The Megyn Kelly Show - Why America is Worth Celebrating, Woke Misery, and PTSD, with Noah Rothman, Jason Kander, and Caroline Messer | Ep. 350

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Megyn Kelly begins the show describing her July 4th celebration, and gives reasons why America is worth celebrating. Then Megyn is joined by Noah Rothman, author of "The Rise of the New Puritans," to talk about the progressive woke left's misery, the sanctimony in our culture today, the puritanical backlash in America, the left eating its own in our new culture, the narcissism of being easily offended, emotional blackmail, and more. Then Jason Kander, author of "Invisible Storm," joins the show to talk about PTSD and the military, the trauma we all experience, being honest about mental injuries, Kander's political ambitions, how the veteran experience can be improved, the parade shooting in Illinois, how we can realistically help stop mass shootings, and more. Finally, Dr. Caroline Messer, founder of Well by Messer, discusses her new practice and a new way to treat weight loss, the endocrinology approach to the issue, 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 are back after taking yesterday off to celebrate the 4th of July. And boy, did we ever. I had seen somebody tweeting out about some California school board member like, there's nothing to celebrate. America sucks. And I tweeted out last week, wait until she sees what we're doing. We went a different way. Completely disagree that there's nothing to celebrate.

This isn't about this holiday, gas prices or inflation or whether you support the current leader in the White House. This is about whether you support and love and believe in America as as an idea, as an institution, as an experiment. And I absolutely still do. And I think most Americans still do. You know, I come to New Jersey, the New Jersey shore for the summers. And it's an amazing thing to do because the politics here are much more mixed than they are back at home. Certainly when I lived in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In fact, I tweeted out a photo of one of the store owners down here who had when I was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I used to tweet out the

photos from this bookstore where they had AOC as a superhero and Dr. Fauci as a superhero and Michelle Obama. You certainly never see a Melania Trump there or any Republican female leader as a superhero, never mind male leader. But down here, there was a New Jersey storefront that had signs about how this administration is crushing, crushing small business owners. They can't hire any staff. And they had a picture of like a gas pump going into somebody's bottom, blaming the administration was funny. And it's like, it's fun to be exposed to a different mix of politics. You can't just subject yourself to far left or far right, or your mind gets

corrupted. Anyway, we celebrated theth and we got into it. We hired this group, which I highly recommend and love. I paid full price that they're not paying me for this endorsement. They're the New York Bells and they're an acapella group. I had them sing a couple of Christmases ago for a party that I had and brought them here to New Jersey to sing some patriotic songs from Yankee Doodle Dandy to the national anthem. Here's just a bit of how they sounded. Oh, love it, right? They all said the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone sang.

The Bells did their patriotic numbers. And then as we did last year, it's a new tradition that we just started. A lot of families do it. We read the Declaration of Independence with our friends, with our friends and our neighbors down here who my husband's been coming down here since he was a little boy. So we've known them forever. And everyone pitched in. I mean, honestly, everybody was like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Only this year I had a little twist. I decided we'd go authentic on the costumes and the wigs. And a couple of people had specific roles. Like my little Thatcher, he was Benjamin Franklin.

It was amazing. And then our friends each read a portion of the Declaration. I wrote like a little intro before we got to the Declaration. And Thatcher, my eight-year-old, kind of tossed to the abridged reading. I don't show his face, so he's kind of blocked out there. But you'll hear him on his intro to the festivities take a listen it took him 17 days and today men and women from the colonies are here to present you in a rich form the decoration of independence and then we were off to the races

here's just a sampling the last reader you will hear is my husband, Doug. And we hold these truths to be self-evident. It is their right. It is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Solemnly publish and declare that these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved. Well, such a stirring document. It's such a good reminder of what we stand for, what's important to us, why we began this experiment all those years ago. It was great to get all the friends together and everybody wore the costumes without complaint and the wigs and the whole thing. And it was hot and

it was amazing. And yeah, my wig went big. I mean, I went really big. Go big or go home when you do these kinds of things. Right. And it just made me think about why I love this country. I do believe it's still the land of opportunity. I do still believe in the American dream. Here's some pictures of my other my kids faces blurred. My son was a red coat. My oldest son was a red coat because we needed somebody to support the king. And I was thinking about, you know, my my pop up who came over from Italy. I was born in 1907. They came in steerage. They had absolutely no money. And here I am, his granddaughter, you know, a national news anchor and obviously have been very successful in a lot of ways in my life because of what? Because of America. Because this is a place where if you work hard,

and I didn't have any particularly amazing education with all due respect to Syracuse University and Albany Law School. They were great. They're fine. But I mean, I didn't have connections. I didn't go to Harvard. I didn't have I wasn't in skull and bones at Yale. I didn't have any of those elbow rubbing opportunities, none. But I worked hard. And this is a country where you can still do that and get ahead. And, you know, mine is a minuscule example of that. You know, there were some writings you should read Barry Weiss's Common Sense this weekend. There was somebody who immigrated from North Korea, escaped from North Korea to South Korea, and was writing about how what an honor it was when she read the Constitution, how excited she got reading the U.S. Constitution and how when she became a U.S. citizen, the first

thing she did was go out for a steak because she remembered somebody in North Korea who had been killed. He'd been starving to death and he killed and ate a cow, part of a cow that belonged to the government over there and get shot and killed for that. So she had a steak the night she was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. Think about that, right? People are still coming to America from all over the globe. They're not leaving. Virtually nobody leaves America, right? This is still the land of opportunity. It's not perfect. It's got a checkered past, but it's also got a glorious past. And it's also got, it's been the center of some of the greatest invention, innovation, progress seen on earth. So it is an honor to be American. And it's worth celebrating and stopping and

getting together with your friends and reading the Declaration and reminding yourself what we're doing here and why we were so honored, so privileged to be born in this, still the greatest of countries on this earth. Joining me now, somebody who stands up for America all the time and is not oblivious to its warts nor to its beauty. And that's Noah Rothman, my friend. He's the associate editor of Commentary, an online and monthly opinion magazine focused on religion, politics, and cultural issues. And he's out today with an amazing new book. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for a gift. Whoever reads it will thank you. It's called The Rise of the New Puritans. Fight back against progressives war on fun.

Noah, such an honor to have you here. It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me and that generous introduction. I really appreciate it. Oh, my God. Well, I read this book. Noah asked me to read it in advance and I read it and I couldn't put it down. I was laughing out loud. I was reading long portions out loud to Doug. He was coming over. He'd come back into the room like, what? No. Yes. Yes. And I'd read him more and more and more. And the thing I loved about it was it's a hardcore look at wokeism and it compares it to the Puritans, but it does it with humor. It does it without depressing you. It's got an optimistic message about how this fight ends because we've been through it before and there are historical examples so that we can know how it ends. And it's it's unsparing of the left in their weird woke ism. But it also is able to find humor in their absurdity. And that's actually your gift as a commentator, too. So let's start with it. Let's start there before we get to where we're going to get to news of the day and the darkness that happened in Illinois and all that. But I really do want to start with

the book because it's it's special in its approach to this issue. There's been a lot of books on wokeism, none like this. So so let's just spend a second on the old Puritans before we get to the new Puritans, because a lot of people don't really understand who they were. Yeah. So there. And thank you again. I have to really appreciate, you know, the time and energy you put into reading this book and all the notes you gave me. They were so special and I really sincerely appreciated it. So yeah, there are direct tethers between the progressivism that we see today and progressivism as it evolved out of the ashes of the Puritan experiment. We sort of forget that Puritanism was mainline Protestantism and what mainline Protestantism became in America in the Victorian period in the 19th century dovetails with a lot of what the Puritans believed and what they strove to achieve in their very homogenized, very small, rather short-lived experiment in the colonies.

The Puritans themselves would be probably shocked to see the extent to which they've had such a long legacy because many of the most prominent voices of that period lived to see the demise of the Puritan experiment. But this is progressivism as it evolved in the 19th century was a meliorist philosophy. It believed that the world can be made better if not perfected through labor. And you have an obligation, therefore, if that opportunity exists, you have an obligation, a moral duty to dwell on the inequalities that plague our existence, on the misery shared by perhaps few, maybe not even in your immediate surroundings, but who you know exist, and therefore you have to devote yourself to their cause. This is a righteous moral outlook. It also lends itself to making you crazy and making you miserable and making

everybody else around you miserable. Indeed, that is mission and purpose. It looks to us like fanaticism, but it is to them a demonstration of their seriousness and an exercise of personal agency in ways that you otherwise don't have the opportunity to do so. And once you have that decoder ring, you see trends and signs of this across the progressive spectrum, the extent to which that they impose political values and ideas and great historic weight on things like burritos, things you wouldn't think have any real political implications, but they're interrogated and tortured in ways that make them profoundly significant. And then everything them profoundly significant.

And then everything becomes profoundly significant to a degree that doesn't make any sense and also drives you completely insane. So, yes, I did try to approach this topic with a degree of levity and irreverence because there is no answer to the crushing weight of sanctimony that we are experiencing now that involves more sanctimony. Right. Good point. The mockery is the answer. That's so concludes Noah. And we'll get to, you know, how, how, how did that work last time around? How did we get rid of the old Puritans? You know, the whole Salem witch trials, and that was a lesson learned, but we're sort of in our own modern day version of it right now. But you do make the point that, that they, they really want you to be miserable. And you quote make the point that that they they really want you to be miserable. And you quote H.L. Mencken famously defining Puritanism as, quote, the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. And you go through the greatest thing about the

book is that, you know, we've seen public figures, of course, targeted for their non-woke views or their non-woke statements. But the the greatest genius of this book is the industries that you walk us through. Poetry, food, you mentioned, a museum. I mean, the most, knitting, the most innocuous, seemingly benign industries that have brought down their own from within just for not the joy of it, the misery of it. They enjoy that. And there was a line about the Poetry Foundation where you write, you might not assume

that the rarefied ranks of professional poetry are also a hotbed of racial hatred, but that's how they see poetry. It's how they see food. So which like when you look back at the examples you examined, which one stands out to you is among the most absurd. reference to a store, an online clothing chain that had engaged in a terrible crime against people of Chinese descent because they had a t-shirt that was supposed to be, you know, Chinese characters. But in fact, it was Japanese characters. Now, a charitable interpretation of this, no, not charitable, a reasonable interpretation of this, no, not charitable, a reasonable interpretation of this is to chalk it up to a mistake. Because it's just, there's no other way you would do this but ignorance. But at least one individual, and there are probably more that I didn't profile or that cut, but one individual

latched onto this as though a great historical crime had been committed. That this was not just, not ignorance, this was an insult. It was deliberate, direct, and had bearings, you know, had a philosophical foundation to it that is immoral and deeply rooted. That's just childish. When you've been inadvertently offended, it's just juvenile to cling to that as though it was a deliberate assault on your character and your motives and your your beliefs um but that's the sort of childish reflect reaction that we we see a lot of these industries i talk about that where you see this kind of puritanical backlash this wokeism a lot of it is the prosecution of professional jealousies under the guise of this animating philosophy.

But the animating philosophy is very important and valuable to help you understand what we're looking at. And the July 4th stuff that you're talking about, the sort of reaction to July 4th is everything is so horrible. There's nothing worth celebrating. We need to dwell on the horrors of this country, not celebrate it as though we don't do that 364 days a year. There's a puritanical backlash against holidays that reaches back to the 1600s, 1700s, not because of the holidays themselves per se, but because of the immoral behaviors they encourage. Christmas, for example, lewd, lascivious behavior, heavy eating, hard drinking, it's the sort of stuff that Puritans discouraged, not because the holiday was particularly offensive,

but how you behaved was something that we could not abide. You'll see this now in particularly American holidays. Americans' conception of Halloween and Thanksgiving are on the chopping block very frequently, but we've seen this now in 4th of July, which didn't make it into the book, unfortunately. But there's the city of Orlando put out the statement last week, the quote, a lot of people probably don't want to celebrate our nation right now. And we can't blame them. When there's so much division, hate and unrest, why on earth would you want to have a party celebrating any of it? They subsequently apologized for this.

But it gives you an idea of how steeped they are in this idea, this ritualistic idea about how everything needs to be tempered with some sort of miserable moral, this plotting didactism. And there's this one piece in Yahoo News that illustrates this, where it talks about people who refuse to celebrate the 4th of July just because the news is so terrible, as though you can't have the perspective to look past the news cycle. But they tell you, no, there's other ways you can get around this. You don't have to just completely abstain from celebrating July 4th. You can go to your neighbor's house as long as you're prepared to spend your time lecturing them about the horrors of our country and its hideous presence or engaging in rituals like, quote, donating or learning more about indigenous causes and, quote, naming the land on which you're celebrating.

These sort of ritualistic behaviors lend a sort of gravity and agency to you that you otherwise don't have. But it also marks you as a very unserious person insofar as you are unable to compartmentalize any of this stuff. You can't compartmentalize the historic failures of the American experiment and its profound successes, its grand capacity to enable human flourishing. And you can't compartmentalize the idea that you're celebrating while other people are not happy or miserable or just deprived or engaged in it,

you know, suffer from probation. That's the sort of thing you should be ever presently aware of to a degree that it consumes you. And that's enough to drive you mad and drop out, frankly, or completely radicalized. There's really one of two things that can happen to you if you succumb to this sort of lifestyle choices, that you become really depressed with the system that isn't responsive enough to your urgent moral dilemma, or you result to radicalize and attack the foundations of these wholly immoral institutions. That's dangerous. It's threatening. But I do see the only way out of that as living a joyful life, as dismissing and mocking the people

who are engaged in the self-destructive, psychologically self-destructive behavior toward no other end than self-satisfaction. So that's what I hope to accomplish with this book. In addition to that Orlando tweet, Orlando used to be a red city in a red state. And then Barack Obama won in 2008. And the city went blue along along with the nation at that time. And it stayed Democrat ever since. I think some people might be surprised that such a tweet

would come out of Orlando, Florida. But, you know, Florida is still considered a purple state, though it leaves red. So, yeah, Orlando apologized. And then some leftists start saying, why are you apologizing? You were right the first time. But that they weren't the only ones. NPR and their their host, Steve Inskeep, for 30 years has been reading the Declaration of Independence on Independence Day for 30 years. This year, they decided they were going to examine what equity meant. What did they mean by like, was what was their equity? Was it equitable? My God, like for one, as you point out for one day, can we just celebrate the founders

and this great country that we're so lucky to be a part of? No, no, we cannot. We have to go back to where's the true equality, not just equality, but equity and forget the founders. They were all a bunch of white guys who had slaves. It's like even yesterday when I was putting together the abridged version of the declaration, I'm thinking, you know, in another world, people would say, oh, you've got to include something about the Native Americans. And you got to include the fact that, you know, we had slavery and the fact that women didn't have equal rights and couldn't even vote until the 1900s. And so I'm like, I'm not doing any of that. Not today. Not today. Today, we're actually just going to celebrate Thomas Jefferson and little Ben Franklin played by my

son. And we're going to talk about the British. That's what this day is about. But people can't do it right. They got NPR switching in Orlando switching. And, you know, the school board out in California doesn't want us to talk. The list goes on. And there's an element of condescension to all of this. You see that particularly in comedy. Well, because we have to contextualize the Declaration of Independence for you, as though you're not familiar with the conditions in which it was conceived. But they don't really trust you to have the right thoughts. You have to be properly educated. We see this most, um, I guess, uh, illustratively in comedy because when, when in my section of the book on comedy, um, there's a part on an, uh, popular view that was, uh, put

into an essay form by this, uh, comedy critic named seth simons who identifies the locus of the alt right in a form of stand-up that was popular in the early 2000s called cringe humor now if you were to give a clinical description of that kind of humor it's very dark finds uh you know humor value in crimes and racism and sexism and unspeakable misogyny, all this stuff that you would otherwise say, you have to be a pretty bad person to tell that joke, much less enjoy it. But this is the essence of dark humor anywhere and everywhere. The course of human history is to find levity in the darkest parts of the human experience and laugh your way up the gallows steps. So he identifies this in the alt-right in the early 2000s,

and that evolved subsequently into the riots at the Capitol building in January 6th. This black swan event somehow materializes out of a phenomenon that is not only not new, it's utterly unremarkable. But he doesn't think that the stand-ups that are talking about these horrible conditions are going to act out the antisocial behaviors.

They're lampooning on stage, but you might. They don't know about you, and they're afraid of you, and they think you have to be properly educated as a result, or maybe even constrained in your capacity to act out these beliefs and these values. So there is an element, I think it's probably apparent throughout the book, but it's most apparent to me there that these people perceive themselves to be just a little bit better, a little bit more noble, certainly more capable of impulse control than you are. And so, yeah, I think that probably plays a significant part in this conception of yourself as more righteous than now. Oh gosh, this played out. I've got, I have got to play this clip. This was on social media over the weekend. This happened in Oregon. And honestly, it's kind of what you talk about in the book, how the woke were trying to outwoke the other woke. It happened on the street. I don't know

what happened that led to this moment. I'm told by social media the the man was dressed, was driving aggressively and cut off the woman who you're going to see in this clip. And the woman we enter the dispute thanks to somebody's iPhone camera when the woman's maintaining she was cut off and the man is maintaining that she said to him, the man is a man of color. I don't know his ethnic background, but he's saying, you told you white lady told me to go back to where I came from. And she's kind of trying to deny she meant it the way he thinks. And it can use this to me is the woke trying to outwoke the woke. The guy's like, I got a card to play. She's like, I'm as woke as they come.

And I'm not abandoning one inch of my wokeness. But I've got to handle this because I don't want to be Oregon Karen. So watch this. She told me to go back to where I came from. That's because of your driving habit. Do you see that? Because we don't drive as good as Oregon. We're fucking kind and we make space.

Okay. And as someone who's from here as well, I'm so tired of people driving like you just did. Admit you're fucking wrong and that it's not a nice thing. Admit that you're driving like an asshole. Admit you're white. Admit you have a colonizer mindset. It is not about race. You're taking out your pain and oppression on me right now.

If you want anything to change. If you want. Shut up. It's not on me to change. It's on you and your colonizer mindset so get the fuck out of my face you white lady you white lady i'm as angry as you are get out of my face because i'm done with this conversation then you'd be walking away fucking colonizer there's work to be done here, so you would walk away now.

Everyone needs to hear how angry you are, but it's not about this. It's not about what just happened. Get out of my face, you fucking... I'm trying to leave. Why can't you just walk? You're in my space! You're in my space. You got in my space, you asshole. Get out! You're breathing my air! You fucking colonizer! Get out of my face. And don't give me those white tears and a fake white deal and a fake condescending look. You don't know the pain of my people. So get out. Get out. I'm going to stand here with you until you walk away. Because what you did was

wrong. And then you made it about race. It's no he's native american he's like i it looks like maybe he cut her off and he's like oh shit but i've got a card to play so back off and she and he read her exactly right he did have a card that would shut her up but she's like no no no the video camera is rolling i'm woke too i i you are angry you have every right to your anger but it's really about something else it's definitely just for the but it's really about something else. It's definitely just for the record, it's not about me. I mean, that's kind of a terrifying situation. And that, again, this is not an uncommon experience to have some sort of altercation with people on the road. But now it's imbued with, again, this sort of significance because

people are using this language that is popular in the academy that has the capacity to capture institutions. They know it's powerful and they're using this language to seek personal advantage. That's as human as it gets. We've created this incentive structure to engage in this sort of behavior where nothing is mundane anymore. Everything has this roots in America's original sin. We literally that that traffic incident, you could trace that back to the Continental Congress drafting of the Constitution. All of these things have culminated in this experience right here on this roadway. That's madness. It provided that gentleman with personal advantage in a way that anybody who's a self-interested animal would not deny, would have to appeal to that tool, because the authority figures have lent so much gravity and weight to this set of linguistic signifiers, for lack of a better word, that opened doors for them and that shut down opposition to them.

They've created their own beds and they're now forced to lay in it. And right now, as you said earlier, they're all sort of training fire on each other, in part because these are soft targets. That gives you the appearance of efficacy. It doesn't do you no good to go after a hard target that doesn't move for you. And then you have to back off three days later and go find another target. So right now, the people most likely to genuflect before this movement are, are its focus. But there will be a day that comes when the, the Borg is successful. They've fully assimilated their own side and they train their fire on harder targets.

Hopefully we can interrupt this perverse cycle before that, that materializes. But yeah, what a, what a weird video. And you know what it reminded me of the during mid-COVID, there was this one video that went viral where these two older white women wearing masks, they get on an elevator and there's a black gentleman who's not wearing his mask on that elevator and they physically assault him.

They attack him physically and he defends himself. He's like, what are you doing? He doesn't hit back but he's trying to defend himself. And then they start yelling Black Lives Matter at him. Black Lives Matter, Black Lives, just as a mantra. It's so bizarre. Sure, that works.

I mean, that is a well-known exception to the need to wear masks and stay inside during a quarantine. That was proven, of course, during the riots of 2020. It's an exemption for battery laws, apparently. You can get away with it as long as you have the right, you know, noble intentions. But that's what's so great about the book is that Noah, he spends a lot of time

showing how the woke eat their own in all these industries, like all these restaurants that tweeted out, like, we stand with the black people and their struggle. And then they have a former employee who's like, F you and all of your appropriation. And before you know it, the restaurant's closed.

You know, it's like you take that route at your own peril. Absolutely. That is when you show your soft underbelly. And anybody who wants to prosecute their professional jealousies knows how to use these words as a weapon can effectively oust you from your profession. As long as your profession is beholden to these ideas, these nostrums, as so many increasingly are, if you don't have an institution at your back that is willing to withstand that kind of fire and storm, you're in trouble. It's like what we just saw at the Washington Post with Felicia Sanmez, you know, and her

blowtorch on everybody. And then the one other guy trying to defend himself by saying, I'm Hispanic and I'm gay. And I was like, hey, you can't get me. I'm here. I'm home. I'm home. I'm home. I'm on home base. I'm safe. So you do have to laugh. And that's the core of Noah's book. Keep laughing and don't engage and certainly don't bend the knee because that won't save you. And so how does it end? Like, how does it actually end? He's looked at that, too. And we'll pick it up there right after this quick break. More with Noah Rothman.

My team just told me during the break that Dave Rubin, a friend of mine, he's in trouble right now on Twitter because he, quote, dead named Elliot Page, who we used to know as Ellen Page, the actress. And now she's become Elliot Page and had this surgery and all that, you know, has been in the papers. And Jordan Peterson got booted off of Twitter for writing a tweet about, quote, Ellen Page. And now Dave Rubin, who he's good friends with Jordan. He went on tour with him a number of times and so on. He tweeted out, Rubin, the insanity continues at Twitter. At Jordan Peterson has been suspended for this tweet about,

and then Rubin says about Ellen Page. He just told me he will never delete the page or delete the tweet, paging Elon Musk. So now Dave Rubin is suspended from Twitter for simply using the name Ellen Page. It's like as if anybody like most people don't even know who Elliot Page is. Dave Rubin's trying to tell you what this story is about, right? Like most people know Ellen Page as a very famous actress who starred in Juno and other films. It's really crossing over to the point of absolute absurdity.

Yeah, that's very strange because Ellen Page has a body of work that Elliot Page does not. And if you're referring to that body of work, when this individual was that individual, look, I'm all in favor of not being rude, not being a jerk. That's a deliberate exercise. It takes actual energy to not be rude and offensive gratuitously for its own sake. Nevertheless, that's not an effort to be rude or gratuitous. That's just a statement of the historical record. But the historical record is the problem here, right? It's not Jordan Peterson. It's not David Rubin. It's the fact that we have a set of conditions that we don't actually like or appreciate. There's one story in the book that

this reminds me of. It was a school in New York that was trying to get rid of all the new offensive language, including the words mom and dad. Why is that offensive language, you might ask? Well, at some point in the indefinite future, somebody who identified as mom or dad may no longer identify as mom or dad. So it's best now to avoid offending them in the future. If that's true, if this person exists, he or she is likely to be so obsessed with themselves, so narcissistic, so easily offended that they are determined to be offended and will be offended by something, your efforts notwithstanding. Your energies would be more productively dedicated to almost any other pursuit than trying not to offend this person who will be offended regardless of what you do.

And that lends you gravity, that lends you power, that sense of offense that you're taking, lends you a sense of self-importance. And now we have this incentive structure that forces you to take those ideas seriously. Your identity confers to you weight and gravity of your opinions that your experience otherwise does not. We used to lend experience that kind of authority. Now we lend it in gravity.

So why wouldn't people who have no authority otherwise, limited authority, limited agency, reach and stretch for this thing that, with a turnkey, gives you all this power, gives you all this authority and gravitas, and especially young children? tq identity among young people who have never taken a same-sex partner in their lives because it gives them an authority that is conferred to them by adults that they otherwise would have to labor for their entire lives to achieve um we're setting these conditions creating these incentives uh in ways that are not very healthy or productive oh you know this reminds me we talked about this when ilya shapiro was you know wrongly harassed at y at Yale. I'm sorry, Georgetown. And he wound up declining to take his still offered position there because it was basically like misstep once and you're out. But since you didn't work here when you sent your poorly worded tweet about the next Supreme Court justice pick will let you take your job. All right. So when they were having the meltdown on campus about Ilya's tweet, which he apologized for and took down and tried to explain immediately in a way that was very understandable, they were having

their meltdown. And somebody who was part of the I think it was the Black Law Students Association on Georgetown not only wanted a safe room to cry, wanted, quote, reparations in the form of food for classes they had missed due to their upset. But this one woman was saying, and I want a reminder to everyone not to criticize any of us in the Black Law Student Association, because, you know, this is real pain and real trauma. And we have a history that means you can't criticize us for raising these objections. And there are people who will buy into that and will self-silence just so as not to be shamed

as opposed to saying, I'm sorry, but whatever happened before you got to this earth or I got to this earth is not on me. I will not be silencing my viewpoints because of a history that happened here 200 years ago. And even if you've had trauma in your own life, I will not be silencing my viewpoint because of that either, because we've all had it.

We've all had it for different reasons. My viewpoint is what it is. You can reject it, you can accept it, but you cannot silence me. Yeah, there's no immunity from criticism. And indeed, you're going to be cerebrally infirmed if you don't, if you can't accept and encounter criticism. And this is, this is the essence of one of the reasons why I think conservatives have an easier time making intellectually

credible arguments, particularly when it comes to law and politics, as we saw in the Dobbs dissent, for example, which was a series of emotions that served in place of a rationale for the Supreme Court's dissenting against the Supreme Court's decision. But conservatives encounter this more often, I think, than the left does. And they have no recourse when they're criticized. They can't simply say, well, you can't criticize me because I have a particular identity. It's generally not something that conservatives believe. And that allows them to sharpen their arguments. You know, you encounter resistance and you have to, you know, convince otherwise skeptical audiences of the legitimacy of your views or position. That's the opposite of what we're seeing demanded by these campus students. I can't speak to the,

the school had this idea around Shapiro's really inartfully worded tweet. We should say that at the outset. While I don't think his sentiment was supposed to be offensive, the tweet could be interpreted as being offensive. So the school said, well, this could result in students not taking his classes and therefore being deprived of an educational experience. So we have to consider that. Now, the school backed off that rationale because they reinstated him and he subsequently resigned to his credit. But if that's if that was the only rationale, then that's off the table now.

Then these students don't have a leg to stand on. So what do they do? They appeal to emotion, emotional blackmail, moral manipulation. And it shouldn't work because these are a child's tools, but we're giving them, we're lending them such undue gravity that why wouldn't they appeal to them? Yeah. I want to talk about Dobbs and some of the ongoing meltdown in response to it. And one second, there's Samantha B's out with a lunatic statement and people do listen to her on the left. But before I before I get that, I want to get to. So how does it end? Is, you know, the the original Puritans that ended Puritanism in its original form, not without some really dark chapters

coming its way. So where do you think we are in the new Puritan movement, which is how you refer to the wokesters, and how does it end? I'm of multiple minds on this one, so I do see many parallels to the Puritan experience. And you referenced the Salem witch trials. They don't really make an appearance in my book until the very last chapter, because this was the final nail in the coffin of the Puritan movement, which had been in decline for quite a few months prior, or years rather, prior to that experience. It was, as one author, I quote, called the fever death throes of the Puritan experiment, which a series of contributing factors had led to this inchoate moral panic. But that was among the last straw in part because it was known rather early on at the time, but certainly immediately thereafter that a great injustice had been done. The use of spectral

evidence to indict potential witches and individuals who were possessed by the devil. No one believed that demonic possession was impossible. Everyone believed in witches, including those who were prosecuted for this sort of thing at the time. They did, however, know that when these individuals were killed, hung or pressed to death, some of them met their ends really nobly and in good form and with Christian love for their persecutors.

And that really did turn the crowd. It certainly turned Increase Mather, who subsequently abandoned his belief in spectral evidence and took seriously the people who said they were being persecuted or giving confessions under duress. And you do, obviously, you see examples of this all the time in the modern puritanical movement that executes the modern day equivalent of witch hunts on a semi-regular basis, which is angering a much larger host. You know, I'm not talking about liberals.

I'm talking about Democrats, not even talking about all progressives. There's a very small band of puritanically inclined progressive that punches way above their weight. And you're most likely to encounter them when they've done something to a lot more people than them, that a lot more people are disinclined to like. A much larger host is being aggravated by this thing. And so if there's one example of how this ends, I cite the phrase banned in Boston to illustrate it. So in late Victorian period, Puritanism had evolved into something even more restrictive,

more stuffy than what the real Puritans genuinely believed. Comstock laws, anti-obscenity laws, the heart of mainline Protestantism in Boston went to war, created these moral institutions for policing lasciviousness in literature. And the Comstock laws around that developed. And so they went to war with poems. They bottlerized plays. They banned books.

Songs weren't allowed to be played on the radio. And it was very successful well into the 20th century. But a backlash began to develop. And when that backlash developed, it found commercialism as the stake that drove the heart through the moral movement. So initially, banned in Boston was a taboo, demonstrated that this was something simply too titillating for you to consume. And eventually, it became a powerful advertisement for that sort of thing. Authors and publishers tried to have their books banned in Boston so that they could increase sales everywhere else. Modern equivalent being banned on Facebook because and this is documented that conservative authors in particular find that the very touchy censors at online institutions, major institutions in Silicon Valley get very nervous about the prospect of a conservative author most of the time, particularly when they're tied to Donald Trump, ban the book, get the book banned, not on Amazon, not on Facebook, what have you. And then commercial sales go through the roof

for that book. All of a sudden, it's got this powerful advertisement for it that no PR campaign would otherwise muster. So I'm kind of hoping somebody tries to cancel my book. Everybody, everybody wins in that situation. Enemies, my enemies draw blood, fans of it get, you know, confirm the worst suspicions about their average. I get money like everybody's happy about this sort of thing. We want you to buy it. But we want somebody to ban it. Okay, I have just a short time left, but I got to get Sam Bee in here because she, among others, is upset with Alito and the Supreme Court and the solution proposed is classic. Here she is. I can't describe how painful it is to be here now in a place where the Supreme Court has the power

to erase 50 years of constitutional law. Make no mistake, this is not where it ends. Conservatives will not rest until they have come for all of our rights. And we have to raise hell in our cities, in Washington, in every restaurant Justice Alito eats at for the rest of his life. Because if Republicans have made our lives hell, it's time to return the favor. Great. Harass the man when he's with his family in the restaurant. That's going to change everything. That's a great plan. Very smart.

And definitely is very normal norm, norm, norms from the people who love the norms. I mean, not just morally bankrupt, but completely wrong. This was not a constitutional right. It's not. There's no logic to it in the dissent demonstrating that it's a constitutional right. The legal arguments and the moral arguments do need to be separated out because there is this burst of moral enthusiasm among Republicans to try to test the parameters of their new environments, which has cultural warring at its heart, cultural revanchism to a degree,

I would say. But the legal arguments are very different. And they're very well supported, even by people who supported Roe as a policy matter, couldn't find a justification for it as a constitutional matter. And what she's prescribing here is the road to irrelevance, because that's not how normal people behave. Normal people do not consume politics for entertainment. They are not obsessed with their political adversaries 24 hours of the day. They won't drop what they're doing to engage in protesting other people eating a meal. That's radicalism. And it's really off-putting radicalism.

It's the sort of thing that will result in you being stigmatized, sneered at, and dismissed. And good, more power to them. If that's what they're going to try to do to themselves, there's just going to be a lot of pain along the road to irrelevance. There certainly is. Okay, so I wanted to, hold on a second. I just want to get, somebody send this to me. Stand by, because I want to read, before I let you go, because we're short on time, but

I want to read it to the audience. Here it is. The blurb that I wrote for Noah's book is I mean every word of it. I'm going to leave you with this. The best book I've read on the absurdity and futility of the woke movement. Rothman brilliantly and methodically exposes the vapidity of these new Puritans with two nuts to be true examples of those they target from poets, knitters and bird watchers to chefs and home decorators. No one is safe in these modern day witch trials until we realize the secret to dismantling them. Mockery. Absolutely brilliant. Utterly engrossing. You will laugh out loud and shout these stories from the rooftops as Rothman reminds us that sanctimonious cults of misery have historically short shelf lives. It is an optimistic read about the nonsense that we've been dealing with for far too long

now. Couldn't recommend it more. Absolutely loved it. Noah, good luck with that. And please come back anytime. Love, love the podcast over on commentaryary with my pals Podoris and Christine and Abe. So recommend that too and all the best with it.

I can't thank you enough, Megan. This has been wonderful. I appreciate it. Good. To be continued. Don't forget, the book is called The Rise of the New Puritans. And don't forget, while I'm reminding you of things that you might love, you can find The Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at

noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel. If you want to see some of those pictures of my big Fourth of July party and the big hair, go to youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. If you prefer an audio podcast, you can follow and download the show on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts there, especially on Apple. If you leave a review, I will read it. I read them all. I've read the most recent postings as well. And I always appreciate hearing from you. And there you can nose around through our more than 350 shows now getting up there. That's good. Coming up on our two year anniversary on on the podcast. Joining me now, former Army Captain, and you may know him. He kind of sort of ran for president. Those are his words. Jason Kander. Jason is now the president of

National Expansion at Veterans Community Project and the host of the very popular Majority 54 podcast. He has a new book out today called Invisible Storm, a soldier's memoir of politics and PTSD. And he is here to discuss his journey navigating post-traumatic stress disorder. Jason, it's so nice to talk to you again. Yeah, thanks for having me, Megan. I appreciate it. It's good to talk to you again, too. Been looking forward to this. So I remember we talked when I was on NBC in 2018. And that was when I think everybody thought you were running for mayor and your political career was doing great. And I knew you were a veteran, that you had served in Afghanistan and all that.

We talked a bit about it. But what I didn't realize shortly thereafter is that you, instead of pursuing your political aspirations, kind of dropped out and that you, we should have explored that PTSD a lot more because it was really, you were racked with it. And so much so that it would change the future course of what you would do. And it would lead to this book, which people are describing as the book that any anyone suffering from PTSD needs to read in the book that you needed to read when you were going through it as well. So first, let me say thank you. Thank you for for serving our country. Thank you for being so honest about this. As somebody whose mom spent her life working at the Albany Veterans Hospital in mental health, she ran the behavioral health unit. I really appreciate your honesty on this because I know

from her just the stories that of the guys in particular who come in. And this is like a tough breed of man, you know, who is not used to asking for help or admitting what they perceive as weakness. So it takes a lot even to walk into the VA and do that. Nevermind to write a whole book about it. Okay. So let me just start with, cause it's so, to me, it's so sad and kind of sweet about how you've just been, you won't allow yourself your service. You know, you won't allow yourself any discussion of trauma around your service because you didn't fire a weapon and you weren't in combat and it was only one tour. And in your mind, that just doesn't count. You're out. You're out of the we call it destitution

derby on Fox News when the politicians at the DNC or the RNC would get up there and talk about their life history. It was always so sad and all their obstacles. You're out of the destitution derby in your own mind because you didn't see the kind of combat that Marcus Luttrell saw. I mean, which is just such an unforgiving, unkind standard to yourself. Take us back to when those thoughts first started to manifest post your service when you're back stateside. Well, I actually, I actually, I feel like I've got to go back further than that because it's where I learned to think that way. Right. So when you go into the, into the military, one of the very first things that you're taught, like when you're coming off the bus at basic, is that what you're doing is

no big deal. Lots of people have done this. Most of them have done it better than you. And everybody has it tougher than you. And the thing is, I'm saying that now, and it kind of sounds as if I'm being critical of it, but I'm not because it's a super necessary form of brainwashing. I mean, for me to go over to Afghanistan and to keep going into rooms as an intelligence officer where there was a reasonable chance that I could be kidnapped and killed and to do it over and over again, knowing that my life was in danger, I have to believe that this doesn't count as combat. I have to believe that if it's not a scene out of Black Hawk Down, that it's not combat, and therefore I have no right to be bothered by it, so that I can

keep going in and getting the information that my country needs as an intelligence officer. But then you come home, and the problem is nobody really flips that switch off, right? So nobody sits you down and says, actually, that was some crazy stuff. Or like in my case, nobody sat me down and said, actually, after you left, we stopped doing it that way because other people, like it was too difficult for people or two of the guys that you served with, you know, they had the same problems in the years that followed that you had, but none of you three talked to each other about it. So, you know, that's really why I wrote the book. But to your question of what was it I was thinking initially, well, I was thinking that I had it on really good authority that what I did was no big deal.

And so as a result, when I was having night terrors, when I was unable to sit in a restaurant with my back to the door, feeling like I was in danger all the time, that sort of thing. I just kept telling myself, well, it can't be PTSD, because I didn't earn PTSD, because what I did was no big deal. And what I found ever since making my announcement almost four years ago now, and now writing the book and doing these interviews and that kind of thing is that everybody feels that way coming out of the military um and uh and they and that that's that's why we win wars frequently right is because as one buddy of mine told me at one point because somewhere there was a world war ii vet sitting in a vfw hall explaining yeah i was first wave at d-day but i was in the back of the landing craft it's really no big deal um and so uh the thing about that, is that I think there's some element of that throughout

our society, right? Like there's a lot of trauma going on in the news. There's everybody has trauma in their lives. But I, gosh, if I had a dollar for every person who comes up to me and says, well, this is what I've been dealing with, but I wasn't in a war or anything. And I'm always like, you know, that actually doesn't matter because your brain and my brain don't know what each other experienced. And so the perspective is unhelpful in this case. And there's in some corners a stigma on men who admit mental health problems. It's total bullshit, but it I think it still lingers. And you write in the book about how you were feeling embarrassed.

You were embarrassed, like when a voter would invite you into their home because, you know, you were in politics for a while there that you mentally were getting tugged back to Afghanistan. You didn't think you deserved it. You write, I was ashamed of myself for all of this. I knew how common these experiences were, like the night terrors and so on that you were having among combat vets. But I was, to my thinking, absolutely not a combat vet.

You write, a four-month tour was not enough to mess with a person's brain, I believed, especially not when that person had the advantages and support I did. To me, nothing I experienced counted as trauma. I'd never been in a firefight. All I'd done was go to meetings, and now it was frustrating and a little embarrassing that I was going through this. That's an obstacle in and of itself to get over just to ask for help. And in your case, it would turn out things would have to get pretty bad, pretty low for you to see that obstacle as something you could get over.

Yeah. You know, trauma is, it's an injury and it's actually not that different from a physical injury. You know, had I come home and just gone and gotten treatment for this injury, I think things would have gone a lot differently, right? I mean, I would have I would have gotten it treated I would have learned the things that I've learned now in therapy the techniques I have to manage PTA

I would have Great uncle referred to when I entered therapy as a master's degree in myself. That's what I needed That's what therapy is. But I didn't get that. I waited 11 years. I waited until everything had gotten so bad that I hadn't had a good night's sleep in almost 11 years. I was genuinely of the belief that my family and I were in great danger all the time and would stock the house at night armed and eventually felt such shame and self-loathing that I ended

up very depressed. And if you haven't slept in 11 years and you get really depressed, you know, eventually felt such shame and self-loathing that I ended up very depressed. And if you haven't slept in 11 years and you get really depressed, you're going to get to where I got, which is I was thinking about ending my own life. I was at that point had decided not to run for president and was running for mayor of my hometown, Kansas city. And it was objectively the campaign going great. Like we were going to win and probably buy a lot, but I, I was not in a good place. And, and the reason I compare it to an injury is, you know, before I went into the army, I really severely injured my knee. It was dumb. I was playing pickup football with my buddies. And, uh, and so I, you know, I tore my ACL and my meniscus and, and the army said it was right

after nine 11. And they said, well, if you want to come into the army, you got to get surgery and you got to go through physical therapy. So I did that. I compare what I did with my brain to, it's as if I went into the army without getting that surgery or that physical therapy and just said, well, I'll walk it off. Time will fix it. I probably, first of all, wouldn't have been able to hack what I needed to do in the army, but had I somehow been able to do it, I would have finished my time in the army with a right leg that was totally mangled. Well, that's what I did to my brain. I didn't go treat the injury. And yeah, my trauma was not as severe, probably as a lot of other people. And I got really hung up on that and fixated on that instead of just treating it. And so then that's what happened is I just allowed it

to get so much worse. Right. You, you write about how, because just so our audience knows you, first you ran for and won the Missouri state legislature position. Then it was on to Missouri secretary of state because you're a lawyer as well. And then there was a Senate run, which was very, very tight. You wound up losing, but you became super famous in the course of that. And that was the one where I remember first seeing you where you assembled the gun, blindfolded. For our audience members who may not know you right now

by sight, they may remember this ad, which is sort of what put you on the map nationally. Here's soundbite seven. I'm Jason Kander, and Senator Blunt has been attacking me on guns. Well, in the army, I learned how to use and respect my rifle. In Afghanistan, I volunteer to be an extra gun in a convoy of unarmored SUVs. And in the state legislature, I supported second amendment rights. I also believe in background checks so that terrorists can't get their hands on one of these. I approve this message because I'd like to see Senator Blunt do this.

It's actually very cool. It's a very cool ad. So you went, you lost that race, but you became a national star. And even Barack Obama sat you down and said, you have what I had, which is you're a natural and it's sky's the limit. You could run for president, which you seriously consider doing. In the end, you said, maybe I'll just I'll start off with mayor of my hometown, Kansas City, Missouri. But you write in the book about this. Every time someone introduced me in an event, the lore of my wartime service got inflated

a little more. I would politely correct any overstatement as I began my speech. Oh, it's nice of you to say highly decorated, but honestly, I was lightly decorated at best. Or I appreciate the kind words, but I do want to clarify that I served only one tour, not multiple tours like a lot of my friends. On top of that, I had just become famous for an ad featuring my deft handling of a weapon I'd never fired in combat. All of this was grist from my own guilt mill. I felt I was being given an honor I did not deserve. And I worked even harder in the homestretch to dull the shame. So people trying to be nice and say nice things about your service or compliment the ad

in a way we're exacerbating what was already happening in your mind. This tick, this like guilt tick of I don't deserve any accolades. I didn't do anything. And I'm not in the field of guys who gets to have this injury. Right. No, that's exactly what I thought. I, my view was I, it can't be PTSD because I didn't earn PTSD. You know, like I had very close friends, including some who had gone to the VA and gotten treated for PTSD. So to your earlier question about this feeling of masculinity, I think that is an issue for a lot of people. For me, it wasn't.

For me, I had a couple of people in my life who had been treated for PTSD, and I saw them as plenty masculine. So that was not a stumbling block for me. Well, I think it is for other people. It was more that I felt like, you know, here I have like this friend who, uh, you know, he saw people die right in front of him. And to me, that's PTSD. But then he would say to me, Hey man, like, cause you know, my job was to go over there, go into these meetings with people who might want to kill me. Uh, and then, you know, know where all the exits are, know how many bad guys potentially between me and my vehicle, all that stuff. But I never had to fire my weapon. And so like, that friend, for instance, would say to me, I came in, I don't know if I could have done the job that you did. And I always would say to myself, he interestingly had read my first book in which I had, in one chapter of it, you know, explained how, yeah, I've had a few issues, but it's not PTSD. And here's why. And she was like,

did you maybe write an entire book to convince yourself that you didn't have PTSD? And I was like, well, I think maybe. And then she walked me through she said well okay let me get this straight she said uh you were in the most dangerous place on the planet your job was to go out and be very vulnerable for hours at a time just you and a translator nobody knew where you were so nobody was coming to save you if things went wrong and you were meeting with people where you couldn't know whether or not they were like there to kill you or there to give you information and they were much more heavily armed and you were outnumbered. And she goes,

yeah, that's trauma. And it's, you're a combat veteran. She's like, it just may not have looked like what you saw in the movies basically, but you know, that's what that is.

And when she said it all back to me, I realized, yeah, if I had, you know, sat down and somebody had described their service to me that way, I'd have been like, Oh yeah,

this person is a combat veteran. And I bet they have some trauma, you know, but it had to be explained to me that way. So what I didn't realize was that shortly after I, I think it was shortly after I interviewed you on NBC about your political career, your rising prospects and so on, you, a famous national figure, certainly in Democrat politics, actually walked into a VA with like the cap down, hoping not to be recognized, but you were and said, I need I need help. And I'm actually really, really low and would wind up shortly thereafter. I mean, maybe that it was that day they put you on suicide watch. Yeah, it's actually a funny story, which is a funny thing to say about a book about PTSD.

But the thing is, is that I recognize that a lot of people are like I was, which is that if you might have trauma or you're close to somebody with trauma, or you just want to understand this better, or maybe you just are interested in what it's like to run for president, essentially, while you have an untreated, undiagnosed psychological disorder. To get people to actually do that, the book also has to be kind of funny. And so it opens with this story, which is that it's kind of humiliating to notice that everybody is kind of doing double takes when you're in the psych ward and they're recognizing you. And then I'm on suicide watch, they take away all my belongings. And you know, I'm sitting there in these like scrubs pajamas they've given me that are four

sizes too big. And I'm kind of hugging my knees in this room with a stainless steel toilet and a nurse watching. You know, she's like, she'll turn around when I have to pee. But and then this psych resident comes in, who I could tell right right away had no idea who I was. And it was a huge relief. And we talked for about 30 minutes. And I tell him stuff that I had not told anybody other than my wife about my night terrors and my, you know, feeling like I was in danger all the time and, you know, suicidal ideation and everything. And then after a while, he asked, he's like, do you have a, like a really particularly stressful job or something? And so I start to explain that I'm in politics. And he's like, what does that mean? And I say, well,

you know, I was gonna run for president, but then I decided to run for mayor instead. But I'm going to call that off tomorrow so I can get help here at the VA. And he goes, I'm sorry, president of what? And I said, well, of the United States. And he goes, well, who told you you could run for president? And at this point, I've gone from mortified that people are recognizing me to just completely irritated that this guy doesn't believe me. And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you, man. Yeah, that's what he thought. And I didn't realize that at the time. So I'm like, I don't know what to tell you, man. Yeah. That's what he thought. And I didn't realize that at the time. So I'm like, I don't know what to tell you, man. I, I, I sat with just me and Barack Obama in his office for about an hour and a half. He seemed to think it was a pretty good idea. And, uh, and then he thinks

about that for a second and he says, how often would you say you hear voices. So yeah. Count backward from 100 by sevens. Right, exactly. Which, yeah. And so that was sort of the beginning of my experience at the VA. But the thing is, I wanted to go to the VA because I wanted to sit across from somebody who had heard people like me talk plenty. And there was never anything like, you know, you were saying, was it your mom? I think you said, who worked in, uh, at the VA and behavioral health. Right. Yeah. So somebody like your mom, uh, never, the people who came in and sat with her, they grew, they had a great comfort in the fact that whatever it is she did there, there's nothing

they ever said or did where she was like, I've never seen that before. I've never heard that before. And that's very comforting. And so to go to the VA where I knew that I was going to get somebody who knew exactly what I was dealing with and knew how to help me lead myself through it, that was the right choice for me. Isn't it strange that there's not an established protocol for helping veterans coming home from combat with re-entry in this way? You know, that I know in the book, even your wife was saying there's no training for the wife either. Like how to deal with the stress of your husband could be getting killed any day now. Like the, the, the military is not very supportive of our men and women when it comes to mental health. I mean, frankly, physical health either. We've had so many nightmare stories about the VA,

the people who work in those hospitals care, but the administrations time after time have proven they really don't prioritize this. Yeah. I think there's a couple of, yeah, there's a couple of problems that we run into, right? I mean, the first is what we talked about earlier, which is the military's job is to prepare you to fight, right? And, you know, I had a conversation not too long ago with my therapist actually during the Afghanistan withdrawal, where I was really involved in the evacuation efforts. And I was trying to sort through, you know, what my feelings were about this and how to like, you know, at night when I was on Afghanistan time, be able to operate in a way where I was effective, but then during the day,

be able to be present with my family. The point he was making was, look, the emotions that you use during the day, just like the emotions that you use when you're here in America, they don't work when you're trying to do these evacuation efforts the same way they weren't helpful to you when you were deployed. It's a difficult thing. I'm not trying to, when I'm completely off the hook, but it's a difficult thing for the military to completely train you and prepare you to be able to take a life if necessary, to be able to do this very difficult job that can sometimes be very frightening. So where I fault the military is in the exit process,

is in not having an established system or a better one. And I know they're working on it, but to flip that switch off. But there are other things that can be done better. When you go from one duty station to another in the military, there's usually a readiness sergeant who, no matter what your rank is, their job is to make sure that you get to where you're going and that you're received. It's a warm handoff, right? So like if you transfer from like Fort Polk to Fort Leonard, Fort Leonard Wood, there's a guy at Fort Leonard Wood or a gal whose job it is to call the guy or gal at Fort Polk and say, yeah, we got him, we got her, and they're set. We got them into their new duty station.

But when you get out of the military, there's no warm handoff between, last duty station and the VA where you're going to live. And that to me is a simple thing that we could fix is just have that warm handoff. Because most veterans don't, and I was invisible Storm, a soldier's memoir of politics and PTSD. That's still how I see myself. And you're still going to see yourself that way for a long time. So the idea of internalizing, well, I'm a veteran now, I'm going to go access veterans care. It's not going to come that quickly or that easily. But you're still a soldier. So if someone tells you, hey, when you're done, this is where you go and you report in here, you'll do it. And I think that would be a much more effective system. Let me pivot now because speaking of trauma and certainly, you know, a different kind of combat in the news today. And we haven't talked about it yet on today's show is this shooting that happened over July 4th yesterday in Highland Park, Illinois. It's a very sort of tony suburb of Chicago, very wealthy, very, very low crime rate. And one of the people who was at the parade that was

attacked said something to the effect of this. This doesn't happen here. But the truth is, it happens everywhere. The person was realizing there's no place you can go to feel truly safe from one of these madmen shooters, mass shooters. Six people on the latest count have been killed, 24 others wounded. Several witnesses said they heard 20, 30 shots. They have apprehended the shooter. And there's precious little detail out there right now about him and his background. Over the next day or so, we're going to learn more about his postings online, his mental health issues, his too easy access to guns. I mean, you know, you know the profile right already without us even knowing much. It's going to pan out. And I just wonder,

you know, as a politician, as a combat vet, as a, you know, somebody who knows about trauma, how are we supposed to be handling this news? how are we supposed to be handling this news? How are we supposed to be handling this as Americans? You know, yesterday when it happened, I was throwing a big 4th of July party. And just for that moment, I said, I can't take in any information about this. I am not a good enough compartmentalizer that if I sit down and I read about the victims of this, I'll be able to go out there and host this party. I've got to table this right now. But nobody in Illinois who was at that parade is able to table anything. And it's just every week, you know, there's another story like this.

Yeah, I think first of all, I think that that's OK. I kind of did the same thing yesterday. Right. I mean, first of all, I think that that's okay. I kind of did the same thing yesterday, right? I mean, I was with family. We had a family wedding on Saturday and then on Sunday. And then yesterday, I was aware of it, but I chose not to dig into it. And it's understandable. I think that's okay in the short term. The problem we have as a country, to your question, is we are avoiding it as a country. We are doing what I learned in therapy I had been doing for a long time, right? Like I kept running for the next office. I kept doing the next thing. I stayed busy as much as I could.

I did everything I could not to be alone with my thoughts because they were unpleasant. I don't have that problem now because I've been through therapy and I'm enjoying my life, but I had to go straight at it. I couldn't outrun the trauma. I had to turn toward it and confront it. And as a country, and look, it's hard for me not to make this part of the gun conversation. I know that some good things have been done recently. There was good federal legislation passed that doesn't go far enough, but it does at least address things like mental health and some things related to guns. But there's a lot of different ways that people, for instance, on my side of the aisle, explain the unwillingness of folks on the right to, not all folks, but some on the right to look at this as

an issue about guns. And oftentimes it is ascribed to, and sometimes I've described it this way, to it being about firearm manufacturers wanting to sell guns and about this culture that elevates guns above lives and all that. And look, I've been guilty of that at times. And then there's some elements of truth to all that. But I think what is much deeper is if it hasn't confronted us like any other crisis in America, if it hasn't directly confronted us and it's deeply unpleasant, well, there's a certain degree of natural avoidance that we as a culture want to do. And that can lead to inaction. That's what happened to me with my own mental health is I didn't want to deal with it.

And so I didn't take action. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I hope we're getting to a point where people see that the kind of weapons, and I don't have any idea what was involved here. It doesn't, you know, each case can be both something. Yeah. You see the basic same thing in almost all of them.

Yeah. And like, and I get, I get tired of the fact that every single one of these becomes immediately. And I don't, I don't have a problem with them being politicized because at this point, like it's happening so often, like let's have the political debate. But I do have a problem with like everybody on both sides wants to figure out immediately, like, well, are there pictures of this person being at the other side's events or at our side's? Like, it doesn't matter, man. Like, like who cares? Like it's a problem. And I bet there were Republicans and Democrats there who got hurt or got killed. Like, so when we're doing that, we are avoiding talking about the fact that, for instance, the weapon that I carried,

which I know people will say, well, an AR-15 is not the same weapon you carried. Look, the reason I was able to do that commercial where I blindfolded, put together an AR-15 is because it feels and looks and carries and does everything the same as an M16 or an M4. It's just got a little toggle on the side that switches the way it fires. Everything else is exactly the same. So basically the weapon I

carried being just like really easy to go get and we shouldn't even think twice about it. Like, I think that's avoidance as a country. That's us not wanting to deal with this. To me, I have avoidance of it because even if you banned all the AR-15s and my audience has heard me say, I'm not like a big gun person. I'm a lawyer, so I want proof. Show me what's going to work and I'll support it. I'm much more worried about my children's safety than I am about anything else. But I avoid it because I know that so many of these mass shootings, they just use semi-automatic handguns. And it's like, even if we get rid of every ar-15 you know we're a gun culture we're a gun country we got you know hundreds of millions of guns over three or more guns than we have people and we're and most of

them are semi-automatic you know one one pull of the trigger one bullet and you can unleash mass carnage and we we can make ourselves feel better if we say okay we're going to get rid of AR-15 and maybe school shootings. They're going to find another way. And we're never getting rid of all the semi-automatic guns in this country. Never. So it's like, oh, so now. So what? What?

OK, mental health. All right. I'm on board. Let's talk about it. Let's let's have tons of programs, screeners, you know, forget red flag laws for guns, just red flag laws for humans. You know, we're like these kids are getting into the system and they're getting identified and they're getting treated somehow. But I don't really believe we're going to do that either. I don't believe that system would be very effective. I don't know that people on social media will start reporting people who are, you know, it's just that.

And so that does lead to avoidance. Like, let's just talk about something else. Because I could go bang my head against that wall for the next half hour too. Yeah, it's overwhelming, right? And we can have like, for me, like I made the reference to AR-15s just because I sort of tracked it to my own experience. But, you know, we couldn't even get, you know, legislation in a bipartisan fashion that I guarantee you the majority of Republican senators actually, you know, if you put them to a lie detector test, things make sense, you know, stuff that makes it where background checks, you know, would apply to all the loopholes as well. And it's stuff that the vast majority of Americans, the vast majority of

people listening to this basic stuff that we all agree on. But what happens is, is that as we avoid the larger conversation and we get overwhelmed by it, we, we do this American tendency that we have now where we, well, there's only two sides. I've got to pick one. Right. And it's like, well, I'm either pro-gun or I'm not. And then that becomes a problem because then there are people like on my side of the aisle who, you know, they will get to a point where they're like, there should be no guns.

And your point is a good one, which is we're not going to get there. So like, how about we have a realistic conversation about what we could do to limit these? Because like you, I care about my kids more than anything else. And, you know, if something is going to be just like a tiny bit effective, like to me, that's pretty worth it. But we don't ever get to have that conversation because everything happens in extremes. It's a good point about, you know, some people I follow on Twitter, I, you know, lean right. And I have a lot of people follow me who lean right. And I follow a lot of peopleies. And I saw so many tweets about the bipartisan gun bill, you know, like, oh, so-called Republicans. And I was like, what's in there that's so awful? People are mad. I looked, I'm like, you know, this is like common sense stuff. I don't know that it's going to actually

prevent that many, but it might. There are a couple of things in here that actually might. And and you're probably right. Right. Like they're worried about getting attacked by right wing commentators or I don't know, the NRA is not as powerful as it used to be. But it happens on both sides where like whatever your private feelings are, you don't want to say it publicly because you don't want to get hit. You don't want your donations to go down. and why you did the right thing, Jason, by, I think for now, at least, leaving politics and doing something that's actually gonna help people, real people. And then maybe, maybe one day in the future, if you decide to actually throw that hat back in the ring, you are my kind of Democrat. You are the kind of Democrat who makes me say,

yes, there's a future for our country. There are reasonable people on both sides who we want in the public square. And I thank you. I thank you for being that voice and forbook.com or wherever you get your books. But all of my proceeds go to the place where I work now, which is Veterans Community Project. And basically, all of my royalties go to fighting veteran suicide and veteran homelessness. Wow. You're amazing. All of us. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. All right. And coming up next, something exciting. All right. Now, I'm bringing on my own doctor. Her name is Caroline

Messer, but she's here for a very interesting reason. Are you struggling with weight loss? Wait until you hear she's an endocrinologist, the solutions that are out there. Okay. That's next. Our next guest is somebody I know very well. Her name is Dr. Caroline Messer, and she's a star endocrinologist based in New York City. She's here today to share the secrets of her new weight loss center, WELL, W-E-L-L, by Messer. That includes evidence-based medicine, specifically or specially trained experts like psychologists and dietitians, and it will offer a more holistic approach to weight loss. Dr. Messer, so good to have you. How are you? Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

The pleasure's all mine. All right. So before we get to the weight loss center, I want to tell people just let's spend a minute on how you became my doctor and the miraculous transition you've affected in my own life. So when I turned 50, my doctor said, you got to go get a bone scan to see if you got old lady bones. This is the way I phrased it, not him. So I did. I got the bone scan. It turned out my bones were a lot older than I thought they'd be.

And I was already having some osteoporosis. So he's like, you got to go see Caroline Messer. She's the best in the city. She's got all sorts of great credentials. I'm like, okay, I'll do it. So I go to you and I'll never forget one of the first things you said to me. You said, I love endocrinology. Do you remember why you explained that? Everything's fixable. Everything's fixable. It's not like some of these other medical professions where it's like bad news and it's going to stay bad and we can maybe make it slightly less bad, but it's still going to be bad.

It's like I can fix it. And she put me on a medication. I had to take a shot, like a physical shot that she would give me or a nurse would give me once a month for 12 months. And it's basically a cure, a cure for my old lady bones. I have my young bones back after 12 months of doing this. And her staff worked with me to get it covered by insurance, which was a true blessing. And I understand it's a big headache for people who don't have insurance. But anyway, this is how

we came to know each other. And it turns out the brilliant Dr. Messer is putting her good services to use in another realm, which affects way more people than old lady bones do. And that is weight, weight management, weight loss, because obesity in this country is out of control. And Dr. Messer, one of your core positions is it actually may not be your fault. Like we all beat ourselves up, like just eat less. But it's actually way more complex than that. Right. So I always say of all of the endocrine

issues I treat, this is probably the most complicated because there are so many different facets of our lives that contribute to difficulty losing weight. You know, there's the psychological aspect, there's our ability or our time to exercise. There's also the metabolic, the hormonal aspect. And so recently we realized that a lot of our patients actually have resistance to a gut hormone. I don't want to get too deep into it, but there's a gut hormone called GLT1 or a whole class of hormones called the incretins. And we found that particular patients, a lot of patients with prediabetes are actually resistant to those hormones. And those hormones are what allow you to effectively lose weight. So we're taking advantage of that

with a new class of medications. We're really helping patients lose significant weight. So how do you find out if you have one of those hormones? Or if you have resistance to those hormones? So that's the problem. It's not like you can go to a commercial lab and measure it. I would say that you have to rule out every other hormonal issue. You have to make sure it's not thyroid, polycystic ovary syndrome, that it's not insulin resistance. And then by default, if you're doing everything right in terms of diet and exercise, and particularly if you also have some insulin resistance, you're likely to have a protein resistance. Okay. So you may be somebody who struggles with weight, not because you just won't stop yourself from eating, but because there's something going

on inside of you that's driving you to the refrigerator more or helping you process food in a way that's not quite as great as your skinny neighbor. And so what about that? Because I think a lot of us look at our skinny neighbor and we just think, well, F her, first of all. And then we think there's something wrong with us that we can't be the skinny neighbor. And then we solve that by eating brownies. Right. So there's so much in what you just said. But we definitely think that certain patients have a set point for like the amount of fat that their body is going to have. We call it adipose tissue. And that is probably somewhat determined by these hormones. And so it's really true that for certain patients, they have a very hard time reaching a weight that's below their set point,

because every time they lose some weight, their body slows down the metabolism, changes their hormones that the weight comes right back on. I know this must resonate with a lot of the viewers. The beautiful thing about the hormone that we give patients is it allows the body to really naturally, I would say, change that set point. And there are very few other ways to do it other than surgically. And so this has been such a game changer for me as an endocrinologist, being able to give patients this benefit. And it's not only the weight loss. I mean, I'm trained in internal medicine.

I'm all about primary care, preventative care. In studies, patients who are sicker, who have cardiovascular disease, who have diabetes, there's a decreased risk of stroke, heart attack, and death. So there's a lot that we're doing beyond just helping patients, you know, reach their target weight. So when you say you're giving patients a hormone that would sort of right this balance, what is the hormone? It's a medication? So it's an injectable, for the most part, it's injectable medication. There's now a once a week version. And it tells the body not only that you're not hungry, but that you're full.

Believe it or not, those are controlled by different parts of your brain, different nuclei and what we call the hypothalamus. So you feel this wonderful feeling of satiety and you're also not as hungry. And then as you're eating, it slows down the passage of food through the gut. And so then you have this fullness actually in your in your gut. That's a bit of an oversimplification. There are other benefits to this medication, but in short, you're a lot less hungry and patients are losing up to 15% of their body weight. In how long?

I would say definitely by six months. Some of the studies are testing it over a year or even longer, but it's sustained weight loss. That's the other key. As long as you're taking the medication, you will eventually plateau. It's not like you continue to lose weight forever, but you'll be able to lose, you know, it depends on the study, 15%, sometimes more of your body weight. So it's a once a week injectable and is it one brand or are there multiple brands? So there are multiple brands right now. The big ones on the market are Wegovi, which is, I hope I'm allowed to say brand names, that's made by Novo and also Saxenda, which is made by Novo Nordisk. But there are others. There are lots of GLP ones on the market. Those happen to be the ones that have been approved for weight loss.

So how long can somebody stay on such a thing? Indefinitely. I certainly have patients who say, listen, let me try, let me get down to my ideal body weight. And then I'll use a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and working out with my trainer and speaking to my dietician to keep the weight off. And certainly that works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. So we can always put our patients back on the medication. We can always use other medications to help maintain the weight loss. You know, we have a whole host of medications that we've used for years. But a lot of patients just say, listen, this is working You can decrease your blood pressure medications, your cholesterol medications, like everything improves, of course.

Nobody talks about this, though. Nobody talks like you go to your annual, you know, physician's visit and they just say like lose five pounds. They don't say here's a medication that can help you. I mean, like this is I feel like this is groundbreaking. This is all a new strain of help available to people. You're 100 percent right. And actually studies have corroborated what you just said.

And I think there are a lot of reasons for it. I think doctors are a little bit nervous to, to talk about weight too much. Like they're worried they'll get negative reviews. Maybe they're not comfortable with the medication, but also treating weight is not always reimbursable by insurance. Like if that's your primary code that you're billing for, you might not get reimbursed for the visit. And so all these factors sort of conspire to have weight not addressed. In fact, you know,

we know that like less than 50% of patients with obesity are actually have like a care plan put into place by their doctors. My God, that's so crazy. Given the number of health issues that obesity causes, it's crazy. Now, I mentioned insurance when it came to my medicine for my bones. And we did work with your office a lot to make sure it was covered. It was kind of a hassle, not because of you, just because, you know, the way pharma works. And what about this? Would this be covered by insurance, like a weight loss drug? They typically wouldn't be. So a lot of plans do cover it. There are some plans where, you know, it's a plan benefit where they call it an exclusion. Um, and there's usually some fine print saying that your plan doesn't

cover weight loss medications and you do have to qualify. So you have to, your body mass index is like a weight to height ratio, and you have to have a certain body mass index for the insurance to cover it. Um, if you have other medical issues, they'll cover it at a lower body mass index, but right, it's not covered for everyone. We have workarounds, of course, we have to because there's so much demand for it, you know, using sometimes compounded pharmacies, sometimes using Canadian pharmacies to try to make it affordable for everyone. But yes, for many patients, we can either get the daily injections or the weekly injections covered by their insurance. That is amazing. Total potential game changer. So the clinic, the new clinic, well, I like that well by Messer does what?

Because it sounds like it's it's yes, this line of injectables is potentially available. That's one of the tools in your arsenal, but it's not the only tool. So how is this different from what's out there right now? So this clinic really evolved out of many years of feeling a little bit frustrated because, you know, I have a small office. I work here and can prescribe these medications, but I didn't have all the other team members that I needed to have the proper approach to weight loss. Because I began by saying it is complicated. It's not just your hormones are off. It's not just, you know, menopause or incretin resistance.

It's so much more than that. And I really felt we needed a team approach to weight loss. And so I had a lot of people I would refer patients to. I would refer to a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a dietician. But a lot of times the patients refer patients to, I would refer to a psychologist, psychiatrist, a dietician, but a lot of times the patients wouldn't end up going. Or if they did go, I didn't always have the ability to work with those practitioners. You know, it was hard to schedule phone calls where we were all working together. And so I decided I need a place that patients can go to where everything is in one place and we're having team meetings and we're discussing the patient and making sure we're optimizing care and the patient

doesn't need to coordinate, you know, five different appointments, everything's in the same place. And so that's, that was really the impetus for Well by Messer. Think of it like a team of people dedicated to your wellness, your weight loss, your maintaining a healthy eating plan. Like it's, I mean, that is something that's so far only been available to like Angelina Jolie, you know, that type of person. So what about that? Right. I'm sure if you want, if you have dough and you can pay out of pocket, this is easy for you, but what if you don't have dough and you want to take advantage of this kind of service. Right. I mean, I tried to make it somewhat affordable. And it's obviously rents are high in the city.

So there's that. But it's certainly not, you know, exorbitant. And it's reimbursable by insurance. So we have a biller who will submit on your behalf. So that's huge. That's huge because so many practices in the city are now all cash and not just in the city and more and more American cities now. You can't get into a great doctor or somebody who wants to look after you unless you pay only cash. It's crazy. So that's good. So they're not just going to say, okay, one size fits all. I hired a woman named Dr. Barry Weinstein, one of my close friends from training, who's

a board certified endocrinologist. Anything that comes in the door, she can treat. So you're coming in with diabetes or thyroid or thyroid cancer or osteoporosis, everything will be treated in a very evidence-based fashion. And she will figure out the best way to treat the weight at the same time. So it's like real medicine, nothing predatory about it, just true wellness, like in the truest sense of the word. We really are going to practice preventative care and get you healthier. That's the thing. This isn't like some quack service online. It's

like take this supplement and lose 10 pounds by the end of the month. Well, now what about people who are not in the New York region? Is there any way they can take advantage of this? So, yes. So we'll be getting the ability to do telemedicine in other states. We just are applying for telemedicine licenses. But it's actually, thank you for setting me up. The plan is to expand this.

So, you know, in the coming months, years to open up other centers around the country. It's a brilliant idea. I mean, I'm amazed that not more people have done it because it's like, I don't want to say it's the cure for obesity, but like if you're, you know, you're kind of dancing around it and there's a massive problem. The latest stats, my team poll, let's say you probably have them, but it says 36.5% of adults are obese in the United States. Another, on top of that, another 32.5% of American adults are overweight. I mean, you can see it, right? And now children, too.

17% of American children, 2 to 19, are obese. That's almost 12.7 million American kids. I assume kids can't go on these meds. They're like, what are, what about kids? It can. So assuming they meet criteria. So there's some, some of these medications, the daily injections have been FDA approved for children. And I have, I start seeing patients at 14 in situations where I feel like the weight is presenting real risks to patients' lives and health, I have started these medications on teenagers. Wow. I mean, think about it, right? It's like because even on a teenager, obesity can cause health problems. I mean, you can run down the list. So it's at no ages. And I know there's like a big push for body positivity. And it's like, it's trying to feel good about being overweight is one thing, pretending that it's actually physically healthy is something else.

And so Dr. Messer will give it to you straight. I'm so happy to talk to you. Can I just ask you, rounding back for people out there who are stuck on the old lady bones part of our conversation, what should they do? Like if they're if they're worried that they might have this problem, which is curable, what should they do? So obviously start by having a bone density. I typically recommend it as soon as you go through, you know, you're entering perimenopause, so not even menopause. As soon as your periods start getting a little further apart or even closer together, you know, signs that you're perimenopausal, you should go get your first bone density. And then if it shows even osteopenia, you can consider, which is the precursor to osteoporosis, you can consider seeing an endocrinologist. But definitely, if the summary

says that there's osteoporosis, you do need an endocrinologist. Not everybody needs to increase their bone density, but at a very, at the minimum, we need to prevent further bone loss. Yeah. And who knew like something like this is actually reversible. So now I'm basically 16. And thanks to Dr. Messer, we'll stay 16 from now on. Such a pleasure. Thank you for my own wellness and good luck with it. Well, by Messer, so glad you're doing it. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. We're going to have Greg Lucchiano from FIRE. He's coming back with us on how he's expanding his mission for the good of America. And then we're going to be interviewing Sammy the Bull, the guy who brought down John Gotti. Long story history there, which we'll get into. And I think you'll find him fascinating. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda and no fear.