The Megyn Kelly Show - Truth About Ashley Biden's Diary, and the State of Men, with Ryan Grim, Joel Pollak, and Coleman Hughes | Ep. 396

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Ryan Grim, of the "Bad News" Substack and Joel Pollak, of Breitbart News, to talk about the journalistic ethics of covering Ashley Biden's diary, what's actually newsworthy in diary, government officials trying to squash journalism and violate press freedom, the hypocrisy of the media in how it covers the Trump adult children, the way Project Veritas operates, suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the latest on the investigation, the politicization of the Department of Justice, and more. Then Coleman Hughes, host of Conversations with Coleman, joins to talk about trans women quickly and absurdly taking the place of biological women, the state of women and men in society today, an article arguing against "gender segregation" in sports, controversy over the Canadian teacher with the giant fake breasts, why "experts" are losing credibility, why young people are more miserable than ever, little boys in our culture now, NYC's crime problem, 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. I want to remind you that tomorrow I'm going to be sending our second edition of the American News Minute. That's my weekly conversation with you. You will get the news of the week in one minute or less. That's my weekly conversation with you. You will get the news of the week in one minute or less. That's my promise to you. Who else is promising that? Really, I truly was like, this is annoying having to thumb through all these newsletters. I haven't subscribed to so many of them. And I was like, you know, we need one that just tells you the news in a minute or

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just have to choose what was the worst thing he did this week. He's lucky. He's so cute. Anyway, if you want this, go ahead and sign up now. You go to megankelly.com and they'll ask you for your email. If it turns out I'm boring you, you can always unsubscribe, but I won't bore you. You'll be entertained. I know how to do a good little email that will enrich your Fridays. Okay? megankelly.com. And also we're going to take emails on there and comments on the show, which then I will respond to on the show. So I'm sick of using the Apple comments section. What good does that do us? Screw Apple. Okay. Sorry. Enough about me. Okay. Today, taking a deep dive into a story that the media refuses to fully cover and the White House wants entirely buried.

Ashley Biden's stolen journal. She's the president's daughter. She's the president's only child with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden. And she's an adult. She's about president's only child with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden. And she's an adult. She's about 40 years old. And the protection around this story has reached very bizarre levels. All right. Because this has become a national story.

She has made it a national story. And yet the media refused to report on it. A few weeks ago, two people pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge regarding the president's daughter's stolen diary. The police made headlines, but what did not is what's actually written in the diaries that have now become a federal case. Now, we have held off on reporting the details while covering this story in the past, too, since there were questions about whether this diary did truly belong to ashley biden but now that two people have admitted to stealing it and are cooperating with the doj and the doj seems totally fine with this reporting by multiple media outlets that it was indeed ashley biden's diary and comes very close to explicitly admitting that itself in its charging documents were good.

We're fine. We all know that if this was a diary belonging to Ivanka Trump, the details would have been printed the minute they were posted online. The second holding off would never even have occurred. It would have been out of the question for most of these outlets who have a history of reporting on the Trump kids as if they are totally fair game. But when it comes to Joe Biden's kids, well, you know what they did with Hunter. And now they do the same with Ashley, even though she is the one who is effectively making this, again, a national story. Joining me now, two journalists not afraid to cover this story, not to mention many others involving Biden and his

children. And you can go beyond that. Ryan Grimm is the D.C. bureau chief at The Intercept and writes the Bad News Substack. And Joel Pollack is a senior editor at large for Breitbart News and a host on Sirius XM Patriot Channel, which is also great, just like the Triumph channel where I am. Ryan and Joel, welcome to the show. Great to have you. Good to be here. Okay. So let's just start with the actual decision to talk about the diary, okay? Because let's just cover why we're covering it and why nobody else is covering it. And Ryan, you have a history of covering things people refuse to cover, and thank God for Ryan, you have a history of covering things people refuse to cover. And thank God for doing that. It's one of the things that drew us together.

I think the first time I really got to know your reporting was with Tara Reid. And that's another story the media buried because it reflected badly on Joe Biden. But anyway, if you look at the history of news outlets reporting on things that have been stolen, things that have been wrongfully obtained by a different source, not the reporter reporting on it, but some bad guy does something bad and steals documents or hacks emails, etc. That person may be in trouble with the law. But typically, the press has absolutely no problem ethically or otherwise in printing the things. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had Pentagon Papers or Glenn Greenwald's reporting on the Snowden documents or all the reporting that was done, for example, when the Sarah Palin emails were hacked. I'm just teeing it up for you,

Ryan, on whether you want to comment on that. My point is simply there's a pattern and there's a history of the media having zero problem doing this. What's happening here is they don't like what the stolen parcel says about their favorite president. Yeah, the Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon Papers case is probably the best example because that's become a canonical in our culture as something good that was done. There are still movies being made about the heroic decisions by the New York Times and the Washington Post to push against the force of the state, the rogue President Nixon, to plow ahead and publish these documents that had been stolen by Ellsberg from the Rand Corporation and leaked to these newspapers. And so, once you have kind of lionized that, you can easily walk

backwards from there and see, like, how important it is that press freedoms not be restricted based on where the information came from. Because if you can only publish information that was, that where you can prove that the entire chain of custody, you know, was completely kosher and lawful from start to finish, very quickly, you give the government power to censor and to stop publication of information

that they don't want out by simply saying that those are stolen or hacked materials or maybe stolen or hacked materials. And so, therefore, you can't publish on it. And like you said, yes, the Snowden stuff, you could argue that the Podesta emails that appear to, you know, that were hacked one way or another, whether you believe it was Russia, which does seem to be, you know, that does seem to be where the evidence is. But somebody hacked John Podesta. Podesta didn't just, you know, leak his own emails to WikiLeaks. You know, the news media covered those. The news media has covered other, you know, stolen and hacked documents. And so I think it's incumbent on reporters to do what they can to

verify the information, especially in our era where you're going to start seeing uh you know you know bad actors some some states some non-state actors who are going to be falsifying information and trying to muddy the waters that way so so you use your your journalistic techniques to verify the information and then once you've done that then as long as it's newsworthy you report on it uh whether it was stolen is not the question. Now, journalists can't participate in the theft, and we can get into that later. Yeah, you can't help. If you help, you're in as much legal trouble as the thief is, or if you incite the thief to go get it or what have you. But if you're just a good faith recipient of the

stolen goods as a journalist, you can go ahead and publish it. And we've seen that repeatedly. That's how Trump's taxes wound up in the New York Times. That's how Sarah Palin's emails wound up a national news story in 2008. And I remember at the time going on O'Reilly and O'Reilly was mad that Sarah Palin's private information was being published. And he asked me as a young legal analyst, is this legal? Shouldn't they not be allowed to do this? And I explained to him at the time, it's illegal for the hackers. It's not illegal for the press to then report on what's in there. And so that brings us to question number two when it comes to Ashley Biden's diary.

And that is, is it relevant? Is there anything in there that's relevant and newsworthy? And secondly, what about the general policy, unwritten policy of the press to say hands off a presidential candidate's children, that the candidate is fair game, but the children we tend to leave alone. And I would say to you, Ryan, this is not a minor. This is not Sasha and Malia Obama or a young Chelsea Clinton. This is a an adult whose diary has information that is that raises a serious question about the character of Joe Biden, of her father. And so it is newsworthy. And on top of that, even if you think, well, it still doesn't pass the test of you know we don't touch a president's child in the news two things number one they violated that with the trump children ad nauseum and number two she's the one who's made it a national news story by allowing this

prosecution of james o'keefe well he hasn't been prosecuted but he's been raided and of the two people who stole it so what's your take on that, Ryan? I do think that there are newsworthy components of it. And I think people can disagree about the level of the newsworthiness because it's not exactly clear what she's saying. And she says as much in the diary. And so for people who haven't looked at it- No, we'll get to that. We'll get to the content in one second so just so yeah so i i think the general rule should be sure if it that the children are private citizens to the extent that their private lives don't intersect uh with either you know implicating their their public relatives uh in some type of uh wrongdoing or whether they implicate some sort of corruption relative

to their parents or other family members who are public. So in other words, if she's just, let's say, going through a really difficult time in her life and going into rehab, I don't necessarily see that as something alone that is worth reporting on, unless it represents some hypocrisy on how the public figure relates to, say, the drug war or something like that. But in general, I think you want to give the kids of these politicians some privacy to live their lives. But if it implicates wrongdoing or if it implicates corruption, then then I think it's newsworthy.

Well, and on top of that, again, now she's made it a federal criminal matter that is widely reported in all the news outlets. And that's what that's really what was the final straw for us, which was you cannot have the entire media reporting on an FBI raid of a journalist's home, journalists who work for him on their homes, and then going after criminally these two people for the theft of a diary, which we all know they would never be doing if this were not the daughter of a president, and then expect everyone to not delve into what is it about this diary that is so explosive. They refuse to answer the question. So it has become a national story. It is news. And if she really didn't want that, she should have strongly discouraged the FBI from pursuing the matter at all.

It's become a press freedom issue for sure. And I think that that's separate from the, you know, the contents of the subject matter discussed in the diary. But the question of, you know, whether or not, you know, the raid of Project Veritas founder O'Keefe was appropriate. And, you know, the general tenor of the kind of DOJ's posture toward this i think is is is quite concerning from from a press freedom perspective because depending on uh like as we were talking earlier you know project red house says it had no role whatsoever in in the theft of these of of the diary that a source came to them uh with the diary and if and if that's the case and if there's still then a prosecution then that ends up putting journalists across the board on notice. Because you already have that precedent being set with WikiLeaks, where WikiLeaks did not participate in the hack of the documents.

The only claim that they make in prosecuting Assange is that Chelsea Manning said, do you want me to look for any more information? And Assange very carefully said, and the quote was something like, in my experience, curious eyes never run dry. Something very close to that. That's not good enough. Which is just generally saying, look, I'm always interested in information. So if that alone, just expressing a general interest in information, counts as a criminal conspiracy to commit hacking, and that puts you as somebody who's now a collaborator in this crime, then any journalist who's receiving information from a source and asking for ways to verify it and otherwise doing what is generally considered to be basic reporting has, you know, can now be

criminalized. Yeah, is guilty. And we have to talk about chilling effect. All right, Joel. So the other piece of it is that I mentioned just a moment ago was the media's glee in reporting on the Trump children knows no bounds, no bounds, right? Like there's been absolutely no respect afforded to them. And again, I get it. They're adults. At least one of them actively participated in the administration. But it goes beyond, oh, did Donald Trump Jr. coordinate with the Russians? Oh, did Ivanka Trump belong at whatever summit? They've got Mary Trump, the cousin of the Trump kids, running around on every show and in every publication to push her book, which is sold somewhere over a million copies, I believe, talking about who the Trump children are and what kind of a father Donald Trump was, how he wasn't. I just pulled it just I was just like one Google search before I came on the air that the children's is from Mary Trump. They believe the way to get their father's attention is through cruelty and subservience.

The Guardian reported reporting about how Trump was a distant father who never changed diapers and instead encouraged the jump up. We could keep going. But this has been totally fair game with the adult children of Donald Trump without any ethical or moral pause. I think that's correct. I think there is a double standard and it's reinforced all the time. This week, we saw the New York Attorney General, Letitia James, sue the Trump children over real estate valuations. Meanwhile, conservatives and perhaps

Americans in general are asking when there's going to be some sort of legal action about Hunter Biden's lobbying and his overseas business interests, which don't really seem to have led prosecutors to any civil or criminal prosecutions or suits. So there is definitely a double standard. I will say that my entry into this story is very much on the First Amendment free speech side and less on the question of the substance of what Ashley Biden wrote, because this issue really exploded, I think, as a First Amendment issue, not just because of the FBI raid last November at O'Keeffe's home, although that was important,

but because after that raid, the New York Times started publishing legal memos that were written to James O'Keefe by his attorney, and they didn't say where they got those. They were evidently leaked by somebody. Now, they could conceivably, I guess, have been leaked by somebody within James O'Keefe's own Project Veritas organization. But it's hard to imagine that. The timing is odd. You have this federal raid, all these materials seized. And then suddenly the New York Times, which at the time was being sued by O'Keefe and still is being sued in state court in New York for defamation, the New York Times starts publishing all kinds of confidential legal information, communications from O'Keefe's lawyer to O'Keefe and to Project Veritas. So a New York judge rightfully stepped in and applied or appointed a special master. You know, we've seen

that issue come up a lot with Mark Alago, but this special master is meant to go over the evidence that was seized. And the judge basically said, we have to make sure that there's no leaking going on from the FBI or the DOJ into the New York Times for the purpose of this state court litigation. So it's really not just about the federal authorities violating press freedom, potentially, by going after O'Keefe and targeting him for what he was publishing or what he had in his possession, because Project Veritas didn't actually end up publishing Ashley Biden's diary or running a story about it. That happened elsewhere. And I'm sure we'll talk about that in a minute. But it's also a question about the New York Times

getting access to confidential information about the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Times. And it looks like that information had to have come or very likely came from a government source. So now not only is the raid potentially a violation of press freedom, but now you see federal authorities using their privileged access to information about O'Keefe and about Project Veritas to assist another potential media ally, the New York Times, at least if you imagine that the left-leaning Times and the politicized Department of Justice are on the same political side now. So there are so many free speech and First Amendment press freedom issues wrapped up

in this. And that's when I started writing about it. The question of the substance, and I know we're going to get to that in a minute, is a very complicated one because we're talking about a diary. Now, I keep a journal. I've done so for 22 years. I would be horrified if somebody found one of my journals and published its contents. Why?

What's in there? Exactly right. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff in there. I mean, I use it as part of a creative process. So I have things that are as boring as what I'm planning to do that day, sorting out my own internal thoughts about what's on the schedule. And then I have things, ideas and thoughts and what I dreamed about last night or whatever it is, but things you would only tell a therapist.

It's private, right? So it's chilling to know not only that someone else could come into possession of something like that, and we all have personal things in our lives, whether they're diaries or other things, but also that that would become public knowledge. And it's sort of a nightmare to imagine that this other person out there has access to your innermost thoughts, particularly as in Ashley Biden's case, when she was struggling with addiction and where apparently keeping the journal was part of the process of going through recovery and rehabilitation. And so you need to

be able to be completely open with yourself. And I suppose with the people who are helping you through rehab, we want people to be able to go through that process, whether they're famous or obscure. And so we do have a privacy interest also. I mean, that's also a right that we take very seriously, whether it's vis-a-vis the government or vis-a-vis other people. We want to honor that. So it may not be a legal question or even from a journalistic point of view, an ethical question, but there is a moral question involved as well in the publication of the diary. No, I get it. I get it for sure. And I also have a journal and I definitely would not want to see it in the press. But there's a reason

this all went down. I mean, the reports have been from James, who came on this show and detailed in great detail how he came into contact with the people pushing the diary and so on, that they originally claimed that it was abandoned. She was at some friend's house or a halfway house, I've heard it described different ways, down in Florida, and she left. She moved out, I gather, and left it behind for some long period, which I imagine you would never do, Joel,

with your journal, and nor would I ever do. You know what I mean? Like, it's very scary to leave possession of something like that behind and move on without it, and there is a risk in doing that, not to excuse the thieves who have now said they did steal it. But I'm just saying that there's that was a problem. That's how this thing happened. And then secondly, the police will always sit you down, the feds, the prosecutors, and always say to you as a crime victim, here are

the upsides of going after the bad guys. And here are the downsides. The upsides are justice, potentially. Someone pays for their wrongdoing. The downsides are things that you may not want out about yourself and your personal situation are going to have to be testified to on the stand. People are going to learn things about you in this situation that you did not want the public eye. And in particular, in a case like this, and then the victim gets to decide whether they want that out there. So very clearly, this is my very educated guess, Ashley Biden approved this. She approved going after these guys for stealing it and potentially of James O'Keefe. And she knew that this was going to get out. I mean, it was already released. I realized that,

but the media is now reporting on it everywhere without reporting the contents? Go ahead. So what we know from public reporting is that the Biden campaign went to federal authorities. And perhaps Ryan has some information about this, but I don't know whether she personally said she wanted them to pursue the case. We know that the Biden campaign. They wouldn't have consulted with her. She is the victim. There's just no way. I mean, it's like the case where the wife accuses the husband of beating her. And then she says, wait, never mind. I don't want you to go after him. Yes, the D.A. could still go after him. And sometimes the D.A. will because she says this is a matter of public safety and I'm there to uphold justice, irrespective of

whether the victim wants it. But in ninety nine point nine nine percent of cases without the victim, you don't do it. You just don't. But in point in point zero one percent of cases, the victim's father is the president of the United States. Right. And so there is no way Joe Biden would authorize this if his daughter did not want it. Well, I don't know. We can say that for sure. I mean, look, we're all just guessing, but I feel like my guess is a well-educated guess. And like you said, it was already up. And I actually think there's a journalistic ethics violation, I would call it, in publishing the entire diary. I think that publishing the newsworthy contents of it is reasonable. I'm with you on that because when you get your hands on the diary, and we're going to talk about the newsworthy portions right now. But, you know, like, let me put it this way. If you get somebody's diary under all these circumstances we've discussed and the person is like, so-and-so is so dreamy. Mrs. Ashley Pollack, you know, like, and with the hearts around it, you know, this is not relevant. Nobody needs to know about, you know, her private hopes and dreams and her love relationships.

Who cares? But the stuff about him is on point. It's relevant, and we're going to get into it. Okay, so the most newsworthy part of this, Ryan, is the part about what she calls her own sex addiction and how she says she got this sex addiction. And this is the paragraph in which she mentions Joe Biden. I'm trying to get to the actual exact quote. I don't know if you have it in front of you. Okay. I've got it. I'm going to read this. It was from an entry January 30th, 2019, where she says, I've always been boy crazy. She writes about some things she did when she was younger, which you don't know, whatever.

You can read all this on the Internet. It's just this is only my choice about what to report. She says, I was hyper sexualized at a young age. What is this due to? Was I molested? I think so. I can't remember the specifics, but I do remember trauma. I remember not liking the blank house at some family's house.

I remember somewhat being sexualized with a female cousin. I remember having sex with friends at a young age. Showers with my dad, probably not appropriate, being turned on when I wasn't supposed to be. And she goes from there. The shower, the showers with her dad, which she describes as probably not appropriate, is newsworthy. And it's especially newsworthy because it fits into a greater pattern of bizarre behavior by Joe Biden with young women that the media has also been reluctant to cover. What do you make of it, Ryan? I think it's newsworthy in the sense that I think the public has a right to know that particular piece of information in there. I think some on

the right have exaggerated its newsworthiness uh because by by not noting that uh you know the ambiguities in it like i i think i'm not sure uh probably inappropriate and and focus instead just on that that one line uh but i still think that that's for the public to to work out that that it is something that that is that would that crosses the bar of of newsworthiness, even as but whereas a lot of it isn't like a lot of like like you said, like what she did as a as a kid or or in high school or whatever with her marriage, not like not. Yeah, her marriage. None of that is the public. Does the public have a real right to. I mean, I'm just going to be honest.

I do want to know more about showers with her father that she thinks were probably not appropriate. public does the public have a real right to as far as i mean i i'm just going to be honest i i do want to know more about showers with her father that she thinks were probably not appropriate joel i i think that's fair game that we've watched this i ryan interviewed tara reed i interviewed tara reed almost nobody else in the media would talk about tara reed the joe biden sexual harassment accuser who came forward during the campaign you can can disbelieve her all you want. Fine. That's your prerogative. But that's newsworthy. The media completely snuffed out that story. He was also accused by another person of Lucy Flores of having behaved, touched her inappropriately. We had Betsy DeVos on the show not long ago. Betsy DeVos, the former education secretary under Trump, who said she was in a wheelchair at one point and Joe

Biden came over, put his hands on the wheelchair, put his forehead down to hers and started rubbing her forehead. And she felt trapped and inappropriate. It was, he's got a pattern of this. We've all seen the videos of him with a young girl sniffing the hair. And I'm sorry, it may make you feel uncomfortable, but it is worthy of discussion as to whether this guy's got a pattern of inappropriate behavior toward women, especially young ones. I agree. And I think that's what makes it newsworthy. What's interesting

is that Project Veritas decided not to publish it, despite its newsworthiness, for all the reasons you mentioned, as well as the fact that it did actually become part of the campaign in 2020 because Joe Biden was eventually pressured to come out and admit that he had been a touchy-feely sort of person. He didn't say toward women or younger women in particular. He just said, that's the way I am with everybody, with men and women, and I'm going to try to be different. Band or Cuomo defense. Right, exactly. So I think it's relevant from that point of view and newsworthy. The question is, from the perspective of Project Veritas, why wasn't it published? And we don't know the full answer to that.

And from the limited reporting there's been about that, it appears that they made a strategic decision that it would look somewhat cheap or it would be a cheap shot, they said, to publish that. And I guess then you have to look at it in terms of what the role of Project Veritas is. And I come from Breitbart, which is very open about its conservative views and conservative editorial standpoint. So there is a kind of advocacy journalism that strives to be accurate, but certainly has an agenda or an ideology. And Project Veritas decided that it would not be to their benefit or the benefit of the cause for which they do their journalism for them to publish this. Obviously, there were differences of opinion over that because it's now emerged that somebody

at Project Veritas leaked the diary to another publication, hoping it would be published. I think it would have- Which it was. It was. And it was. And I know we're going to get to that, but I think for a long time, it wasn't clear whether Project Veritas had publicly made the decision not to publish, but then privately, secretly leaked to someone else so that it would come out and i think we now know that wasn't the case but i think it would have looked worse in terms of the case they're now facing or they may face in the future from the federal government if they had played

this kind of double game where they're going to maintain a kind of moral stance in public about this kind of material and then in private leak it to other publications. It appears that didn't happen. There was actually a, I'm confused about the reasons. Cause as I recall, when James came on this show, he said, the reason we didn't publish it is because we could never satisfy ourselves that in fact it was Ashley Biden's, you know, that they had done a few things to try to confirm that, but they never got it to the point where he was comfortable saying. Can I say something about that? Well, can I just say, let me just finish and I'll give it back to you.

But now the New York Times is reporting that what actually happened was they did satisfy themselves that it was hers. They got her on the phone. Some of some of James's people, his journalists got her on the phone saying, oh, we think we found it. We want to return it to you. And everybody involved felt that they had sufficient confirmation from her. She was like, oh, God, yes, please give it to me to proceed based on the assumption this did indeed belong to her. And then they report that James allegedly went to then candidate Joe Biden and wanted an on-camera interview with him in which he was going to present the diary. And that never happened. And then James did not publish it.

And then James went down to the authorities in Florida and returned it, saying, we believe it may be stolen property. And then one year later was raided. At this point, Joe Biden had become president. Go ahead, Joel. So the point I was going to make is that when you are known for the kind of journalism that Project Veritas is known for, which is undercover journalism, right? Their major scoops happen when they are able to place an undercover reporter inside an organization who has a video camera or a microphone, and they can record what people are really saying when they think nobody else can hear them. They can observe how left-wing organizations or government organizations are really working. And I think the risk that they were worried about was that someone might be trying to do that to

them. I think that they are hypersensitive to the risk of being reported on in the way that they have become known for reporting on others. So I think that they might have been hyper cautious with regard to the diary, because there's nothing worse for their credibility than to be fooled, let's say, by someone who's planting something with them that would discredit them. And I suppose, if it's something so really sensational and personal, it would look so much worse if they had published it, and it turned out not to be real. So I think they were very sensitive to that issue, partly because of the way they do their own journalism. Can I add to that real quick? Yeah, go ahead, Ryan.

And so I interviewed the publisher of the National File, which is the conservative publication that ended up actually posting the diary. And he said that his source at Project Veritas disputed O'Keefe's public claim and said that they absolutely did verify that the diary was authentic and that O'Keefe saying that they couldn't verify it was just cover. Because what Veritas is also known for is fearless journalism and not flinching in the face of power and so to say that you have verified the diary and then to have you know flinched at publishing it might have uh you know been some type of a blow to their brand or to their credibility and so publicly uh you know internally o'keefe told staff this would be a cheap shot that's why we didn't didn't publish it i think that's accurate publicly he's why we didn't didn't publish it.

I think that's accurate. Publicly, he said we couldn't verify it. We would have. You know, we're not afraid to publish whatever, whatever we have, but we couldn't verify it. So I think that that was not true. I think I think that Joel's right that they're on guard for, you know, for getting punked. But I don't think that that's what happened here. Well, that would make sense. I mean, if James came to the conclusion

that this doesn't make them look good and doesn't rise to the level of warranting publication and he was honest with his staff about that, I can understand that. And then publicly, I can understand a lot of people who run businesses have a different message outwardly than they do when they're dealing with their own staff

about their reasoning. And then a couple of guys got ticked off and leaked it so that it did hit. It did hit before the election. It was the month before the election and, of course, got no coverage and nobody cared. And I don't I don't think in any way this would have been a deal breaker for his election, his electoral chances. But again, it's kind of not the point. You know, it's like they were already working on suppressing another story about one of Joe Biden's children a month before the election, Hunter Biden. So I'm sure the media had no interest in this. And, you know, this is a problem at many levels with the FBI,

with the media and so on. We're going to pick it up because Joel's been doing a lot of reporting on Hunter Biden. And we've got an update on that case. Where is that case, by the way? Lots of indictments of Trump, not a one of Hunter Biden. As we continue with Ashley and Hunter Biden. And we've got an update on that case. Where is that case, by the way? Lots of indictments of Trump, not a one of Hunter Biden. As we continue with Ashley and Hunter Biden, right after this break. So before we move on from Ashley, the thing that really galls me about this whole thing is how the media has absolutely no interest in it, right? They know it's going to reflect poorly on Joe Biden. They've ignored it. And it reminded me, Ryan, of what they did to Tara Reid.

First, they tried to totally ignore her. Then when she finally came forward, she gave you an interview that I read. That was really interesting. She gave me an on-camera interview. They tore this woman to shreds. I is, I'll never forget doing this interview because it was right in the height of the COVID pandemic, the lockdown. And I got on a flight. I was in Montana. I got on a flight to go out to see her. And it was, there was literally nobody in the airport. I mean, it was truly a ghost town in the airports that I was going through,

including Denver, which I had to like connect in. I mean, Denver is a massive airport. Nobody was there. It was so weird. You know, I took an overhead shot at one point. Just, it was an eerie ghost town. In any event, I went, I did my own hair and makeup just for the record because you couldn't get hair and makeup

during the COVID pandemic. And as a reminder, here's how that went and what she accused Joe Biden of doing when she was his intern. It happened very quickly. I remember being pushed up against the wall and thinking the first thought I had was, where's the bag? Which is an absurd thought, but that's what I thought. The bag?

Where's the bag? Yeah, because I was handing it to him. And he had his hands underneath my clothes. And it happened all at once. So he had one hand underneath my shirt and the other hand, I had a skirt on and he like went down my skirt and then went up and I remember I was up almost on my tippy toes and when he went inside the skirt he was talking to me at the same time and he was leaning into me and I pulled this way away from his head I remember and so he was kissing my neck area and he whispered did I want to go somewhere else and a low voice he said some other

things i can't remember everything he said um but he said um something vulgar and hey i ask what he he said i want to f**k you you can believe tara reid or not believe Tara Reid, but that's that is a newsworthy story. And what I see right now, right now is reporting on E. Jean Carroll and her lawsuit against President Trump over something that happened 20 plus years ago, allegedly on a plane and the media runs. And by the way, I've interviewed the Trump accusers. So everyone can just take a seat on the left. He said, what about the Trump accusers? Well, I think I might be one of the only reporters on Earth who's interviewed both Trump accusers and Biden accusers. I don't care. My politics don't

enter into this. So the media loves to report any story to this day on women accusing Trump. But Tara Reid gets shut down. And the Ashley Biden Biden diary to me, Ryan, fits right into the same pattern. Yeah, I think everyone should be everyone should be heard, you know, who has, you know, who has a credible and credible enough claim. And I think the media is having a hard time for with the Ashleyiden diary for a lot of the reasons that that you say but also the like like we were talking about earlier you in order to like do you know do a you know an on-camera interview with ashley biden she'd have to agree to participate in an on-camera interview for instance uh all you can do right now is is to that one line in the diary. That line, it's a newsworthy line.

It raises all sorts of questions about the obvious questions. But without more, it does become difficult to know how to advance the story. I don't think it's difficult. I think it's pretty on the nose, how the questions that need to be raised. You can't always answer the questions as a journalist, but it's our job to raise them. It's literally part of our job.

Joel, you've been raising questions about the Hunter Biden situation. We're in the news today as Letitia James, once again, going after Donald Trump in a civil case and not just Donald Trump, but his children as well, as you pointed out, claiming that they overstated the value of certain real estate assets in order to get favorable loans. The banks are not complaining. The banks are not claiming that they were defrauded. The banks are claiming that Donald Trump misled them. But Letitia James has swooped in to say she's mad about it and is pursuing them. Meanwhile,

nothing, nothing on Hunter biden and as far as i can tell i went back just to look at the dates the the computer repair guy who got the laptop that was 20 hold on i wrote it down um it was april of 2019 that hunter biden left the laptop at that at that store uh john paul mac isaac he's a computer guy he says in december of 2019 after he contacted them giuliani got involved all that two fbi guys came and took the laptop december of 2018 and we now know that the grand jury had already opened an investigation into hunter biden as early as 2018 prior to the laptop even coming on their radar. And yet here we are, 2022, closing it out, Joel. Nothing. Nothing on Hunter Biden. No indictment. Nothing. Why?

What's the update? Well, it's very interesting that the month in which the FBI seized or took possession of Hunter Biden's hard drive from the Mac store was also the very moment when the House of Representatives was busy impeaching Donald Trump over the phone call in which he asked the president of Ukraine to investigate the alleged connections between Hunter Biden and Burisma and all of that. And the story of Hunter Biden's hard drive isn't just newsworthy because of the drug use and the sex and so forth. The leading story that came out of that, the first story the New York Post published, was about Hunter Biden arranging a meeting

between then Vice President Joe Biden and one of the other board members on the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. So it really was about substantiating the accusation that Hunter Biden had profited from selling access to his father to this energy company. That's something that Joe Biden denied. That's something that the impeachment investigation deliberately wouldn't allow questions about or tried to minimize. And that's the point at which the FBI took possession of the hard drive and then set on it rather than moving ahead with an investigation. So what was newsworthy there was that it substantiated the allegation that Hunter Biden had used his father's position to enrich himself. And it raised questions about whether

Joe Biden had also benefited directly or indirectly from allowing his son to do that. Biden had already said on the campaign trail, and I was actually in the room when he said it in Spartanburg, South Carolina, I was covering the Democratic primary in 2019 and 2020. And Mark Caputo, I think it was from Politico, asked the question in a press scrum about his family's business interests. And Joe Biden said unequivocally he had never discussed any of his family's business interests. And here was an email on the hard drive proving that he had in fact done so, or that he very likely did so. I mean, he's meeting the business associate of his son from Ukraine.

So this was very, very important. It's the reason that the laptop was a story. The pictures of Hunter Biden, the lifestyle stuff, that's human interest. It does have some broader newsworthiness just because if that stuff is out there, if the laptop is abandoned somewhere, maybe foreign intelligence might have it. You might be able to blackmail the president. It's the same reason people raised for defending some of the reporting on Russia collusion. You know, if Trump had been cavorting with prostitutes, as the Steele dossier suggested, then it was important to know whether that was true because Russia might have compromising

information on Trump. And that's the newsworthiness angle of that story, although it didn't pan out to be true. But the Hunter Biden story was suppressed, And it was suppressed, even though it was directly relevant to the very same kinds of questions that were being asked about Donald Trump. And that had been asked for many years. And in that vacuum, we weren't really seeing any reporting on Hunter Biden. And that's one of the reasons that conservative filmmakers had stepped forward. We've got the MySonHunter.com movie by Robert Davi, which is based on real material on the hard drive. It's based on Hunter Biden's autobiography. That's another difference, by the way, between that case and the Ashley Biden case.

Hunter Biden wrote a book about his own experiences, reviewing a lot about his drug use and about his past, obviously hiding some things, concealing or trying to explain. She wrote a book about hers too. She just thought hers was going to stay private. They both wrote a book. She just thought hers was going to stay in her dresser. Wait, let me shift gears because I only have a couple minutes left. The New York Post, Miranda Devine reporting earlier this month that the FBI agent, this guy, Tim, is it Tybalt? T-H-I-B-A-U-L-T, basically buried the Hunter Biden investigation at the FBI. She reported that Bobulinski, remember Tony Bobulinski, who was in on this whole thing with Hunter, and he was sort of the guy in all these meetings with Hunter who was saying, you know, Joe Biden's the big guy and these folks are, you know, corrupt. He spent over five hours being interviewed by the FBI in October of 2020.

He gave them contents of three cell phones, encrypted messages, and all sorts of emails and financial documents. And that he was allegedly told that this guy Tybalt was going to be his point man. That's the one at the FBI you should contact. He's got this. And Bobulinski, according to Divine, was never contacted again, nor was he brought before the Delaware grand jury investigating Hunter. That was a big question. We had we wondered had he testified in front of them. She's reporting. Nope. He never got contacted by the FBI again. It reminded me I had Senator Ron Johnson on this program not long ago, and I asked him about Bobulinski and listened

to what he said. We were actually going to do a transcribed interview with Tony Bobulinski, but the FBI, I'll say, convinced him to interview them first. And I warned him, said, if you want your information out, don't go to the FBI. That's just going to be a black hole. And quite honestly, that's what ended up happening there. So, you know, past that press conference, we didn't get a whole lot more information

in terms of eyewitness testimony from Tony Bobulinski, unfortunately. That guy, Tybalt Joel, has now retired from the FBI just this month amid an investigation of special counsel into his anti-Trump social media posts and after Republican senators suggested he buried the Hunter Biden material has become politicized, has been politicized. And there are other questions about the degree to which left-leaning media seem perfectly okay with that. You know, we started this discussion by referencing the Pentagon Papers, which was a very important investigative story. And now we have this complete trust in the CIA, the FBI, the DOJ. We're seeing conservatives starting to question those institutions. But we see the media simply accepting their word. And it's a very, very serious problem if the Department of Justice is on one side of the political spectrum or the other.

Yeah, that's right. We need to be able to believe in these institutions. And the more you hear about the FBI in particular, the more it's tough ryan joel thank you guys both so much it's been a pleasure thanks megan thank you all right we're going to be right back with our pal coleman hughes who's been just crushing it on the podcast front lately really interesting stuff going on over there and don't forget folks you can find the megan kelly show and uh we can find it on video at youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly, including the full video show and clips. And you can email me right now at Megyn at Megyn Kelly dot com. It's Megyn at Megyn Kelly dot com.

That's how you can reach me and subscribe for that weekly email from me at Megyn Kelly dot com. OK, you'll get tomorrow's American News Minute. Today, we welcome back one of my favorites, Coleman Hughes. Coleman is the host of Conversations with Coleman, which you should definitely download right now if you haven't done it already. And he is a brilliant thinker with a unique philosophical perspective. It's even more mind-blowing because he's only 26 years old. We're going to dig into the state of men in this country, why young adults are apparently miserable, and we're going back to that Canadian teacher. Welcome back, Coleman.

Great to have you. Great to be on again, Megan. Have you seen the Canadian shop teacher? Have you seen this person? You know what I'm talking about yes i have i have okay so another picture of this person has just been released um i gather it's by the pool um which we will show the audience so if you look at youtube.com later you can see this and um i have to tell you this is absurd i mean this is like this person's in bright orange like bike shorts a bright yellow t-shirt with the blonde wig. And again, this enormous set of breast prosthetics that is down to below his navel. Now he's a she now because he's transitioned to female. And this is apparently this person's idea of what women look like and how they behave. And it isn't. And of course, they've got the crazy fake nipple prosthetics on there just for an

added insult. And I have to tell you, as crazy fake nipple prosthetics on there just for an added insult. And I have to tell you, as a woman, this really irritates me. I'd love to be able to say, this is not what women look like. But then you look at like the Kardashians and I think, well, I'm not sure I can make that argument. But still, I feel offended by his caricature of women. And I feel really offended that he brings it into shop class by the circular saw with young children. What's your take on this one? So my take on this is that I'm not sure it has to do with the trans issue. What it has to do with is the fact that if you look so distracting that no one in class can focus, then you shouldn't be a teacher. You shouldn't be hired. And it's cause to be fired.

If I were a teacher and I showed up to school every day in a full clown costume, not on Halloween, and that made it impossible for me to teach a class because no one could take me seriously or no one could take their eyes off of the ostentatious displays on my body, that would be enough cause for firing. And if you showed up to a job interview in a clown costume, no one would hire you. So to show up with just gigantic prosthetic breasts, whether you're trans or not, like for all I care, it could be a cisgender woman that just showed up with something impossible to ignore that makes it impossible for kids to focus. You can't be a teacher. I'm sorry.

Well, you're exactly right. You may or may not be surprised to learn you've hit the legal standard directly on the head, at least in America. Canada, I don't know. But in America, the courts have repeatedly found in their seminal U.S. Supreme Court case saying, if it's a distraction, it can be ruled out of acceptable bounds. So you can, children don't lose all of their free speech rights when they cross the, you know, the school house threshold. But if what they're trying to say elevates into a distraction the school can quiet it down it can snuff it out and that's what this person is but the canadian authorities and apparently canada law is all about protecting one's expression of one's gender identity and so

this really could be taken to an even further extreme than this one we were talking yesterday about what if somebody wanted to wear a fake male prosthetic bulging out of their pants you know i mean that's okay because that that would be as offensive as this and yet they seem to think you're a bully if you object to this right i mean i i think there comes a point where you have to be in touch with common sense and uh you know the purpose of a classroom is to get kids to learn. It's a hard enough task already to have something so distracting. It's just a non-starter. And the way that this is framed as a trans rights issue, I just think that's the wrong framing of the issue. Once it gets framed as a trans rights issue, it becomes this sacred space where you cannot critique anybody. You cannot make common sense observations

about what a classroom requires. And so I just think this whole framing it, just because this person is trans, I have no problem with trans people. I call people what they want to be called as a matter of courtesy. And I would even agree, trans people face a lot of discrimination, right? This is not that. You have to be able to run a school and run a classroom by some common sense ideas. And the people that want to deny that are just living in a different world. But it has something to do with it because if this were a biological woman who was just really well endowed or who had chosen to get breast implants of this size, it would be different. You couldn't say, don't bring those breasts into class.

They're on her. They're part of her. This, as we understand it, is a prosthetic that he is putting under a sweater with enormous nipples that no actual breasts anywhere truly have. So clearly this is a person looking for attention of a sexual nature parading around children. And so there is an element to this connected to this person's biological sex that we wouldn't have if this were a biological woman? Well, the way I would put it is the reason it's so distracting is because it's clearly a prosthetic and all of that is noticeable, right?

If you just had a cisgender woman, which is, say, a typical woman who happened to be very well endowed, it actually wouldn't be that distracting to kids because we're used to what a typical woman looks like. And that's just inherently not as distracting as seeing someone that your mind knows was born a male have gigantic prosthetic breasts and impossible nipples, right? All of that contributes to actually all of that is the reason why it's so distracting, right? It just says to me, this is a choice. If you have naturally enormous breasts, you know, like that's your thing. Okay. But like to put them on display with the fake nipples, which are so in your face is a choice. He clearly is making this choice for a reason that he can take

that up with his therapist. But it disturbs me that this person wants to parade around like that in front of children, even though they say this is a great shop teacher. It's unfortunate because if this person had just continued teaching shop and had to make, as the guys were saying yesterday, just want to make a birdcage a little birdhouse then we wouldn't be discussing this person as a natural as a national news story all right there's a related story in the news today that i want to get your take on i don't know it's another thing calling like i feel uncomfortable but i have to say how i feel um which is i'm not in favor of this person being featured at the forbes power women summit most powerful women

or women's summit i don't know it's forbes they're sort of trying to draft on on the back of the fortune most powerful women summit which is a thing that a lot of women go to so now forbes is getting in on the deal and they have invited because it's 2022 someone who is a trans woman okay so this person is named dylan mulvaney and um this person i guess has there's a tiktok video and this person is very famous has got like seven million followers on tiktok about the the 66 days or this is day 66 of girlhood with dylan skipping around outside basically acting like a moron here here's a clip. Day 66, being a girl, and today I'm in nature. Trees? I love them. Water? Lakes? I love them.

Heels? They're my hiking heels. I love them. Bridges? Love them. Coconut water? Love it. Not NAD, just love it. Wind turbine? Love it. Meadows? Love em. The hills are alive with the sun. I'm scared of getting Lyme disease. I'm scared of getting Lyme disease.

Love ya! She freaks out because there's a bug did you see that i gotta get out of here did you see that there's a dragon oh my god never again get me out of here love you i don't even know if that's a joke or if it's that's real like the bit with the the bug at the end but But here's the thing. Dylan is not a woman. Dylan is a trans woman. And there is a difference. And Dylan has been acting like a woman for a very short time and doesn't know jack about

what it is to be a woman. And I don't think she'd be speaking at the Forbes Women's Summit. I just think we're getting to the point now where we've lost sight of what it actually is to be a woman. What's your take? This reminds me of the Dave Chappelle joke. I think it was the Chappelle joke about... Oh, God, how am I blanking on her name right now um woman of the year time woman of the year from 2016 2017 uh caitlin jenner yeah caitlin jenner um that you know she had been she became woman of the year after one year of being a woman right yeah and almost almost any woman that's lived a lifetime as a woman, being a girl as a child, being someone like yourself that has been extremely successful in industries dominated by men, and some of the challenges you've had to face in your career and that many women like you have had to face and overcome, all

of that is, I think, at the core of the difference between a cis woman's experience and a trans woman's experience. And for what it's worth, it goes the other way. I don't think cis women know what it's like to be a trans woman. No, and I wouldn't expect to be named trans woman of the year or be honored at a trans women conference. along with a popular trend right now that has very little to do with actually supporting and uplifting women. Now, I mean, it's fine that this TikTok star is funny and has a following and is sort of like weird in this funny way and absurdist. That's all cool. That doesn't mean she should be speaking at a conference that is aimed at highlighting the challenges women face because

she probably knows very little about that. Exactly right. This is why it's so infuriating when they talk about Rachel Levine, who's in the Biden administration as the first female admiral to obtain this position. Meanwhile, it's like Rachel Levine lived until her late 50s as a man, went to medical school as a man back in a time when it was very hard for women to get into medical school. And now they want us to celebrate Rachel Levine as this woman who's crossed barriers. It's like she didn't cross any barriers. She was a man her whole life till 10 years ago. And now she gets to the top of our mountain and she's like, look at me, ladies,

I did it. And we're all like, what the hell? How'd you get there? You got helicoptered in. We don't get any of the credit for having the blood, sweat and tears, literally, that come with living one's life as an actual woman. It really irritates me. And just like the stuff we've talked about in the past, Coleman, about like people who are obsessed with racial differences and shoving them down our throats all the time. It causes alienation, right? It's like so undermining to the growing acceptance most people are having of trans men and women who, for the most part, just want to be left alone and don't need to be celebrated in these summits etc yeah most my impression is that most trans people are not like this tiktok influencer right most trans people uh that have no media profile they want to be left alone they want to live their life live expressing their gender identity and just having a life like the

rest of us i think um they don. They're not necessarily going in for these absurd stereotypes of the gender they're transitioning to. And it's good to keep that in mind. It's good to know how different this would be on any other topic, like race, for example. If you lived your life as a white person for 50 years and then transitioned to being black, you wouldn't be getting awards, right? That's a good point. An object of fascination. But yeah, this is a trend right now. And we have to remember, it's a trend that like 95% or more of people are not a part of.

This is a trend. If you think this is a big thing, it's because you are living your life in the elite bubble where Twitter is real life and TikTok is real life. And the vast majority of the electorate, left and right, are not living on a plane where this kind of trend is the right thing in their minds. And that's always something you have to keep in mind. No, it's very true. Before we leave

the topic of trans people, the Atlantic made a bunch of news this week and got a lot of people reeling. People on the left and the right, because they have this piece that is titled, Separating Sports by Sex Doesn't Make Sense. Now, this is something for the Atlantic. Maybe you see this in some far, far left, and I realize the Atlantic is left-leaning, but this is pretty established far left. They make the following points. It's by Maggie Mertens. Maintaining the binary in youth sports reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting, a notion that's been challenged by scientists for years. Though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don't know how much of this to

attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential. Part of the reason why we have this belief that boys are inherently stronger than girls, and even the fact that we believe gender is a binary, is because of sport itself, not the other way around, says a University of British Columbia professor in sociology who she interviewed for this piece. I'm sorry, Coleman, but this is like beyond the pale. Now they're arguing that if we could just be more encouraging to little girls to be boys and to play in boys sports and vice versa, that somehow the girls are going to grow to be six foot two. They're going to get larger femurs. Their hearts are going to enlarge like

a man's is. And somehow we're going to generate the testosterone needed to have the muscle strength and all the other things that come with testosterone. This is absolutely absurd to appear in a place like the Atlantic. So in the past five years or so, there's been this question of why don't people trust experts? Why don't people trust the experts? People have been banging their head against the wall about why the so-called rubes and uneducated masses of this country don't trust experts. This article, in a nutshell, is the reason, right? You could not have a high school degree. You could be like my grandmother and have a third grade education. And you know, based on every single day of your life, just witnessing the world, that men are quite a bit stronger, especially in the upper body than

women, and that there's just no competition between your average man and your average woman at something like an arm wrestle or a sport like basketball or football. And then it's actually dangerous for men and women en masse to compete against each other in contact sports. This is among the most obvious things you could possibly know about human beings. They challenge that too. They challenge that too. In this piece, they say, what's the difference between a man competing against a woman in whatever the sport may be, let's say wrestling or swimming, what have you, versus a woman competing against a woman who's a lot taller than she is and a lot more muscular than she is.

Well, listen, there's some truth to that. I mean, if you want to get really deep and philosophical about it, it's all luck at the end of the day. It's like Usain Bolt was born with a better package of genetics than both you and me. Neither of us would be a match for him in a 100-meter dash, and a lot of that has to do with our genetics. But at the end of the day, the reason we segregate gender in sports is because if we didn't, women would not have a league to participate in 90-plus percent of sports. There may be a few at the edge where strength doesn't matter so much,

but in 90% of sports, women would not have a league. And that actually would be a gender injustice for all the women out there that really love to compete, which there are a lot of women out there that love to compete. And the only way for that to happen is for us to have women-only leagues. It doesn't work to just say we could segregate everything by weight class, right? And maybe the 120-pound weight class would effectively be the women's weight class. No, there's going to be a 120-pound man that's going to dominate that weight class. The only way to make it so that women have a field to compete is to gender segregate. And I'd love to hear from all the female athletes in the world that make their living or just the female athletes that don't

make their living, but who love to compete and love sports as a hobby. I'd love to hear what they have to think about the idea of getting rid of gender segregation, right? These so-called experts are so out of touch with the real world and with what actual people want and value. And that's why they've lost all credibility. And then to look back at the women, as this article suggests, and say, it's not the biological differences between you and the man that make the man better, faster, stronger. It is the lack of support provided to female athletes to reach their highest potential. I'm telling you, Coleman, the messaging to young girls and

young boys is almost universally negative. Young girls are told being a woman is to be metooed, to get unequal pay, to be introduced into the patriarchy. And if you see biological differences between you and your male athletes, it's because the system screwed you. They didn't support you and your efforts to reach your full potential. And young boys, which we'll get to in a minute, are being told you're part of the problem. You're toxic. You should shut up and take a seat and let the women go by you. Meanwhile, as I know you just discussed on a recent podcast, the boys enter school at a less mature age with more disadvantages facing them. They tend to be more active and get disciplined more readily because of their natural tendencies to just be active and energetic.

And they're sort of put behind the eight ball from the beginning, but they're held up as privileged to the rest of the world. So we get it from all sides. But I do think telling young girls the reason you can't beat the boys is because the system F'd you is deeply problematic. Well, yeah. First of all, it's wrong on the facts. And it encourages an attitude of ungratefulness, entitlement, the idea that the world is against you. I think most of us know that that attitude is one of the least helpful attitudes for living a happy and productive life, right? It's like every religious tradition at its best teaches that you should be, you know, count your blessings,

think about what you're thankful for every day, not focus all day on, you know, the small ways in which you may be disadvantaged, right? That's even useful if you come from a lot of disadvantage, right? If you come from a lot of disadvantage, it's still useful to dwell on the positive because that's what leads to a successful mindset. The worst thing you can do is teach someone to be ungrateful and angry at things that aren't even there, right? You're literally feeding the evil side of human nature, the unhelpful side of our personalities, the self-pitying and the wallowing. It's the opposite of what you ought to do to raise self-possessed and well-adjusted adults.

Think about it. Think about somebody like Serena Williams, right? The tennis queen, who did not have a father who in any way looked at her and thought, you can't to them. You will you'll be number one. they did. There was a playoff where they played, Serena played against some guy who was like barely ranked and he killed her. It's not because Serena Williams sucks at tennis, not at all, right? It's because there are inherent biological advantages that men have over women. And this is why, by the way, you're not going to see, you are not going to see trans women get into women's tennis. It's not going to happen because it would devastate women's tennis and women's tennis would be over in the course of a week because some no-name guy could in a day declare himself a woman, cross over and crush everybody and wind up getting all the prize money from all the major grand slams and so on. So it's just absurd to think about looking at a little Serena and saying,

if only you had had better support around you, you could have been the world's number one tennis player, not just the women's. Yeah. I mean, the solution to this may be to have a separate trans league that is separate from both the men's and the women's league. Because there is this problem, there are trans athletes that love athletics and have every right to compete. And we want they were a child to just come in and have someone who has gone through male puberty just destroy them with relatively little effort. So I think, I mean, the solution to this may be to have separate trans leagues for sports where, you know, strength is a component. i'm in favor of that i think that's fine i think that we should find a way for trans athletes to compete a way that's fair to everybody

like and it's always the women who get screwed there's no trans men who are beating biological men cis men there's that doesn't happen right so it's like although they women are inherently better at certain things that are in the athletic field than men i'd learn this when i went to camp lejeune and pretended to be a marine for a story i did at uh nbc which is super fun and hard um they told me that women tend to be better at uh at better snipers like they whatever their breathing is slower and more controlled and i guess their aim can be better meanwhile rob o'ne is like, I've got a shiver down his spine right now. Like, bring it. But I'm just saying, that's what they told me at Camp Lejeune.

So I'm just not saying that you could never beat a man as a woman, but come on, let's get real. Okay, let me shift to something that's related. New Harvard study, young people are miserable. I mean, absolutely miserable. And this is basically your age group. You're so young, it's hard for me to believe. Those who are 18 to 25 are basically at an all-time low when it comes to happiness. They felt they were worse off across all these dimensions,

happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, financial stability, et cetera, worse than any previous generation or group between those ages has ever felt. And social connectedness reported to be the lowest in this group as well. So ironic given the advent of social media and the iPhone and all that, which you've grown up with. So you're on the cusp of that, you're 26, but what do you make of the massive unhappiness amongst this age group? Yeah. So the first explanation that comes to my mind, and this partly comes from the psychologist Jean Twenge, who wrote a book called iGen a few years ago. She was early

noticing this trend of people roughly my age and younger just taking a sharp decline in happiness and life satisfaction right around the time that iPhones come onto the scene. In combination with social media and iPhones, what this does is roll the clock back to 2005. If something terrible happens in Topeka, Kansas, I'm not going to learn about it. It's going to be in the local Topeka newspaper the next day. And there will be time enough for journalists to really assess what happened and present the facts to you. Now, look at what happens today. Something horrible happens in Topeka, Kansas. It's in my newsfeed within minutes, probably a video of it. So what this dynamic creates when the speed limit of information has been increased by a thousand fold, it's that now people feel that horrible things are happening in the world

every single minute. It creates this atmosphere of fear, this sense that every problem is a thousand times bigger than it actually is. You combine that with the fact that people are substituting real life interactions for phone interactions, which are not nearly as high quality. All of the trends that Gene highlights in that book are teens are going out less than they used to. They're having sex less than they used to. They're experimenting with real life in every domain less than they used to. They're staying in their house, they're on TikTok, they're reading articles about how scary the world is. And all of that is substituting what in an earlier generation would have been going and hanging out with

friends, talking to people face-to-face, and living the kind of life that we as animals were meant to live, right? We're meant to talk to people face to face. And people are just doing less of that. And it's having a clear effect on mental health. You layer in all the things we just discussed, the negative messaging to young girls and to young boys, and you factor in cancel culture, the obsession with identity the messaging that it's good to be a victim not as great to be a victor you know all that is just these kids have a lot to get past to find that happiness wall you know to just get over all these barriers that

people place between them and wellness and happiness. Reminds me of the discussion I heard you having with Roland Fryer, brilliant economics professor at Harvard, who's now been turfed off of his lab, at least has been turfed because of some bullshit Me Too allegations because they didn't like his reporting on race, which was totally fair.

But anyway, he wasn't towing the party line. Anyway, Roland, who started all these charter schools that are just crushing it, was telling you and I learned myself when I was reading his experiments and his approach, kids come in, disadvantaged, rough life, kids of color. And he believes very strongly the response is, I know it's sad. I'm sorry. Anyway, this is the bar to which you're going to be held.

It's way up here. That's exactly right. I think I would give a shout out as well as to Roland, to Ian Rowe, to my friend Ian Rowe, who- Yeah, he was just on yesterday. Yes, that's right. Yeah, who for many years ran a charter school in the South Bronx. And I asked him this question, what do you make of this idea that if kids come from a

disadvantaged background, you have to give them a pass, right? If they show up late to class, you have to say, oh, well, I know he only has one parent in the home and he comes from a poor neighborhood and there's crime in his neighborhood and his brother's in a gang. So I'm going to just give the kid a pass. I'm going to show some mercy. What Ian said to me, and I think is true, is that in life, you often have no idea how high you can fly until somebody demands it of you. I can say this of my own education. When I was in sixth grade, I went to a much more rigorous private school than I had come from. The school I came from.

Everything was easy for me. And then suddenly I went to a much more difficult school and I really thought that I was going to fail under the, the, this like this sudden jump in expectations. But what actually happened is it lit a fire under me and I And I just excelled much more than I thought was ever possible. So the truth is, most people don't know how good they can get at a skill, whether that is a school-based skill or something else, until somebody demands that they meet a certain level. And then you realize you can actually fly much higher than you thought possible. And this is doubly true. This is doubly and triply true for kids that come from chaotic, poor neighborhoods where they don't know anyone who's been to college.

And the boilerplate expectations they have for themselves is to be impressed if they finish high school. If that's your level of expectations, you more than anyone need someone to come into your life and tell you that you can actually achieve here, right? Because no one will tell you that. You won't get that evidence from your environment until someone comes in and sets the bar high for you. So you're not doing kids any favors by, quote, showing them mercy on these kinds of things. That's so true. I'll just tell you a story in my own life where, you know, my dad died when I was in high school. I went off to college to Syracuse.

My mom was still grieving and in a dark place emotionally. And I was doing fine at Syracuse. I was applying myself, but I hadn't really considered future plans very much. And a teacher I had, a professor I had, pulled me aside one day and said, and it was actually right around,

it was like right around when the Iraq war broke out, the first Iraq war, the Gulf war. And I remember he pulled me aside and I'd done a long piece, I think on that or the international environment. And he said,

I assume grad school's in your future. And literally to that point, I had not considered grad school at all. I'm like, oh, should it be? Could I go to grad school? Yeah, but maybe I'll go to grad school. It could be something as small as that, right? Like you just have somebody look at you with a different set of eyes and expectations. and then that reflection you see back and you know it's bam you know you're off to the races um all right let me pause it there as i much much more with colman hughes coming up after this quick break such a delight having him back on the subject of children and their struggles as the mother of three of them, and two of whom are boys, I had a particular interest in your discussion with Richard Reeves on September 20th, who wrote The Unique Struggle of a Man, right? That's the title of his new book, I think. I think that's a subtitle. Of Boys and Men is the book.

Of Boys and Men. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, I'm trying to find it. Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling. And then it goes on to say that. Okay. Yeah. Right. I'm trying to find out boys and men, why the modern male is struggling. And then it goes on to say that. Okay. So Richard Reeves posits that the, that little boys and younger, younger boys are basically being screwed over by a, by an age that is super focused on girls and women and their empowerment and has completely misunderstood and ignored and then shamed young boys. What did you learn from him that you thought was interesting? So one of the most interesting things I learned from him was our education system is tilted against boys. Now, obviously, 50, 60, 70 years ago, the problem with our education system is that we weren't allowing girls to compete with the boys. There was this expectation that boys would go to college and women didn't have to. And in the effort to correct that, we have ended up overcorrecting to the point where our K through12 and even college education system is tilted to benefit girls rather than boys. So, boys are much less likely to graduate high school. They're less likely to

enroll in colleges to the point where colleges have to practice a kind of affirmative action for men to keep a 50-50 ratio. Now, why is this happening? The reason this is happening is because the way our education system is structured, we ask kids to sit still for six hours a day and look at the whiteboard and regurgitate answers and be disciplined in a way that is easier for the average young girl than it is for the average young boy. The other part of this is that the vast majority of K-12 school teachers are women. There are very few male teachers relative to female teachers. And female teachers are more likely to penalize the kind of behavior in a young boy that a male teacher might recognize as

boys being boys, to use a phrase that has been somewhat demonized. So, young boys, they face a discipline structure that is skewed more towards typical young girl behavior than typical young boy behavior. And another way you can see this is ADHD. For every four boys diagnosed with ADHD, only one girl is diagnosed with ADHD, which is an extraordinary ratio. Basically, we're saying that a lot of typical young boy behavior like difficulty sitting still, wanting to be active, we're saying that that's a disorder, that there's something wrong with that that needs to be medicated away. And that's having downstream consequences for boys in the education system.

This is one of the reasons why we chose to put our boys in an all-boys school and our daughter in an all-girls school, because there are challenges in the girls' lane too, historically, when it comes to girls are less likely to raise their hands and math and science and so on. But they merge, by the way. These two merge, these schools that we're at in high school, which I like too. At some point, you got to be with the opposite sex and learn how to navigate that. But the boys, yeah, they're antsy, especially the littles. Elementary school, they are antsy. And one of the things our all-boys school does with the little guys is the first thing

they do is gym. That's brilliant. They get there, they're in their seats, they've got the ants in their pants. They go, they run them. So then they can sit for a little while. And then they have a different thing later that's active and they sit. And they incorporate into some of the classes like the teachers do fun, athletic games for the boys where I don't see that being done in my girl school. And nor do I think all these girls need it as badly as the boys.

But like there is a different approach. And by the way, all this underscores something you're not allowed to say anymore, but it was a book that we read prior to making these selections, which is called Why Gender Matters. All of this underscores the fact that gender is real and it does matter. Yeah, here's the other big point that Richard Reeves pointed out. And all those reasons for sending your kids to single gender schools make a lot of sense. Another thing Richard points out that I think is common wisdom is that girls mature faster than boys. I think most people that have kids have witnessed this, that an 11-year-old

girl and an 11-year-old boy, on average, they're not at the same level of mental or emotional maturity. And so, what are the consequences of that fact? Well, we start girls and boys at age five at the same level, doing the same homework, expecting to show the same level of discipline. And yet, girls have an advantage because at any given age, they're likely on average to be more mature, better able to sit still, better able to think long term. And that creates a natural imbalance. Obviously, men and women, by the time we're 25 or so, our prefrontal cortexes have developed and we're at the same level of maturity. But one gender gets there faster and we put a lot of weight on how good, how mature, how disciplined you are between

the ages of zero to 18, which inherently advantages girls. So Richard Reeves argues that we should quote red shirt the boys, that boys should start school a year later than girls on the grounds that on average they mature more slowly. So this is fascinating to me because we literally just had on Malcolm Gladwell. He was here last week, who is sorry that his chapter in the book Outliers has been used as much as it has to redshirt kids based on different factors, not based on this gender gap we're discussing, but based on I want Johnny to be the star hockey player. And therefore, if he has a birthday that's later in the year, I'm holding him back a year so that instead of being

the smallest he'll be the biggest and then it's led to this nuclear arms race where now even if you know danny was born born in january of a year and therefore might be on pace to be the the biggest danny's parents now hold him back because johnny just got a leg up because now johnny comes in as a seven-year-old instead of a six-year-old so like oh no no no danny's gonna be a huge seven-year-old so he regrets not sort of making more clear in the in the book that he wasn't suggesting this he was condemning this and doesn't really see this as a useful thing but reeves is making a different point he's saying it from an emotional maturity, it makes sense to hold back your boy and not your girl. Well, he's making an even bigger point, which is he's saying systematically, kindergarten should start at age six for boys in general.

So I think he would get out of that arms race issue by making it a system-wide thing. He might. He might. Yes yes i guess it's an interesting idea um in any event i i think it's it's it's about time we started taking an honest look at our boys we've been so focused on our girls and that's good but like they're half the population and they're sweet and who if we just continue with this demoralizing and ruination of boys, who are our girls going to marry? Who are they going to reproduce with? Who are they going to, you know, just spend the rest of their lives with? Like, even if you only have girls, you need to carry, care about this.

And I do think mothers of both girls and boys and dads too, could be particularly helpful in this. In the time we have left, can we spend a minute on crime? We've talked about crime before, and I saw you tweet about this, and I thought the same. So New York City is having an epic meltdown when it comes to crime on the streets and so on. People are so fed up with even the new mayor and the soft on crime DA. And now we've got this governor who clearly doesn't know what she's doing. She is not ready for prime time.

She's been a massive disappointment in my view. So she's got the subway problem solved, Coleman. Fear not if you are one of the millions of New Yorkers who will not get on the New York City subway. And I used to ride the subway, but I tell my friends who go in now or tourists who I know are like friends

who are like, I'm going to go visit. I'm like, do not take the subway. There's so much crime happening down there. She's got the solution. she's going to put cameras down in the subways now i said to my team we were talking about this is anyone on the other side of the camera you know even plugged in do we have any idea but she thinks this is going to make people quote feel safe what do you make of it well what would make people feel safe is if it were safe, primarily. I ride the subway all the time. I continue to ride the subway all the time. But I will say, as someone who's lived in New York for eight years, I can say I've never felt less safe than I have right now, especially in

neighborhoods at night, neighborhoods that I would have described as quite safe for most of my time in New York. And I had the luxury of if push came to shove, I could Uber places. I probably don't have to take the subway everywhere. Most people don't have that luxury. They have to walk the streets. They have to take the subway. most important issue. Before the government tackles education, inequality, any issue that you may care about, the government's job is to keep you safe. What does it matter if you don't have as much money as your neighbor if you can't guarantee you won't get mugged on the way home? What does it matter if your kid's school is good if they're not going to be safe on the way there? Safety, it is the first social justice issue before everything else. So, the dismissiveness that many people on the far left show towards crime, that it's all just a fantasy in our heads. And it's all just old law and order rhetoric that is retrograde and racist. We have to hammer that out of our consciousness as

a society. Crime is the most important social justice issue, in my opinion, and it's something that we have to begin taking seriously in all of our cities. Yeah. Well, what I saw you tweeting about was this video from the New York City subway in which a crime occurs, but a surprise hero enters the scene. I'll play it for the youtube audience and describe it for the listeners that's dancing oh and then he steals steals the money he steals he runs and then guess who guess who gets him somebody wearing a is it it's a batman cape isn't it yeah it's a batman cape saves the day and gets the bad guy and gets the money back and returns it to the guy with the guitar case open yay but we don't have enough said guys yeah so obviously that that video is staged and hilarious but i think think the reason it resonates so much is because New Yorkers are feeling this crime wave. Let me tell you, for example, I go to my local pharmacy to buy toothpaste and such. Over the past year or two, every time I go, there is new products behind class. It's to the point where I have to call a staff member over to get almost any item in the grocery store because there's so much shoplifting.

It's insane. And we really have to take it seriously. It really is crazy. You're like, everything. Deodorant is locked up. And they say like, ring bell for a tenant. It's like, well, I just need the attendant to stay by my side for my entire shopping trip. Like this system does not work. Coleman Hughes, such a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me.

Tomorrow, my pal Melissa Francis will be here. Been wanting to talk about her incredible background and her story. And we'll do that for the first time tomorrow. In the meantime, don't forget, go to megankelly.com. Sign up for my little email that comes on Fridays, summarizing the news of the week. Give you some links to some pieces if you miss them on the show. I'll give you the update on Strut.

I'll give you one that's not going to be in the newsletter. There's a tree in my front lawn that produces weird little berries that are edible but not poisonous. But no human would eat them. But Strud will eat them. And we have to let him out on the side lawn. Otherwise, he'll be in the crate all day, right? This dog has to either be outside or in a room supervised. So we let him outside. He's got the invisible fence and he eats these berries all day long. So he wasn't dying. I figured it was okay. Well, now every day when we wake up, there's an enormous steamer waiting for us in his crate. And at the end of the day, there's vomit with a bunch of hard berries

in it. And if you can't get to the vomit before Strud does, well, let's just say it goes down second time around. More tomorrow. See you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.