America's Ability to Tolerate Risk, and Hillary's Cringe Comeback Attempt, with Mike Rowe and Maureen Callahan ｜ Ep. 822
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 10 minutes
Words per Minute
159.96858
Summary
With Independence Day just around the corner, those who love this country and are proud of our history will be very interested in a new film that reminds us who we are. The man behind this movie, Something to Stand For, has a name you probably know very well: Mike Rowe.
Transcript
00:00:00.580
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
00:00:11.880
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. With Independence Day just
00:00:16.560
around the corner, those who love this country and are proud of our history will be very interested
00:00:21.520
in a new film, all right? And it comes out tomorrow. It's by one of my favorite people.
00:00:26.080
I watched it last night and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. The timing could not
00:00:32.060
be better because while you and I want to celebrate our country, more and more people,
00:00:36.420
it seems, want to tear it down. You're seeing it, seeing it all over the place. You're seeing it
00:00:40.120
mostly from the left, but even some on the right now. And the man behind this movie reminding us
00:00:45.000
who we are has a name you probably know very well. Mike Rowe. He's an Emmy award-winning
00:00:51.360
television host, best known for the hit show, Dirty Jobs. And his new film is called
00:00:56.960
Something to Stand For. Here's a bit from the trailer. Watch.
00:01:02.140
My name's Mike Rowe, and this is Something to Stand For.
00:01:07.340
A film that celebrates a few extraordinary Americans who risked everything to build the nation
00:01:17.820
we call home. Americans who gave us something to fight for, something to be grateful for.
00:01:24.280
And today, all these years later, something to stand for.
00:01:27.980
Can't wait to talk about this film. First, I thought, okay, Mike says something he wants to
00:01:35.420
promote. We'll talk about it for a second and then we'll move on. But no, I want to talk all
00:01:39.060
about this movie, which was filmed entirely in Oklahoma with actors from Oklahoma. And it is so
00:01:45.580
fun. I woke up this morning and as you know, Doug also saw it and blurbed it for you. And my brother's
00:01:52.580
in town with his wife and where I had so much fun quizzing them. And I did it just the way you did it
00:01:58.600
in the movie on these various stories, because I want the audience to know what Mike does is he tells
00:02:04.260
you a really fascinating story about somebody. The story itself is full of great nuggets and you're
00:02:09.520
really enjoying it. And only at the end do you get the big reveal. It's just like your podcast in
00:02:15.780
many ways of who is the person you've just become so fascinated in and by. And it's always a big name
00:02:25.460
where you're like, oh, my God, I never knew this is your favorite thing to do and talk about our
00:02:30.220
history. And what's the slogan, Mike? Things, things you don't know about people you do something you
00:02:37.440
didn't know about somebody you do. And look, first of all, thanks for all the kind words. I wish I could
00:02:44.080
take credit for the format. I I stole it from the late, great Paul Harvey with the permission from
00:02:51.460
his son, Paul Harvey Jr., who actually wrote most of the rest of the story. That was the title that
00:02:58.560
most people will remember from the 70s and 80s. But, you know, this guy, Doug Brunt, he he borrowed
00:03:05.420
from it as as well. And, you know, I loved his book, too. But he uses the same kind of thing where,
00:03:11.940
you know, he's talking about diesel, but you can't believe what you're learning along the way.
00:03:17.680
So the trick to me, anyway, at least when it comes to history, is you have to you have to find a way
00:03:24.440
to make history interesting for people who would otherwise not give a damn. And if you can do that
00:03:31.920
with a new level of enthusiasm, great. We all had teachers who could who could do that. But for me,
00:03:37.660
it's it's always a bite sized piece, a little something you didn't know about somebody you do.
00:03:44.440
And that opens a portal, hopefully, and inspires something like curiosity, perhaps. So you come
00:03:51.380
into the shallow end of the pool, but there's plenty of room to go over to the deep end and take
00:03:56.900
a deeper dive if you want to learn more. Right. Instead of hearing all day, every day,
00:04:02.920
as we approach July 4th, about how this founding father owned slaves, you will hear about extraordinary
00:04:09.120
acts of courage they performed, risks they took, notwithstanding their positions in society,
00:04:15.280
not to mention the military stories that are in there. And just, you know, it's one thing to say,
00:04:20.700
we're the United States of America, we're the greatest source of freedom and liberty,
00:04:24.760
an example in the world, we liberated the world and saved it literally back in the 1940s and so on.
00:04:30.460
These are individual stories of the people who formed the country and became icons within it
00:04:36.300
for a reason because of our shared values and what they stood and fought for. It's stirring.
00:04:41.660
I actually had chills more than once in hearing the stories. We need that. This is the antidote
00:04:51.280
Thank you. I mean, I'm literally blushing on satellite radio. That's so nice to hear,
00:04:56.580
especially from you. Because look, I, for me, the thing that worries me most about the time we're
00:05:03.420
living in right now is we've, we seem to have lost our nuance. We, we seem to have lost our ability to
00:05:10.240
hold, you know, two conflicting thoughts in our head at the same time. In this case, it's the fact
00:05:16.260
that, yeah, our country was formed by imperfect men. And yes, we are still under construction as a
00:05:24.280
country and an idea. There's still work to do. There's still progress to be made, but that does
00:05:32.520
not have anything or shouldn't have anything to do with our ability to, to celebrate the progress
00:05:39.760
that we have made and to be grateful for the steps that we have taken and to be proud of how far we've
00:05:48.380
come. And it just seems like you're either on one side or the other. And to, to see the coin with both
00:05:56.800
sides, to see the men for who they were and where they failed and how they tried and how they strived
00:06:05.780
and, and how ultimately we became better for it. It's not just a love letter to our founding fathers
00:06:13.660
and, and, and, and famous people. It's, it's a love letter to anybody who's ever put on the uniform
00:06:18.480
to defend those ideas and risk their lives for you and me and everybody list. And if we,
00:06:28.780
if we can't agree that, that that basic thing is worth standing for in 2024, then I'm,
00:06:36.520
Hmm. We need this. We need this now more than ever. All the stats are kind of depressing on the
00:06:44.300
falling patriotism in the U S I'll give you some of those numbers. Gallup does a poll every year.
00:06:49.680
It's depressing. It hit record lows in terms of, uh, Americans who feel patriotic and love a great,
00:06:55.200
extremely proud of the country in 2022. And it hasn't recovered since. Um, but we need it for people
00:07:00.860
like this gal. Uh, let's play sought eight. I'm here enjoying a nice day at the beach with my kids.
00:07:05.840
This guy. And I turn around, I got these flags planted here on the beach by these MAGA fucks.
00:07:14.360
Listen, this is all America. We know you didn't storm the beaches to stake out your territory on
00:07:21.780
the beach. This isn't the fucking moon. I get it. This is America, but I'm sick of my flag
00:07:27.860
being represented by white nationalist trash on a goddamn beach. Go fuck yourselves.
00:07:35.840
Okay. So he's not ironic, Megan. How ironic that the very flag he's so nauseous over represents
00:07:48.580
the very notions that give him the very right to run it down. Interestingly, about a hundred yards
00:07:57.880
from where the owners of the flag are sitting, which one might conclude would have something
00:08:03.860
unflattering to say about the conspicuous absence of courage in that particular gentleman, but far
00:08:11.600
be it for me to connect those dots. It's, um, crazy is whenever we get to the July 4th, I look into
00:08:18.480
these stories because I just find them depressing and also important. I, we got to keep our eye on
00:08:22.480
what's happening. This is from April, 2024 in Seattle, where a dance squad was set to perform
00:08:29.440
in the Emerald city hoedown, which sounds like an all American kind of event. So the dance squad gets
00:08:36.440
together. They show up at the hoedown and at the hoedown, Mike, they were told, um, they needed to
00:08:45.360
leave because they were wearing American flag shirts, which the hoedown organizers in Seattle
00:08:53.600
said might be triggering, uh, or upsetting to some in the audience. And therefore these girls were not
00:09:01.300
welcome. They had to take them off or leave. Uh, they said in particular people might bring up Israel's
00:09:09.500
war against Hamas or transgender issues. And those people might not like the American flag
00:09:15.880
on the shirts. God bless the girls. They refused to do it. They did not perform.
00:09:21.980
Well, because the girls wouldn't stand for that. This movie is not just about what we should stand
00:09:29.640
for. It's about what we shouldn't stand for. And you know, the, that's a, that's a very important
00:09:38.000
distinction to make. And I think, you know, just watching that last clip and listening to that story,
00:09:44.680
I, I had a conversation not long ago with a historian who I really admire. He told me that the
00:09:51.500
make America great, um, slogan, the motto, the hat and Trump and everything that all of that combined
00:10:01.160
it, it put the other side in a really difficult position because they were in this binary space.
00:10:10.680
And because they clearly understood that Trump was the devil, they had to take exception
00:10:17.500
to, and with everything he said. So suddenly a big chunk of the country was in a position of saying,
00:10:26.220
well, wait a minute, no, we're not going to make America great again. In fact, America was never
00:10:31.760
great at all. And here's why. And so suddenly we started having a, a conversation, not between
00:10:38.840
conservatives and liberals, at least not in the traditional way. We started having conversations
00:10:44.260
between that, which was American and that, which was anti American. And so both sides go back and
00:10:51.360
forth and the stakes are ratcheted up higher and higher and higher. And that's a hell of a thing.
00:10:58.540
I don't, I, I, it's, it's amazing to think that in our lifetime, Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan,
00:11:06.480
who tore each other's throats out by day, arguing over policy would go out at night and have a stake
00:11:14.040
and a bottle of wine and, and talk to each other like Americans. I don't know what to say about
00:11:20.100
that. Other than with regard to the guy in that clip and the people in the story you just told, I,
00:11:25.040
I didn't write the movie for them. I wrote the movie because of them, but not for them. This is,
00:11:32.220
this is still for people who, who really do believe our country needs to be better and constantly
00:11:38.980
improve, but nevertheless love it. And those people seem to be in shorter supply. Unfortunately.
00:11:47.260
Yeah. That's, that's what the Gallup poll shows. I'll give you the numbers. I'm sure you you're
00:11:51.760
familiar. Uh, this one's from June of last year. I'm sure shortly we're going to be getting one,
00:11:57.320
the one from 24, 39% of American adults say they are extremely proud to be an American 39%.
00:12:08.060
That's basically unchanged from the all time low of 38% in 2022. Uh, okay. So that's not adults.
00:12:16.560
It's just 39% of Americans say they're extremely proud to be. So it used to be, uh, let's say 2003,
00:12:23.000
70% were extremely proud. So a precipitous fall there. You break it down. This is again,
00:12:29.320
June of 23 by party, 60% of Republicans, extremely proud, 33% of independence, 29% of Democrats,
00:12:39.320
29% of Democrats. So the vast majority of Democrats would not say they are extremely proud to be
00:12:47.440
Americans. It was not always this way back to 2003, 65% of Democrats said extremely proud,
00:12:54.240
62% of independence back then. And 86% of Republicans, even the Republicans are starting
00:12:59.320
to fall now. And that too was probably, I mean, it was two years post nine 11. We were feeling
00:13:04.380
more proud and we weren't yet in the midst of Iraq. 90% of us adults then said, well, I'm extremely,
00:13:10.860
are very proud to be American. It's just going down and down and down. And today the lowest numbers of
00:13:16.520
all are of course, amongst the youth, only 18% of 18 to 34 year olds say that they're extremely proud
00:13:26.420
to be an American. That is really tough to believe. It just goes back to the framing of the argument.
00:13:33.300
You know, we're, we're in such thrall of the talismans, you know, everything now represents
00:13:40.240
something more than what it is. Everything is a flag status. A mask has repercussions and insinuations
00:13:49.400
that have absolutely nothing to do with, with health or medicine. Everything is a way to, to show
00:13:57.160
or indicate your belief. And when you conflate politics, uh, with patriotism, you're going to get
00:14:06.140
this one side is going to put the metaphorical and literal flag in the sand and they're going to own
00:14:11.600
it. And it's not going to leave the other side with much wiggle room, except to push back against
00:14:16.940
it. Unless they're of a mind to say, okay, wait, yes, of course I love my country. Of course. I
00:14:24.440
appreciate what Patrick Henry said, even though I don't agree with a, with the way he lived his life,
00:14:31.460
but look, that was 250 years ago. What's going to happen, Megan, 250 years from now. That's the
00:14:37.900
question for the guy on the beach. How is your great, great, great, great grandson going to feel
00:14:43.960
about you looking back through the mists of time with all of his or her enlightenment and awakening,
00:14:52.080
you know, somewhere down the road, what, what statues are going to be pulled down today? How are we
00:14:58.800
going to think about, I don't know, meat eaters? Right. I mean, well, it's so much easier to judge
00:15:09.040
than think. And that's why those polls suck so bad because we're not thinking about our country anymore.
00:15:19.960
And we're not thinking about the price that was paid for us. We're simply judging. We've all been
00:15:28.320
assigned a little gavel and now we all have, you know, our little smartphone and we all have our
00:15:34.300
connection and we're just out in the world, slapping the gavel down, passing judgment,
00:15:42.080
not just on our neighbors, not just on this news network or that news network, but on men and women
00:15:48.580
who have been dead for centuries. And so when I talked to the park rangers in this, in this movie,
00:15:56.120
a couple of random encounters that I had in DC, and they tell me that the first thing they do
00:16:01.920
every morning, they go out and they, they scrub the filth off the memorials. They get the graffiti
00:16:08.840
off of the monuments. One said, you know, I, I pray that we want people to express themselves. We,
00:16:18.100
we, we want a free country that allows for protest, but can't they just use chalk? Can't they just
00:16:25.220
write what they want on the sidewalk in chalk? So the rain will just wash it away. But no, there's
00:16:31.920
red paint in places where red paint should never be. And it's no, well, it's a, they'll never win.
00:16:39.520
Those guys will get up every day. They will continue washing the monuments. You can throw the paint on
00:16:44.180
them all you want. The United States of America will prevail in protecting the things it holds most
00:16:49.280
dear. And we saw vandalism, even at the Lincoln Memorial. That's insane. I mean, like who, who would
00:16:55.700
dare ever touch that treasure, but sure enough, there it is free Gaza. You know, I've been talking
00:17:01.140
to the audience this week, Mike is Doug and the family and I were in, um, Scandinavia last two weeks.
00:17:06.180
We went to, uh, Sweden, Norway and, and, um, Denmark. It was beautiful, absolutely gorgeous part of the
00:17:11.460
world. Lovely people. But you feel these things on an innate level about like who you are, what your
00:17:18.220
background is versus this new place that you're exploring. And one of the things I was noticing
00:17:22.560
was what's America. It's a capitalist country. We're not a socialist country, though. Some many
00:17:27.240
in the left would like us to be more and more. And these are democratic socialist nations and they
00:17:33.960
have different policies and they have definitely a better social safety net. But when we asked our one
00:17:38.560
guy, what are you paying taxes? And she said, 75% of my money. Okay. All right. Well, that's the
00:17:44.380
thing. All of these folks know that no matter what they do or choose, they will be supported by the
00:17:48.420
government till their dying day. And they also know that whatever they make, they're at best, they're
00:17:54.000
only going to take home, let's say 25% of it. Now, what does that do? Does that just make you feel
00:17:59.360
happy and secure and, you know, encourage entrepreneurship moonshots, right?
00:18:07.360
Risk, invention, risk, right? No, I would suggest it does exactly the opposite. And this to me
00:18:15.120
manifested in small ways. You, when you're not in a capitalist society, you walk into a hotel
00:18:21.660
and the bellman, you know, who normally would rush to take a woman's big bag coming off of it.
00:18:26.180
They're like, eh, you're good. They don't, there's no rush. They're not hustling for a tip. They don't
00:18:32.360
care. You go to the restaurants and there's not a waiter who's going above and beyond to try to,
00:18:39.220
you know, give you good, good service, make sure you have a good time so that he gets a good tip.
00:18:43.620
That's the American capitalist spirit. If I work harder for you, presumably you will reward me
00:18:49.680
with something that says I value you. Nope, not there. It's like, we don't really do that here. And
00:18:56.760
my government's got me. I mean, it was, you could feel it. And I missed that American hustle. I missed
00:19:02.900
the gunner, you know, that you see, I miss going, like I live outside of New York. You go into the
00:19:08.240
city, you see these guys everywhere. You go into a cocktail lounge and these are the movers and shakers
00:19:14.620
of the world having drinks. They're talking about the future. And then you go out on the street and you
00:19:20.140
see the guys who are drilling the streets and with the, you know, doing the dirty jobs. And they say,
00:19:25.500
Hey, sweetheart. And you say, Hey, yo, you, you go guy. And you thank the cops for their service.
00:19:30.020
And they'd got the New York acts. I missed all of it. I didn't really, I couldn't see life at a 6.5.
00:19:37.580
You know what I mean? I much rather live in a place where there are ones intense.
00:19:42.180
Well, you round the edges off of the thing, you know, and everything is smooth and careful and all
00:19:48.820
terribly polite. It's, it's really, I think the only four letter word that, that really matters in
00:19:54.920
this conversation is risk and the willingness to accept it and society's decision to either
00:20:02.580
reward it, encourage it or punish it and discourage it. We're coming out of a three-year period,
00:20:09.800
Megan, right now. I, I think we're, we're risk in all of its forms has been mitigated. Uh, we've,
00:20:17.480
we've attempted to erase it, eliminate it. You know, I was listening to an old clip. I posted something
00:20:24.520
a few years ago when Andrew Cuomo as governor, uh, said no measure, no matter how draconian
00:20:33.100
could be deemed excessive if it saves a single life. And, you know, you think about what would
00:20:41.820
really happen to a society that actually believed that. And we started to see it. And when you read
00:20:49.900
the texts of our founding fathers and when you look at the affirmative steps that were taken a couple
00:20:57.340
of hundred years ago, the amount of courage, the amount of risk that the signers of the declaration
00:21:03.960
had to assume and knew they were assuming before they put pen to paper, it's mind boggling when you weigh
00:21:12.120
and measure it against, uh, today's state of mind. It's we're like a frog in the boiling water with
00:21:20.940
regard to that. We've, we've truly embraced a literal safety first mentality in our country,
00:21:28.680
which is absurd. Safety is never first. If it were, we'd still be in our homes. If it were our,
00:21:37.120
the speed limit, Cuomo could have dropped the speed limit to five miles an hour, made rubber cars and
00:21:44.600
made all motorists wear a helmet and eliminated left turns. And it would have saved 35,000 lives
00:21:50.780
a year. But we don't do that because people weren't made to stay in their homes and cars weren't made to
00:21:57.840
set in the driveway and, and, and ships weren't made to stay in the Harbor. And, and all of that
00:22:04.440
freedom and all of that individuality, that's what I think you guys probably missed in Scandinavia.
00:22:10.980
It was the, the freedom to screw it up. It was the, the right to try and the concerted effort to
00:22:20.360
encourage the trying and the failing, the flaw, all of it, the stuff that makes it interesting,
00:22:27.680
that walk down that New York city street, you just invis envisioned, you know, it, who knows what
00:22:34.080
that construction worker is going to say next. He might go too far. Who knows how that we don't
00:22:39.100
know. We're not supposed to know. It's not supposed to be that anodyne and safe, you know, that's back
00:22:47.560
to Franklin, right? Safety and security. And you get those two things mixed up. You don't deserve
00:22:53.400
either. Yeah, no, the, uh, the right to try. That's what we give you here in America. You have
00:23:00.140
the right to try. You don't have the right to win, no guaranteed success and no guaranteed safety net
00:23:06.460
for a lot of Americans. That's also true, but the right to try and to change your station in life,
00:23:12.060
unlike any other country in the world. And all right, this brings me back to the movie and one of
00:23:19.180
my favorite stories. So now, as I said to the audience up top, it's got about 10 or so stories
00:23:24.580
of people whose names you will know for the most part, some of you won't, but you'll recognize the
00:23:30.220
role that they're being highlighted for. And my, and the fun part is getting the big reveal at the
00:23:35.120
end. So I'm not going to ruin it for the audience because I hope they would experience it the same way
00:23:39.580
I did, but I'm going to tell, I think, and I have your permission, I think to tell one just so they can
00:23:44.440
get a feel for what's in this movie. And it's my favorite one. Okay. So you're going to help me
00:23:50.100
tell it. Um, here's a little bit from the movie that will jumpstart this particular story, uh, about
00:23:58.160
a guy named Harry sought for Bill believed that Harry's daughter would make an excellent wife and
00:24:06.400
planned on proposing after he graduated from Stanford. All he had to do now was convince Harry that he was a
00:24:13.880
good match for his little girl, a challenge that would require him to swallow a mouthful of bull
00:24:20.640
testicles. And you literally mean bull testicles. So the stars of this little story are Harry,
00:24:29.340
his daughter and Bill who needs to impress Harry in order to win the hand or his blessing for the hand
00:24:36.600
of the daughter whom Bill would like to date. You take it from there. Yes. Yes. So when I wrote that
00:24:42.780
story a couple of years ago, uh, the title was not inclined to judge because our hero, Bill was not
00:24:51.440
a judgmental guy. He, he took everything at face value and he always played the cards he got and he,
00:24:58.540
and he fell in love with this woman, Harry's daughter. And so he basically goes to court her,
00:25:06.220
to woo her. This is a Stanford student, by the way, smart fellow,
00:25:10.180
but he's a bit out of his depth on the lazy B ranch and the old man, Harry, you know, he knows his
00:25:17.720
daughter's a catch. And when the suitors arrive, he likes to weigh and measure them and see how
00:25:23.540
they'll respond. In this case, he has them go through some, uh, uh, dehorning, which is a very
00:25:29.760
difficult thing to do on a ranch and basic animal husbandry practices and branding and things like
00:25:36.700
that. And then of course we move on to castration, which on a personal level, uh, was kind of a big
00:25:42.280
deal for me during dirty jobs. In fact, when I castrated lambs in season four, uh, won an Emmy
00:25:48.340
award. I don't know if you can see it back there, but there it sits. So I, I, I knew this, I knew that
00:25:54.640
this topic would hit a chord. And so, uh, I tell the story of what Bill does and spoiler alert,
00:26:03.340
he's up for the job. Old Harry takes these testicles off of these bulls with the help of
00:26:11.680
his daughter who really seems to enjoy it by the way, and runs him through an ice pick and then puts
00:26:17.340
them on an open flame. He calls them shishka balls and he hands one to Bill and Bill takes it off the
00:26:25.800
ice pick and he eats it. Now this is a true story. In fact, I'm going to show you something. This,
00:26:30.720
it's so weird that you brought this up. Your viewers should know, I swear this isn't scripted,
00:26:35.700
but the prop director two days ago in camp Pendleton gave me this. We screened the movie
00:26:41.740
for about a thousand Marines the other day. It says hero bull testicle. I'm going to open it up for
00:26:47.100
you, Megan. I'm going to, Oh God, this is what you saw. This is what you saw on the film.
00:26:54.000
I'm sorry, but it looks like a penis. It doesn't even look like a testicle. It looks like
00:26:57.340
a severed penis. I can't speak to that, Megan. I don't know what your experience has been
00:27:02.660
testicle versus penises, bulls versus, you know, aardvarks, but that's a good size testicle.
00:27:08.720
And that's the prop that we use. Was it recently severed? There's still blood marks on it.
00:27:12.640
No, no, that's just all Hollywood magic. That looks like a vein, doesn't it? It's so realistic.
00:27:17.260
God, that's disgusting. This is what Bill had to eat. Okay. In order to win Harry's approval,
00:27:25.080
in order to get a chance to date his daughter, he does. And the two get together and they kind of
00:27:33.600
live happily ever after, except for the fact that Bill waited too long to propose. And another guy
00:27:42.000
comes to the ranch, another Stanford student who also passes the same testicle test, he proposes
00:27:49.260
and winds up marrying Sandra Day. His name, of course, was O'Connor. And so that couple goes off
00:27:59.020
into the sunset. But what about Bill? Poor Bill, the man who's not inclined to judge? Well, that was
00:28:05.500
Bill Rehnquist. He and Sandra Day sit on the Supreme Court for decades together. And the families become
00:28:15.080
dear friends brought together by the father of a pretty young girl who wanted to see what the men in
00:28:23.740
her life were made of and decided to do that with a litmus test that involved the recently severed
00:28:29.780
testicles of a bull. Now. A pair of scissors the dad called the emasculators. The emasculator. Look,
00:28:38.180
when you show up, I don't know what your dad was like, but when your old boyfriend showed up knocking
00:28:42.440
at the door, when the old man answers holding a bloody emasculator and says, come in, I'd like to
00:28:49.360
have a word, right? I mean, that to me is so relatable. Never mind history. You know, if you're
00:28:58.800
trying to get permission to tell somebody a larger story or to make a bigger point, you have to get
00:29:05.440
their attention. That's Dirty Jobs 101. So the reason that that story is in the film, it's different
00:29:12.820
from all of the other ones. But the reason I wanted it in there was because it has to do with judgment
00:29:19.400
and it has to do with what people will do in order to get to the heart of a thing, the truth of the
00:29:26.980
matter, the character of a man. How do we measure that today? And regarding my earlier comments,
00:29:33.960
you know, how will we judge these people from our past and how will we be judged from our grandkids
00:29:40.700
somewhere down the road? How do we think about our history? We, we get to do all that. But to me,
00:29:47.520
for, for, for Bill Rehnquist and Sandra Day to become great friends and colleagues in spite of
00:29:56.300
everything, I just found something really hopeful in that metaphor. And, and so the way it works in
00:30:04.220
the movie is it's just a piece of the puzzle. And the other piece of it, Mike, that, that I love too,
00:30:10.000
is, um, in the film you get to, and in 1981, um, president Ronald Reagan would ask chief justice,
00:30:23.200
William Rehnquist, whether he thought a woman he was considering to appoint to the high court,
00:30:29.500
the very first woman ever could handle being on a court with all men being surrounded by that much
00:30:36.960
testosterone. And all people said, Mr. President, she's good. She's got me. She is not going to be
00:30:48.440
intimidated by eight old bulls, you know, like, I mean, they, it just must've been one of those
00:30:55.280
great moments. Look, this is why my podcast is called the way I heard it. I wasn't there when
00:31:00.940
Ronald Reagan asked Bill Rehnquist, if he could recommend Sandra Day for that position. But I know
00:31:09.280
for a fact that Bill was there when Harry Day tossed him a severed testicle as his daughter
00:31:16.380
applauded and hoped that he would have the intestinal fortitude to take a bite out of that ball. Well,
00:31:24.960
he did. And I, in, in my mind as a, uh, you know, a fake cinematographer and an erstwhile writer,
00:31:33.260
I want to see that scene. I want that moment because I can see it in my mind's eye. So to
00:31:40.040
suddenly have permission to cast Ronald Reagan and William Rehnquist and create that little moment
00:31:46.040
in history that nobody ever writes about. I found that story buried in a footnote and a biography
00:31:52.880
on, on Sandra Day's life. And to be able to make that a centerpiece of a story that that's a fun way
00:32:05.300
to turn history on its head. You know, all the facts are right, but it is the way I heard it. I don't
00:32:12.620
know. I don't know exactly how Reagan put it. I don't know precisely what Rehnquist said, but I'd bet
00:32:18.620
big that somewhere in the reptilian part of his brain, he was remembering the emasculator and the
00:32:24.880
way young Sandy applauded in glee. Those two must've had such fun behind the scenes chemistry
00:32:31.740
when they were deliberating on these cases. I can't imagine, especially because now Rehnquist was
00:32:37.140
not exactly her boss, but in a, in a even more powerful post than hers, uh, I would have loved to
00:32:42.880
have been had a bird's eye view. I did go to, um, you know, I was at many arguments where they were
00:32:47.000
present. And, uh, I went as a reporter to cover chief justice Rehnquist funeral. It was actually
00:32:53.240
an amazing event. I mean, everybody was there of course, but, and it led to my, my one and only
00:32:57.860
meaningful interaction with justice Antonin Scalia, my very favorite justice ever who I saw on the steps
00:33:05.920
of the, of the, um, facility, the church was coming out and he came right over to me, Mike. And I was
00:33:12.800
like, this is it. He's going to tell me he appreciates my coverage. He probably watches Fox.
00:33:18.620
He's a more conservative guy. He's going to tell me I'm the only one who truly gets it. You know,
00:33:23.780
I'd practice law for 10 years. So I got a leg up on all these other people. And he did come right
00:33:28.520
over to me and handed me his camera and said, miss, could you please take my picture with this man
00:33:33.740
right here? Yeah. Oh my God. That, I mean, and, and, you know, though, Megan, you know, he knew exactly
00:33:44.360
who you were, you know, Oh, he knew, but that is such that, that that's great. I mean, that tells you,
00:33:52.780
I mean, you, you could take that moment and that would get people interested in hearing more
00:34:00.140
about who Scalia was and why he took the positions he took because, and that, and that's the point of
00:34:07.460
all these stories. You know, if, if I can find something in your background that informs and
00:34:14.240
foreshadows the kind of woman you're destined to become, that's, that's where the story starts.
00:34:21.260
That would, that's what Paul Harvey was so good at doing. And that's what I've tried to, uh,
00:34:25.140
you know, speaking of, uh, some of the desecrations of our flag and people getting upset over seeing
00:34:32.280
the American flag triggered now, you know, in the United States of America, it is legal to burn the
00:34:37.240
flag, which is something we should be proud about. And Scalia was one of the ones who casted the
00:34:42.660
deciding votes, affirming that saying it is legal. It is constitutional in this United States of America
00:34:49.580
to burn the flag. And he said, if this were the United States of Antonin Scalia, I would make it
00:34:55.840
illegal. I would make it unconstitutional, but I am a job. I am a lawyer in a robe whose job it is to
00:35:02.700
interpret the constitution as written. And as written, we have this very precious thing called
00:35:07.940
the first amendment that gives you a right, a freedom of expression that's written right there.
00:35:13.200
And it's really unambiguous. And the reason it's so important to let people burn the flag is because
00:35:19.980
the right to do it is more important than their objection. Uh, the objection to seeing somebody do
00:35:25.080
it. It's funny though, isn't it? How that logic doesn't quite transfer to say the Nazi flag or
00:35:33.240
maybe, I don't know, pick your favorite flag today. I mean, maybe it's the pride flag. Do we feel
00:35:40.880
as magnanimous about that? That guy on the beach you showed me 20 minutes ago, if those flags waving
00:35:50.180
in the breeze behind them were the rainbow flags, would he still be spewing the same kind of thing?
00:35:57.140
And how would we feel about it? You know, how do we feel about a person who protests today, uh, behind,
00:36:04.860
uh, a bandana or a mask? Are we generous with them? It, it, it, it feels like we kind of are, but
00:36:12.920
isn't it interesting? Like what's the difference between a Klansman who wants to go out there and
00:36:20.400
set something on fire and a protester today who wants to go out there and set something on fire.
00:36:26.240
If both of these people are primarily concerned with covering their face. So yeah, I, I'm with
00:36:36.500
Scalia. If I, if, if I were wearing the robe, my first duty of care is to the constitution,
00:36:42.120
but he's also, it's incumbent on him to share his personal feelings too, because he's an individual
00:36:48.740
and a human. That's right. And, and that I object. I don't like it. I don't want you to do it,
00:36:55.220
but I'm not going to say you don't have that right. Especially as a Supreme court. I mean,
00:36:59.900
this is turning into an X-rated show people. He's banned this. I, I object to this prosthetic
00:37:05.820
testicle. I I'd rather not eat it, but I will, I will because there's, there's something greater at
00:37:14.580
stake. Do with that metaphor, but you will. Stand by quick break more with Mike Rowe. You've got to
00:37:24.060
check it out. The movie is something to stand for. You're going to see it in movie theaters. He's
00:37:28.420
making it easy on you. Uh, and it starts tomorrow only for a limited run. This is not going to be
00:37:33.200
out in the theaters for that long. He's just trying to get people to think about this country,
00:37:36.620
something to stand for back in a moment. Joe Biden knows how to do this. Yes. He knows how to do this.
00:37:42.960
He's, he's quite good at this. And, you know, you can't refute anything with him because he just,
00:37:49.360
when I say him, I mean. He rambles. Trump. Trump. Yeah. He tends to just.
00:37:55.540
But can I mention one thing? Because Trump is out there calling. Did you say his name?
00:38:03.320
I said his name. It was a trick. So that was Whoopi Goldberg spitting,
00:38:08.840
openly spitting on the show of The View, on the set of The View after saying Trump's name,
00:38:12.560
something she has sworn never to do. She would never say President Trump. She told
00:38:16.920
David Axelrod years ago. And, um, she, I guess she just caught herself letting his name slip out
00:38:23.880
and thought that was worth spitting openly on the set of ABC news. Uh, welcome back to the Megan
00:38:29.760
Kelly show here with me today, Mike Rowe, writer and star of something to stand for, which is in
00:38:35.720
theaters tomorrow. Tomorrow. You can check it out by going to something to stand for.com. And then
00:38:39.660
it'll show you exactly where you can find it. Um, that's the Sop movie. Okay. Stop movie. That's
00:38:47.040
how you find it. That's the state of America today where we no longer have the Walter Cronkite's of
00:38:52.120
the world, but we have openly spitting when the name of the former president comes out of your
00:38:58.020
mouth on the set. So there's been a slippage in terms of courtesy and behavior and standards.
00:39:05.420
I think we can agree on that thoughts of any on that, Mike, and also on whether you're going to
00:39:11.140
be watching what could be the only presidential debate of this entire election season on Thursday
00:39:17.580
night. They say there's going to be two. We'll see. There's definitely going to be at least this
00:39:21.240
one. I'm not sure there's going to be the one. I think the whole situation is, uh, fluid as they
00:39:28.220
say, but sure. I'll watch. I might even make popcorn. I mean, I, what can it, what else can you
00:39:33.000
do? Uh, but, but bear witness and, and there's a lot to watch, you know, I, I don't quite know yet
00:39:41.160
what to think of the reports I've read about the president hunkered down in, uh, in an airplane
00:39:49.560
hangar with 16 people coaching and prepping and preparing for a moment. Well, 90 moments, right?
00:40:00.620
It's a 90 minute debate. It just, I don't know. Again, when I think about the people in this movie,
00:40:07.220
when I think about our founding fathers and, and how they would prepare and how people spoke
00:40:13.900
back then and just the, the, the sheer poetry of so many of these people, their mastery of the,
00:40:24.060
the, the language, their control of rhetoric, their ability to make a case on the fly, uh, to make a
00:40:33.600
point, to be understood that stuff. I, I don't know where that went. I mean, hell, our ability to write a
00:40:41.680
letter, Megan, if you go back and read the letters from soldiers during the revolution or the civil
00:40:49.660
war, even in the first world war, that it was, we, we had such a better control of even common people
00:40:59.980
had a, a seemingly more facile, uh, control and understanding of how to be understood. It's just,
00:41:09.280
this thing has been reduced on all sides, especially on the media side to a kind of, uh,
00:41:17.980
kabuki, you know, I don't even, I, I don't even know what to watch for when I look at a debate like
00:41:26.480
this, because all of it reeks of preparation, performance, and the moment it, it just,
00:41:33.800
it's drenched with it. You mentioned Cronkite. This is something else that, that I think a lot
00:41:39.400
about, you know, he used to sign off. Do you remember how he would sign off every newscast?
00:41:45.280
And that's the way it is. August 4th, 1977, or whatever it was. Well, that's over, isn't it?
00:41:54.680
Nobody can look in the lens now and tell you the way it is. I mean, they try, but you can almost hear
00:42:00.600
the masses giggling from sea to shining sea. What do you mean? That's the way it is. Who are you to
00:42:05.480
tell me? That's the way it is. What do you know? We don't trust anybody in front of the camera,
00:42:12.000
anywhere close to the degree that we used to trust uncle Walter. And that's because we don't trust,
00:42:19.260
nor should we, right? We should be skeptical first and foremost, but the reason we need to be more
00:42:25.240
skeptical today than we've ever been in the history of bipeds is because our media has never been less
00:42:32.260
skeptical. We need people who are willing to hold the elected officials' feet to the fire,
00:42:40.900
regardless of your personal feelings. We need more people like Scalia, who to your earlier point
00:42:47.080
would, would not do a thing, but would enforce the law. And our media is just not doing their job.
00:42:54.340
And so it's incumbent on the rest of us to embrace this heightened level of skepticism, which means
00:42:59.320
that Walter Cronkite is not only dead and gone, but any attempt to say, trust me, is over. This is
00:43:06.300
impacting every single thing in our world, Megan, from paid spokespeople like me, from time to time,
00:43:12.640
to journalists, to politicians. I would suggest to you that anyone who stares into the lens of the
00:43:21.540
camera and speaks with great earnestness about a thing and then concludes with something along the
00:43:27.700
lines of take my word for it is about the most unconvincing, unpersuasive. That's not for sale
00:43:37.340
anymore. In my view, the way to be persuasive today is to say, don't take my word for it. I actually
00:43:46.120
wasn't there. But this is what I read and this is what I think and this is what I believe. And that's
00:43:52.160
why, whether it's a product that you use or a fact that you're reporting or a headline you're calling
00:43:58.120
into question, we've entered into a place where people are now so skeptical and so dubious and in
00:44:04.820
many cases so cynical that I honestly don't think there's any upside in being persuasive by trying
00:44:13.680
to be persuasive. So that's a long way of saying, I can't wait to see what happens in this debate
00:44:19.660
because I don't know how either of these two men are going to fundamentally overcome the deep suspicion
00:44:31.240
held so close by so many viewers who are watching. We smell a fake. We we can smell it. We've I mean, I can't
00:44:42.400
believe anybody uses a teleprompter anymore, but present company excluded. But I mean, from a from a
00:44:49.880
persuasive standpoint, what what are we doing? We say on the one hand that we're desperate for authenticity
00:44:56.980
and then we watch people perform. You know, there's nothing wrong with a prompter, but show me
00:45:04.080
the wide shot. They're both going to do it. But Biden's I mean, there's no question Biden's
00:45:08.840
rehearsing way more than Trump is and he's going to have his canned lines. And I think Trump will be
00:45:13.220
much more off the cuff and ad lib. But when you were talking about, you know, Walter Cronkite and
00:45:18.520
what's changed, all I could think is. We we've made a critical error and it's something a Mike Rowe would
00:45:25.480
never have allowed had you been in charge of all the journalism. And that is we've let our journalism
00:45:30.600
class become part of the elites. You know, they're they're no longer those shoe leather, scrappy
00:45:38.140
working class guys and gals shoving dimes into the payphone, trying to work their sources.
00:45:44.580
F the man. I I'm not on his side. I'm on the side of my readers and my viewers and my listeners.
00:45:50.520
No. Now they are on this. They are the man. And worse than that, they've forgotten their
00:45:56.960
connection to the other side. You know, I think about it in terms of my own life. You can go
00:46:01.740
on a Scandinavian vacation. You can enroll your kids in the in the summer club where they learn
00:46:07.880
how to play tennis. But you should never forget that you spent your own childhood. Your summer
00:46:12.900
yacht club was your mom's sprinkler in the backyard. Right. Like that to forget that is the unforgivable
00:46:18.860
part of what the journalism class has done. Yes. A thousand times. Yes. You I mean, we often say,
00:46:27.240
look, our our elected officials work for us. Well, of course they do. But they have a duty of care
00:46:33.600
to groups. They have a duty of care to their own party. They have all sorts of other things,
00:46:40.020
all kinds of chronologies and hierarchies that make that platitude not not terribly plausible.
00:46:46.940
Journalists don't. Journalists work for all of us. We need you on that wall. Right. We need you to
00:46:56.960
be skeptical. We need you to be disagreeable, unlikable and unflappable in your relentless pursuit
00:47:05.840
of the truth. Because if you don't do that, if you don't question the experts in every other field,
00:47:12.780
you will leave us no choice but to do that for ourselves. And we can't because we don't know
00:47:18.760
who to believe anymore, because anybody anywhere can go to any website to find any number of self
00:47:24.380
appointed experts to confirm that which they hold dear. And so we're lost. We need you guys.
00:47:33.640
We need journalists back and we need them scrappy and pissed off and highly dubious of every single
00:47:40.840
thing. You said it exactly right that the goal of any journalist should not be to be liked. It
00:47:47.700
should be to be respected. That's it. If you're in the being liked game, you're failing. Mike Rowe,
00:47:52.740
both likable and respectable, the very rare combination with the movie Something to Stand
00:47:58.860
For. Go and see what theaters you can watch it in at something to stand for dot movie. Great to see
00:48:04.560
my friend. It is great to see you. Please tell Doug hello. And I swear to God, if there's any justice
00:48:10.560
in this world, we all have to get together in person sometime with a frosty beverage and do this
00:48:15.960
right. Oh, it's happening. It's all three of us are counting the moments. I look forward to it. All
00:48:21.720
the best, sir. Till then. Thanks. See you soon. And we'll be right back.
00:48:25.540
I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly show on Sirius XM. It's your home for open, honest and
00:48:32.440
provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal and cultural figures
00:48:37.380
today. You can catch the Megan Kelly show on Triumph, a Sirius XM channel featuring lots of hosts
00:48:42.800
you may know and probably love. Great people like Dr. Laura, Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey,
00:48:49.980
and yours truly, Megan Kelly. You can stream the Megan Kelly show on Sirius XM at home,
00:48:55.540
or anywhere you are. No car required. I do it all the time. I love the Sirius XM app. It has ad
00:49:03.080
free music coverage of every major sport, comedy talk, podcast, and more. Subscribe now. Get your first
00:49:09.180
three months for free. Go to Sirius XM dot com slash MK show to subscribe and get three months free.
00:49:16.880
That's Sirius XM dot com slash MK show and get three months free. Offer details apply.
00:49:25.540
Hillary Clinton is out with a new op-ed in the New York Times, giving President Biden tips
00:49:33.480
on how to handle Donald Trump during the debate tomorrow night. Surprisingly, one of her tips
00:49:38.220
was not to get the questions ahead of time from the DNC. That is so helpful. Donna Brazile did me a
00:49:45.020
solid. That's really what her op-ed should have said. Plus, why is Jennifer Lopez suddenly trying
00:49:49.740
to pretend she's not mega rich, flying economy, and obviously leaking a picture of herself to TMZ?
00:49:55.480
There are so many stories to get to with our friend, Daily Mail columnist Maureen Callahan.
00:50:00.920
I want to tell you right now, Maureen is also out with a must-read new book. This is the must-read
00:50:10.480
book of the summer. It's called Ask Not the Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed. You will fly through
00:50:20.660
this thing. There's so many interesting new nuggets on this bizarre family. Trust me, you're going to
00:50:29.020
want to read it and you're going to want to buy it for everyone you know. She's giving us the first
00:50:33.400
exclusive interview on it ahead of the book's release next week. Maureen, welcome back to the show.
00:50:38.280
Megan, thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for supporting this book.
00:50:45.320
As I've said before, your opinion means so much to me and giving my book your stamp of approval
00:50:53.600
is just, you're the best. You're the best. Oh, oh my gosh. Thank you so much. I enjoyed every page
00:51:01.080
and some of these topics and cases that you go into, I have studied pretty extensively. I learned
00:51:07.600
so many new facts, even on the things I thought I knew well. It left me feeling I never want to
00:51:14.740
really do a story again without having Maureen research it. She just gets things nobody else
00:51:21.100
gets. Anyway, we'll get into all of it. Let's tick through a couple of the news headlines because I
00:51:25.840
always love getting your take on what's in the headlines, but then I really want to spend all of
00:51:29.360
time on your book because it's just so good. Um, let's start with politics. Okay. First of all,
00:51:35.060
we showed our audience this clip the other day. Let's just remind them sought 22 of AOC going into
00:51:41.640
the Bronx, acting like Cardi B like, yeah, yo screening, trying to get people riled up for what
00:51:47.840
to vote for Jamal Bowman, fellow member of the squad who went down in flames last night. So let's
00:51:55.980
remind them what AOC looked like rallying for him.
00:51:58.980
Yeah, yeah, me and my son, you know what they're picking. Cheap and expensive, you know what the
00:52:03.060
difference. You know what it's getting, you know what it's giving. Here, reels, come in there. I can
00:52:06.720
survive in the cold, it's conditions. Bang all day, tone, they spend. There's five, soap and
00:52:10.720
the dishes. I'm black, pressure like boy, constricted. I'm so old, you, daddy, I'm not gonna do. I'm in Miami, I put up on
00:52:16.980
two ships. You in Miami for all two weeks. Let's not play!
00:52:18.980
Step this damn people on that can't breathe. Whips the hair down.
00:52:22.980
Well, apparently not, Maureen, because Jamal Bowman, the
00:52:52.980
I didn't really pull the fire alarm congressman, uh, was booted out very easily by his Democratic
00:52:59.940
challenger for this role. And they were not ready to fight on behalf of anything AOC was selling,
00:53:05.660
as it turns out, in the Bronx. What do you make of it?
00:53:07.800
Or take anything back. I mean, what a ridiculous and embarrassing display. This woman
00:53:14.400
is positioning herself as a future elder stateswoman of far left. So what does she do? She gets up and
00:53:23.220
she cosplays as Cardi B, singing along to lyrics, calling women bitches and hoes, in support of a guy
00:53:33.360
who is a rape denier, who said that what Hamas did on the 7th was an out-and-out lie, that there was no
00:53:42.640
such thing as mass rapes or killings of women and babies. This is, I mean, you have to marvel,
00:53:49.840
as ever, at the lack of self-awareness. It's amazing to me. Jamal Bowman then getting up in his, like,
00:53:57.840
sleeveless muscle shirt, slamming this stool around and, you know, yelling all manner of
00:54:05.580
things about taking things back and blah, blah, blah. And you contrast that with his appearance
00:54:10.440
in Westchester in, like, a suit and a tie and being all decorous, you know, as a would-be. It's just,
00:54:18.460
it's remarkable. It's a great kickoff to the summer.
00:54:21.060
There it is. Yes. Well said. I agree with that. So Jabal Bowman in the, in the final stretch before
00:54:27.820
he knew he was going to lose, played the race card, uh, came out and said during his final debate,
00:54:32.800
I'm an outspoken black man. And, uh, said his, his challenger supporters don't want that
00:54:38.740
because it challenges their power, right? When in doubt, play the black card. It didn't work.
00:54:44.660
And even now in defeat where he didn't concede, he came out and played the victim. Listen.
00:54:53.000
We should be outraged when a super pack of dark money can spend $20 million
00:55:00.780
to brainwash people into believing something that isn't true. Unfortunately, some so-called
00:55:09.340
Democrats are aligning themselves with radical racist right-wing Republicans. We should be
00:55:15.260
outraged about that. Ah, you see, that's why he lost to Democrat George Latimer, 58.4 to 41.6,
00:55:24.200
because those dumbass misinformed Democrats align with racist Republicans, Maureen.
00:55:31.360
Well, Megan, I think you really have a hard time playing that card in a post-Obama America.
00:55:37.580
I think if you're going to call that segment of the electorate racists, I think you then have to
00:55:44.080
turn to Hillary Clinton, who endorsed Latimer. And lastly, I think the loss lays at your feet when,
00:55:53.240
as at that rally, you take the stage full of vim and vigor, and you yell things like,
00:55:59.620
we're going to show them who the fuck we are. Well, you did, and you lost.
00:56:04.480
Right, noted. And we are moving on. Okay, back to, speaking of Hillary, her op-ed, which is really
00:56:14.080
pretty spectacular in the New York Times. First of all, my team just showed me this. Have you seen
00:56:19.720
the cover for her new book? It's something lost, something gamed. Gained. A gamed is with Freudian
00:56:30.220
slip. And she, I, like, the amount of retouching on this face I haven't seen since, you know,
00:56:38.740
Joan Rivers had her 15th surgery. God love Joan. This, I don't know what she's trying to be with
00:56:44.880
this soft focus. My executive producer, Steve Krakauer, is like, she looks nothing like herself.
00:56:50.200
I said, well, why are you saying that? Like, she's Cindy Crawford. That's a good thing in the case of
00:56:54.580
Hillary Clinton. We shouldn't be upset. Sorry, personal insult, but yeah.
00:57:00.040
It's on my mind, though. Like, the air-toucher, the retoucher deserves a huge raise. This is a much
00:57:10.040
more soft, welcoming, friendly, I suppose, Hillary. Although, again, to self-awareness,
00:57:18.220
something lost, huh? I wonder what that was, really. You know? The woman who wrote a book called
00:57:25.240
What Happened, like, marveling over all the external forces that could have caused her loss
00:57:30.800
in a presidential election that was handed to her on a silver platter. And then you get into this
00:57:36.760
op-ed, which, again, is just remarkable for what's in there. She has a paragraph in there
00:57:42.300
about all the prep she did to debate Donald Trump herself in 2016. And she ends that passage
00:57:48.860
with these two words. I kid you not. It worked. It worked? You lost. If it worked, you would have
00:57:58.760
won. Why aren't you the president, if you're so smart about how to debate Trump, asking for a friend?
00:58:05.820
Like, it didn't work out for you. But she comes in like the elder stateswoman, like,
00:58:10.620
you can do it perfectly, is really what she's arguing. And it won't help, because you can't
00:58:16.720
debate this insane man. She writes, it's a waste of time to try to refute Mr. Trump's arguments
00:58:21.760
like in a normal debate. It's nearly impossible to identify what his arguments even are. He starts
00:58:28.500
with nonsense and then digresses into blather. This has gotten only worse in the years since we debated.
00:58:34.620
So this is these are just insults, right? It's like, actually, what he did was he got out there
00:58:40.860
and said you'd be in jail if he were in charge. And people loved the challenge of power of somebody
00:58:47.900
who'd been considered untouchable. You, in the meantime, as we now know, were cheating behind
00:58:52.980
the scenes of these debates. He was not cheating with the Russians or anyone else. And he was raising
00:58:59.660
issues that really mattered to working class in middle America, whom she totally ignored.
00:59:06.020
None of that's in the op-ed. None of it's in the op-ed. By the way, she also has a line in which
00:59:13.100
she refers to Biden. She calls him this, the most empathetic president we've ever had.
00:59:19.260
I cannot repeat this enough. Ashley Biden's diary. Was I molested? I think so. Showers with my dad.
00:59:30.200
Probably not appropriate. Let's talk about the debate tomorrow night. Let's talk about
00:59:36.000
which moderators are going to go all in on Donald Trump. And I guarantee you the opening question
00:59:42.180
is going to be Mr. Trump, President Trump, rather. You are now a convicted felon. How is it that you
00:59:48.580
can tell the American people you possess the character for the highest office in the land? Do we think a
00:59:55.680
single one of those people is not only going to raise Ashley Biden's diary verified by Ashley herself
01:00:01.620
in court filings? Do we think they're going to raise the concerns of world leaders at the G7
01:00:07.620
who said they have never seen an American president so out of capacity mentally and physically? Are we
01:00:17.760
going to reference the Wall Street Journal story two weeks ago in which 45 government officials,
01:00:24.320
Republican and Democrat, Republican and Democrat said that they were so concerned about Biden's
01:00:30.680
fitness for office and all but said he falls asleep in meetings and he clocks out at three in the
01:00:36.460
afternoon? What are we going to discuss this? I would love for Hillary Clinton to have raised some of
01:00:41.720
these truths in this self-reflecting, self-regarding op-ed in which she, the biggest loser in modern American
01:00:51.460
politics, is telling President Biden how to beat this guy. The other absurdity is in all of these
01:00:58.340
debates, whether Trump was debating Hillary or Joe Biden, the moderators were on the opposing side.
01:01:04.920
They were all against Trump. She had the assistance of every moderator they appeared in front of,
01:01:10.200
as did Joe Biden. That was obvious to anybody watching. It's a lot easier to feel you did well
01:01:15.020
when you're not getting asked the most pointed questions, when the other guy is taking all of the
01:01:19.720
frontal blows. And you're right. Like if this, by the way, a prediction, I think if they asked Biden
01:01:26.260
about his age and infirmity, then they'll feel the need to ask Trump the same question. They're
01:01:30.200
going to, both sides of that one, like, oh, well, they're both old. Yeah, they're both old. And Trump
01:01:34.600
has normal, I'm getting older signs of aging, like he mistakes a name here or there, stuff that we all
01:01:41.180
kind of do after we hit 50. It's not there's no comparing what Trump is experiencing and what Joe
01:01:47.820
Biden. No, no comparing and no respectable, honest debate moderator would feel the need to both sides.
01:01:54.280
It will see whether they do it. OK, so we'll see. That's tomorrow night. Much more to get to here.
01:01:58.780
I got to ask you about Jennifer Lopez. This story has been everywhere. You're the only one I wanted to
01:02:05.580
talk to you about it. Now, J-Lo, when she left, when she and A-Rod broke up, he was cheating on her.
01:02:14.260
All the tabloids had the fact that he was dating some reality secretly star while he was supposed to
01:02:19.840
be living with J-Lo. And like that, she was suddenly all over the magazines. She suddenly had
01:02:25.660
the tabloid photographers catching her everywhere. And within about two minutes, she was back with Ben
01:02:31.060
Affleck and completely changed the news narrative to Bennifer. They're back. They're amazing.
01:02:38.340
Not J-Lo is kind of past her prime and got cheated on. Right. That's she didn't want that headline.
01:02:43.760
And I understand why. But I'm convinced she got back together with Ben Affleck to get rid of those
01:02:49.080
headlines. Then she went so far as to marry the guy. And shock of all shocks, it's not working out.
01:02:55.100
So now the PR campaign is back into gear, Maureen. And you see her. I mean, I'm sure you saw the
01:03:04.060
shots of her in Italy on a boat, like by herself, taking pictures of her own ass.
01:03:10.900
I saw those pictures, Megan. And I was like, this woman is maybe 13 years old emotionally.
01:03:19.740
Like your marriage matters. Every project you've put out this year has failed. You had to cancel your
01:03:27.880
tour because when you reduced your tickets to $9, Americans still don't want any part of you.
01:03:35.340
You vamoose to Italy to lick your wounds. You're in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
01:03:42.080
And what do you do? You take out your cell phone to shoot pictures of your own ass. Are you kidding
01:03:49.220
me? Oh, my Lord. I think we've talked about this before. But for anyone who hasn't seen her
01:03:56.380
documentary called The Greatest Love Story Never Told about her and Ben Affleck. I mean,
01:04:02.480
never told immediately. It is beyond incredible. And like the way that Ben talks about her on camera,
01:04:10.940
he talks about her, Megan. He literally says like, she's a bottomless pit of need.
01:04:15.000
Right. This is her husband. Oh, my Lord. And then the shot of her in coach. That was like
01:04:22.780
chef's kiss. Okay. So tell them what you're talking about.
01:04:26.860
So she's on like a almost like a puddle jumper in Europe. It's like an hour long flight between
01:04:33.460
countries. And somebody gets a picture of JLo looking downward, seated in coach. Jenny from
01:04:41.620
the block. She's just Jenny from the block. She's not trying to like us, like us not trying to unload
01:04:47.360
a 60 million dollar mansion, you know, and navigate a divorce while we all know she's like frantically
01:04:53.920
trying to line up her next victim because she cannot be single for a single second. You know,
01:05:00.400
we have to all participate in this delusion that Jenny's just a dewy little starlet, not like a
01:05:06.520
thrice divorced mother of two. Yeah. And oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, like fresh off the heels of trying
01:05:15.760
to sell this relationship as the greatest love story. Never mind the never told never told it's
01:05:22.080
been told incessantly. We're just not that interested. We pulled knowing that you were
01:05:26.680
coming on a clip from said, quote, documentary. Here's a here's a bit of it. Stop 24.
01:05:34.520
On that first day, I showed everybody this book. This book is a book that they gave me on our first
01:05:41.740
Christmas back together. It is every letter and every email that we wrote to each other
01:05:47.100
from 20 years ago and today. It became like our Bible and we just left it there in the studio and
01:05:52.960
people would thumb through it. They're like, can we look at it? It's like you have been showing all
01:05:58.860
the musicians all those letters that and they're like, yeah, we call you Penn Affleck. And I was like,
01:06:05.460
oh, my God. What's so because what's a love letter from your husband if you don't share it with the
01:06:14.140
world? Right. I mean, Jenny from the block is such a strong, proud Latina, you know, a real woman who
01:06:23.780
gets shit done. But it doesn't mean anything if the world and by the way, the like 35 songwriters she
01:06:32.340
had to hire to articulate this great personal love story do not have access to the JLo and Ben Affleck,
01:06:40.980
quote unquote Bible. And, you know, watching that documentary, which I did with my jaw on the floor
01:06:46.700
the entire time, what really struck me was there's a real strain of cruelty in there because that
01:06:52.240
Bible, which she so proudly holds up to the camera is dated like 2001 to 2024 and counting. And what that
01:07:02.360
says is he was writing to her the entire time he was married to Jennifer Garner, the mother of his
01:07:08.720
three children. On what planet does this woman feel the need to try to humiliate a woman that in her
01:07:17.140
mind, you know, she's like vanquished, you know, as the one who landed the amazing Ben Affleck, you know,
01:07:24.160
the alcoholic degenerate gambler who, despite his protestations, we all kind of believe screwed the
01:07:30.360
nanny in the house. Yeah. Yeah. Who won't, who won't, who finds Republicans so disgusting. He
01:07:35.500
won't even act in a movie across from one that's from his own lips. So she was just fine with him
01:07:43.620
marrying him. And now that it's going South, he must be destroyed. We're seeing all the articles leaked
01:07:49.300
about how he's mean. He's sourpussed. She's done all she can Maureen, but he's just too unhappy and
01:08:00.100
unlikable to save. She's really got to move on now. It's like, this is yet another failed marriage for
01:08:06.980
her. She's trying to dump it all on the guy, right? She's taking no responsibility. I tried,
01:08:12.160
I did my best. I lied to everybody about the greatest relationship. Um, what more can a girl do?
01:08:18.360
I guess it's back to my ass. I'm sorry. I have zero respect for this person. And I see what she's
01:08:24.060
doing with the tabloid press and America's too smart to fall for this. She's failing. She's failing
01:08:29.220
in all of her professional lanes. The only way she's not failing is she's got a huge social media
01:08:35.340
following. So she's reinventing herself as a Kardashian. Yeah, she is. But you know, I think
01:08:41.500
part of the factor here is that the American people, like we just don't like her. We don't like her.
01:08:46.860
We know she's a big phony. We know all the stories about her. Like the one thing you can say about
01:08:53.440
Ben Affleck is like, reportedly he is a great tipper and wherever he goes, he will lay down
01:08:58.740
like hundreds or thousands. And she snatches those tips back out of the hands of working people.
01:09:12.840
She's well known in Vegas for doing this. Oh, it's all over the place. You just, you know,
01:09:17.360
Megan, really, you've got bigger things to worry about. Like the likes of me,
01:09:20.540
I control like corners of the internet for these little breadcrumbs that I just adore,
01:09:25.540
really. But it says everything. Like this woman who's worth, you know, more than he is,
01:09:30.840
she's worth like $450 million. So flying coach, that's bullshit. But pulling tips out of the
01:09:38.440
hands of working people in like the hospitality industry, one of the hardest industries to work
01:09:44.640
in, you are lower than low. So we don't like her. Also another nice little nugget for Jenny's
01:09:51.480
Annis Horribilis. Sephora is discontinuing her cosmetics line. Great. Great. She will be
01:10:00.040
reduced to a reality show. I think you're right. She's going to go the route of the Kardashians,
01:10:04.440
try to make herself relatable. No one wants to hear it.
01:10:11.300
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.