The Megyn Kelly Show - Victor Davis Hanson on Defunding the Police, Woke Warriors, and the State of the Biden Presidency | Ep. 122

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, to talk about the cost of defunding the police, the state of the Biden presidency, Gwen Berry and her Olympic stand, woke warriors in academia and the military (and the military turning against Middle America), how the left used a COVID crisis for their benefit, what's important in America today, the left-right realignment when it comes to institutions, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind 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. Victor Davis Hanson. Need I say more? You're going to love this. If for no other reason, stay tuned for Victor on what's happening with the woke-ification of our military. That's one minute away. Victor, wonderful to have you back. Thank you for having me, Megan. There's so much I want to go over with you. Let's start with the crime, with the crime spree that we're seeing. The latest stats, New

York Times sample of 37 cities for the first three months of this year saw 18% increase in murders year over year. In Philly, as of mid-June, 238 homicides up from 179 at the same point last year. New York City, as of June 6th, 191 homicides up from 162 last year, 687 shootings up from 409 same time last year. They say that's 77 percent increase. L.A., 148 homicides by last week up from 121 the same time last year. And the message from our leaders right now is let me start with Jen Psaki from the Biden administration. She is blaming Republicans for not bailing out states that chose to defund their own police departments. Here's Jen Psaki. Part of his announcement is taking steps to do exactly that. But part of his announcement is

also ensuring there's specific guidance to communities across the country to ensure that they have funding to get more community police around the country, something that was supported by the American Jobs Plan that was supported, that was voted into law by Democrats just a couple of months ago. Some might say that the other party was for defunding the police. I'll let others say that, but that's a piece. No, no sane person would say that. These cities defunded the police. Now they're reaping the results and they're quietly starting to refund the police. We talked about that in our last episode without acknowledging their deadly mistake. And Biden, seeing the problem politically and otherwise, decided to say that they could use some of the covid relief he

quote gave them, you know, the people's money, to refund their police departments. And the Republicans have objected, saying that's not a slush fund to refund state budgets that was supposed to go for COVID relief. And her response is the Republicans are to blame for defunding the cops. Yeah, I think, Megan, they're in full panic mode because this is analogous to the open border. And by that, I mean the optics are terrible. The culpability is clear whose fault it was. And it's not pulling well with their constituencies, the swing suburban voters, the inner city voter. And they can't afford to lose those rubrics. So they're in a, but they're also in a dilemma paradox because once they start to talk about

refunding the police, getting more cops on the beat to stop this, then they bump into their foundation or their base, the AOC people who don't, don't want that. So now they don't know what to do. And I say that not cynically. Remember all summer we heard mayors, for example, Minneapolis, I think it was the mayor of Minneapolis say that, well, you know, the precinct went up in flames. It was just brick and mortar. Property really doesn't matter. And then we had the mayor, do you remember her of Washington, Jenny Durcombe, who said, you know, yeah, they occupied a whole section of downtown, but it's a summer of love. And then we had, I think it was four or five years ago, Mayor Rawlings in Baltimore said, we gave every group space, even those who wanted to burn, we gave them space. Here in California,

we've had in the Fresno area, where I live out in the country, we've had a 350% increase over the first five months of last year in murders. So it's not just these major cities, it's everywhere. And we have a DA of LA County, a DA of San Francisco, Mr. Gascon and Boudin, who don't really believe in deterrence. They don't believe in that age-old human trait that criminals can be very intelligent people. And they make a cost-to-benefit analysis whether or not to commit a crime.

In other words, what are the chances of me gaining money or revenge or psychic thrill versus punishment? And the criminal has come down on the side that throughout the United States now, whether for a variety of reasons, there is no deterrent. And so they're on a crime spree. Sometimes they think it's ideological. 14,000 people arrested last summer for rioting. Almost none of them were arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and put in jail. Or ideological race space, where they feel that people, because of race or poverty, get exemptions from the full force of the law. But we've lost deterrence. And when you lose that, then it's

wide open. We're leaving. It's survival of the fittest, a war of everybody against everybody, so to speak. And New York is a mess. It's why Eric Adams, the former cop, a black man, appears to be winning or have won. It's unclear, but is on track, I guess you could say, to win the mayoral race. One of the only candidates who said, I don't want to defund the cops. That's insane. That's not what we should be doing. And yet the congresswoman from the Bronx, AOC, is confronted with the crime wave happening in New York City, which is trying to rebuild from this COVID madness. It doesn't need a crime spree right now on top of everything else. And her response was,

look, let's not get hysterical. OK, don't don't let the numbers drive a hysteria. Here she is. We are seeing these headlines about percentage increases. Now, I want to say that any amount of harm is unacceptable and too much. But I also want to make sure that this hysteria, you know, that this doesn't drive a hysteria and that we look at these numbers in context so that we can make responsible decisions about what to allocate in that context. Yes, we should make responsible decisions, which she did for herself, Victor. Glenn Greenwald pointed out, she says this after she voted present. People like Ilhan Omar opposed Nancy Pelosi's plan to preserve a $2 billion increase.

She wanted a $2 billion increase in Capitol Police protection that would protect AOC and Ilhan Omar and others. Ilhan Omar said no, to her credit. I mean, for what it's worth, she's consistent in her hatred for the cops. AOC, when it's her skin on the line, says, OK, that I'm in favor of. And by the way, in New York City, she said it right before a 21-year-old tourist was

shot in Times Square, broad daylight, outside the Marriott. If you've ever gone to a theater in New York, the Marriott is a main, main hotel right in the middle of everything. He's walking there with his family doing nothing. The guy gets shot and AOC is telling us not to get hysterical. Yeah, and they always use, she used the word,

we have to think of the context. That's like Kamala Harris saying, we have to think of the root causes. These are cosmic abstract forces. They never define. They never give us any detail about. They never give us any detail about. They never give us any cause or effect how these context or root causes affect because they can't because human nature being what it is deep down inside, they know that they have given messages,

both explicit and implicit to people that if you commit a crime, there will not be consequences. And a lot of people are taking them up on that bargain. And so it's now out of control. And yet their social justice ideology says, well, you know, maybe looting or theft is not really a crime. And I'm not being hysterical here. Do you remember Hannah Nicole Jones during the June riots. Why is everybody getting mad? Looting and theft is not violence. It's not violence. It's crime against property, but it's not really, shouldn't be illegal.

She was, it's redistribution is what she was essentially saying. So they have on one level, they have their elites that are trying to contextualize the crime. On the other level, they have the establishment, what's left of it of the Democratic Party, who understand that these are terrible optics and that their own constituencies will say, you know, at some point life's not sustainable in New York or in Chicago or in Baltimore. But, you know, another final thing, Megan, is that I think people forget how influential cities like New York were under Giuliani and even Bloomberg in that they established a paradigm whether it was stop and frisk or broken windows or stopping the squishy guys washing your window on

traffic that other departments emulated and that was the national brand or model and once that was rejected and stopped and discredited then all of these other police departments followed in step. And so it's been a ripple effect throughout the country. And I don't know, all of these things stop when they start to affect the architects of these ideologies. In other words, when they can no longer avoid the ramifications of their own ideology. I mean, Nancy Pelosi has a walled estate in Napa. Dianne Feinstein just selling her $41 million estate in Lake Tahoe. She's got a big one in Presidio Heights.

I think she moved to Pacific Heights. Mark Zuckerberg's building a 57,000 square foot home in Hawaii with a big wall around it. So they think that they have ways of protecting themselves from the erosion of civilization around them, which is partly due to their own bromides. But eventually it'll catch up to them. Nobody escapes an open border. Nobody escapes inflation. Nobody escapes criminality. Finally affects the elite that kind of winked and nodded and thought it was amusing in the beginning, at least. You know, I certainly hope you're right.

I mean, not that I'm wishing anybody to get hurt. But if you're going to push these policies that hurt people who don't have the walls around them, you should walk a mile in their shoes and see why they're against this. You know, the black community, they don't favor defunding the police at all. You've got out in Oakland, California. You're in California. Out in Oakland, California, there's a black police chief. He's the first black police chief to have been born and raised in Oakland. And they just defunded the cops out there to, I think, the tune of 17 million dollars. And this guy came out. His name is, hold on,

Leron Armstrong. He's angry. He's he's like. You know, the folks here in New York who have been objecting to this, like Eric Adams saying this is insane. Listen to him. I want to address a comment that was made by one of our city leaders during these budget meetings. It was referred to as a bump in a road, a speed bump that we would go through a period where there would be speed bumps, and there would be challenges, and things may not go right, but we would be okay. Well, for me, those speed bumps are 65 lives so far this year. Far too often in these meetings, we are talking about numbers, we are talking about money and cost. I don't know what the cost of a life is, but I know not having resources

makes our city less safe. Saturday night I went out to a scene of a young man that lost his life and a lady yelled out the window, do something about it. Without the resources, it makes it challenging to make Oakland safe. When the yellow tape is gone and when the streets are cleaned up, there is still hurt and pain and tragedy in our community. I hope that we can put politics aside and put public safety first. The city council voted seven to two to defund the police budget by 17 million. They want instead to deploy teams of crisis workers to de-escalate situations instead of armed officers. You tell me, Victor.

I'm thinking about that Micaiah, the girl who the police shot as she almost stabbed the other woman in the heart. Yes. You tell me whether you'd rather see a crisis worker show up, Micaiah Bryant, a crisis worker show up, or a cop with a gun who had one option and managed to stop a murder. Yeah. The police chief is speaking though, Megan. He's admirable, but he's not speaking because suddenly he woke up one moment and decided he was going to change his ideology. Although he may have secretly wanted to, he's doing it because people in that community are telling him privately, life cannot go on as it is. Remember that when I meant that no one escapes the consequences of their ideology, Gavin Newsom, our governor, was walking on the street in Oakland about a week ago, and a homeless person jumped him, despite all the security, and tried to knock

him down and assaulted him. And he was, he was shocked at that. I've spoken in Piedmont in the Hills above Oakland. I can guarantee you that if you drive up and a person asked me to speak at a private home, I didn't get more than three blocks into Piedmont than I was pulled over by a security, private security policeman. And then I was asked where I was going. What's the address, what was the name they called the person. And so those people on the hills above what the chief is talking about are terrified. And they're sort of like people in fifth century Rome AD,

when it was starting to crumble that they had their own security forces. And the governor's not immune. Nobody's immune ultimately when it gets to this point, I don't think. And it's starting to get to this point. And I think that's the Republican, if they're wise, this and an open border will be their two great issues in critical race theory. And they're all connected in one way or another as identity politics and nullification of a law. But I don't see how the Democrats run on any of these issues that they've embraced. There's no public support and they can't renounce them or they can't really blame the Republicans, as we've talked about earlier, because they have so many mayors and governors and activists and

people within their own party that wanted this to happen and said that crime was not really crime. It was an ideological form of oppression, or it was a relative construct, or it was just a manifestation of the values of the wealthy imposed on the poor and the people of color. So they got what they wanted, but now apparently they feel that they don't really want it because it's not a pathway to the retention of power. All we hear about is, you know, how we need to get rid of bail. And of course, they got rid of stop and frisk because they said that was racist. A court found that it was as well. And you wrote in a recent piece, but you said progressives obsess over those things.

But, quote, they have little concern for keeping the streets safe for the young, the elderly, the weak, the inner city poor, and the vulnerable from the attacks of history's archetypical predator, the unbound young male between 15 and 40. I mean, that's all of our focus. All of our focus has been on the alleged criminals and none on the victims. They just don't seem to count. Black Lives Matter doesn't go out there and protest the number of dead in Chicago, thanks to the spiking crime right there or Baltimore or elsewhere. And it's not just them. It's the progressive wing, the very progressive wing of the Democrat Party. No one's covering this. And when it does bubble up, there's no accountability. As I pointed out, Psaki blames the Republicans. They were there where they're

refunding police. They're doing it quietly. And I've heard you talk about this, too, on other circumstances. You know, it came out. Trump didn't order tear gas used on protesters outside of the White House. The military generals who said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Where's their apology? Why haven't they come out and acknowledged that that was B.S. They they fed us on and on it goes where these lies are told that have a real impact whether it's on an election or a community and it's safety and then no accountability i think also it's innate to leftism that is the neo-socialist or marxist i don't want to call people marxist but that is historically kind of a signature of leftism, and that is that you look for cosmic resets, recalibrations, revolutions of entire societies, and then you don't really worry about the effect on little people, partly because you're part of the nomenclature and you can avoid them, get your docker in the Black Sea in the case of the Russians, or the Maoists as well. They had exemptions. But they're not interested in people.

They're interested in the abstraction of humanity. And so you can see it everywhere. You can see when John Kerry says, I have to use my carbon-spewing wife's private jet because I have to win the battle of climate change. Now, you can't. You've got to go onto a subway and live densely packed and give up your car.

Or when he moved his, remember he moved his yacht from Massachusetts to Rhode Island because he didn't want to pay the taxes that he supported increasing. And Al Gore sold his TV station to Al Jazeera, a carbon industry that fuels that to gutter. And then he did it to try to beat the new capital gains increases. So all of these people try to promote these cosmic ideas for us, but they have a parachute for themselves. And they feel that we're collateral damage. So if you try to tell a

progressive, when you guys open the border, you're empowering the cartels, you're getting children to come on a company, you're encouraging criminals to prey on the innocent, and then you're using the very facilities that Barack Obama created, and then you called for four years cages, and then suddenly they were unnamed and no longer cages. But people suffer, and they will suffer. Americans will suffer. Mexicans will suffer. It's simple, but they don't really care because they feel, well, you know what? We don't believe in borders in the abstract.

We want to create, we create the demography to make a more socially just society. And that's, that's what's so frightening about them because they have that humanitarian veneer or that phony, we care about you, but they don't. They don't care about the victims of crime or the innocent or shot or killed or the people who won't set foot in Chicago. So Michelle Obama can give all the neat, snarky lecture she wants about, she worries about her daughters walking out as if they're going to be preyed upon by white supremacists. But the fact of the matter is she does not want to go back to Chicago and live, and I don't blame her, where 700 African-American males were murdered last year, and more this year are going to be murdered than

that number, tragically. And there's going to be a lot of innocent people shot in a crossfire. It's much better to live in Martha's Vineyard or call around in Washington and then give lectures about a racist America in which, you know, she lives around mostly, I hate to say it, wealthy white people. And yet she's suggesting they're the problem, but she's not suggesting they're the problem because if you look at what she does rather than what she says and i could go on and on about lebron james criticizing the policeman you mentioned earlier about the stabbing and his security detail or prominent nba star the other day was robbed in his uh i think it was his hollywood's hills home 150 000 taken from this person very angry about it and i think what happens with these I think these revolutionary movements they reach a peak and then either it's not gradual when they get to that peak it's not gradual either way going up and down finally people either stop it as they did in the French revolution with the Jacobins

and they said you know what we're not going to allow the guillotine to go on and if we're going to if it's going to exist it's going to to exist for you. You're going to line up first and they stop it or they don't stop it. And then the Bolsheviks take over. But we're still talking about minority movements, minority in the sense of 10 or 15 percent of the people support this. But it doesn't really matter if they can convince people they're the majority. And they do because they have control of social media, corporate boardrooms, the mainstream media, professional sports, the campus, K-12. But those are megaphones, but they don't represent the majority of people. Up next, it turns out that they're offering Ibram X. Kendi books for our military men and women to read now.

Critical race theory making its way into our armed services. Why? What does this mean? And is it part of a much larger, more disturbing pattern? Do not miss Victor on that next. You mentioned Oprah. You mentioned LeBron, Michelle Obama. Meghan Markle's another one.

And you had written, quote, They hype charges of white racism because their oppression reminds America that one can become very rich, yet remain a sympathetic victim. And you you wrote about Ibram X. Kendi, a.k.a. Ibram Henry Rogers and Robin DiAngelo, and said that you concluded as follows, quote, America is systematically being conned by those who disguise their hypocrisy, who manipulate the guilt ridden, who have no interest in solving America's most dangerous problems and who get or stay richer by hyping an America in need of massive rebooting and with it their own careerist remedies. Right, so the folks who are the loudest on this tend to be the most successful people and or those who are actively making money

off of these lies they tell about the United States. Yeah, absolutely. I think people forget that Barack Obama did two things. I know that the left is angry at him now and they feel that he didn't get the progressive movement going quite like Joe Biden's surrogates have. But he did two things that we have underappreciated. First, he redefined race in America. Race was essentially African Americans and non-African Americans. And there were historic, you know, slavery, Jim Crow,

and the country was trying to deal with that through the civil rights movement. And there were historic, you know, slavery, Jim Crow, and the country was trying to deal with that through the civil rights movement. And it didn't really involve people that were immigrants from India, or it didn't really involve people who came in from Brazil, or even people from Mexico. It was a uniquely American problem when we were dealing with. But Obama said, no, no, it's diversity. It's not anything other than being white. If you are non-white to the degree anybody can define themselves, then you are not 12% of the population. You're 30% and you're a growing demographic and you have historical claims against endemic racial society. And what he second, to further that aim, he got rid of all notions of class.

So suddenly I noticed in the academic world, there were these fakers that would come with PhDs from the University of Buenos Aires, blonde and blue eyes, but they'd trill their R's and they spoke Spanish and they were victims. And then we would have these people coming from the wealthiest families in the Punjab and they were victims.

And then I would have in the university, a Nigerian professor, he was a victim that came. And then I would know people. I went to high school with the predominantly Mexican American. And by the time, you know, the last 15 years, they were in second, third generation. They didn't speak Spanish. They were upper middle class. Suddenly they were victims. And that was what diversity was. And it got rid of class. So what we have now is this absurdity where Opa is going to be a victim for the rest of her life. She can have a private plane. She can have a $90 million, but she's not white. Therefore she's a victim. There's no class considerations. And who's going to be the bogeyman? He's going to be that white high school dropout on a forklift in Bakersfield because he's white. Nobody cares about his class. He was born, say, in 1965. He got no affirmative action. He got no special consideration. The elite white hate his guts for a variety of reasons, snobbery one of them. And he had no privilege. And yet he's the mythical oppressor. And LeBron

and the Obamas are the mythical victim. So that's a lot of it. The class is really important in America. It always was, not in the revolutionary sense, but it's where we should be trying to help people. Instead, we've substituted race in a very fluid society and we've got a lot of people who claim they're not white. I don't know how we determine that other than the top down, is that it's going to create more racism, more division, more hatred. It's going to create hatred. That guy who's had no advantages in his life whatsoever and is busting his butt every day, he's not only being told you'll get no advantages and you'll get no help getting your kid into college, you'll get nothing. He's being told he's the problem. He's he by virtue of his skin color and his gender, he is the walking problem. And on top of that, he's supposed to sit back and take it and just sort of shrug and accept the anti-white racism that is growing in this country.

And you had a really interesting piece late, not long ago, talking about will the madness last? And you said the foundations of this new woke race agenda are mostly anti-white. You gave a few examples, one from The Nation, a guy named Ellie Mistel, one from a senior editor of The Root, Damon Young, and then a guy at Barnard College. Do you remember those? I have them. Yeah, I do. His name was Mr. Felice. He wrote a novel. He referenced it, where he envisioned gassing whites. In the case of Mr. Mazzell, Ellie, I think his first name was, he said that after the quarantine ended, he had no desire to meet any white people. He wanted to

avoid them entirely. In the case of Damon Root, he blamed all of civilization's wolves, whether it was climate change or race or crime or poverty. It was all due to white people. Then we had that Yale speaker, the psychiatrist the other day, who said she dreamed of shooting with her revolver white people. So it's getting to the next level of what I'm saying. And notice this word they've invented, whiteness. That's very scary because when you use these abstract terms, Hitler had a big problem in Germany, and that was that Western European Jews, unlike Eastern European Jews, were very rarely orthodox. They were almost indistinguishable from the general population. They were very successful. They were the most patriotic Germans. They were iron cross holders from World War I. And yet his hatred, his ideological hatred then focused on him. But the average German said, well, that's my cardiologist.

That guy right there is my loan offer. That's my lawyer. Why would I hate him? So he said they suffer from Jewishness, systematic, systemic Jewishness. And then he started to say they're bloodsuckers, etc. So when you can't point to this white person did this to me, that was prejudice, you come up with this abstract, well, they suffer from whiteness. And once you do that, it's not about people. Again, we're getting back to the abstract, but all of these people expressed sheer hatred that if any other person had said that about a non-white person, they would be ostracized. You know, very quickly, Megan, yeah, go ahead. There's consequences to this. And we're starting to see a backlash because I don't know in history any time that a minority, meaning the diverse minority, has attacked 70% of the population. It doesn't make any sense,

but it does have ramifications. I'll give you one example. The military traditionally relied on the working classes, predominantly white, not all white, but predominantly white, especially south of the Mason-Dixon line in places like upstate New York or southern Ohio or the San Joaquin Valley of California. Okay, now they're woke, and they're going after that very rubric, and the retired generals are coming forward, and they're saying things that are very strange. Stanley McChrystal, I'm not a big fan of Robert E. Lee. I wrote a couple of books where I was very critical, but when Stanley McChrystal says,

oh, suddenly I woke up and I looked at my picture of my Reverend Robert E. Lee and I got so angry that I threw it in the dumpster. Now he belongs where he is in the dump. Then we had David Petraeus and he says, oh, suddenly, oh my gosh, I was at Fort Bragg and Fort Hood, and these are Confederate races. I didn't know this. This was all during the 2019 to 20 woke movement.

And then we have General Hayden, and he says, oh, my God, Trump is a Nazi. The cages on the border remind me of Auschwitz. And he starts tweeting pictures of Auschwitz. And he starts tweeting pictures of Auschwitz. Then we had General McCaffrey that says, oh, wow, Donald Trump canceled the New York Times. He's Mussolini. Well, then you add General Miley, that incoherent rant he had where he got mad. And it was the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen because he says, well, I read Mao and I read Marx, i.e. I read things I do not agree with. So what's the problem? Because these are pernicious texts, but I want to understand how to combat them. So what's wrong with reading Kendi? And I'm thinking, well, what's the logic?

You're saying that you don't like Kendi and you're worried about critical race theories, racism. So that's why you're reading them, just like you read Marx and Mao. No, he's saying, I read things I don't approve of because I want to understand how to combat them. But I'm going to, and then Kendi's an example of that. No, you're reading it because you recommended it and you agree with it. Yes, he's forcing it on our troops. Yeah, he refuted himself. And I thought, so you're the guy, and now your military is going, you and Secretary Austin are going through the ranks, and you're systematically looking for mythical white supremacists, and you're destroying the very constituency, generation after generation after generation, that volunteers and fights for our country. And if you look at the, I just looked at the deaths in Afghanistan and the

deaths in Iraq, and guess who is the most overrepresented rubric? It's white male. It's not the Vietnam mythology. It was true in Vietnam too, despite the mythology. So you're going after this rubric that has died disproportionately in your wars that you didn't win. And you're now going to move them all out of the military. And after all these retired generals have come out and politicized in violation of the code of military justice, it says retired generals are subject to laws that prevent the disparagement of the commanding chief. You want us to support you? And we were the ones, we being middle America,

supported the increases in the budget. And who attacked all of you people all of these years that wanted to cut your budget? It was the left. And when you guys got in trouble, when David Petraeus got in trouble with the law, who supported him? Middle America. When General Hayden got in trouble when David Petraeus got in trouble with the law? Who supported him? Middle America. When General Hayden got in trouble with the left about procedures at Guantanamo, who supported him? Middle America. When James Mattis got in trouble with the Theranos kind of Ponzi scheme collapse, who supported middle America? Who supported General McCaffrey when he was under a cloud during the first Gulf War? Middle America. So what these generals and this machine have done is they basically said all the people who serve in the military and all the

constituencies in America that have always supported increased budgets and a strong military and us, when we got in trouble, they're all suspect of being white supremacists, which begs the question, why are they doing this? And I'm kind of cynical about it. I think that if you start to look at them, there is a new culture of one-star, two-star, three-star, four-star, where they gravitate into the Washington postings and billets in the Pentagon and the National Security on the Hill. And they start to see that if they wanted to be promoted, it's not going to be how many artillery shells in your brigade hit the target or how many missions per hour your

naval pilots took off and completed the mission. That's what's the percentage of gays, women, minorities? What's the what was your attitude about reeducation? What was your reading list? And they make the necessary judgment. But, you know, and then the final thing is they're all on corporate boards. The left used to say no general shall be on a corporate board. This is terrible. They're using their expertise of the Pentagon labyrinth to enrich themselves when they come out of the military. They go to General Dynamics or Northrop or Raytheon and they say to them, here's how you really get a bid.

I know because I was involved in the decision making. And the left went crazy about that. Middle America stuck up for it. Not now. General Austin went in and out of Raytheon. General Mattis went in and out of General Dynamics. All of them do that. And Chief of Naval Operations, they all do that. So what I'm getting at in this kind of windy rant is they have really lost support on the very people in America that were the backbone of their military and the backbone

of their political support for the military. And I'm really afraid of it because I talked to people and they said, you know what, if the left wants to cut the military budget, and they do, maybe they'll cut critical race theory train. Ha ha. I said, well, they won't, but maybe that's what they need. That's what people are saying. And I think they're going to have families that have served for three generations and four that they're not going to volunteer to join the military. And I'm worried about it. It was bad enough when they were indoctrinating college students. Right. But college students tend to be more left leaning and they're experimenting with ideas. And I think once rationality sets in, they tend to make up their own minds one way or the other. And they don't they don't all keep that indoctrination forever.

At least it used to be thus. But now we're seeing in today's day and ages, they're infecting and forget corporate America that that's already spread in sports and so on. But they're infecting kids, young children. They're they're indoctrinating with these divisive messages, our military. And then those things are going to have its abuse towards children and its children. They're indoctrinating with these divisive messages. Our military, I mean, those things are going to have its abuse towards children, and it's endangering the men and women in the military and our country as a result. I mean, so next up on the show is Marcus Luttrell. I'm interviewing him next. And, you know, he's the guy who, he's a Navy SEAL, and he wrote Lone Survivor, and they made a movie about him starring Mark Wahlberg.

And it's all about this horrific experience he had in Afghanistan with his comrades who were all killed. He was the lone survivor. But you watch, I went back and watched the movie recently to prepare for the interview. There's no black, there's no brown, there's no white, there's none of that. It's a brotherhood. Those SEALs, they don't see skin color. They see a brotherhood. They would die for each and every one of the guys who they fight with. They would die for this country every day of the week. Marcus would die for Texas every day of the week. And, and they do, they do. And for this, for the,

for Millie to go in there and try to make the military or their relationship about their melanin is so undermining of what they stand for in the overall messaging and mission. I can't, I feel like he should be fired. It's so irresponsible. I do. I thought he should have been fired when he did. He walked across the lawn with Donald Trump to the burned out St. John's Episcopal Church. I think it was on June 2nd of last year. And then immediately, the left got angry because he said he was empowering a photo op, why people were gassing and tear gassing. And that's when I think General Mattis wrote that letter about using Nazi-like tactics on the part of Trump. And then we learned that the whole thing

was a fraud. They made it all up that the Capitol Police were not working in conjunction with Trump for photo op. They did not use tear gas. And then General Miley said, you do not have a photo op of the president. If I went, which I did, I went back to the last 10 presidents. Every single one has photo ops with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, every one without exception. And I also went back when he said, well, we're not going to use troops for domestic. I counted 14 instances when federal troops were used to quell domestic violence. The most striking was during the Rodney King riots. And I say this because it illustrates your point about this hypocrisy.

Colin Powell was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs. George H.W. Bush wanted to send 5,000 Marines into Los Angeles to stop killing and looting because he thought there'd be a civil war among the Asian communities, especially who were being targeted, their small stores. So he didn't know what to do. So he inquired about the Pentagon. Colin Powell voluntarily suggested,

Megan, he said, when you want those troops, they're ready to go, quote, end of quote. And so Colin Powell then during this whole period where Miley was sort of training for the cameras that he was embarrassed and all of this. They came out, the former joint chiefs. I think there was Richard Myers and him and two others. They said, we're going to fraud. We'll help Joe Biden if he needs to remove Trump. And then Biden gave it, says, I got four people on my side, but what I'm getting at is, here was Miley lecturing the country about politicizing the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and yet he was

doing nothing wrong what all the other Joint Chiefs had done, but he was politicizing it by criticizing the commander-in-chief for something that didn't happen. So he should have been fired right then for that. And he wasn't. And that emboldened him and felt, you know what, if I can get away with that, I can get away with anything. And I think all of them thought that way. Somebody should have said, Article 88 of the Code of Military Justice says that any retired general who is still taking a pension is subject to the same rules that active generals are. And you cannot disparage and enlist the number of people. You can't.

The vice president, the chairman, senators, and the commander in chief. And yet they all went out and said he was a Nazi and he was Mussolini. And it was really something really went wrong there. And nobody said a word. And when you did say, and I wrote a couple of columns about that, I had all these people at where I work would write me and say, have you flipped out? What are you doing? You can't criticize our military. And I thought, wow.

We're over those days. It used to be thus. I mean, when I was on the primetime at Fox to criticize the military, the FBI, the CIA, it really was unthinkable. We had implicit trust in them. There weren't sort of the Glenn Greenwalds and others who were really pushing back against government authority, or maybe there were, but they were just dismissed as one-offs. And you have to trust these institutions. They're patriotic. They protect us. Boy, the mask has come down. I don't know to this moment whether they were always this political

or whether they've just become, but we need to open our eyes that these are political bodies now to your point about what happens with people like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs when they get to Washington. And be honest that they do get wooed into the Georgetown cocktail party circuit and their behavior reflects that. Yeah. And, you know, those are excellent points because the CIA and the FBI, you make a good point, they were also bastions where conservatives didn't dare question them, even though they were always brought up among Congress by the left and said, you, I can't remember. Robert Mueller, former head of the FBI, going under oath saying that the very basis for his investigation, the Steele dossier and the Fusion GPS shenanigans, he says under oath, I don't know anything about the Steele dossier. I don't know anything about GPS. And then Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI, for occasion saying, yes, I lied to federal investigators that I was aware of the leaks and I was one of the people who leaked. And we had Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer who altered a FISA document, forged an email. And we're not even getting into the CIA where John Brennan, on two occasions, under oath, lied and said that the CIA was not monitoring Senate computers and the CIA did not, in their targeted assassinations, had never had collateral damage. I could go into James Clapper.

He said under oath, I gave you the least untruthful answer, meaning I lied about NSA. Not wittingly. Yeah. You remember? So, yeah, if somebody said to me, the CIA is under attack by the left now. They want to cut off their fund for snooping. FBI. I would say go to it.

You know, they've lost my confidence. Right. Mine, too. It's that's been one of the biggest 180s I've experienced as a reporter and just an American over the past 10 to 15 years. But I just want to round back to one thing you you I love all the points about the generals in the military because there's one area in which I'm deeply concerned. I'm more concerned about them than I am about colleges. But I am I'm concerned about education. But but just to round back to the point that you had made about this Barnard College guy, he's an English instructor. His name is Ben Felipe. Yeah.

This guy. Now, keep in mind, there was a, remember the professor who got suspended because he said a foreign word that sounded like the N word? He wasn't saying the N word. He said a Chinese word. He was a professor at USC, business professor. Yes. Okay. So he gets in trouble for that. Right. So that guy gets in trouble for that. Just to pick one example out of the ether. He said nothing wrong. He said a foreign word that happened to sound a little bit like a problematic English word. He gets in trouble. Barnard College English instructor, Ben Philippe, recently wrote a novel. And in this novel, you pointed out in your article called Will the Madness Last? You say he envisioned mass gassing and blowing up of white people. So we actually went back and looked at it to say like, wait, what?

And here's the quote. This guy still has his job. Quote, when this race war hits its crescendo, I'll gather you all in a beautifully decorated room under the pretense of unity. I'll give a speech to civility and all the good times we share. I'll smile as we raise glasses to your good, white health while the detonator blinks under the table, knowing the exits are locked and the air vents filled with gas. Not fired, still on the Barnard College website. no problem. You can talk about gassing white people and you're good. And it spreads when you lower deterrence. Because I think, remember, I think her name was Kelalani.

And she spoke at Yale, a psychiatrist, where she said that whites were pathological liars. And then she said that she had a dream where she dreamed of taking her revolver and shooting white people. The problem with that is that a lot of people, then that becomes institutionalized and there's no consequences for it. And then people down the food chain say, well, that person said that maybe he meant that I should shoot somebody because the left always has told us words matter. Words matter. I heard that for 20 years at the university. Be careful. If you say this word or that word, you should be dismissed because they matter. I think Cornel West wrote an essay, words matter on them. Well, they don't because we know

that those words can be inflammatory, but no, there were no consequences. And there'll be results from that because people then will think that it's been green green lighted it's okay it's institutionalized to say that sort of stuff we had a new york times editorial uh board member i think her name was sarah jeong and she had she had a whole social media remember that about i i treat people like white men, like dogs that urinate on fire hydrants. They're just scum and nobody said a word. And yet they had fired somebody from the board. I think a lesbian woman who had said something about whites or something. And so it's asymmetrical and everybody understands that asymmetry then permeates society. And you can see it with a capital six people.

Nobody approved of that riot. But when you start to reexamine not just the evidence that there were no armed insurrectionists, nobody was using a gun or even possessed one. And then when you start seeing that Officer Sicknick died of natural causes and then the three people, the other four either died of natural causes or Ashley Babbitt was unarmed and shot. And yet the officer was never, no information was ever disseminated about him, which has become a national pastime to within hours, give you that information about anybody who shot while unarmed in a confrontation with police. And then you juxtapose that to the 14,000 that were arrested during those 120 days of rioting that all basically got off. So I think a lot of people, I don't think the left understands that they have now really told half the country,

the law is a political weapon and we're going to selectively prosecute and use it to the full extent and we're going to go after you and all of these things have consequences we talked earlier about pushback remember sanctuary cities the left all of a sudden adopted the neo-confederate idea that a sanctuary city or a state could nullify federal law, and that was okay because of the higher moral aim of helping illegal aliens. Now we're starting to see the right do the same thing. They're saying, you know what? EPA laws, endangered species laws, federal gun registration laws, abortion, we're going to have counties in certain Western states where those federal laws will not apply. And the left is going crazy about it.

But where this ends, I don't know, because it's looking like the 1850s right now. Up next, I'm going to ask Victor about this U.S. Olympic athlete who, in trying out for the U.S. Olympic team, she's a hammer thrower, decided to throw a fit instead about the fact that the national anthem just happened to be playing when she took to the podium. Is this what we're going to get at the Olympics coming up? We'll have Victor's thoughts on it next. But first, we're going to bring you a feature that we have here on the MK show called You Can't Say That or Think That or Be That. Oh, wait, this is America. Today, we have a story of you can't post

that on social media. That was detailed in an incredible and incredibly sad Reason magazine piece by Robbie Suave. Robbie details the story of a liberal composer in Tennessee who supported police reform and the social justice movement after George Floyd. That was until a small group of the activists at a Nashville protest smashed the historic courthouse windows in the city, started fires in the building, and caused damage throughout Nashville. Dismayed by these actions of rioters and so on, this Tennessee composer, Danny Elder, posted on his social media accounts a picture of the words, I'm done, and a post that read, enjoy burning it all down, you well-intentioned blind people. He then deleted his Instagram

account. What happened next? Well, what do you think happened next? He began getting hate mail, a lot of it, because you're not allowed to call out the arsonists and the rioters. That's not okay. One person called him a white supremacist piece of garbage. But it wasn't just comments from random people. You see, GIA Publications, Elder's publisher, and the only major publisher of religious choral music, wrote up an apology for him to publish, reading in part, over the weekend, I made a post on my social media accounts that was insensitive and wrongly worded. I deeply apologize for the anger, offense, and harm that this post caused. While this offense was not intended, it is what was created. But Elder refused. So GIA

disowned him. Quote, the views expressed in composer Danny Elder's incendiary social media post on Sunday evening do not reflect the values of GIA or our employees, they wrote, saying they will never work with him again. Again, don't forget what he posted. I'm done. Enjoy burning it all down, you well-intentioned blind people. That's what he wrote. That's what did not reflect the values of GIA. What are their values? They're pro-arson? What are they saying? They'll never work with a guy who doesn't like criminals again? Not only is his career publishing music still stalled more than a year later, but local choral directors refuse to associate with Danny. And the kicker, Danny Elder says,

as a result of being publicly shunned and exiled, quote, I started listening to voices on the right and the center, especially these classical liberals who have been exiled from the leftist movement. Come on over, Daniel, to the side of reason. Because these days, if you write that setting fire to buildings is counterproductive to your cause, well, you can't say that. Oh, wait, this is America. And now back to Victor Davis Hanson after this. Well, now it's fine to demonize white people and it's fine to demonize America. And that's why you have only people who are on the right, Fox News and so on, reacting at all to this Gwen Berry, who the audience may know that name by now. It's been out for a day or two. But this is a woman who wants to be on the Olympic team and just qualified.

She's a hammer thrower. And Gwen, when in third position, she got the bronze at the trials to get on our Olympic team, is she became angry to quote her. Forgive me. She's pissed, she said, that the national anthem happened to be playing when she got up to receive the bronze medal or was honored in the third position. She started to fidget. She chose to turn her back on the flag. She did not want to face the American flag, the country that she wants to represent. She then held up a black shirt that read activist athlete. And in response to some of the blowback from, you know, corners on the right, she said, I'm the one who's mad. I feel like this was a setup. I wasn't expecting the anthem to be played, she said, and they did it on purpose. I was pissed. It was, quote, real disrespectful.

She thinks she was disrespected by the anthem playing and Jen Psaki on behalf of Joe Biden just defended her. And the U.S. Olympic Committee has specifically allowed this. They are going to allow our athletes to do this kind of thing at the next games. And you know what's very scary is when the French, the French of all people look at this and things that are going on and they're scared about it. And they've stopped all statute toppling, iconoclism. They won't allow it. And Britain is now saying, you know what? You're not going to topple Cecil Rhodes' statue. You're not going to get a Rhodes scholarship and come to Oxford and then destroy the man

who endowed it. We're not going to allow that. And yet they look at the United States, and they used to make fun of us as being sort of redneck. And now they feel, wow, it's completely flipped. It's more revolutionary than we are. And it's unfortunately a superpower. And it's unfortunately entrusted by keeping the world safe.

And it's in chaos. And no country can exist, they know, if the people in it don't believe it's better than the alternative. And she obviously doesn't. It's also, I think, a lot of it's performance art. She thinks that she'll get clicks or she'll get a Nike endorsement or something as a cutting edge person in the way that Colin Kaepernick kind of institutionalized that model, that the more outrageous you were in attacking the country, the more particular

consumer demographic would buy your product. And she's looking for that. It's very narcissistic as all these people are. We don't even know about this. I don't know anything about the first and second winner, the gold and silver person. They seem to be very good athletes. They beat her in the sport. And yet all the attention is for the third place person. So it was really, and then you think that she's ignorant. She doesn't know anything about the history of her country. She's very leisured and affluent like most athletes in this age. And you want to say to her, well, there's all sorts of choices. It's a globalized world now. You can get dual citizenship.

That's an alternative where you can compete for other countries and retain your use as citizenship if you wish. Or you know what? You can leave. There's a lot of places that would. And you might find if you want to have indigenous people or you feel that the black choice is better, you can go to Africa. If you feel that the European socialist model is better, go there. Just go to China if you want to be more in a revolutionary mood and see what happens. sick about this is that when we look around the world, we have to ask ourselves, even our most liberal allies, there's no way in the world that Barack Obama would ever be chancellor of Germany. There's no way that Kamala Harris would be vice president of France.

If you or I or the person in question ever went to China and wanted to be a Chinese citizen, because we don't look Chinese, we'd never be accepted. If you wanted to go to Mexico, you would never be accepted unless you looked like you were Mexican. This is the only multiracial democracy in the world. Brazil, to a certain extent, maybe India, but they don't work nearly as well, where we are supposed to be united by an idea and race is incidental, not essential to who we are. And yet, so she's very blessed to live here. But if she doesn't like the model, there's all sorts of other paradigms. And believe me, they tend to be blood and soil paradigms where people are a particular nationality based on how they look. And what do you make of her, of her, her defense, which is, you know what I, this is a quote, my purpose and my mission is bigger than sports. I'm here to represent those who died due to systemic racism. That's the important partmish. We fought 700,000 people died in the Civil War, including

about 250,000 Union soldiers. She could say, I mean, I've written extensively, the sole battle of the book. There were people in Ohio and Indiana and Michigan in 1860 that had never seen in their entire life a Black person. And when they went down to Atlanta and burned it with General Sherman, and they marched all the way to Savannah, they freed 40,000 people that were black, and they had never seen a black person. So what would motivate somebody in a western state, a small farmer, to leave his farm and volunteer for the Army of the West to go liberate people that he'd never seen before. And he had never seen a slave. He'd never participated in slave in the Western states in

the North or get killed at Antietam or die at Shiloh. So there were people who, you know, 150 years ago plus were dying for what she wanted to envision. And I know that a lot of people who tried to thwart that dream were not what she thinks are right-wing white Republicans. They were people like Woodrow Wilson and the progressive movement. They were people in the Democratic Party that Joe Biden, you know, James O. Easton, that he praised to the sky. So I don't understand that. I don't quite, there were 475,000 Americans died to stop the racist Third Reich from taking over and maintaining all of

Europe. It would have been a nightmare for anybody who wasn't German. And so we fought that war. And this was the only country that there was a chance because of the documents, the Declaration, and the Constitution. The Declaration, all men are created equal. The Constitution not one time mentions race. Only one time does it say three-fifths of people who are serfs or slaves. This is what's really damning about the misinterpretation of that element in the Constitution, that the northern states had just freed themselves from Britain, as did the southern states, the 13 colonies. And yet they were faced with an immediate civil war because the north would not allow slavery and the south would not allow its abolition. And then the south said, for every slave that we will not give freedom and we treat as a subhuman, we still want one representative vote in the census, one credit, so we can get more House representatives. And the abolitionists said, no, we don't want to give you any.

And so there was a compromise. We'll give you three-fifths if that's what it costs not to have a civil war. So from the very beginning, there was such an opposition to racism and for the times and slavery. It's a very complex story for her just to dumb it down and say that only people who fought racism. And you know, the final thing, and I'll stop ranting, Megan, is that there's a lot of things that are important in life history. gender, sex is important. Poverty is important. Courage is important. Science is important. And race is important. Race is not the most important thing. Until the George Floyd incident, Black unemployment was the lowest it had ever been in the United

States. We had had a Black president, and we were shortly going to have a black vice president. We'd had a black secretary of states. We have two people running, I think, for lieutenant governor in South Carolina, or maybe it was North Carolina, the bastion of the old Confederacy, and they were both Republican and Democratic candidate were black. So we had kind of transcended, we were transcending race in a way no other country had really done that. And yet to go back and say it was all a failure and we're all culpable. And I think a lot of us have to speak out. I taught 21 years at a very middle-class, working-class college, Cal State Fresno as a classics professor. And I had mostly minority students, Southeast Asian, but mostly Mexican-Americans, some illegal. But I also had the remnants of

the Oklahoma diaspora. These were poor, okie kids. I shouldn't say okie, but they were second generation or third. And their parents came to Bakersfield or Tulare, the Merle Haggard group, Grapes of Wrath. And this is the story I had for the 21 years. You're brilliant. You're just as brilliant, but there's no way in hell that I'm going to get you in to Stanford Law School or Harvard Medical School or the Yale Classics Department. It's just not going to happen. You're a white male. Forget it. And I tried. I got about 55 people in that 21-year period in, and they they were either without exception, women or minorities. And I think that was great. But my point is this myth that suddenly all this white privilege was everywhere. It's not true. The lower working class whites had no white privilege. I can testify to that. That's right. And yet you're not allowed to protest on their behalf. I mean, the U.S. Olympic Committee is not saying you can take the podium and hold up a fist to

on behalf of the men in Appalachia. And what they've said, by the way, just in case people are not aware, because I was not prior to this moment, the committee is going to permit forms of demonstration, including holding up a fist, kneeling during the anthem and wearing hats or face masks with phrases such as or groups that have historically been underrepresented, minoritized, or marginalized in their respective societal context. However, hate symbols will not be allowed, which of course, that'll be determined to be a MAGA hat, right? Now, there's a bit of a conflict because the International Olympic Committee is saying athlete protests are not allowed.

So we'll see what happens. But the American, the U.S. Olympic Committee says saying athlete protests are not allowed. So we'll see what happens. But the American, the U.S. Olympic Committee says, go for it. And I just wonder whether Americans are going to sit and watch that or if they will tune out in record numbers like they did. Just to give you one example from The Bachelor, right? The Bachelor got woke. They fired poor Chris Harrison for saying absolutely nothing. And they premiered to less than a they lost over a million viewers versus their last season premier i think that's happening don't you think that's happening everywhere nba is down professional baseball is down nfl is down i think everybody's grammy's down tony's ground down oscars down ceremonies i think people are retreating to kind of a monastery of their

mind they say and i talk to them all the time i feel i'm part of them i just don't want to go see a late you know a recent movie in the theater i know what to expect i don't watch any of the network uh television news i don't think i've watched network news in years i don't watch any professional sports anymore i think a lot of people just feel that they want a monastery. They're just tired of it. COVID epidemic and the quarantine and the self-induced recession and what followed after George Floyd as a crisis that should never be left alone or should never go to waste. Gavin Newsom said that. He said, we're going to emerge from the lockdown with a more progressive capitalism. Hillary said, we're going to emerge with better health care. And I think the great reset, Klaus Schwab and the Davos crowd said,

we're going to completely remake the globalized system after this COVID. So there was a sense that we kind of went collectively crazy in fear of COVID. And we've never had a national quarantine. So nobody got to see face-to-face people, their expressions, their nuances. It was either Zoom or they were isolated in their apartment. And then we had this sudden, wonderful economy that just was voluntarily shut down. We never had that. We've never had 120 days of rioting, never. And we've never had $2 billion of rioting. And we never had 102 million people mail in their ballot or vote early, 63% of the electorate, in a radical recalibration of our very system of election.

And then we had the pushback. And I don't think that those, that was a perfect storm. We might have survived one of them without going crazy. But all of them together kind of made us prone to all of the stuff that you and I have been talking about. And my only hope, and this is another windy way of why I'm optimistic a little bit, I think that's why the left does not want to let people get back out and have to earn a living and not stay home and get $51,000. They don't want people to be independent, to see, to smell, to look, to hear other people and see they're not the monsters that Elie Moselle said that when he was locked up, he didn't want to see white people.

And once you get that intercourse going again, Jane Fonda said that. She said, thank God for COVID or we would have never got rid of Trump. And I think that's why they're scared. And I think that's why if we get the economy going and we get people out and COVID's a memory and we start to reexamine how we're changing illegally the voting laws and the state legislation, I think there'll be a big correction in the midterms, a big correction, analogous to 2010 or even greater. Well, I hope you're right. The generic ballot does, because I love divided government in general, but the generic ballot right now, the forecasts are suggesting that Democrats are going to gain seats in both the Senate and the House. Let's see. We don't know. But in the meantime, you have a media that is just completely complicit. I know you've described them as just mere toadies. They do absolutely nothing to hold the Biden administration to account. You know, we had Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader on the show last week. He just met with Biden. He told us Biden told him, and I quote, I inherited a border mess and I fixed

it. He fixed it. The press will do nothing to hold him to account for that. And I know you've been pointing out they they sort of downplay anything that he does. They won't acknowledge what appears to be some sort of, you know, mental decline, obviously. Never mind. Fact check the guy there. The latest this week was this weird, creepy whisper video. I was taken to doing like weird whispers. I have to play it for our audience because it's kind of entertaining as well. We're going to need the chance to laugh where we can, but what's going on with this? Listen. I got them $1.9 trillion relief so far. They're going to be getting checks in the mail that are consequential. I wrote the bill on the environment. Pay them more this is an employee's employee's bargaining chip now what's happening victor

what's what's happening yeah well it wasn't that much different that was what was tragic about it wasn't that much different than the regular decibel level he talks anyway anyway. So he has that raspy voice. But I think in the media that doesn't cover these things or him tripping or having a brain freeze or interrupting at the G7, the chairman saying you didn't call on our person from South Africa, which he just called on or blowing up at the press. They don't believe their media anymore. They're not journalists. Ben Rhodes, remember, said these people know nothing and that you can create an echo chamber and they'll just reverberate what you want. He had disdain for the very people that he catered to. But in their own words, they don't see themselves as journalists. I think it was Jim Rutenberg when Trump was elected

said, I don't think standard journalism applies anymore, that we have to be advocates. And Jorge Ramos said, you know, I'm not going to be a disinterested journalist because these issues are too important. Christiane Amanpour said the same thing about climate change. He's such an existential threat, this administration. We cannot be neutral. So they see themselves as fused with the progressive party. And that's why they don't have any two things have happened from that one they have no reputation or respect not from people like you and me that was lost a long time ago but from their own people the politicians don't

respect them that they're they're covering because they feel that their serfs are employees. And then the second thing that's happened, every politician, we keep getting back this idea of deterrence. They have to tell somewhat, they have to speak somewhat truthfully because they're afraid they'll get a gotcha question. When you have none of that, self-examination, cross-examination, or no hostility from the press, then they get sloppy and they lie and more so than usual. And I think that's what happened to Nancy Pelosi and all of them and Biden and especially Kamala Harris. They think they can say or do anything and they're getting increasingly ridiculous. And they don't have the two things they've had so far to keep our attention away from the border or the race problem or the crime problem or this inflation specter that's looming ahead is Donald Trump and there's a racist under every bed.

And I don't think that's going to be there very much longer. I don't think they silenced Trump. So he's not communicating. It's probably in his own interest. And so he's not a player in our everyday lives that they need to get the ratings if you're CNN or get everybody angry. And then the race thing is becoming boring. When she did that on the podium, a lot of people just said, this is so boring. Been there, done that. So what? Kaepernick, Kaepernick, Kaepernick. This was old, old hat. And so I think a lot of people in the radical racial movement are afraid that their message

is getting boring. Well, that's my one comfort. When I see stories like the one out of Brandeis University that, you know, they have a feature on the show that we call You Can't Say That. It's about the growing list of things that are supposedly banned or problematic. And, you know, when that they came out this week and basically gave this long list of the things that you can't say anymore. One of the things was the word picnic, because it allegedly reminds some people of lynchings. But somebody was pointing out online, lynching is still fine. You can say the word lynching, but you can't say the word picnic among many other things because it's

supposedly back in the day, people would picnic and watch lynchings. That was the suggestion. And so you can't say the word. Well, it's a, I think it's a French word that, you know, from pick pick K or something that, but I don't think it has anything to do with any, I don't understand that. Let me give you a couple of other examples that they, that they gave. Um, you cannot, this is their list. Violent language. The oppressive language that you should dump is killing it. Possible alternative.

Great job. Oppressive language you should get rid of is trigger warning. This has connections to guns for many people. They say instead possible alternative content note. Oppressive language, rule of thumb, allegedly comes from an old British law allowing men to beat their wives with sticks, so no wider than their thumb. Sure, that's what people think of now when you say rule of thumb. A possible alternative, general rule. Then they want you to get rid of you guys and ladies and gentlemen. Instead, they want you to use y'all, folks, friends,

loved ones, or people. You can no longer say policemen or congressmen because they're gender specific. And here's a great one, Victor. They think it's oppressive to say everything going on right now. They don't want you to say that. They say being vague about important issues risks miscommunication and can also avoid accountability. Instead, try using language like police brutality, protests, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19. Name what you are referring to. And here's my favorite. You're no longer allowed to say spirit animal, because in some cultural and spiritual traditions, spirit animals refer to an animal spirit that helps guide and or protect a person through a journey.

Equating this with an animal you like strips the term of its significance. Well, too bad, Brandeis. Too bad. We're going to say what we want. But it functions in the sense that one or two board professors with tenure and lifetime job security or get together with a couple of graduate students and they'll say, maybe there's eight of them. Let's think of words that they're bored, obviously, and they have little accountability or they'd be teaching or they'd be writing something valuable. So they say, let's think up some words. And then they contact the left-wing journalism student who's working for a left-wing online outlet. And then we're supposed to think that there's this grassroots movement throughout the United States on the one hand. That's exactly it, by the way, their defense was, oh, this was

student generated. Yes, it's not. It's artificially concocted, but that's how they operate. They're supposed to, we're supposed to think there's all these people, the postman that came to the door, the guy who rented the car, the Uber driver, they're all on this and they're not. And that's what these revolutionary movements do throughout history. They feign this idea that they have popular support, but it's usually from intellectuals and people who are disaffected, students, unemployed students. And then, you know, what's really sad about it is, so here we are in the 233rd year of the republic. We're facing $30 trillion of debt. I don't know how we're ever going to pay it back. Gasoline here is $4.50 a gallon.

We're looking at maybe 7% to 9% annual inflation, which we haven't really seen since Jimmy Carter. And these are, and we have China ascendant after the Wuhan, it may well have engineered a virus that leaked and then never let a crisis go to left ways, attitude of infected the world, destroyed a lot of the economy of the United States, not to mention the Iran deal. And we're worried about these people. So I guess all these existential problems that are facing us that we collectively should be worried about, these people are trying to convince us that they're important, and they're hothouse plants, faculty lounges, neuroses, psychodramas are suddenly things of national import. And I'm not criticizing you and I for talking about them

because they have a point because they are well in, if we don't talk to them and waste our time to condemn them, then they become institutionalized and add to the problem of the frame of the fabric of society. That's what's been happening. Exactly. And I can't think of any, maybe you can't, I can't think of any nation in history that when a large number of the citizenry felt that it was flawed at the beginning, flawed during its ascendance and flawed in the presence and will be flawed in the future, that it survived because history is pretty unkind. If you don't think you're somewhat exceptional or at least better than the alternative, that it survived because history is pretty unkind. If you don't think you're somewhat exceptional,

or at least better than the alternative, then why should you continue to exist? What do they have to be placed on is what I'm getting at, I guess. I'm struggling to think what statues are they going to put up when they destroy Christopher Columbus or Martin Luther King or Cervantes and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco? The words that you mentioned, you all, these are all slang words. You all is just a term I hear on campus

from basically pampered white kids that want to sound like they resonate with the black Southern culture. And so they say you all, but they never say that at home. They never say that with home. They never say that with friends. They just say it as performance art. So I don't know what they want to replace all the things they want to destroy with. They want a statue of Patrice Cullors,

the BLM founder with the four homes. I didn't realize she was under investigation. That was actually news to me. I mean, I knew she, somebody was calling for one, but she's, she's in a whole host of trouble. I just want to point out the juxtaposition. Right. The point I'm trying to make is that there's no moral authority of the people who are trying to lecture us about our speech, about our behavior, about our internal thoughts that we may or may not have access to. Right. It's like our it's our latent racism. They're trying to attack our latent sexism that they want to get us for. These people have no moral authority. Over at Brandeis, you can't say killing it, but over at Barnard College, it's fine to say I'm going to gasp white people. There's no universal standard. What you're saying is, Megan, is so they're condemning culture. So then we're going to look at you guys. So let's look at you guys in the

academic world. You've created a system that indebted students to $1.7 trillion in aggregate student debt, which postpones marriage, child raising, home ownership. You did that. Your test scores have gone down every year, infants' test scores, to the point we're not even going to require them anymore. Graduates who leave have the least amount of factual knowledge we've ever had. And you've gone from about 58 to 60 percent of tenured professors, tenure-track professors as well, as your new hires.

Now you're the most exploitive institution in the country. You've got about 20 percent tenure-track or tenure professor, but 80 percent of your labor is exploited contingency labor, part-time lecture that you don't really give full salary or equal equitable pay. And we're supposed to listen to you? Don't leave me now. We got more coming up in 60 seconds. I know you pointed out that Joe Biden's the list of racist or problematic race related things that he has said goes on and on, not to mention his weird, creepy problem with young girls. I mean, he's going to lecture the rest of us on what is moral behavior and don't even get me started on. How about Hunter? Right. I don't do yellow.

And look at his own niece said, Hunter, I don't want to have any Asian American models meeting you. And he said, I don't do yellow. Both of them were racist. And he's lecturing us. And yet he's got racist right in his home nest. And he's the one that called a journalist a junkie. And he's a black journalist. He's the other one that said that, you know, you ain't black. It's almost, it's like it's projection. You know what I mean? That people who really feel racist empathy, excuse me, racist ideas or racist feelings, then they project that onto other people as a way to square the circle that they can't come out and confess if they're racist. But Joe Biden has always had this problem. He called Barack Obama the first presidential candidate who was clean and articulate. And I thought, wow, Barbara Jordan ran for president. She was the most articulate person I've ever heard. And to Joe Biden, it's just all Black people, or put you

all back in chains. And I went back and played that YouTube that he said about Romney in 2012. He was speaking to a group of black professionals, very accomplished people as if they were children that could be easily enslaved because they were so weak or subservient. It was really insulting. And then you get into the corn pop stories about black kids looking at the white hairs on his leg, just sick. And yet nobody says a word. I've got to use this opportunity to play one of the best soundbites we've played on the show in recent weeks, which is his creepy little exchange with a young girl who I think was a prepubescent. We had her age. Was she 11, you guys? My team will check. And what he said to

her at a White House event, she was up there on the dais with him. Listen. I love those barrettes in her hair, man. I tell you what. Look at her. She looks like she's 19 years old sitting there like a little lady with her legs crossed. I think she was, I think, nine. Nine or 11.

Prepubescent. Look at her. She looks like she could be 19. How is it? How does he get away with this? I just, I don't know. I had, I as a father of two daughters, when I would hear, if I had heard anything like that from a relative or a friend, that would be sort of the end of things. You just say to yourself, you tell your daughters, if I'm not around or your mother's not around under under no circumstances do you have anything to do with that person,

just for their own safety. That's right. And this is even scarier, Megan, because he's been warned. That was a campaign issue, that he breathed, that he squeezed, that he talked, that he invaded the private space of so many women, among them underage women, teenagers, that you would think that he would be extra careful. And yet nobody says anything. And yet we're supposed to believe that Tara Reid is an absolute liar and absolutely couldn't be

telling the truth about him. I don't know. I want to end with this. One more point, because we're on the topic of creepy men who get a pass from the left. And I heard you talk a little bit about Jeffrey Toobin. And I I'm just flabbergasted by the whole thing. And I but I thought you made a very interesting point on your podcast recently, which is you actually don't believe him that it was unintentional because he said he thought he had muted. Originally, he said, I thought I had muted the video before I masturbated in front of all my colleagues at the New Yorker while we were rehearsing for the election coverage. And then he changed it when he just came back for his CNN rehab tour to, oh, I thought the call was over. No, that's not what he said at the time. He said he thought he had muted the camera. That was his initial and therefore, you know, closer in time defense. You think it

may have actually been intentional all along? In the sense that if somebody wants to have auto sexual gratification there and they live in a house, there's all sorts of places to have privacy, right? And he's not going to be on Zoom for five hours. So you're telling me that a middle-aged man's sexual drive is such that he has to gratify himself only when he's on Zoom in a multi-room home? I don't believe that. I believe that if he wants to do such a thing, he can find a place of privacy that nobody will see him. And two, that if he has such a huge sexual appetite and hormonal drive, that he can go an hour without satisfying himself. So I think what he thought, and I think there's a lot of psychology research to back that up, is that exhibitionists really do

believe psychologically that women, if you're heterosexual in his case, that there are women who just really secretly, secretly, secretly, deep, deep, deep down inside, and this is very sick of a person to think this, that they might find him attractive and they might feel thankful that he allowed them to share his exhibition. And that's pretty much the psychological profile of most exhibitionists. When they're caught and they confess or they're examined, they say things like that. Well, I thought that there was no problem with that. I thought that they liked me or that I'm sexy or I'm important. Because there's no other rational explanation. You can't find

privacy to do that. You can't find privacy to do that. You can't wait. You have to wait only in a public forum, which is what Zoom really is. It's a de facto public forum. And then I think he also doesn't think there's any deterrence, Megan. I think he thought, you know what, I'm left wing. I've said some pretty controversial things in the past. Nobody's ever said anything about it. I've had some personal problems that were pretty embarrassing. Nobody said a word about them. I am very important. I'm a Harvard guy. I'm at the top of my game. There's no way in the world anybody will ever question what I do. And he had no deterrence at all. And he was kind of right in a way. He suffered for a few months, but they took him back.

And, you know, he was the object of maybe one or two jokes on late night TV. I'm not even sure of that. I assume maybe one. So he didn't pay much of a price for that. But, yeah, I don't believe that at all, that he was just got a thought in his head. I'm kind of sexual right now, and I'm going to masturbate. Oh, by the way, I forgot that I'm on Zoom. And my God, I forgot that people were hearing.

It's just too it's too. It makes so much sense. When I heard you say it, I was like, it was an option I hadn't even considered, to be honest. I mean, just the whole thing is like he did what? Why? And he thought it was an excuse to say he thought he had muted the camera what sane human would say oh that's i thought it was okay because i had muted and now it's actually coming together because you're right exhibitionists exhibitionists are narcissists that that's a classical symptom of

an exhibition they are narcissists and they have this delusional view of themselves. It is so self-important that anybody would be fortunate to see them in their most intimate expression. That's what they think. And they're so deluded, but that's, that's one of the pathologies of that syndrome. And so I don't think anybody believed him actually what he said. And I think basically the left said, he's a very useful tool in the revolution. He comes on and gives a patina or veneer of being a sophisticated legal analyst, but he's a total hack and partisan. And during the Kavanaugh hearings, he said some pretty outrageous things and kind of helped our ratings and almost got Kavanaugh. So he's useful. So we

don't want to throw him completely out. I think they regret Al Franken. They lost him, you know, and they think, you know, we're not going to do that anymore. It's crazy that we have to think about that when we see Jeffrey Toobin. Not that I watch CNN, but those viewers over there, look, I guess you get what you deserve. Nobody's forcing you to sign on to CNN. And you want to watch Chris Cuomo, who's tweeting out pictures of his ridiculous muscles every night. Okay. Or Andrew Cuomo. He's tweeting out pictures of his ridiculous muscles every night. OK, great.

Andrew Cuomo. He escaped too. Right. Of course. Well, that's I mean, look at CNN, right? Don Lemon's been credibly accused by another man of fondling himself. Don Lemon was in a bar and then rubbing his hands all over some strange man's stranger in a bar. And there's a bartender who witnessed the whole thing and says he can back it up. That's Don. Then there's Chris Cuomo, who worked with his brother, Andrew Cuomo, to

summarily discredit the 11 plus accusers that have come out against his brother, Andrew Cuomo. No problem. And now this, Jeffrey Toobin, who actually gets caught on camera masturbating in front of a bunch of professionals. No problem. And it makes me wonder what's going on with Jeff Zucker. walked out and wiggled their hands in the air. It was completely fabrication of Michael Brown. Or the reporters that were fired for saying, you know, that Anthony Scaramucci was working with the Russians or Donald Trump Jr. knew in advance of a Russian meeting and Trump, all of that stuff. I don't know how it even still exists. Well, it's the reason why, and this is the most charitable number I could offer the media's way, but there was a study done by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

at Oxford recently. They surveyed 46 countries, 92,000 news consumers involved in the survey, U.S. ranked dead last when it comes to media trust. We're behind Poland, the Philippines, Peru, Finland, just FYI, leads at 65% trust their media there. It's dead. I mean, the journalism experiment in America is over. We can start over, which I think we're sort of trying to in the digital world and the audio world and elsewhere. But there's really very few left to trust. And I do think I've said this before, but I think it's about personal relationships and just finding people you think are honest brokers, because these companies as organizations very clearly have an agenda. And it may or may not be yours, but it's not truth that they're delivering. I agree. Maybe podcasts like we're doing today and blogging and websites that maybe even Mark Zuckerberg can't control them all.

But there are people. It's kind of encouraging that this monopolization of the news and the distortion of the news or erosion of the news and the coverage has created sort of a grassroots counter response, prairie fire. There are outlets. They can't control everybody. So there are people who can get the word out. And let's hope that this is a model for the other industries that are controlled by the left. I hope so. I think it's going to happen in the universities too.

Yeah, I think it's happening in the universities. I hope you're right. In sports? I don't know. Maybe not in sports proper, but certainly I love to see a place like Outkick with Clay Travis do so well. They've just been acquired by Fox. But we need more and more alternatives for people who, even if you're not right wing, even if you're just sane and you recognize that the nuttiness of what's happening, there have to be alternative ways to get your

information, get your sports, get your media, get your entertainment. Even Republicans like to watch movies. They just don't want to be lectured to about what bad people they are every time they go. Bill Maher has been doing great work on that. Victor, it is such a pleasure. I love talking to you. Thank you so much for being here again. Thank you for having me again, Megan. I appreciate it. Victor Davis Hanson is brilliant, isn't he? He's so good. I mean, I assume you know who he is, but at this point, he's got an amazing podcast. He's a brilliant writer. He's at the Hoover Institute, institution, I should say, the Martin and Evie Anderson Senior Fellow. I feel like he needs no introduction at this point.

But anyway, as we wrap the show, I was thinking I'll just note it for those of you who haven't been paying attention. Do not miss our next show. As I mentioned with Victor, we've got Marcus Luttrell coming on along with his brother. You know, did you know he has an identical twin brother? They're coming on together. And he is the lone survivor, as you know, and we just thought going into this July 4th weekend might be good to be reminded of brotherhood, sisterhood, patriotism? What makes a Navy SEAL? What makes an American? What are the values that we share

that bring us together as a nation? What were the values that made him willing to die for his country when he got caught on that Afghanistan hill years ago with his brothers who were all killed, leaving him, quote, the lone survivor? We'll get into it next episode.

Don't miss it. Go ahead and subscribe now. Download. Give me a rating, leaving him, quote, the lone survivor. We'll get into it next episode. Don't miss it. Go ahead and subscribe now. Download. Give me a rating. Five stars, please. And a review. What'd you think of Victor? What'd you think of the Jeffrey Toobin theory?

And what'd you think of that bit on our woke military? I thought that was on fire. Okay, love to hear from you. And we'll talk on Friday. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures. you