The Megyn Kelly Show - Biden Lawyers Find More Docs, Vaccine Safety Signals, and MLK's Legacy, with Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke

00:00:00.440 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:12.080 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Happy Monday on this

00:00:16.840 Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We've got a couple of MLK stories to bring you later. One, an

00:00:22.120 homage, and one, the story about an attempted homage out of Boston, which I'm sorry, but

00:00:29.660 if you have not seen the statue that they unveiled in Boston Common, it was meant to honor Dr.

00:00:36.860 King and Coretta Scott King and OMG. What a misfire. We'll get to it. But we begin today

00:00:44.900 with the news of more classified documents being discovered at President Biden's home over

00:00:50.620 the weekend, discovered not by the FBI, but conveniently by Mr. Biden's lawyers. It's a

00:00:58.200 perfect story to kick off our first National Review Day here on The Megyn Kelly Show, where

00:01:03.160 we will bring you some of the National Review regulars, you know, but now appearing together.

00:01:08.520 Today, we kick it off with Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief, and Charles C.W. Cook, senior writer. You can

00:01:13.880 find all of their work when you become a National Review Plus subscriber. That's NR Plus. Rich

00:01:21.120 is always pushing this on the editors. I went ahead and did it. And he is right that it does

00:01:25.540 help you avoid the annoying ads and all that. Like, you can get right to the content,

00:01:30.500 and it's actually relatively inexpensive. So check out NR Plus. Become a member. You and

00:01:35.700 I can be in the same club as we take in some of the smartest writers and thoughts in America

00:01:40.740 today. Welcome back, Rich and Charles. Great to see you.

00:01:44.340 Hey, how you doing?

00:01:45.080 Thanks for having me.

00:01:47.320 So we were preparing for today, and we actually did a little deep dive into some of your backgrounds,

00:01:52.920 you guys, because it's kind of fun. And this is the first time, Charlie, that I found out

00:01:56.920 what C.W. stands for. Charles Christopher William Cook. So many names to choose from. Why

00:02:05.040 so many?

00:02:06.100 Well, because when I first moved to America, I wrote under my name Charlie Cook, which is

00:02:12.580 what most people actually call me. And of course, there's a famous pollster called Charlie Cook.

00:02:18.120 And people were mightily confused. I kept getting emails saying, well, hang on a minute. I thought

00:02:22.000 you were a pollster, right? Why are you so right wing? And the emails he got were a lot less polite

00:02:26.440 than that. So I thought that it might be good for him and good for me if I made my name so different

00:02:33.000 that we couldn't be confused.

00:02:35.640 I like that. So do new people call you Charles? And sort of people who know you well call you Charlie?

00:02:40.560 Yeah. And people will say, can I call you Charlie? And I say, that's fine. And occasionally people

00:02:45.860 follow it up. They push it a little further and say, can I call you Chuck? But I draw the line there.

00:02:49.900 No, no, no. That's that's a hard pass. There's a there's a street in Greenwich, Connecticut called

00:02:56.060 Poor Chuck. And we met a guy who lived on it. And he's like, why? Why would they name my street

00:03:02.940 Poor Chuck? Poor? Literally poor? Like no money? Poor?

00:03:08.960 I think it might be spelled with one O, but you pronounce it Poor Chuck, which is just not ideal.

00:03:14.520 Not ideal. Just like the MLK statue.

00:03:16.500 I had no idea what the CW stood for. I've worked with Charlie for a year or so. Meg, this is why you

00:03:22.120 are the foremost journalist among us here. I never would. It never occurred to me to ask.

00:03:27.300 I thought it was concealed weapon. I like that. So I my son, my eldest child is

00:03:33.300 Edward Yates, because my dad was Edward and Doug's dad. His name was Manly Yates, but he went by Yates.

00:03:40.700 So as a tribute to our son's grandparents, his granddads. And but he goes by Yates. And so it's

00:03:47.460 fun to have the first letter, you know, like you can always mystify people. What does the E stand for?

00:03:51.380 Excellent. You can have fun with that for the rest of your life. So maybe every time you'll come on,

00:03:55.000 we'll come up with a new CW for you, Charles CW Cook. In any event, we've never interviewed

00:03:59.040 Charlie Cook. So you're the only Charlie Cook we really know and love. OK, let's talk about

00:04:02.840 documents because there are a lot of them. It's a whack-a-mole situation now where they're coming

00:04:08.060 out of the ears of everyone Biden knows, every house he's ever lived in, every office he's ever,

00:04:13.700 despite this assurance from the normally totally reliable Corrine Jean-Pierre last Thursday.

00:04:20.860 Listen to what she said.

00:04:22.900 In the statement from the special counsel that the second set of documents that the lawyers

00:04:26.800 have completed the ongoing review by the president's legal team last night, does that mean there are

00:04:33.800 no other locations where documents could be stored? There's no other search underway at this moment in

00:04:38.160 time for documents from vice president's side? As part of the lawyers, they look through the places

00:04:42.380 where documents could have been stored and the council's office released a statement on that.

00:04:48.280 You should assume that it's been completed. Yes. You said that the search has been completed,

00:04:53.840 but is the president confident that there are no additional documents with classified markings

00:04:58.100 that remain in any other additional locations? Look, I can just refer you to what his team said.

00:05:03.460 The search is complete. He is confident in this process.

00:05:08.220 The search is complete. And we were supposed to be done with all this nonsense. But now

00:05:12.940 we've got five more documents. First, there was his D.C. office in connection with this affiliation

00:05:19.220 with the University of Pennsylvania, which conveniently gave millions of got millions of

00:05:22.860 dollars from China after they forged this relationship. The university did where his documents

00:05:27.320 were apparently unprotected, though he claims locked closet. Maybe he himself said they were in a

00:05:33.680 closet, a locked closet or at least a closet. Box says and then box, he said. So we're really not sure

00:05:40.780 what was found there. That was number one. Then came his garage. But fear not, because it was next

00:05:45.000 to his Corvette, which apparently he wants us to believe he took pains to protect like it was in

00:05:49.760 a garage. Then one document from inside his home that was post assurances that they had found them

00:05:55.520 all. And now these additional five documents that they found on Saturday, none of which were found

00:06:01.340 by the FBI guys, none of which were found by the it's like Biden's personal lawyer touching the

00:06:06.940 documents, searching for the documents, looking at the documents. Now it's like a White House

00:06:10.420 lawyer who claims he has security clearance, but that's not true for all of these discoveries.

00:06:16.380 So, Rich, where are we on, you know, document gate part two?

00:06:22.520 Yeah, well, obviously it's a major embarrassment and it's funny on top of everything else. That's

00:06:27.800 really what gives a political story extra resonance when it's really amusing. And the defense

00:06:34.500 that, wow, these documents were in a locked garage next to my Corvette is a highly amusing thing to

00:06:41.160 say. It's obviously not the standard that we've ever been used to people having for classified

00:06:46.880 documents before. And I wonder who thought initially, oh, we better look in the garage, right? And we've

00:06:54.060 seen that they did that ad where he's backing up the Corvette into the garage in 2020. And you can see

00:06:59.560 like a classic, you know, there's a set of drawers or something that is probably there. But how did

00:07:04.960 they get there? You know, how did they get there when you're supposed to be extra special concerned

00:07:10.020 with protecting classified documents, as we've heard from the White House? So is he gonna get prosecuted

00:07:15.420 for this? No, you can't prosecute a sitting president. Are there circumstances that make it

00:07:21.260 different than what Trump did? Yes. But it's gonna make it really hard now to go after Trump. I mean,

00:07:27.860 there'd just be no legitimacy to indict Trump for what he did with Biden now and is having a special

00:07:35.680 counsel appointed in his own case. So it's embarrassing. And then has this knock on effect

00:07:41.220 making it harder to go after Trump. And our colleague, Andy McCarthy, you know, former prosecutor

00:07:46.120 has very good judgment and stuff was up to 70% chance Trump was going to be indicted and thinks now

00:07:53.260 that the odds are falling by the day. Yeah, I think there's no chance now. I really I said it

00:07:59.340 after the disclosure of the second batch of Biden documents. It's done. And now we've had two

00:08:05.600 additional disclosures after being assured that this whole thing is complete. Charlie, the whole thing

00:08:11.880 feels sketchy, doesn't it? It doesn't feel like we're being told the truth, the full truth. It feels

00:08:16.440 like there's some sort of, you know, scratching of the backs between the Biden White House and

00:08:22.360 potentially the Justice Department. But why is Biden still in control of this process? And the FBI is

00:08:27.560 not doing the search. And we're supposed to just take the personal assurances of this guy they brought

00:08:32.560 in to protect Biden. This guy. Let me see. It's he is. It's confusing because he calls himself special

00:08:41.040 counsel to the president, Richard Sauber. But he's basically working for Biden to protect Biden. He's

00:08:46.980 not the special counsel who's been hired to investigate Biden. That's Robert Herr. This other

00:08:52.920 guy, Richard Sauber. Why is he the one investigating all this? Well, you're always going to get a lot of

00:09:00.640 weirdness when the executive branch is investigating the executive branch, which is in effect what's

00:09:08.060 happening here. We talk about the FBI and the Department of Justice and special counsels as

00:09:14.100 if they're independent, but they're not. There is no fourth branch of government. There is no free

00:09:19.560 floating agency within our constitutional order. So, of course, Joe Biden is nominally at least in charge

00:09:26.920 of the institutions that are now looking into him. In an ideal world, it would be Congress that was

00:09:32.780 leading this investigation. I think the bigger problem is that the media has been at pains to

00:09:39.400 point out why this is different, which in some ways it is, but also at pains to downplay it at every

00:09:45.000 juncture and to acknowledge and internalize and repeat the idea that everything here is above board

00:09:54.680 when it's not. In the grand scheme of things, I think Biden's infractions here, which are real and

00:10:01.480 which is serious, are probably the least egregious of the big three, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump,

00:10:08.600 and Joe Biden. But that doesn't mean they're not extremely serious. And it certainly doesn't mean

00:10:13.560 that everything here is above board and that Biden has followed all the proper procedures. You just

00:10:18.460 mentioned that the investigation here seems to be primarily being carried out by Joe Biden's lawyers.

00:10:26.060 Well, Joe Biden's lawyers do not have security clearances. They're not allowed to see these

00:10:32.120 documents either. The press was keen, except for, of course, Peter Doocy, to repeat the idea that this

00:10:39.400 doesn't matter so much because the garage in question was locked. But we don't keep, as a country,

00:10:45.900 classified documents in garages. It doesn't matter whether there was a Corvette in there or a Ferrari in

00:10:51.660 there or the treasure of the Sierra Madre in there. We do not keep classified documents in

00:10:57.060 garages, especially garages that open, garages into which film crews and Jay Leno were invited,

00:11:03.640 garages to which Hunter Biden, really the very definition of a security risk, had access.

00:11:09.300 So what bothers me much more than the weirdness around the executive branches investigating itself

00:11:14.520 is the total lack of interest in the press in all of the lies and smoothed edges that were being

00:11:22.980 offered up from the White House podium.

00:11:25.600 Yeah. And also, why were they all of a sudden looking for this stuff, right? That's one thing

00:11:31.480 we don't know. His lawyer goes to the Penn Center and just starts rummaging through a locked closet

00:11:36.020 and find these documents. That's unusual. Why was that happening? And then, of course,

00:11:42.860 there's a matter of not informing the public, right? This happens several days before the

00:11:47.840 election. They, of course, don't make it public before the election because they realize that

00:11:52.140 at least cause a bad news cycle, which they don't want right before the midterms. And it takes months

00:11:56.360 and months for the public to know. So those are a couple threads still to pull. How did that happen?

00:12:04.380 Who made the decision not to inform the public?

00:12:08.540 Look, these are things that remain to important matters that we need to know.

00:12:15.760 Well, and following up on this guy, Special Counselor to the President, Richard Sauber,

00:12:20.000 this is the one who now is looking. He's not the guy who found batch one, as far as I know,

00:12:26.160 or batch two, but he found batch, he found the third, and then he found the fourth. So he issues

00:12:33.020 this very strange statement. He says, I have a security clearance. Okay. They say, and by the

00:12:38.160 way, I'm told, I read, I read in the papers, they hired Richard Sauber to be, quote, special counsel

00:12:42.160 to the president when they saw the likelihood that we were going to have an incoming GOP house and

00:12:46.660 that he better lawyer up in connection with the investigations that were coming his way in

00:12:49.760 connection with his son, China, Russia, all these dealings that they've been accused of having

00:12:53.900 Ukraine. So he's there to run interference for Joe Biden. He says, because I have a security

00:12:59.880 clearance, I went to Wilmington Thursday evening to facilitate providing the document. Remember,

00:13:05.020 batch three was just one inside the home. The document, the president's personal counsel found

00:13:09.960 on Wednesday to justice. While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me,

00:13:18.600 five additional pages with classification markings were discovered, passive voice, among the material

00:13:26.800 with it. What? Like they just suddenly appeared behind the single document that was found inside

00:13:32.440 the house. This is intentionally vague. Lawyers know how to be specific in their language when they

00:13:37.740 want to be, and they know how not to be. Uh, for a total of six pages, the DOJ officials with me

00:13:43.840 immediately took possession of them. Okay. Again, five additional pages with classification markings

00:13:49.580 were discovered among the material with the first document. By whom, right? That raises the question,

00:13:56.180 by whom? Yes. Right. He's hiding something for a reason. I don't know what it is, Rich, but again,

00:14:02.040 this is fishy. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, um, uh, absolutely. And, um, now, you know, the, the advantage they have

00:14:11.180 to having a special counsel, which is another embarrassment, right? They're, they're now on equal

00:14:15.380 footing with the guy that they think was uniquely irresponsible. Donald Trump was the special counsel.

00:14:19.740 Now he has his own special counsel, but the advantage is now it just gives you the ready excuse

00:14:24.480 not to answer anything. So we've already seen this from the white house press secretary. Oh,

00:14:29.220 it's an ongoing investigation. You know, contact the department of justice. Of course,

00:14:33.160 you're going to get nothing from the department of justice. Yeah, that's ideal. All we're going to

00:14:37.840 get is Kareem Jean-Pierre, who we all know doesn't know anything. And even if she did,

00:14:42.820 couldn't be relied upon to say it in a way that we could understand and take to the bank.

00:14:46.520 Uh, Trump meantime is truthing again, wrong verb, but he's truth socialing over at his website.

00:14:53.300 And, uh, here's just an example of what he's saying. I will skip you all the, I did nothing

00:14:58.460 wrongs. That's presumed he's been saying that. Uh, he says Mar-a-Lago is a walled fortress built

00:15:06.000 with unlimited money with the idea that it would one day be the Southern white house. I didn't know

00:15:09.840 that. I don't know if that's true. Apparently it was built in the 1920s. I didn't actually

00:15:12.900 fact check on that. I guess that turned out to be true. He writes in addition to locks and strong

00:15:18.680 structural setting, I have security and secret service there full time. Compare that to a flimsy

00:15:24.100 garage with no security, easy access for anyone. Also, he had them for six years in many different

00:15:29.820 places. I arrived to Mar-a-Lago with the papers as president, Joe as vice president, uh, and goes on

00:15:36.680 to actually say, can we just stop these ridiculous investigations? This is all absurd. Like stop

00:15:41.760 with the not, we have other things to worry about as a country, which I agree with. And then goes on

00:15:46.160 to say Mar-a-Lago is essentially an armed fort. It's an armed fort. Uh, it was built that way.

00:15:52.560 Uh, and then goes on to rip on his spot, special prosecutor, prosecutor Jack Smith as a Trump hating

00:15:58.260 political thug versus Joe Biden's special counsel, who is reportedly a nice guy, very friendly with

00:16:05.300 Democrats and rhinos alike and pretty much liked and known by everybody. He's like, my, my guy is a

00:16:11.660 Trump hating lunatic and his guy is pretty nice. So, um, look, he's not wrong, Charles, that Mar-a-Lago

00:16:22.340 is probably more secure than Biden's garage. I mean, Trump was down there with former secret service.

00:16:28.440 I mean, with secret service as former president, um, you know, but he, uh, he's also right. Cause

00:16:34.320 he goes on to say here that he, there's a difference between a former president, former

00:16:37.580 vice president, a president can declassify and a vice president can't. Well, he's not wrong,

00:16:45.020 but it's irrelevant. And it's especially irrelevant to Joe Biden's case because Joe Biden says he didn't

00:16:51.940 know he had them. And if he didn't know he had them, then he couldn't have secured them.

00:16:56.340 So any boasts that Joe Biden makes about how secure these documents are, cause they were in a garage

00:17:02.120 are purely incidental. In effect, he's saying, I didn't know I had these documents. They were in

00:17:07.460 my garage. Therefore I lucked out. But again, we don't keep classified documents in garages. The

00:17:14.820 problem was that he had them in the first place. And that's also true of Trump. Yes, it is a good

00:17:20.820 thing that the documents Trump had do seem to have been in a safe inside a fairly secure building,

00:17:27.880 but Trump wasn't supposed to have them. And the more, Hey, that Trump makes, and this is true of

00:17:35.660 Biden as well, out of how secure those documents happen to be, the more it's going to look as if he

00:17:40.820 knew he had them. You really have to pick one. Of course, in Trump's case, he did seem to know

00:17:46.080 that he had them and didn't want to give them back. If I had to guess, I think what probably

00:17:51.940 happened here is that the case against Trump started to proceed internally. The decision was

00:18:00.880 made to raid Mar-a-Lago, which was a real moment, whether it was deserved or not. That was a big change

00:18:08.940 in American practice. And Joe Biden and his team were probably asked repeatedly by Merrick Garland

00:18:17.020 and others, are you sure that you don't have any documents? It's going to look really bad if you

00:18:23.480 end up having documents. And Biden probably said, no, no, no, no, no. And then it was discovered that

00:18:29.440 he did have some documents. And then the Republicans took the House and the Biden administration thought,

00:18:36.100 ah, we are liable here to be embarrassed if the Republican House starts looking into, say, Hunter Biden

00:18:43.580 and finds these documents, incidentally. They will make hay out of it. We would rather have control of this.

00:18:49.920 And so they dripped, dripped, dripped the truth out so that it was out of their control. And that was

00:18:56.380 probably smart from a completely amoral political standpoint. That was probably smart because the House

00:19:03.600 investigation into Benghazi discovered the Hillary Clinton documents that destroyed her presidential campaign

00:19:10.400 and her reputation. So in one sense, Biden has done this quite well by getting out in front of it. But in another

00:19:19.020 sense, this is the byproduct most likely of the decision to go after Trump, which I have a problem with not because I

00:19:25.580 don't think Trump is guilty. I think he is. But because we don't tend to prosecute people who are

00:19:31.760 guilty of these sorts of crimes and because we didn't prosecute Hillary Clinton, even though there

00:19:36.720 was a strong case against her. And so what we're probably going to see here is nothing. We're going to

00:19:44.060 see Biden skate and Trump skate and Hillary skate. And there is a poetic justice to that, in my view.

00:19:50.440 Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It's bizarre though, Megan, if you think about it, the best things that have

00:19:54.660 happened to Trump for the last six months politically have had to do with his illegal

00:19:58.940 possession of classified documents. One, the raid itself, which was a huge boon to him. And now the

00:20:04.540 discovery that Biden was guilty of essentially the same offense has elevated Trump and given him all

00:20:10.160 this material, the truth social about everything else has been bad. You know, his announcement speech

00:20:15.300 was a fizzle. You fell asleep during it. You know, the Kanye dinner, all that. But his possession of

00:20:20.040 classified documents has worked out for him. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

00:20:23.880 You know, I agree. I agree with most of what you just said there, Charles. And the thing is,

00:20:29.480 and neither one's going to be prosecuted. I totally agree with that. I think they were

00:20:32.360 going to indict Trump and this has completely saved him. I mean, because just just putting aside the

00:20:37.000 nitty gritty of the investigation, indicting a former president is a plus plus on the scale of

00:20:43.580 mega bombshells in the news world, in the political world. It's never been done before to do it to

00:20:49.080 Trump after two impeachments and all the rest of it would have been extremely unsettling to the

00:20:54.260 nation, which any attorney general would factor in. Right. And it is ultimately the AG's call

00:20:59.820 to do it under these circumstances where, yes, Trump went one step beyond what Joe Biden did.

00:21:06.460 He he filed an affidavit through a lawyer saying we've given you everything when, in fact, it looks

00:21:11.560 like they haven't. And he hasn't had the chance to fully defend that charge. But that's the

00:21:16.100 allegation. That's not enough. That's not going to that's not going to win the hearts and minds to

00:21:21.340 where people are like that. Well, that's an egregious step too far. Get him when Joe Biden

00:21:26.060 appears to have done pretty much everything short of that and also didn't have any power to declassify.

00:21:31.200 I will say this. Trump's not wrong about his special counsel's wife. His special counsel's wife

00:21:38.420 worked as a producer on Michelle Obama's documentary Becoming. I didn't know it was a documentary.

00:21:42.480 That was just a book. She twice donated to Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign. This is from

00:21:47.760 Newsweek. And let's see, there's more. She I guess she's made very public statements about Trump,

00:21:56.660 making clear she does not like him. So not totally wrong there. Here's the question, though.

00:22:02.520 I said at the beginning of this mess with Trump, Rich, that I really believed they were so excited

00:22:08.360 about these documents, not because they put such faith in the National Archivist, right, who, by

00:22:13.020 the way, needs to be going back. Where's the smart reporter to say, did you make this request of

00:22:16.660 President Obama, President Clinton, President Carter? How far back have you gone to make sure

00:22:22.220 Trump's not being singled out as the one ex president who has inappropriate documents?

00:22:26.140 Who's going to ask that of KJP? Somebody better do it ASAP because that maybe they've already done

00:22:31.120 that. Maybe they already collected those documents. Let's find out how many presidents have done this so

00:22:34.580 we have a better perspective. OK, anyway, they started this nonsense in earnest, I believe,

00:22:40.080 with so much firepower fired at Trump from the DOJ because they were interested in Jan 6.

00:22:45.700 They wanted to know what was down at Mar-a-Lago on on that subject, which is their favorite subject of

00:22:51.020 all. And then it expanded into Trump behaving badly in a way where they got even more excited.

00:22:56.500 But you guys had a piece recently about it was called it's by the editors, the Biden documents mess.

00:23:03.720 And you pointed out the difference between these two investigations, these special counsels

00:23:09.220 who are looking into Trump and Biden and how the one looking at Trump has this wide berth of things

00:23:15.940 he can look into and is in his charge with looking into. Not so in the Biden case, whereas it could

00:23:21.420 be. Can you explain? Yeah. So clearly, January 6th is the crucial background to what's been going on

00:23:31.300 with Trump, not just with regard to the search. Mar-a-Lago, Andy McCarthy, by the way, has the

00:23:36.820 same theory you do, Megan, that it was a broad search because they're rummaging around hoping to

00:23:41.440 find documents related to January 6th, but because they really want to prosecute him, indict him for

00:23:46.980 January 6th. But that's really hard. You know, he didn't incite violence. Once you get this into a

00:23:52.480 prosecutorial realm, you got to look at everything with not just whether it was immoral, what Trump

00:24:00.660 did, whether it was wrong, but whether it was technically illegal. Right. And just on the speech

00:24:06.260 he gave that day on January 6th, he said, let's peacefully march to the Capitol. That's a get out of

00:24:12.040 jail card right there. Now, it doesn't mean he wasn't reckless. He wasn't wrong. But if you want to

00:24:15.980 nail him to the wall for January 6th in a criminal sense, it's really hard. It's going to rely on

00:24:23.080 novel theories and it's going to be an attenuated case. So then like, oh, aha, we got him on something

00:24:28.900 else, which clearly is illegal. There's some aggravating factors there because it doesn't

00:24:34.340 seem as though he was completely forthcoming. He obstructed this investigation. So we'll nail him

00:24:39.520 for that in order to get him for January 6th. So that's not how the system's supposed to work.

00:24:44.940 You don't go hunting for an offense to try to nail someone for just because you think he did

00:24:51.400 something wrong in a separate case. I mean, that's un-American. It's unfair. But I think that

00:24:57.660 accounted for the attention and focus on this. And they thought they were getting there. And now

00:25:05.380 revelations over the last week have abolished that as well. And I just don't think unless he

00:25:11.540 literally shoots someone on Fifth Avenue that you should be indicting a former president, right?

00:25:17.240 These are, you got to make the case against him politically. You need to beat him in an election.

00:25:23.140 You can't short circuit that by indicting him, which is basically the fantasy they've been under,

00:25:28.680 living under since the beginning, right? And this is the whole walls closing in

00:25:32.780 2017-type thinking, which they've never let go of.

00:25:38.620 The reaction in the media to what the Republicans have said following the drip, drip, drip,

00:25:48.120 what would you expect them to say? What would you expect them to say is predictable. We are

00:25:52.760 literally seeing the Republicans pounce headline come back, guys. It's crazy. I'll give you a couple

00:25:59.420 examples. I'm sorry to even cite Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post to you, but bear with me.

00:26:04.460 She says Republicans have rushed forth to scream foul. Vanity Fair. Republicans already feasting on

00:26:10.280 the documents. CNN, Poppy Harlow. Republicans now pouncing on Biden for these documents. CNN headline,

00:26:16.980 see how Republicans downplayed Trump classified documents, but pounced on Biden. And that leads

00:26:21.180 me to NPRs out front or up front this morning. Up first. Sorry, forgive me. I listened to it this

00:26:27.900 morning and, of course, heard this. President Biden's classified document troubles are piling up.

00:26:34.820 His lawyers announced they had found more files at his home in Wilmington, Delaware,

00:26:39.800 and congressional Republicans pounced. Well, we don't know exactly yet whether they broke the law or not.

00:26:45.480 I will accuse the Biden administration of not being transparent. Why didn't we hear about this

00:26:50.100 on November 2nd when the first batch of classified documents were discovered?

00:26:55.540 That's the chair of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer, pouncing. You heard him

00:26:59.640 pouncing. Wasn't that a pounce, Charles? That was definitely a pounce, although I would note that NPR

00:27:05.500 and others are now behind on their game because as we learned from The Washington Post this week,

00:27:10.120 the new verb at the margin is thrust. Republicans thrust things now into the culture wars or the public

00:27:18.720 consciousness or the news cycle. So pouncing is very much last year.

00:27:22.520 Oh, wait a minute. Can I, I listened to your, to the editors on Friday and didn't you make an

00:27:26.520 analogy about this? Like somebody coming up your driveway? Do you remember you said something that

00:27:30.140 really worked for me on this? Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, the way that they talk about Republican reactions

00:27:35.220 is if somebody had come up my driveway with a gun and attacked me, I'd fought back. And then

00:27:40.640 they said, why is Charles Cook committing violence? Well, they're not aware that pounce has become a

00:27:50.980 joke, right? And they're, they're still using it unironically. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah.

00:27:56.120 Of course, you know, naturally we're going to get that kind of reaction from that. I guess we

00:27:59.540 shouldn't be particularly surprised though. It's not just Republicans. Listen to David Gergen. You

00:28:03.160 probably saw this over the weekend, a former Clinton senior advisor talking about this matter on MSNBC.

00:28:08.760 How big a mess is this for the Biden administration?

00:28:13.280 It's very, very big, not legally, but politically. It's a very, very big deal.

00:28:18.680 You know, this is a president who was marching upward for the first time in his presidency for

00:28:22.840 all sorts of reasons to believe that he could, that he can now present himself. The fears that

00:28:27.920 people like me have about how old is he and can he govern? Well, those fears will be dissipated

00:28:32.780 if he were able to stay on that track. But I don't think sitting there hunkering down now,

00:28:37.520 they're just acting like it's not out there as they, as they go straight. They're just going to

00:28:41.900 have, they're going to get cream doing it. Hmm. Well, what do we make of that? What's going on

00:28:47.760 there? Is that old democratic guard trying to push for new blood in the party? Or is that honest

00:28:53.060 analysis? Well, David Gergen, you could say it's not just Republicans or it's not just Democrats. I

00:28:59.460 mean, he's been on both sides during his long career. I mean, I believe it was Ronald Reagan

00:29:04.660 was telling jokes about how long, how long David Gergen had been in Washington and sort of

00:29:10.340 establishment figure in the 1980s sometime. Um, so, so he was very much an old hand. And I think

00:29:18.120 that's, um, it's, it's pretty good analysis, right? I mean, this is, this is embarrassing. It

00:29:24.100 hurts Biden. I don't know to what extent Biden had momentum, but certainly he was helped by the

00:29:28.980 midterms. And then you have this, this story, it's not going to sink his presidency. It's not

00:29:33.860 going to destroy his presidency unless there's something kind of unimaginably bad, um, that,

00:29:39.920 that we're not aware of, but it's an embarrassment and it makes it harder to go, go after Trump,

00:29:44.820 obviously. And it creates this sense, um, Trump and Biden are locked in a symbiotic relationship,

00:29:50.980 right? They're both not very popular figures. They're both in their seventies. They both have

00:29:57.440 special councils appointed to investigate them. They both mishandled classified documents. And

00:30:03.320 when, um, when, um, when either makes a misstep is better for, for the other one. Um, I would,

00:30:09.460 I would prefer to get out of the Biden, uh, Trump embrace and find someone who doesn't have a special

00:30:15.960 council on them and hasn't, uh, mishandled classified documents, at least not yet. And as a little

00:30:20.680 younger, um, but, uh, they, they both seem, well, Trump's running again and, and Biden seems set on

00:30:26.560 running again. And, uh, this may be what we're looking at. They both have a long list of weird

00:30:32.060 and disturbing allegations made against them by a number of women. So many of whom I've interviewed

00:30:37.820 on both sides. Can we do a little better than this? Apparently not. Cause here we go again,

00:30:43.560 Charlie and rich stay with us up next. We're going to show you this MLK statue and Oh my God.

00:30:47.920 All right. Stand by.

00:30:50.680 On Martin Luther King jr day, America honors one of the most impactful men in our history,

00:30:58.200 whose legacy continues to inspire. Wanted to bring you some of his powerful words from a lesser known

00:31:03.780 speech titled. What is your life's blueprint? And we've all heard the, I have a dream speech,

00:31:08.980 which can continue to inspire. A lot of us though has become weirdly controversial in some circles,

00:31:13.120 but what is your life's blueprint was from October 26, 1967. And he delivered the speech to high school

00:31:20.320 students in Philadelphia. This is four years after the, I have a dream address and just a few months

00:31:26.120 before his tragic death. Here's some highlights of the speech published on the beacon press YouTube

00:31:32.120 channel. Number one in your life's blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity,

00:31:46.720 your own worth and your own somebodiness. Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody.

00:31:59.320 Secondly, in your life's blueprint, you must have as a basic principle, the determination to achieve excellence

00:32:14.040 benefits in your various fields of endeavor. Finally, in your life's blueprint must be a commitment to the eternal principles

00:32:32.720 of beauty, love, and justice. Don't allow anybody to pull you so low as to make you hate them. But we must keep moving.

00:32:52.720 We must keep going. If you can't fly, run. If you can't run, walk. If you can't walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.

00:33:10.180 My goodness. We don't have somebody like that today. We don't have somebody who can inspire everyone. Such a powerful message.

00:33:18.120 It resonates with most of us as much today as it did back in 1967. As we remember MLK's lasting legacy.

00:33:26.100 There's a reason we pause once a year to remember him. Back with me now, Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cook of National Review.

00:33:33.800 So beautiful, so inspirational, and sadly, so forgotten, right? In the way that just the so-called movement for equal rights

00:33:45.140 and justice has pursued, has continued today, it doesn't bear any resemblance to that. I mean, he had

00:33:51.820 the temerity in that speech to talk about, have a basic determination to achieve excellence. You would be

00:33:57.880 told you were racist if you said that to a group of children of color today, to try to have the nerve to

00:34:04.100 tell them to achieve excellence, as opposed to talking about how they're really going to be hampered in their

00:34:08.920 effort to do that because they were born into a racist society. What do you make of it? Charles,

00:34:13.580 you've written beautifully about your love for this country, how you fell in love with America.

00:34:18.520 What do you make of MLK's legacy in it and what's happened to it all these years later?

00:34:24.340 Well, I think one of the greatest things about the United States is that it came with an instruction

00:34:30.640 manual, which most countries don't. That instruction manual is in a few places. You have the Declaration of

00:34:38.040 Independence, you have the Constitution, you have the Federalist Papers, and then you have the second

00:34:44.940 edition of the instruction manual in the Civil War. But it's an instruction manual nevertheless.

00:34:52.740 It's quite difficult in a place like, say, Sweden, to ask the question, are we living up to our national

00:35:00.180 creed? Because there isn't one. That's not to say the Swedish aren't good people or that it's not a nice

00:35:04.820 place to live. But there's nothing you can really grab onto. And Martin Luther King grabbed pretty hard

00:35:13.980 and correctly onto a set of promises, he called it a promissory note, that had been limited in its

00:35:23.620 application. Where I have a big problem with the American left's historical analysis and modern

00:35:32.420 political output is that it insists, and it must be said much the same way as did many Confederates,

00:35:40.640 that America is either built on sand, or built on a lie. But I don't think it is. And if you listen

00:35:48.880 to Martin Luther King's speeches, neither did he. What he thought at root, like Frederick Douglass before

00:35:56.580 him, at least in Frederick Douglass's later years, was that America was built atop a beautiful set of

00:36:04.860 presuppositions, but that they had been assiduously denied to certain people. He was right, they had

00:36:11.380 been, and it needed intervention to fix. But that intervention came and was made possible only because

00:36:20.560 of the integrity of the underlying ideas. And I think when people try to strip away all of that

00:36:27.920 scaffolding, they're actually pushing Martin Luther King over with the rest of the edifice. Because if

00:36:36.120 he wanted people who were non-white, not just blacks, although blacks had obviously been very much more

00:36:43.580 oppressed than everyone else, to fall heir to the promises of the founding, there has to be a promise

00:36:49.820 of the founding. You know, Richard, it occurs to me that back during MLK's time, the Civil Rights Act

00:36:56.160 and so on, the people most ardently opposed to him were racists. And today, the people most ardently

00:37:03.100 opposed to his message today are racists, but they style themselves as anti-racist. And yet their message

00:37:11.580 bears a striking and disturbing resemblance to the ones we heard from King Detractors.

00:37:16.720 Yeah. So when you played that clip, that voice, whoa, what resonance, right? That's a voice that

00:37:24.340 changes the world. It's not just Martin Luther King's voice. It has such resonance in part because it

00:37:29.180 has a foundation in this great tradition of African American Christianity in this country,

00:37:34.060 which is one of the most amazing stories in this country. You know, people who are brought over here

00:37:39.020 in the most horrific circumstances possible, and the transatlantic slave trade, whipped, you know,

00:37:47.740 humiliated, enslaved, and they pick up Christianity. And it's an oral Christianity, right? Because no one

00:37:56.560 wants them to read. Many of them are illiterate. So it's tradition based on preaching and based on

00:38:02.560 music. And Martin Luther King was very much in that tradition. And it was a Christian advocacy.

00:38:11.980 You know, he talked in that clip about never let anyone make you hate them, right? Because that's

00:38:18.220 terrible for you, not just for them. And that was the power of the civil rights movement. It basically

00:38:24.200 said under Martin Luther King's leadership, you're going to spit on us, you're going to disrespect us,

00:38:29.040 you're going to jail us, and we're going to love you anyway. And that was extremely powerful. And

00:38:34.660 that was the other wing of it. Charlotte hit very eloquently on going back to the Declaration of

00:38:41.280 Independence and American ideals, but also that Christian element was hugely important. And then

00:38:46.320 to get what you're asking about, Megan, I would say a couple things. One, he had every reason in the

00:38:52.580 mid-1960s to quit on America, right? To think America was fundamentally corrupt, right? This is

00:38:58.760 America of segregation and deep injustices. But he believed in America and thought it could be

00:39:04.820 redeemed. And today, when in terms of racial justice and all sorts of other metrics, we're in a much

00:39:10.460 better place ever in the entirety of our history, perhaps in the entirety of human history, compared

00:39:16.820 to any other societies, people want to quit on America, you know, because a wrong pronoun might be

00:39:23.580 used or microaggression might be committed. And they don't believe America, they don't believe in

00:39:30.980 its ideals. And they've twisted themselves into being in, as you point out, in this position,

00:39:38.460 where they're the racialists, where they can't get over race, where they want people to be judged on the

00:39:43.720 basis of race and iniquities to be committed in the name of race. And that's just perverse.

00:39:50.860 Martin Luther King was a man of the left. You know, he wouldn't, I doubt very much,

00:39:55.380 if he's still with us today, he'd agree with Charlie and I, with Charlie and me on many political

00:40:00.820 issues. But it's hard to believe he would be on board this kind of woke racialism that's so

00:40:07.660 pervasive now in so many of our institutions. It certainly does. His message, you heard it there,

00:40:12.600 so empowering and optimistic. You know, don't let them tell you you're nothing, basically. Don't

00:40:18.940 don't don't you tell yourself you're nothing. And today, the messaging is so very different.

00:40:24.300 It's why there are so many black and brown families standing up to the messaging being

00:40:30.660 handed down to their children in class. Like, how dare you tell my child he's less than or he

00:40:36.940 should feel less than or he can't he can't do the math or he can't do that because of some imagined

00:40:42.900 social inequity that we we deny he's suffering from. Right. It's not to say it's not in any case,

00:40:49.180 but to paint with such a broad brush. He was the opposite of that. And that's why, Charles,

00:40:53.020 so many as part of this woke movement are moving on from him. They're rejecting the of the, you know,

00:40:58.540 my dream is to see the two children who and they would be judged not by the content of their or not

00:41:03.440 by the color of their skin, but by the country of their character. They don't believe in that.

00:41:06.040 They don't believe in the colorblindness. They want to go back in a way to before King

00:41:09.860 and they're doing it at their and at the country's peril.

00:41:14.700 Yeah, I think there's a couple of problems with it. The first is, as Rich noted, that

00:41:19.600 there is far less reason to criticize or dislike or even give up on the United States now than there

00:41:27.940 was in the 1960s. And yet you see people doing it in a way that Martin Luther King did not. And that

00:41:38.280 is perverse. The other side of it is, I think, a fashionable cynicism, a self-aware fatalism.

00:41:52.900 And you see this from people such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, who essentially said in his book and many of

00:42:01.340 his other writings, that the United States had an original sin, which I think is true, but that

00:42:09.800 there was no redemption for it. Not what Martin Luther King said, which is this original sin exists,

00:42:17.320 but that it can be forgiven or overcome, but that nothing has changed and nothing can change.

00:42:24.660 And in the case of Ta-Nehisi Coates, he wrote this in a book that was nominally addressed to his son.

00:42:31.840 I think this is one of the worst things you could possibly tell a child. And I think it's a preposterous

00:42:37.480 thing to tell a child when it was written, which was in the 2010s. This is a backsliding of sorts,

00:42:47.220 and it's different in intensity and it's different in intent, but it is no less pernicious than

00:42:54.440 backslidings that we have seen in the past from white supremacists who believed that there was

00:43:03.040 something intrinsically wrong with people who were not white and they could never escape from it.

00:43:09.620 Whatever they did, it didn't matter. The content of their character didn't matter.

00:43:14.980 Their work ethic didn't matter. That they were different and always would be. And this is a

00:43:22.380 philosophy that should be rejected by absolutely everyone, partly because it is grotesque in and

00:43:29.560 of itself, but mostly because it's not true. Shifting gears, Rich, they decided to do an honor,

00:43:37.280 create this statue to honor Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta Scott King. And it's

00:43:44.840 from a moment, I'll show you the photo. This is the photo for the YouTube audience that you,

00:43:48.060 for the listening audience, it's Dr. King and his wife embracing. He's got his arms around her and

00:43:52.240 she has hers around him. They unveiled, this is right after he learned he won the Nobel Peace Prize

00:43:56.420 in 1964. So they wanted to do a statue. They hired Hank Willis Thomas to sculpt this sculpture that would

00:44:03.280 wind up in Boston Common, sitting on the 1965 Freedom Plaza, which honors 69 local civil rights leaders

00:44:09.400 who had come through. Okay. This is what they came up with. It was meant to be just be the arms and the

00:44:17.080 hands of the hug. What it looks like, I'm just going to say it, is a giant penis being held by two hands.

00:44:25.560 Look at this. Look, YouTubers, I'm sorry, but that's it. That looks like a giant penis right there. I'm

00:44:30.720 sorry. It does. You guys, it does. Does that, I mean, you tell me what that looks like. Look at

00:44:36.740 this one. Look at over there on the screen left, on the bottom of the screen left. Okay. You see it

00:44:41.380 as well as I. This is why you need to run, run stuff by people close to you and your spouse. You

00:44:51.060 know, what do you think of the design, honey? It looks like a schlong, dear. No, it doesn't. Yeah,

00:44:56.160 it does. It looks like a schlong. And then you take that on board and you change the design. But

00:45:01.080 the deeper story here is we've lost the capacity to create public beauty. There's no piece of public

00:45:06.620 art in the last 50 years that has been beautiful or uplifting. I mean, it's just amazing. Michelangelo

00:45:13.840 could do the David 500 years ago and now 500 years on with all sorts of technical advance and what have

00:45:22.420 you, we, that's, that's all we can do. And, you know, there's one unveiled in DC, the national

00:45:27.040 monument that's less vulgar, but it's also equally ugly of, of MLK. So it's amazing. We just can't

00:45:33.720 create a, a, a, a finely crafted uplifting statue of this band. Didn't they walk around like to the

00:45:40.800 back of it? Like I see maybe you had the front. Apparently at the unveiling, there's a, there's a lot

00:45:45.220 of like confused faces. It's like an enormous penis. How are we? And I love this tweet from

00:45:51.760 Stephen F. Hayward, which I retweeted, uh, who, who tweeted this picture out and said, um, I am

00:45:57.480 calling for a complete and total shutdown of modern art until we can figure out what the hell is going

00:46:02.360 on. You know, on the drum thing, Charles, what do you make of it?

00:46:09.180 There, well, I think to Rich's point, there is this strange idea. And I can remember first hearing

00:46:15.420 this and just thinking, this is not true. That beauty is entirely subjective and it's not. I grew

00:46:24.940 up in Cambridge, England, which has a lot of really old, beautiful buildings, especially around the

00:46:29.920 university. And some of them have these 1960s concrete, uh, add-ons and people come from all over

00:46:36.600 the world, all different cultures, not just Europe, but they come from South America. They come from

00:46:41.540 Asia and they love the old building and they hate the concrete appendage. And I think the average

00:46:48.360 person looks at this sculpture and says, that's horrible. I don't think it is true that every single

00:46:54.360 person sees it differently. And I don't think it's true that this is somehow informed by the world in

00:47:00.140 which we lived in or pressure. I think it's horrible. I think we can all see it's horrible. I think most

00:47:05.180 people are going to assume it's horrible. And there will just be a handful of people pretending

00:47:08.460 it isn't real.

00:47:09.120 Just a handful. Nicely done. Um, Coretta Scott King's cousin is, has spoken out, uh, Seneca Scott

00:47:15.980 saying this is a massive, a masturbatory homage to my family. That looks more like a pair of hands

00:47:23.080 hugging a beefy penis than a special moment shared by the iconic couple. He says, this is insulting.

00:47:29.260 It's $10 million wasted to create a masturbatory homage. And he says, um, this is sort of

00:47:34.680 wokeness gone wrong. Now Boston has a big bronze penis statue that's supposed to represent black

00:47:39.560 love at its purest and most devotional and goes on from there. Jesse Kelly, hat tip to him. He had

00:47:45.440 the best reaction of all, which he says, in all seriousness, I don't mean to mock the MLK sculpture.

00:47:52.320 Every man wants to be remembered this way.

00:47:54.380 All right. We'll be right back with some cleaner content in one second.

00:48:06.140 I promised a cleaner version when we got back, but I, I need five minutes that's unclean before

00:48:10.820 we get to that. Um, there's no way this segment is going to have as much penis in it. At least I

00:48:14.880 hope not. Oh, Rich, look how you underestimate me. Charles, I've been dying to ask you about the

00:48:24.140 Mary, the Harry and Meghan media tour, the controversy with the Royal family. And in particular,

00:48:31.400 since you are a Brit, um, I needed you to explain what the hell we are listening to here. And this

00:48:38.720 excerpt from Prince Harry's book, Spare. My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive

00:48:46.200 and borderline traumatized. The last place I wanted to be was Frostnickistan. I'd been trying

00:48:52.760 some home remedies, including one recommended by a friend. She'd urged me to apply Elizabeth Arden

00:48:57.680 cream. My mom used that on her lips. You want me to put that on my todger? It works, Harry. Trust me.

00:49:03.820 I found a tube. And the minute I opened it, the smell transported me through time. I felt

00:49:10.140 as if my mother was right there in the room. And I took a smidge and applied it down there.

00:49:19.220 Wow. I think you should be asking Dr. Freud instead of me about that segment. I don't know

00:49:26.160 how that got through editing without them asking him. Are you sure this is the series of associations

00:49:31.060 you wish to make? I will say I had forgotten this having lived in America for 10 years,

00:49:37.040 but todger really is one of the great words in the English language. It's one of those words you only

00:49:41.200 get in England. I actually am starting to wonder, joking aside, whether he needs help.

00:49:51.640 Yeah. I'm not a fan. I don't think they've behaved well. But the excerpts that I'm hearing from this

00:49:59.600 book, I mean, we've all heard that one because it's so egregious, but the excerpts, including

00:50:05.620 him suggesting that he was born to become a organ donor for his older brother,

00:50:13.620 if the case need arise. Someone asked why, if that was the case, he hadn't been forced to donate

00:50:19.460 his hair to Prince William. I think he is damaged. And one of the problems that many celebrities seem to

00:50:31.540 have, especially nowadays, is that they work out these issues in public. And they're often encouraged

00:50:40.080 to do so. We saw this recently with Kanye West, who's clearly damaged or going through something.

00:50:48.940 And the same is true of Harry. But the business model he's chosen for himself, if I can call it

00:50:56.160 that, is one that rewards anything that is salacious or aggressive or a bit unusual. So for the

00:51:05.320 foreseeable future, the incentives are all going to be to produce more content like that, not less.

00:51:11.340 It's crazy, Rich. He's come out now and said, I have enough of me for another book easily,

00:51:15.380 that my original manuscript was 800 pages. And this book is only 400 pages. And all of it was

00:51:21.300 stories about my brother, some about my father, but mostly about my brother, the future king of

00:51:25.820 England. He clearly wants to take down the royal family, though he denies it. And this example of

00:51:31.800 the todger is so interesting to me because it reveals a complete lack of dignity and shows to me,

00:51:39.000 it's one of the many examples, though, that shows we, we so many of us had been blaming Meghan Markle

00:51:43.900 for sort of tearing him out of the royal family and wokeifying him. Harry is an unwell man. No

00:51:51.040 normal person, never mind man, would read a passage that way, the way he, you know, the intonation on

00:51:57.800 it, write about it in the first place. You want to do a tell all. Okay. What kind of a man would share

00:52:02.520 a story like that? That's about his intimate parts. So, so openly and with detail and with

00:52:09.500 the word cream associated, I'm just sorry, but most men would have every instinct, which is correct

00:52:15.000 to say, there are some things that are too personal and not for public consumption.

00:52:19.120 Yeah. I mean, writing it as, as one thing, then, then reading it, how, how could he do that? And

00:52:25.100 you know, he needs help. He's supposedly getting help, right? He's in therapy. I think one of these

00:52:29.480 stories, I haven't followed the Harry and Meghan drama extremely closely, but I think one of them

00:52:34.260 isn't, you know, there was some leak against him, supposedly from the royal family. He went and talked

00:52:38.100 to his therapist about it. So he's in therapy, but this is just an industry now of self exposure

00:52:45.800 and the more titillating and embarrassing, the better, right? There's a, there's only one reason

00:52:52.320 we're talking about it, right? Cause it's humiliating to him. It's it's perversely

00:52:59.160 funny, right? But we're giving it publicity and people have talked about it and they'll watch the

00:53:04.900 documentary and they'll buy the book because of this, this kind of material. And further to your

00:53:11.600 point, you know we have tended to blame her, but you know, he's an adult. He's a troubled adult,

00:53:19.360 but he could say, no, he could go away with some dignity, but he doesn't want to do it. Um, because

00:53:25.640 there, there's a mint in this, you know, there's fame and riches in this kind of self-abasement. And

00:53:31.200 that's something new, uh, under the, uh, the sun, right? You wouldn't have been able to publish this

00:53:36.520 50 years ago. If you had, you would have been, you know, laughed out of the building and that would

00:53:40.500 have been the end of it. But now it's, uh, it's, it's a key to a kind of stardom.

00:53:44.740 Mm. Yeah. I would just add one thing. Where is his dignity? Where is his dignity? Go ahead,

00:53:49.180 Charles. No, I just said, yeah, I think in a, in another sense, this, this represents an

00:53:54.020 overcorrection as well. And if you go back and read accounts written by the royal family,

00:53:59.720 you know, 70, 80 years ago, they wouldn't have admitted in public that they were upset about the

00:54:06.900 death of a child. If, you know, if you had said, how do you feel to a member of the royal family who

00:54:15.820 had just suffered a genuine tragedy, they would have said, I'm fine. Now I'm not endorsing that.

00:54:22.580 I don't think that's a particularly healthy way to live, but whatever objections you might have to

00:54:28.560 the classic British stiff upper lip or suppression of emotion that you would see in the royal family.

00:54:34.940 And this is one of Harry's themes, implicit and explicit. That is too far the other way. That's

00:54:42.140 not how you correct that flaw. Um, and in fact, if you are a member of the royal family who still

00:54:49.420 has a sense of duty, you're probably more likely to, uh, go in the other direction and say, well,

00:54:56.060 to offset what Prince Harry is doing, we're going to have to, uh, stay quiet.

00:55:01.720 So Charlie, and then point here, right. It was the death of Diana, where you had this kind of

00:55:07.680 overly sentimental part of our culture represented in her death and the out outpouring of, of grief,

00:55:14.340 almost toppling the, the, the whole affect of, of the institution of the monarchy, right? Because they,

00:55:20.520 they, they weren't willing to play ball in that way, but they, they, uh, they eventually, you know,

00:55:26.600 um, got their equilibrium. Um, but that, that was, that was sort of the, the, the right,

00:55:32.560 that was the sign of kind of the new, the new way of thinking and feeling in our culture. Right.

00:55:38.560 Yeah. Well, and then, and then they too didn't handle it well. Right. Because they were under

00:55:41.980 such criticism at the time. The queen was for not saying anything or doing anything or lowering the

00:55:46.120 flag on Buckingham palace. Right.

00:55:47.560 Which he addresses in, in this book, um, saying they, they never, that was the stiff upper lip.

00:55:52.980 Yeah. But then they overcorrected because the queen actually was coming under some fair criticism

00:55:56.840 at the time. And what do they do? They parade the boys or the grieving sons around in front of us,

00:56:01.560 which was wrong. I mean, now we see that with, in retrospect, that was wrong. That was a lot to put

00:56:05.820 these young kids through. One good point he had in his memoir was there was, you see the video of

00:56:11.360 the well-wishers handing the boys flowers. He was only 12. And then he took the flowers and then he

00:56:16.940 would have to put the flowers with the collection of flowers that was accumulating on the gate by

00:56:22.440 Buckingham palace, almost as if he was there to help others in their expression of grief. Like he

00:56:29.320 would be the, the deliverer of the flowers to his mother's memorial. And that was a good point. You

00:56:35.680 know what I mean? They, they weren't used correctly. They should have been behind closed doors. We

00:56:39.280 shouldn't have been able to see those boys for a long time after that. In any event, I will say

00:56:42.660 this, that was a legit complaint. 99% of all the others are not. And here is what it's come to. I

00:56:48.800 retweeted this over the weekend because I thought it was so funny. And, uh, it captures his, his actual

00:56:54.440 complaints in his book so perfectly. Like I didn't get the right parking spot. My brother's room was

00:56:58.280 bigger and my dad and my brother can't ride on the same plane together, but me, I can ride on

00:57:02.520 whatever plane I want. My God, shut up. And if there's somebody, it looks like it was made by a group

00:57:07.360 called Belfast media tweets out a picture of him. And it reads when I was a child, my father grabbed

00:57:13.300 at my nose, then pulled away with his thumb between his fingers saying, I've got your nose.

00:57:19.980 I thought I had been badly disfigured, but torment I suffered towards me to this,

00:57:25.320 torments me to this day. And he's become so absurd. People believed this was real. They thought

00:57:31.960 this was a real excerpt from his book. Yeah. I can almost hear him reading it. Now that you say

00:57:37.000 it. Right. His todger didn't get touched when they took that nose. Okay. Moving on. So see,

00:57:44.260 we did penis and todger in that segment. I did not underestimate you, Megan.

00:57:48.880 See, let's talk about actual medical dangers, unlike the one expressed in that meme.

00:57:53.460 And that brings me to the vaccine. So there was relatively big news on Friday evening on the

00:57:58.200 Pfizer vaccine and the boosters in particular, the latest bivalent booster, um, the CDC actually

00:58:05.220 acknowledging a problem with the vaccine, which is rare for them, uh, saying a safety signal had

00:58:11.400 been identified showing an increased risk of ischemic stroke, which is basically accounted that

00:58:16.540 accounts for virtually all strokes. Um, it's an, it's the most common form. It's a blockage of the

00:58:22.180 blood to the brain and they're usually caused by clots. But in any event, an increased risk of stroke

00:58:26.960 in people 65 or older. And now they go on to say, um, blah, blah, blah. Let's see. Um,

00:58:35.760 it's it's the risk is in the 21 days following vaccination. Uh, this preliminary signal has not

00:58:41.220 been identified with the Moderna vaccine. Um, then they go on to say, furthermore, it's important to

00:58:46.980 note that to date, no other safety symptoms have shown a similar signal and multiple subsequent

00:58:51.320 analyses have not validated this signal, uh, and go on to say, nonetheless, we believe we don't think

00:58:58.580 this represents a true clinical risk, but we believe it's important to share this information

00:59:02.000 with the public and they recommend no change in vaccination practice. Okay. Okay. Um, CNN reporting

00:59:10.400 actual numbers, which were not in the CDC's statement of the 550,000 seniors who got the Pfizer bivalent

00:59:17.480 booster and were tracked 130 head strokes in the three weeks after the shot. Now, my instincts in

00:59:24.380 the COVID are probably the same as yours. If they say it's 130 at a 550,000, it's probably more, um,

00:59:29.820 not everybody reports or gets tracked or gets marked down. But in any event, those are disturbing

00:59:34.720 numbers. And here is the headline from, from New York times, New York times, their headline on Friday.

00:59:44.040 Did they, did they make it the headline? No. Uh, on Saturday morning, the vaccine was not even on

00:59:49.920 their homepage. That story. All right. Um, it winds up in the Corona virus pandemic section of the online

00:59:56.600 paper. Um, we looked there. No, no, no. We looked there and it wasn't there. What was there was it's

01:00:01.560 time to wear a mask again. Okay. That's what the New York times wants you to know. Then if you go way,

01:00:06.140 way down, way, way down, they cover the news with the following headline, no increased stroke risk

01:00:13.500 linked to Pfizer's COVID boosters. What? That's exactly the opposite of what the CDC says. The CDC

01:00:22.460 says, uh, there's an increased stroke risk with the, with the boosters and the New York times by

01:00:28.920 Apoorva Mandevelli. She's the one who made the mistake on the number of kids who had allegedly been

01:00:33.820 hospitalized by COVID. She said it was 900,000. Uh, and in fact, it at best had been 63,000.

01:00:39.380 Um, she's, she's saying no increase. Anyway, you get the gist. Um, a pretty significant stroke risk

01:00:46.060 has been identified and it's being buried by most of the media, including the New York times.

01:00:51.820 What do you think of it, rich? Well, just everything having to do with the pandemic really

01:00:57.720 is the, the reporting has been based on a certain point of view and advocacy and what journalists think

01:01:06.440 is good for us and what should happen. Um, so I, I, I'm a fan of the vaccines. I think they've saved

01:01:14.640 a lot of lives, obviously, but it doesn't mean that they're not downsides and, um, we should just

01:01:22.400 have factual reporting on, on these things and a reasonable debate about them, but that's what the

01:01:28.960 other side, uh, on these questions, opposed and tried to stop from happening over the last two

01:01:35.880 years. Um, we've talked about masking kids, Megan, but you would, you'd have no idea unless you really

01:01:42.360 dug in yourself that no other advanced society had a, um, uh, the equivalent of the CDC saying that

01:01:50.060 young kids should be masked the way they were in the United States. We were a bizarre outlier,

01:01:55.700 but right before the fever broke on mask, you know, you had Youngkins, uh, Glenn Youngkin in

01:02:01.900 Virginia saying, well, it should be the choice of parents. And, you know, you had, uh, the White

01:02:07.640 House saying he's putting kids' lives at risk, you know, based on zero science whatsoever, just based

01:02:14.120 on a distorted view of what the facts were that they then piled this moral panic, uh, on top of,

01:02:21.580 and it's happened, uh, again and again. I, I, I find this whole, like the sequence of events here

01:02:27.000 is right on brand, Charles. You know, we, we find out there's a safety concern with one of the

01:02:33.560 vaccines, boosters, Pfizer vaccine booster, and the New York times immediately rushes to both bury

01:02:39.140 the story and to the extent they cover it to cover it wrongly. And of course, always in the direction

01:02:44.280 of downplaying the concerns again, was not on the homepage. We went to the coronavirus pandemic

01:02:49.920 section. The headline there was, it's time to wear a mask again. And then buried down below

01:02:54.560 in the section that addresses the vaccines, the headline appears, but it is, there is no

01:02:59.360 increased stroke risk associated with the Pfizer booster. Exactly the opposite of what the CDC had

01:03:05.400 said. Yeah. So I'm not particularly alarmed by the statistic that you noted 550,130. I'd need to see

01:03:17.000 if there was even a causal link there. I am alarmed by the New York times. Right. But you know,

01:03:25.340 people have strokes. There's a difference between coincidence and, and causation. And I I'd need to

01:03:30.260 see the, the study. What I am alarmed by those, the headline that you read, because it's indicative

01:03:36.720 of everything that's been wrong with our conversation about this right from the beginning. And I'm afraid

01:03:43.820 this is true on both sides, in that the New York Times is clearly unwilling ever to put out any

01:03:54.720 information that could dissuade people from either masking in the early days, or now getting the vaccine

01:04:04.840 or the boosters, because it believes that the American public is full of children who need to be

01:04:12.180 led to the right decision. And that broadly speaking is how the CDC has behaved as well.

01:04:18.260 The CDC has managed us from the beginning, instead of saying, here are the facts, here is our take on

01:04:24.680 them, or here are the facts, make up your own mind. The CDC has put out misinformation at times,

01:04:31.020 in an attempt to nudge people into the behavior that it thought would be best. And as a result,

01:04:36.640 it and the New York Times have lost a great deal of trust. There has been a similar mistake made

01:04:41.720 on the right. Now, what I think should have happened in the early days, is that we should have

01:04:47.000 acknowledged that we do not normally live in circumstances such as we did in early 2020.

01:04:53.920 Pandemics like this seem to come along every 100 years or so. We should have recognized that this

01:04:58.600 was not just the flu, that it was serious, but it was also not, you know, zombie-inspiring,

01:05:04.460 flesh-eating bacteria, and that we were going to get a mitigating factor, probably a vaccine,

01:05:13.860 that would by definition be untested, and that we should make allowances for that.

01:05:18.780 Now, the vaccine has been really effective. It is not an accident that the number of people dying

01:05:23.580 of COVID dropped in the way that it did when the vaccine came along. That's not a coincidence.

01:05:27.740 But the vaccine is also not equivalent to, say, the polio vaccine. You get these people who say,

01:05:34.600 well, what are you going to come after next? The polio vaccine? You're going to come to the flu jab?

01:05:40.660 No, the difference here is that this was an experimental vaccine, and it may well be the

01:05:45.360 case. We should have acknowledged this from the start. It may well be the case that it has some side

01:05:50.100 effects, and a few of them lethal, but we didn't. And so when conservatives correctly said that we

01:05:57.760 should go easy on the mandates, because you don't want to mandate that people take experimental

01:06:02.600 vaccines, make them available, subsidize them if you want to, but don't mandate them,

01:06:06.780 the left pushed back. But the right also made a mistake here in concert, which was in order to

01:06:11.900 attack the mandates, to underplay the efficacy of the vaccine. And so you've had this weird push-pull

01:06:18.640 between some people on the right who have said, you know what? The vaccine doesn't work. It doesn't

01:06:23.620 help. It's dangerous. It's killing athletes all over the place. Look at all these young people who

01:06:28.080 are suddenly dying. Not really true. And people on the left who have said the vaccine is perfect.

01:06:33.220 Not only will it save your life, it will stop you getting COVID. It will stop you transmitting COVID.

01:06:37.780 It will make you better looking and taller as well. And this is all nonsense. What we're dealing with

01:06:43.600 is an imperfect world in the midst of a completely unprecedented in our lifetimes circumstance and

01:06:50.760 a vaccine that did pretty well at what it was supposed to do, but is going to have some unfortunate

01:06:55.340 side effects over time. And we can't talk about it because the loudest voices on the left and the

01:07:01.720 right, and it's more complicated than that. There's a lot of anti-vax sentiment on the left as well and

01:07:06.160 pro-vax sentiment on the right, have just decided not to have that conversation in the way adults

01:07:11.420 should. And the result has been this mess. I have to say, I am more skeptical of the vaccines now

01:07:19.080 than you are, and certainly than I was at the beginning, in part because of my lack of trust

01:07:26.180 in any of these public health officials, you know. And I would say that Vinay Prasad, who I do trust

01:07:30.240 online, he's a doctor who's been neck deep in all of this from the beginning and been a real straight

01:07:34.760 shooter. He's pro-vaccine. But he raised some of the concerns in response to this announcement

01:07:39.260 that reminded me of why I'm having this feeling of distrust and questioning. First of all, Marty

01:07:46.160 McCary of Johns Hopkins comes out and says CDC should make public the raw data set. Exactly right.

01:07:51.320 How many? Exactly. Why did you conclude this? It must have been pretty significant for the CDC to issue

01:07:56.440 this warning. Then Vinay Prasad, he's a hematologist and oncologist and professor in the Department of

01:08:01.860 Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, Sam Fram, says the following.

01:08:06.460 This administration's vaccine policy has been horrible. They always err on the side of pushing

01:08:10.800 doses. They initially decide the safety signal of myocarditis. They delayed polling J&J in young

01:08:16.560 women. They never banned Moderna in young men. And they rubber stamped kids vaccines with inadequate

01:08:21.600 efficacy data. Most recently, long after the emergency phase of the pandemic ended, the

01:08:25.740 administration granted emergency use authorization to the bivalent booster down to five-year-olds

01:08:30.400 based initially on mouse data. And let's not forget it was only eight mice. And to this day,

01:08:35.360 supported only by confounded observational studies. Right. Not exactly the gold standard. Arguably,

01:08:41.960 this is an illegal action. There is no emergency to justify boosting 20 year old men who had three

01:08:46.940 doses. He goes on to say, we know very little, but it appears a safety signal of stroke may be

01:08:51.760 identified. He means safety signal like a problem complication. Of course, there's nothing magic about

01:08:57.140 65. So it may also occur at younger ages. What's the absolute risk? Where is the press conference?

01:09:03.940 Sadly, no further information followed. A sensible FDA commissioner would have held a press conference

01:09:09.160 and stated what was known. Instead of that, you know what our FDA commissioner is doing?

01:09:13.560 Well, he tweeted out a picture of himself here. And I guess I don't know what it is. A grow house.

01:09:20.960 It's a grow house. It's FDA commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf, Califf, who is talking about,

01:09:27.340 yay, new controlled environment, growing facility in Davis and learning how this new technology

01:09:32.940 can boost the resiliency of our of our food supply. Off message, buddy. Off message. Like

01:09:39.500 Vinay Prasad is exactly right, Rich. And we're not going to get any of that. We're not going to get it

01:09:43.100 because the media won't demand it. And with the media is not demanding it. We'll never get answers.

01:09:47.820 Yeah. So more transparency, more facts are, are better. And, you know, that that's true across

01:09:57.140 the board, especially on this, but they've been so motivated by, I think, you know, an understandable

01:10:02.580 goal getting people vaccinated. I agree with Charlie. I think the vaccines have been a huge benefit in

01:10:08.880 terms of reducing deaths, but they, they, they never wanted to let anything interfere with that,

01:10:16.420 with that goal. Right. They, they never made any sense, for instance, that you couldn't,

01:10:21.120 having had COVID wouldn't relieve you from these various vaccine mandates, various places. Right. I mean,

01:10:28.920 having gotten it gave you a high level of immunity. So why didn't that count that we, for, for,

01:10:37.060 for the longest time in some places, even today, it's presumed that being unvaccinated makes you a

01:10:44.540 threat to everyone around you, including vaccinated people, right? If you're unvaccinated and you have

01:10:49.680 other health risks, you're a threat to yourself being unvaccinated, you don't have a threat to anyone

01:10:56.620 else. But so all of it has, has been this, this grinding wheel just in one direction. And it has

01:11:03.280 created, you know, skepticism and distrust among rational actors, including yourself. But we should

01:11:09.240 have, you know, a, a, a, an upfront transparent debate about it. Give, give people the data and

01:11:16.600 let them, let them argue about it and draw their own conclusions. They won't do it. And there,

01:11:21.980 there's no sign that they're going to, it's very disheartening and people are left wondering

01:11:25.740 what's real. Okay. Let's shift gears. Cause I have something exciting to tell you. Don't know if

01:11:30.700 you saw this over the weekend in the wall street journal, but here's the headline. Supreme court

01:11:36.140 investigators have narrowed leak inquiry to small number of suspects. Oh, okay. I'm excited to see

01:11:44.660 that. I do not have faith in the Supreme court Marshall. I hope one day she makes me eat those

01:11:49.880 words. I really do. I hope she's capable of doing more than yelling. Oh yay. Oh yay. And introducing the

01:11:56.160 high court, but she's been on this case for quite some time. Now that leak was in May month five.

01:12:02.520 We are now in month one of the following year and we don't have the perpetrator, but the wall street

01:12:07.280 journal reports per people familiar with the matter. Investigators have narrowed their inquiry to a small

01:12:13.980 number of suspects, including law clerks, but officials have yet to conclusively identify the

01:12:23.120 alleged culprit. Does that mean they've preliminarily identified an alleged culprit? We don't know.

01:12:30.080 Uh, they say reminding us here that, uh, chief justice Roberts did not call in the FBI. They gave,

01:12:35.460 he gave this investigation to Gail Curley, uh, the Marshall and that, um, apart from a demand from the

01:12:42.400 investigators in June that the justice's law clerks sit for interviews and surrender their cell phones,

01:12:48.360 not a lot has happened. By the way, that demand prompted several of the three dozen law clerks

01:12:53.760 to seek legal counsel. I I'm just sorry, but if they wanted my cell phone and I was working for

01:12:59.100 a Supreme court justice and I were not the legal leaker, I would fork it over immediately. This is

01:13:02.920 not one that I would need legal counsel on. So I do find that a little suspicious. They say Gail's

01:13:08.260 interviews were sometimes short and superficial. I don't know if she did it personally, but they were

01:13:11.860 under her authority. Said a person familiar with the matter consisting of a handful of questions,

01:13:17.400 such as, did you do it? Do you know anyone who had a reason to do it? Go Gail, go, go, go, go.

01:13:26.980 Isn't that a natural question to ask Megan in such investigation? Did you do it?

01:13:32.860 Do you have faith in Gail, guys? What do you think, Charles?

01:13:37.580 Well, I just think it's really unfair that it's taken this long for the investigation to come close

01:13:44.460 to finding out who did it because it's delayed the culprits inevitable MSNBC contract. Just think

01:13:49.460 about how much money they could have made in the interim. So true. I don't, I do think this is

01:13:57.560 sensitive and difficult. I also think that it has to be resolved. We cannot have an inconclusive at the

01:14:04.520 end of this because this was a flagrant attack on one branch of government. And I use that word

01:14:12.800 advisedly. It was an attack on the authority of the Supreme Court. It was an attempt to intimidate

01:14:19.000 them. Whether or not the intended result was to have somebody fly from California and whether you

01:14:30.640 want to say attempt or pull out of an attempt to kill a Supreme Court justice, I don't know. But that

01:14:36.940 was the result, nevertheless. And if we just get a shrug of the shoulders and a while this happens,

01:14:44.140 then the incentives are going to be pretty clear next time that there is a big case that people

01:14:51.880 really care about. And we have them coming up. We have a big affirmative action case coming up this

01:14:57.380 year. You're going to see people saying, well, why not me? And that is the beginning of the end of the

01:15:07.380 role of the judiciary. I mean, there is a reason we give Supreme Court justices lifetime tenures.

01:15:15.800 And that reason is that they're supposed to be insulated from political pressure. They can't be

01:15:21.320 removed except in exceptional cases for impeachment. Well, if they worry that their drafts and their

01:15:28.740 deliberations and their early votes and their internal discussions are going to leak, then they

01:15:34.740 will behave differently. And you may as well at that point actually not have the independent judiciary

01:15:41.540 we've relied on for nearly a quarter of a millennium. You know, Rich, the thing is, Chief Justice John

01:15:46.660 Roberts is the one who farmed this out to the to the marshal instead of the FBI. And I realize he's

01:15:52.080 the chief justice of the United States, but it's not his court. He doesn't own it. He it's he doesn't

01:15:59.600 you know, he maybe he's kind of like the acting CEO, but it's not he doesn't own it. We do. It's our

01:16:04.960 court. And we, the American people, are entitled to an answer as to who did this. He cannot in any world

01:16:11.360 keep this secret or choose somebody who's going to run this investigation into the ground so that

01:16:17.840 it's mysteriously never known who did it because he thinks that's what's in the best interest that

01:16:22.180 what can be done. I mean, already the House, the GOP House is talking about how we're going to do our

01:16:26.000 own investigation, which would be great. I'd love to see somebody who genuinely has a will of getting

01:16:30.800 to the bottom of this take charge. Yeah, they should. I don't know how optimistic we should be that

01:16:37.520 they could get anywhere. If you want an answer, clearly, you should have gone to the FBI. I don't

01:16:42.600 know the legal in and outs of referring it to the FBI. But John Roberts is supposed to be an

01:16:48.040 institutionalist. And this was an attack, as Charlie said, on the court as an institution on the court as

01:16:55.560 such. I think it was Alito at the Heritage Foundation not too long ago who said that this the

01:17:00.220 leak was basically a public advertisement to say, you go and kill one of the conservative justices and

01:17:07.180 you'll block this decision. And lo and behold, you know, a troubled young man who, you know,

01:17:13.880 it's you can we can learn more about how serious he was, but he certainly had the materials to carry

01:17:20.120 out an assassination at Kavanaugh's house shows up on his street where he lives. So this is a literally

01:17:28.020 a deadly serious matter. And, you know, once once you're relying on the court itself to try to track

01:17:36.200 it down, relying on a force that basically what it does is provide security at the court itself and

01:17:44.600 doesn't really have the wherewithal or the experience for a complex investigation like this,

01:17:49.680 you're setting the investigation up for failure. So if it's true that they've actually narrowed it down,

01:17:56.720 that would be great. But I'd unfortunately be shocked if they actually nailed a perpetrator here.

01:18:02.960 I agree. It's eight months later. Get to work, Gail, or farm it off to somebody who who can give

01:18:08.780 it to the cops in Idaho. They know how to solve things like this. I'm so disappointed in the job

01:18:14.120 being done here. And it does make me think they're running cover. I don't think it would be that hard.

01:18:18.740 I really don't. I think you get a qualified interrogator in front of these Supreme Court.

01:18:23.360 Megan, that that Roberts is thinking it's better for the institution just if we don't know when it goes

01:18:28.060 away. Yeah, I really am starting to believe that. And I don't know what that means. Does that mean

01:18:32.860 it links to a justice? Gail is in the unfortunate position of sort of investigating her bosses.

01:18:38.840 Gail is not above the Supreme Court justices. They walk around over there like gods.

01:18:43.280 And what if what if it led to Chief Justice John Roberts? I don't think he did it. But what if it

01:18:47.200 did? You know, is Gail going to be able to point the finger? It should have been given to an outside

01:18:51.780 group like the FBI, somebody with law enforcement experience and who knows how to ask questions that

01:18:58.480 get to the bottom. I mean, this is not Gail's bailiwick. There's a I'm trying to look up her.

01:19:03.180 I had her background in front of me, but it's not that impressive when it comes to investigating

01:19:06.560 a ton of crimes. That's how she wound up in the job she did. And Alito, you mentioned those heritage

01:19:12.760 remarks. You're not wrong. He came out. This is in October at this event and said this leak made those

01:19:20.340 of us who are thought to be in the majority in support of overruling Roe targets for assassination

01:19:25.600 because it gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening

01:19:31.760 by killing one of us. That's why the leak like coming out before the decision was final.

01:19:37.820 It's like one thing. Of course, he's going to put his name to the decision as he did when it's final.

01:19:42.160 But that was different because at that point he can't be manipulated out of it. He can't be

01:19:46.940 killed out of casting his vote. That's why what the leaker did. One of the many reasons it was so

01:19:52.900 egregious. And for them to just treat this as like, oh, somebody may have leaked a little thing

01:19:57.560 to the media. You know, no, this is this is top level betrayal. I use the term treason loosely,

01:20:05.280 not legally. But what a betrayal by somebody who now could potentially be entering the legal profession

01:20:12.200 and asking whole hordes of people to trust them. Yeah. And, and, you know, I tend to minimize

01:20:18.860 the extent to which we we have civil conflict in this country. And people say, we're, you know,

01:20:24.320 we're on the cusp of the civil war. All that I think is is hyperbolic and way overblown. But God

01:20:31.040 forbid, if that guy showed up at Kavanaugh's house and succeeded, you know, and going in there and harming

01:20:36.140 him and his family, that would have been an inflection point in our society and legitimacy

01:20:42.040 of our institutions. And, and the kind of conflict we've, we're, we're experiencing, it really would

01:20:49.320 have been a horrible event in every single sense. And the leaker, whether it was his or her intention

01:20:58.800 to do that, and it very well may have been made that possible, kind of opened up that door. So

01:21:06.220 it's extremely important that this person be found. But, you know, as we've been saying,

01:21:11.080 Roberts chose to go down a path that makes that unlikely. Yeah, I'm really starting to doubt his

01:21:15.740 commitment to getting to the bottom of this. It's been too long. And he doesn't have the right team

01:21:19.600 in place. I hope I'm proven wrong. Standby guys, much, much more with Rich and Charlie. After this,

01:21:24.620 we're going to get personal. We're going to talk about them. You don't hear them talk about that

01:21:28.960 much in the editors. Little vignettes here and there, but we're going to talk turkey next.

01:21:35.660 So we were just talking about the Supreme Court. Guess what? We missed the news. Yesterday,

01:21:40.860 President Biden was at this worship service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta

01:21:45.500 to join in a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and had a thought about our newest

01:21:52.500 associate Supreme Court justice, who he nominated. And here's how that went.

01:21:59.100 Those are the words of Ketanji Drown Jackson. Oh, my God.

01:22:04.000 Our Supreme Court justice. Rich. I can't.

01:22:09.840 Yeah. Yeah. This is why I'll make, you know, I never say what's her name, the White House press

01:22:16.640 secretary's name, because I know I might mess it up. But I guess if you're president of the United

01:22:20.360 States and it's the text in front of you, you got to try to read it.

01:22:24.880 Oh, we need to hear it again. Let's hear it again. Let's hear it again.

01:22:27.540 Inevitable results.

01:22:28.340 Those are the words of Ketanji Drown Jackson.

01:22:32.780 Drown.

01:22:33.500 Our Supreme Court justice.

01:22:36.640 Ketanji Brown Jackson. It's actually not that hard. Ketanji Brown Jackson. It kind of flows.

01:22:40.780 If you would just practice it. He clearly doesn't know her at all.

01:22:43.080 Yeah. Chris Buckley told the story about George H.W. Bush. Buckley was a speechwriter for him.

01:22:50.400 And he wrote in a into a speech, a reference to Aristophanes, the Greek playwright. And,

01:22:57.600 you know, Bush, having been around the block once or once or twice, knew he wasn't going to risk

01:23:02.160 trying to say Aristophanes. So he edited it and just wrote in Plato.

01:23:06.160 Yeah. I have to say, if that had been Donald Trump, we'd be getting a think quote,

01:23:15.420 of course, think piece tonight on MSNBC about what a racist he is.

01:23:19.000 You get to be getting a read out there like it's Ketanji, right? Like no way would they let him get

01:23:25.100 away with that.

01:23:26.940 You know, I have made embarrassing mistakes in my life in front of audiences, mispronouncing words.

01:23:33.020 I read Arai as Ori once. I didn't know how to say Huawei, the Chinese technology firm.

01:23:41.240 I once stood in front of my school and congratulated a girl on winning the reading prize and asked her

01:23:46.060 what her favorite character was and then announced it as Hermione instead of Hermione, which was odd

01:23:50.980 because I did know the name Hermione. I just couldn't process it. But the thing is, as you say,

01:23:56.160 this White House has repeatedly screwed up that name. It's not just Biden. Ron Klain kept writing it

01:24:03.000 wrong during the nomination hearings. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, pronounced it

01:24:09.600 wrong. She also tweeted it wrong over and over again. I think they kept saying Ketanji.

01:24:15.280 And that happens. The problem is, is that when you make a mistake like that in modern America,

01:24:20.320 people ascribe all of these insane reasons for it. One of which is racism or insensitivity or

01:24:27.820 white supremacy or what you will. And I think it's worth laughing a great deal at Biden for this,

01:24:36.020 knowing that had it happened the other way around, we would have had a week long news cycle about it

01:24:42.100 saying so much about the other side. There's nothing wrong with it per se. Of course, we all screw up.

01:24:48.080 Yeah, it's not like she he just found her. She's on the Supreme Court. There's only nine. It's not

01:24:55.780 that hard. I would say Neil Gorsuch's name is much tougher. I don't understand it to this day. I get

01:25:01.180 afraid as I get to the end of it. Like Gorsuch, is it Gorsuch? Is it Gorsuch? It's Gorsuch, but it's a

01:25:06.220 tough one. OK, somebody who's very good with the word things is Rich Lowry. I think Charles C.W.

01:25:12.320 Cook would agree with me. And now I have had the opportunity to look a little bit into your

01:25:15.920 background, Rich, some of which I did not know. Born and raised in Arlington, Virginia, son of a

01:25:21.460 social worker mother and an English professor father. OK, this is how we bonded. My dad was an

01:25:27.660 education professor, went to UVA where you studied English and history. And then after graduating,

01:25:34.360 worked for Charles Krauthammer as a research assistant before the great William F. Buckley came

01:25:39.080 into your life. So you were sort of born to do what you are doing right now. Am I right? Or were you

01:25:44.960 thinking about a career in baseball? I was. I was until I realized in high school I couldn't hit a

01:25:54.040 curveball or a fastball. So that ended my baseball dreams. But I really wanted to be an opinion

01:25:59.440 journalist from the first time I discovered Bill Buckley through his show Firing Line. You know,

01:26:05.560 just incredibly compelling, witty, unusual figure. I hadn't heard of National Review yet until I

01:26:12.560 saw him on TV and heard a reference to National Review. And then I, you know, ran down the local

01:26:18.780 drugstore to try to find a copy as soon as I could. Were you conservative? Were you like an Alex P.

01:26:23.980 Keaton? Yeah, but not yet. I mean, I was inclined that way, but I hadn't thought any of it through.

01:26:34.640 And National Review helped me think it through. But, you know, as a young person then, and obviously

01:26:42.220 even more so now, if you're going to be a conservative, you have a contrarian reflex in

01:26:48.160 you somewhere. And you need to be able to defend what you think and what you believe, because the tide

01:26:55.960 is flowing the other way. And National Review helped me, helped arm me that way. And in high school,

01:27:04.240 they, at some point, they did some sort of an employment survey or something. And they asked,

01:27:11.020 you know, where do you want to, what city do you want to be in 10 years? And what do you want to be

01:27:14.160 doing? And I wrote, New York City, I want to be working for National Review, you know, as a high school

01:27:20.740 student. So it's been a great blessing to actually be able to do it.

01:27:23.120 I can't imagine what it would have been like to actually work for Buckley. My team pulled a couple

01:27:29.180 of fun quotes from him, such as an interview he gave in 2004 with New York Magazine, to New York

01:27:34.620 Magazine. The interviewer was Debra Solomon, who asked, must you be so clever at all times? In response

01:27:40.520 to which he answered, I haven't practiced the alternative.

01:27:47.600 Yeah, I was blessed to work for two giants, you know, Bill Buckley and Charles Krauthammer,

01:27:52.740 both of whom, you know, I was terrified around for a lot of, a lot of the time with Bill, because

01:27:59.600 he might give you some important instruction that you literally didn't understand, right? Because

01:28:03.420 he didn't, didn't know the words he was using. And Charles was just this, obviously, this formidable

01:28:09.800 intellect. And this kind of, there's an inherent dignity to Charles. There's something big about

01:28:18.300 Charles. And if you're a 21 year old working for him, you know, fetching his soup for lunch and

01:28:26.100 proofreading his, his columns, it was, it was a daunting, a daunting prospect just being around

01:28:32.720 him.

01:28:33.340 You can still get his book, Things That Matter, which is a collection of his best columns. And it's

01:28:38.960 so well worth your, your time and the read. Charles, how about you? You were, you mentioned

01:28:43.740 you were raised in Cambridge, but you went to Oxford and you fell in love with America from afar. I love

01:28:52.300 your writings on America. You're now a U.S. citizen as of 2018. You fell in love with this girl,

01:28:58.960 America, before you fell in love with your girl, your wife and created a beautiful family.

01:29:03.420 Um, but what about your conservative leanings? Because the UK is kind of like America and that

01:29:07.980 there's a very large leftist presence that would certainly be trying to get its grips into a young

01:29:12.700 CW, Charles CW Cook.

01:29:16.720 Yeah. So I always loved America. I loved America in an entirely pre-political sense. We first went to

01:29:24.160 America when I was three to come to Florida, Disney World, SeaWorld and the rest. And I said at the time,

01:29:33.420 I want to live in America when I grow up, I'm not quite sure then what it was, maybe the

01:29:39.820 palm trees and the sunshine and the warmth and probably the idea that everywhere was full of

01:29:48.000 roller coasters, which I love. But as I grew up, we visited America a lot more. We had some

01:29:54.300 family friends in Newport Beach, California and in Phoenix, Arizona, and we would visit them. And I

01:30:01.120 just love the place in a way that I can describe in a way that I can't describe. It wasn't political.

01:30:08.020 I didn't have any politics until September 11th. I didn't know a great deal about the world and I

01:30:16.120 didn't want to. I was born in the mid 80s and everything was fine. The economy during my childhood

01:30:23.740 was fantastic. The prospect of Britain being dragged into a war seemed remote. The only wars I'd heard

01:30:30.400 about, the first Gulf War and then Kosovo, we won. I suppose I was an unknowing, unwitting end of history

01:30:39.360 sort of kid. But 9-11 changed that and I started to be interested in the world and in ideas. And then

01:30:45.820 that really went into full flow when I was at Oxford. And I did a whole module on British colonial

01:30:55.140 America. And then I chose to do the revolutionary era. And then I actually wrote my thesis at Oxford

01:31:02.400 on the passage of the Second Amendment. And at that point, I was sold. I remember reading the founders

01:31:09.380 and thinking, well, that's my politics. That classical liberalism is my politics. And really,

01:31:17.340 it still is. So there's an answer that is more informed and comprehensible. And then there was a

01:31:27.320 gut level love of America that I still have. And I've written before that a lot of it sounds irrational.

01:31:34.380 If I see a mountain range and you tell me that's in America, I like it more. I'd be moderately

01:31:40.320 disappointed if you said that's in Canada. I can't quite explain why, you know, Patsy Cline or

01:31:48.360 Ray Charles have quite the effect they do on me. But it matters that they're American. And I followed it.

01:31:56.500 You guys did a great Fourth of July podcast this year. And forgive me, what is the name of the older British

01:32:04.540 guy who comes on from time to time on the editors? Andrew Sutherford? Yeah, Andrew. So Andrew made the

01:32:10.300 mistake of saying he thought that the American flag was kind of messy. It was like mean girls at National Review

01:32:19.480 the pylon. That just seems so wrong. It's the most beautiful flag in the world, just objectively. I

01:32:26.820 don't know how anyone can have any different view. But in fairness, Andrew did design the new Martin

01:32:32.820 Luther King Memorial in Boston. Don't get me restarted. All right, a couple of quick questions. We only

01:32:38.780 have like two minutes left, but so quick answers. Rich, you're married. How many kids do you have?

01:32:43.240 Sexes? How old? We have three kids, older girl, in between boy and younger daughter, seven, five and

01:32:56.600 20 months. Man, that is like, that's, that's heavy lifting. Godspeed. Charles, you have younger kids.

01:33:03.200 So you're married, you're married and you live in Florida in Fort Lauderdale?

01:33:06.320 No, not Fort Lauderdale. I'm in North Florida. I mean, the further north you go, the further south

01:33:12.620 you get, right? So I would say I live in the south near Jacksonville. Okay. You're constantly down at

01:33:18.600 the neighborhood pub and you have two kids with your wife and how old are they and what are the

01:33:22.580 genders? They're both boys, they're six and five. Oh my gosh. I mean, one would wonder because you're

01:33:29.100 both so well read. So do you spend your entire day reading and just a little bit writing because you

01:33:34.380 make so many book references on the show. I'm like, when do these guys have the time to do all

01:33:38.420 this reading, Rich? Well, um, I, I, uh, I, I just do it whenever there's some in between time. Um,

01:33:49.960 you know, 10 at night when things are settled down, I'll, I'll be sitting at the dining room table with,

01:33:55.960 uh, with a book in, in a beer. Yeah. You're not passed out by 10. Like most parents of those age

01:34:02.200 children. I, I wish, I wish I would have passed out, but the kids take a very long time to get

01:34:06.600 to sleep. And that's really the only me time for lack of a better phrase, you know, 10 or 11 at

01:34:12.520 night. You gotta, you gotta fight for it. What about you, Charlie? When do you find the time to read

01:34:16.280 all these books and everything you do? I actually read a lot less than I would like at the moment

01:34:22.040 because of my kids, but, uh, I did read an enormous amount before I had kids and I'm blessed to have a

01:34:30.860 really good memory. I absorb books. So I, I, I do read during the day, but a lot of the references

01:34:39.100 I make are to books I read quite a long time ago. Oh, you're lucky. That's like Spencer Clavin. I had

01:34:43.480 a great conversation with him. He was saying that's his best gift is that he has a great memory. And so

01:34:48.040 he's read a lot, but he remembers it unlike the rest of us, uh, rich and Charlie. So fun. Looking

01:34:53.380 forward to our, our new national review day and, uh, to everybody signing up for NR plus.

01:34:59.260 It's well worth it. In honor of this day. Yeah. I, I know exactly what it would be.

01:35:04.700 We'll reveal it beforehand. Okay. Look at Jesse Kelly to design it. Bye guys. See you.

01:35:15.160 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - January 16, 2023

Biden Lawyers Find More Docs, Vaccine Safety Signals, and MLK's Legacy, with Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke ｜ Ep. 472

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