The Megyn Kelly Show - Tuesday's Red Wave and the Kyle Rittenhouse Trial, with Victor Davis Hanson, Jonna Spilbor, and Arthur Aidala | Ep. 196

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Victor Davis Hanson, author of "The Dying Citizen," and Jonna Spilbor and Arthur Aidala on for a "Kelly's Court" segment, to talk about Dr. Fauci vs. Sen. Rand Paul again, the continued fallout and reaction to Tuesday's red wave in Virginia and throughout America, the status of Biden's agenda, the Alec Baldwin movie set shooting and potential "sabotage," the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and his claims of self-defense, the "Tiger King" lawsuit from Carole Baskin, 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. We have a big show for you today. The fallout from Virginia still being felt, not just Virginia, but many states nationwide. As President Biden and the media weigh in on how that state and so many other districts went so red so fast. Plus, we've got new information on vaccines and vaccine mandates today. And the Kyle Rittenhouse trial gets underway. We have our all-star legal panel here a bit later to talk about that, along with the latest in the Alec Baldwin case. The Armorer has just put out a statement, and Alec Baldwin is tweeting now again. So we'll get to all that. But first,

we have Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Dying Citizen, who is back with us. This is Dr. Fauci, right at this moment, is testifying before a Senate hearing again today. And he just had another contentious exchange with Senator Rand Paul, which we are going to show you in one second. Victor, great to have you. Before we dive into what's going on between Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci, let's talk about Tuesday and your takeaway, because as the audience now knows, it's not just about what happened in Virginia. It's about people voting Republican up and down the ballot, writing in candidates to avoid socialists, voting for Republicans like Ed Durr in New Jersey, the guy who unseated this very powerful Senate

Democrat, state Senate Democrat in New Jersey, with $153 spent total on his, I mean, they just voted Republican. And your takeaway from them doing that was really running as a conservative in New York in comparative terms. So I think we're starting to see that people have concluded that wokeness that was an abstraction on the national level has done two things. It's making life impossible to live, whether that on the national level means you can't afford out here in California, $5 gas or your natural gas bill. I just got mine. It's double, $4 for natural gas for a cubic thousand feet. And when you look at, you can't buy a car, you can't buy, your shelves are empty. You don't want to walk out in Los Angeles or San Francisco at night anymore. So what I'm getting, and there is no border. It's not porous, Megan. There is no border. It doesn't exist. And we're

starting to see people who are bussed into my community from the border. So people are concluding that on the national level, it's not viable. And that's what the polls show. But it's filtering down to the local level. So wokesters that are the versions of the Biden administration are everywhere, and they're trying to advance those agendas. and they affect people's lives, whether it's the schools that have these transgendered issues or critical race theory. And people are saying, this isn't political. This is whether America continues to exist and it makes it possible to live. And with high inflation and high energy prices and an open border and a collapsing foreign policy. It looks like a complete systems collapse. And then when they ask for answers, they say,

wait a minute, this wasn't Katrina. This wasn't the Gulf War. This wasn't the old Iranian oil boycott. All of these problems were self-induced. We decided not to pump oil. We asked Putin and Saudi Arabia to do it instead so that we didn't have to get our hands dirty, but they would. We didn't have suddenly, you know, the wall collapse on the border. We did that on the border. We did that with critical race. We ginned up this racial animosity, we being the government. And so people, when they get angry and they ask for answers, and it's basically two things. You're a racist for asking and Donald Trump's responsible. But in case of Trump,

he hasn't tweeted. He's barred. He's been given a great gift by social media. He can't communicate. So people are thinking, well, he's not tweeting this crazy stuff. So I just remember that his agenda was better than Biden's. And so a lot of things are happening. It's in flux right now. But I think the wave has broken. It's at peak woke and we're going on the downside. It's so true. It's they took away Trump's sort of worst characteristic, you know, his impetuousness, his thin skin nature, which he communicated through Twitter. And you're right, while it's left standing as sort of the vague memory of some of those things and' throats in school is not, it's not CRT. It's just, you know, benign history lessons about slavery, about Jim Crow. And anybody who tells you the opposite is lying to you.

And the schools are doing their best to get open and the teachers are trying hard. That's been the messaging. And it's been very much a don't believe your lying eyes kind of messaging back to American voters who know this isn't true. They've been feeling it. So going into Tuesday, I wondered what what's real? Who's going to have the final verdict here? The ones who are on the television all the time telling us not to believe the lion eyes or the real voters who may say one thing in front of their corporation or be too afraid to take a bold stance, even at the school board meeting or by liking a post on Facebook because they could get in trouble, but are going to do what's in their heart and what they know to be right when they're in those ballot boxes. is that the echo chamber that you're talking about, this 360 degree, I guess you'd call it panopticon that just we're surrounded by, it really doesn't have popular support. By that, I mean, there's enormous influence in the media, in academia, K through 12, what we saw in Virginia,

the corporate boardroom, professional sports, foundations, the traditional network news, PBS, but they don't represent the majority of the people. So as you said, they created a false impression that this was the future and everybody had agreed on it. But when people sat home and contemplated, they said, wait a minute, there was no mandate in that election. It was 50-50 in the Senate. The House has a thin margin. It looks like there's going to be a correction in two years. And I don't have to take this isn't political for me anymore. It may have been political in the start, but now it's just simply questioned where they're going to have America or we're going to have something that I don't know what it is, but it's not America that

I know. It's not based on the constitution. It's not based on our customs and traditions. It's not based on a majority of support of the people, and it won't work. Economically, culturally, politically, socially, it doesn't work. And the chaos is there for all of us to see it. And when they get press, these are very liberal people, we're told, that believe in free speech and let it all hang out and do your own thing. They don't. They call in Merrick Garland to sick the FBI on people, or they have weaponized the IRS, or they get the Pentagon to enact a chain of command fast track where they woke agenda. So people also said, these Silicon Valley people, these people in the Pentagon,

James Comey and the FBI, these are not liberals. This isn't Frank Church investigating the CIA in the 1970s as a Democrat. These people are, I don't know what we're going to call them. Historians might say they're Jacobins, but they're neo-Bolsheviks. They do not want any objections. They do not want any cross-examination because they don't have a majority support. They rely on institutional support that they can control and bully. And they have great wealth and influence at their back, but they do not have 51% of the people. For several years now, I mean, since Donald Trump came onto the national scene as a politician, but certainly over the past year since Joe Biden became president, we've been told that basically

anybody on the right is a racist. Certainly if you voted for Trump, you're a racist. And now, of course, in Virginia, if you voted for Glenn Youngkin, you're a racist. If you voted for the lieutenant governor there, Winsome Sears, who's a black woman, you're still a racist because she's white adjacent. She's sort of become white in the eyes of the left. You can sort of morph into whiteness, even if you're black, basically by being a Republican or even a white supremacist, if your name is Larry Elder and so on. To me, it almost is starting to have I mean, before it was obviously untrue. But to me, in the wake of what we've seen on Tuesday, it's starting to feel pathetic. And I'll the Grabian does these great mashups, supercuts of the liberal media and what they say and sort of the narrative. They're very effective super cuts because they really do gather, quote, the narrative capital T capital.

And you'd think that a memo goes out. But having been in the media at ABC, at NBC, at Fox, I can tell you there is no massive memo that goes out telling you how to start talking about things, whether you're in your left wing or right wing media. But most people on the left are in the same ecosystem and they just believe it. So they don't need a big memo. And so Grabian captures some of that here. You tell me, to me, it's just starting to feel kind of sad and desperate. Listen. Yeah, voters do have anxiety about a changing America, right? That it is blacker, it is browner. You've got the Republicans yelling like, hey, look, the black and brown folks are coming for us. Some Republican candidates are perfectly willing to use race

as a motivating factor for their base. That has gone on for decades and it happened this year. Race is just the most palpable tool in the toolkit. It used to be of the Democratic Party back in the day when there were Dixiecrats, and now of the Republican Party. This is about the fact that a good chunk of voters out there are okay with white supremacy. Let's call a thing a thing. Your thoughts, Victor?

Translated, that means that this woke takeover is very careful that people will not support it any longer by their indifference. They never supported it actively, but passively, I guess they did by not objecting to it. What do we mean by that? That we mean of universities massively hiring people to be really commissars, diversity, equity, inclusion people, or to give preferences in hiring by race, or to be disproportionate in racially selecting actors or roles. In other words, it's not just proportional representation of the past. It's disparate.

It's sort of repertory ideas that we're going to have so many. We're going to have 20% or 30% of African-Americans who weren't commercials to make up for this, but it's just engineering. And the beneficiaries of it are, we don't talk about class, Megan, but all the people that you show, they're very affluent people. Don Lemon, just to take an example, is very affluent. LeBron is very affluent. The Obamas are affluent. They're all privileged. And the people I work with in the university of all different ethnic backgrounds that are

woke are very privileged. This was a top-down elite squabble for people who said, I want more airtime. I want a better role. I should get this. I'm a Jesse Smollett. I wanted to get this role. Or, you know, I want to have four classes in the morning

and not in the afternoon. It's a squabble. You can see from the elections, it's not a grassroots, bottom-up, populist demand that we do this stuff. And I think that's really hurting them. They don't talk about class at all. But as we said earlier, I think in a broadcast, when you have OPA talking to Meghan Markle and then Obama's weighing in on it or lecturing people, they all have something in common. And that is they're from the very, very elite. And it doesn't sound convincing that they're victimized. And that's why

the Lieutenant Governor was so convincing because she said, I'm very privileged. I'm very happy to be in America. It's the greatest thing that ever happened. And there's this empirical evidence they just don't deal with. Two million people destitute, the majority in their definition not white, but risking their life to break into the United States, which is supposedly a toxic, racist place where they would have no future. They know that's not true. They know that what their whole agenda is, is to bully, bully, threaten, cancel, topple, deface, rename, and then therefore, they'll say, well, you give me the following concessions and we'll stop. Of course,

they'll never stop. They only get more bolder the more that you appease them. And so they don't have a rational agenda. They don't have one that appeals to the majority of people. And they're not going to stop, Megan. I think there's a lot of pundits after the election said, well, they're going to make a correction. And I think I said on Fox, I don't think they're going to say, you pointed out, I think, that if you lost in Virginia, it was because there was racism or it didn't matter. Or Virginia is always the opposite of what Washington is doing. Or there was voter suppression. But they're never going to say we have a message that's extremist, that alienates our own independent and mostly liberal voters. And we better change or we're going to end up like, you know, George McGovern or something. I don't think that's going to, I think they're going to go over the cliff. And we're all divided, aren't we?

We think, well, maybe they should just keep doing this for two years. But look at the damage they did in 10 months. And some of this damage is not collateral. It's institutionalized. Yeah, I don't want to go on. Institutionalized, but it's actually in the school setting, whether it's the covid mandates and restrictions or the CRT and the trans and the highly sexualized lessons they're giving them. It's abusive. It has to stop.

It has to stop. It has to stop yesterday. And I do feel like in the latter lane, either we're going to stop them, you know, in the Democratic Party, if you were more moderate, you might be taking a correction from Tuesday night as your lesson and say, you know, scolds or not, because to me, most of the Democrats, even if they're moderate, are beholden to the to seeking the love and approval of the wokesters in their party and will not willingly cross them because they don't have the stomach for being called the names. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that things are very vulnerable. You notice how sensitive they are when people say, you're racist. You're the one that's tribalizing America. You're the one that's saying our superficial appearance is everything to our persona. It's not incidental, according to you.

And that's why we're all black, black, black, or Latino. We're not just people. And then second, you're very wealthy people. You're very privileged. You've had a lot of opportunities and you're doing quite well. And those are two charges that they just flee from. They don't like the idea that anybody would ever suspect them of being illiterate and racist or privileged and elite. And I think people have to keep making those charges because that's what they really, really don't like.

The other thing is that we're getting the stages of reaction to woke. At first, it was bewilderment. People said, my God, nobody's serious about this. You don't defund the police or you don't just end the border and make it, you know, Northern Mexico and the United States one country. You don't do that. Or nobody in their right mind would tell fractors and horizontal millers when we're energy independent and we're doing so well without having to worry about Middle East oil that we're going to go back and cut 2 million barrels plus out of development. So they were bewildered.

And then they got kind of fearful and said, wow, these people destroy careers. They make you have this indoctrination training at work. Friends that you know won't speak out. And now they're angry. And I don't know what follows after angry, but they want this to end. And they're going to vote. They're going to protest. And they're not going to stop.

And I think the left is terrified because they have, as I said earlier, it's a minority of view. And I think if everybody will just kind of transcend, it used to be that we were living in a monastery of our minds. A lot of people said, I don't watch the NBA anymore. I'm done with it. I don't watch network news. I'm done with it.

I don't go to the movies and get that Hollywood crap anymore. I'm done with it. I don't watch network news. I'm done with it. I don't go to the movies and get that Hollywood crap anymore. I'm done with it. I don't really want my child to go to a prestigious school anymore because I know what's going to happen when they come home for Christmas. But now, and they kind of drop out of popular culture. They don't listen to particular types of music. They don't know it. Now, I think they thought, you know what? Passive resistance wasn't enough. I've got to get mobile. I was speaking to some women's group this last week in Seattle and Los Angeles and in Central California. I have never seen, Megan, so many bright, active women and not all white women, Asian women, Hispanic women. And I'm talking in the age group of 60 to 85 who are angry and they are organized and they had enormous people come out. And I've never seen it my entire life how angry they are. I've never seen it either, just in my own friend group, most of whom are liberals,

just because I've been living in New York for the past 20 years, angry, red pilled secret meetings, organization, finding ways to fight back, celebrating these electoral results, even though they may still be registered Democrats. And then they turn on the news and they're told this was all a conservative push. This is like conservative racists who made this happen and oblivion to the fact that no, independents have rejected the Biden agenda. A lot of Democrats have rejected the Biden agenda. The working class, you know, you look at those, the white women who put Glenn Youngkin over

the top, most of whom 75% were without a college. If you, if you were a white woman without a college degree, you went, they went 75% for Glenn Youngkin. Is that because they're racist? Or is that because they're the ones who couldn't get private tutors when the Virginia schools were closed for an entire year? They're the ones who had to sit there with their kids in the class masked all day and had no alternatives. They're the ones who can't stock their shelves and who actually shop at the dollar store and see that it's now $1.50.

And so they can't run from the downside of these policies. And by the way, they live in a very pro-military state that certainly wouldn't have liked to see what happened in Afghanistan and the national embarrassment of America, international on that kind of a stage. And instead, so they go in the ballot box and they have their say, Victor, and what they see the next day on the news is, you're all racists. It's the Don Lemons again of the world, the millionaires looking at them from their high poaches or perches saying you're racists. And to me, I sit back and I say, great, keep saying it. That's perfect. I think that's the attitude. Everybody has to mock it. It's incoherent, too. I was talking to some soldiers from the Central Valley, and they don't know what to make of it because Pfizer vaccinations, even though they're told that with high antibodies from a recent case of COVID, it's not such a good idea to get vaccinated. And yet when they look at people coming in from Afghanistan, 2 million people across the border, the same government says, all you non-citizens are going to be exempt from mandates. But all you soldiers who have COVID and you have probably higher antibody levels in people, you're going to be vaccinated. And we don't care because that's just the way it's going to be. And so they've lost respect for the institution. It's very dangerous because

while this is happening, there are people like Vladimir Putin, who gave one of the most bizarre, surreal lectures I've ever heard. And he basically said, we went through Bolshevism. He's very cynical. He's happy about this. And he said, we went through it. It destroys the institutions. We've suffered for it, through it for 50 years. And if you want to go ahead and do it, this is great. Go ahead and do it. And then we've had the Chinese who were bizarre as well in their reactions. And they think, you know, rather than Putin egging them on, we'll just kind of, in saying it's ridiculous, we'll say it's great. So every time you mentioned to the Chinese what happened about the gain of function virus that leaked from your lab, or why didn't you tell people that were traveling all

over the world from Wuhan that they may infect people before the travel ban. They say one word, you're racist, you're racist. You hate Chinese because you're racist. And so what I'm getting at is it's not just, it's not sustainable in the United States, but it's been a gift, a gift for our existential enemies abroad, both Russia and China. Now Iran is pumping oil like crazy and in violation of the embargo. And we're not doing anything about it because we think, well, it's going to be more oil in the market. Maybe they'll get the price of the gas down before the midterms next year. So I think everybody just says, we have lost our collective minds. I get a lot of friends overseas, so do you, and when they email or call, and they're not just conservative,

they're liberals or moderates. And so what has happened? You guys are gone crazy. And I say, well, it's kind of like the reign of terror in 1793 or the Satan witchfile, this massive pet rocks, hula hoop craze. It's a massive stereo. And maybe it'll subside if we stop it. But they can't. They're very worried about it. There was a burst of reality on Tuesday night. I want to ask you about the covid thing. We'll squeeze in a quick break here, but that's what we'll pick it up, because to what extent were people voting against these restrictive covid policies or trying to object to how the Biden administration has handled this crisis. It's one of the interesting questions. And it's actually it's timely because Rand Paul is cross examining Anthony Fauci right now about his denials on the United States funding gain of function research, research where you make a virus more transmissible or more dangerous. And it's fiery, as always,

we'll show you what just happened right after this quick, quick break. More with Victor Davis Hanson in one second. frustration with this administration and how it's handling the pandemic. It's vaccine mandates, it's refusal to acknowledge natural immunity, it's punishment of the working class guys, you know, the firefighters, the cops, even the teachers who helped get us through the pandemic with firing them or, you know, benching them without pay if they won't get the vaccine, even if they've got a valid medical exemption or religious exemption or natural immunity, something they account for in Europe, but we've decided doesn't exist inexplicably here in the United States. We just choose to totally ignore it. And all of this plays out against the backdrop of how did this thing get started? The total unwillingness of our intel agencies, they had issued a three-page summary

months ago on their second look at how COVID got started. Was it in a lab? Was it natural through an animal? Well, they just released the full 18-page report about a week ago, and it was utterly benign and unhelpful, and to me, just betrayed their unwillingness to really look. We won't press China. We won't punish China for hiding the data. We're too beholden to China. And there's a real chance here that this was from the Wuhan lab. That certainly should be the predominant theory. And possibly with some nefarious actor behind it. We don't know. At a minimum, it appears we funded very dangerous research in that lab. And that is one of the things that was on the topic today, on the docket today when Rand Paul was pushing Anthony Fauci yet again on whether we funded, quote, gain of function research. And just by way of background, as you watch this clip for the audience, what happened was the NIH, after Fauci's last dust up with Rand Paul, where Rand kept saying, you funded gain of function research and Fauci kept saying, no, you don't know what you're talking about.

That day, the NIH went back on the website and changed the definition of gain of function. So now Rand Paul gets another bite at the apple. And here's just a little bit of his exchange with Dr. Fauci. Watch. So what you're doing is defining a way gain of function. You're simply saying it doesn't exist because you changed the definition on the NIH website. This is terrible. And you're you're completely trying to escape the idea that we should do something about trying to prevent a pandemic from leaking from a lab. There's the preponderance of evidence now points towards this coming from the lab. And what you've done is changed the definition on your website to try to cover your ass, basically. And then on January of 2017, the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the White House issued the current policy. And coincidentally, I have not changed any definition. On the same day the NIH said that,

yes, there was a gain of function in Wuhan, the same day the definition appeared, the new definition, to try to define away what's going on in Wuhan. Until you accept it, until you accept responsibility, we're not going to get anywhere close to trying to prevent another lab leak of this dangerous sort of experiment. You won't admit that it's dangerous, and for that lack of judgment, I think it's time that you resign. I have a great deal of respect for this body of the Senate, and it makes me very uncomfortable to have to say something. But he is egregiously incorrect in what he says. Thank you. History will figure that out on its own.

On and on it goes, Victor. And maybe we'll never have a final verdict, but I think the American people are figuring it out for themselves. Yeah, I think, I mean, what is he doing, Megan? He's making the argument from authority. I'm Anthony Fauci. I'm a famous public health servant. I'm the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, and what I say counts because of the letters after my name. But he's also talking to an MD who's a U.S. senator who's pretty well informed. And I think what he's basically telling us, Anthony Fauci and also Rand Paul, is that if you just step back from the turmoil right now and put it in historical perspective, we've got about 770,000 people that died.

And this is the largest disaster that's hit this country. If you look at the economic, cultural, social, all the things we've been talking about earlier, Megan, in some cases were let off. They were IEDs that were exploded by this COVID stuff. They were there, but they were activated by this crisis. And really what we're talking about is Anthony Fauci at the age of 80 is essentially can't deal with the reality that he spent U.S. government money when gain-of-function was not allowed and routed it through Echo Health. And it ended up, I think he knew it, and he intended it. So in the Wuhan's level four lab that had Chinese military oversight of it,

and they created a gain of function virus that seems to be very pernicious in its mutations, except for transmissibility. And in some way, we have culpability for it. And we being America and him in particular. And at 80, I don't think he's able to resign or retire with that legacy. So he's not. But the more that he digs in, the more it requires him not to tell the truth and not to face reality. And it's another, I mean, look at the people, Megan, that we have created in these positions of power. They're public servants. Sometimes they do very good jobs, but Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, James Comey, John Brennan, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, they all get before Congress and they cannot tell the truth or be candid.

None of them can. And so it's a reminder, we've given these people enormous powers of executive branch, legislative branch, judicial branch. Anthony Fauci, just a few months ago, was determining whether landlords could collect rent from their tenants based on the degree of COVID pandemic levels. And he would say, no, it's still dangerous. And then the government would say, okay, you can suspend, you renters can suspend payment to your landlords, not all of whom were wealthy. And so we've given these people so much power and they're so unaccountable that they have an arrogance about them when they're caught. And they're kind of, they're very scary people. And when

they get caught, they always, I'm General Milley and I've got this chest of medals here. And look at this. And that, you know what, that was a righteous strike, that drone strike. And this was a logistical success, getting out. And if you question him, then you're on patriotic. Or I'm

Anthony Fauci, and how dare you suggest that I would have anything to do with gain of function? That's beneath you. This body, that's the reply. Or I'm James Comey. Or I'm Robert Mule. I don't know anything about GPS, using GPS. I don't know anything about the Steele dossier. Why should I? Well, it's the basis of your whole investigation. And so I think this is all caught up that what we're talking about, the people feel that they've lost control of the government, that their elected officials, but especially their unelected officials simply are not accountable. And they can't audit them. They can't hold them responsible. And they're getting angrier and angrier about it. And Fauci literally said, I am science. Well, he does. Okay, we'll be the judge of that. But I think the COVID policies forced on regular Americans by this administration definitely

played out to some extent on Tuesday, because I do think part of what we saw at those angry school board meetings was parents mad about the never ending masking. And this is before we've gotten to the mandatory vaccinations for children. It's coming for five to 11 year olds. In many schools, it's already there for 12 and up. In our school, it's there for 16 and up. And and they're they're going to expel any child who doesn't get it, who's 16 years old. It doesn't matter if your covid madness and the refusal to to be reasonable, not to mention Biden's promise that he would shut it down. And he hasn't. So the virus isn't shut down, though it gets better. They won't loosen any of these restrictive policies. Our children suffer. Our businesses suffer. The working class suffers. And I do think that was playing out there. In Northern Virginia, the schools were closed for a year, Victor. They were closed for a year. They have zero credibility because we've got to remember that Joe Biden came into office thinking that the vaccination program that he was the narrative. They're not going to happen. I'm going to kill the virus.

He didn't understand it was a gain of function, highly mutating. So we got the Delta. And here we are, not even 10 months into his administration, we have 370,000 deaths. We have more deaths per day since Biden took office than when Trump was in office after the first case was reported. In other words, there was about a thousand deaths per day under Trump to get to the 390. And we have about 1,300 under Biden. That wouldn't matter, Megan. It shouldn't matter. It's not fair to blame the president, except that was what Biden said. The president is to be blamed. And then he never thought that he would be boomeranged on that. And then we heard all of this one mask,

two masks, 60, 70, 80% immunity. Don't worry about anybody else. You go get the vaccination. You don't really worry whether they're vaccinated. It's the gold standard, 96% immunity. You can be in a room with people who are not vaccinated. And then we heard Biden say, you know what? I don't want mandates. I'm not going to do that. And then everything is reversed. Everything is not true.

And now we're in a worker shortage. And we're paying people not to work. And the least thing imaginable that any leader would do would compound that worker shortage by firing thousands of people in key industries and the military and the federal government if they're not vaxxed. Even though we know that prior immunity naturally acquired is good. You know, I had a very strange thing. I went to a doctor's appointment. I got the Moderna in February. So it's been nine, nine months. And they gave me, I don't know why they gave me, but they gave me not only COVID, but an antibody. And they called up and said, Victor,

you have 2,200 antibody. What's happened to you? Your, your antibody levels have gone way down. Are you, we were going to give you a booster. I said, I don't want a booster. And they said, well, you don't need one. You must have had COVID. And then I remember I was teaching, you know, some kids got sick in my class. I had 101 temperature for a day. I didn't even, it was on a Friday. I didn't go in to get tested on Monday because I woke up 14 hours later, perfectly fine. But I guess I did get some kind of COVID. But my point is that natural immunity spiked so high that they thought that I had a booster. And they said, wow, it's like you've had just got your Moderna shot or a booster yesterday.

What I'm getting at is that we don't even talk about that. We don't talk about all of these people who suffered from COVID. They have natural immunity. We don't talk about all of these people who suffered from COVID. They have natural immunity. We don't quite know its relationship with vaccination immunity, but it looks almost, in many cases, there's parity. And yet we're telling them on anti-science, really anti-science, that they have to be vaccinated again. And so we started out with all these conspiracies, we said, that said, you know what, this is a way for the federal government to gain greater control of our lives, to empower people who are not elected to make economic and social decisions based on suspect signs. And we didn't believe them. And now we do because that's exactly what's happening. They're controlling more and more aspects of our life. And when we get the vaccinations, we get the boosters, they feel panic.

And you know where we're going to end up, Megan? We're going to end up with an engineered virus that's going to be like a bad flu, I suppose. And all of us are either going to get vaccinated, we're going to have residual T cell or B cell immunity or some antibody. And then we're going to make a choice every year whether to get a booster or to get a day or two of COVID because we probably will have immunity either from prior exposure or the original shots. And it won't kill us. And that's not even considering the therapeutics that are down the pipeline. We don't even talk about that. No, we don't even talk about the therapeutics. We got the vaccine. We don't even talk about that. No, we don't even talk about the therapeutics. We got the vaccine and then we gave up on the cure.

Yeah, and they're going to be here pretty soon. What do you think the odds are of Democrats, if not today or tomorrow, by the time we approach midterms, at least, let's hope it's not that long, finally saying, oh my goodness, we are going to have to relax these crazy policies because we're going to pay for it if we don't. All this firing of cops and medical personnel and prison guards and teachers and health care workers and mandatory masking of children who are not effective vectors of the disease all day long in school. We've completely forgotten about them. We've muzzled them, stuck them in schools and forgotten about them, except when we pull them out for two minutes to stick a needle in our five-year-old's arms,

or they get expelled. That's really where this is. I do think that people will punish the Democrats if they don't reverse some of this. I don't think that, I think they will punish them, but they won't change. And their way of thinking, two things got them elected, and they did not think that they would defeat Donald Trump, much less control both houses of Congress. They said it. And what they feel worked for them was the demonstrations, riots, and chaos after George Floyd that empowered critical race theory that was an abstract academic, I mean, academic exercise into the mainstream. And so they're never going to give up on that, that winning, what they feel was a winning ticket in 2020. And the COVID crisis, because the COVID

crisis, and I'm not getting into conspiracy about voting and balloting, but there was 102 million absentee or early votes that were not cast on election day. And they feel that that worked out for them. And I'm not just saying they feel. I mean, Jane Fonda, remember, said, thank God for COVID, we wouldn't have gotten to Trump. Or Gavin Newsom said, this gave us a chance to get a new progressive capitalism. Or Hillary Clinton said, this is a chance to push through single payer health care. The Davos Great Reset people said, this is the chance we've been waiting for. So in their mind, the longer you have the COVID threat, and the longer you have racial tensions and critical race theory, the more polarized, chaotic anarchy, the more anarchy, the more there's a need to

people will react in a way that they usually don't politically, and that favors them. So I don't think they're going to give up. I think they're going to say, you know what? These boosters are necessary every year. The masks work. We've got to keep everybody locked down. Or at least they'll say you need to show this to a restaurant. I was in New York, you know, your city, and I could not believe it. I went to about six restaurants,

and I would call multiracial, multiethnic neighborhoods. And it was like being in the 1950s South. They were all white people. And so I kind of asked one woman there, and I said, do you all, I showed my, I said, everybody, I had this, I was asked to show my vaccination certificate. She said, everybody does. And she said, of course, so-called affluent white people are more likely and Asians to be vaccinated. So there's no, minorities are not being treated very well. And I thought to myself, how many African-American people or Mexican-American people, none of which are in this restaurant? And I wasn't the high-end

restaurant. Some of them weren't. And I thought, how many of them really had COVID? And they almost died or they got seriously sick for a week and they have sky-high antibodies and they cannot come into this restaurant. Right. Right. No, it's absurd. And by the way, while they sit at home, God forbid they have an emergency, no firefighter firefighters going to show up because they're not at work because of this vaccine mandate. They've been benched one third of the fire department and it's coming next month in December for the prison guards and so on. And you can feel the anger, by the way. I mean, there's a reason that the New York constituency just elected a former cop who's

pro-gun and who says he's revisiting these mandates that the lunatic de Blasio put on all the public employees come January 1st. So hopefully Eric Adams is going to undo Mayor de Blasio's ridiculous and non-science based mandates on our working professionals. But stand by because there's so much more to go over with Victor Davis Hanson in a moment, including what about Trump? How are the Republicans supposed to run now? Victor's a Trump fan. What does he think? I'll ask him next. And remember, you can find the Megyn Kelly show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips when you subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. Or if you

prefer an audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a good way of sharing the show with people who may have missed it when it was live. And there you'll find our full archives with more than 195 shows. And here's a hint. Go back and listen to any single one with Victor. It's worth your time. So, Victor, the president was asked by the White House correspondent for who is it? Not not NPR. PBS. Thank you, Yamiche Amador, about the election on Tuesday. And he got a couple of questions. First, he said, what we really need to do is get things done. We got to pass my infrastructure bill and we got to pass my build back better bill, which is his $3.5 trillion social spending bill, which, you know, thanks to Joe Manchin is now cut down to about $1.75 trillion on top of the

$1.2 trillion. I mean, the numbers are just they boggle the mind. But what he wants is more spending. He says that's going to really change everybody's attitude. Then she zeroes in on him on on strategy and race. And here's how that went. Listen. Your message, though, for Democratic voters, especially black voters who see Republicans running on race education, lying about critical race theory, and they're worried that Democrats don't have an effective way to push back on that? Well, I think that the whole answer is just to speak the truth, lay out where we are. Look, um, I'm convinced that if you look at everything from my view on criminal justice system

to my view on equal opportunity to my view on economic issues and all the things I have and what I've been pushing in legislation, each of the elements are overwhelmingly popular. We have to speak to them. We have to speak to them and explain them. Look, I just think people are at a point, and it's understandable, where there's a whole lot of confusion. is so classic. We hear this from Democrats every time they lose an election. My views are extremely popular. We just need to explain them so the dum-dums at home understand better why I'm so amazing. That's my takeaway. Yeah, the more people understand them, the more they dislike them. That's his problem. And he's not able to, even if he were able to explain them and he's not,

if he did, then they would be even more appalled than they are. And the funny thing is that the media and the hard left and the woke people want Biden to go over the cliff at a higher speed than he's going. And he knows that. And he doesn't know what to do about it because that's the people who were going to sit out on the election. Remember the Faustian bargain that got him there. Bernie Sanders and BLM and all those people that appeased Antifa said, okay, if Bernie doesn't get the nomination, we'll support Biden. But once he's in office, he owes us and he's going to carry this agenda across the finish line. And that's where he's

trapped. And so he just says, as you say, as they always say, that we need more information. But it really opens up a question about the Republicans is that Youngkin found out a way to bring back the suburban voter, the moderate voter, by not disowning the Trump agenda. But actually, he got a higher turnout in some counties than Trump did in Virginia, the really hard red counties of Virginia. So he didn't distance himself, and Trump being barred from social media didn't really hurt him because Trump was not weighing in, so Youngkin was not being asked every day,

what do you think of this tweet five minutes ago? Wouldn't it be amazing if now Twitter allows Trump back? That's probably where it's going to go. This is probably what's going to bring him back after all this time. All right, got to run because we're up against a break. But Victor Davis Hanson, you know I love talking to you. I love your wisdom, your expertise. Thanks for being here and sharing them with us today. Coming up, we're going to do Kelly's court, Kyle Rittenhouse, Alec Baldwin and more. Stay tuned. On Monday, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial got underway in Wisconsin. All eyes in the nation are on this case.

Rittenhouse is charged with reckless and intentional homicides in the killing of two men and the wounding of a third during the Kenosha, Wisconsin protests that followed the shooting of Jacob Blake by police. You remember Jacob Blake was encountering cops while he was trying. His ex-wife or ex-girlfriend or sort of active girlfriend but distanced had called police on Jacob Blake. They got there. He resisted arrest. He fought through a taser and then he pulled a knife on cops and he got shot five times and he lived, but he's paralyzed. In any event, the police have now been exonerated in that shooting. And but that didn't that didn't help the residents of Kenosha in the days after the shooting, because BLM was out on the streets

saying, you know, this is yet another unfair police shooting. Not true. And chaos unfolded in the streets there. Well, two days after the Jacob Blake shooting, there was this chaos, this madness on the streets of Kenosha. And one of the people involved was Kyle Rittenhouse, who had meandered over from Illinois. He didn't belong there, but he had answered a call on Facebook saying, let's get there and let's protect these businesses and not let buildings be burned and so on. 17 years old, somebody who was over 18 got him the rifle, which he was not allowed to have lawfully in Wisconsin, but he did. And he was accused of acting as a vigilante, which is not entirely wrong. His defenders say they needed it because

the cops are outnumbered. And those who are against Kyle Rittenhouse say he was completely out of line and he wound up killing two people. Now, the jurors are going to need to decide. They've just been chosen. They have 20 jurors, 12 of whom will actually decide the case. They've got a bunch of alternates. Just today, they had to bounce one of the jurors. We'll get into that. But they'll have to decide whether Rittenhouse was an instigator or a victim who just used self-defense to protect himself against an unruly mob. Joining me now to discuss it all, that and a couple other cases too, two of my very favorite lawyers to ever appear on Kelly's Court, a segment we've had alive since I was a young cub in the D.C. Bureau at Fox News 2004. That's how long we've

been doing this. Jonas Bilboer, who's a criminal defense attorney and founding attorney of Jonas Bilboer Law, and Arthur Aydala, a trial attorney and managing partner of Aydala, Bertuna and Kamens. He's a former prosecutor, now defense attorney. Hey, guys, how's it going? Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Johnny, you still look so good 2004 lady oh my goodness well you're going backwards because you look absolutely beautiful so age of 2004 the years are very kind to you megan same same you look awesome not to mention arthur i'm the only one who's in bad shape but

that's okay okay let's get down to business could worse. You could be on trial for involuntary manslaughter, intentional, intentional murder. OK, so just to set it up for the audience. So Kyle Rittenhouse, I think, has got a very good self-defense case. It's not to sanction him being there in the first place. He shouldn't have been, in my view, a 17 year old should not take an AR-1515 go on the streets to try to play cop for a night doesn't end well didn't hear um the the two people he shot and killed were one guy rosenbaum and one guy huber then he shot another guy named gage grosskreutz sorry for the name pronunciation who got injured but lived his he got shot but lived his he got shot but

lived um and the way it went down as i understand we're going to play a little video but basically what happened is this is my notes from watching the whole video the new york times put it all together from everybody's video that was taken this guy rosenbaum rosenbaum is dead rosenbaum was not a well person rosenbaum was a convicted child molester. Rosenbaum had just got out of some mental institution. Rosenbaum shouldn't have been there either. Rosenbaum sadly chased Kyle Rittenhouse, which was a mistake. Then another guy shot his gun into the air. Another guy not named Rosenbaum or Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse apparently got confused that he was getting shot at. That's what his lawyers are going to argue. And then Rosenbaum lunged towards Rittenhouse apparently got confused that he was getting shot at. That's what his lawyers are going to argue. And then Rosenbaum lunged towards Rittenhouse, who fired at him four times and killed him. All right, so that's death number one. Rittenhouse then fled away with his gun. He was scared. He had just shot a man. And a guy named Huber, Anthony Huber, then chased Kyle Rittenhouse. Huber's girlfriend says he was being a good

Samaritan. He thought Rittenhouse was a bad guy. He thought he was killing people. He was trying to disarm him, sort of do the public service. I don't think that's the way Kyle Rittenhouse saw it. There was nothing on Huber that said police officer or I am a good Samaritan. What Rittenhouse saw was Huber coming at him with his skateboard, attacking Kyle Rittenhouse, who had fallen on the ground. He attempted to take Kyle's gun. Instead, he was on the receiving end of that gun's bullets and died. with gauges, gun drawn. And Kyle shot him too. So you can see how I'm sort of laying out the facts, but this is why they're going to say self-defense, you know, stupid ass moves, but self-defense. And just before I get you guys to weigh in,

I'm going to show the audience a little bit of video and those listening can listen to it as well. This is going to be soundbite number nine, which is 55 seconds. It's from the New York Times mashup of the first and second shooting. Rittenhouse walks towards a parking lot where cars are being vandalized. He passes Joseph Rosenbaum, who was fighting with the armed men at the gas station earlier. Rosenbaum now starts chasing Rittenhouse and throws a plastic bag that holds his belongings from the hospital. Close behind them, a man holds up a handgun and fires it.

We don't know why. Then Rosenbaum lunges towards Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse fires four times. Rittenhouse trips and falls. Anthony Huber hits Rittenhouse with a skateboard and attempts to disarm him. Rittenhouse shoots him in the chest. Here is Gage Grosskreutz with his gun drawn. He also gets shot and calls out for help. I need a medic. That's that's going to be one of the witnesses. All right. So, Jonna, for the purposes of today, you are a defense attorney.

So you tell me why this is. I mean, should he have been charged at all? Kyle Rittenhouse. Well, the optics are not very favorable. If you knew the story without listening to the context in which it was in, you're, yeah, I mean, he was not going to escape getting charged, especially when you look at what was going on in the country during that time. And, you know, in the era of George Floyd and the things that happened just prior and just after, there was no way that optically a prosecutor was not going to charge him. So here we are in

trial. And the real question is, what is this now 18 year old, then 17 year old boy going to get convicted of, if anything. And when you tell the whole story, when you get into this kid's mind, because that's going to be crucial in determining whether his actions were reasonable. And that is the legal jargon that is going to be applied. That's what the jury is going to have to sit with. And it's interesting for a number of reasons, because I don't know if any of those jurors are 18 years old. I believe they're older. And they're really going to have to put themselves in a place where the three of us can sit here and say, man, that was dumb for him to go to Wisconsin and engage in this and try to save somebody's business and protect somebody. Like, stay home.

We would say that. Now, are the jurors going to be able to get past that as well and say, okay, well, he didn't. But he doesn't deserve to be charged with these homicides because he truly was protecting intentional homicide. First degree, Arthur, that's thanks to Keith Ellison, this far left political operative who was in the in the House of Representatives. And now he is the A.G. out there who decided to up the charge they wanted to up the charge against kyle rittenhouse and and also is trying um wait a minute i might be convincing or confusing my my two prosecutors because so that's kim potter that's the case we're doing next he

stepped in in that case to try to up the cart to charge against a cop anyway this one's first degree intentional homicide which was the result of pressure by the families in this case as well. They wanted him charged with with exactly this. They think this is murder. And he's also been charged with reckless homicide as well, which is a lesser charge. But you tell me whether showing up stupidly can lead to an intentional homicide, even if the cameras show us in the moment it was self-defense? So to answer the question you asked, yes, even showing up even stupidly, it can lead to that charge. When a call goes out over Facebook that we need some help from law enforcement, if that was accurate, I don't think they're looking for a 17-year-old kid who has no military training, no law enforcement training, with a weapon of mass

destruction running out into a crowd of people. They may have been looking for retired police officers, off-duty correction officers, off-duty court officers who have training, military people. So it's beyond stupid. It is a degree of recklessness, criminal negligence that rises to a crime. Just the fact that he's out, first of all, he's guilty. He's charged with being in possession of the weapon and being underage. He's 100% guilty of that. So we know we're going to hear at least one guilty.

There's no way to get out of that. That makes sense. The self-defense statute in Wisconsin, it's the same as the one I live with here in New York, is it has to be equal force. You can only use deadly force to meet deadly force. And look, if someone's coming at you with a skateboard, what John has said is accurate. It's reasonable. If it happens to be a football player who's 280 pounds and 6'4", and one whack of the skateboard is going to kill you, then you may be able to be justified to shoot them. But if you're on the floor and a guy hits you once with a skateboard, trying to take away

your semi-automatic rifle, then a jury is going to have to make a decision. Was it reasonable to kill that person and to kill the person before that and to try to kill the person after that? You got almost three deaths here that I don't think this jury is going to say, oh, no, that was fine. That's that's the problem, John, is that it's like one incident. You might look at it and say, oh, God, he was in a tough situation to been there. But like but three, he shot three people, two of whom are dead. It makes it look like he really was a kid who didn't understand this is a real gun. This isn't some video game.

And, you know, making a split second life or death determination. There's a reason we don't want 17 year olds having guns like that and behaving that way. Well, that's true. And it's funny that you mentioned video game, because when I view what happened, I look at the victims and sidebar. This judge is not allowing the victims to be called victims, by the way, which I applaud. I agree. They can be called rioters. They could be called looters. So when you look at the victims, I thought they believed they were inside some sort of video game and that they were all bulletproof. And we have to keep in mind that we weren't there, but this was obviously a completely chaotic scene.

Right. Skateboards and other people with guns drawn and the police and, you know, the fire and the brimstone. take all that collectively, that has to be taken into consideration when you're determining what was going through this kid's head at the time he was pulling triggers. And I think, you know, and Arthur and I agree that if somebody is trying to whack your head off with a skateboard, to me, that's deadly force. You see somebody else with a gun drawn. To me, that's potentially deadly force. If you people are screaming, I think one of these victims slash looters, rioters said, let's get them or let's whacking me with a skateboard, which could be bad. But I have a gun. I have an AR-15. And I know what he's going to do to me after he knocks me out with that skateboard. He's going to take this gun and my life could be in danger.

I have no idea that this is later going to be claimed to be some good Samaritan. No, but the law, we have to look at what was in Kyle Rittenhouse's head. And his lawyer seemed to telegraph he's going to put him on the stand. And Kyle's going to testify. And presumably he's going to say, I thought that guy was trying to kill me. I thought the first guy was trying to kill me. He was chasing me. I heard a gun go off. I thought the second guy was trying to kill me because I was down. He was beating me with a skateboard. And even his friends say he was trying to take my gun. I didn't know it was for altruistic reasons. I thought he was going to use it against me. And then the third guy actually had a gun on me. So under that theory, Megan, all of these tragic cases that you and I have covered

where, you know, people are in the movie house and some guy pulls out a gun and starts killing people. Would it be justified if someone tackles him and he's trying to take the gun and then he kills that one person because the original shooter says, well, I thought he was going to take my gun and kill me. But Rosenbaum had no weapon. OK, he heard a gunshot somewhere else. But the clip you just showed showed it was number one distance wise and time wise. There was a separation, unlike the guy who actually got shot and lived. He threw a bag of medical stuff.

Yes, he threw something at Kyle, but he chased Kyle. He threw something at him and then he lunged toward him. I mean, we all know that. You can't execute someone for that. Otherwise, every street fight that took place, someone would be justified

of pulling out a weapon and shooting them and executing them. But you're forgetting that Kyle Rittenhouse heard a gun go off repeatedly before that in the midst of all this.

So he's going to argue, I thought he had a gun and I realized Rosen that in the midst of all this so he's going to argue i thought he had a gun and i realized rosenbaum is not was not a good man child molester you know convicted repeated not good uh but that's not going to come in the judges excluded that so the jury's not going to know i mean not that it's relevant necessarily to this particular instance but i'm just saying he wasn't exactly some squeaky queen squeaky clean Boy Scout on the scene trying to keep order. The guy was confused. As you know, Megan, that's only relevant. It's only relevant if the defendant knew that. So if the defendant knew he wasn't a squeaky clean person, then it's relevant. But if he doesn't

have that knowledge, which he didn't, then it doesn't matter if he was the Pope or the devil. So that doesn't count. Okay, listen to this. Wait, to your point about the movie theater. Okay, listen, Arthur, this is the self-defense statute in Wisconsin. Okay, listen to this. Wait, to your point about the movie theater. Okay, listen, Arthur. This is the self-defense statute in Wisconsin. First, it says you can use force against another person when you reasonably believe that they intend to do you harm. Only the force necessary to prevent the harm. Then they say, okay, if you provoke an attack, all right, that's the shooter in the theater. If you provoke an attack, you may not be able to claim legal self-defense against the attack unless it's likely to cause your death or great bodily harm.

Even then, you must attempt every other reasonable option to escape, avoid or prevent the attack before resorting to deadly attack, deadly force yourself. And then you may not be able to claim self-defense if you provoked another person attack as an excuse for you to kill them. So that, that your movie theater guy goes out based on that last sentence. I don't know that Kyle Rittenhouse loses protection. If a police officer acted in the same way as Rittenhouse, where he'd be charged for the police officer wearing his shield, the same exact set of circumstances, somebody's chasing him and throws his bag of his medical stuff

or his hospital clothes at him, and he kills him. Then he runs the other way. He trips, and a guy comes after him with a skateboard. He kills him. And then the last one is the most justified. A guy's got the gun in his hand. That's the one that he should be found not guilty of, in my opinion, because that's hand-to-hand combat,

and that's deadly force against deadly force. But I believe if a police officer did the same at the same set of circumstances, that cop would be standing trial right now. Go ahead, John. Do you think so? Well, I think it's a slightly different standard because we do hold police officers to a different standard than we hold the average Joe. And here we've got to hold this 17-year-old kid to the reasonableness standard, given the totality of the circumstances, what he was hearing, what he was seeing, what he was feeling. And I think when you factor all of that in,

I mean, really, this defense attorney is going to have to convince these jurors to be Kyle Rittenhouse for the duration of this trial in order for him to, like I said, Arthur's right. He is going to get convicted of the gun charges. Really no way around that. But on the top charges on the homicides, they really have to put themselves in his shoes and in between his ears. And that's going to be the challenge for this defense attorney. Well, that's why he's going to testify. He's got to testify, Megan, almost in every,

I shouldn't say every, but in many self-defense cases to put yourself, like John had just said, to put the jurors in his head, they have to hear what his head is. They have to hear what he saw, what his perception was, distances, lighting, sounds, every little detail they have to put in there and make the jury feel the fear that he felt that he was so terrified that he was about to be killed. He had no other choice. Like the statue says, you have to take any reasonable steps to get out of there. I had no choice except to do what I did. Therefore, find me. My homicide took place, but it was justifiable. Therefore, I don't go to jail.

All right. So I want to tell you that one of the jurors was dismissed today. Apparently, he told he or she told a deputy him escorting him to his vehicle on Tuesday. Quote, Why did the Kenosha police shoot Jacob Blake seven times? Because they ran out of bullets. So he's gone. So they will that they don't want anybody who's got biased pro police, anti-police, what have you. There's already a dust up about the race of the jurors. Wisconsin is overwhelmingly white, as is the jury in this case. I mean, Kyle Rittenhouse is white and everyone he shot is white. But it sort of stems out of an incident with a black man, Jacob Blake, in which the cops, again, have have not been charged and have been exonerated.

Anyway, we'll continue to follow it. They're up against it because it's turned political there too right it's like become part of a movement kyle rittenhouse is allegedly a white nationalist and they're going to try to you know suggest that i don't know that they get any of that proof in but they've got sort of pictures of him doing the okay sign which is now you know how that goes we'll continue to watch it we've got much more with john and arthur coming up we're going to talk alec baldwin who's now speaking out and uh hannah gutierrez reed her lawyers are now making a statement, too. Kim Potter is the woman, the cop, who shot a man named Dante Wright, a 20-year-old black man who had been pulled over for driving

without a registration. I think that he had an expired registration. And the tags showed that they discovered that there was a warrant out for his arrest. Three officers tried to detain him. He stepped back into his car in the midst of resisting. There was a brief struggle with the officers and Officer Kim Potter, who very clearly meant to taser him. It appears accidentally grabbed her firearm instead and shot him and he was killed. Here's the videotape of what happened. Altasia! Altasia!

Altasia! Altasia! Altasia! Holy shit! I just shot him. Oh, wow. Yes! You can hear her say, holy shit, I just shot him. And I'll tase you, I'll tase you.

And then her obvious shock that she wound up firing her firearm at him. She is the one who is now sort of being targeted by Keith Ellison, this former Democratic congressman who's very far left, who's now the AG there, who stepped in to amp up the charges against her and amp up the possible prison time she could be facing. She's looking at first and second degree manslaughter charges. Manslaughter in the first degree would require imprisonment for not more than 15 years. You have to intentionally cause the death of another person in the heat of passion provoked by such words or act of another that would provoke a person of ordinary self-control under life circumstances to commit the act. Anyway, to me, this is a clear accident. I don't know how we get first degree manslaughter

out of this. Arthur, you explain to me how they make that charge to this jury. I think, look, you previewed this perfectly regarding Ellison. So you have an attorney general here who's not a real lawyer. He's not a real prosecutor. He's a real politician. And I'll tell that to his face. And he overcharged the case. I mean, if I'm playing the role of prosecutor here, this is not how I would charge the case at all. I think a jury should determine whether her negligence, whether that mistake was so horrific that it rises to the level of criminality. That's why they have laws that are called criminally negligent homicide, which is that there's zero intent. You're not trying to hurt anyone. The next step up is recklessness, where if you just take a gun and you're firing it at no one, but you know there's a lot of people around and you could kill them. Well, that's, that's a charge that you can be sentenced with more time. But negligence is, it's just a mistake. It's just an accident, which is, in my opinion, looking at the evidence and having covered this for many times,

that's what it was. It's, she's so genuine in her protestations to herself that she shot him. And, you know, oh, my God, she curses, as you heard. So the count here that a jury, 12 people weighing all the evidence has to determine, in my opinion, is whether her mistake rises to a level of criminality, which is typically called criminally negligent homicide. And usually those counts carry a much, much lower jail sentence, like a year, two years, three years, not 10 or 15. This woman doesn't deserve that. So she's charged, Donna, with first degree manslaughter and second degree manslaughter.

Second degree is culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another. I don't know if that's this case either. You know, I mean, this is accident. Is there is is criminally negligent homicide less than second degree manslaughter? Because that that's not charged. Yeah, it's probably just a little bit less egregious along the continuum. But I agree. I don't, you know, why is it when a cop makes a mistake, that cop is now a criminal? When really that's not how it should be. We don't just have a system of justice that has a criminal law to it.

We have civil law as well. And if somebody makes a mistake and that mistake results in the tragedy of somebody dying, but because of an innocent mistake, an innocent, albeit horrible mistake, the civil law steps in to say, you know what? Well, now this person, you have to compensate the family. You have to compensate the injured person. You have to compensate them with money

to try to make up for it. But you don't need to throw somebody in jail or prison because of it. But now if you're a cop, you cannot make a mistake because the political environment is such that you have to be not only charged and tried, but we're going to up the charges to make sure that you're tried as a murderer and not a human being on a stressful job that made a horrible and horrendous mistake. This one is charged completely wrong. Probably should not have been charged at all. Her biggest, the prosecutor's biggest point to the jury is she's not, she's so far from a rookie. And again, I'm not talking about anything intentional.

I'm still going back to the mistake, maybe rising to the level of a criminality is, you know, she's, she got like dozens of years on the force and she received, received many times explicit training on the difference between the taser and a gun, a handgun, and also the, the, the holsters themselves and how they lock. And it basically falls into you knew or should have known that what you were pulling out was your handgun and not your taser. And that's that's the if she was a rookie, I think she'd have a stronger argument that said, look, this was just a mistake.

I've only been on the job for nine months and it's a horrible thing. And John is right. You know, the city will give you this family six, eight, 10 million dollars. And let's call it a day. But yeah, but that and I don't know what the taser feels like in one's hand versus what the firearm feels like in one hand. And in this particular jurisdiction, it must have been awfully similar. Otherwise, one presumes she wouldn't have been so confused. If it was markedly different, that's definitely going to be a point in favor of the prosecution. But yeah, to me, it's almost like a surgeon, though, who's performing an operation and, you know, wrongfully uses the scalpel instead of another instrument or cuts

where he shouldn't cut and causes a death. It's pure accident. It would be malpractice. It would lead to a big civil payout. But the surgeon doesn't go to jail. The only reason she got charged is because of the charged political environment that we're in. And this DA who's a politician, this AG Keith Ellison, to me, that's unfair. This woman shouldn't have her freedom taken away because we have a politically charged atmosphere right now when it comes to cops exactly i think we all agree on this one yeah all right well here's one we may may or may not agree on and that is alec baldwin this is another accidental shooting and i was actually making this comparison the other day because you know you can look at the media and certainly democrats can look at alec baldwin's shooting and say it was an accident.

Obviously, obviously, the guy did not mean to kill his cinematographer, Helena Hutchins, but he did. It was an accident. Do most people think he should face criminal charges? I'd venture no. They don't think that if you want him to go to jail, you probably paid him for his politics. Right. Like he doesn't belong in jail over this. He screwed up. Number number of people screwed up, but they can't look at Kim Potter and say the same, right? And yes, she had an obligation to understand how to handle a firearm. So did he. So did he. The rules on a movie set are, and the actor knows this, and he had been trained,

according to those around him, you don't point a gun at anybody in a movie set, period. You just don't do it. even though it's so rare that they have an accident like this everyone knows something could happen you know it's happened before with brandon lee um a blank went off and there was still a bullet cartridge in the gun and he was killed anyway the point is the politics blind people's ability to see these cases clearly. So in the Alec Baldwin case, it's very interesting. He is both the producer and the actor who fired the trigger and took this woman's life tragically. But he could be on the hook civilly as a producer or potentially, I guess, I don't know if criminally he could be facing some liability as a producer. Everyone in this case seems to be pointing at the young armorer.

Her name is Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. She's like 24 years old. She's very young to be in charge of guns on a set, but she's done it before and she's the daughter

of like one of the best or the best known armorers in all of Hollywood. So she had good training, one presumes. To me, I see it so interesting. The assistant director who was supposed to make sure that gun didn't have real bullets in it

admits he didn't check the chamber before he handed it to Alec Baldwin. He was the last line of defense. Well, Alec was, but he was second to last. They're all pointing at her. Now, yes, the armor has responsibility for the gun, but they're all pointing at her and she hasn't spoken yet. But her lawyer finally spoke. They went on on the Today Show. And here's where her defense is going. Very interesting. Listen. There was a box of dummy rounds and the box is labeled dummy. Hannah did take from that box, which she, by all accounts, should have been able to rely on, that contains only dummy

rounds. She loaded rounds from that box into the handgun. Only later to find out, there is a, and she had no idea, she inspected the rounds, that there was a live round. Now, we don't know, however, whether that live round came from that box. We're assuming it did. We're assuming somebody put the live round in that box, which if you think about that, the person who put the live round in the box of dummy rounds had to have the purpose of sabotaging this set. You have a round that's supposed to contain only dummy bullets, prop ammunition that have a projectile but are incapable of being fired.

And they resemble a real round. Why would someone do that? Why would someone do that and who in your mind would want to sabotage the set, want to prove a point, want to say that they're disgruntled, they're unhappy. And we know that people had already walked off the set the day before, and they're unhappy. And the reason they were unhappy is they're working 12 to 14-hour days. They were not given hotel rooms in and around the area,

so they had to drive back and forth an hour to Albuquerque and they're unhappy. He used the S word. Your thoughts on that, Arthur? Well, I drive back and forth an hour to work. I mean, that's the big complaint here. And the reaction, I mean, you know, you talk about overreacting. You put a live bullet. I mean, that's what you do. That's not what you do. Maybe you give someone like rotten tuna fish in their sandwich as opposed to good tuna fish. Or I didn't play some sort of practical joke.

You don't put a live round in the middle of a film set where they're going to be firing weapons. I mean, that's absolutely inexcusable. I do know that the sheriff is doing a very thorough investigation. If they find out who put that live round in there, I mean, they should be charged. It's not the easiest charge, but they should be charged immediately.

Mm-hmm. So that's what we learned. Cause she released a statement to John, the Hannah Gutierrez read, which basically says she was dealing with a with a box of rounds that was labeled dummy rounds now yes it's her job to know the difference right there's a way of telling the difference between dummy rounds and live rounds um but to their point to her point or lawyer's point if somebody other than the armorer herself right if she she

was negligent, she put something in there. That's one thing. But if somebody actively put a live round in the box labeled dummies, this case looks a lot different. Right. And that would be absolutely murder. But what's not flying with me is there's no way that the armorer inspected the bullets that she put into the firearm and did not notice that one or more of them was not a dummy round, that one or more of them was a live round. So the only way this gun really could be sabotaged if you follow her theory is if she loaded the dummies, inspected them like her lawyer said she did, loaded the dummies, put the gun down. Somebody sneaks up,

takes the dummy out, puts a live round in and she's nowhere around it. And nobody rechecks the gun, which is also, as far as I'm concerned, negligent. But you can tell a dummy round, just like you can tell a blank. You can tell by looking at the primer is going to be dented in. There's going to be no powder in there. They typically put something that makes noise. So if you inspected like you said you did, you would have known that a live round was among them. So when did the sabotage allegedly occur? That's going to be something that's probably going to be very difficult to prove, if provable at all. So that's what's crazy. Apparently, the only way you tell a difference between a dummy round, which does nothing, there's dummy rounds, which do nothing. They're just there to look good, you know, to make the gun look like a real gun. There's blanks, which actually do

fire and create smoke and are potentially dangerous. You have to be super careful. And then there's live rounds, which is a real bullet, you know, projectile. And the way you tell the difference, I guess, between a dummy round and a live round is you shake it. And I think it's, it jingles. The dummy rounds, if I'm not mistaken, I could have this backwards, but I think it's the dummy round jingles and you hear a little jingle. And so either she heard a jingle on all six of the rounds and loaded them and then somebody later messed with with it or she heard a jingle that wasn't really there. And she loaded a live round, not realizing it. You know, so it was either she was negligent or somebody else was intentionally sabotaging, as the lawyer claimed. And if they can prove sabotage, that takes this case. I mean, that kind of gives you an explanation of why the

sheriff's taking his time. But Megan, if what you just said is accurate, and right before she puts that bullet into the gun and hands it to Alec, she does the shake test. Ostensibly, even if someone did put live rounds in that box, if she's shaking it, that's supposed to be the line of last defense. Oh, wait a minute. It's not making a noise. It's not jingling. It's not jingling. Let me put this one aside and let me use another one. Okay, but wait. Let me challenge you on that.

Let me challenge you on that. If I were her lawyer, I would say, okay, you have to understand, in no world, because they made a point in their statement saying something like this, but in no world would you ever be expecting live round. This is how their statement ends. No one could have anticipated or thought that someone would introduce live rounds into this set, into a box that was labeled dummy rounds. I realize ultimately she's the armorer. She's responsible. But to her point, like it's never happened. Who the hell would put a live round in a dummy box? Obviously, that's going to be their it's never happened. Who the hell would put a live round in a dummy box?

Obviously that's going to be their, that's going to be their argument. And I mean, I've heard a couple of experts on saying it, like it doesn't matter. Like when you take that cartridge and you put it into a weapon as, as the armor, you're getting paid, whether you're 24 or 54,

you're getting paid to make sure that that round is not a live round. And that didn't happen here. And then the assistant director is supposed to be another line of defense to make sure he's and he admits he didn't look at all the rounds before handing the gun to Alec. And then Alec wasn't supposed to point it at an actual person, which he clearly did. So it's like that there's plenty of responsibility to go around. I will say he has he should stop tweeting and making Instagram posts. He should stop posting stupid Halloween photos of himself. But he made seven Instagram posts this week sharing the comment from a costume designer who also worked in the movie who said the story being spun of us being overworked and surrounded by unsafe chaotic conditions is bullshit. She said no one was too tired to do their jobs and the crew were offered hotels but turned them down because

they didn't feel they were fancy enough and he retweeted it saying read this just be quiet right just just be quiet that you're not helping right i mean you guys would be say like pipe down alec okay quickly i gotta ask you about tiger king did you guys watch tiger king during the pandemic the only thing that got me through 100 right it was amazing so exotic so um carol baskin has filed a lawsuit um she is suing netflix over the sequel yay there's going to be a sequel it comes out november 17th and tiger king 2 uses footage of her and she's mad because she says she's suing Netflix in this royal good production saying you shouldn't be showing footage of me. You got footage of me the first time around under fraud fraudulent means. You told me you were doing one long documentary on the abuse of tigers by people like Joe Exotic. Not something that's going to make me look like

i killed off my first husband so she doesn't want footage of her appearing in the second film and she says the original release she signed allowing for footage of her in the first one doesn't say anything about sequels or a series uh no mention of sequel rights whatsoever or derivative works so jonna doesonna, does Carol Baskin have a good case against Netflix? No, she might. And it's all going to be in the fine print, because if in fact, you know, she signed off on one project and they're trying to use her likeness for something that she didn't agree to, you know, show me the money, honey, because that's what the complaint is going to be about. And she actually may have a case, but it's going to come down to what's in the

four corners of whatever she signed way back when, before she became as famous as she is now. Well, I wonder because, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Arthur. No, no, that, well, that's the, Johnna's last word about famous. Like, I don't know, does it become where she, point where she becomes so famous, she's now in the public domain and they don't need, I mean, we don't know what the second piece of the documentary is going to look like and what kind of footage they're using. But now that she's crossed over that line

from being a civilian to a celebrity, where basically under the law, the rules change regarding slander and libel and defamation and all of that. She's definitely a celebrity now. I mean, if you haven't seen Tiger King, you've got to watch it. And apparently, I didn't totally understand this,

but she thought she was cooperating with them. They were going to do this nice piece showing the abuse of tigers by unsavory characters that Joe Exotic might be a very small part of it, but it was going to make her look like a heroine. And she was stunned to watch Tiger King, which does not make Carol look like a heroine, she was stunned to watch tiger king which does not make carol look like a heroine and um you know suggest she might be a murderer and attacks her wildlife sanctuary and

all that and now she wants nothing to do with this part two even apparently the the director had said i don't i don't want it to do like more in the series because I just want it to stand as is. But it was such catnip, pardon the pun, for America. They had to do it. P.S. In sad news, Joe Exotic today tweeted out or he can't tweet. He's in prison. But he released that he has an aggressive, an aggressive cancer.

He said in June he has prostate cancer. And today he says it's aggressive. He wants to get out on compassionate leave. Could be vying for a part three. We'll see. You guys, great to have you here. Great to see the gang back together. Listen, tomorrow, so excited,

Jason Whitlock's going to be here to talk about that insane Colin Kaepernick Netflix series. Yes, that's appointment listening. Download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube.com slash Megyn Kelly. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.