeping the pedal down now more than ever. When you guys stood by Russell Brand, again, even given my own feelings about that story, I just completely sat back and cheered. It gave me hope for the future of this country and the prospects of being able to have free and open debate. God bless you. Thank you, Megan.

Thank you for having me on. All the best. Talk again soon. I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM. It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today. You can catch The Megyn Kelly Show on Triumph, a SiriusXM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love.

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Get your first three months for free. Go to SiriusXM.com slash MK show to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com slash MK show and get three months free. Offer details apply. Welcome back to the Megyn Kelly show. Are you sick of supporting companies that don't support your values? There are so many of them. They're everywhere. If you are at all right-leaning, you suffer from this problem. Do you think DEI and ESG are ruining corporate America? Yes, I do. My next guest agrees. He's someone fighting to change the

way business is being done and to offer you some more options if you're in this frustrating category. Omid Malik is an entrepreneur and investor and founder and CEO of 1789 Capital. Omid, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Great to see you. It's a pleasure. So couldn't agree more. Share the frustration. And I feel like we're just sort of in the renaissance of people like you recognizing this problem and trying to create a new lane to combat it. Vivek Ramaswamy spent most of his time in this lane before he ran for president, just trying to create alternatives to these left wing platforms that kept conservatives out, whether it's media, an Amazon type offering. We had on a guy who's offering a Google alternative. And that's sort of your new mission, even though you're at least a former Democrat. I don't know if you're a current Democrat, but you've been a Democrat for most of your adult life.

That's definitely true, although I would say that, you know, the Democrat versus Republican distinction to me is more or less meaningless for the last five or six years these days. I actually think of it being either normal or abnormal or competent versus incompetent. Those are the way I look at that distinction these days. On the normal versus abnormal front, I just have a few things I think are obvious and truisms and that I believe in, like there are two genders. We need a border. China is a huge problem. Big tech's gotten too big. If and I believe in free speech. So if that makes me a Republican or a Democrat, I don't care. But those are things I think are obvious. And so that's on the normal side. And then as it relates to competency, I'm a former New York City resident for over 20

years. And I think people should just look at, because I'm a finance guy, the results of New York and California versus the model of Texas and Florida. And show me who has the highest taxes in the nation. Then show me the states that have zero income tax, and then explain why the ones with zero income tax have surpluses and the other have deficits. Like this is all right in front of people to read and understand data and then make a determination and not get so caught up in kind of the partisan distinctions. That's less interesting

to me. But yes, that's a roundabout way of saying that I used to be a Democrat in New York City. But it's also a segue as to why I think we need a parallel economy, to your point, which is really around COVID. I saw this bifurcation across approaches culturally and politically. And at the same time, we saw the real ascendancy of this scam known as ESG start permeating the private sector. You know, you and I are both lawyers. We learned that shareholder primacy was what governed corporate America when we were going to law school. That was what mattered, the shareholder. But then in 2019, the Business Roundtable told me that they had introduced something called stakeholder capitalism, which you've got to take in consideration all these other things. And I don't think that's true. So all you needed was, I guess, the tipping point,

which was COVID, where we saw private actors working with the government to suppress our constitutional rights. And that's when I knew I had to move to Florida and start financing free from the private sector. Oh, God bless you. You've got, as I mentioned, Vivek has created a company that does something like that, tries to encourage companies who don't believe in that nonsense, who just want to create profits for their investors. I mentioned Todd Ricketts. He came on the show to talk about FreeSpoke, which he created as an alternative to Google because they weight results on Google that will suppress things like I mentioned before,

vaccine information that's true, but that doesn't go along with their narrative. We just talked to Chris Pavlovsky of Rumble as an alternative to YouTube. So it's starting to happen more and more, which is hopeful. It's hopeful. And you have Public Square, which is an alternative to Amazon. So how is Amazon? I mean, I can think of a couple of examples off my head that we've covered on the show, but how is Amazon a part of this problem? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, Vivek is a good friend of mine. I helped him.

He's approaching the problem, just to give a distinction, from the top down. So what he's trying to do is change the behavior of existing public companies and invest in them through his ETFs the way BlackRock does. Super important. And I'm an ally of his. What I'm doing is a little bit different with 1789 Capital is I'm taking private money and try to contrast myself to venture funds. So I'm doing it from bottom up. I'm trying to find the companies to compete against these incumbents. He's trying to change the behavior of existing incumbents, if that makes sense. I just wanted to provide just a little bit of distinction for

the audience. And then the other thing I do is I take companies public with my SPACs. So those are companies that are already public. They don't have any operations. And I find a private company that I want to take public and list, which will compete against these existing companies. So there's basically two things. There's 1789 Capital, which is the private fund that we invested in our mutual friend Tucker Carlson with. And then there's the SPACs, where I find a company that I say, this is so important, it needs to go public right now. And that's exactly what I did with Public Square that you're asking about. They fall into what I call the replication bucket, where you're trying to take

on an existing incumbent the exact same way that my other friend, Chris Kavlovsky, you're just talking to is doing the rumble. He's a response to YouTube. The reason why Amazon falls into the problem, it's not as obvious as just the fact that most of the stuff you buy there is made by the Chinese Communist Party and you're enriching an enemy every time you buy products. It's also that their tentacles are all over the economy. My business partner in 1789 is a woman named Rebecca Mercer. She started a company called Parler, you may recall. And Parler at one point was one of the most downloaded social media apps in the country. What ended up happening is that a bunch of big tech companies colluded then to de-platform them. So you had Apple and Amazon work together to basically, and Google. So on the Google and Apple side, you could not download it because those are the two folks that

have all the ability to have the app stores, either on an Android or an Apple phone. So they wouldn't let you download it. And then the thing that Amazon did is Amazon has Amazon Web Services. People don't realize that most platforms are hosted by Amazon Web Services. They just took them off the web and violated a contract. And so you have to ask yourself, look, that's collusion in one respect that should be troubling. But it starts begging the question, are they getting their marching orders from the federal government or various intelligence agencies? And I think after what I observed with the Twitter files, what they were doing is that they are, which means that the government is using these large incumbents.

And I think it's a devil's bargain, by the way. They're not busting them up with antitrust laws because these companies are doing their bidding for them and suppressing the free speech of American citizens. That makes perfect sense. And yes, we have every reason to believe that's true. I'll say this, Amazon, it's not just on the big ticket items that we need to worry, you know, they're suppressing speech or they're putting the thumb on the scale. I've had people on the show, Eli Steele, son of Shelby Steele, and Shelby too. They made a movie called What Killed Michael Brown

with the truth about what happened in Ferguson. These are two black men, by the way. I mean, Shelby Steele is an icon and took a hard look at actually what was happening in Ferguson, Missouri. And so, and Amazon wouldn't promote it, wouldn't offer it for time until the pressure got too big.

Abigail Schreier's book, Irreversible Damage, one of the most important books of the past three, four years, but bar none, also was suppressed by Amazon, anything on the trans stuff. So they're just like YouTube in too many circumstances and the old Twitter, not under Elon's Twitter, his ex, they choose their favorites and they decide what we can talk about. So we do need an alternative. So if I go on Amazon and I want to buy hairspray and I want to buy, you know, I don't know, dog treats. Is that still if I go on Public Square as opposed to Amazon, can I do that now? Is it is it up to the point where I can get whatever I want?

Absolutely. I mean, we have over 80,000 products and vendors on Public Square, and this is all within a year. So, you know, the growth has been incredible. When we were tracking registered members, now you don't need to register. But when we did in the first year, we hit like 1.6 million registered users faster than like basically Twitter. And we did it as fast as Facebook did, which shows how much people want something like this, because there is no kind of digital marketplace alternative. The idea stems from, you're right, wokeism has got completely out of hand. And we just thought about it. And what was the easiest way to kind of quantify the opportunity is I just looked at

election data. I saw that, you know that 73 million people voted for Donald Trump. They basically comprise 30% of American GDP. And that's 7 trillion of GDP that is not only ignored, but actively alienated. So I said, this is a huge market. I fall into that category. Why aren't there companies that people can shop from that share their values? Because there's this other part of the country, which is, by the way, a lot more than 73 million people that are sick of buying these products because every day there's a Bud Light that's doing stuff to piss them off. The best part about Public Square for me, though, is that all those 80,000 companies are small and medium-sized American companies. So they're basically owned, yeah, by families. They're the kind of companies

that were actually shut down and locked down during COVID. So Public Square is also a way to support those American companies that are owned by really the backbone of country, which is the middle class, which as you know, just like the family is currently under assault. So I use it as a way to vote, not only at the ballot box, but with your wallet every single day. Because if you don't do that, then you get a situation where you're using products and services where you're enriching these oligarchs who then go and take your money to go finance things that are against your interests. It's really that simple, but unfortunately we don't think of it that way. We've kind of been lulled into thinking, oh, these products are so great. They make myself myself so convenient. But every time you're doing that, you should ask what

Reeve Hoffman's doing with your money or Mark Benioff or any of these people. Right. Why are you and why are you funding the Chinese? I really had never considered Amazon that way, but you're absolutely right. And by the way, will your delivery drivers actually put the package in the special box that I put on my front porch so my dog can't get them any longer and actually put it says put packages in here, but they don't listen to me. Right. Yeah. No, I mean, and what we're doing right now is every single vendor has their own, you know, DTC ability to get it to you. The other interesting thing we're doing that I should just point out, but I think puts a finer point on it, is our average customer is a 38-year-old woman with about two kids on Public Square. And we could see what they were searching for. And the number one most searched product were

diapers and wipes. And so we did a little bit of research and said, what options are out there? And what we found out is that the top three or four diaper companies all affirmatively either financed Planned Parenthood or paid their employees to get abortions. So we thought this is like kind of the most, I don't know, insane thing in business marketing. So we've actually launched a company called Every Life, which is the country's first affirmatively pro-life diaper brand. I know that sounds crazy, but it is. And it's probably the fastest growing in history right now. And it's a wholly owned subsidiary of Public Square. And that's called Every Life. So that's really exciting. And so people.

And I love the idea of 1789, too, is we we try to study that with our kids every 4th of July. That's when the Bill of Rights was drafted. That's exactly right. Yeah. So we got to get back to that. So one of the it's one thing to have your voice silenced on Amazon, Twitter, what have you. It's quite another to have your bank tell you you can no longer do business there. That's something else that's happening. It happened to some of the people who have come on the show, including Nigel Farage across the pond. But more and more Americans, if you are at all involved in J6, you've been threatened potentially with debanking. And most conservatives have heard of this because it's publicized in right-wing circles.

Saturday Night Live, not so much. They did a skit, a skit because Trump used the term over the weekend showing how clueless they are. Just watch this a little bit, Sod 18. Trump did have a slight stumble this week while talking about banks and he introduced an interesting new term called debank. We're also going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you. They want to debank you, and we're going to debank... I don't know what the hell debank means, but he might have to take deambulance to see the doctor.

I think that's the guy who's married to Scarlett Johansson. They don't have to worry about money. They don't have to worry about getting debanked because they're woke liberals and they have no clue what's happening to real Americans. Your thoughts on the banking problem? Thanks for the clip. That's a microcosm of the divide in this country. It's almost funny, but it's also sad because it shows that we effectively live in two different worlds. People on the island of Manhattan who watch that show or are stars on it have no understanding of what's happened to people that either want to embrace their Second Amendment rights or are standing up against certain levels of repression. You don't even have to look that far than Canada as to what they did with truckers that wanted to resist taking

the fake vaccine called the shot. It's not a vaccine, by the way. I don't buy into their language because it has no attributes of a vaccine. But that's a different conversation for another day. They tried to exercise, you know, their right, and they were debanked. The government went and took away their bank accounts. You know, there's a series called Black Mirror where they started trying to show, this is like eight years ago, the notion of with technology, social credit scoring that they have, again, in a place like China, it seems like the leftists that run a lot of these Western European and some elements of the Democratic Party want to embrace that kind of social credit scoring. And the way that they're going to do it, again, is exactly the thing that's become my life's

mission. They're not going to do it, obviously, through the government. They're going to use the private sector to make you irrelevant. And that's how they do it. So they go to certain huge private actors. That's one of the reasons why they want so much consolidation in the banking industry. Too big to fail, right? What do we do after the financial crisis? Nobody went to jail. You made every large bank actually bigger. So they are effectively stewards of the state and they can control three or four. That's why it's really not a big deal when you have two or three banking failures of the magnitude that you had under the Biden administration, because the less of these government sponsored entities there are and the more that they can control them and ultimately implement their will on people, which is what Canada just did. That's also taken place in the private sector. I've observed with places like PayPal, they were fining people for misinformation that they determined to be misinformation.

Yeah, that's crazy. people for misinformation that they determined to be misinformation. This is parallel economy is so important. We need to finance alternatives to all of these institutions. Okay. So let me ask you this. We have a minute left. How can people support you? Right. Like what exactly should they do? Well, I think that one of the easiest ways is when I try to provide, you know helping Tucker get up and running or Public Square and other companies that we're putting out there. Please do your best. It's my job to get the word out there. And thank you, Megan, for having me and being able to do that is to patronize things like Rumble and Public Square and other companies that share your values. That's the only way we're going to win. The more you continue to patronize these other companies, the harder it's going to be. But what we're doing, I think, is the essence of capitalism, which is to give people choice. If those companies want to behave that way,

like Bud Light or Amazon, fine, that's your prerogative, unless the federal government's doing that and telling you to. However, we should have every right to have our own products and services. And my mission is to finance those, to do what you said, ensure that private companies are not infringing on the Bill of Rights. And we just need our own superhighway. We just can't rely on the mainstream for anything. They don't want us and we shouldn't want them either. Omid, thank you for what you're doing and thanks for coming on. Thanks so much, Megan. I really enjoyed it. Have a wonderful day. Yeah, come on anytime. If you think of another lane that you've created, I would love to talk to you. All the best. I will. Thank you. All right. We're going to be back tomorrow with

Glenn Beck. Don't miss that. We'll see you then. Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.