The Megyn Kelly Show - The Rise of Threats Against the Supreme Court Justices and Leaker Latest with Sen. Ted Cruz, Rich Lowry & Michael Knowles | Ep. 315

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by National Review’s Rich Lowry to discuss progressive activist groups planning to target the homes of “six extremist” Supreme Court justices and why the White House is refusing to condemn the person who leaked Justice Alito’s draft opinion.  Then, Texas Senator Ted Cruz joins and reacts to the escalating threats against the justices, how their lives are now in danger, and his theory on who the leaker might be. Plus, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles joins to discuss President Biden’s targeting of Trump voters after claims of ‘unity’ at inauguration, pro-remote school union boss Randi Weingarten finally admitting ‘our kids are in crisis’, why Michael was just banned from speaking at an event at a Catholic university, 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. Today, there are new concerns for the safety of America's Supreme Court justices as left-wing activists publish a map pinpointing the supposed home addresses of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The activists are calling for protests at the homes of these, quote, extremist justices, saying it's time to, quote, rise up to force accountability using a diversity of tactics. What does that mean? This comes as Justice Alito has

now had to reportedly cancel an appearance at a judicial conference that he was supposed to be attending with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges and I believe the federal court judges below the Fifth Circuit. Meantime, Democrats are now renewing calls to pack the court, an emergency measure they're calling it. They didn't have the votes for this before and they don't have it now for a national codification of Roe versus Wade. We'll get into whether that's possible. It doesn't look good. Looks even worse today than it did yesterday. And California is making plans to become an abortion sanctuary. But Governor Gavin Newsom had a major slip up when announcing his plan. We'll tell you what he said. We've got a great, great lineup for you today. Texas Senator Ted Cruz will be here in just a bit. He once clerked for Chief Justice

Rehnquist and will tell us what Chief Justice Rehnquist used to tell the law clerks, in addition to weighing in on a bunch of stories today. Michael Knowles, our pal from The Daily Wire, will be joining us on what he sees as the most surprising part of this entire story. But we begin today with Rich Lowry, Editor-in-Chief of National Review. Rich, welcome back to the show. Glad to be here. How's it going? Good. It's going great. Let's start with this crazy- That's a week. Good for news podcasters. I know. Well, of course, I love the editor, so I've been listening to you guys all week too.

Can you believe that they're going to go to the homes of the Supreme Court justices? Can I tell you, this makes me especially angry. I had my team pull it because I remember this from her confirmation hearings. Amy Coney Barrett has seven children. Her youngest son, who I believe is 10, has Down syndrome. How dare these people go to that person's home and try to scare the children, which is what's going to happen. Amy Coney Barrett will not be scared, but her young children actually might be as they come outside of the house with their megaphones and start chanting terrible things about this child's mother. Not to mention Kavanaugh, who's got two children. I think they're 13, one's 13, one's 16 and so on. So this is disgusting. It's beyond the pale. And to do it to Supreme Court justices, by the way, it wouldn't be the first time they did it to Brett Kavanaugh is just it's deplorable to steal a term. Yeah, unfortunately, it falls in that category of shocking, but not surprising. protesters and whatnot, telling colleagues if they ever come close to overturning Roe, they're going to have to have someone sweeping the bottoms of their cars with mirrors every morning before they put the metaphorical key into the ignition. It'll be that bad. And we're beginning to see that. And what's sad about it is the Supreme Court has been

a relative sanctum removed from the worst of our political sewer, right? The Dobbs oral arguments, they're arguments I heard that I didn't like. Sotomayor said things I thought was ridiculous, but it was civil. It was substantive. It was intense at times, but something you can be proud of as a nation. That's the way our highest court decides issues. And now that's all been blown up. Whoever leaked this deliberately wanted to blow that up. The justices will never be able to trust themselves the same way. Their deliberations will never occur the

same way. And whoever did this must have had in the back of the forefront of his or her mind that this kind of pressure campaign would start. In a nation of laws, this is not how you decide Supreme Court cases, who's scared and who's intimidated and who has a mob outside their house. So it's another descent down in our political and civil culture. It's very sad. These justices need 24-7 security. And this opinion needs to be, as some of my colleagues have said, released as soon as it's a final majority opinion to remove all incentive for someone to do something crazy to try to stop it from happening. That's true. That's actually a good point.

I was kind of thinking, to be honest with you, that most people who are saying just release it right away were on the pro-life side. It was just like, it looks good let's you know fire away get it out there because they didn't want a wobbly justice to jump ship but what you just said is a good point um removed the incentive from the lunatics to do anything to these justices and and when you you know don't we can't say it's not possible people are so angry over this and you have people expressing their anger in ways that are just totally beyond the pale, like making all sorts of predictions about

what's likely to happen, like gay marriage is going to be illegal and interracial marriage is going to be illegal and contraception is going away. I mean, they're intentionally trying to stir up anger, passions and so on completely baselessly as this group says, go to their homes, go to the homes of the justices and quote, rise up, quote, force accountability. What outside of their home? What does that mean? Using a diversity of tactics.

When they're talking about bailing people out, you're obviously contemplating lawlessness. Right. And the supreme irony here, no pun intended on supreme, is that in 1992, when the court basically upheld Roe, but also rewrote it on the fly, it said, we're settling this, right? When there's a contentious issue like this, the court, which has such an amazing standing in our lives, can just come in and decide. And everyone respects that. And Scalia and just one of these another one of these incredibly prescient dissents is like, that's crazy. That's not going to happen. And by the way, there's this portrait of Roger Taney who wrote Dred Scott at Harvard Law School.

That looks very sad. He looks very sad in the portrait. You know why he's sad? It's because that's what he thought he was doing in Dred Scott at Harvard Law School that looks very sad. He looks very sad in the portrait. You know why he's sad? It's because that's what he thought he was doing in Dred Scott. He thought this is the court taking on an issue Congress can't decide that is really divisive, that people it's a fraught moral issue and the people are really passionate about. In the court, nine of us in our robes will decide it. And we know how that turned out. It turned out really badly. This has turned out really badly. And what you've seen is not all, but a large part of the political contention and divisiveness over this issue, not removed, but centered on the court, right? So now we're seeing our kind of poisoned and embittered politics coming directly into the

court to interrupting how it's operated for decades, changing it probably the nature of its internal culture forever. And now you have a situation where justices plausibly need security 24-7. So how is that settling this issue forever working out for you, Casey majority? Most of those justices aren't with us, but that was a catastrophic mistake. That's exactly right. And now I'm actually looking to see what. Yeah, we do have it. This is soundbite 13. When asked specifically about the leak, Jen Psaki speaking for the White House. I mean, this is an incredible breach of trust, of confidentiality, of 235 years of dignity and precedence and respect for the justices in their process.

She couldn't even bring herself to condemn it. Not one word of condemnation. Take a listen. Does the White House condemn, explicitly condemn this leak and or has seeing this draft been seen as welcome by some here? I don't think we have a particular view on that other than to say that we certainly note the unprecedented nature of it. What we are mindful of, and I spoke to the president about exactly this question yesterday, and obviously it's up to the Department of Justice to determine what, if any, action they will take. And I know, obviously, there have been calls for that from some Republicans, but also members of the Supreme Court. Unbelievable. She wouldn't do it. Yeah.

They won't even do the caveat. And I don't think I've seen one person, one Democratic elected official. I'm not even sure I've seen anyone in the center left just say, this leak is bad. Shouldn't have happened. This isn't the way you go about business. It's a breach of trust. But, you know, Alito's opinion is terrible and reversing Roe would be awful and would threaten the whole infrastructure of rights, modern rights in this country. You can do all that, but give us at least the caveat. And they have it. And it just goes to, you know, I think norms and institutions are important no matter what. I don't care who likes them or dislikes them or who's hypocritical about them. I think they're important and nothing's going to change my view on that. And you said that during the Trump administration.

What's that? You said that during the Trump administration. Yeah, yeah. You would be critical. And for five years, people like Jen Psaki said how important norms are. This is one of the most shocking breaches of norms, you know, the last couple decades, right? Coming into an institution that's been totally different and above this kind of thing. And they can't even bother with a one sentence caveat, you know, to be sure clause, as opinion

writers say, when you have to acknowledge some reality, it's a little bit uncomfortable, but make your main argument, they won't do it. And it just goes to how hypocritical they are about institutions and norms. And I was I was at this point long before, but it just reinforces I never, ever, ever want to hear a lecture from them on that stuff again. Yeah, same. We're sleeping giants looking forward to its campaign to restore normalcy to the way we treat our institutions. What a joke these institutions are that try to act as guardians of our country and all that we stood for for all the Trump years. Give me a break. That's the one advantage of this kind of thing is you see the truth. Even people who are denying it

see the truth. But it is it's gross. So, yeah, she couldn't spare a word, even though the justices safety is in danger now, for sure. There's no question. Even even the liberal justices are potentially in danger. If she couldn't spare a word for the conservatives, maybe she could spend some time thinking about Justice Breyer, who's 82, who just for the audience, because I've gathered now from a lot of online comments, people aren't totally understanding that Breyer is still on the court. Katonji Brown Jackson is going to take his seat, but she's not on the court yet. Breyer is part of this decision because some people are like, it was Katonji Brown Jackson's clerks.

You know, she's the new person. Like, no, she's not there yet. She doesn't have her people yet. So anyway, no respect even for the lips. Megan, even if these protesters, you know, are really nice when they show up at the, and if nothing happens, of course, we pray God that it doesn't. Just having it in the justice's head is a terrible thing. I remember a couple of years ago, it's nothing like what other people have faced. I was doxxed, right?

And I talked to someone, a colleague who had been doxxed a lot. I was like, what do you do when you're doxxed? He's like, don't worry about it. You know, it's not a big deal. Probably anyone could really find that information about you anyway, even if this publication hadn't put out there. But what they're doing is they're getting in your head. They want you to think next time when you say whatever upset them.

Maybe I won't do that because it's too much trouble. And to have this in the head of justices is a terrible thing for this country, a terrible thing for the rule of law, and a terrible thing for our institutions. And this is an extreme example, but I just read this great book on Japanese deliberations prior to Pearl Harbor and how they decided to launch that attack on us. And part of it was almost everyone knew it was a bad idea, but they were afraid to say it. You know, some of it was just the culture there. But some of it was people were assassinated or under threat. And if it got out there, you're wimpy and a dove and betraying the nation. Someone could come and kill you.

And if they didn't come and kill you, you at least had to think about that. So we don't want to get anywhere near that road. We don't even be one step on that road. But this puts us at least a couple steps on that road. idiot who left it on the copier or like brought it home and the husband found it and leaked it you know like i guess we have to leave uh open the possibility that incompetence is is to blame but i doubt it they've been incompetent for a long long time in washington this is the first time it ever happened and it happens to have happened on roe versus wade reversal no it was intentional in my belief so anyway my point is it so it was not designed most likely to manipulate. And that's totally contrary to the very mission of the Supreme Court. It is designed to operate without political whims influencing it. It's supposed to be independent. That's why we give these guys lifetime tenure so they don't have to worry about getting reelected. So somebody either doesn't understand if it's a law clerk, the job she or he accepted, or the institution that they're working at, or they understand it perfectly, and they're part of the burn it all down crowd. Yeah, again, this is because the court intervened

with no constitutional warrant on a hot button, social and cultural issue. And if Roe had never come down, at the time, abortion laws were liberalizing, that trend would have continued, but many restrictions would have stayed in place and we would have reached some sort of equilibrium where some states it would have been legal, some states it wouldn't have been, and some states it would have been in between. And as an ardent pro-lifer, that wouldn't have been satisfactory to me. For ardent pro-abortion folks, it wouldn't have been satisfactory to them. We'd still have a big argument about abortion, But one side wouldn't have expected to get everything it wanted because of a judicial have this proxy war over the court, one side getting used to having everything it wants because of what the court said. And now, you know,

it partly kind of blowing up or at least damaging the court and its legitimacy and its reputation. So this is one of the most catastrophic decisions the court's handed down in its history. Roe. Roe was. Yeah, you don't mean the reversal. So here's a bit of the Democrat messaging on this, because it really has been a total meltdown and misrepresentation in many cases of what this means and what this is. But so the audience understands this is where the Democrats are on this today.

This is soundbite one, a montage. Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women, will we say, how dare they? This is the first time in my living memory that the United States Supreme Court has actually taken away a right. What are the next things that are going to be attacked?

Because this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that's existed in American history. In recent American history. It all comes down to who should make decisions about your health, your life, and your future as a woman in America. Republicans are spending all their focus on the leak because they don't want to talk about Roe v. Wade, where they know they're on the wrong side of history. They have been out there plotting, carefully cultivating these Supreme Court justices so they could have a majority on the bench who would accomplish something that the majority of Americans do not want. If you stand for freedom, for self-determination, for the right to privacy,

if you stand for these principles, stand with us. Oh, boy. Apparently, Kamala Harris's speechwriters wrote and rewrote and rewrote that speech for her to deliver at Emily's List. She finally could look tough on something rich. To me, it's like I don't see Republicans afraid to talk about Roe versus Wade. Not at all. I see the Democrats trying to say this is about reproductive freedom and not wanting to touch what an abortion actually is and what the Republicans actually want, which is for the United States of America, which is a republic, to operate as a republic, where we have a small federal government that doesn't pass a whole lot of laws,

and the states get to decide how the people within them are going to live as voted on by those people. Yeah, it's very telling. And all those clips, which are quite representative, there's really no one arguing abortion is in the Constitution. Here it is. You know, here's the line that establishes a right to abortion that the founders put in the Constitution public opinions in favor of Roe, and this is an important right. And those are fine arguments to make. I would disagree with them, but they don't really make a constitutional argument because there isn't one. And the court's role is to interpret the constitution, and when it's been wrong, to reverse itself. And there's no warrant for this. An honest pro-choicers like my former great legendary boss, Charles Krauthammer, he was pro-choice. But he said, Roe's travesty is just not there.

And the fact is, Roe hopefully was going to go away. We'll see. And then most places, you know, most people who had inherently a nod along to Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, you know, they live in California or New York where nothing is going to change. Literally nothing is going to change, literally nothing is, is going to change. And I do think Democrats, they will one, they sincerely are invested in abortion in a major way. But two, they realize talking about this is better for them than talking about anything else that's going on. So they're desperate to talk about this. But I just wonder, you know, when Texas banned abortion or sort of a clever way around Roe, Terry McAuliffe tried to run out in Virginia, didn't didn't get him anything. So I just wonder, in most blue jurisdictions in America women won't be able to get abortion after 15 weeks. Is that really going to be a cause of outrage that knocks inflation off of the top of mind concern for

people? I kind of doubt it, you know, and then you'll have red states where you'll have pretty sweeping prohibitions, but they'll be popular. And then you'll have some states where, you know, purplish states where it's a real political war, and they'll come out somewhere in between. But that, as you allude to, that's what happens in a democratic republic, right? It's messy, you have a debate, and then you have some sort of settlement or consensus. And if it's not in the, you know, if mores change or political opinions change, then you move the needle and you change the laws. And again, it'd been much better if we would have been doing that the last half century, but we didn't because of the travesty of Roe. You know, this morning on the New York Times

podcast, The Daily, you know, it is obviously not a right leaning program. They were talking about how in general, the laws like the 13 trigger laws that as soon as Roe gets over overruled, automatically abortion will be illegal in those states. And then you've got, you know, another maybe 11 states on top of that or 10 that are going to make it somewhat illegal or illegal in most cases. They were saying those the popular will in those states actually does match up with those laws. In other words, there are majorities in places like Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia to strike down abortion. Those laws are on the books because that's what the voters want. It doesn't mean all the voters, but a majority of voters. That's how it works in our country. So it's not like New York and

California are going to outlaw abortion. The voters are going to have their will here and there as well. It's just that the Democrats want to make sure that some, you know, unknown people in these states who don't have a majority that they get what these Democrats want for them. But that's just not the way the country was set up. That's just not the way it works. But unfortunately, as a pro-lifer, I'm not happy about this, but I think it's just a fact. There'll be a massive push, you know, Mississippi bans abortion. There'll be billionaires, progressive billionaires funding programs to, you know, if a woman abortion. There'll be billionaires, progressive billionaires funding programs to, you know, if a woman wants to get an abortion, lives in Mississippi to get her

someplace else, you know, where she can to transport her someplace to get an abortion. And also, you know, pills, abortions will be very hard to stop. So this will, if Roe's overturned, it will diminish the number of abortions in America, which I think is a great thing. But 20% or something, not where I want it to be, 90% or 95% or 99%. So for pro-lifers, reversing Roe would be a significant victory, but it really just puts us at the starting gate. It puts us able finally to legislate, and there's still tons of work and advocacy and convincing to be done. Yeah, the right couldn't even have the battle on this while Roe was in place because it just shut you down. You'd already lost. And now it's like, OK, now it's on. Now we get we both get as I was saying this yesterday as it would have been 20 plus years ago. But that that won't stop the Democrats and the media from trying, you know, because the media, too, wants the Democrats to win. And the media, too, sees inflation and sees crime and sees these poll numbers for the Dems.

And the media doesn't want bad results for the Dems. And that's why you get soundbites like this one. This is number six with a media reaction that is, you know, it mirrors what we just heard from the Dems. And that's why you get soundbites like this one. This is number six with a media reaction that is, you know, it mirrors what we just heard from the Dems. Listen, it's going to be very hard for me today because my blood pressure is so high. I want to cry in so many different ways. I also feel my blood pressure ticking up by the minute. I couldn't go back to sleep. It's that devastating. This is a category five hurricane. This is really an upending of the rights of women in American society. Women who are poor, women who are women of color, they will be forced to have pregnancies that they cannot afford to terminate and pregnancies that will then turn into children.

Next, they'll go after gay marriage and maybe the board, what is it, Brown versus Board of Education? Gay marriage, maybe even interracial marriage. The court will surely suffer for this shattering self-own to its own legitimacy. What did you think was going to happen in 2004 when they replaced Sandra Day O'Connor? I hope there will be a national uprising. What did you think was going to happen

when Mitch McConnell stole the Supreme Court seat? There is some connection between an effort to overturn an election and an effort to overturn Roe. The Founding Fathers didn't recognize abortion as a fundamental right because the founding fathers were racist, misogynist, jerk faces who didn't believe that women had any rights at all. So, so Megan, there are so many there. It's hard to keep up, but did someone say near the beginning, I want to cry in so many ways? Yes, yes, yes. Neil Cathy said that.

Yeah. So- By the way, that was put together by the geniuses over at Media Research Center. I want to give credit where it's due. Yeah. I've met journalists who are hawkish, journalists who are pro free market, et cetera. I don't think I've ever met a journalist for a major mainstream outlet who's pro-life. Just never.

The culture on this is so strong. Some of those folks are just commentators, but others purport to be journalists. And yeah, that's, again, it's shocking, but not surprising. That's just where they are on this issue. It's hysterical. Now you have people like Gavin Newsom, who says California is going to be an abortion sanctuary. Oh, and by the way, before I get to Gavin Newsom, you guys on your homepage today, you probably know, have an article about how the Biden administration is looking at whether they can use Medicaid to fund travel for poor women in the states that ban abortion to go to states that are blue, you know, blue states that allow abortion. That's taxpayer dollars. All this stuff's going to be shot down, Rich. I mean, this is not going to withstand legal challenge. They're looking to throw out some crumbs to gin up electoral support, but there's zero chance they can use Medicaid funds

to support abortion trips. Yeah. And everything they're talking about doing in Congress, obviously, they would need 60 votes in the Senate to do it or abolish filibuster. They still don't have the votes to abolish filibuster, and they're not going to get 60 votes in the senate so we're going to be back kind of um with the voting bill again where we just have these votes as theater where they they i don't know how it makes sense to just just own yourself and put up bills that go down to defeat but that's what schumer's like that that's what he's going to be he's going to be known for that that's like his thing yeah exactly his exactly. His strategy. Yeah. Mitch McConnell got a couple extra Supreme Court seats, but Chuck Schumer got a lot of his own bills defeated. Who's done a better job? But the actual be, you know, with with the states, as you're saying, with Gavin and private actors, you know, flying every woman in a red state wants an abortion to California. Yeah, exactly. All right. I'll get to Gavin Newsom just a bit later in the show what he's tweeting out now because he's just as crazy as you would think, Rich. Always a pleasure,

sir. Thank you for coming on. Thanks so much. Have a great day. OK, up next, we're going to be joined by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who not only has worked on a lot of this type of a lot of these issues, but he actually clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist. And so he's got some thoughts on the leaker and what should happen to him or her. Joining me now, Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Senator Cruz was a law clerk for the late Supreme Court Chief Justice. He's considered Chief Justice of the United States, William Rehnquist. He's also argued nine plus times before the high court.

Welcome back, Senator Cruz. Great to see you. Megan, great to be back with you. Can we start with this threat now to the justices where these groups are organizing protests outside of their homes, including the ones, I mean, they're targeting're targeting the quote extremist justices meaning the conservatives who are reported to be in the majority including amy coney barrett who's got seven children two adopted from haiti youngest child has down syndrome they range in age from 10 years old to 20 years old and i know you have two young daughters of your own kavanaugh has got two two daughters as well I think they're 13 and 16.

It's disgusting. And they're calling for innovative tactics, saying that they've got to get these extremists. What do you make of it? Well, I think this is the latest manifestation of a multi-year effort from Senate Democrats to demonize the court and to politicize the court. And they're willing to go to almost any lengths to do so. We saw Chuck Schumer stand on the steps of the Supreme Court and call out two justices by name, threatened to unleash the whirlwind, saying, you will pay the price if you do not decide these cases the way we want you to. We've seen multiple Democrats get behind packing the court, the radical plan to put four new justices on the court and expand it from nine to 13 justices to put four leftists on the court immediately. All of this systematically has worked

to create an environment where now, for the first time in the history of our country, someone leaked a draft of an opinion before it issued. That's never happened before. It is difficult, Megan, to overstate just how great a breach of trust this is. The Supreme Court keeps the confidentiality of its decision makings and drafts of opinions at the very highest level. There's never been a leak like this before. And it was an obvious attempt to bully and intimidate the justices and the majority to cause them to change their votes. And the threats of violence, we're saying, are escalating that even further. Leftists willing to threaten violence against justices and their families in order to try to bully or threaten or frighten them into voting the way they want. And it is an incredible threat

to the independence of our judiciary, to the integrity of the Supreme Court, to the rule of law. Look, we see this in banana republics. We see this in third world countries where judges find their lives threatened and they're sometimes subject to physical threats or even murder. If if whether it's drug cartels or whoever it is, if they don't rule the way that the group wants them to. And this threat here, it's really dangerous. How about the fact that the White House won't even condemn it? Jen Psaki was asked specifically, what would you condemn this? She's really not that concerned about it. And she did talk to the president about it. These justices are now in danger. Their lives are in danger. The integrity and dignity and process that's worked for 235 years at the Supreme Court has been essentially blown up. And they've got nothing to say about it. Well, look, this is the same Democrat party that for a year when we had Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots all over the country, that was unwilling to condemn the violence. We had

the summer of love as Democratic office holders just ignored rioting and, in fact, went even further than that. Kamala Harris raised bail money to bail out of jail the violent rioters who were committing horrific acts. We saw all over the country police cars firebombed. We saw, obviously, stores looted in great numbers. We saw people assaulted. We saw people assaulted. We saw people murdered. And today's Democrat Party is willing to not only look the other way on that kind of violence, but in Kamala Harris's instance, to raise money in support of the is meant to be apolitical law enforcement. And it's really dangerous. I got to say, in the wake of this leak from the Supreme Court, a number of the left-wing activist groups, a number of the activists are going online and

celebrating the leaker as a hero and saying things, you know, one left-wing activist, you know, celebrated him as a hero for saying, F it, let's burn the whole thing down. And sadly, the modern left is willing to destroy the institutions of government, whether it is the Supreme Court or the Senate, in order to achieve their partisan objectives. And that's that is incredibly dangerous. You know, Laura Ingram used to clerk for Justice Thomas. She and I've talked about that many times. And she mentioned it the other day on the air saying when I was there, I, Laura, the chief justice, Rehnquist, your old boss, used to sit us down as the young law clerks and had a very stern warning for all of us

about leaking. Did you get a similar warning from him? Oh, absolutely. And I mean, the culture right when you start, you have very serious training and orientation about confidentiality. You don't take opinion drafts out of the court. So when you're working on an opinion, you work in your office, you work in the justices chambers. And it's the reason why on any given night at midnight, one in the morning, most of the law clerks are still there because you're working. You have to do it in the Supreme Court building. You don't take it home with you. You don't take it on the train or on the bus. You work there. Every law clerk has under his or her desk a burn bag.

And it's a brown bag with red stripes on it. And any draft that you have, anything you have, you put in the burn bag. The burn bag is then sealed. It's shredded. It's actually shredded twice. It's shredded horizontally and vertically. And then it is burned. I mean, the levels that the court goes to make sure that nothing leaks. And the reason is, look, the process of how the court decides.

You have the briefing. You have the oral argument. Shortly after the oral argument, the justices meet in conference. When they meet, it's just nine of them in the conference room. Nobody else is allowed in the room. Conference room is is directly adjacent to the chief justice's chambers. So much so that the junior justice is required to get coffee for the other justices. And the entrance to the conference room are two doors. And it's like an airlock. They're about four feet apart from each other. And if for some reason someone needs to contact the justices, what you do is you open the outer door, you write a note, you set it on the floor, you knock on the inner door, you step back out, you close the outer door, and then the junior justice goes and opens the inner door to get the whatever note has been written. I mean, that's

the level of security. At that first conference, the justices vote. It's a tentative vote. And they cast their votes. And then the senior justice in the majority assigns the opinion. So in this this case, that would have been Clarence Thomas. And so Clarence Thomas presumably assigned the majority opinion to Justice Alito. The justice then spends typically a couple of months working on the opinion and circulates a draft. In this case, the draft was circulated in February. To all nine of them. That's a first draft. To all nine. You circulate it to every justice.

That's a first draft. And what happens over the subsequent weeks and months is there's ongoing negotiations back and forth where justices will say, I don't like this paragraph. I don't like this sentence. Can you add this? Can you take out this? Add this footnote, take out this footnote. And there will be, on a run of the mill opinion, there will be dozens or even hundreds of edits. On a case like this, there could be thousands of edits because there's an ongoing back and forth. At the same time, dissenting justices will circulate their opinions, and then you start having the majority and the dissents altered to respond to each other.

So it's an ongoing deliberative process. And by leaking this draft in the middle of it, it destroys the trust everyone has in the ability to conduct a careful deliberation following the law. jive with what you're saying two months after the oral argument, which was December and the likely first vote. So that opinion was likely circulated. I mean, they've confirmed that it was authentic. So it was circulated in February. So why, if you're a Supreme Court clerk, why would you circulate a decision from February? If you would, I think you would tell me that as of May, May 2nd, when this came out, they would be several drafts beyond that. There'd be many drafts beyond that. So this was apparently the initial draft that circulated. So what would be the reason for that?

I mean, can you think of any reason to use one of the old versions? You know, I don't know. At the same time the draft was leaked, the leaker also gave apparently inside information. And what the leaker said was that at conference, there were six justices who voted to uphold the Mississippi statute. There were five justices who voted to overturn Roe versus Wade. Interestingly enough, that is exactly what I predicted. As you know, I do a podcast every week, Verdict with Ted Cruz. It was the number one podcast in the world when we launched it. We still get more viewers on Verdict than CNN gets on its morning show.

You set a higher bar. I didn't even say CNN Plus. I mean, like the real CNN. But right after the oral argument, I did a podcast walking through the details of the argument. And what I predicted then is that there were six votes to uphold the Mississippi statute. And I thought there were five to overturn Roe. And Chief Justice Roberts, from the argument, seemed to be desperately trying to

pick off one of the five to not go so far as to overturn Roe. Well, it turns out, according to this leaker, that was an accurate assessment of where the court was. And so the inference I'm left with is that this very, very likely came from a left-wing clerk who is deeply dismayed at the direction the court is going, that sees an outcome that is imminent, and is trying to put political pressure on the five justices in the majority to get one or more of them to flip. I don't know that for sure, but that seems to me the most natural influence. What about, how would a clerk get the opinion out of the court? Because this was a legitimate copy, so do you believe that they would have had to walk out with a hard copy that they couldn't have, or maybe just wouldn't have been so dumb as to email a version

outside, you know, that would all be traceable? Because I assume they're not searching the bags of the clerks. There's a trust system there. So would it be possible to slip a hard copy into your bag before you left at midnight? Oh, sure. And then that would be pretty easy to do because they don't search your bag. You know, you remember back in back some years ago, Sandy Berger, who'd been the national security advisor, classified documents down his pants and tried to sneak about. You wouldn't need to do that. I mean, a clerk, you could put it in your briefcase and take it home. His pants. justices, obviously, they operate almost like nine independent law firms. The justices rarely talk to each other. Each of the justices hires four law clerks. So the universe of people who would have access to the opinion and also who would know about the vote totals from the conference, you really are limited to the justices and the law clerks, maybe a clerical person or two or a secretary, but a clerical person would be unlikely to know the details about the conference like that. I think it is almost certainly a law clerk. I cannot bring myself to believe that a justice would have anything to do with that. This would be the gravest violation of trust and integrity for a justice that I just I refuse

to contemplate that scenario. What I think it likely was, was a clerk for one of the three most liberal justices. If that's true, you've got a suspect pool of 36 clerks, but really 12. And listen, you and I have both known a lot of Supreme Court clerks. Many of them are book smart. They're very book smart, but not a lot of them are street smart. And I am skeptical that we have a master criminal at the court. Someone's going down. We have, I think, a woke nitwit who believes passionately in his or her heart that this is a grave injustice and that they're going to burn the place down and the ends justify the means. And so I think it is almost certain that this clerk, that there's an electronic record,

that there are emails, there are texts, there are in-person meetings with the reporters in question. There are also significant security measures the court takes, and I won't get into the precise details, but to identify which printer printed a given draft of the opinion. And so forensically, I think we're going to catch this person. I think so too. And when they're caught, I think the repercussions, they will be fired on the spot. They will be immediately disbarred if they're members of the bar. Some of the clerks are already members of the bar. Some are not. If they're not a member of the bar, I don't think they will ever be's a chance the justices or the marshal now who's doing the investigation, the Supreme Court's marshal, the chief law enforcement officer,

it's a woman, there's a chance she could have each clerk ask them to sign a statement saying they didn't do it. And if they lie in that statement, it's a federal crime. You know, it's the old, not the crime, it's the cover up that always gets you. And because it may be hard to get this person on an underlying crime of obstruction of justice, though Bill Barr suggested he likes that crime for this particular behavior. Maybe theft of documents, Andy McCarthy was kicking that one around. And if those don't work, if they're too tough to make, it's going, I mean, that's really the moment, right? Like you said, you did the leaking, maybe you didn't know it was a crime, but now you sign this thing and this isn't your average schmo. This is somebody who went to, you know, probably one of the greatest law firms in the world. I mean, law schools in the world and has been working steadily hard since the, you know, two years out, two years into life to succeed. So like this, this is where it's all on the line.

Are you going to sign a piece of paper saying you didn't do it, which is a crime and handed it like that is where the whatever, what's the word, the pedal hits the road, the metal hits the road, whatever it is, that's where your come to Jesus moment is. No, I think you're right that the most natural criminal penalty will be 18 USC section 1001, which is lying to a federal officer. And it could either be signing a false statement that you didn't do it or simply telling the investigators, I didn't do it. Presumably, this person is going to lie. Presumably, they're going to try to get away with it. And that lie carries with it serious jail time. So that's the easiest and most straightforward thing to prosecute them for. But the examples you gave of theft of government

property, of obstruction of justice, ironically, some of the charges DOJ is pursuing right now against the January 6th defendants trying to obstruct a government proceeding. You know, even the word insurrection gets bandied about. But this is an attempt to to go right to the heart of the operation of one of our three branches of government. And so there are lots of charges that could be contemplated. But I think the most natural one is lying to the federal officer under under 1001. What about disbarment since the bar is so liberal, right? Like if the ABA gets involved, they're so liberal. Maybe they're working for a liberal justice who would say, I don't want to see this person disbarred. But you got all these others

whose lives have been endangered now whose children are potentially endangered as a result of the fallout of all of this. I mean, who who would make the decision? And will politics play? Because, you know, the country's divided right now on whether we care about the leaker at all, you know, like Jen Psaki, who cares? Or those of us who think this is whatever your views are on abortion, who think this was an egregious breach that has to be severely punished? Yeah. So I think any state bar would disbar this person, even some of the most politicized, even a California or New York. Look, there is for the judicial system to work. You can't have law clerks handing out internal decision making during the process. And

lawyers are officers of the court. You have a responsibility. If you have someone that is willing to steal from the court and make it public, I don't believe there's any bar that would tolerate someone remaining a member of that bar. person, perhaps after jail time, will be lionized on the left. They may well have their own show on MSNBC. And it wouldn't surprise me if there are law schools that will make this person a law professor. You don't have to be a lawyer to be a law professor. And there are radical enough law schools. You look at these schools that take people who were violent terrorists and try to blow up the Pentagon and they make them tenured professors. Yes. So that's right. Bill Ayers, his wife, Bernadine Doran, she's at Northwestern Law School.

So given that, I think there are law schools that would celebrate this person and make them a professor. And as I said, you know, the left will turn this person into a hero, but I don't believe they will ever practice law. I have to say, I made this point yesterday, but a hero for what? What do they do? The decision is going to come out anyway. It's not like the NSA thing with Snowden where he actually did reveal something that was never going to come out. What did she do or he do? Just got like a jumpstart on something. That's just a reporter scoop. The hero of that story, if you're on the left, is the political reporter who got the scoop of a lifetime. She just gave us a little advance notice on what was coming if it was a she. All right. Let me ask you quickly before we go. Any chance we've got too hard, but any chance of any of this legislation actually getting pushed through a codifying row within the Senate? I mean, is there any chance of that? Look, I would be surprised if we don't vote on it. I think Schumer and the Democrats will force a vote. We had a vote earlier this Congress on a

really radical abortion bill that the Democrats teed up that would have gone much beyond codifying row. It would have struck down essentially every restriction that's been put in place on abortion across the country. So state laws restricting partial birth abortion, restricting late term abortions, all of those would have been struck down. It would have struck down parental consent laws, parental notification laws. We voted on it and it was a party line vote. That i could see them teeing up again i could also see them teeing up just a straightforward they're gonna tee it up but the but the question is i'm sorry i gotta go but yes or no it won't it won't pass all the democrats will vote for it you may get a couple of republicans who vote for it but it won't get 60 votes so unless the democrats blow up the filibuster it won't pass and i don't think they have the votes to blow up the filibuster, it won't pass. And I don't think they have the votes to blow up the filibuster. Senator Cruz, always fun talking to you today in particular. Thanks for being here.

Thanks, Megan. Joining me now, Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show over at The Daily Wire. There's so much to discuss, including Secretary Mayorkas admitting yesterday he did not know that his newly appointed disinformation czar, Nita Jankowicz, called the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation. Oh, and by the way, she believed the Steele dossier was real. Okay, we're going to get to that. But first, let's start with the security breach at the U.S. Supreme Court. Welcome back, Michael. Great to see you. Great to be with you, Megan. Thanks for having me. All right. So the Supreme Court leaker has not yet been found, but there's still a lot of leading candidates who we're not naming, but outed on various threads on the internet. One who we referenced yesterday, not by name, but there is a female clerk who's married to a guy who's a

reporter who used to work at Politico and shared a byline with the guy who broke this story. Doesn't mean she's the one, but she's also an activist when it comes to, quote, reproductive rights. So my only point in raising it is they're going to get to the bottom of it. I've heard rumors, rumors only that they already know. Somebody said it on my show yesterday and then another person suggested me last night that they know. But it's not confirmed, so forgive me because I'm just speculating here based on what I heard. I think they'll find the person. And you tell me whether you think there's going to be severe penalties for the person, given the fact that half the country will think she's some sort of a hero or he's some sort of a hero. They will find the

person. You're totally right. There just aren't that many people that it could be. What are there? Something like 36 Supreme Court clerks, period. If it's four times nine, yeah, then it's right. So it's not not a whole lot. We assume this is one of the liberal clerks. We assume it's probably from one office in particular. Again, just speculating, but they will get to the bottom of it. And presumably there will be severe consequences from the standpoint of the law, meaning disbarment, the end of one's legal career, probably not criminal penalties. I wish that there would be, but I just sort of doubt that that will actually happen. The person's career, as it is currently going down the road, is probably over, but it doesn't happen. The person's career as it is currently going down the road is probably over, but it doesn't matter. The person will almost certainly be rewarded with

a much more lucrative career. They will be hailed as a hero, probably put in charge of some extremely well-funded left-wing nonprofit or given a show on some left-wing network. And so this breach of trust, this huge upsetting of norms at the Supreme Court, a breach of trust really with the American people where the clerks and the justices are supposed to be public servants, all of that is probably going to pay off pretty nicely in the end for this left wing activist. And this person for me will forever be known as the person who tried to take down the U.S. Supreme Court and endangered nine people who could have been making millions in private practice, but decided to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court in service of the nation,

left wing, right wing, whatever. I have a lot of respect for these people. It's not that I think they all have equal intellect or equal judgment when it comes to deciding cases, but I have a lot of respect for all nine of them. And I think it's disgusting what this person has done to them. For what? For what? Just to stroke her own ego or his so they could say I was the one. We were getting the opinion anyway. There was no point. And now they're protesting at the justices' houses, including the ones with young children. And this person is probably sitting there inside the Supreme Court pretending that she's not the snake while all of her colleagues get investigated and have her stank all over them because they don't know yet if they don't know who did it. vanity and her own applause on the left, which is the very thing you just said. These Supreme Court justices are being protested. They're having threats made against their life. And as happens in every Supreme Court term, it ain't a vote until it's a vote. So we've now seen a

draft opinion. I hope that the Supreme Court stands by the apparent vote on the Dobbs case and votes to overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. But we don't know. There was some talk during the Obamacare case that Chief Justice Roberts was on the side of striking down Obamacare until the very end when he switched his vote. So obviously, this left-wing activist who destroyed the trust and integrity of the court, this person, I think, is hoping that you might see a similar thing here. I doubt that the conservative judges could do it. At this point, you want to talk about the institutional integrity of the court. If they switch their votes now, it's going to become clear that the Supreme

Court has no integrity whatsoever and they'll move along with political wins and wherever the threats are coming. But there is a whole lot of political pressure that was successfully brought on these judges as a result. I can't help but feel like, okay, so obviously, if this is a left wing clerk, there's, and if it's a, if it's a reproductive rights advocate, and so on, there's not much of a care for the child in the womb, right? This is somebody who thinks that the mother's rights trump all. And there's not much of a care for the justices children, the children once they're out of the womb and living in the home of a justice who might happen to lean conservative. Because you tell me that a 10-year-old child who happens to have Down syndrome is going to have to look out his window and see these assholes coming to protest outside of his home because his mom happens to be a Supreme Court justice. And I tell you, you don't give a shit about children.

You don't care about anything or anyone but yourself. It's disgusting. And she knew or he knew that this would happen. This is totally predictable. And this better be all that happens. You know, you actually have to worry about the safety of them. This person thought what they felt mattered more than all of that. And so, no, they should not wind up on MSNBC. By the way, that's probably why Jen Psaki wouldn't criticize them because that's her new employer, right? She knows this person's going to wind up there. But no, this person should not be lauded or celebrated or given any financial reward or

somebody else going to do it again. And you've hit the nail on the head here, Megan, which is I think I might be the only person in America who was not surprised at this Supreme Court leak. A lot of people were saying, no matter what you feel about abortion, no matter what you feel about Roe v. Wade, it is absolutely shocking that a Supreme Court clerk or someone else at the court would leak this opinion. I don't find it shocking at all. We're talking about people who kill babies, to put it as bluntly as I possibly can. I know that we're trying to dance around the procedures and the case history, but the issue that is actually at hand is whether or not to kill babies in the womb. And so when the stakes are that high and when people are going,

willing to go to that length, then upsetting a few court norms is child's play. I mean, the true hardcore activists want abortion on demand through nine months of pregnancy. So I don't I don't you're not wrong on those. And I understand that any form of abortion is taking at least a potential form of life. I don't disagree with that at all. So it's really controversial. And, you know, who knows, again, if it's if it's one of the people that they think it is, this person's been a lifelong ardent advocate for abortion and very expensive abortion rights. Time will tell. I keep checking my phone because I'm like, at any moment, we're going to know. We're going to hear.

I hope that we'll know very soon. I mean, they need to deliver this opinion, I think, sooner rather than later at this point. But what it does show you is just how desperate the pro abortion side has become. There are basically three arguments in the abortion cases and with regard to Roe v. Wade. The one, the furthest left argument is that abortion is protected in the constitution somewhere in invisible ink between the emanations and the penumbras. No one can quite tell you where it is, but it's there. Just trust us. Then there is the originalist view, which is the view pushed by Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, apparently Justice Toledo, which is that the Constitution simply doesn't take up the question of abortion. And so talk to your legislators, talk to your states and pass whatever laws you want. There is a further view,

which was articulated by Robbie George and John Finnis, conservative legal scholars in a brief for the court in this case, which suggests actually the court has a responsibility to outlaw abortion because the 14th amendment prohibits abortion in that it provides equal protection to unborn babies as well. They argue their case very, very well, going back to Blackstone's commentaries and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the debates around the 14th Amendment. I think what you're seeing here is that of those three arguments, the argument in favor of Roe has just gone completely out the window. No one can really articulate that anymore. The pro-life movement has moved the ball down the field. Now the only question is, is this up for the

legislatures or should the courts strike down abortion themselves? Well, here's what's really interesting to me is that now you see all these Democrats saying we've got to codify Roe and they don't have the votes to codify Roe. I was just talking about that with Senator Cruz, who I know he was talking about his podcast, Verdict. You're on that. You helped him launch that. Anyway, so he didn't mention you. Classic Senator Cruz. I guess he has bigger things on his mind. He does. So they're going to going to try to codify. They don't have the votes. Judge Napolitano, Judge Jay Sekulow was out in the program yesterday telling me, despite Jen Psaki saying they don't have the know, you do have Murkowski and Collins. You got two Republican senators who could potentially cross over and vote to codify Roe. But here's the thing. If they vote to create a statutory nation right to abortion and that'll get challenged,

it'll go, it'll wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court because somebody will say, same as they did with Obamacare, there are limits to your powers and you overstep them. You don't have the power to create a national right to abortion. It's not in the Constitution and you don't have that. It has to fall within your enumerated powers. Okay, commerce clause, abortion affects commerce. That's how they got Obamacare through. The court has been very restrictive on commerce clause powers over the past 20 plus years they've said no many many times saying that's a bridge too far so is that so is this other thing so i don't think that they will uphold that and i think they'll say you didn't have that power by it's going back to the states but go one

more link with with me if the court were to uphold that congress the u. Congress, has the right to impose a national statutory right to abortion, that can be done the other way, too. Then Congress, under a Republican president with a Republican Congress, can come in and say, OK, great, we see it the other way. We're going to regulate it, saying there is a national ban on power. So the Democrats right now are damned because this is going to wind up a states rights issue, as it was always meant to be, no matter what tricks they are dangling in front of their voters right now. Well, it does raise a question, which is sort of even beyond just the minutia of the Constitution and the minutia of these laws and even our political arrangements. And the question is, are there some issues that are just so fundamental that we need to decide

it at the national level? One issue like this would be slavery, states rights. I'm a big proponent of states rights, but states don't have the right to do everything. And the question of slavery was never going to remain as a state's rights issue. The country had to come to a decision. Frankly, the question over the definition of marriage was a similar answer. I asked Justice Scalia this when I was a student. We said, what do you make of the debate over marriage? Can it just be left to the states? He said he didn't think so because a question of marriage is going to change whether you're in one state and moving to another. We're all citizens of the United States. It's a basic question about our relationship to one another and to our state. And I think more so than either of those issues, frankly, is the question of what is a person and

are people protected by the laws from the moment of their conception onward or not? As you say, Megan, you're so right. The moment that Democrats try to pass a national abortion protection, the minute Republicans get power, they're going to undo that. And then the minute the Democrats get power, they're going to do it again. And so at a certain point, one probably has to just resolve the issue. I hope it's resolved in an easier way than we've resolved some of those earlier issues. But this this it might not be so simple as just go right to your congressman. Yeah, the Democrats don't want a national law. If you think it through, it's because the only way to keep it legal at this point, if

this decision comes out the way the draft looks, is to let it be a state by state issue, to let it be left up to our Democratic Republic, because if they do have a power to enact a national permission slip on it, then the next Congress has the power to pass a national ban. And there will be a period of time just because of politics in the country where it will be banned. So if it's a state's rights issue, they'll always have it. They'll always have abortion available. There are too many states that are too devoted to it.

New York, California, Connecticut, all of those for it to ever get truly banned on a national level. So they should just, just take what you can at this point, be happy that it's not going to be banned entirely. Okay. The only other thing I wanted to mention was court packing. This is another thing they keep talking about. I mean, this is the lunatic fringe. Like there's not going to be any court packing since 1869. We've had nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. FDR tried to pack the court because they were striking down all his New Deal legislation. And even with huge Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, they wouldn't act on it. They were like, he's gone insane.

We're not going to pack the court with extra justices. And even if so, like this Congress, which is very evenly divided, is not going to support any such plan. Not clear at all. Joe Biden would ever want such a plan. So they're out of options. They're out of options. And running around saying elect more Democrats at the federal level makes no sense because those are not going to be the people in power, Michael. Right. I think their their last option, which is the entire purpose of this leak from the Supreme Court, their last option is to just gum up the whole political system, to quote some prominent blue checks on Twitter, to burn it down, to disregard the Supreme Court, to just to just upend our system of government and probably get some more mostly peaceful Molotov cocktails, the likes of which we saw a couple of years ago. I hope that will not work. I hope the justices will not cave to the pressure, but that is the threat that they're making. You are seeing explicit threats against Justice Alito, against Clarence Thomas from very prominent blue check mark, big accounts on the left on social media. So that's that's their last option. I agree with you entirely within the political process. The pro abortion side is out of options. But one fear is that they could become violent as they have in the recent past. us group. We must rise up to force accountability, force accountability. Speaking about protests

outside of the justices' homes using a diversity of tactics. What does that mean? Good luck defending that if something violent happens. Right. Good luck defending it. Unfortunately, they've got the tacit approval of the establishmentarian left. I mean, this was during the George Floyd riots to look at the most recent example of political violence that was not discouraged by prominent left-wingers and prominent Democrats. It was actively encouraged. And then when the violent people were arrested and brought to jail, you had very prominent Democrats, including the current vice president of the United States, raising money to bail them out. They weren't bailing out the mostly

peaceful protesters. By definition, they were bailing out the people who were arrested for committing crimes. And if they did that over the George Floyd killing a couple of years ago, how much more will they do that when we're talking about what has become essentially the sacrament for the modern left, and that is the license to abortion? Now there's been a bit of a breakdown in the language and the messaging around this. I mean, everyone's remembered what a woman is. You know, everyone has remembered that women are the ones who give birth to the babies, except of all people, Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom has forgotten that actually it's just men and women can both get pregnant as his side says he tweets out as follows if men if men michael if men could get pregnant hello he didn't get the memo from his side if men could get

pregnant this wouldn't even be a conversation and he goes on to say this decision is not about strengthening families it's about extremism and control and we'll fight um so he got dragged on twitter from people who pay attention to these debates saying, you're a transphobe. If men could do what now? If who could do what now? Reported this tweet for transphobia. Men get pregnant now. Keep up with your whack job party, dude. And so needs his emojis. If he just pulls up the emoji keyboard, he can see very clearly that men these days can get pregnant. And so the silver lining in the storm cloud of the left's really aggressive push to preserve abortion is that we finally move past one of the dumbest talking points in the entire debate, which is if you don't have a uterus, you can't have an opinion. I say to them, how do you know that I don't have a uterus? Whether I do or not, I certainly have opinions. And those opinions seem to be winning the day. Wait, is there a male pregnant emoji now? Oh, Megan, I'm shocked that you would be so old fashioned that you wouldn't regularly

be using the emoji. Not only is there one, but I have put it in my Twitter name. So I am totally protected. There is nothing politically correct about this conversation we're having right now. Oh, well, that brings me to something I wanted to ask you about, which is your recent controversy. They keep inviting my friends at the Daily Wire to give speeches, and then they find out that you're not totally woke and going to say all the things that they wanted you to say and then saying, don't come. Right. It happened to Matt Walsh. It's happened to Ben many times. And now it's happened to you, a Catholic church. Explain where you were supposed to go. School, school. And what happened?

This was the silliest example I've heard yet. There have been plenty of disinvitations that have gone out, but I had been invited to give a speech through my Young America's Foundation lecture tour. I was invited to give a speech at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. And this is a Catholic university. You may have heard of this fellow St. Thomas before. I'm a practicing Catholic myself. This seems like a good fit. However, the leadership of the University of St. Thomas looked into some of my speeches and my writings, and they discovered that I do not go along with transgenderism. I don't believe that boys can become girls and girls can become boys. I think that boys are boys and girls are girls. And if people are confused about that,

they should receive counseling to bring them toward the truth and not to indulge their delusions. The University of St. Thomas took this very personally. They said that they do not go along with the values specifically on transgenderism that I have articulated, which is very confusing because I got those values and those beliefs from the catechism of the Catholic Church. So if the Catholic University doesn't like my values because they're Catholic, I guess that raises a question about what exactly is being taught at this Catholic university. Yeah. Good question. So that is it, is it done? They just booted you off and you like this conservative group can't hear from you that wanted to hear

from you. They have booted me. We just heard from the student group yesterday. It was news to me when this came in, they said, we're appealing the decision. We've got a petition going around. I think there's one of these petition websites to bring Michael Knowles to the University of St. Thomas. It's all the sillier. It's always bad when conservatives are not allowed to say conservative things on campus. But it seems especially crazy that a Catholic is not allowed to say Catholic things on campus. And the only point I would make to the University of St. Thomas leadership is if they think that what I am saying is shocking, just wait until they read St as religious fervor, right? Like this is crazy

religiosity changing women's lives for the worst and it's wrong. Case in point, and I almost never cite this lunatic because truly she's lost her mind. She used to be like, okay, Kirsten Powers. But she not only, she's very woke, of course, but she is possibly the nastiest person on the left. And that's saying something like at least Joy Reid kind of smiles and laughs once in a while. Right. This is an angry, angry woman. And everything she says and writes and so on reflects that. So here's the latest tweet from her. Somebody sent it to me. She blocked me.

You can see why I don't like her. She blocked me. You can see why. I don't like her. She's right. But this is what she tweeted. If you think abortion is wrong, don't get an abortion. It's not okay to impose your religious view on others. Why should a Jew or a Muslim, for example, have to live according to your interpretation of the Bible? If you don't get this, please don't ever use the phrase religious freedom again. Okay. So like what else it would,

however you came to your views, you don't get to force them out. If you just think slavery is bad because of your Catholicism, you can keep it to yourself. Michael Knowles, stop imposing your value system on me. This is especially ironic because the thing that the pro-abortion people are trying to defend here is the ritual slaughter of children. It's human sacrifice, which we've seen in every crazy cultic religion in all of human history, but they don't see it as such. They can see everyone else's religious views, but they believe that their own religious views are simply natural and self-evident and don't actually constitute a belief system. Even though their own religious

views are extraordinarily eccentric. They have a religious view now called transgenderism, which is really just Gnostic dualism. It's an old religious view that your body has nothing to do with your soul. And so if your soul is your true self, your body must be rejected or mutilated to look more like your soul. It's an old religious view. They just don't understand that. And so in answer to Kirsten Powers' question, what gives you the right to tell me how you think we should live? Well, the answer is because I'm a citizen and we live in a society. And the way that self-government works is that we persuade our fellow citizens of the way that we all want to live together here in society. And that's not without limit. There is a limit that is imposed here. That limit is the United States Constitution. And the United States Constitution simply does not provide any sort of license to abortion. It's not in there. It's not in the document. And so we are free to decide this issue for ourselves. If abortion is at all in the Constitution, by the way, it is only in the Constitution in the

14th Amendment to outlaw abortion. So I don't really think Kirsten Powers wants to go down that road. But it is an amazing sort of hypocrisy. She can have her religion, but I'm not allowed to have mine. She can have her rights, but I'm not allowed to have mine. And how you came to your opposition to abortion is none of her business. It's irrelevant. The same, like your Catholicism is as irrelevant to your political views as her lifetime of bitterness and loneliness and rejection is to how she came to hers. But Megan, what do you really think? Not a fan. Did I make that clear? Yeah. So that's sort of what we're hearing. All right. Let me shift gears with you now because I've got to talk about our disinformation czar. The story on her is getting worse and worse. I actually didn't know that she said the Steele dossier was real. That was news to me. Found that out today. So she thought the Steele dossier was real. And she thought the the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation from the Russians. That's the woman who's going to be making the calls on what is and is not disinformation by the federal government, a department that should not exist at all. And if it were to exist, certainly shouldn't be run by a partisan hack like this person. So Senator Kennedy got into this on Capitol Hill with Mayorkas, who's her boss, because

for some reason, this whole thing is coming out of the Department of Homeland Security, I guess, because she's going to be spying on us. I don't know. They say, don't worry, she's not going to spy. But it has something to do with minorities. They always just say, we're helping black and brown people. And we're supposed to say, all right, we'll do it. So they get into brown people and we're supposed to say, oh, we'll do it. So he they get into a back and forth, Mayorkas and Kennedy about her.

Listen to this. When the department picked her, did did it know that she had said that Mr. Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation? Senator, let me let me repeat myself and add one other fact. I was not aware of that. We do not discuss the internal hiring process. Did it know that she had vouched for the veracity of the Steele dossier? Senator, let me repeat myself and add an additional fact. One, we do not discuss internal hiring processes. Two, I was not aware of that fact. I can tell.

Because he goes on to say she's very good at what she does. He goes, I can tell. So he didn't know. He has no idea who he's putting in charge of this thing. This woman who absolutely knows nothing about disinformation, right? If it's not, it doesn't align with her worldview, it's disinformation. And just in case you were wondering what her worldview is, as if you didn't already from what she's said, listen to this latest soundbite dug up on her. Here, listen, listen here. Critical race theory has become one of those hot button issues that the Republicans and other, you know, disinformers who are engaged in disinformation

for profit. Frankly, there are plenty of, you know, media outlets that are making money off of this to have have seized on. And I live in Virginia and in Loudoun County. That's one of the areas where people have really honed in on this topic. Disinformers and Republicans synonymous. I have to disagree with only one point you made, Megan, which is I think this woman knows a lot about disinformation. I think she is extremely good at crafting and peddling disinformation. She's not so good at stopping it. The cherry on top of this whole thing is that her boss,

Mayorkas, needed more information. The self-appointed commissars of information did not have sufficient information. And it's so important that you keep going back to this odd fact that the Ministry of Truth is going to exist within the Department of Homeland Security. Because what we have been told by the White House is that this Ministry of Truth is only focused on foreign disinformation, foreign propaganda. Well, okay, if that's the case, why is it in DHS? Shouldn't it more likely be in the State Department? Well, it takes only a little Google search to show there already is an Office of Disinformation in the State Department. It's being funded. It's been around for a fair number of years now. So why are they doubling up on this? Because obviously, the White House is lying. They're sending out disinformation. And this is not focused on

foreign threats to the integrity of our information systems. This is going to be focused on conservatives here in the United States. It's going to be focused on people at home who the left has accused of spreading dangerous extremism and Russian disinformation out of every other breath that they've taken for the past five years. The target is us. So not only might they be open about their attempts to crack down on discussions in the way the White House has with the disinformation dozen and the pressure it's put, contrary to the First Amendment on big tech. But I, I do worry somewhat about what's going to happen behind the scenes. You know, we had a report out this week about the CDC getting phone information, phone location information, it doesn't show them where Michael Knowles was on any given day or Megyn Kelly. But it shows sort of where the blobs were the mass, the masses were on any given day or Megyn Kelly, but it shows sort of where the blobs were, the mass,

the masses were on any given day during the COVID pandemic. And, you know, whether people were obeying curfews and restrictions in certain cities and so on. So they're already trying to data mine information on American citizens to figure out our behavioral patterns. And that makes me uncomfortable. And I certainly don't want this woman who thinks every Republican is a disinformer, the Steele dossier is real and the Hunter Biden laptop isn't, to be mining data on any of my fellow citizens. Of course. And this is the really hard fact of the whole announcement. We've been making fun of this woman. We've been making fun of the office. We've been making fun of her show tunes videos that have been going around the internet. Ha ha ha ha. The joke is on us because as of now, this office is going to continue to exist.

It's going to operate. It's going to obviously operate in a way that they're not telling us it will because otherwise it would just be duplicating another government office. And they obviously have other designs. The whole thing was announced, what, hours after Elon Musk said that he would take over Twitter and give conservatives more free speech. The timing is simply too coincidental. And so I think what is so important for the conservatives to do here, especially looking ahead to 2022, when we might take some of the government back, 2024, when we might take the whole thing back, is it's not just a personnel issue. It's not just that we need to get rid of this woman. This office needs to be destroyed. There is a legitimate surveillance and law enforcement aspect to our government, and we've got to put protections on

that to make sure they don't overstep. There is no reason for this office to exist. It should be destroyed, and they should salt the ground where it once stood. The two things are kind of parallel. Elon's going to take over Twitter, we hope, and they can't burn everything. There's going to be some evidence of all the shadow banning and so on that they were doing. Many people calling for Elon to make that public. Show us exactly what they were doing to many of us on the right who definitely saw our numbers suppressed and so on or didn't have posts circulated and so on. But so that there's that. And then there's this woman who should remember that the chances of her boss, her boss's boss,

Joe Biden staying in office in 2024 or beyond are looking pretty grim right now. And that there will be a new sheriff in town at some point and they're gonna get to take a look at her little department and everything it's done. And if it went one way only, and if they were spying on Americans and doing inappropriate,

we're going to know. We're going to know. And there could be congressional hearings and so on. So that's cold comfort, but at least it's there and they know they need to operate under that threat. All right, Michael, stand by.

There's so much more to go over. There's great topics ahead, so don't leave. But I want to tell you first that you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111. We're live every weekday, noon east, and the full video show and clips are available on

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wherever you get your podcast while you're on apple leave me a review give me five star rating get leave me a review i read them all read them today uh appreciate it all and you will find our full archives there too with more than 300 shows a couple of notes on joe biden and his messaging uh it wasn't that long ago that he stood there telling us he was going to be President Unity. Remember, he was going to be President Unity. And it didn't matter who you voted for. You know, he was going to be the guy to bring us together. phones and literally referred to Trump's voters, anybody who considers themselves MAGA, as the most extreme political organization in American history, at least in modern history.

Most extreme political organization. All right. Most of these diehard MAGA fans are working class, middle class people who have been totally forgotten by Barack Obama in this eight years that he was president, who wanted to try something different, who took a shot at improving their lives and actually saw them improve under President Trump. And that was a failing. Even Barack Obama acknowledged that he'd overlooked this group. Now they have to sit there and listen to President Unity refer to them as the most extreme political organization in American

history. Extremists, same thing as they're calling the Supreme Court justices, the extremists, right, which is a very loaded term. And it's basically fraught with racism and bigotry and, you know, anti-Americanism and so on. I'll just give you a sampling of here's President Unity and how he sounds today, then and now. With unity, we can do great things. I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days. History, faith and reason show the way, the way of unity. For without unity, there is no peace. And unity is the path forward.

To restore the soul and secure the future of America requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy. Unity. Unity. Together, we shall write an American story of hope, not fear, of unity, not division. This mega crowd is really the most extreme political organization that's existed in American history and recent American history. Hope, not fear, unity, not division. Maybe I'm Pollyanna-ish, Michael, but like maybe somebody in the media would mention that.

Maybe somebody would note the shift in attitude, the broken promise, which was never going to be real anyway. Right. But he's just gotten so divisive in his own rhetoric. Well, regardless of the civility of his claim, the claim itself is just absurd. And it's not difficult to figure out how the proof that the Republicans or the conservatives are not the most extreme group ever in history. And in fact, actually, the left is quite a lot more extreme is that I don't think that conservatives today hold any opinion that would not have been considered common sense by the majority of Americans 30 years ago. What are the issues that we're talking about here? Regardless of what you think about these issues, the Republican view

on marriage, and now it's probably even a minority of conservatives and Republicans, is the view of marriage that men and women make up a marriage. It's the view of marriage that Barack Obama held, not only in 2008, but even as he was heading into the 2012 presidential election. The left-wing view of marriage completely upended that institution. The right-wing conservative view of education is that we shouldn't push transgenderism on five-year-olds. The left-wing view now being pushed by the White House is not only should we teach kids those things, but we should put little tiny children on cross-sex hormones and irreversibly

mutilate their bodies. Regardless of what you think about marriage, transgenderism, abortion, for goodness sakes, the Clintons ran on safe, legal, and rare abortion, and they were seen as extreme in their time. Today, Democrats are running on abortion on demand without apology up until the moment of birth. And if you're talking about the former governor, Democrat governor of Virginia, even after birth on no issue is is the right more extreme than the left. It's actually quite the opposite. And that's why Biden's not citing any examples. And even the you know, you think about, OK, crime, right? Republicans were against defund the police. Well, the Democrats came around to that. Now they're denying that they were ever on a different page. Immigration. Republicans have been jumping up and down about the border. Well, Joe Biden must have taken a look at the police. Well, the Democrats came around to that. Now they're denying that they were ever on a different page. Immigration. Republicans have been jumping up and down about the border. Well,

Joe Biden must have taken a look at the polls. And now he's like, oh, you know, yes, we care. We have to secure the border. And Mayorkas is like, we've got a plan for when we pull Title 42. Like they talk like Republicans. So on paper, they share a lot of the values that Republicans actually live. It's just when they go back behind doors, when it comes to policymaking, they do something different, which, by the way, the Clintons were the masters of. They said safe, legal and rare, but they didn't actually believe that. But they were much better liars than most Democrats. You know, it's a lot. It's a lot like that meme that Elon Musk just posted, which was him standing to the left of center. And you had the people on the right and the people on

the left. And that was 10 years ago. Now, it's not that he has moved. It's that the center of politics has moved and the left has moved so far to the left that he's considered right of center. I don't know how anyone could say with a straight face that it is the right that has moved right. If anything, the right has moved left on certain issues, a little too far left. But to your point, Megan, the Democrats used to agree with us on all of these issues. Then they went extreme. And now they're starting to come back around to us because it's killing them in the polls. And now so.

So now Joe Biden is making up fake boogeymen to scare people about the right. You know, like like this one that we have it about how what are they going to do next? They're going to start kicking gay children out of classrooms, LGBTQ children out of classrooms. So if you have a child who's on the LGBTQ group, he can no longer learn. That's what Republicans have in store. He said it.

Psaki doubled down on it. Here it is. What happens if you have states change the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can't be in classrooms with other children? Is that legit? What happens if you have states change the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can't be in classrooms with other children? What is he talking about? Well, I think, Peter, we've seen extreme laws that target LGBTQ families, their kids across the country. And I think what he's saying is we don't know what they're capable of, given what they've already done to date. Which state is trying to segregate LGBTQ children in the classroom?

Well, I think we've seen laws that are incredibly discriminatory. That's what the president's referring to. And the fact that he doesn't know what additional steps could be Seriously, they could make an argument. They could say there was only one transgender clinic left in Texas. And kids who think that they are trans are getting treatment at that Texas clinic. And they're trying to shut it down. That's what the Republic and what are these kids going to do who have been who have felt affirmed who have felt non suicidal because they've been getting this treatment that they find necessary. And these are 16 and 17 and 18 year olds. We're not talking about five year olds. That's what I mean. Why can't you just say that? That would be at least a reasonable answer that you could say, OK, I got I now I know what we're arguing about. I can make my counter argument. You know, it's on. But the fear mongering tells us something. You know, it tells us something about the way they're thinking about their own arguments.

Well, they know that the reality is not convenient for them, especially in an election year. And so they've got to try to burn down fields of straw men. We also have to remember Joe Biden is a nasty man who lies like he breathes. He has cultivated this image that he is good old Uncle Joe, good at look. He might not be the brightest bulb in the pack, but gosh darn it, he's honest. He cares about you. He's just nice old Uncle Joe. He's not a nice man. He's a very, very nasty man. And the defining feature of his political career is that he lies with ease. He lied in the 1988 presidential race. That's why he had to drop out. He lied during the Clarence Thomas hearings, actually, which he was leading. He's lied in 2012 when he said that Mitt Romney wanted to put black people back in chains. He's lied about some of the most intimate aspects of his lives, about his academic record. I think he lies so much that he actually can't tell the difference

between truth and reality. A lot of people are blaming this sort of thing on his senility because he's obviously lost a step. But I think it's even deeper than that. When people are practiced and habitual liars, they start to not be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. And I suspect that's where he is. When he says that Republicans are going to try to throw five-year-olds in the gulag or whatever, he either believes it or doesn't believe it or doesn't really care what he believes. And so Jen Psaki is left not giving a defense of what he said and merely insinuating that Republicans are extreme and therefore there's no limit to what we will do. He's not the only one lying. And I'm thinking now about so the two topics I just hit defund the police. The Democrats

now want to want us to believe they were never for that of course they were that's why we had a defund the police movement to begin with it was they were the ones pushing it same thing on covid once the democrats saw what happened in virginia and that tight race at the new jersey gubernatorial level they started to say we don't sick of the masks take these off this is nonsense we don't COVID's over. Right. And now perhaps the biggest whopper of them all, Brandy Weingarten of all people who runs the second largest teachers union in the country had the nerve to come out this week and talk about her lamentation over the stress in America's children at having been out of school. The nerve of this woman to try to get us to see her as someone who's empathetic toward the pain the children feel at not being in school because of her. Because of her, she's the one who made it

happen. She's the one who revised CDC guidelines to make sure they could keep our kids out. She worked with Rochelle Walensky's people to make sure the teachers union would have the last word.

So listen to what she said this week about the kids being in crisis. And then I'll play you what she used to sound like. Kids are in crisis. And we had a mental health crisis before COVID, but for two years of disruption,

two years of looking at the screens, two years of not having a normal kind of routine and rhythm. Recovery is really tough. She can't even say it. She's reading it. Can we just play it one more time? If you're listening, you can go back and watch this on YouTube.

I'm just going to tell you where she's reading. She's looking. She can't even spit it out because she knows she's lying. She's got to read her lie. Listen. Kids are in crisis. And we had a mental health crisis before COVID, but for two years of disruption, two years

of looking at the screens, two years of not having a normal- Holding her notes, waving her notes. ... routine and rhythm. Recovery is really tough. Reading. The nerve. Can I tell? notes and rhythm recovery is really tough reading the nerve can i tell this is two years of listening to this woman because i you know i've got young kids i've been she's far too powerful of saying kids are resilient so many people asked her they're out of school this is going to cause lasting damage they're going to face crisis and she kept saying kids are resilient she tweeted

it multiple times. She said, I think we've got one of the examples on tape. Here's here it is. Is there a point in which kids have been out of physical in-person school for so long that the education that they've lost isn't really recoverable, that the third grade, the fourth grade, the kindergarten they lost, you can take extra semesters in the summer, they can do, but it can't really be fixed. No, I don't believe that. I believe that kids are resilient and kids will recover. We have to believe that this is recoverable. Oh my God, Michael. That's always the line of people when they screw up kids' lives. They always say, well, don't worry up kids' lives. They always say, well, don't worry. Kids are resilient. No, don't take responsibility off yourself here,

lady. You're the one who kept the kids out of school. She talks about a mental crisis. I'm having a mental crisis trying to contain myself while this woman is gaslighting me because she is the one who did it. And this is exactly why, by the way, to tie it in with the Nina Jankowicz DHS Ministry of Truth story, this is why they need the disinformation boards, both the formal one in the government and the informal ones in big tech and at the so-called fact-checking websites. Because what they are saying is not true. It's easily discoverable as not true. And so they need to have a power structure that prevents you from saying that and punishes you. I'll give you an example of this actually tying all the way back to abortion. There was a Democrat governor who

just signed a law to legalize abortion up through all moments of pregnancy, all nine months. We've seen other laws like this around the country. And PolitiFact rated the claim that this Democrat governor had signed this law as false. When you looked and read the PolitiFact article, it said, yeah, okay, so sure. They actually, he did sign that bill and actually it does allow for abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. But look, it's pretty rare. It doesn't usually happen. So we rate this claim false. But they just admitted in the article that the claim was true. The reason this has power is because the so-called fact checkers determine how the social media algorithms work and they can

suppress conservative content. They can de-platform conservative voices. And if they won't do it, then the government might have to step in themselves. If the Democrats were not lying with the sort of blatant gaslighting that you see from Randy Weingarten here, they wouldn't have to do this kind of thing. But because it's so obvious, they've got to come in and censor us. Yeah. What are the children resilient in the face of? You, you, your policies. Even the New York Times, David Leonhard, one of the straight shooters over there, today has a piece out saying what might have been in his morning news column. Were many of these problems avoidable? The evidence suggests that they were. Extended school closures appear to have done much more harm than good. And many school administrators probably could have recognized

as much by the fall of 2020. And I mean, for her not to take any responsibility for being the person who pushed that on the children is outrageous. More on that and another day when I to get past my personal mental health crisis over the lies being told in my face. Michael Knowles, what a pleasure. Thanks. All right. We'll do it again soon. Tomorrow, we're going to have the very latest on the Supreme Court leak. I'm telling you, it's any moment now that they announced they found the person. Plus, I'm excited, speaking of the Supreme Court, to talk about this. That football coach who was fired after praying with his players, his case went up to the high court and it went well for him. So he's going to join us live to tell us what this was all about and how he feels about his chances. In the meantime, download The Megyn Kelly Show so you don't miss any of that on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher. Also at youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. Go on over there, subscribe, smash that like button. Thank you for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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