The Megyn Kelly Show - Zaid Jilani and Andy Ngo on COVID Truth and Censorship, Antifa's Tactics, and Failings of the Corporate Media | Ep. 112

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Zaid Jilani, co-founder of the Inquire More Substack publication, and Andy Ngo, independent journalist and author of "Unmasked," to discuss COVID truth and censorship, failing of the corporate media, antifa's tactics, the rise of elite victimhood, the value of intellectual discomfort, ideological bias in the media, Big Tech power and how to fix it, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh, what a great program for you today. Great, great, great, great. We're going to start this show with Andy Ngo. You know Andy, he's an independent journalist and author of the bestseller Unmasked, Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. We had him on not long ago talking about his book and so on, Antifa. But he's been attacked by this group, Antifa, in Portland, Oregon, again. It happened on May 28th.

And the backlash against Andy has been bizarre and very telling. No one seems to want to do anything about this. The police don't seem to care. Certainly the local politicians don't care. The media, the holier than thou media. Why? How could Trump call us the enemy of the people? He's endangering us. They couldn't care less that Andy Ngo was beaten by this anarchist group. So he's going to walk us through what happened and what it means. What does it say about us? And then we're going to get to a guest I've been looking forward to speaking to. His name is Zed Jelani. Zed writes on Substack now for, it's called Inquire More, and that's where you can go read him. But he's been pretty much at left wing

publications since he got out of school, The Intercept, Think Progress. And I'm going to talk to him about that. How did he go from being at those organizations to being with me on the advisory board for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which is a group that's fighting back against this critical race theory and this crazy wokeness. He is not a woke liberal, but he is somebody who's of the left, who's been very bold and brave in pushing back against some of the nonsense. And we are going to get into this incendiary report at a Vanity Fair on what's happened with the Wuhan lab theory. It's so much deeper and more tentacled and disturbing than you know, how these scientists were working behind the scenes to shut up anybody who was going to say

that it came from a lab as opposed to directly from an animal into some human in a wet market, about how the journalism community completely fell down on the job, accepted that that was just a racist thing to pursue, and ignored it for a year. And now Vanity Fair has State Department employees on the record by name talking about how they were told by the State Department in open meetings to say nothing. This is a can of worms you do not want to open. Let's not go into whether research in a lab, gain of function research, as it's called, where you try to make the bat coronavirus more dangerous. We funded too much of it to really be opening that can of worms. It's stunning stuff. Anyway, we get into all of it. A lot of news in this podcast,

and I know you're going to enjoy it. We'll get to those guys in one second. First this. Andy, how are you? Hi, Megan. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you again. Of course. Thank you for coming back. How are you feeling? I think emotionally, I'm taking this one a lot harder.

And the injuries this time are to the body, so it's more painful. Two years ago, it was brain, which was more serious, but no pain in the brain. But, you know, having support of you and other journalists and friends have meant a lot. Laura has taken very good care of me. I know you had her on your show recently. She's amazing, and she's somebody who, know you had her on your show recently. She's amazing.

And she's somebody who, like you, has a history of running toward the danger to cover stories and understands sometimes reporters take risks and sometimes it goes south. Let's start with what happened, just in case our audience is not up to speed. It happened May 28th. And what were you doing? So I have been out of the country for about half a year now. I went on record earlier this year to state that I had fled Portland because of escalating death threats against me. So I had been in the UK. I returned home recently, temporarily, for family matters. I have elderly parents.

And it's been six months since I've been on the ground to do observations about this violent extremist movement known as Antifa. And I was beaten two years ago severely, given a brain hemorrhage. And I was never reckless going back out and I've been out many many times and diversify the ways to gather information and and the result of that is my book on maps but I think what

I underestimated is that their strategies and sophistications has also evolved in the past six months in ways that I wasn't prepared for, unfortunately. So I was incognito, walking amongst them in their weekly violent protest that's still ongoing in downtown Portland. Towards the end of the night, they became suspicious of me and i believe it's probably because of the fact that i was not engaging in any of their criminal acts such as shutting down the roads or throwing projectiles at police or trying to um break into the central police station any of those things that they were involved in that night how many people were you with just to help set the scene? The Antifa that night was around 100 people.

It was to mark the one-year anniversary of when their rioting began. Okay. And the reason that you can blend in is because they wear masks, right? So you can just put a mask on and kind of pass. That's right. Well, yes, but there's nuances to that. So what is their strength in the anonymity is the black block.

And that means dressing head to toe in black, sticking together as a group so that when some of them engage in criminal activities, they can easily run back into the crowd, the block, and blend it in and make it nearly impossible to be identified. That's their strength,

but it can also be a weakness and that means other people can show up in that same uniform. However, they develop certain protocols to try to weed out outsiders because that's how paranoid they are. The press have been intimidated into not recording any of their activities. That's why you're not seeing a lot of the video footage coming out because they've actually assaulted and beaten the other local journalists. And so the media reporting we have,

there's a small media crew, they stay about half a block away. And they follow the orders and instructions of the Antifa, which is that they do not photograph or record them, even though it's in public, they're engaging in newsworthy activities. So what were they doing when you say they were running around committing crimes? And to me, this reminds me of like a gang where you've got an undercover officer there and that guy's got to commit some crimes if he doesn't want to be outed to the gang as law enforcement. There you are not wanting to do the stuff they're doing. But what kind of rebel rousing were they up to that night? eggs and other things at the central police station and screaming in the faces of police officers. They were driving by, standing in front of their vehicles. So that's, for Portland,

that's a good night, you know, when you don't have buildings set on fires where people are inside. Now, are you, when you are reporting on this, are you doing it just visually or are you trying to sneak video of this? What are you doing? That night I was observing visually and taking mental notes. Anytime you take out a camera, people notice. And the only time they allow people to take out cameras, which is one of the the explicit rules is to record police. So it's to, it puts out disinformation. For example, if one of the people gets arrested and all the cameras come out, including the

local journalists, then that's when they run in with the cameras and they try to portray the police as arresting peaceful protesters. Okay, so you're there. I mean, that's what most reporters don't. We're so used to viral videos now, we forget that most reporters, that they're just there as a person observing with their eyes and ears, and then they'll go report based on the knowledge that they acquired. You don't have to have a video camera with you. And especially if you're in this operation, which is essentially undercover. You're intentionally not identifying yourself as a reporter, certainly as Andy know, who they know and hate and have been very open

about threatening. So, I mean, this is an undercover reporting situation. That's right. And, you know, some people have asked me, like, why didn't you stay a couple blocks away? Like, some of the local broadcasting would do, and they'll use a Zoom lens. You can do all that. I've done all that before. But to really like hear their conversations and get a kind of an understanding of the organized nature of the group as they're moving,

you really have to be like a part of them. So, you know, I'm hearing these things like the different monikers that they're referring to one another they don't you they don't call each other by the real names um they pay attention to things such as um are you socializing with the group if you're not why not why are you not engaging in the same activities as them and all that so towards the end of the night, as the night went on is when this suspicion grew. One of the Antifa members, and I recognized him because he was only partially unmasked and he

has a lot of scarring on his face. He had assaulted me two years ago and I reported that to police and I have an ongoing um civil suit regarding that he went up to interrogate me he asked me a rather innocuous question but it sent shivers down my spine he looked at me he said can you actually see through those goggles and the point of asking me that was so that he could hear my voice um I didn't respond but I knew that it was time to go. If they're sending people to ask questions, it's time to go. I made it one block away and another group of them were following me. And they asked the next question they asked. I didn't want to take off running because, you know, I was thinking if I immediately do that.

I mean, there's no police around, even though it is in the middle of downtown, everything's cordoned up. It's a dead part of the city because of the riots that's been going on for a year. They said, the question that I was asked was, why did you look so nervous tonight? And at this point now, I'm panicking.

And I'm really trying to play it cool. You have to speak or run. Yeah, and at this point now I'm, I'm panicking and I'm really trying to play. You have to speak or run. Yeah. It's, it's speak or run. And I, uh, my decision was to former, um, I spoke in a fake voice, what I tried to put on a fake voice. And I said, I have anxiety. That was my answer. And their response was, uh, to each other. I think it's him. Oh, God. And then you really did have anxiety. Yeah. Oh, gosh. So talking about this is kind of hard. Immediately started walking away, not running yet. I'm thinking now. OK, what is my exit? Look, keep looking on the street.

Where are there any police in the distance i can sprint nothing um they were now saying take off your mask take off your mask i wouldn't so one of them reached for my face grabbed off my mask and my goggles and then i was fully exposed and then that's when i took off sprinting running for life, and I had this mob pursuing me. And the fastest one in their group was able to tackle me to the ground several blocks away. All in the meanwhile, when I was sprinting down the street, I'm trying to flag down the cars that are on the street. Because this was a Friday night in downtown Portland. And this was a total bystander. In fact, the drivers just ignored me.

Maybe because there's been, you know, Portland, there's so much dysfunction in the city that having screaming, crazy-looking people in the street, you know, you just sort of ignore it. And so nobody helped me. And then I was tackled and punched repeatedly on the head and pinned down. And I could hear in the background the footsteps and the yells of the mob pursuing.

And this is the mob that has been calling for my blood for two years. They write murder and death. Just to refresh our audience's memory, you are public enemy number one of Antifa because you've been fearless in reporting on them, where I think you're actually being kind in saying the press has been intimidated into ignoring them. I think many in the press simply have no interest in them because they're not outraged by what they're doing and they have similar ideologies and they think, you know, they cover Antifa a lot differently than they would cover a Proud Boys rally or some rally of a group, you know, known to be affiliated with white supremacists, right? Like they think these guys are anti-Trump, I guess,

and, you know, sort of pro-Black Lives Matter and they can stand for that cause. So this is a group that you've been covering for a while and that hates you. I mean, the death threats, we don't have to take your word for it. The spray painted murder Andy Ngo signs are all over the internet. Yes. And another thing they do to try to intimidate me is to release the address of where they think my family is. So, you know, I have two dozen reports with the Portland police. Nothing's ever done. And in addition to the instances of violence and sometimes deadly violence carried out by Antifa,

just when one of their members shot dead, a man in downtown Portland last year, like what empowers them and what I really appreciate about you as you're a straight shooter and you call that as it is, you have a media establishment since 2016 has thrown their lot in essentially with the far left for the cause of so-called resistance against the previous administration by any means necessary. So Antifa is a fringe extremist movement. Any person on the left or right can recognize that.

But when the public has been fed day in and day out this propaganda of America has elected a Hitler figure, America is a fascist regime now, that was the most powering, um, empowering aspect for Antifa and that they had now mainstream recruit, recruiting, um, propaganda that was being put out by legacy media and print and broadcast and radio everywhere. So, um, you know, my, my job is to recognizing that they're not anti-fascist or anti-racist.

They're not peaceful protesters. This is by their own admissions, anti-government, insurrectionary, property destruction, all the way to arson, to assault and robbery and killing. And it's not just in Portland, right? I mean, Portland's just been an ongoing nightmare, notwithstanding what Nick Kristof of the New York Times says, he tweets out, it's delightful. I'm here having my coffee. I love the helicopter reporters who just helicopter in, say, I had a delightful lunch, and try to essentially diminish your reporting that you've done on the ground there. But it isn't just in Portland for people who are thinking this is a Portland problem. Seattle is another place that's particularly bad. There's also Antifa cells in Seattle, Philadelphia, New York.

There's New York City Antifa. And they all operate in these rather large Twitter accounts, these groups. And that's how they organize. You know, when I was on the ground, I was paying attention to what they were saying. And one of the women in the group who was using the moniker Mama, which suggests to me that she was in a more like leadership type role. She said that we can't do what we're doing. We can't do our mutual aid. We can't organize without Twitter. She was talking amongst them. And that's absolutely true. This is how they blast out their crowdfunding links. That's how they get funding through

Cash App and Venmo to pay for the bailsails that's how they organize and announce when and where to go and i've been trying to bring the attention to to big tech that hey your platform is being exploited and used by violent extremists to carry out criminal activities. It says so on these flyers, fuck shit up, no cameras, and things like that, or set fires to the precincts, and inciting violence day in and day out, primarily on Twitter, but also Instagram and Facebook. And really, very, very little has been done. So, you know, for all we've been hearing. Well, that's the crazy thing. Yeah, exactly. But this is the whole reason Parler went away.

It's back now, but it went away for a long time because it was supposedly used by extremists to organize the January 6th riot. Now, you know, forget the fact that Facebook was also used and they're up and running and other platforms too. Um, so if, if, you know, the inner, if Amazon, for example, really cares about this, if Twitter really cares about, about stopping violence, stopping organized violence against innocence, uh, why wouldn't they pay attention? Why wouldn't they crack down on, on the use of their platforms for this kind of organization? Yeah. It's because many of the people who work in Twitter and these companies are sympathetic to the messaging of Antifa. That's why you can have groups like the Youth Liberation Front,

which, by the way, was involved for organizing the riots in Portland and Seattle and other cities. They still have their account operating, the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front. You have Rose City Antifa. They're still on Twitter. So this is the issue with the mainstreaming of the far left is really what kind of the key arguments and what I write in Unmatched.

It's like they would not be able to do what they're doing without this critical massive support unmasked. It's like they're not, they would not be able to do what they're doing without this critical mass of support that comes through complicit locally elected politicians, complicit media. We even write down to the president of the United States in his debate with Donald Trump, he said, you know, they're just an ideology, partially quoting the FBI director without really espousing what was actually said, which is they are organized at a local level and they've done a lot of damage and continue to. But they get a shoulder shrug because they don't wear red MAGA hats. I want to get more to the reaction to what happened to you in particular by the press, the press that is so upset at any

nasty Donald Trump tweet about the press is the enemy of the people. Then when an actual person who's trying to do real reporting gets attacked, it's like, oh, he asked for it. That's basically been their reaction. But before we do, let's finish up the actual assault because, and I apologize, I'm sure it's unpleasant to actually go through it again, just reciting it. But I want people to understand this is not, it's not just a bunch of people who sort of try to scare you tried to scare you and backed off they didn't back off you saved yourself by getting into a hotel and even then they didn't leave so they caught up with you and then what happened yeah when i was pinned to the ground all the adrenaline just left my body in that moment

as i was hearing the the mob coming closer and closer i was my thought was this this this is it and i just hope they make it quick uh in and either through um the miracle is that the person who pinned me down and was beating me, he became either distracted or intimidated by the fact now that there were several journalists who were recording and taking pictures of this assault. And he let off enough of his weight that I was, I crawled forward and was able to take off running again a second time. And everything's boarded up on the street.

The nearest thing I, the only thing I saw open was a hotel and i ran it screaming erratically call police call police call police and the first thing that the hotel staff said to me was you need to put on a mask that was what they said yeah and then they said they they would not call police and they said that i needed to leave the property and by this point now there's a mob gathering outside the hotel. One of the Antifa had run inside the hotel lobby and was live streaming, threatening me on her live stream and saying, come to the hotel. Come to the Nines Hotel now. We may have this soundbite.

Can we play that, guys? I can't wait for you to come out, Andy. You thought the milkshakes were bad last time. We're going to beat the fuck out come out, Andy. You thought the milkshakes were bad last time. We're gonna beat the fuck out of you, bitch. Y'all, Andy knows here at the Nines Hotel. Andy knows inside the hotel, calling the cops on everyone, saying he's gonna get killed out here. At the Nines Hotel right here by Pioneer Square. He's hiding right here on the phone with the cops. And they're trying to kick him out. And that's exactly what she wanted.

That's what they all wanted, was for you to get kicked out. By the way, if that hotel, the Nines, had kicked you out, and your assault had continued, you would own the Nines Hotel. They are very lucky that somebody there finally listened and didn't push you out of that building. Well, actually, up to the very moment, how I escaped from that lobby was I ran into the elevator because the guests had just gone in and I pleaded with him, please let me go up,

let me go up because it seemed the, the hotel staff were telling me, you need to stand up now. I was on my knees. I, my leg was bloodied and injured and I didn't know if they were going to push me out or what. um so i ran into the elevator unfortunately that guest um thank god for him he probably thought i was a crazy person but swiped the the hotel card and uh i i went up to a high level uh in the building and hid and dozens of swat police responded at this point i looked at looked at video later to secure the front of the hotel because the mob was trying to break in. I was eventually led out through a discreet exit to the back where staff are and there was an ambulance there and the police and they took me to hospital. And just so the audience knows, since this is just an audio program, there's visual documentation of all this. I mean, you've heard the woman yelling. We have more of that. We've seen the actual pictures of your injury, your bloody eye, your bloody side. We have audio of

them banging on the hotel windows. In fact, let's play that so you can hear that too. This is crazy. They're screaming Nazi scum at you. I mean, this, not that anybody is going there, but just for the record, this is not a Jussie Smollett situation. This happened. And there's been no accountability for it. You point out, I didn't realize, Andy, until just now, even though I've interviewed you before, that you knew the name of the person who attacked you in 2019 and put you in the hospital with a brain hemorrhage. I did not know that. He hasn't been arrested. No one's been arrested for that attack. And now here we are a week after this attack, and have the police even contacted you? Well, one week out, I have not heard

from a detective at all, not a single phone call. So, you know, if this wasn't my second go around dealing with assault in Portland police, I would be angry. But in 2019, I had absolutely no support from the local authorities or the district attorney or the state attorney general. So in the conditions, I've just gotten worse now. We have a district attorney who's even worse than the one that was there before. So why don't the cops care? I can see the D.A. and elected politician, you know, these far left wingers not caring. But it seems odd to me that cops don't care. So last year, in response to George Floyd dying, the city council abolished the gun violence reduction team, which is a unit of the Portland police that deals with shootings and homicides.

And Portland is now at record levels of shootings and homicides and police are overwhelmed. The department also was defunded by the millions and officers have been quitting in record numbers. So the detectives, and this is a charitable take, the detectives are just swamped with all these murder cases. So anything else is just much, much lower priority. This is the same. The murder rate's up in Portland. It's up in all major cities in America that have at least a million people by at least one third. This while I saw you tweeted about this not long ago, the Portland politician, the city commissioner, Joanne Hardesty. Can you tell folks, she wants to defund the cops very badly until she needed them for something absurd.

Can you tell the audience what we're talking about? Right. So late last year, this is a woman who weaponizes her race. She was the first Black woman elected to Portland City Council, and she used that as a bludgeon against her political opponents. And at the forefront of that has been the Portland police. She's repeated all the same talking points that everybody's familiar with. She says that as a, as a black woman, she is endangered by police. She wants to defund police. She spread conspiracy theories during the riots last year,

at one point telling in an interview to Marie Claire magazine that she believed Portland police were behind the arsons at the riots and were using it to blame protesters. And when the police chief asked her, what's your evidence for this very serious allegation? She had none and she was forced to apologize. Anyways, this is her background. You know, we found out through public information requests of her call to police late last year is that after a gambling trip that she took to a nearby city on the way back to Portland, she had a lift ride home. She called police on her lift driver when he asked her to close her window, to keep the window open because of COVID rules for the company. She wanted him to close the window and he wouldn't.

Right. Yeah. She made a scene. So he canceled the ride and then she called the cops on him. It's fantastic. That is how it goes, right? All these politicians who want to defund the police, they don't want cops until they need cops. And then they say, Oh, let me call the cops. And they don't think about the people who actually live in crime ridden areas who need the cops every day. And they don't, most normal people don't involve the police over a dispute about a window with a Lyft driver. You know, it's just absurd. And yet when somebody like you actually gets assaulted, actually gets assaulted, it's a shoulder shrug.

And I think the reaction has been, he asked for it. You know, he asked for it. And so before I get to that, because I do want to ask you some of the criticism, I watching this, even though I admire your courage and getting in there and shining a light on something nobody else will, I also think, get out of there, you know, like, like, get out. Stop doing this, because you already documented what they did. And this is getting really dangerous for you. Yeah, you know, two years ago, that was the same advice I was given. And my, uh, my intuition is that if I, if I stopped covering this, uh, then they've won, you know, everything that Antifa does is about deception and they, uh,

are able to mean that deception by, um, making sure that there's no record of what they do, whether it's their criminal actions on the streets at rides or their mugshots and names and things that they post on social media accounts that tie them explicitly down to you. But they don't want that out and known. And so, you know, I constantly did risk assessment. I mean, you know, I just want to remind, you know, those critics who have my best interests at heart that, you know, I went to nearly two years going forward without other injuries, maintaining and constantly thinking of new ways, you know, and as an independent journalist, you know, I don't have access to like a corporate media backing that could potentially give a lot of resources in terms of security and all that. So I have to make do with what what limited resources I have. from now playing this soundbite saying he's gone they got him they will kill you they're obviously very serious about it and i i just think is it time now to say this situation's gotten too dangerous

for me uh it's this is what i'm thinking about a lot. This past week has been extremely difficult for me. And I made the decision to leave Portland last year and returning recently, last week, was a mistake. You're right that this beat is important, but not important enough to die over. So. And you've exposed them, you know, you've, you've accomplished the mission and now it's crossed over to this point where

you're you in particular really are their perceived enemy And it doesn't make it right or wrong. You know, you're just trying to report what they do, but I, I worry about you. I do not want to be running Andy no soundbites saying, Oh my God, it happened. You know, please, please make sure that doesn't happen. Right. To the, to your point, you don't have security. If I went out there for Fox news, they'd have a team of people around me and I'd have a camera and a light and they'd know they couldn't attack me. But the way this reporting has to be done, given the nature of that group, is very different. And on top of all that, Andy, I feel like people like places like The Intercept, in a way, they've put a target on your back, a new target on your back. You know,

that's the organization that Glenn Greenwald founded. And then it morphed into something totally different from what he envisioned. And he left with a great screed about how unfair they'd become and how ideological they'd become. And he'd been going off on them about a month ago because they did this long hit piece on so-called riot squad over at daily caller and it's people like shelby talcott people like yourself richie mcginnis who go into these riots and try to document what's happening for the rest of us and it really does put a target on their back and i feel like you're swept up in that too you know it's just fever pitch right now yeah you know uh people like myself expect um to be targeted by Antifa and all

that. We don't expect other journalists and media organizations to put the target on our backs to make it easier for Antifa. And that's what that intercept piece did. And actually, surprisingly or not, when I was, this past week when I was this past week when I was recovering I saw tweets from a writer self-described journalist named Arun Gupta he wrote Andy Ngo fucked around and found out on his Twitter

in response to what happened to me and then he also wrote another tweet that asked from an operational standpoint why did you let Andy Ngo escape after you caught him? And this is somebody who contributed to The Intercept, as well as Washington Post at one point, and The Guardian, and other places.

So you have really extreme political actors who work in the world of media and journalism, who, you know, it's really like, I don't know what we can do, but it's like, you have these extremists who are in these institutions of press and media and putting out, poisoning the minds of the public with disinformation or disinformation or inciting violence. Yeah. I mean, we, we, there was something you were trending on Twitter as, you know, journalist

Andy Ngo, independent journalist Andy Ngo, and, and the left wingers complained and Twitter changed it to author Andy Ngo. Like they bowed to the mob in calling you that. Meanwhile, journalism has so evolved to the point now where it's, you don't have to be in the nightly news chair as the anchor to be considered a journalist. We have a lot of citizen journalists out there doing really great work. And that one of the reasons I was so surprised Tim Pool came after you is because he's one of those guys, you know, he's been in the middle of a lot of dangerous situations himself as a citizen journalist. You know, he sort of,

he came on the show and talked about how he kind of looked, looked around one day and realized I'm a journalist, but this is what I'm doing. And let me just read, I know you've seen it, so the audience knows, this is what he tweeted about your situation. Quoting, what purpose was served by trying to infiltrate Antifa? Some journalists can't cover certain topics. Women, he says, were barred from reporting from Tahrir Square by some outlets due to violence against women specifically. About you, he says, this was pointless and unbelievably stupid. And then he says, Andy going into the fray with no security, no plan is not reporting. It's tribal spectacle. What do you make of that? Yeah, well, with respect to Tim,

I'll say this. Journalists who go into dangerous areas, who challenge power, who go into war zones and do that type of coverage and put themselves at risk and may be injured, blown up, killed, or have limbs blown off. They need solidarity and support, not condemnation.

And with respect to what he does now um i i wouldn't be able to we wouldn't know much about antifa if myself and other people have the comfort and luxury of just of sitting in a room behind a computer all day so um this work is dangerous and you yes you have to come up with ways to mitigate risk and i was able to outrun the the death threats and all that for two years and it caught up to me but um i wise up and i'm not gonna ever give them that opportunity again to pin me down again. It's make me beg for my life like they did last Friday.

But they, they won't have the Antifa won't have the last word in this. Because if I don't continue to cover them in different ways, then they will have won. So there are other things that I won't disclose at this point of what, you know, I'm brainstorming and all that. But yeah, I take the criticisms that I get in stride. And, you know, at the same time, I stand by my decisions for being on the field because, um, that's, there's no other way. It's crazy to me as you know, in an, under the Trump administration, Trump said the press is

the enemy of the people. Trump went after many reporters can speak to that personally. It was fine. What did he do? He sent out some mean tweets, right? It's like, I think we can handle that. That's not in the same league as what you've just been through or many reporters have. And yet we were lectured by CNN and others about what a terrible time it was to be a journalist and how we have to stand up for safety of the press and just how the environment had gotten so dangerous. Silence from those people in response to this attack on you. In fact, what it felt like to me was there was a pile on against you trying to attack you for, I mean, you know, I don't understand. I know Tim says that you purposefully escalated, escalated risk and danger. I don't see that.

I will say I like Tim. I just, I don't see that you were there. You were with them. That, that is risky. It is dangerous, but it's not like you were poking the bear, you know, showing them who you were getting in their faces, yelling things at them, you know, sort of doing something for a camera to create a situation. I don't see that. Um, and so the same journalists, not Tim, but others who are just so sanctimonious

under the Trump administration, I almost felt like it was gleeful, Andy, the reaction of what happened to you. Yes. Uh, it's very painful to see that. I, um, you you know I wish I could say that seeing all that from peers who do similar work to what I do but publications and networks and all that would never see

me they don't see me as an equal which is why as in 2019 and as now one of the first things is to always say andy's not a journalist and i think they do that because um any decent person can see that attack assault intimidation of a member of the press um is wrong they they want to take away that sympathy that um that outpouring of support that comes to me from both the left and the right so they want to cast me as a agent provocateur uh somebody who i just went through this with laura logan i we just talked about how this disgusting piece that

was written about her in new york magazine after it was about her, the attack on her, the gang rape in Tahrir Square. Part of the piece referenced it. But the actual piece was written after her reporting on Benghazi, which was critical of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And the reporter diminished the gang rape by saying she'd been subjected to some groping. And she was just on this show saying that in her belief was done intentionally to take away the image of her as any sort of a sympathetic figure or somebody who was willing to face down danger to get the story,

who paid a very high price for trying to bring that reporting to the people. I mean, I see a parallel here. Yeah. And it's disgusting, but it's to be expected. All these, it's disgusting, but it's to be expected. It's all a charade about all these people who talk about how press are under attack in the United States and when actual journalists face violence from the far left. And it's not just me, it's many people including people at cnn and other

um liberal um news places you know the silence because it's like there's this effort to make the public not aware of the extremism of the far left you know we have all these organization media um report organizations and reporters are focused full time, full teams, focused full time on the far right and you're not supremacist. You don't have any equivalence of that on the far left. So the because there's so few of us covering it makes the risk to each one of us individually much higher. Yes, that's right. There's no safety in numbers for you. So can you, I saw the pictures of the injuries. I saw your bloody eye. I saw your bloody side. I saw a bloody leg. What, have I missed anything? What can you just tell us about your injuries? Yeah. So primary injury was to the leg. I was given crutches after I was discharged. Actually, after I got off this podcast and heading to a medical appointment for a one-week checkup, there was injury to my wrist as well. From when I was tackled, There was contusions to the back of my head and then bleeding in the eye. So physically, this time has been a lot more painful

and quite unbearable at times than two years ago, even though two years ago was, um, physically, um, much more dangerous than that. I had a brain, uh, brain hemorrhage could have died. Um, so I'm just, uh, I, I left Portland, um, as soon as, uh, uh, I was discharged, uh, and I've just been focused on recovering and, um, trying to remind myself that I'm not alone. Because people who say that I am a provocateur, I'm not a journalist, I'm an agitator, I'm a far-right agitator, all that is meant to isolate me and to make it so that people don't want to express support for me. And, you know, I'd be

lying if I said that all that stuff didn't bother me. It does. Well, and I mean, they've said it before, and you continue to do it. But I would say as somebody who you know, is rooting for you, now might be a good time to do a realistic assessment of the danger and the benefits, because we've gotten so many benefits from you already. We've got the book unmasked, and we can't lose you. They are not worth dying for. I appreciate your courage and your effort, but these losers are not worth dying for. It's just gotten so dangerous for you. It is somebody else's turn to take up this mantle and, you know, local news desks are dying for reporters, Andy, you could be sitting

on a desk. You could be filing reports on like crime on a city hall someplace. Maybe you don't have to go quite to that extreme, but, um, you got to take care of you as they say. And I hope you do. I really do. I have great people around me. They're taking care of me. Good. All right. Well, stay well. And we'll stay on the police to see what happens and whether they're going to make any arrests in this case. It's always good talking to you. Thank you so much. Up next, Zed Jelani. And we're going to start with this piece from Barry Weiss's blog on, and I quote, what happens when doctors can't tell the truth, essentially because of wokeism. That's right after this. Zed, how are you? Great, Megan. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for being here.

Oh, no problem. I'm a big fan of the show. I listen to it all the time. So I'm happy to be here. Oh, I'm honored. All right. So let me just start where I just left off, which is I just spoke to Andy Ngo about the attack that he suffered at the hands of Antifa out in Portland and the reaction from the vast majority of the Twitterati, which was basically, oh, you're no journalist, you asked for it, and too bad on you. The same crowd that got so upset about mean Trump tweets doesn't seem to much care that this guy now twice

has been beaten to a pulp by this group. Your thoughts on it? Yeah, I mean, I think it's sad. I talked to Andy actually after this happened the first time because a few years ago, he was also attacked by some folks in Antifa and Portland. And I think he was hurt so badly that he had to have repeated doctor visits, brain scans, things like that. And that kind of brutal assault over politics, I mean, that's not the kind of thing that you generally would expect to happen in the United States, right? It seems like something you'd see in maybe

like a civil war or, you know, the Weimar Republic or something like that, right? And yeah, I think so many people have been warped by the algorithms of these social media apps through, you know, Silicon Valley to basically see people who disagree with them politically as actual combatants or enemies in some kind of conflict. And so I think the exact same thing had happened and he had a different political orientation. People would disapprove of it. They would see it as that's one of ours. It's not one of theirs. And that's generally how we view conflicts in an actual war, like in a shooting conflict. It's not generally how we viewed politics, but unfortunately so much of our politics

has turned virtually sectarian, right? Like we have different tribes and they're at war with each other. And hey, if it happened to one of theirs, it's not the same thing as if it happened to one of ours. And I'll say this about Andy, you know, I think I disagree with him about, I don't know, maybe 75 or 80% of the things that he says are rights,

but that's no excuse for hurting anybody. And the only human response to that is to say that's unacceptable and the people who are doing it should be arrested. And it doesn't matter what the political orientation of the journalist or of the human being who they're hurting is. And it's sad that so many people, I think, have become what they despise. They haven't realized it, but that's unfortunately what happened here. That tribalism infects everything. And this is one of the things that I feel like has bound you and me together,

both being on the advisory board for FAIR, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which is a group trying to push back against this insanity. But the tribalism grows by the day and it's not just K through 12 education or universities or sports or news media. There was an extraordinary piece in on Barry Weiss's substack. And she it's sort of, you know, it's her column, it's her it's her place to write now

having left the New York Times, I say, like, you know, just sort of like Daenerys Targaryen with everything on fire, She was great. She just lit it on fire and walked out. Now she's killing it on Substack and she'll turn her column over to people for reporting or pieces of their own. And she did to Katie Herzog. Katie Herzog, who actually has come on the show as she's a co-host of Blocked and Reported with Jesse Signal. And they're both great. They're fun. Well, she's, I think, kind of like you, correct me if I'm wrong, ideologically sort of of the left, but intolerant of the intolerance being born on issues when it comes to identity. And so she does this long piece. It's 17 pages. I read it this morning on Barry Substack about the medical community. And it's titled What Happens When Doctors Can't Tell the Truth. Going on is that about how doctors aren't allowed to push back against

unsound or quote shoddy as hell publications about, you know, alleged bias in the medical community. That's just basically being made up. They can't push back on it because they're going to get fired. They can't push back on affirmative action, which even a majority of black people don't support in the medical community because they'll get fired. And she's got all these examples of how now even the young doctors are saying openly that their plan is to confront their patients on their perceived racism. And they may even prioritize people for treatment based on the color of their skin. Yeah. I mean, this is actually one of the, I would say, biggest civilizational threats,

right? Which is, this is the cornerstone of, I think, any society is to be able to have open and free inquiry about any number of topics. And I think it's very, very important in STEM in particular, because these are the people who are designing our vaccines to end pandemics. People who are designing our airplanes that fly around and cars we drive around in and computers we use and technology, they have to be able to pursue questions with an open mind and not foreclose avenues of inquiry based on any kind of political orientation or religious belief or any kind of taboo. And I think once these fields start being hemmed in and being told, you know, you can't ask that question. No, you can't come to that conclusion. Even if all the data shows you that it comes in this direction, you just, you can't come to the conclusion because it's not acceptable. We're going to start seeing people, I think, actively

work against their own expertise, you know, and work against, in some cases, their own conscience. And I think something like what was happening with the vaccine, I mean, we know that a virus does not discriminate by quote-unquote racial groups because race is not a biological fact, right? It's a social construct. Of course, depending on the geography and the region, some of the things that may actually impact whether or not you're susceptible to a virus may be correlated to race, but sure, they could be correlated to whether you're Catholic or Protestant, whether you're Southern or Northern, you know, it could be correlated by gender, but that doesn't mean that we should start using those single categories to start distributing a vaccine rather than looking

in a more, I think, specific and nuanced way as to the factors that were actually driving how people were being infected and how they were falling ill from the virus. But I think that once you have the obsession on a single variable like race, you start blowing up its importance, right? And I think when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And that's, of course, not only in medicine, but it's across our entire country right now. I think every field is being pressured to center their work around certain racial narratives, which I think, honestly, often just don't hold up to scrutiny when you put them under a magnifying glass. But again, if you create a culture that tells you you're not allowed to even question those narratives or you're not supposed to be, you can't even get to that conclusion in the first place that the narratives are flawed.

Right. And it's one thing and it's bad enough in news media where we're supposed to be brokers of information. But in medicine, you know, in medicine, we really need people to be able to speak honestly and openly. Her piece talks about one of the publications that many of these doctors who are apparently meeting quietly, secretly one time a month on Zoom to, it's like a support group for those who are concerned about the spread of deeply illiberal ideology. One of the articles that they were taking issue with was a quote, black newborns are more likely to die when looked after by white doctors. They were saying it was so methodologically flawed that it was impossible to extrapolate any conclusions from this thing at all. But no one wanted to criticize it. And an article like that is the bar is very low for it to get published.

And articles that would push back against it, the bar is very high. And then when you have a doctor like this Norman Wang mentioned in the Katie piece, he's a, from the university of Pittsburgh cardiologist, try to say, Hey, maybe not everything needs to be viewed through the lens of race. Uh, they get punished. So this guy, he published a paper in the journal of the American heart association, critical of diversity initiatives in cardiology. He looked at 50 years of data. He argued that affirmative action has failed to meaningfully increase the number, the percentage of black and Hispanic clinicians or improve patient outcomes. And he argued for race neutral policies saying, quote, long term, long term academic solutions and excellence should not be sacrificed for short-term demographic optics. Well, Norman went right into the buzzsaw of our social justice press and social justice young folks in medicine. And soon thereafter, the editor-in-chief of that publication issued an apology and retracted it. Apparently only two pieces have ever even been retracted. One was just totally medically unsound. And now his piece, um, this Dr. Wang has been removed from his position as a director of fellowship program in a clinical cardiac

electrophysiology at university of Pittsburgh. He's been banned from having any contact with students being told his classroom is quote inherently unsafe because of his piece. I could go on. She has a bunch of examples in here where doctors are publicly flogged, punished. They lose positions just for pushing back on this obsessive focus on race. Look, this is actually very important. But I think one thing that everyone has to remember is that the field of science relies on people sort of attacking preexisting notions, the consensus, the status quo. Science is entirely about taking a hypothesis and trying to rip it apart, right? That's how we advance in the field.

When you're in a science classroom, they're telling you, okay, this is all the things we believe now, but what's wrong with this? And all the students get to work to trying to figure out how to change it, how to fix it. It's never supposed to be that you arrived at a conclusion. The conclusion is unassailable, right? If you did that, scientific progress would basically end. And I think that it's just terrifying that there are people who think that they basically

they possess the truth in an almost religious fashion. And it can't be questioned in any way, shape or form because it's actually anti-scientific. It's actually anti-intellectual to do that. Now, of course, there should be standards in terms of how you're doing that. And that's why we have a peer review process when we publish things in academic journals, for instance. And yeah, there is shoddy science out there. But the way to tackle that is, again, to question it, to go through that process, to lay out the evidence, the facts, the data. If you're suppressing that, you're preventing science from working, right? Because science is always a process. It's never going to be a time when we reach the ultimate truth and then

we've got it, right? And there's no reason to ever to check it against any facts or do any more new research. And when you try to subsume everything to an ideology, that's exactly what happens. And I think it's a wonderful piece. I haven't gotten all the way through it, but everything Katie writes is wonderful. So I would definitely check it out if the listeners haven't. Well, and it sort of dovetails nicely into this explosive piece of reporting just out from Vanity Fair on whether COVID came from a lab in Wuhan, China, as opposed to a wet market where some random animal just naturally wound up there and spread it to a human. The latter theory has absolutely no proof. They've been able to find absolutely no evidence and no animal that

would back it up. And yet there's a lot of evidence for a lab leak. Now, the thing that we haven't been allowed to talk about, to your point, we're not allowed to talk about it for the past year. Silicon Valley has decided that is a quote conspiracy theory that must not be discussed. And more and more now, I mean, we had Josh Rogin on from The Washington Post who wrote a great book about this. There was a New York Times reporter who wrote a long piece about this. Now, Vanity Fair. I mean, I hate to be so, I don't know, deferential to the or complimentary of mainstream publications getting in on this. But the truth is, we need that in order for people to start taking this stuff seriously, because if it's in right wing echo chambers, people don't listen, you know, so you need a

wide swath of the public to listen. And this report. I mean, it's a it's on fire. It basically says the State Department employees were told explicitly early on not to explore the thought that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is one of the only three places in the world where they study bat coronaviruses, that their gain of function research, specifically how you take the bat and make the coronavirus even more dangerous for humans, you know, ostensibly to help humans survive it if it gets unleashed. But, you know, there's a question about that. They were specifically told, don't go there. Don't explore it because it's going to bring unwelcome attention to the United States government's funding of it. And here's just a detail from the piece. Officials at the meeting were advised by Christopher Park, director of state's biological policy staff, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government's own role in Pandora's box, according to four former state officials. It smelled like a cover up, said one state employee who's on the record, Thomas Donano, speaking to Vanity Fair.

He wrote a memo saying staff from his bureau were warned not to pursue this investigation into the origin of COVID-19 because it would, quote, open a can of worms. And it goes on to say we were we were funding gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. And the very doctors who benefited from it, who did it, who supported it, who devoted their life's work to it, were the ones who later orchestrated article after article in the press saying anything that says it came from a lab is a conspiracy, something that was supported by Silicon Valley, shutting all of us up for a year. Yeah, I mean, this was this was a prime example of all the different like pathologies that are involved in the media right now coming together, you know, to suppress, I think, what was a legitimate line of inquiry and a legitimate story.

On the one hand, I think so many people in the media, you know, they see themselves intentionally or maybe even subconsciously as, I think, arms of the Democratic Party, right? And I say this as someone who has worked in many Democratic Party-aligned institutions over the course of my life, but it's galling and it's shocking and surprising to the extent which has happened. And I think when you saw early on people like Senator Tom Cotton, who's a conservative Republican from Arkansas, raising the possibility that there was a lab leak. You had Mike Pompeo, who was Secretary of State under President Trump, raising that possibility. I think there was a reflexive reaction among a lot of reporters saying, you know, that can't be right. You know, Trump, if it's Trump, if it's the Republicans saying this, no, they're wrong. We don't want to be seen as on their side. Again, they're saying they see themselves as in an activist role or an activist position, right, taking a position rather poorly on a lot of what the United States was funding, right? And a lot of what doctors and public health professionals and scientific researchers here in the United States had invested in and decided to pursue and to forego. So I think that the reality is that we had just a massive failing of, I would say, not just the institutions of the media,

maybe even the culture of the media. Because what you'll notice is that all of a sudden, this is like an okay thing to discuss, right? Like Facebook actually unbanned people from talking about the possibility this was like a man-made virus, right, recently. It's so infuriating. That is so infuriating.

Who is Mark Zuckerberg to tell us we can't talk about this? It shouldn't have to be that when the leader of your political faction, in this case, Joe Biden, decides, OK, it's an OK line of inquiry, or when Mark Zuckerberg decides, OK, then OK, then it's OK. It's OK if the facts lead you there, right? It's OK because we need to know where it came from, because that'll help us prevent future pandemics like this in the future. And also it may bring accountability to the Chinese government or to the U.S. researchers or the institutions and bureaucracies that set up this funding and this research. That's why we should have been pursuing this line of inquiry. And yet it seemed to be foreclosed entirely for political and institutional, you know, for turf protection reasons, right? Yeah. Well, that's what's so messed up about it because it is not a new phenomenon to have partisans or parties who have done wrong, try to cover it up and try to mislead the public about, you know, the true origins of whatever the

problem winds up being. It is a new relatively phenomenon to have the media join in on the cover up soup to nuts, you know, across the board, except for a couple of random politicians or publications. And when you read this piece, what you see is that there's this guy, he was featured on the 60 Minutes report on this whole thing after the WHO came out with its BS report saying, oh, we think it didn't come from the lab. And even the head of the WHO had to say, well, you know, we should keep investigating because the people in his piece, the guy, the people who are running that report were totally conflicted. They're in bed with this Wuhan lab. And what the Vanity Fair piece shows is that in particular, this guy, Peter Daszak,

who's a zoologist, who's this is his life work trying to show that these viruses come out of bats. They come out of pantalons, whatever you call them, these animals and go directly to humans. This guy had been had had had had a ton of money from us and other people to to help with this gain of function research and so on. This guy was running around organizing the articles to say it came from an animal. It came from an animal. It came from an animal. And Vanity Fair has proof that Daszak and another scientist, this guy, Dr. Ralph Barak, who's from UNC, who had collaborated with the Wuhan lab lady, they call her the bat lady.

She's the expert on these viruses and may have in fact been the person who inadvertently or otherwise released this one. They'd been collaborating with her. That they organized this statement early on in the Lancet saying it didn't come from a lab. And there's an email that reads and I'm quoting from Vanity Fair. You, me and him should not sign this statement in the Lancet. So it has some distance from us and therefore it doesn't work in a counterproductive way. This guy was looking for a validation of his life's work because if it was a lab leak, says Vanity Fair, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science. had been made more dangerous by human beings with funding from the United States.

They wanted to cover their asses, their life's work, and the press bought it hook, line, and sinker. That right there is exactly what the problem is, right? Institutional actors always have some sort of incentive to kind of shape a narrative to pursue their particular interests or objectives, right? The news media shouldn't have that, right? The news media should have one objective primarily. Of course, there's always going to be activist journalists. There's going to be more partisan outlets, but primarily their objectives should be to seek the truth,

right? The implications of the truth are secondary. If it makes Republicans look good, okay, fine. That's not the point. That's not what your objective as a journalist should be to decide who looks good or who looks bad. If it has certain implications for researchers in the United States who are tied up with China and tied up with this field of research, fine. But that shouldn't be your first objective. Your first objective should be to find out what's true and report it out to the public, right? It shouldn't be to cover somebody's turf. It shouldn't be to defend somebody's interests or objectives. And it shouldn't be to take a partisan side. And yet all that was happening and it was happening in concert and aligned with the very people here in the United States. And honestly, a lot of people in the Chinese government who I think have the same exact interest, right? And that's what corrupted this process. And I think we've seen that exact same storyline, that exact same confluence of factors play out in story after story after story over the past few years, which has been really, really bad biased. Yeah, of course. They thought it was racist to say it might've been released from a Chinese lab.

That's what the media does. This is so much more pernicious than that because there was an incuriosity, an unwillingness to challenge this piece in the Lancet, which said, no, not from a lab and anything to the contrary is conspiracy theory, right? Like something, remember Dr. Fauci joined on and that and the same guy, Peter Daszak,

sent him a note. We now know, thanks to the BuzzFeed FOIA request that got Fauci's emails, he sent him a note saying, hey, thanks, Anthony. Thanks so much for saying that. Meanwhile, we were being fed misinformation. But my point is, over 3 million people are dead. We're going on 600,000 people dead in the United States. All the people who have lost loved ones deserve answers on how this deadly thing became such a major year of our lives, people who have lost businesses, people whose children still have masks on their face and people who have been fearful to leave their apartments, right, because they're immunocompromised, what have you. They deserve answers. A press that had

a shred of decency or honesty would have been fighting for them for real answers for a year. Instead, they took these broad brush assertions that you couldn't say that and bowed at the altar of Silicon Valley to snuff out any intellectual curiosity, nevermind investigative reporting. It's a travesty. It is a travesty. And it also, you know, it also demonstrates another factor, which is that I think that there are corners of the media who don't entirely understand what expertise is, right? So like the Lancet letter, for instance, right? Oh, it's signed by a bunch of people who have some kind of medical background, research background. They have fancy degrees, so on and so forth.

They must be correct, right? That's not really how it works. As we were discussing earlier, science is a process, right? There's been plenty of times when there was a legitimate scientific consensus that was blown apart by a new discovery, right? That's not really how it works. As we were discussing earlier, science is a process, right? There's been plenty of times when there was a legitimate scientific consensus that was blown apart by a new discovery, right? The fact that a bunch of people with some form of clout or assigned expertise can sign on to something and express their will doesn't mean that they're automatically right. We saw that during COVID-19 when you had, we had two, people forget this, we actually had two sets of mass protests during COVID-19. The you had, we had two, people forget this, but we actually had two sets of mass

protests during COVID-19. The first came from the right. Those were the anti-lockdown protests, right? They were conservative libertarian protesters. We saw article after article about how those protests are dangerous, how maybe they could be spreading COVID outside, blah, blah, blah. Then when we had the protest after George Floyd's death, from the left, we had so many people who are medical professionals signing letters saying, oh, this is totally okay. This is completely fine.

The media, you know, there's no risk to this. The fact that these people were signing these letters was not necessarily an expression of their expertise, right? They have interests themselves. They have ideologies themselves, right?

Yes, exactly. This guy, Dasik, had a very clear conflict of interest that any reporter could see had they bothered to look into it. Funding from the NIH and this nonprofit called Eco Health Alliance had parceled out grant money from the U.S. government. And Eco Health is run by Peter Dasik, this zoologist who helped organize that Lancet piece early on, saying this came from an animal and anything else is a conspiracy theory. Daszak to the end featured, you know, one of the guys handpicked by China and the WHO to go over to China to tell us once and for all whether this came from a lab or from an animal. Surprise! He said it was an

animal. And we're still listening to this guy who was manipulating us by trying to get well-known scientists to put their names on that Lancet thing to try to keep some distance between him and the organization behind the piece. Meanwhile, he was compromised. He, his organization, had been funding gain-of- function research. For all I know, this guy's been coordinating with Bat Lady on how to make it as dangerous and deadly as humanly possible and had an oh shit moment right before he organized that piece so that he didn't have the death of three plus million people on his hands. Yeah. And that's something that we have to recognize and see, I think, in every story that I try to write as a journalist, is I try to think what the person's interests, their objectives,

their ideology are, and how those could influence what they're telling me and how I'm interpreting the facts, right? And I think that when people stop doing that, when they start deferring to a group of bureaucrats or a group of experts because they think, oh, they have all the answers, maybe they do have a lot of answers, but they also have their own personal objectives, right? And once we stop seeing that layer of conflicts of interest, then we're very easily manipulated. I think we're very prone to be manipulated. Well, and one of the things that concerns me is, and I tip my hat to Vanity Fair. I really do. It's a great piece of reporting.

And it's not the first, as I point out, you know, people like Josh Rogin and others have been reporting on it too, but this one's an explosive piece by any measure. But one thing I do have issues with is they seem to spend a fair amount of time excusing the lack of interest by the press based on Trump's toxic racism. Trump's toxic racism contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence, quoting here, in the United States. And that's one possible answer to this all-important question remaining largely off limits until the spring of 2021. I mean, I'm sorry, Zedd, but bullshit. I'm not taking a position on Trump or any of the stuff he said or didn't say. It's no excuse.

You don't just say, oh, it's racist to say it came from a Wuhan lab and I'm going to be on the side of the anti-racists as a journalist and not do my job. That is not an OK excuse. One, it's not it's not an OK excuse in any in any factor. You know, if no matter who says something if it's if it's true or if it's worth investigating it's worth investigating right it doesn't it it has no bearing on you know if trump says water is wet i can't i can't automatically disagree just because uh someone who i maybe i have some political disagreements what says it uh but second i don't

know their timeline is even necessarily correct uh in early in 2020, I don't think Trump was actually even proposing this as a theory. I think it was coming more from Tom Cotton. It's coming from some sort of populist right-wing smaller publications and outlets. I think blaming Trump on it is almost kind of lazy. They don't even know the timeline of the events in and of themselves. Actually, at the beginning of the pandemic, at they did quote Trump was downplaying. They quoted Trump at some press conference, and I don't have the date in front of me, saying something like it came from Wuhan lab, but I can't say anything more. So I don't know the date that he did that. I think a little bit later in the spring, he was getting some intelligence that was saying that. So

he mentioned it, but he really did just mention it. He didn't he didn't even pursue it that much, really. And it would be remarkable if if Trump just mentioning this means it's automatically verboten, right? That would just be, that's extreme journalistic malfeasance. By the way, so my crack team has just forwarded me. You're right. Trump and his allies rallied around the Wuhan lab theory early on in the pandemic as he sought to direct blame for the pandemic on China during a White House briefing on April 18th, 2020. Trump said this. You're right on your timing. Coming up next, we're going to get into Silicon Valley censorship and why Zed thinks the tide may turn on that and how he thinks we need to turn it and specifically who's working on the side of

the angels to try to rein in Mark Zuckerberg from putting tape over your mouth. So we'll get to that next. But first, we're going to do a feature we have here on the MK show called Asked and Answered, where we answer some of our listener questions. And Steve Krakauer, our EP, has got today's question of the day. Hey, Steve. Hey, Megan. Yeah, this one came to us from questions at devilmaycaremedia.com, where anyone who's listening can get their question answered as well. Like this one, who is from Anna Maria Petrov, although it actually really comes from Anna Maria's sister. She says that she likes to listen to the podcast with her husband and her sister, but her sister wanted to know that, why do you hate Chelsea Clinton even more

than Hillary? This was something you mentioned, I think, in the episode with Andrew Gutman. And she says, she's curious. This is not the most important question in the universe, but she wouldn't have asked it if it wasn't for her sister's curiosity. So spill the beans, she says. I got I got thoughts, Anna Maria and sister. I do, because I don't understand why this person has a voice at all. Why is anybody listening to what the hell Chelsea Clinton has to say? What has she ever accomplished that makes her somebody we should be listening to? Right? I mean, honestly, so she is the daughter of a president and a presidential nominee. Okay, that doesn't entitle her to know anything that doesn't qualify her as an authority. And the problem is, she acts like she is one and so does the media,

they also treat her like she has some sort of authority, which she doesn't. Now, the mother, I get it. You may not like the mother's politics, but at least Hillary Clinton has had a lifetime of accomplishment. You know, she was a very successful lawyer. She went to Yale. She became a United States senator. She became the secretary of state. She's done some things. You may not like the things on paper, and there's plenty that I don't, but she is a woman of accomplishment. You can't deny that. Chelsea Clinton's done nothing. She's done nothing. And yet she's out there. She's a part of the cancellation brigade, which is where we first sort of got crossed with each other. I'll give you one example. When I was at NBC, I interviewed Alex Jones and Chelsea Clinton

led the campaign to have me canceled. She wanted me to get fired. She wanted my show to be boycotted because I interviewed Alex Jones. Are you kidding me? I mean, her mother has actually made decisions that have had people killed. Alex Jones hasn't done that. And yet she's out there defending her mom. But I can't interview Alex Jones as a news person. Does she understand how journalism works? Oh, wait, she doesn't. You see, Chelsea Clinton worked at the Today Show for a short time. Why? Because of a family connection, not because of any talent, which she has none. It's just none of. I'm sorry. I know she took a lot of beatings when she was young for her looks and Saturday Night Live. That wasn't nice.

Maybe she's still bitter because of that experience, but I don't really care. You should grow up, get over it and go get some real credentials. Do something on your own before you start casting the cancellation net, projecting yourself as an authority, because your parents' accomplishments and fame say nothing about you. Okay. And that today is the lovely episode of Asked and Answered. I don't know, Steve. I feel like this is a place for me to be my meanest self. So are we should not book Chelsea Clinton then, I guess? Should we just cross her off?

Oh, my God. Didn't I tell you? I told you I have a perfect record of never of never booking her and I don't plan on breaking it. I if she came on the show, I'd have nothing to ask her. Honestly, what what's in that head? I got no idea. I guess she married somebody very have nothing to ask her. Honestly, what's in that head? I got no idea.

She married somebody very rich. Good for her. I mean, I might want to ask her how she felt when her dad was stooping the White House intern. That's interesting. I want to know what she thinks about Ghislaine Maxwell at her wedding. Oh, good point. Right. Did you look into that at all? Like her with the young girls and the massages? I just I'm so tired of this know nothing mouthing off about everything she can on Twitter and then trying to play herself like she's Kate Middleton, who's above it all. She's not Kate Middleton. She's in it. She's a bomb thrower and she has no basis to be in there slinging those arrows until she's gone off and actually done something. And frankly, you know, before Ivanka Trump got to the White House and got all the important roles that Trump

gave her, I would have said a lot about her, too. I don't I don't dislike Ivanka the way I dislike Chelsea. But I also wondered what the hell Ivanka was doing at the G7, mingling with these leaders as though she belonged there. She didn't. Right. Like, I appreciate that she did some stuff while working for Trump that helped people. And I'll give her that. But that didn't make her upon entry into the White House a qualified person for that just because she ran some business that focused on women's clothing. I don't think you have to be supportive of these outsized roles for these daughters or children of politicians just because you're pro-woman, right? Like, look, I could get started on Meghan McCain too, but at least Meghan McCain has gone on to actually make something of herself in journalism. You know, she talks about her dad a lot, a lot. I understand that for me, I would confess it's a little too much. Um, but she's been out there offering opinions based on fact and can, we'll argue

her point on the view in a way that's persuade. What does Chelsea Clinton done? Nothing. She failed. She failed on the one role she got because of her dad, which was the Today Show role. That's it. Okay. I'm sorry, but I'm showing my really snarky shot side today, but I'm feeling it. So there you go. Asked and answered, Steve. How do you like it? We're just alienating people left and right. I love it. I know this has been one of your things, you know, the growth in the power of Silicon Valley, which to me, it's almost like the opioid crisis where, you know, so many millions of Americans fell into it without realizing they were part of something bigger. You know, they just thought they got addicted to a drug. And I think that's kind of what's happened

for millions of Americans when it comes to big tech. They didn't realize that they were getting addicted to it, that they were being manipulated by it, that their every decision, that everything they've purchased over the past 10 years, they've purchased because big tech put it in front of them. And now one of the good things about the past presidential cycle is,

I think a lot of people were forced to realize it. You know, they're looking around and they see the swamp around them now in the same way you can see, oh, opioid crisis. That was a thing. That wasn't just me. That was a thing. We see it now with big tech.

And yet the danger hasn't been corrected. You know, the first step is awareness, but nothing's been done to curb the danger. Yeah, I think that there is greater awareness, though, as you said, there is a growing consciousness among the American public, and I think publics around the world, that tech is a monopoly power, right? We have maybe four or five companies that control most of the communications across the world. You know, we're talking about Google, Facebook, you know, Apple, to a lesser extent, Twitter, but of course it's very powerful, as the former president showed.

These companies are basically controlling access to information and how we get the information. Because, you know, I'm more or less a free speech absolutist, so I often get dragged into debates about speech. And, you know, I want people to be able to speak their mind, consenting adults to be able to speak their mind to each other, no matter what they say. But actually it's, it's a, it's a bigger problem that because it's an economic problem, right?

Like something like the majority of digital advertising in some countries now is like controlled by Facebook. And that actually feeds into the speech problem because it means people have a very hard time starting up alternatives to these companies because, you know, Amazon web services controls an enormous amount of your web storage and they can just take off an app. They can take down Parler. They can take down the Twitter alternative basically on a whim with zero deprocess or zero accountability if they want to. And this economic power, I think, is what these companies are really scared that we'll be paying attention to. Because I think Facebook's current strategy for dealing with criticism is saying, okay, we'll censor more. We'll slow down the New York Post

during a crucial election where the Democrats are likely to win. We'll take down these QAnon pages. We'll suppress vaccine theories that maybe end up, or virus theories that maybe will end up being true later. Who knows? They're happy to do all that because then they feel like it'll help them avoid regulation. Because what they really fear, I think, is actually being treated the same way that I think big telecom companies were treated in the past, or oil companies, or railroad companies, which is that they were actually broken up. And I think that the most insightful people about this are actually on the right and the left. I think Elizabeth Warren in early 2019 was talking about breaking them up. And I think now Josh Hawley on the right is speaking, I think, very charismatically and incorrectly about how this is primarily an economic problem.

They built an attention economy that monetizes basically us staring at screens all day, scrolling through screens all day, us fighting with each other. Mark Zuckerberg internally in meetings shows a graph where no matter what their prohibited content is, content that goes right up against that line always does the best because his product is basically created to make people fight with each other, right? Or to argue or to be as incendiary with each other as possible. That's how the algorithms are gamed and that's how the product is designed. And no matter how much censoring they'll do, it'll always be conflict-driven products because they need your eyes on those screens.

They need you addicted to those products, right? And I think that it is possible to have communication platforms that don't do that. Open source, digital platforms. I think the post office could probably run one that just shares photos with your family members or addresses or helps you meet people you knew in high school

that wasn't built around algorithms that are there to addict you and make you fight with other people and be contentious. And I think that also small independent companies would be happy to step up and make those platforms should the overwhelming monopoly power of the current ones be reduced through antitrust action, through legislative solutions about breaking them up and through imposing things like interoperability, through common carriage laws. I think it's within the power of global governments to do something about this problem. It's always been within the power. It's just we haven't had the consciousness to really look at them as a problem until I think barely the past four, three or four years. And now that we do have that consciousness,

I do think both the right and the left in this country at some point will converge on some type of solution, the same way we tackled the railroad, the same way we tackled oil. These are the monopoly powers of our time. They are among the most powerful corporations on planet earth. And they are monopolizing the most basic thing, which is our human attention and our human connection with each other. And should that really be controlled by Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg? Should these weird kind of techno-libertarian bros out in Silicon Valley really be controlling the minds of billions of people? I don't think so. Have you seen Jack Dorsey? I mean, there's no way that man should be in charge of my life.

And it's sad because when I listen to you talk about it, it does remind me, I confess, of my time in cable news. I mean, one of the reasons I left cable was I was so sick of the outrage machine. I remember saying when I launched the show at NBC, I want my audience to feel something, something other than outrage. You know, that was really, it was a simple goal. And that's what the cable news industry is. I mean, I'm just going to be honest. It is. It's to stoke fear and outrage. And that's what makes people tune in. And that's what makes the numbers pop. And it's a cynical, cynical business. But at least cable news, you know, it's not necessarily in your pocket. You know, people don't generally watch cable on their iPhones. But the iPhone is there with you all the time. Social media is there tapping you on the shoulder all the time. And, you know, that, that movie, the social dilemma shows, you know, sort of a fictional version of where the brain at Facebook is like, Hey, he's awake. Hey, he's looking, Oh, you know, pump something onto the phone. That'll lure him on and keep him engaged for hours and hours.

And when you see it like that, you recognize those behaviors in yourself, right? You just went on to check the time. You were just going to look at an email or you were going to make a note before you know it, three hours have passed and you're all over Amazon ordering shit you don't need. And like on Instagram, looking at pictures that are not real. Yeah. And I think the really important thing to recognize here is that, you know, these things are all designed to be as profitable as possible. And that's why they're designed around addiction. That's why there's designed around conflict. I think we can have perfectly, we can certainly have very similar services that connect people from across the world. I think it's wonderful that I can talk to you. I can talk to someone who's living in India or Malaysia or Kenya. It's awesome that we have the technology to do that. But it doesn't have to be used this way. It doesn't have to be owned by people who are interested in basically addicting us, right? It doesn't have to be that way. I think it just happened to develop that way because of the

natural progression. It's like the corner drug dealer. Exactly. Exactly. And every new product that we've had that revolutionized society has at some point come up against public regulation. For instance, automobiles. Automobiles used to be much more dangerous. We used to have far more people dying in car crashes every year before Ralph Nader came around and wrote Unsafe at Any Speed and started actually getting regulations for these things. Of course, regulation can be done poorly, and we should look very closely at any time

the government regulates anything. But I do think that when you have corporations that are this powerful, they're profoundly impacting public life. They can't say, okay, Mark Zuckerberg can't say he just owns a website somewhere that's like 12 people are on it. It's like a web forum about flowers or something. And it's a big government imposition to have the government come in and inspect it and do things with it.

No, these are services with billions of people. They are literally, in some cases, they are driving newspapers out of business with their monopolies over advertising. They have profound public implications with the work they do. Once a company becomes so big that its actions are impacting the lives

of billions of people, I think those billions of people have a right to go to their governments and petition for inspections, for accountability and for regulations when it's warranted. And I think it is warrant am an absolutist, but I'm close. And what you'll get, I recently did a seminar with some students at a very, very well-known, one of the top three universities in the country. And they accept that words can be violence. They accept that speech needs to be censored because it's hurtful, that hate speech shouldn't be constitutional, and that Facebook, Twitter, every other publication for that matter, ought to be cracking down on hurtful speech and certainly on speech like, let's go to the Capitol and fight for our rights.

You know, not like let's let's, you know, take guns and shoot people right now, which is much closer to actual incitement. But, you know, stuff that doesn't actually right now currently cross a legal line. They want it to. And I'm concerned that the young generation is so willing to censor speech that they really believe that words are violence. I mean, it is concerning to me. And I think the two individuals who wrote the book about this are Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, you know, the coddling of the American mind. Really brilliant guys. I've done a little bit of work with them in the past. And what I would say is that I think there's a real danger that you have more and more Americans who simply don't know how to really interact with

ideas they don't agree with. For me, it almost comes naturally because I was in a weird position. I grew up the son of immigrants, a religious minority, a racial minority in the deep South, outside Atlanta, at a time when the South was going through a lot of changes. And I would say, I don't know, 80%, 90% of my friends were super conservative, probably very problematic by today's standards. This was when Georgia was in a big fight over the Confederate battle flag was our state flag and Zalmilo was trying to get it changed. And like, I think I just had so much interaction with people I didn't agree with on various things that it, it just kind of lowered my, my anxiety levels around it. Right. Like I had so much immersion, like when, when psychologists work with people who have anxiety disorders, the way the, the main, uh, angle of attack, the main treatment is basically slowly is basically slowly exposing them or immersing them in the things that give them anxiety.

Not all at once, but over time, right? The same thing with getting over an allergy. Exactly. It's actually very similar medically. So the same as that thing applies to politics, right? If you have people, I think many of these people who you're talking about, if I had to guess, they probably come from very well-to-do families who tend to curate their social circle, tend to curate who they live around, who they work with, the ideology probably they're exposed to in their homes. In that circumstance, if you've never been exposed to anything that's remotely different from you, you're going to freak out when you hear it or you

see it, right? To me, it's not like a huge deal to hear somebody say something that's like a little bit racist or offensive. Like, yeah, I've heard it a million times growing up. You know, people would tease me. I'd tease them back. It would be rough housing. You know, I'd see something. It's very, very normal, particularly for people from working class backgrounds or like middle income backgrounds where they're moving around a lot, exposed to a wide group of people to see that and to understand it, to internalize it and to not catastrophize it, right? To not blow it up into something much bigger than it is. And I think many of the students here talking to you, if I had to guess, they just haven't had that exposure, that healthy amount of exposure. And I know some people are probably going to freak

out hearing me say that I should be exposed to someone saying something racist, blah, blah, blah. Actually, yeah, you probably should be exposed to some mild, you should be exposed to some mild adversity in your life because it'll help you deal with things in the future. Right. It's, it's literally impossible to go with, go throughout your entire life and no one will ever say anything ugly to you. Right. Maybe it's your royalty or something. I've told a story about the head of school at my daughter's school was saying I was telling her she needed to work on the girls grit because they have so much diversity and sensitivity training that she needs to remember at some point they may meet somebody who hasn't had the training. Not everybody is getting the training that they're getting at this school. And she said, you should teach that class.

And I said, I'll do it, but I'm going to show up in an inappropriate Halloween costume. My dream is to make all the people show up, the kids, whatever. They all have to sign waivers saying abuse will follow and I accept it. And then I'm going to call them the worst names I could possibly think of. I'm going to say terrible things to them. I'm going to offend them at every turn. And you know what they're going to learn? They can handle it. They're fine.

Exactly. Of course, you know, there are times when this turns into like sustained harassment or bullying. And I think, you know, school should step in in that circumstance and so on and so forth. But yeah, the mere, you know, explication, the mere expression of certain ideas or words shouldn't really drive people to depression or anxiety or freaking out or crying or so on and so forth. That is really a fairly new pathology, I think, in the United States. And it's really an upper class one, again, because I think the people who are experiencing it in the most harsh ways just have very little interaction with the rest of the world. Like if you go into any like low income community in America, like, you know, I've done a lot of work with the homeless

and volunteering. I've done work with immigrants. I just, you know, keep myself busy. You're going to expose yourself to all kinds of things. And generally it's people not even trying to be offensive to each other, but they just come from different cultural backgrounds, right? And they don't have the same ideas about what's, what's offensive and what isn't. And over time, I think you learn. There's no tolerance for any amount of discomfort now. Right. I mean, like not like the, the, the story this week with the tennis player, Naomi Osaka, like she's being,

there was a piece by Jamel Hill, like talking about her empowerment of women. And, you know, because this woman who made $55 million last year, just last year alone, nevermind the years prior, she's the number,

I think number four best paid athlete in America behind like Federer, LeBron. I mean, she's in a very in America behind like Federer, LeBron. I mean, she's in a very nice class of athletes earning earning income because she doesn't want to talk to the press. They get in her head because they ask her questions about how she's not so good on clay. That's literally the complaint that she's not so good on clay and they ask about it. It's not that she gets bullied because of her race, her gender. They call her mean. It's none of that. And yet we're supposed to be looking at her saying, right on, she stood

up for mental health. In this case, silence would be violence. No, I don't see her as a heroine here. I see her as weak and I don't even want my daughter being exposed to this story. Yeah, this is also a new phenomenon, which is that it seems like everybody who, not everybody, but a lot of people who are at elite levels in America, they're like showing us, they're showing themselves bleed to the rest of the world, right? Like they're, they're showing their weaknesses. They're showing, they're trying to portray themselves as victims. That's very like weird and unusual. Typically people who are in leadership positions, they try to show strength. They try to show confidence and pride. They want to show that they can stand up for other people. They can, they can be models to emulate,

right? We're getting a lot of like, you know, what I would associate with like Victorian monarchs or something like that, where like, they're not really accountable to anybody. So they're, they're free to talk about how hard they have it, even if they're earning tens of millions of dollars and they get, we literally have a model. Right. Like it's, it's actually very, very strange. And like, it would be very difficult for me to take this story, what you just described to me and like, tell it to my parents, right. Who came to the United States, Dirk Boer, who faced a lot of, I think, harsh conditions, discrimination, who grew up in a certain, you know, countries that at times were at war, like it's would be almost impossible for me to tell this story to my parents or for them to actually believe all this was happening because like they wouldn't

think this is how a normal human being functions. Right. They would be like, yeah, she, okay, maybe she'll just, she won't do this interview or whatever. And then she'll get a little bit of flack for it. And then she'll move on with all her money and her riches and her fan base. Like it's not a, it's not really something for public concern, right? Like it's, but again, I think so much of this is driven and you know, my, my colleague and I, uh,

Sean Misrobian is a really, really, uh, cool progressive political consultant. We have a sub stack at inquiremore.com where we write about these issues. You know, our thesis is that so much of this is because of the class cleavages in America, right? The upper class in America talks about themselves as if they're not upper class, right? They talk about themselves as if they're the biggest victims in the world. But the irony of it is that actual victims

don't ever have a voice, almost definitionally, right? We're never hearing the stories about, you know, the homeless woman who survived domestic abuse and her life and her travels. You know, we're hearing about the actors, the celebrities, as you said, literal monarchs, and how hard their life is apparently because they had some family foibles.

Let me tell you, as someone who comes from an immigrant background, anyone who's in some kind of interracial marriage has a ton of drama around it, right? Particularly minorities. Particularly minority parents often have a ton of drama they give you if you marry outside the community, right? That's an extremely normal thing. I imagine at the monarch level, it's a little bit different maybe, but it's probably not going to drive you to suicide. She probably was

not telling the truth when she said that. It probably was a manufactured press thing. But the point is that I think that a good society is led by people who are standing up for others. I want these people with all this power, with all this privilege, with this fame, this fortune, the riches, I want them to use that for other people. I don't want them spent all day telling us how hard they have it because they don't have it that hard. They can afford really good therapists to go and tell about whatever problems they have. But I don't want them begging about themselves and crying about themselves. And even at my level, and I'm a middle class person, I'm not not rich or famous. I you know, I have a decent journalism career. I don't spend a whole lot of time complaining

about myself because I view it as a facet of narcissism. And maybe that's just my cultural background. I think where my parents are from, Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent, it's very much looked down upon to do that. So maybe I just inherited that cultural trait. But I think it's a very, very kind of nasty narcissism that's taken over the American upper class. And it's not just left-leaning people. I think our former president on the right had a little bit of this bug as well. But I want our leaders to stand up for other people. I don't want them to play the violence themselves. You think Trump was a narcissist? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. I know it's a very controversial assertion.

But the saddest part about it is that when you engage that mindset, you're actually hurting your own happiness a lot. Like, I don't think Trump was a very happy person. He never struck me as a very happy person, which is insane, because the guy has like hundreds of millions of dollars and he was the literal president of the United States. Like if I had that, I feel like I'd be kind of happy. But because, yeah, but I think I think he had a pain in the ass father. I don't know. You know, who knows? I don't have that nutcrack.

He did have a lot. He did have a lot of family troubles with his brother as well with the alcohol addiction. And yeah, and honestly, a lot of times I looked at him and I felt sorry for him. But the thing is, like, I don't want to feel sorry for our leaders, right? I want our leaders to be standing up for us. I want to feel pride in them. I want them to feel like they're leading people. Right. And I think having a leadership class across the board, left and right, you know, in arts, culture, celebrity, finance, politics, who are constantly talking about how hard they have it. I think that's a really pathetic situation for a country to be in because it shows that those people are self-obsessed and it shows that they aren't thinking about the homeless woman. They aren't thinking about the low-income family. They aren't thinking about the refugees and the immigrants and the person working at Walmart 12 hours a day to get by because they're thinking about themselves with their $55 million. And I'm like, why would

you do that? That's not right. It's not morally right. No one cares that you have some social anxiety going out to speak to the press. Get over it. That's what everybody does. I mean, I think about myself. Can you imagine if I just didn't want to, I just wouldn't speak to people who asked me hard questions or didn't think I was on my a game all the time, or might say something mean about me. I'd be sitting like a loser on my couch. That's what I'd be doing. I wouldn't have achieved anything in my life. We have to get over these challenges rather than leaning into them and saying from my mental health, I'm going to avoid. One of my favorite soundbites was Serena Williams, who she was one of the ones to come out and be like, I feel for her. I get it. And I was like, oh, she's supporting her. And then you listen to the whole soundbite and she's like, some people are thick. I'm thick. Some people are thin,

you know, it's like totally throwing shade at her, but she's right. Toughen up is really, I think what she was trying to telegraph. And that's what, you know, America could use as its message. All right. Let me shift gears with you because I do have to ask you about your former place of employment from 15 to 18, the Intercept. Because I mentioned this earlier with Andy, but these guys, they're so, I just feel like they're a shadow of their former selves. It's not like America cares about the Intercept. But I do think it's interesting that now they're at war with Glenn Greenwald. They're calling out sort of reporters in the street who are doing, you know, fearless journalism, you know, sort of independent citizen journalists who are trying to get stories that the intercept, I think would normally have celebrated, but now will not. And this week,

there was a big hit piece on the guy who founded the intercept, but left it because it changed. Glenn Greenwald saying, is he the new master of right wing media? And heavens to Betsy, prepare yourself, Zed, because they talk about how he's been on Fox News 72 times. He writes a headline and it gets put on Fox News. And now he's basically the new assignment editor for right wing media. Your thoughts on all of it? Well, full disclosure, I also occasionally go on Fox News. So I am also tainted in this way, apparently. But yeah, I think, look, when I joined the Intercept in 2015, I think a lot of what attracted me to it was that it wasn't super partisan,

right? Like I think most people who are attracted me to it was that it wasn't super partisan, right? Like, I think most people who are associated with were left leaning for sure. But it didn't, you know, my editor at the time, Dan Froome, who no longer works there, I think he said something like we're anti partisan. He, we had no intention of rooting for a political party of trying to get behind a candidate, so on and so forth. And I think in the years since, it had more and more of that attitude. The more and more of the people that they were hiring, I think, were in left-wing social cliques, particularly in New York City, that Brooklyn crowd, gentrified Brooklyn crowd,

I should say. And I think that they viewed a lot of, honestly, a lot of what I was writing, a lot of what Glenn was writing when we were there, which was journalism. Like, I was not an opinion guy at The Intercept. Every article I wrote was, almost every article I wrote was reporting. You know, generally, I try to be fair and see things down the middle. But they viewed a lot of it as just being, I think, unhelpful to the Democratic Party and unhelpful to liberals, right? Like as if I had a mission, as if I worked for the DNC or as if I should be working for, I guess I would say the left wing of the DNC since they don't really like the moderate Democrats very much. And I think

that's just a big mission change over at The Intercept. And I think Glenn felt very uncomfortable with that. Of course, Glenn is a friend of mine. So again, I'm biased. But I think Glenn, you know, he has almost this like constitutional, like inability to like lie or like to hide what he thinks. And I don't think that he thought that the intercept should try to go soft on one political faction or another

in the service of any kind of political goal. Whereas I do think the people who work there do think that it should. And they do think, and they do think that it should serve an explicit like left-wing ideology. And even though I that it should serve an explicit left-wing ideology. And even though I'm sympathetic to a lot of left-wing ideology, I'm very uncomfortable with news outlets that are trying to serve one ideology over another. I understand that everyone has their own bias and their own point of view. And I don't think anyone can have zero bias,

but I don't think you should lean into it, right? You shouldn't go out of your way to just actively reject storylines that might harm some kind of political objective or political goal. And that's a lot of what the intercept was doing. It felt almost like a super PAC for the left wing of the democratic party. And that's a lot of why I ended up leaving. So this is where you're different from the average person. This is where I think I'm different from the average person is you may have political views on different issues. You may be consider yourself a liberal, but it's not your ideology. It's not your identity. It's not your identity. You're able to befriend people across the aisle. You can talk about issues with people who have divergent views from you. I've heard you talk about this. I heard you on the

Federalist recently, and I know you went kind of studied how to do this, how to bridge differences for a couple of years at all of all places, Berkeley, which confuses me, but that's what makes you different. And I think a better journalist. I actively pushed myself. Like if, you know, we had a round of a very bloody fighting in the middle East recently, you know, there's a lot of people who I think I would disagree with who I'm friendly friendly with. Barry Weiss is one of them. I'm very friendly with Barry. I think we disagree very hard on this issue. But I actively push myself to say that if somebody disagrees with me, internally within their mind, they think they're just as morally justified as I am. They think they're doing the right thing. And I can only hold that so much against them,

right? Maybe they're misguided. Maybe they don't have the right facts or whatever, or maybe they just have a different value set, but they really do think they're doing the right thing if they're a true believer in what they have to say. So once I come to that realization, even if I have an emotional impulse to really dislike someone for their point of view, I have to check myself and say, no, it's not entirely rational to do that, right? Their brain is telling them that this is how the world works. And my brain is telling them this is how the world works. And maybe they're right. Maybe I'm wrong. I have changed my mind over the years on a few things. So maybe, who knows, maybe I'll come around to their point of view one day. But I do everything

I can to actively not dislike the person, right? Even in extreme cases, like if I meet someone who I think is really very off base or very extreme, I tell myself, well, they've had certain cultural influences. They had a certain upbringing. They probably have a certain information stream they have. That's probably why they came to that conclusion. I shouldn't try to hate them personally for doing that. You had Daryl Davis on your show. To me, he's one of the biggest heroes in America because he came to this conclusion and brought it to some of the most extreme circumstances anyone ever could, you know, meeting with Ku Klux Klan people as an African-American man, right. And actually persuading them, uh, to, to, to leave these racist beliefs and ideologies behind. And he's done that with

hundreds of people. Um, I aspire to be, I aspire to be somebody like him and I don't, I don't think I'm anywhere close to it now. I don't think I'm at the point where I can be like him. But he is one of my role models in my life. And that's what I want to do with politics. And there's a professor at University of Maryland, Liliana Mason. She wrote a book about this based off some research she did called, I think it's something like Where Politics Becomes Identity or something like that. It actually, it turns out that being very left wing or being very right wing in your actual like policy beliefs is not what actually polarizes us for the most part, right? Like you can, like I can be extremely left wing in some

areas, but still not hate people on the right. What really polarizes you is when you elevate politics to identity. When you personally identify very strongly with the label of like liberal or conservative or Democrat or Republican or something like that, once that becomes a core part of your identity, you start seeing disagreements as a threat to your identity, as a threat to yourself personally. It's the fight or flight stuff in your brain starts to activate from our evolutionary path, right? Once you start doing that, that's the most dangerous thing. And so what I do is I have a lot of hobbies. I do improv comedy. I'm in a happy marriage. I play guitar. Like these, these, these, these are my identity, right? My identity is not

some gaggling of political solutions. I have in my mind that I, you know, I, I advocate for sometimes or write about, uh, journalistically, like that's not my identity that those are just that that's to me, that's like building your identity around how to fix your car. You know, how to fix your country is a series of things we need to be doing. It's very important. Just like fixing your car is important or going to the doctor is important, but it's not the core of who I am as a person, right? That's a much more complicated thing. I love everything you just said. Yes, I completely relate to all of that. My audience has heard me say similar things all the time. I just, you know, the things that matter to you are generally within what, 20 feet of you.

It's not, and it's not the internet, you know, it's the people, it's the people who love you and who you love and the way you choose to spend your time, this limited time we have on this earth. And that doesn't include obsessing over Donald Trump. You can be interested in politics, you can cover it, you can get excited about it, but it can't be your identity. And that's something you said about the ideas that I like that it a long time ago, when I was practicing law, I had a case for Harry Winston, the jeweler, you know, the famous fancy jeweler where you get all the diamonds. It's on Fifth Avenue here in Manhattan. And we were representing Harry Winston. I had to try a case for them. And you'd go into Harry Winston. And since we were representing them, sometimes they would let me try on one of the beautiful jewels, you know, I'd put on like the necklace or the earrings, which I could never afford, but it's like icing, you know, it's, it's a lovely experience. And if somebody is espousing an idea who somebody who's not hateful, right? You don't want to listen to somebody who, you know, hates you or your, you know, your, your ideas, but somebody who's a genuine idea broker, um, even if I don't agree with them, right? Like it could be on

anything to me. It's like trying on the beautiful diamond necklace. You just try it on. It could sparkle. If it flows in terms of its logic and its presentation, it can be a really pleasant experience. Doesn't mean you're going to buy the necklace, but you can enjoy the experience of different ideas or in my case, unattainable ideas just by trying the stuff on every once in a while and seeing how it looks. Yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of benefits that come from it. One is that you learn to just understand other people, right? Even if you'll never agree with their idea, I think you'll get a much better understanding of where the person's coming from. And you might even understand like better counter arguments. You know, you'll, you'll be able to, what's called steel manning

arguments. You'll be able to explain someone's argument almost better than they can. Um, so that way you can really, yeah, that way you can really persuade people. Um, I think that that's very helpful and that can be very useful for you. I think that, uh, so much of social progress is based on just having someone in the room who can say, hmm, I'm not sure that's quite right. Here's A, B, and C points that we should consider. So many disasters have happened when someone wasn't in the room to do that. The Bay of Pigs was that way. Nobody was around Kennedy pointing out any of the many huge logical errors they were making in planning the Bay of Pigs,

a disaster, the Challenger Space Shuttle, right? Like there were people who knew that there were problems with the shuttle, but they were just being shut out because of the kind of climate of conformity at NASA at that point. There are many examples throughout history. I think this is why dictators don't make very good decisions, right? They often do very stupid things because everyone's too afraid to tell them they disagree, right? The safest thing to say to a dictator is you're absolutely right. That sounds great, right? So, you know, I think it's very, very important, even just to have a few people around you who disagree with you, even sharply disagree with you or majorly disagree with you, because they can help you point out flaws in your own logic, if anything else.

That's your point on NASA is well espoused by Adam Grant, who's been on the show. And he writes about how the NASA really, they had so many, no, well, not so many, but they had quite a few, uh, catastrophes as a result of this culture. That was more of a yes, man, or yes, ma'am, um, that they really made a conscious decision to try to challenge that and started getting better results. Um, and something on Trump, you know, you might think I totally agree with you on the narcissist point. But for people who are thinking he might want to be one of those guys who doesn't want feedback. I know for a fact it's not true. I know for a fact that at least one person who was in a high up position there was demoted because Trump was complaining

the guy was just a yes man, you know, that the guy was not bringing fresh ideas. He wasn't challenging him. I think that's some of what Trump did that was good in terms of policy, I think, came from his willingness as a businessman to not be too identity driven, to listen to the best idea in the room. Yeah, I think there's there's certainly a part of Trump, I think, that was pragmatic, that wasn't as ideological as certain parts of the GOP. For instance, you'll notice that what he did on trade was actually popular enough that most Democrats in Congress supported it or enough to actually to get it through the Congress, right? Because I think he took a less ideological look at what the trade issues were, and he was able to actually go outside the box and bring in advisors like Peter Navarro, who aren't your typical GOP go-tos. And he appointed a trade rep, I think, who would have been perfectly at home in a Democratic administration because, again, Trump was willing to look outside the normal right-wing bubble. So yeah, I do think

that's one of his more positive qualities. And I think it's a positive quality in any leader, right? Any leader who's just assigning people who agree with them all around themselves, they're going to end up making huge mistakes. I think if you go back to President Lincoln, I mean, Lincoln understood this more than anybody, right? I mean, he's the classic example of someone who built a team around him who in many ways were rivals and who had ideas. I'm sure ideas that he found at times to be crazy, but he's probably glad to have them there to make the counterpoints to him. And yeah, I do think that it's not only important for presidents, right? It's important for everybody. One thing that corporations often do is they build what's called a red team.

A red team's job is basically to look at your plans and projects and proposals and poke holes in them, right? Here's everything that could go wrong. And I think that that's something that should all kinds of organizations should host. I think any kind of social organization, business, religious organization, civic group could have a sort of red team or at least just have people in the room who will tell you honestly when they feel like maybe something could be a little bit different or maybe something's off. so let me ask you somebody who

is and you don't sound particularly ideological but you did work for think progress progressive news website um funded by the center for american progress right is that john podesta who is center for american progress yes so podesta founded it uh for sure he wasn't he he left for a while so he wasn't always the president but yeah he did he did found it. Okay. So what, I mean, what made you join that organization? What, what is it in your own ideology that makes you lean left enough that you would work for think progress? Yeah. So this was, um, this was actually my first job out of college. This was in 2009. It was the first term of the Obama administration. And yeah, at that point, I think I was definitely a fairly left-leaning guy. I felt strongly that, particularly on a few issues like universal health care, I still feel pretty strongly about universal health care.

It's just way too expensive in the U.S. compared to everywhere else. We could probably do it causes in a way that honestly is a little bit different than what I do now, because I think we've spent the last however number of minutes criticizing media for being ideologically slanted or narrative based. But honestly, I don't think, I think the problem is not so much that think progress existed, but that like a big portion of the media turned into think progress, right? Like, I don't think that it's a problem for there to be ideological media that does have a certain kind of agenda, but you need to make sure that all the media doesn't turn into that, right? Because then you really aren't getting anyone to disconfirm your biases, you aren't getting the other side at all. And you're not getting like a bigger search for truth. So I think at that point in 2009, I was a little bit more

activist oriented, like I really wanted to do something on healthcare, I thought that we needed to start moving out of Afghanistan, I thought we need to do something about income inequality after the Great Recession. And so I think think progress was a good place for that, although not a perfect place because something unfortunately, it was unfortunate that it was controlled by Center for American Progress, right?

Because Center for American Progress was a very kind of like, you know, it's a political picture aligned to the Democratic Party, even though it's technically nonpartisan. And so, you know, if you wrote something too critical of Obama, the White House might yell at you for a day, which was what happened to my boss one time when I wrote something about Afghanistan and how they weren't meeting their commitments

there. So like there was a lot of stuff like that and also stuff with corporate donors to cap interfering a lot of think progress. And so there were things like that happening, which were which was a good introduction to me about how D.C. politics works and how, you know, a lot of it is not how we imagine philosopher Kings talking to each other about, you know, what is the most moral or best idea, but it's a lot of like politicians protecting their turf and donors protecting their turf and cynicism and horse trading. And so it was, it was a good education and all of that at the end of the day. Um, but yeah, basically I, and I think I ended up there because in college I was just a left leaning activist type who had done some journalism and I wanted to continue that through my career path.

Uh, and that's sort of how I started. So I, I definitely, I would say 10, 11 years ago, I was in a more, I was definitely in a more partisan trajectory, I think, uh, than I am today for sure. Don't leave me now. We got more coming up in 60 seconds. When I see you went to UC Berkeley's greater good bridging differences, I'm like, Berkeley, who goes to Berkeley to get rid of their bias and figure out a bridge differences, but that could be my own bias speaking. No, it's a really good question. So I was at CAP and ThinkProgress in 2009 up until 2012. I went on and I worked for a few other nonprofits and political action committees. I worked for Progressive PAC. I worked for a few other progressive publications. I went to The Intercept finally, thinking that feel like I can't write super honestly here,

right? I can't report stories out because I feel like I have to be promoting a certain agenda all the time. It was ironic, honestly, that I felt that way at an outlet founded by Glenn Greenwald, who's a very independent minded person. But that's just how it turned out. Did you know at the time he was having the same feelings? I didn't really know because I think one of the things people don't understand about The the intercept is that Glenn did not like run it with an iron fist, right? He's actually a very like chill guy. Like he did not, he did not manage the day to day. He did not edit people. He kind of let people do what they wanted to do. Right. Uh, we just kind of the problem honestly, because a lot of the editors really ended up sucking. So, you know, they didn't,

they didn't know what they were doing. Um, but, uh But yeah, so basically what happened was I saw a job opening. UC Berkeley has a center that works on basically psychological wellness and well-being called Greater Good Science Center. And what they wanted to do is they wanted to hire somebody to come in and write about how, basically write a series of articles based on interviewing researchers about how we tackle social and political polarization in the United States, like the stuff that's tearing us apart. There's, I would say, a small but growing number of nonprofits dedicated to this problem, like Braver Angels, One America Foundation, Open Mind Platform. I think that basically my goal at Berkeley was, it was an 18-month fellowship, so it was a time-limited fellowship funded by a grant. It was basically to write a series of articles really looking at what was driving us apart in terms of polarization in the United States and also what can we do about it.

What people-to-people skills, what skills can communities use, faith organizations use, schools and universities, businesses, so on and so forth. So I wrote a series of articles. I put together a guidebook along with my team about skills we can use. And it was actually a really great experience. I think that, yeah, Berkeley does have a reputation for being a very left-leaning place, but my team there was fantastic. I think they were all probably left-leaning people, but they were all, you know, they were all kind of a similar mindset, right? That like... Okay, but that's what I was going to say. Now, if Megyn Kelly showed up there, right? And I'm not some dyed-in-the-wool conservative, but I That like, okay, but that's what I was gonna say. Now, if Megan Kelly showed up there, right, and I'm not some dyed in the wool conservative, but I'm perceived as such given my time at Fox, and my own thinking is center right, for the most part, how would I be

treated? Would they would I have a good experience there? I think they're such nice people. And the center is literally based around psychological wellness. So like, if they were just mean, they would be, it'd be very weird because they know, they like know all, they know, they know all the like mindfulness techniques and they spend all this time writing about it.

Like, you know, it would be weird. I think they would treat you well. But yeah, I do think that that is probably something I would say about the depolarization space.

Like, like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Luthianoff are both liberals, right? Like they're both left-leaning liberals, but they're also like very open-minded. They treat conservatives well, so on and so forth.

I do think a lot of people in this space do happen to be left-leaning. I don't really know why that is. I think it could use more conservative people. There should be more conservative people in the depolarization movement. John Wood at Braver Angels, he comes from a Republican background.

He's great. So the people who are in the depolarization space- Is he a Trump leader? Because in my experience, you're only allowed in those crowds if you, you can be conservative, but you can't support Trump. You know, what's good about him is I don't think he is actually. I think he plays it pretty straight with them. He does everything he can to engage with people who voted for Trump, which is pretty crazy. Honestly, this is one of my beats with the media is that you're absolutely

right. It does sound like there's a certain segment of like CNN and MSNBC approved Republicans who just like hate everything about the Republican Party and almost all Republicans. And it's just like, especially why are you brought on as the Republican representative if you're not representative at all of these people, right? Like just as a practical matter, you need to bring on someone who probably doesn't agree with Trump on everything, which I think most Republican voters don't agree with him on everything, but who probably voted with him because they, they, on balance, they agree with him more than they agree with the Democrats. And that's a representative person, right? And like, for some reason, across the media and a big part of the NGO world,

you have like people who represent maybe 5% of Republicans, right? People who voted for Evan McMullin or so on and so forth. Um, but so forth. But yeah, I do think this depolarization space was really good for me. I worked there for 18 months, a little bit longer than that. And it really helped me, I think, center myself into a place where, yeah, I think I still have a lot of left-leaning commitments ideologically. But I feel like when I do my journalism, I can do it much more objectively, much more straight. And I can also just orient myself in a way to where I don't feel I try really hard not to scare any political faction away. And sometimes it's hard because sometimes I think that there I sometimes I think I write something and someone will just automatically think,

I'm the most conservative person in the world or vice versa. But if they read my breadth of writing these days, if they read the sub-second inquiremore.com or they read my columns at Newsweek or the reporting I've done elsewhere, I think you'll see that I'm kind of doing what I imagine CNN was doing in the 1990s, right? I'm trying my best to appeal to everyone and actually get at the truth in as many directions as possible, because I think it's really very important to get outside of narrative journalism. I think narrative journalism taking everything over has been. I'll give you an example to back you up. Here's here is. Well, I'm just looking at a couple American. This is you. May 27th, American journalists shielded China and erased the Wuhan lab leak theory.

May 27th. Oh, you were busy that day. We need to talk about anti- antisemitism among the West's Muslims. Now that's it. I mean, you're a Muslim and you're talking about antisemitism among Muslims. So I'm just, I'm just sort of saying like, you're not, you're not afraid to counter program, right. To sort of go to the place people don't expect you to go. Yeah. And I think, I guess it's just because I don't think anyone has a monopoly on truth, right? Like I think that traditionally speaking, I mean, yeah, there, there, I think that there is just so much information out there that thinking that one political faction can give you everything you need. It's just, it doesn't make any sense, right? Like there, there are

obviously going to be, there are going to be so many issues where like, if I, if I just read left-leaning media, I don't even know if I would recognize that there were like riots last year, enormous riots, thousands of businesses destroyed people. Some people even killed in them. I don't know if I even realized those things even existed because left-leaning media almost never talked about it. Right. Like, I don't know as a phenomenon, I would even, like, intellectually understand that this happened, right? And if I only read right-leaning media, I don't know if I'd get a very good sense about, like,

how does healthcare work and honestly work in, like, a country like Germany or France or Japan or the UK or Taiwan. Like, I think there are some issues that right just doesn't engage enough on. Now, I think it's improving in some regards. I think senators like Josh Hawley are getting more interested in kind of using, you know, using government and public policy tools to promote the common good.

And also, I think some challengers like J.D. Vance and some people at the more grassroots level, like who write at places like the American Conservative or the Federalist, I think they're getting more interested in that. But I guess my point is that both the right and the left tend to have a lot of insight in particular areas. And if you're only reading one side, you're going to end up being blind, you know, like a bird can't fly with one wing, right? And like, I think it's the same principle here. And just a note on how that's going for CNN, their hard turn, they were lifted up like all the other cable channels during Trump,

by Trump, the ratings machine. There was a report out this week, CNN's most watched show, just take Tuesday, for example, was Cuomo primetime, which notched 873,000 total viewers. That's nothing. He didn't pull a million in households in America on his primetime show and 162,000 in the demo. That's the 25 to 54 year old. That's the only number that matters because that's what we look at for advertising revenue. 162,000 in the demo in primetime. I said this before. It's still true. We're crushing that here on my podcast. And I think there's a reason that no one's going there. And by the way, Fox is down, MSNBC is way down, they're all down, but no one's down as low as CNN. People are finding alternative ways of getting their information that don't constantly pit them against one another, that don't assume a team jersey, that try to bring actual information in an honest way that's not completely colored by ideology. I feel like this alternate system is growing and it's working.

Yeah, and honestly, when I see the defensiveness about it, I think many people in mainstream media, they don't like Joe Rogan's show, right? They think it's terrible. It's just some guy riffing. He doesn't have editors or fact checkers and all that's true.

But what it reminds me of is that in the early 2000s, we had the same kind of backlash against bloggers, right? Like newspapers. I think I remember when HuffPost got its first question in the White House press room, like people were laughing at them, like mocking the White House for even calling on them.

Now it's like seen as a fairly like, you know, respectable left-leaning news outlet. And I think that a lot of this backlash against podcasts against alternative media, it's going to be the same way. Like people are going to initially have their backs up against it. And they're going to throw a lot of criticism at it. And you know, some of the criticism maybe is merited, and it'll help those those platforms and those mediums improve. But I think that it's just how people tend to react to change, right? I think they find it to be weird and they find it to be disorienting. And yeah, like Rogan's show is interesting because Rogan does not claim to be CNN, right? Like Rogan,

he tells you, like, I'm not here to tell you the news. Like, don't trust my view on politics. I'm not here to tell you exactly what to do on COVID. And I think it's good that he says that because he's not an expert in any of those areas. He's basically an entertainer. He's a commentator and an entertainer. But yes, he's admitting to you that he hasn't done the fact checking and fact screening. But people should think about why is it this man is getting hundreds of millions of people across the world, by the way, tuning into him, listening to a show, watching it. I think it's because he's just like an average guy trying to figure things out. He's not talking down to you.

He's not kind of setting. He's extremely open minded. And it finally feels like there's someone out there who's kind of like on the level of the average person kind of trying to move through the world the same way they are. Right. And I think if people understood that he would get a lot less criticism because they're not he's not trying to be Jake Tapper. Right. I don't I don't agree with you. I don't agree with you. Because there are attacks on his you know, when he makes a mistake on the fact on the facts, it's not really based on that. It's based on the fact that he's anti woke. He's he doesn't believe in all these identity politics, which you need to if you want to be covered favorably by the mainstream press. stream press and they'll never forgive him for that. So they'll jump on all of his mistakes and so on as if he's pretending to be Lester Holt, right? And it's all just a false game.

But I think the two things are related, right? The fact that he's an average guy trying to figure things out is the reason why he's anti-woke in a way, because to be woke, you know, like wokeness is like a narrow ideological niche, right? That has to be constantly reinforced through basically public shaving and conformity inducing procedures and processes and society, right? Like if you're just an average person, like talking to people across the political spectrum, talking to celebrities and culture and change makers, blah, blah, blah, you can't really be woke, right? Because woke is like, it's like a religious formation, right? It's like, it's like a church or something, right? You're not allowed to be

Joe Rogan when you're doing that. So I think you're correct. But it also, it also like goes into the into the category of where he is basically talking like an average Joe, trying to figure out the world, because an average Joe figuring out the world can't be a militant in a political movement. It's certainly not one as militant as wokeness. So. Well, and I also think, you know, we just had Dennis Prager on talking about meaning in one's life and how these sort of elitist, it tends to be rich, you know, Hollywood people or news people, whatever they, they don't have a lot of meaning. They've gotten rid of religion in their lives. Right. They, um, they don't have to work that hard, right? It's not like that the woman to your point earlier who suffered domestic violence and is working two jobs to put meals on the table.

She doesn't have time to worry about this BS. She's got real problems to worry about, right? She doesn't have too much time on her hands. And Joe Rogan lives a full life, not only in his interests that he talks about all the time, MMA and all that stuff, but he's interviewing really interesting people. I feel like I have the privilege of doing that now, too. It keeps you busy, keeps your mind in a healthy place, as opposed to somebody who's got nothing to do other than think about other people's failings. And as you as you say, conduct conformity inducing procedures on others, which really captures the unpleasantness of being subjected to the woke. Yeah, I mean, I think this point about religion, I think John McWhorter makes this point. There's other people who make this point. And I don't want to make it disparagingly because I come

from a religious background myself. I wouldn't say I'm super religious today, but I'm also not secular. I'm probably more in the middle. But I think that being given that foundation by like my parents, by my family, by community was really, really helpful to prevent something else from subsuming it or something from replacing it that would be similar to something like political fanaticism, right? Because I think political fanaticism is basically there to fill a hole in somebody, right? If somebody doesn't have a sense of meaning, a sense of belonging, family ties, social ties, I think thinking that they are a militant for a cause or even a martyr for a cause can be a very hopeful or meaningful thing to them. Honestly, I'm not saying woke people are ISIS, so no one say I said that, but a lot of the people in the West who are educated, wealthy Muslims who went to Syria, who went to Iraq to join ISIS. I think a lot of them just felt like they didn't have meaning in their life otherwise. Right. They felt alienated in some way. Right.

So and I think there's always been particularly young people throughout society who have joined things like cults. Right. Or who have joined these kind of mass revivalist religious movements, because they felt like they needed something to drive them, right? And I think that the rapid secularization in the United States, particularly among upper class people, particularly among probably more white people than other people, which is why so much of wokeness is upper class white liberals. I think that's created a big hole in a lot of people. And I understand why people are trying to go and fill it with something. I think having this idea that like the United States is one long struggle against like white supremacy, right? Like that's, and that we need to be part of this struggle and we need to like

shed our guilt and we need to be constantly agitating and mobilizing to do something about this problem as it manifests in every single part of our society and our lives, I think it really does give someone some drive or some kind of mission in life that maybe in the past, maybe going to church or being active in their community in some way could have done. And I totally understand it. And I'm sympathetic to somebody who's jumped into this because they didn't have anything else, right? Even if I'm not sympathetic to the ideology, I find the ideology to be very corrosive and sectarian. But if I'm sympathetic to a person, I understand why they're doing it.

I know that you live it because I know you're part of this fair organization that I am too, and I encourage everybody to check out because we need sort of a central repository for fighting back against some of this madness. And it's a bipartisan group that I'm very proud to be associated with. I think what we're building over there is really special and it's going to have a huge impact. And while you're online searching for fairforall.org, you should also go and check out Zed's Inquire More sub stack, which I highly recommend to you and read read anything that Zedulani writes, because whether it's on Twitter or it's on your Substack, it's always thoughtful,

reasonable, well-informed. And I know a lot of our audience is looking for that from the left. They want different inputs, right? They don't want to just have all affirming views. You're a great guy for it. Thank you for being here. Thanks, Megan. It was a great time. All right. Don't forget to subscribe to the show. Go there, subscribe, and leave a five-star review and leave a comment, would you? I love to read the comments.

I am reading them. They're so fun. And I'd love to know what you think about that crazy-ass Vanity Fair report. I'm just so fired up about it. It's such a shameful moment in American journalism. Anyway, go ahead and do that. And don't forget to tune into our next show where we have a jam-packed day of news for you. We've got some really smart news people who are going to come on and break down for you what is happening in this country. Don't miss it.

Five stars. See you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.