The Megyn Kelly Show - Tech Censorship, Media Malpractice, and Woke Icons, with Victor Davis Hanson, John Stossel, and Ben Smith | Ep. 174

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Victor Davis Hanson, author of the new book "The Dying Citizen," John Stossel, host of Stossel TV, and Ben Smith, media columnist at The New York Times, to discuss tech censorship and Stossel's lawsuit against Facebook, the rise of "woke icons" in America, harassment of Sen. Sinema by the progressive left, the possibility of prosecuting parents over school board incidents, Dr. Fauci's failures, the downfall of Ozy Media and Carlos Watson, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow 

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh my God, we have an unbelievable show for you today. I'm bursting at the seams to get to this. In just a bit, Victor Davis Hanson will be here to discuss the diminishing power of the American of the American citizen and the silencing of dissenting voices. Case in point, President Biden's DOJ today is going to start investigating upset parents who show up at school board meetings if their behavior can be considered harassment or intimidation. Okay, you know how that's going to be abused. They're finding a way to shut down these embarrassing school board meetings that we've seen.

That's where this is going to go. But when asked by news outlets like the Daily Caller to specify what exactly it's going to classify as a crime or as a problematic incident, no response. Victor's got thoughts on that. Plus, have you been following this crazy story about the media company Ozzy? The journalist who first broke the news about this company appearing very much like a fraud is Ben Smith of the New York Times. He's their media reporter, their top media columnist. He's going to be here.

You guys remember I had on Carlos Watson and we had a lovely chat? And now the company he built has basically been accused of being a house of cards. I have taken a deep look at this case myself. I've got a bunch of soundbites I'm going to go through with Ben and we're going to get into it. But first, I'm joined by someone who I know and love, who's been fighting back against big tech censorship and now is suing Facebook for two million dollars. And that's John Stossel, host of Stossel TV, which you should definitely Google and check out if you haven't already. John, it's great to have you here. I love that you're pursuing this.

You've filed a federal court lawsuit in Northern California against Facebook seeking two million bucks. Why? Because they lie about me and won't take it back even after we point out the lie. You, in particular, you take issue with them labeling two of your popular videos as misleading. The first one is about 2020 wildfires in California. And I believe that, yeah, we have this. This is soundbite number one. Let's watch a clip. A large part of America is on fire. Mother Earth is angry. Why would Mother Earth be angry? Because of climate change. Politicians are eager to blame the fires on climate change. The debate is over around climate change. California's governor smiles while he talks about it.

All of this catastrophizing around climate change is just a huge distraction. Michael Schellenberger, an environmentalist who Time magazine calls a hero of the environment, says it's silly to blame the fires on climate change. Climate change is real. It's not the end of the world. It's not our most serious environmental problem. And it's not the main cause of the California fires. Governor Newsom tweeted out that last year we had one tenth of the area burned as we're having this year and therefore it's climate change. It's like, well, what, did climate change happen between last year and this year?

None of this makes any sense. So what did Facebook do in response to that clip, to that video? Well, Facebook is largely wonderful. I sympathize with their problems, but they've partnered with these so-called fact-check organizations to try to police the fake news off their airwaves. And they give it to Pointer, a so-called journalism organization. That's a joke. It's basically a left-wing group.

And they partner with this group, Climate Feedback, that wants no discussion that climate change might not be a catastrophe. So they label this misleading and put up a quote implying that I said the fires were not at all caused by climate change. And it wasn't my quote. I never said that. We acknowledge climate change played a part, but we put Schellenberger on there to put it in perspective. We called them government-fueled fires because they don't pick up the brush on the floor of the forest, And that's their right. But it's not their right to reprint this quote in my name as if I said that, said something I never said. You can't appeal to Facebook. You have to appeal to the fact checker that made the mistake in the first place. And they ignored me at first. And when they finally responded, they said, well, no, a quote doesn't have to be exactly what you said. I would have been fired at my previous jobs if I made up a quote like that. And they just won't change it. And then on top of that, we interviewed some of their reviewers and it turned out they hadn't even watched the video. That's what's so crazy. They're labeling your claims misleading, having no idea what your claims are because they've misrepresented your claims as being something other than what your

claims are. And then they admit they didn't even watch the video after they slapped the warning label on it. We don't need to watch it because we know what's in there. We know who you're interviewing. So here's, so the audience understands you concluded in the piece, you, you say you repeatedly acknowledge in that piece, climate change plays a role. This is a quote from you. Climate change has made things worse. California has warmed three degrees over 50 years. Then you have Schellenberger on who says climate change is real, but forests, you know, the ones that were well managed, they survived the mega fires. So you're, you're pointing out to the audience, climate change is a factor, but management of the fires or the forest is a bigger factor. That's what you concluded, concluding bad policies were the

biggest cause of this year's fires, not the slightly warmer climate. And they say you're missing context. They say, click here to see why. If the viewer clicks, they're sent to a page on Climate Feedback's website, which states, claim forest fires are caused by poor management, not by climate change. Verdict, misleading. Well, their claim about your claim is what's misleading. And putting it in quotes is misleading. These are sleazy opportunists who are taking advantage of their relationship with Facebook, and Facebook is too lazy to do anything about it.

Oh, that's time for your hit on the Megyn Kelly show. No, wait. So I want to get to. Oh, it's time for your hit on the Megan Kelly show. No, wait. I saw it. Cause I want to get to, yeah, go ahead. There was a second video that they smeared.

That's what I want to get to. I'm going to, we're going to now let's get into the second video and then I'll play the clip of you challenging the fact checkers because you actually got them to go on camera with you, which is just unbelievable. All right. The next video that's in trouble that got you in in trouble with them, is Are We Doomed? Are We Doomed? And this questions

claims by environmental alarmists that hurricanes are getting stronger, and that the sea level rise poses a catastrophic threat that humans will not be able to cope with. Here's a clip from that so-called problematic video. The alarmists have evidence that supports their fears. Temperature is rising. The UN predicts that it'll rise another two to five degrees. What do we do in the land we live on is under attack. But does that justify the fear?

Climate change is not a lie, so please don't let our planet die. Does it justify this claim? We have 12 years to act. We have 12 years. We have 12 years before the effects are irreversible. Really? 12 years? It's warmed up around 1 degree Celsius since 1900, and life expectancy doubled the industrialized democracies,

and yet that temperature ticks up another half a degree and the entire system crashes. That's the most absurd belief. I recently moderated this debate on climate change at the Heartland Institute. Well, not a debate because the alarmists who were invited didn't show. Mm hmm. So you put that out and tell us what happened because you first published it in November of 2019, then you republished it again, same piece,

in April 2021, and it was treated differently. Well, Facebook let it go out the first time. It got 24 million views. And the second time, this group, Climate Feedback, called it, I forget what their label was, but instantly Facebook- Partly false. Partly false. Partly false. That's right. And they stopped sending it out to people. And that's my business model for my videos. It's why I left Fox to do those 2020-like videos. Facebook was my biggest way to get to people, and this Paris-based group of young activists just gets to cut me off.

It just makes me so angry just to talk about it. It makes me angry, too. But Facebook has a right to be biased i mean maybe the scientists from heartland are wrong maybe this will be a big catastrophe but it deserves being discussed not being cut off entirely and um it's crazy to me that they thought it was fine it stood basically for two years almost without being labeled problematic or partly false. Facebook was fine with it. Then suddenly, magically, in April 2021, it's now partly false and requires a warning label.

And the- Because these fact checkers finally got to it. And when one of them agreed to talk to me, he actually said, oh, well, we didn't find any facts wrong. We just didn't like your tone. Oh, and we criticized you for saying hurricanes haven't gotten stronger. Well, we shouldn't have done that. They haven't.

The IPCC doesn't say they have. So we were wrong about that part. But he said, I disagreed where you said we can handle the sea level rise because it might rise 200 feet. But nobody says that. And he, well, that would be over hundreds of years. So they're going to dump my video because of what might happen in hundreds of years? This is what's so crazy. The so-called fact checkers have an obvious left wing agenda and you're including their points of view in your videos. You're just offering the other point of view too. And in the end, you may conclude that these left wing fact checkers point of view may not be entirely correct. And that's when you get the misleading label. It's like they're the god of all of these things that are not knowable. We don't know what the sea level is going to be in 20 years. It's all projection. And you're not allowed to have your POV. So this is the greatest part of the story until the lawsuit. You, unlike everyone out there, stay dogged.

And you click through to these climate activists and you say why was it labeled misleading why was it labeled partially true um you know give me your facts and both the two guys two out of the three guys who labeled the first video problematic and the guy who got involved on the second video gave you interviews which I'm sure their lawyer is very sad about right now in your lawsuit. But here is a clip of you cross-examining the fact checkers. You're smearing me based on something I didn't say. Yeah. I mean, I've never commented on your article. That was a shock. He hadn't even seen my video.

If this is implying that we have reviewed the video, then this is clearly wrong. My assumption is because Schellenberger pops up in there and his statements have basically been shown to be partially wrong. This issue has become very political, which is unfortunate. Zeke Hausfather is another climate feedback reviewer. He hadn't seen the video either. I certainly did not write a climate feedback pieceer. He hadn't seen the video either. I certainly did not write a climate feedback piece reviewing your segment. So we sent him a link to my video and he watched it. Is that a fair label on the video that I did? I don't necessarily think so. You know, while there's plenty of debates around how much to emphasize forest management versus climate change,

your piece clearly discussed that both were at fault here. So you would think after that kind of exchange, and you had a similar one after the second video with a different guy, they would then take down their label and say, we kind of screwed over Stossel. Sorry, our bad. That's not what happened. No, Facebook policy is you can appeal, but you appeal to the fact checker. And they ignored it. And when then they finally responded, they said, no, our review was fair. And you can say, so what if they call it misleading? But Facebook gives them the power to cut us off. And what you're claiming in the lawsuit is that they defamed you by labeling you a purveyor of bad information. It hurts your role, your status, your reputation as a journalist and a truth teller. Well, they did defame me. They lied about

me. And it hurts me. Hurts me financially and personally to be labeled as a liar. Some of the commenters on the Facebook posts are, oh, I used to trust you, but now Facebook has labeled you misleading. And how does it hurt your business model, John? Explain to us, when they label this video as misleading, what happens to the video? As I said, the second video got 24 million views. We used to get most of our views from Facebook. Now I get thousands of views. I get most of my views from YouTube. Facebook has throttled me based on these climate feedback idiots. And so your monthly ad revenue on Facebook has, according to your lawsuit, been cut in half? About that. but we get most of our money from

viewers' donations. So when I'm reaching millions fewer people, that's the big loss. Oh, I see. All right, so let me run the response by you. Facebook basically gives the generic, this case is without merit, we're going to defend ourselves vigorously. Climate Feedback, who we saw clips of there, says as follows, Stossel misunderstands how fact-checking partners operate on Facebook. Given that many pieces of content posted on Facebook can separately make the same claim, it is not necessary to create a separate claim review article for each post we rate. This is where they lump you in with everybody. It is, of course, necessary that the claim we reviewed is representative of the claim in each post we rate, which is true in this case. So they're basically saying, even though you didn't

say the stuff they attribute to you, the claims that they red flagged are representative of your overall message and therefore they're in the clear. Well, they aren't because they aren't representative. They put in quotes something I didn't say. And in fact, quite different from what I did say. Mm-hmm. It's amazing that that's a response from a fact checker. We rely on our inaccuracy and imprecision in doing our fact checking, even when we're on camera admitting we got it wrong. I do not agree with Facebook that they're going to defend this vigorously and that the case is without merit. I think they're in trouble, and I predict you get a settlement.

What do you think? I sure hope so. And frankly, in California, you have to ask for more than a million dollars. And so I did. But I don't care about the money. I want these people to stop smearing people. And they smear John Tierney of The New York Times, Bjorn Lomberg, who does great environmental reporting, and Schellenberger. And I want Facebook to fire these guys and make them stop doing this. Yay. Me too. All right. We'll continue to watch it. Go get them. It'll be fun to watch. Thanks, John. Great to see you. Thanks, Megan. Coming up next, Victor Davis Hanson is here. He's one of my favorite,

favorite people. He's brilliant. And we've got so much to get to, including his new book, The Dying Citizen. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show, everyone. Joining me now, one of my favorite people, Victor Davis Hanson. He is a conservative commentator, a Martin and E. Lee Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of the brand new book, The Dying Citizen, out today. Victor, so great to have you here. Thanks for being on. Thank you for having me, Megan. Okay, so we'll get to the book in one second,

but there's so many barn burner columns that you've issued lately, I want to get into them. And I want to kick it off with AOC, who it hit the news today that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got her booster shot already. She's only 31 years old. As far as we know, she has absolutely no comorbidities that would justify a booster shot, but she works in a crowded building. And so she says, you know, her physician has given it the thumbs up.

My thought on this was, you know, what about all the third world people who haven't yet gotten the shots? This is what the sort of more socially conscious minded folks have been warning about. Don't go get a booster shot unless you really need it. Because there's lots of people in the world who don't yet have their first shot. And people like AOC don't need a third one until we get more in globally vaccinated. And to me, it plays right into this column you had recently talking about these wokest, I'll use the term losers, like AOC and the people at the Emmys and Obama's party goers and Ibram X. Kendi, all of whom lecture us constantly on how we need to be better in their view, but live a life that bears no resemblance to their messaging.

Yeah, I think this whole woke revolution, Megan, is a top-down phenomenon. It's an argument among wealthy elites or wannabe wealthy elites or celebrities. It's kind of musical chairs. They're fighting for the chairs. They don't want to be left out. But it doesn't have a lot of grassroots support from the middle classes. It really doesn't. So when they are successful, if you're Kendi, then you can charge $20,000 an hour in Zoom for kind of medieval penance for corporate executives. Or if you're Patrice Quellars and you're the Marxist, Marxist co-founder of BLM, that allows you to get four homes and of all places, all white Topanga Canyon, not too far from Malibu or if you're lebron

it doesn't really matter that you're hawking chinese goods that use uh wager forced labor because it's kind of a cosmic um justice a cosmic wokeness causing cosmic abstraction and then it allows you in the real world to be what you don't like. It's kind of like Orwell talked about in Animal Farm. If you're woke and you virtue signal, it's like taking out an indemnity policy against woke retaliation or enhances your career. But it doesn't mean, it really doesn't mean materially

that you're going to actually act that out. You're going to be one with the people, you're going to wear normal clothes, you're not going to go to the Obama's party, or if you're the Obama's, you're going to go back to Chicago and work on those inner city problems that's plaguing that city. It just means you don't have to because in the abstract, you sound so virtuous. And you've talked about how these sort of woke warriors give a pass to these billionaires who ride on their private jets everywhere and corrupt our teenagers with their product. But they get a pass just as long as they say the right thing when it comes to these favorite

issues. Meanwhile, these are the guys who have caused a lot of the very problems that the wokesters claim to be fighting against. Yeah, and you can really see that with Joe Biden. I mean, if you look at any president who's had, you know, we talk about Trump's tax policy, but we were just told that he found a way to avoid not just $500,000, but $500,000 in payroll tax. At the same moment, he was making up this new category of trillionaires that don't pay their fair share. And he's always talking about, we've got to get unity,

and we've got to be woke, and we've got to have a new attitude on race. And yet, if you collate what he said, you know, the corn pot saga, and you ain't black, and called an African-American, very gifted journalist, junkie or very sophisticated audience of black professionals. He said, put you all back in chains. Or Barack Obama was, in his words, the first articulate clean black. I mean, that wasn't even true. Shirley Chisholm was a brilliant candidate. And he does that. And then Hunter Biden uses the N-word and the Biden family exchanges anti-Asian slurs while Joe Biden says, you know, there's an epidemic of anti-Asian racism as if there's a bunch of clingers doing this. this woke revolution, they can do anything. It reminds me so much of the psychological

background of the whole medieval indulgence and penance right before the Reformation, where you actually signed something that you were going to give so much money, or you're going to build a certain part of a church, and then in exchange for that, you were permitted to sin, or you could work off your sin. This means if you sign up for the woke revolution, then you don't really have to change your attitude, your material appetites, the way you live. And it's not sustainable. I think there's going to be a correction against it. Well, let's talk about that. That's in your book, which I'm proud to have gotten an advanced copy of. You're not going to be doing an event on it later this week. But one of the points you make in The Dying Citizen is this, wokeism is basically an appeal

to return to tribalism. And tribalism doesn't bode well for societies like ours. No, it doesn't. It doesn't bode well for any, but particularly, as you say, and I wrote in the book, that if you're a multiracial democracy, a very rare concept, there are no multiracial democracies in history that I can think of. Today, we have Brazil and India that are trying it not very well because they do have these ethnic tensions and they lead to violence so often. But when you had multiracial empires like Rome or the Ottomans or the Soviets, they had to have a degree of coercion or the former Yugoslavia. But when you have a consensual society and it's multiracial, it's dependent upon everybody's primary identity being American, an idea, and that your ethnic or racial or religious identity enriching the body politic, you know, food, fashion, music, culture, but not tampering with a core. But once you tamper with a core, it's going to be a war of everybody against

everybody, if that's your primary identification. You can already see it, Megan, with these, we had a U.S. senator that was followed into a restroom while she was in a locked stall being hectored and filmed. And that was excused because supposedly this cosmic justice about illegal immigration outweighed not only common decency, but it's a felony to go film somebody without their knowledge in a bathroom. Oh, it's been insane what's happened to her. Actually, we have that clip. Let's watch that. Actually, it's been insane what's happened to her. Actually, we have that clip. Let's watch that. Actually, I am heading out. Right now is a real moment that our people need in order for us to be able to talk about what's really happening. We need a Build Back Better plan right now.

We knocked on doors for you to get. We have the solutions that we need. We knocked on doors for you to get you elected. And just how we got you elected, we can get you out of office if you don't support what you promised us. I'm a survivor of human trafficking. And it's because of the lack of worker protections that we don't have in the gig economy. I need you to stand by workers, lots of people who are aligning. We can have justice and solutions that we need for immigration, labor, black and white. This is crazy for our listeners who are taking this in on Sirius XM without the

video. And you can watch it on youtube.com forward slash megan kelly later but um it's kirsten cinema um who's a holdout on this wreck so-called reconciliation bill um being followed into a woman's room into the stall they're right outside of the stall as she's doing her business shouting all the things you just heard at her because she and joe mansion are the only two um the democrats are going to ram this thing true or through are going to they would like to try with only 50 votes, a three point five trillion dollar spending measure on top of all the other trillions we've already had, the one point two trillion that's going to that looked like it was going to go through on infrastructure, the one point nine trillion that they spent on covid relief months ago. And she and he have got some reservations about that

kind of number. And and I don't know what her number is. Joe Manchin said his number is 1.5 trillion. That's still enormous. We're way in debt as a country. And so they've got some reservations. They're being castigated. I mean, it's basically a pile on it's a, it's a country wide, at least with the, with the left, uh, gang up on them. I mean, just enormous pressure campaign. And for what? You know, for what? We already basically have amnesty, Victor. What is it exactly they want from her? I don't know. But when she said my people and our people and my community, who is her community? No one forced her parents or her to come to the United States. That was the brutal bargain.

You came into the United States. You did so legally. And once you came in, you adopted the customs and traditions and laws of your host. And that was your primary identity. That's why a multiracial, multiethnic democracy worked. But we didn't have people come in illegally as their first act and as their second act reside illegally and then start telling their host, this is the way it's going to be or else we're going to follow you into what? Your bathroom

while you're relieving yourself and we're going to film it. And we're so confident that nobody will dare question us that we're actually going, we're not going to be found out doing this. We're going to broadcast it on our website. We're proud of what we did. We're going to follow you on an airline, even though we are paranoid about mask and civil decency on airlines now. We're going to come up and attack a U.S. senator verbally on an airline and cause a sensation. So we have got to the point where not only do we have no border and not only are two million people scheduled to come across illegally, but there's a sense of entitlement that the non-citizen does not have to be vaccinated. But the people who are guarding the border who are citizens do have to be vaccinated. We're worried about bringing 100,000 people from Afghanistan, whether they have culturally sensitive food, they don't have to be vaccinated. The people who are escorting them in the military do. So it's not just that

we're treating residents who aren't citizens as citizens, but in some weird cases, we're giving them exemptions. We don't even provide our own citizens. And back to the multiculturalism thing. I mean, this is interesting because we used to, you know, I grew up in the seventies and we were told that we were a melting pot and that was one of the beauties of America. And it was true because back then we didn't care where you came from. No one cared about skin color or ethnic background or traditions because the thought was once you came to America, that would become the tie that bound us together. Love of country, patriotism, belief in America as an institution, belief, as you point out, the dying citizen, that this is a better place to live than the place from which you came. And what's happening

now, though, is as we open up the southern border, I mean, that's absolutely what's happening. We're letting it's a sieve now. No matter what Joe Biden says, the numbers show it every month. We have another record 200 plus thousand cross into the country unaccounted for. What's happening now is once they get here, the messaging is don't blend in, don't love the country, stick to your tribe, stick to your own native sort of traditions and cultures. And by the way, if anybody who's already here tries to celebrate those, that'll be condemned as cultural appropriation and some sort of racism. And it's encouraging a strange form of division and tribalism that maybe not even all these people would adopt if they didn't have this messaging. No, the messaging comes from the host. They adapt to it because they

feel that it promises material or curious rewards. I I live in mostly a community of Mexican-Americans, and many of them are here illegally, but I have lunch or breakfast with a lot of my friends from high school, all Mexican-American, and professionals that are Mexican-American. They always say the same thing. Why would we come to this country if we were going to replicate what is going on in Mexico? We left Mexico because as indigenous people from Oaxaca, we were treated as tribalists. Our tribe was not as good as the Spanish aristocracy in Mexico City. So why would we come up here and then replicate that same tribalism? Or why would we adopt the culture of a different country than the United States. And the reason why the United States is materially prosperous, the legal code is transparent, there's equality under the law,

is because it's unique and we don't want to tamper. They understand that. But the message they're getting from our elites who aren't immigrants is that we find you useful for our political agendas, short term though they be. and we're going to tell you how you react. I really, I don't want to keep bashing Barack Obama, but you know, Megan, about 2009, he really institutionalized this kind of rare academic word diversity, and he divorced it from class. It used to be there was this binary that for Jim Crow and slavery, we had affirmative action, civil rights, and we kind of included Hispanics, people who were poor on the economic scale because of past bias. But what he did is he said, we're going to call it diversity. So one thing that the Punjabi millionaire has,

or the Chilean aristocrat, or the Nigerian dentist, or the South Korean immigrant who's a capitalist, With all of these other groups, it's they're non-white. And they're not just 10 or 12 or 3 percent. They're 30 percent. And we're not even going to talk about class. We're just going to say that you can be oppressed. All of a sudden, Colin Kaepernick, 50 million, is oppressed. Marxist Patrice Quellar's fourth house to Ponda Cannon, she's oppressed. Kendi, $20,000 on Zoom for an hour session with him. He's oppressed. Oprah, $90 million home in Montecito talking to Meghan Markle, $15 million. They're oppressed. And what their oppression is, is they're not so-called white. So you look at, it's very racist what we did. We completely ignored class.

And we know now that of ethnic groups, so-called people who identify as white are about 16. They're behind a lot of Asian groups as far as per capita and family income. We know in the last three years that middle-class wages for so-called whites has not increased like minorities. I'm not trying to defend, you know, criticize it. I'm just suggesting that the real problem is poverty that is transcendent across racial lines. And it's no longer an absolute equation between not being white and being poor and exploited. And yet we're told that. We're said, you know what, I think the left thought, you know what, this capitalist economy is so effective, and there's so much upward mobility, and affirmative action works so well, we've got to be very careful, we've created an upper middle class

that's non white, but we have to say they're still oppressed. So it's almost like a theater of the absurd when Obama comes out of a $25 million Martha's Vineyard estate and he said he's worried about his children being stereotyped. You know, if they were stereotyped, unfortunately, it might be by African-American youth, given the crime rate that we see. And he surely doesn't want to go back to Chicago and community organized. So it's it's absurd. And I think a lot of the wokeness is sort of a substitution or a mental projection or squaring the circle of elitism and feeling guilty about it and not acting out your ideology with your daily life. So they can sit in the ivory tower and say defund the police so that inner city

folks are in danger but they're they're not having any trouble like cory bush on the squad defends all of her tens of thousands in security saying too bad i'm gonna do what i'm gonna do and you've pointed out the three out of four members of the squad i don't know who how many members of the squad but they but they are immigrants who have come here or they or their parents have come here and that they but they seem to hate america it's like well why why'd you come here what they or their parents have come here and that they, but they seem to hate America. It's like, well, why, why'd you come here? What, what's the point? Like what, why? I mean, I didn't want to put words in their mouth.

I didn't want to put words in their mouth, but I wasn't AOC whose parents came from Puerto Rico. They were, by the way, they were very successful professionals. She grew up in Connecticut in a very nice suburban place, but she called the country garbage. We can be, we should be better than garbage. And I think it was Representative Omar said, you know, we saw all these things in Somalia, then we got to the United States and it was just as bad. And then, you know, if you look at all of their criticism of capitalism and everything,

what was one of the first problems they all had as representatives? They all ran into campaign finance violations, Omar, Presley, Tlaib, and AOC. And so it wasn't that. And when you see AOC's taste in her designer clothes that we talked about, you get the impression that their ideological complaint of America was that they wanted to be somewhere very quickly. And the fact that nobody appreciated their genius, in the case of AOC, she kept saying, I'm an international relations person. I have an MA from Boston University, but yet I was a barista. This is so unfair of the system. And a lot of their grievances seem to be about their own particular trajectories. And now once

they found out that they're a megaphone for all the discontent, their real tastes are starting to come out. And they want to be sort of what Orwell said, you know, two legs are bad, but now suddenly two legs are good if you're an animal. And that's what animal form was all about and a lot of his work was. That's right. It's been a while. Two legs are better.

I can't remember. Okay, so I'm joined today by Victor Davis Hanson. You can hear how brilliant he is, right? It's just like, like, I don't, with all due respect, it reminds me of Charles Krauthammer, listening to him. It's just like a special brand of brilliance.

You just want to be quiet and listen. Victor's a Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the new book, The Dying Citizen, out today. Up next, we're going to take on General Milley and Dr. Fauci. So, Victor, a couple of news items that play into my question here. came out today that a restaurant worker was just awarded $30,000 because his manager, their manager refused to use their pronouns, the they, their, and kept referring to, I guess it's

a biological woman, her as she, her, whatever. So that person gets $30,000 for the refusal to use the pronouns. This as, is rejecting American woke culture. Listen to this. Some people, including President Emmanuel Macron, have rejected our woke ideology, and there's a cover story in Le Spectacle du Monde, one of France's leading magazines, recently running a piece titled,

and I feel like they stole this from you, The Suicide of America, very close to The Dying Citizen, in which they blame the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan on a woke dictatorship over here and question whether the American empire is collapsing. Your thoughts on that? Well, the French are right, but they're not entirely right, because all during the 19 late 70s and 80s, I kind of wrote a book about it called Who Killed Homer with John Heath about 24 years ago. We had Lacan and Derrida and Michel Foucault. These were all French ideological imports, authors who were postmoderns. In other words, they said there is no absolute truth.

It's all created by people who have power, white male, Christian, all that stuff. So what we're seeing with the woke movement was critical race theory, critical legal theory, new monetary theory. It all came from France. And we kind of, as we do in America, we swallowed it and vomited it back in atrocious manner. And then they're mad at what happened, but they create, they help create it and they don't

want anything to do with it because they understand where it leads to it leads to an end of national uh singularity exceptionalism and it's uh socialism and everything that we see in the world that doesn't work racially we saw it in the the former Soviet Union, Rwanda. We see it in tribalism in Iraq. We saw the economic model in Venezuela and Cuba. We see all of it. And why would anybody want to emulate those failed paradigms? Okay, but let me ask you this on brass tacks. How does woke ideology translate into a loss of power for the United States? Yeah, I think a lot of ways.

The first thing it is that one of the reasons that, you know, I travel a lot in the Middle East and I asked a lot of people and I said, why doesn't the Middle East work? And they said, because I hear it again and again, we hire our first cousin rather than somebody who's meritocratic, somebody that's in our tribe, somebody that is in our religion, but especially familiar. So if we start adjudicating who gets into which particular school or who becomes in the United Pilot Training Program, or if the CEO of American Airlines can't guarantee that when you take off, you'll have enough fuel. I've been in two American Airlines where you had to divert to get fuel, but he has time to comment on the Texas voting law or the Delta CEO or Chick-fil-A or

we have General Milley who can tell us, along with the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon hierarchy, that they're going to go after white rage, they're going to go after white supremacy, they're going to hunt through the ranks. But there's a success. There's progress in Afghanistan. So it's a zero-sum game, Megan. When you invest enormous amounts of capital and labor and time in a commissary system where you're looking over your shoulder all the time or somebody without talent, a diversity, inclusion, and equity coordinator is going to look at your syllabus and doesn't know anything about Virgil or Sophocles or in the old days, your chairman would say, you know, Victor, I think you're reading a little bit too many Euripides in that class. Why don't you put some Sophocles or Thucydides? Or if I was in English, teaching English classes, they'd say,

you know, get another play of Shakespeare in there for balance. They don't know any of that. They're just going to say, well, what is racist or sexist in that text without any attention to quality or what's good for the students? So we're wasting a lot of our time on this wokeism and attacking it and defending ourselves from it. And we know from the former Soviet Union that commissary system is disastrous. And we're promoting people not on the basis of talent. You know, we used to say, well, wokeism is just an affectation of the nutty academic where it started. They never have nuclear plant operators or surgeons do it. They would always say we're going to be meritocratic, but, you know, United Airlines just announced that their pilot training program, the acceptance would not be based on prior military experience with planes or aviation test scores, but it would be on criterion of diversity. So we're going to get into some very interesting territory where we're promoting people on criteria other than merit. Wow.

And then next thing you know, air traffic control, which there should be only one skill there, and that is steady as she goes, right? You can handle yourself well under pressure. It shouldn't have to do with skin color or gender or any lady parts. I will tell you this, as a practical matter, the woke ism, you know, we've talked about this, but I, we pulled our kids out of the New York city private schools because they went so hard left on the woke ism and the, the divisive messaging. And I just heard an update on the boys' school that we left. They're no longer referring to the boys as boys.

They're no longer calling the boy. It's an all boys' school. They no longer say your sons. They just say your child, children your individual and one of the parents recognized this you know they didn't announce it but one of the parents recognized this during like a grade-wide zoom and called up one of the administrators after the fact to say is this is this by design right like i've noticed the absence of son or boy and the guy owned it and he claimed he inherited it from the previous head of school, which is a lie. He owned it. They're not going to call the boys boys anymore at one of the oldest and most prestigious boys K through 12 schools in the country. Yeah, it's almost unbelievable because

we all grew up with the idea that the Chinese Maoist system or the Russian system where you had you could no longer call anybody anything other than comrade. Everybody became a comrade. Or in the Chinese system, when you embarrass somebody, you wore a cone and you sat in the corner where everybody laughed at you. You were an enemy of the people. Why would we emulate these systems that are anti-liberal, that are destructive, they're nihilistic, they're anarchic. To be inclusive, to be kind, to be non-bullying, to be right. That's the answer you get, right? It's the mere use of the term boy is somehow offensive. Use of the term breastfeed is

offensive. Use of the term woman is now offensive. But, and then I don't want to keep being reductionistly cynical, but you get the impression that the people who are implementing these ideas from on high are worried about their own careers. They have no knowledge of history or language or what's good or bad. They just were told the prevailing ideological agenda is critical race theory. I better, for my own protection or my own advancement or my own career, I better adopt it. The only positive thing about that, Megan, is that we can defeat it. And because they have no ideological allegiance to anything other than themselves, if you get just a scenario, if you would get a huge change in the House in the midterms, as in 2010 or 1994 or 1938, or take back the Senate, and there was this clear expression of these protests against school boards, that would be

the prevailing win. Then these people would change on a dime because they would be at odds, and that's because they're cynical and they don't really believe in anything i mean there are hardcore ideologue but that's not the majority they would have no power they amplify their power because they control social media entertainment hollywood k-12 academia wall street uh the media in general but they don't have a majority support. But if we could convince people in those institutions that it's not in your interest if you're in the NBA to lose all of your American audience, or we're going to really criticize you for doing business with an autocratic China, or we're going to take our children out of your Tony school or the public schools, or we're going to

look at homeschooling or charter school, then I think they would make the necessary adjustments. At least the majority would. They wouldn't follow these very cynical, and they are cynical, as we said. Patrice Quellars is cynical. Kendi is cynical. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was sort of the architect early on about wokeism, he's making a fortune translating African-American

focused comic books into screenplay movies. So he's a big believer in capitalism and money and upward mobility and et cetera, et cetera. They all are. And I think people need to point that out, that the people they're hurting are the people who are in the inner city and they don't have access to a curriculum that improves their grammar, their knowledge of history and inductive thinking that wouldn't allow them to be competitive. They're almost the foot soldiers in this that are terribly used and manipulated by the elite. Well, this is where we're going to pick it up because I want to ask you on the subject of will people rise up in the midterms to push back against this? Will there be some resounding message? It's pretty interesting that today the news is that the Attorney General Merrick Garland has just ordered federal law enforcement authorities to confer with local leaders on how to address harassment,

intimidation and threats against educators and school board members. Maybe they don't like what they're seeing in these viral videos. Is it really about threats or is it about parents just expressing their consternation? We'll get to that. We'll get to Millie. We'll get to Fauci. As we continue our talk with Victor Davis Hanson, author of the new book, The Dying Citizen. Don't go away. so courtesy of politico the reporting today is that uh not long after less than a week after the national school boards association pressed joe biden for federal assistance to review whether violence and threats against public school officials could be considered a form of

domestic terrorism and hate crimes we get news that our Attorney General Merrick Garland is ordering federal law enforcement authorities to, quote, huddle with local leaders in the coming weeks to address what the nation's top prosecutor called a recent disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against educators and school board members. No one wants to see threats, intimidation, or harassment of school board members, No one wants to see threats, intimidation or harassment of school board members. But the question is, obviously, what are they going to categorize as threatening behavior or harassing behavior? We've already had reports of a lot of these school board meetings being made private. Now, you're not allowed to videotape what happens, because parents are finding a way

to be heard. And the school boards don't like it. Yeah. I mean, you see these clips and the people who are asking for explanations and clarifications, they're usually pretty polite and they're making all these rules, as you say, that you have to even live in the district or people are going to the extent of renting a home just so they can speak. And, you know, look at the asymmetry, Megan, that we just talked about, a left-wing political action group that went in and broke the law and filmed a U.S. senator while she was attending to herself in a bathroom stall and then went on a plane and harassed her at a time of increased tensions and air travel, and nobody

said a word. This whole DOJ has been so politicized. We see it with these, even at the local and city and municipal level, with all these DOJs that will not follow the law. And I think the leftists, once they get in control, I think people really don't understand that this is not the Democratic Party. This is a hardcore, not even progressive, they are hardcore leftists and they believe that any means necessary are justified by their utopian ends and they will do almost anything. And I think Marilyn Garland is politicizing the DOJ that's coming off a politicalization under Obama's, as we saw with everybody from Bruce Ohr and Loretta Lynch. And so they feel it's an arm of the progressive war,

the ideological struggle for utopia, and they're willing to use the DOJ in a political fashion. And it's like, what are these parents objecting to? The wokefication of the schools, critical race theory, and masks, and and mandatory vaccines and school closures. And, you know, just the government overreach that we've seen as this pandemic wanes and the refusal to acknowledge it. So I want to get to Fauci in one second, but let me let me not leave. Let me not get to that without sticking with General Milley. I do think his his woke-ification, his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and then his testimony last week about subverting President Trump, essentially saying I had the permission of the acting defense secretary and I didn't do anything that wasn't in the normal course of business. admitting that he's basically deep throat for Bob Woodward, among other reporters at every turn. I

don't know when he had time to actually come up with any plans to get out of Afghanistan because he was dealing with the press so often. But what do you make of General Milley and sort of the way he's emerged over the past few months? Well, he's kind of emblematic, emblematic or iconic of all of these pathologies we talked about and I kind of talked about in the book, I mean, he violated the statute, Uniform Code of Military Justice says that no high-ranking officer can disparage the commander-in-chief. Now, we've seen that routinely broken, but when he told a journalist that Donald Trump emulated Mein Kampf, Hitlerian tactics, he violated that. And the 1947, 53, and 2006 Goldwater-Nichols specifies in an increasingly restricted fashion that the chairman of the Joint Chief is an advisor. He has no operational

command. So General Milley comes along and says, ha, I'm an operational officer because I'm interpreting a conversation from the opposition leader, Nancy Pelosi, who thinks Donald Trump is dangerous. I agree with her. So I'm going to change the operation of the nuclear chain of command as far as nuclear weapons. I'm going to tell them the protocol has to go through me now. I'm in the chain. That's a violation of the statute. And then he goes back to the statute and says, I'm not responsible for Afghanistan. I'm only the chairman of the Joint Chief. I'm not in that operational command. And as you say, he says, the duty of the chair of the Joint Chief is to meet with the media. And then we're supposed

to equate that with getting on the record and disclosing confidential conversations with political military leaders that favor yourself. And then remember when he said that he had to apologize for the photo op he did with Donald Trump in June of 2020. And Donald Trump was accused of militarizing Washington and clearing out Lafayette Square with tear gas. And he was very political. He leaked to his supporters, I might resign, promises, promises. But the inspector general, the interior department found that to be absolutely false, that whole scenario.

And he didn't really object to the use of military to quell civil disturbance because he was a big supporter of putting 25,000 troops in Washington after January 6th. And they sat there and there was no threat there and no existential threat. So I think it's time for him to go on about every, he's violated the law. He called our existential enemy, and it is an enemy, the Communist Party's People Liberation Army, and warned them that if he, General Milley, felt that there was a problem in the

United States, in his opinion, that he would warn them of aggression and be sort of like a chief of naval operations in World War II in November, calling up Admiral Yamamoto and saying, you know, Franklin Roosevelt's not as well as everybody thinks. And we were very punitive about that embargo. And if they might want to start a war with you, but I will call you if we think that the fleet's going to go out in Pearl Harbor. That's ridiculous. And we're in such a crazy, surreal time that we've lost our sense of proportion because in normal times we would say, be gone. We would say what they said to all of our crime. We've done with you. Get out. And so he should resign. He should have resigned immediately.

Just as an aside, because you mentioned the tear gas, I saw something in one of your recent pieces that I didn't know about Beverly Hills and tear gas. Yeah. Can you tell us about that? Well, I mean, when the woke people and the BLM and the Antifa marchers got wise and they felt, why are we going into the working class areas and the downtown areas of Los Angeles when the capitalist insects, as they see them, are all associated in Beverly Hills? We're going to go up there. And they were met, if you saw the pictures, with tear gas, and they were met with a phalanx of shields, and they didn't get very far. And they didn't press it because they were also given, you know, friendly advice that the people in Beverly Hills, some of them at least, were on their side. So that was ended. If you notice something that for supposedly a ground-up revolutionary

moment, they go in and attack downtown, they attack working classes, they burn down during those 120 days of riot and looting and arson, et cetera, they burn down the working class, but they did not go into the very wealthy, wealthy areas. And I think they knew that there might have been a more muscular police response. And those very, very wealthy people had avenues of exercising their influence that affected them. And so they were very selective in who they attacked and whom they didn't. I must have missed the headline about the Beverly Hills tear gas, because that's just that's so emblematic of of what's wrong with America right now. You know, the whatever one fake story about it and one real story about it that gets absolutely no coverage.

All right. Dr. Fauci and covid. A couple of items in covid news today. First, it breaks today that Louisiana is going to charge workers extra money if their spouses or domestic partners choose to remain unvaccinated. I think the report was as much as a hundred bucks a paycheck. They're going to withdraw extra if your domestic partner doesn't get the vaccine because they say, you know, we employ you and it costs a lot to take care of an unvaccinated person who winds up in the hospital and therefore you're going to have to pay more. I mean, so once again, it's like, how about if my domestic partner is obese? How about if my domestic partner is an alcoholic? How about if they're a drug addict? You know, it's no, it's just the COVID unvaxxed irrespective of whether

they have natural immunity and have had COVID. And on top of this, Dr. Grinch, I mean, Fauci comes out. He's tried to walk it back since because he got a lot of flack for it but he's he told cbs over the weekend it's too soon to say whether we're going to be able to have christmas gatherings he's then he said it was misconstrued it was like well that you know you're on camera anyway uh that it was too soon for christmas gatherings and you tell me whether he's in denial that this pandemic thank god seems to be finally waning. Yeah, he is because the irony is, and there's a lot of ironies with him, that he doesn't follow the science. Because if you do the math of the number of people who have been vaccinated, it's well in the high 50s.

And if you do the math of people who've had COVID, I know there's overlap between the two groups, it's up to over 100 million. So we're getting to that 65 to 75% that either have antibodies or vaccinations. So the number of people becoming seriously ill has peaked, but he's not interested in that. And I say that not emotionally, but empirically, because remember, from the very beginning, he told us that masks would not be valuable, but then one mask would, but two masks might be better. That herd immunity would kick in at 60, but maybe 70, but maybe 80 or 90. But there was no way that this virus was engineered in a lab. It was naturally

occurring from bats or pangolins, but maybe it may not or may be, but he would never give money to the Wuhan lab, but he did, and he routed it through Echo Health. But it was not a gain of function. But in fact, if you read the description of the Chinese grant, it obviously was. So he doesn't have a lot of credibility. So what is he doing? And what is the theme that we see? And I think the biggest problem he's had before I answer that question, Megan, is that he cannot answer when he's asked. The science now suggests that if you've had COVID, you will have a natural level of antibodies that might offer superior protection than artificially from a vaccination. And therefore, could we develop

a sophisticated antibody test so you could either choose one or the other? He can't answer that. He just says, well, we'll look into it. So what unites all these contradictory things? I think he's a practitioner of what the noble lie is, and that is an elite who feels that if he tells the truth, the unwashed or the uneducated will do what he doesn't want them to. So if he says, well, you can, if you have natural immunity, don't get vaccinated because you don't need to, then people might wait and not get vaccinated and thinking they might have a better chance of getting, you know, less side effects from the virus. Or he might think if he doesn't tell people that masks are valuable at first, then they won't go out and buy them. And then the medical practitioners will have enough. He said that. But he's always changing the story to what he thinks will be good for all of

us in his particular view. And he's lost now all credibility. He too is like Millie. He should be gone. He's not doing his job and he's casting doubt and he can't tell us the questions that people have that you mentioned that they're angry they say things like well i have a is it true or is it not that somebody under 12 is either not as likely to get the virus or if they get the virus will not have serious consequences or if somebody's 18 to 24 and a healthy male, or the side effects, maybe swelling, cardio swelling, or something like that is about as serious as the side effects from getting the virus. Or if you've had the virus, and you get a shot, you have a higher propensity for side effects. And if you look at his logic, it's absolutely Alice in Wonderland. He says,

well, even if you've had COVID, you've got to get the vaccination, even though the vaccination is not as prophylactic as getting the virus. And if you take that upside down, you would say, okay, so you need two sources of immunity. You need double indemnity. Okay, Dr. Fauci, everybody who's got the vaccination, since you want double protection, and we know it's not as effective as COVID, should they go out and take the mask off and be around people so they can not only get COVID, but get the vaccination? Because that's what you're saying. And it doesn't make any sense. And I think he's lost credibility. And I think he's going to end up like Ruth Bader Ginsburg tragically did.

And Robert Mueller, remember, they're both for a while. They were representatives of the they made they romanticize them. They made them into icons, movie stars. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was standing against the court. Robert Mueller was going to hold Trump to account. And then suddenly Mueller found nothing. And they said, oh, Bob Mueller was a joke. And then Ruth Bader Ginsburg wouldn't step off the court. And she lost the liberal slot and they got angry at her. And that's what the fickle left does.

And I think they're going to find that when Fauci is no longer useful, that he won't be St. Fauci with bubblehead dolls and cartoons and all that stuff about him. So what's going to force states like yours, California, and my former state as of a couple of weeks ago, New York, and the state I'm in now, Connecticut, to be honest about where we are when it comes to the pandemic, take off the masks, get rid of these mandatory masks in the schools, and heaven forbid, ease up on the mandatory vaccinations and stop firing 1,400 healthcare workers in states like New York

because they won't. What is it going to take for them to admit that we're not back to normal because that's not realistic anymore, but that we're at the endemic stage of this thing and we should be able to go about our lives without government putting its thumb on us at every turn? I think nature is the answer. Nature has a law of its own.

And nature basically says that when X number of people have some sort of immunity, they either don't get sick or they don't get sick in a fashion that hurts them permanently. And we're getting to that point. If you look at the statistics, I don't really look at the statistics of how many cases, but the statistics of death, even in places where there's a high caseload. I mean, I've been vaccinated, you've been vaccinated, but we may have had a case and we don't even know it. And so if we had been tested, we thought we had a cold, then we would be a statistic of a growing pandemic. But I think we're starting to see now that the number of people who have been vaccinated and the number of people who have had COVID is reaching a point where it's starting to decline, and it's starting to decline fast. And the second thing, Megan, I think it's very important. We have forgotten medical treatments for this virus. We put all of our psychological energy in vaccination, but Merck is coming out with a drug that they think can limit it to one or two days of symptoms. We know from experience that vitamin D, zinc, even some supplements may mitigate some

of the symptoms. People outside of the official channels are taking things and they're doing things, whether it's, you know, taking a lot of zinc or vitamin D, and I won't mention the dreaded ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, but other things. They are doing studies on ivermectin. Yeah. We know that monoclonal antibodies and other drugs can save people from dying. So we're catching up to the morbidity of the virus. And that always happens in science. And so science is taking care of it. And I think once that's clear, what's going to happen is the authoritarians are going to get desperate and get even doubled down. And the more they double down and they're at odds with science, the more ridiculous they're

going to become. They're at odds with science now. And it's very ironic because remember, they told us they were the party and they were the establishment of science. Yeah. In so many ways. And we would talk about this yesterday when it comes to the trans situation. They're very much at odds with science. But let me ask you about politics for a minute, because now the buzz in Republican circles is who's going to be the I know it's always off, but, you know, it's never too early to start talking presidential politics.

Is it going to be Trump? Is it going to be DeSantis? Is it going to be Pompeo? Like, who is the likely standard bearer going to be on the GOP side to take on? We have no idea on the Democratic side. We genuinely, I think, don't know right now since Biden's promised to be a one-term president and it does not appear from any single poll that Kamala Harris has any chance of winning the presidency. So I don't know what the Democrats are going to do. But what do you make of whether Trump should run again is a big question. There was a pullout the other day saying DeSantis and he were pulling evenly.

Trump said, I'll beat him. And Trump's definitely saber rattling that he's going to get back into it. What are your thoughts on whether that's a good idea? Well, I think whatever whoever is the Republican nominee, we're not going to go back to the Mitt Romney Republican elitist party that could not win. And so I think there will be the Republican Party represents the upper middle, the middle and the lower middle classes. Now, it's not the rich and the poor like the Democratic Party. And I do think that getting tough with China and getting tough and legal only immigration and worrying about the interior of the country and industrialization and manufacturing assembly, we can do that.

All of those issues and conservative justice won't go away. So the question really boils down to, we've seen Donald Trump and we haven't seen DeSantis, and they seem to be the two. Is DeSantis going to be as effective as he sounds like, that he has the Trump agenda without the downside of the tweets and the polarization? Or is he going to be sort of like Governor Scott Walker, an ideal candidate, we thought, but when he got up on the debate stage, he was less than inspiring. So that's the known

unknown. We don't know. And we don't know what Donald Trump will be like, not when he's, you know, 72 or three, but when he's 78. And we don't know what he's going to be like in three years. And we really applaud his agenda. But sometimes people say, you know, and I've said that a couple of times. My criticisms were the debt. We spent way too much money under Trump. We borrowed four or five trillion dollars. And then my other criticism is that getting angry does not mean getting even. And what I mean by that, Megan, if he had put his arm around Anthony Fauci months ago and said Anthony Fauci did a lot of human service for this country. He's run the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wonderfully. And he's really given me advice, but at 80 years old, he's deserved a well-merited retirement. He will be leaving. But instead he kept them, but yet he tweeted things like, well, he does those like a girl. you combine the both the worst of both worlds. You insult somebody, but you don't always get rid of the right people, the right-wrong people quick enough.

And he was buried by them. And he didn't understand the nature of the deep state, I think, or administrative state or permanent government. But, you know, that said, Donald Trump is chemotherapy. He attacked the cancer effectively, but the side effects were such that we don't know whether that was always going to happen, that to take on this stuff we've talked about today, media, corporations, foundations, academia, that you have to be so toxic that you polarize people? And could Donald Trump have been less toxic and survived the onslaught when he's still been able? Can DeSantis get 50,000 people at a rally? I don't know those answers. But I feel that there's people who want the Trump agenda, but maybe they would like Trump to evolve into a position of senior statesman or kingmaker or something. You really saw that very briefly.

And some people from the White House called me and I said, right after the election, you're not going to change the election, but we're going to get socialism because we have two unimpressive conservatives in Georgia, and they have two charismatic socialists, and they're going to win that election. And then we're sunk. So you've got to get Donald Trump down there and rally everybody to come out to vote. And then you've got to have him as a senior statesman barnstorming the country to win the House. But instead, he went down there and talked about all the grievances of the past election. And that made people lose confidence in the election integrity in Georgia. And some didn't come out to vote. Some got turned off. And that was a needless loss. And that really put us in the

dire straits that we are today. This is this is why you're so brilliant. Donald Trump is chemotherapy. I haven't heard that before that. Yes, that brings it home, right? Like you've got to have toxicity injected into the host to fix it. But that doesn't mean there aren't going to be some very negative side effects. Victor Davis Hanson, such a pleasure and honor as always. The new book is called The Dying Citizen. It is out today. You've got to read it and read everything Victor writes. Well worth your time. Great to see you. Thank you for Megan for having me on. Up next, I'm really looking forward to this segment too, wanting to talk about Carlos Watson. He came on this show.

I've been on his show. Then I find out, is half of his business, is all of his business a fraud? The guy who first broke the story about subterfuge with Goldman Sachs and impersonating a YouTube executive is Ben Smith of The New York Times. He's here next. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly show. Joining me now is media columnist for the New York Times, Ben Smith. Ben broke the story that kicked off the downfall of Aussie media last week and of Carlos Watson, who has been a guest on this program and who we have invited on again to explain some of the claims about deception of investors and

more, though he has not accepted our request. He actually hasn't gotten back to us at all. Though he was on CNBC and the Today Show yesterday, so he put himself out there, Ben. First of all, I mean, amazing reporting. So I've got to hats off to you because what turned out to be like a barn burner of a column turned into the collapse of a media company, which I don't think many people saw coming. Carlos came on our show and I repeated claims I'd read in the media about their amazing numbers at the traffic on the website, on his YouTube show, on his podcasts. And you have reason to believe that those were overstated in addition to this out and out fraud that appears to have been committed on Goldman Sachs as it was considering investing $40 million into Aussie

just this past February. Let's start with that big headline on what happened last February. Carlos's number two guy, Samir Rao, who's a COO. And that's, by the way, the guy who Abby has been talking to whenever they book me. That's the guy who contacts her, my assistant. She said she feels personally betrayed. But tell us what he did. Well, what happened was Goldman Sachs, I think, was fairly close to an investment. They'd been having great conversations and was trying to sort of basically, as part of their due diligence, talk to some partners, talk to a bunch of partners. I think YouTube was among the last partners they were going to talk to and get on the phone with a guy, with a person that the Aussie folks tell them is a guy from YouTube. And at some point, the call is weird and they reach out to YouTube and the voice sounds weird. And they reach out to YouTube and

say, Hey, was this, we, I wanted to follow up on our conversation. And the actual YouTube executive says, you know, what conversation? We never talked, which kicks off an investigation at YouTube, which turns it over to the FBI. And subsequently, Carlos Watson then says, well, it wasn't actually a YouTube executive. It was my partner, Samir Rao, impersonating a YouTube executive, which he chalked up to a mental health crisis it's crazy and they stood by him so they i never read anything more specific about what they did with the ceo samir rao for his to address this mental health he took time off although the employees i talked to don't recall him taking time off i mean has he gotten specific with you on what the mental health issue was yeah Yeah, yeah, they've discussed it. They see it. They said he had a specific condition. And there were some issues with his medication. I haven't

seen any records or anything. I think that the thing that I mean, you know, who knows, I'm not trying to I don't I don't know. I think that the problem with this story is just that. I mean, obviously, a lot of people struggle with with struggle with mental illness and don't commit alleged securities fraud. And, and this was really was very much part of a pattern of specifically lying about their relationship with YouTube. Yeah, Carlos had sent an email to somebody a couple a month or two earlier that they had sold a show So YouTube has its own, it has a separate section called YouTube originals, and that's where they put their own money behind your show and bring you over to YouTube. And Carlos had, had told people that they were going to do that for his show. And it turns out that's, that's not true. He, that YouTube has gone on record with you saying there was never a YouTube original show for Carlos. Right. And so this, this deception in this phone call really was part of a broader pattern of the company misleading people, particularly about its

relationship with YouTube. I mean, there were also, there were signs up all over the plate, all over New York and LA that said in Chicago that said, you know, fastest growing show on you, fastest growing talk show on YouTube. And I mean, it's not, you know, that's not an official category. There are lots of people talking on YouTube, but there's just no reason that wasn't true at all. What would happen was either organizations like yours, the New York Times could find no evidence that quote ever appearing in your paper, or it would be this guy Samir Rao again, saying to Variety, Carlos Watson is on fire or something like that. And they would attribute it to Variety instead of a guy who actually works at Ozzy, who was just pumping the company. Yeah, it was pretty remarkable. I mean, the other one was, um, right. There were, there were different ways that they also, they didn't interview with good morning America. And maybe this, when you interviewed Carlos too, where they provided a bunch of stats and the good morning America host says, wow, it seems like Ozzy is doing great. Like sort of as a question when he's reading the statistics that they've given him. And then sure enough, Ozzy is doing great. Oh my gosh. I've never looked up to see whether my quotes were used. I certainly hope not. But

I want to go through a couple of them, Ben, because Carlos came out yesterday and in a really bold, brash move, told CNBC and told the Today Show, I'm back. On Friday, you reported they're closing the company. I mean, less than a week after your original report about the fraud and the impersonation of the YouTube exec. Then it comes out they're overstating their numbers when it comes to their newsletter, when it comes to their online traffic, when it comes to their YouTube views and so on. Just to name a few of the problems. And they say we're closing. Then Monday, he comes on NBC properties and says, we're back open. We're back in business in my Lazarus moment, reference to the figure in the Bible resurrected by Jesus. And this is my Tylenol moment. Tylenol was brought down or suffered a major crisis in 82 when somebody put cyanide in their capsules, but it wasn't them. It wasn't Tylenol. I'm not sure you can say this is a Tylenol moment when

it's you and your COO behind the problems. And I want to go through a couple of them, because he's really trying to downplay everything, Ben, he said, first of all, YouTube, it happened, but I wasn't there. It's heartbreaking. It wasn't okay. Sumer did this, but it was a mental health episode, and I wasn't on the call. Okay. Then there was a guy who is Brad Bessie, who was brought in to be his executive producer of his show. And you tell us what Brad Bessie's complaint was. So Brad was a very experienced TV producer. He'd run Entertainment Tonight, and I think he started The Talk and ran that for a bit.

And loved the idea of the Carlos Watson show and went to work for it and was told, we're launching on A&E next month. This is last summer. And they're all scrambling. And then finally, it's strange. It's unusual. was told we're launching on A&E next month. This is last summer. And they're all scrambling. And then finally, it's strange. It's unusual. Typically, the executive producer would be talking to somebody at the network just to sort of figure out what exactly they want. And Carlos and Samir would never put him in touch with anybody from the network.

So finally, he reached out to a friend at the network and said, hey, look forward to getting the show on the air. And they said, what show? And it turned out they had passed on the show months earlier so carlos's defense yesterday they were hiring people and particularly they were booking celebrity guests saying yes come on this hot new talk show on a and e not come on a youtube video we're going to post to youtube carlos had a defense they were telling advertisers other things i have a document where they sold a million dollar advertising campaign to the American Family Insurance Company. And one was with Andrew Sorkin, Becky Quick over on Squawk Box.

And this, I have to tip my hat. I have criticized Sorkin in the past just because he's been snarky about me, to be perfectly honest. But he did a great job in that. That's a great reason. You know how it is, Ben. He did a great job in that interview yesterday with Carlos. I was very impressed.

And here he is asking Watson about the A&E claim, about whether there was ever an A&E deal. Listen. The company had represented at one point that your show was going to appear originally on A&E, by the way, represented to me because I appeared on your show. And to appear originally on A&E. By the way, it represented to me because I appeared on your show. And when I first got that email from the producer, it said this show was going to be on A&E with 95 million households. So lots of miscommunication in that. But I want to clarify that one because I think that that was definitely one where we lost a lot of trust. We originally conceived the show with A&E. And as the summer moved on, we realized that they were on a different timetable than we were.

And so we shifted to YouTube. The executive producer that you hired believed that he was making a show for A&E. And in fact, suggested on the record in the New York Times this week or last week that the show that every time he was told that he wanted to call someone at A&E, he was told effectively not to. You know, I don't know about that, but I have to say this. I made a really bad decision last week and I didn't respond to your text. I didn't respond to text lots of other people I know. And he went on to say, you know, I should have not gone quiet. I should have defended myself.

But you tell me whether it's true, as he claimed yesterday, A&E's timing just didn't work for, for them. And that's why his show never aired on A&E. No, it didn't air because they had already said no. So once again, on his rehabilitation tour, he appears to not be, not be coming out straight with it. Then his, then he allegedly said, uh, so claims Brad Bessie that, you know what? It's going to be a YouTube original. The show is going to be a YouTube original. And YouTube spoke to you. They said what?

Just, I mean, you know, that it wasn't a YouTube original. And honestly, if you look at YouTube originals, they don't they don't do news. They don't do talk shows like that. It was not a possible path. Carlos yesterday denied that, said I didn't lie about YouTube originals. I never claimed that it was that it was going to be on the YouTube original. And then Sorkin on CNBC said, I was personally told that I was told after, you know, when I said, hey, how come I'm not going to be on A&E? Somebody on your team told me, oh, now it's going to be a YouTube original. And Carlos said, well, I hope that was just a mix up. OK, so we go from it's heartbreaking. It's not OK about the YouTube call. You know,

I'm sorry, but it's a one off. Now we're back on the, we're back on the A&E misleading and the YouTube original. Well, I hope it was just a mix up. Then you've got, um, the newsletter they claimed Ozzy told Axios that had more than 20 million subscribers to its newsletters. Now it says 26 million. Can you just put that perspective for us? Does anybody have 20? Like what, what does a successful newsletter company have in subscribers? I mean, you know, for instance, Morning Brew, which is this very successful sort of newsletter centric company has about 3 million, the New York Times, which is a big media organization with a big newsletter, morning newsletter has about 5 million. Wow, I think they do have hundreds

of 1000s, maybe a million people opening that newsletter that they also have hundreds of thousands maybe a million people opening that newsletter they um they also have internal correspondence where they're telling essentially telling each other don't allow anyone to unsubscribe i mean there are all sorts of actually laws around you can't just keep spamming people with your newsletter that they ignored and and they acquired they didn't nobody very few people signed up for ozzy i've heard from a lot, a lot of people who said, wow, thanks for that story. It explains this random newsletter I've been getting for years. A couple, by the way, I had, I think, two emails that said, this newsletter came out, this weird newsletter came out of nowhere, but I kind of like it. There are some people, certainly, who like the product, but, you know, not a lot.

Like, I think one thing you'll notice on the internet now is there's not sort of a, a, you know, cadre of Aussie heads out there saying, how could you malign this company whose content we really love? And I think that's kind of a tell in itself. Well, I I'm a speaker myself. I really liked Carlos. I never really was a big Aussie media consumer, but I liked him. And, um, it's sad. I kept my mouth shut about it for the first week or so because I just I wasn't sure what was what. Right. It's like you don't want to see a guy, you know, and like Paul, media executive going out on his own person of color, which, of course, plays into this in terms of the advertisers, the investors really wanting to get behind him and

back him and see him succeed. But this is not good. And the facts that you continue to report and others now, too, they're not good. And the newsletter he was asked about on CNBC yesterday and Sorkin said to him, hey, you know, you're claiming you get, what, 26 million newsletter subscribers. That doesn't seem real. You claim you have a 25 percent open rate, like that's the percentage of your subscribers who are actually opening, which is good. You put that in a deck for your series D investment where you're seeking money from investors. And Carlos responded to him, oh no, no, 25% open rate only amongst our

best, most regular people. I hope that's what it was just for our best, most regular people. And Sorkin followed up. We'll just play the soundbite. Let me just play the soundbite and I'll get your response. Sorkin followed up. Oh, this play the soundbite. Let me just play the soundbite and I'll get your response. Sorkin followed up. This is soundbite number 12 saying that's not true either. Watch. I asked you about the email opens before and I'm looking at the deck. I'll show it to you right here. 25 percent email opens as the email average, 25 percent open rate, two times, 2.5 times industry and 3 percent CTR. It doesn't have a star next to it that says just the people who are actively engaged with you in some way. You know, I need to look at that more closely, but let's make sure that we do something here, which is that I don't want, if you and I looked

at any small company or any large company, we would find a handful of things that aren't great. Just to be really clear, we would find it. And just because something is sloppy or stupid doesn't mean it's illegal. Your thoughts on that, Ben? I mean, I do think that the question Andrew's asking, which is basically, you know, in some sense is, did you commit securities fraud, is going to wind up being the central question here. The first lawsuit hit, I think, yesterday. We just reported that a money manager in Los Angeles who'd invested $2 million of their client's money sued, basically saying that the failure to disclose this incident with Goldman was itself securities fraud.

You can't just go raising money for a company that has this massive skeleton in its closet and not tell potential investors. And they raised more than $30 million, at least $30 million in this year after the incident with Goldman. And I think you're going to see those investors try to get their money back. And I think that's going to make it very hard for the company to operate going forward the there were questions about the youtube numbers overstated traffic um there that they were paying for views he defended that saying you know there's nothing misleading about us doing that um you know lots of people pump the numbers like for people for internet nerds that's an important point they were not fake views on youtube it's the

issue was that there was no organic fan base for the show if you want the people who were watching the carlos washington show were watching it because it was airing as a pre-roll ad before the thing you were actually trying to watch carlos says like those are great views those are views those are people we paid to reach that's how much we love our audience we pay to reach them it is a unconventional i would, interpretation of how video works. Yeah. I mean, they're claiming that they were reaching millions and millions of people. And what your reporting shows is that they'd have a video that had one million views, just a small number of comments.

And that shows that this is a views, just a small number of comments. And that's that shows that this is a paid, boosted viewing, I will note for the record, I have never paid a dime for this company to get a YouTube view or any sort of traffic anyplace else. And if you look at I just look by comparison, my site, there's a video we did the other week that has 1.1 million views. It's got 8,415 comments. That's the kind of numbers you would expect to see if you have real live people actually watching. Yeah. As opposed to like a kid on her parents' account who's watching Peppa Pig and suddenly there's Carlos Watson and she doesn't know how to skip it, which is often what pre-roll is. Yeah. So he's asked about

all of this yesterday. And one of the things that they asked him about, because he had claimed on CNBC that Sharon Osbourne was an investor, Sharon and Ozzy, who sued him because Ozzy Fest is very close to Oz Fest, something they put on. And he had said that. And then Sharon Osbourne came out yesterday and she said, oh, this guy's a liar. You know, it's not true. We're not. No, I've got nothing to do with him. And I want to cue this up for you, Ben, because in an incredible twist, Carlos denied to Andrew Sorkin that he ever called Sharon Osbourne a friend. And Andrew was zeroing in on the dismissal because he had earlier said, oh, and she's an investor. Turns out, well, they got in a lawsuit and she wasn't a real investor. They gave her

some shares as part of the settlement. So you can't run around saying, oh, she's an investor, like she gave me money. All right. So this is the point Andrew's trying to raise with Carlos. You said she was a friend. You said she was an investor. Listen to Carlos deny that he ever called her a friend. And then we went back to the original CNBC segment that Sorkin was raising to show you who was telling the truth. Watch this. Sharon Osbourne, you made a comment on this program, by the way, saying that she was a friend and investor in the I didn't say she was friend. I think we can probably go back and get, you know, play the tape that please go ahead and play the economy. I didn't say she was a friend. I think we can probably go back and get the tape. You know what? Play the tape then. Please go ahead and play the tape. I don't know if we have the tape. You know what? Cue up the tape. This is an Obama-Romney moment. Cue up the

tape. Show me the tape. Ozzy's the name of our larger media company named after a great poem 200 years ago. But fun fact, our friend Ozzy and Sharon sued us briefly. Did they? And then we decided to be friends and now they're investors in Ozzy. It's spelled differently. Oh, they're investors now. Now they're investors or part of the family. Not once but twice he called her a friend. He said that they are investors. He didn't disclose how they became investors.

I mean, to me, that was so indicative, Ben. It's just a pattern. It's a pattern of lying when you don't have to, being deceptive or certainly not dealing in actual fact, to try to make your company and yourself sound and look better than you are. Yeah, I do think the central question going forward is going to be to what extent they did that to investors, because that's where it becomes securities fraud rather than lying on television, which is apparently not a crime.

You know, when he came on my podcast, it's now makes me sad. There was an interesting moment where I asked him about character and listen to what he said. This soundbite six. I want to learn how you're thinking, how you came to that,

what you do with that. Would you ever consider something else? Like who moves you you and you're always going to end up being surprised right like you know and and and if you if you stay in it and you're just with the person they're going to share something that reminds you that most of us are contradictions right that um uh what did uh dr king used to he loved that quote that there was a famous quote, you say, there's enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue.

Right. And I think very few of us are only one thing or the other. It's sad. It's sad to see this happen. I will say I want to give you the chance to respond. He's taken aim at you. He said Ben Smith shouldn't be allowed to report on me. He offered me $225 million for my company a few years ago when he was running BuzzFeed. And this think that's, it's not really, it's not really all that relevant to the story. I wasn't, I was not privy to a deal that he was talking about with Buzzfeed around the time I was leaving. You weren't involved in that at all. I sent a two sentence email introducing him to my boss on my boss's request. That was, that was my involvement. I mean, the real question is whether this stuff is true, right? Even if you did have an ax to grind. And I I mean, yeah, I don't and I don't even understand how that's supposed to amount to some kind of vendetta. But I you know, I don't think

he's, it's his right to say what he wants. Do you? Do you think they actually could come back at this point? The investors bailed the advertisers bailed? Is this just puffery with him out there saying we're back? We're, you know, we're not, you know, the question is going to be whether the people who put money in after this Goldman Sachs incident are going to be able to get it back. I think if you have a court say, sorry, you got to give all the money back and liquidate your company, that'll make it very hard to go forward. I don't know what courts will say, but the first lawsuit was just filed. And who's who will be the advertisers and who would invest at this point seeing the pattern? Listen, the the your reporting has been unbelievably detailed and well supported. And, you know, it is sad overall, but it's also kind of maddening. I just, I don't know, Ben, maybe I'm too gullible, but I, I believed it. And I think a lot of people believed it. He had a lot of well known investors, a lot well-known people go on the shows. And I don't know, I'll give you the last word on what this story says about all of us. I think that at least for those of us in the media business,

it's worth spending a little more time, you know, just like in reality, because you run into people at the sort of highest levels of the media business who make claims about what's happening. But actually, it's a public business, like talk know talk to people you know and if you haven't heard of something and you're a normal person who consumes media it's possible but it's like not as big as it says it is um it's one thing to go up here on the show it's another to invest your money yeah and and to your point i mean you've been good about pointing out 75 people are out of a job now. It's not just the investors who have, you know, a lot of money. People like Lorraine Jobs or Steve Jobs Widow. It's real people who are depending taking your calls. Love to know your thoughts on anything. Did you listen to the Carlos Watson interview when I did it? Gosh, you remember that? I feel like such conflicting feelings about the whole thing. Love to know any of your thoughts on Stossel's lawsuit, on Victor Davis Hanson, the genius, on Ozzy. Call me. 833-444-MEGYN, 833-446-3496. You know, you guys were up against it because we went a little long because we packed 20 pounds of potatoes

into the 10 pound bag today in the show. So we're not going to be able to squeeze in the calls, but I just, you know, I have to tell you, one of the things that has been so great about launching this show and having a direct relationship with you guys and me being the CEO of my own media company is that everything is authentic. I mean, I would never do what

they did. He's describing it as smart. I would never pay for false views or fake pop-ups or any of that nonsense. I think the relationship is authentic, warts and all, right? I'm not perfect. I don't get everything right, but I try. And I think this is the future of media, developing a relationship with somebody who you trust, right? And severing relationships with those you don't. Tomorrow, we're going to pick it back up with COVID. We've got Josh Rogan of The Washington Post back. He's been doing great reporting. Plus Scott Gottlieb, former head of the FDA. That'll be fun. Download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify and Stitcher and watch us on YouTube.com slash Megyn Kelly. All views are real.

See you tomorrow.