Bombshell School Videos, and Dark Brandon's Speech, with Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch ｜ Ep. 385
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 34 minutes
Words per Minute
184.40434
Summary
After a long holiday weekend, Megyn Kelly is back in the real world. She talks about the return to school for her kids, why dogs are crapping everywhere, and why it s so hard to be a conservative in the 21st century.
Transcript
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Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.
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Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
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We went to get my little guy Thatcher up this morning
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And I look over and Strudwick had done an enormous dump.
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If you think you can just ship them off by bus, by car, by foot, by bike,
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Some of our worst fears about education and indoctrination are confirmed,
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are being confirmed by the day, thanks to, God bless James O'Keefe, okay?
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He continues to put his reporters undercover and to unearth people's true character.
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And now he's taken focus on educators, on administrators at our nation's K-12 schools,
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They published one video of a school administrator at one of New York City's most elite schools.
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I mean, literally, this school is considered the number one school in the nation by a lot of
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And he's got this administrator admitting that she sneaks her left-wing agenda into the classroom.
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She intentionally silences conservative voices.
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Here is just a sampling of this woman's views, including the suggestion,
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so funny, that they should get a serial killer to kill the white boys.
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It's definitely a school where conservatives would not feel comfortable.
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Unfortunately, it's the white boys who feel very entitled to express their opposite opinions
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But there's a huge contingent of them that are just, like, horrible.
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And you're like, are you always going to be horrible?
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Or are you just going to be horrible right now?
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Is there any saving, these Republican, like, white guys?
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That's kind of what I'm afraid of with my white students that are rich.
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For the record, she's now been placed on paid leave while they investigate at Trinity.
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$60,000 a year to get Jennifer Norris to think about murdering your child because he's white and a boy.
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Joining me now are friends from the Fifth Column podcast, Matt Welsh, editor-at-large for Reason Magazine,
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Michael Moynihan, a correspondent for Vice News Tonight, and Camille Foster of Freethink Media.
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My daughter goes to a private school in New York, and she hasn't started yet, as yours actually starts later this week.
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I think they sent her off to Havana to cut sugar cane for the first week, and then they come back, and then they do the indoctrination.
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But, no, there's literally nothing surprising about this.
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I'm not a huge fan of the technique that James O'Keefe uses, and there's nothing surprising about this to me.
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You should actually know this, and you're paying for this stuff.
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And I hope that kind of wakes people up and says, you know, maybe your $60,000 is better spent elsewhere.
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Now, keep in mind, this is the school that Eric Trump went to, Oliver Stone went to.
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I mean, there's a long list of kind of luminaries and rather wealthy people that went there.
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But, you know, the crazy thing about it is the...
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I can't remember the exact phrase, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong on this.
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And she said, you know, it's the white boys with their other views, their opposite views.
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There's one view, and there's these kids who are diverging.
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But there's kids with these other views, which she then, I believe, blames on capitalism.
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So I'm more offended that the entire argument is incoherent.
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You know, she's straight out of central casting, I have to say.
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You know, she's got like the nose ring, and she's got sort of the gender neutral appearance.
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And, you know, she's like the boys, the white boys in particular are the problems.
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So what they all need to look like you in order to be accepted at Trinity School.
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And I don't know how James O'Keefe manages to get like his staff to continue getting these
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administrators to speak so openly about their views.
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But I have to think they're just pretty close to the surface for them to be talking so openly
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So I would love to talk to James about his strategy and tactics.
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And what it seems like is there's a lot of honey traps taking place.
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And you will often find that there are these men divulging their secrets to someone who
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sounds like a young woman who I presume, you know, is it at least an eight or a ten or
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I'm just saying that's that's sufficiently enough to kind of entice you to start spilling
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But but apparently willing to do this with both genders doesn't quite care about your
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But I imagine there's a lot of kind of hot or not fishing going on.
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But it's amazing to me like you because there's so many questions and we're going to show you
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And by the way, I think we're having James O'Keefe join us later this week.
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But it's amazing to me how many questions the undercover journalist asks these administrators
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You know, the Republicans, the speakers and so on out of the school, out of the class.
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If somebody had me just kept tweaking over and over, I think at some point I'd be like,
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holy shit, I better put down this margarita and maybe rethink this date.
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So in fairness, not everyone is expecting to have their kind of date surreptitiously recorded
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by people trying to smoke them out at a private school.
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I mean, you know, this is you can find monocultures in a lot of different places in this country.
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And God knows the New York City school system, as all of us here have had experience with
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it, with the exception of Camille, but he's been close enough to it.
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But God knows that that can be a monoculture and just filled with jargon.
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I recommend if anyone hasn't to read George Packer's Atlantic piece that was like five
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trillion words long from three or four years back, talking about navigating what turns out
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You just like most normal people would read this and say, my God, I don't even recognize
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But you can find monocultures in a lot of different places with a lot of different slants on it.
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I don't think James O'Keefe will be going in the middle of Kansas somewhere to try to
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find, you know, if there's a conservative place that like, yeah, you know, these these
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liberals that come over here, we got to do something with them.
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In fairness, I don't think that that place necessarily exists.
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There's something about there's something about that process, which which strikes me as a
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And for the rest of the country, looking at this saying, oh, my God, this woman is from
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So I realize James has gotten criticism for the tactics they use.
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God bless this guy, because we do need to see it.
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It's like the Disney situation where somebody pressed record on that executive and people
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didn't have to suppose anymore about Disney's secret agenda.
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It was all on camera, just like we don't have to suppose now like these teachers who then
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wind up blaming libs of tick tock for taking something they said on Instagram out of context.
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No, I can see you say what context makes your joke about hiring a serial killer to take
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I understand you think that's an appropriate joke as the mother of two white boys.
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And what lunatic would pay sixty thousand dollars a year to send their child there?
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Most of them will be really deeply offended by this shit.
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These lunatics have access to our children and it's alarming.
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And so, again, God bless James O'Keefe and this crazy lunatic of Trinity.
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I'll give you one more soundbite before I get on to her buddy in Connecticut.
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All right, here's the second soundbite we cut from this person, Jennifer, about how even at Trinity, okay, which is already, as you point out, in the New York City private school system, far left to begin with, okay?
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But even there, she's having trouble because she's finding she has to sneak some of her left wing agenda in because apparently there's at least some person there who's like, well, you might have to not do like the craziest stuff.
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Like, there's always groups of teachers who are like, I want to do these things, but the administration just wouldn't let us.
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So we've been just sneaking things in, in the cracks.
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I just keep trying to, like, disrupt whoever I can.
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And now that I'm in this position, I have so many opportunities to do that.
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And I said, there are some speakers I am not even going to put on the plate for them.
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And if that's a problem, I cannot be in charge of them.
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He said, this isn't a time for the, like, both sides.
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Like, he said, we're not in that place in our society.
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So you guys wouldn't let Republican perspectives on campus?
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And then she talks about how if you sneak off campus to go do a demonstration, you're supposed to get suspended or you're supposed to get a detention.
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And they just talk about social justice activities while there.
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I mean, you wonder why you get these lunatics on the college campuses and then running corporate America.
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Trinity, the people who are coming out of Trinity aren't necessarily going to be those people.
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They're going to be, like, investment bankers who live in your neighborhood, Megan.
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It's the people I'm worried about, the people who are spending my money to do this and teaching my kids, in this case, that pipeline, which contains a lot of the similar things.
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You know, there's a place in a school in Manhattan that told kids in middle school in the morning, all right, let's everyone segregate by race.
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And then we're going to go and talk about, you know, our various things.
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And that's where I think the locus of our upset should be, because we have the ability to target that and to affect that with, you know, kicking people out of school boards, in this case, in places like San Francisco and elsewhere.
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Matt Welsh, if it is public schools you want, it is public schools you're going to get because James O'Keefe has been busy on behalf of private school students, though.
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No, no, you're wrong. It's a problem in both places, because let's say you live in an area where the where the public schools are crappy.
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And so you really feel like you got to put your kid in a public school or private school or Catholic school, what have you.
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So, you know, you flee and then the problem pops itself up again.
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Our schools are not indoctrinating quite as badly as New York, otherwise I wouldn't have gone here.
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But, you know, the problem of left leaning administrators who want to force their political views on your children is pretty much universal.
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This is not my my school district I'm taking you to.
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But James O'Keefe went to I believe it's the Cos Cobb Elementary School public in Greenwich, Connecticut, and gets this guy.
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My oh, my speaking of honeypot, right, is a honeypot or honeytrap, Camille?
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Honeytrap, you hope you get the honeypot as well, I suppose, but I don't know.
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Well, that's definitely what happened to the assistant principal of Cos Cobb Elementary School, who's you can just tell he's got his margarita.
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You can't see the woman he's talking to, but she looks kind of hot from what you can see.
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Yeah, and talking about how, well, let's kick it off with the one that started to make all the news, which is he doesn't want to hire Catholics.
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You got to screen out all the Catholics, which, by the way, sir, just FYI, is illegal.
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If you find out someone is Catholic, then what?
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OK, I left that playing because our YouTube audience will see it later and they can see it.
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But for the listening audience, here's what happened.
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Protestants in this area are probably the most liberal.
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But if they're Catholic, conservative, the journalist says, what do you do with them?
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Because if someone's raised hardcore Catholic, it's like they're brainwashed.
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So when you ask them to consider something new, like an opportunity, or you have to think
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about this differently, they're stuck, just rigid.
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That's, as I say, illegal, as is his on the record statement to her that he only hires
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He'll only go younger because older might mean more conservative.
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So he will never interview somebody who is older.
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I mean, I need that to be a two-camera shoot, by the way, because for me, it's six margaritas.
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They made some mistakes in Iraq, but let's move on.
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No, this is amazing because this is always an experiment that I do.
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Catholics, of course, you know, last name Moynihan.
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But imagine if the news story, if this wasn't James O'Keefe, if this was anyone else, and
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the administrator on a secret tape was saying, you know who I really won't hire?
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Because they're very, very conservative Muslims.
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Muslims are really, really bad on gay marriage, and Muslims are just bad in general.
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This would be a cover story in every newspaper in America.
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But you can have that sort of religious intolerance when it comes to Catholics, because, you know,
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it reminds people of Amy Coney Barrett or something.
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But I do appreciate the fact that he doubles down and says, you know what?
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The previous one was legitimately racist, saying we're talking about white students.
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In the entire race of students, these whites are bad.
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And then you move on to, you know, this religious discrimination.
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Okay, let's throw another thing in there and say, we don't want the olds.
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If this guy has a job as of tomorrow, and again, this is all presuming that these tapes are
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But if this is as it is presented, one would presume that this person would be out of a
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But the lesson to everybody is, you know, don't discriminate religion, race, age, and don't
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get drunk with strangers and talk about your job.
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I mean, it reminds me of a couple of years ago, people kept getting caught, like, by
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They kept getting, you know, their accomplice to their crime would get them on tape and turn
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There was like a rash of those, a wave of them.
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And somebody on Twitter had such a great response to one of the cases where the accomplice had
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gone back and gotten their co, you know, partner in crime to confess to it all.
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If your accomplice in a crime comes back to you and tries to get you to repeat everything
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The only proper response is, no, that is not a thing.
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The incredible thing about this is the questions are literally like, so what you were saying
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This guy is too drunk to be like, wait a second, do you work for James O'Keefe?
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What he hears is, oh, she's really listening to me.
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This is actually something you have to wonder about.
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I don't know how much of the things that they're saying are actually true or the things
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In either case, you're willing to say it and you're not revolted by it, which suggests
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that there's something defective about the culture or the cultural milieu that these
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people exist in, which it's worth underscoring here, that we've had extensive conversations
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about bans and prohibitions on the kinds of things that can happen in classrooms.
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But ultimately, what this boils down to is what is happening in the culture.
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And if you are not actively having these arguments in the culture, shifting the needle with respect
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to the kinds of ideas people are willing to entertain, you're ultimately not going to
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be in a great place to make a huge dent in the kind of philosophy that is animating these
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particular concerns and the fact that people want to exist in these monocultures, that teachers
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are determined in many instances to circumvent prohibitions on discussing divisive concepts,
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for example, and find ways to inculcate it into their classrooms, to talk about it with
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students. Finding actually high-quality, serious academic institutions that are interested in
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kind of complexity and nuance and genuine diversity, like that's a legitimate challenge
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that we're all faced with and there is no shortcut to getting there.
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And yet they're going to one day encounter a bunch of conservatives who have had to wrestle
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with the other side for their entire existence because that's all they've been exposed to.
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So their argument abilities get better, their intellectual, logical reasoning abilities get
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better. Just to add on to this guy, the CosCobb, he's been placed on administrative leave while
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they investigate. But I have to say, both of these schools sound more pissed off about the
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James O'Keefe recording than they do about what their teachers said. I mean, I wouldn't be one bit
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surprised if both schools reinstate these administrators and let their ongoing access to children continue.
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So this guy, CosCobb, says, I'm not allowed to ask about the politics, but I've found a way around
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it. He says, brags to the girl, I haven't hired a conservative yet. He said he complains he can't
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get past the parents as much as he would like to because they're so nosy and try to intrude between his
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direct conversations with the students. He talks about how it doesn't matter what anybody thinks
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about it. He says it doesn't matter what the students think about. If they think about anything
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in a progressive way, that becomes their habit. It's subtle, but they get the democratic messages
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in there in that way. I mean, this is his game plan. Go ahead, Matt.
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It's terrible. Yeah, no, it's terrible. And it does matter to these people ultimately because
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they're going to find that the piece of cheese that they're sitting on is getting smaller by the day
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because people like Megyn Kelly take their kids out of the public system, actually taking them out of
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New York. I've taken one of my two kids out of the public system in New York. You're seeing across the
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country, but especially in big cities, an unprecedented decline in enrollment. And funding for public schools
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is tethered to enrollment. It didn't bounce back after the pandemic because precisely a bunch of
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parents suddenly got sort of paying a lot more attention to what was being taught in schools.
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And they couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe that in the teeth of like, you know,
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unprecedented closures, the likes of which we did not see almost anywhere else in the Western world,
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that the things that their schools wanted to communicate them was how to develop their kids as
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anti-racists and just sort of buying into a bunch of Ibram X. Kendi ideology. Like, no, tell us about
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the plan for opening the schools and counteracting what we've now seen from last week, an absolutely
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historic decline in reading and math acquisition. Tell us about that a little bit before you do your
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activist stuff. And people are voting with their feet and leaving. And it's going to be an absolute
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wipeout for teachers' jobs. They're not going to have it. And you should all go to the fifth column
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sub stack and subscribe so Matt can take his other kid out of the public school and into a private
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school because Patrice Lumumba Academy that she goes to needs to be shut down. The interesting thing
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that we're not even pointing out is that this is elementary school, correct? The Costco one is
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elementary school. And that is the deeply offensive thing. At least kids who are 16, 17, 18 have a
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fighting chance and can push back against this stuff. Elementary school kids don't, and they have
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no concept of this stuff, is that this is the great thing. And I've seen this actually in New York
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school. It's actually true, is that monocultures produce kids who want to subvert them because kids
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don't just sit there and say, I love the teacher. I want to do exactly what the teacher says, is that this
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is actually the backlash that's happening. And I've seen it amongst teachers. I mean, I've seen
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it amongst students and I've seen it amongst, you know, friends, kids who are like, you know,
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being red pilled at 16 years old. So guys, you know, when you are doing this in high school,
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don't believe that everyone's going to be, have this Pavlovian response and just eat it up and become
00:24:40.940
one of you. They probably won't. We could totally draw an analogy to like the DARE program, which also
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persisted in public education and did not succeed in wiping out drug addiction. It's, it's always
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important to kind of, to, to take our concerns about this and, and peg them against what is
00:24:59.820
realistic. And as much as these teachers are determined to, in some instances, turn these
00:25:04.580
places into propaganda institutions, the, what they're likely to do is just hollow them out and
00:25:09.740
make them completely ineffective at their actual job. One of, one of my favorite pastimes and by
00:25:15.180
favorite, I mean, kind of morbid fascinations is finding these different controversies at these
00:25:21.140
schools. And oftentimes with the public schools in particular, the places that are having these
00:25:26.140
ridiculous race controversies where the teachers are doing the most egregious stuff also tend to be
00:25:31.180
the worst performing schools. Like the kids can't read, they cannot do math. It persists from elementary
00:25:38.040
through secondary, right through high school where the scores only seemingly get a little bit better
00:25:43.240
because I presume plenty of kids are dropping out. These schools just don't work in terms of doing
00:25:49.500
the job that we imagine that they ought to do in terms of educating kids, but they are also very
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likely to fail with respect to their propaganda project. Remember that just two weeks ago, the story
00:25:59.180
in Minneapolis public schools where the union negotiated that they could, they had to fire the white
00:26:04.080
teachers first, irrespective of performance. So if the white teacher happened to be teacher of the year,
00:26:09.240
10 years in a row, she's got to go over somebody who is black or Hispanic or, you know, of some sort
00:26:16.700
of minority status. And that was one such school system, Camille, where the reading and the English
00:26:24.060
scores or the math scores were absolutely atrocious and the dropout rate was atrocious. And so they're so
00:26:29.460
obsessed with just keeping the teacher who has the right skin color in the position, irrespective of
00:26:35.720
merit, and not at all concerned about who can actually teach.
00:26:41.100
And there's also a flattening effect. The same institutions are the ones that are going to be
00:26:45.640
the quickest to get rid of gifted and talented programs. Any kind of specialized schools got to
00:26:50.480
get rid of that. I've seen this in New York very heavily. All of the energy is where is the perceived
00:26:55.360
place where privilege is being perpetuated? Let's knock that down. And that can happen all the way up
00:27:01.980
until it can't. And again, San Francisco, they did the same thing. It wasn't just they tried to rename
00:27:06.900
40 schools like the Thomas Jefferson School during the pandemic, although that didn't help. But they
00:27:13.200
also went after one of the two basic specialized schools where immigrant Chinese families sent their
00:27:20.400
kids. They did everything in the world to try to sacrifice so that their kid could go and finally
00:27:26.760
succeed. This is the way to do it in America. And these progressive activists, many of whom are pulling
00:27:31.100
down $200,000 salaries, are like, no, that's perpetuating privilege. We can't do it. And so
00:27:36.820
they knocked that down. That touched off a complete backlash that we're seeing in a lot of different
00:27:41.360
places. But it's widespread. These fads are all concentrated in the same place. It's wherever we
00:27:47.020
can institute plans like controlled choice, where the school basically controls the choice of where
00:27:53.400
they want to send your kids based on income level, because they can't do it on race anymore,
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because of the Supreme Court decision. And this is just producing failure all over the place. It's
00:28:04.000
Quickly just add, why does that happen? We hear the expression all the time in these universes,
00:28:09.280
do the work. One has to do the work. Well, it happens because they don't want to do the work.
00:28:14.000
And it's much, much easier to say that people are privileged, and that's why there's a disparity in
00:28:18.800
scores, than actually having to look at the pedagogy and kind of re-evaluate the system and rebuild the
00:28:24.880
system. You cannot do that if you're just saying, well, it's obviously privileged. Well, you look at
00:28:30.460
New York City, where gifted and talented programs have been cashiered, and you have something like
00:28:35.480
Stuyvesant High School, which is the most elite public high school, and it's merit only, test scores
00:28:40.820
only. And you see the number, there's like, by the way, there's like no white people in the school,
00:28:44.840
because it's very heavily Asian. And when you look at the Asian populations, a lot of them are
00:28:49.500
first-generation immigrants in Queens. These are not wealthy people, and they're doing exceptionally
00:28:54.880
well because they have, you know, kind of tiger mom visions, to borrow from Amy Chua, about how
00:29:00.840
their kids should perform. And that's a tough nut to crack for people who just say everything is
00:29:05.760
privilege and everything is race. Yeah. And now they can't get into Harvard, because Harvard is
00:29:09.820
secretly using race very much in a way it's not allowed to do. And that case is going to go up to
00:29:14.600
the Supreme Court in the fall, asking whether the Supreme Court used to say, the law is currently,
00:29:19.860
you may not use race as a quota, but it can be a factor among others that is considered.
00:29:25.780
But the Supreme Court said there will be an end to this. This is not a forever ruling. And the
00:29:30.760
Supreme Court will decide in the fall whether we are now at the end of allowing that. I mean,
00:29:34.780
again, I've pointed out before, they changed the law in California to say you can't consider race,
00:29:38.720
and they did it anyway. They were like, oh, okay, we got it. We'll comply. And they did it anyway.
00:29:43.560
And it was only with a lot of time that they sort of had to start not relying on race as one of the
00:29:50.260
main factors. And what they found was that black students did much better. They did much better.
00:29:54.240
They aligned with the universities in a much more true and productive way. So you wound up with black
00:30:02.020
scientists who might otherwise have gone to an elite university out there like Berkeley or Stanford or
00:30:08.020
whatever the public system offers and majored in African-American studies or same thing with women
00:30:13.740
who might have gone and become like a gender studies major at Berkeley, whereas they could have
00:30:18.000
become a doctor if they'd gone to maybe on paper, lesser UCL, whatever. And so anyway, the experiment
00:30:25.320
has proven that the people who are just totally focused on race aligning with or gender aligning with
00:30:30.280
the most elite institution have engaged in a failed experiment. All right, stand by because
00:30:36.900
there's much, much more to discuss. And I have to tell you, listening to these two people talk about
00:30:40.700
our kids and Republicans and conservatives and Catholics reminded me very much of Dark Brandon,
00:30:47.660
which I haven't had the chance to talk about yet because I was off the day after his speech.
00:30:51.560
But we'll talk about Dark Brandon and the president's, you know, president unity,
00:30:55.340
his latest message with the guys from the fifth column in just one minute. Stay tuned.
00:31:05.260
Okay, guys, so before we get on to Dark Brandon, which apparently they're embracing now,
00:31:09.440
the White House likes it. Let's talk about because we're coming off of the schools discussion,
00:31:16.560
the new White House claim like they did with the defund the police where they were like,
00:31:20.820
we've always been for funding the police. It's the Republicans who don't want to
00:31:24.120
who've been pushing for defunding. I mean, it's a true gaslighting. Just that's just not true. And
00:31:30.340
we all lived it for a year plus. And we know you're lying. But they they're really good at
00:31:35.720
looking right in the camera and lying. And here's the latest version of that, where
00:31:40.260
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, actually tried to argue that it is the Democrats
00:31:48.160
who wanted schools open and who we have to thank for the schools being open now. And it was the
00:31:54.380
Republicans who wanted them to remain closed. Here it is. In less than six months, our schools
00:32:01.040
went from 40, 46 percent to to open to nearly all of them being open to full time. That was the work
00:32:07.800
of this president. And that was the work of Democrats in spite of Republicans not voting for the American
00:32:14.020
Rescue Plan, which 130 billion dollars went to school to have the ventilation, to be able to
00:32:19.840
have the tutoring and and the teachers and being able to hire more teachers. It shows you how mismanaged
00:32:26.580
the pandemic was and how the impact of that mismanagement had on the on kids progress and
00:32:33.960
academic well-being. And, you know, every Republican Congress voted against that money. That is the
00:32:39.640
reality. We had to do this on our own. Just again, for the listening audience, she read that entire
00:32:44.440
thing. She cannot speak extemporaneously. She cannot make a point without reading from her notes. She
00:32:50.660
doesn't know the facts. That's very clear. It's it's infuriating to me. I just as a woman, you know,
00:32:57.520
you see a woman in a post like this, like get on your two feet and make the argument. That's literally
00:33:03.220
your job. They could send anybody up there to just read. Oh, I got a question about schools reopening.
00:33:09.880
There's paragraph eight. Read that. She can't do it. It upsets me as a human and a woman. But OK,
00:33:17.800
moving on to the substance of the argument, Camille, I saw you shaking your head. I mean,
00:33:23.480
it really is up is down and down is up. But, you know, what do you make of it?
00:33:28.460
Well, first, I want to second your perspective. I think she's uniquely bad at this job. We see a lot
00:33:33.580
of people go into to being like the White House press secretary and having to spin for on behalf
00:33:39.660
of their bosses telling half truths. She's just terrible at this. I think there have been dueling
00:33:46.020
editorials in recent days in the New York Times, well, the Washington Post and the Wall Street
00:33:50.460
Journal, both about covid and educational policy. And the Wall Street Journal was blasting the teachers
00:33:55.880
unions for keeping the schools closed as long as they did. And the Washington Post editorial,
00:34:00.760
and this is the entire editorial board, did not say in response, this is unfair because
00:34:05.380
Republicans are responsible for this. What they said was specifically, this is unfair because it
00:34:12.080
doesn't take into account that there was a lot of fear and trepidation at the time.
00:34:15.680
We know who was responsible for keeping the schools closed. This isn't debatable. There's some
00:34:23.280
question about whether or not it was justified, whether or not it's understandable. But the fact
00:34:27.660
that it's been consequential, that it's hurt students in general, and that it was almost certainly
00:34:32.400
unnecessary, that is what we should be focusing on. This wasn't a function of money. One line that I do
00:34:39.000
want to slag the Washington Post editorial writers for is suggesting at some point that it's not worth
00:34:45.640
talking about whether or not teachers unions are responsible, that we shouldn't be looking
00:34:50.640
backwards, we should be looking forward because we need to help students catch up. One, I would love
00:34:57.000
to see them apply the same exact philosophy to kind of their conversations about systemic racism. They seem
00:35:01.900
to be particularly obsessed with talking about what happened in the past and not what actually matters
00:35:07.560
is likely to improve people's lives in that context. But two, I think it's vitally important
00:35:12.380
that we have conversations about what went wrong and what went right with respect to public health
00:35:16.660
and pandemic policy. I think a lot of that is going to inform how we respond to other problems in the
00:35:22.540
future, but may also have some sort of informative value with respect to the policy solutions that we
00:35:27.780
select when we're trying to help kids get out of the rut and the hole that we've dug for them
00:35:34.000
as a result of really disadvantageous policies that were adopted during the pandemic.
00:35:39.220
It's amazing how she's, yeah, go ahead, go ahead, Matt, because I was just going to say the,
00:35:43.100
the, um, she's mad that the Republicans didn't support the American rescue plan. Meanwhile,
00:35:46.980
all these schools still have so much money sitting in the coffers that they didn't spend.
00:35:50.820
Right? Yeah. So now she's trying to say, this is how they got, they got the schools reopened. You
00:35:55.700
know, it was Joe Biden. Meanwhile, he took office and he took possession of a vaccine. You know,
00:36:01.740
Trump did not have the vaccine though. He developed the vaccine. So to compare,
00:36:05.960
you know, just, just, this is the percentage of schools that were open when we took office
00:36:11.340
to, um, you know, the, where we are today is so misleading. It doesn't add any context.
00:36:18.020
If you go back and look at Trump spring of 2020, he was saying we should open the schools and,
00:36:22.900
and the, he was getting attacked uniformly by Democrats for being absolutely irresponsible.
00:36:27.940
Go ahead, Matt. So Ron DeSantis was called, uh, widely in the press, Ron death Santis because he
00:36:36.400
insisted that Florida public schools be fully open in the fall of 2020, just like basically almost
00:36:43.280
every single school district in the entire continent of Europe. By the way, I guess we only
00:36:47.760
pay attention to Europe when it's advantageous for ourselves, but he was called Ron death Santis.
00:36:52.120
If you look and you can find this very easily online, there are color coded state by state rankings
00:36:57.020
on which States had the most, uh, open school days from beginning in 2020 in the fall onward.
00:37:04.060
And which ones had the most closed, the most open, all of them are Republican. They voted
00:37:08.660
Republican in the 2020 election. They have a governor who's Republican, their state house is
00:37:13.340
Republican, all the ones that were the most closed, all Democrats, the, the, the correlation
00:37:18.480
between whether your, your school systems were open or closed was entirely about partisan politics
00:37:25.020
entirely. And what do we know about partisan politics on the democratic side? 94% of teachers
00:37:31.360
union giving goes to democratic party, political giving goes to democratic parties. So it's exactly
00:37:36.800
in those places where they have the most power that they closed the most schools. And we have just
00:37:40.900
seen as mentioned of last week, what these big report about, uh, what happened to learning loss
00:37:46.660
over the last couple of years, it is those places. And if we're going to use an equity as a focus in
00:37:52.740
all other circumstances, let's look at equity in this circumstances. The, the populations that got
00:38:00.280
hit hardest were poor and minority period. When it comes to this, I know Camille doesn't like that
00:38:05.240
because he doesn't believe in the word minority, but, uh, it's certainly among my perspective.
00:38:11.180
I'm just kidding. Uh, traditionally disadvantaged, uh, communities suffer by far the most. And there's
00:38:17.120
those places that run by Democrats. Uh, and, and so it's, it's worse than gaslighting a term that I
00:38:23.280
normally hate, but it is actually, uh, absolutely on point in this case. Can I just say, can I just
00:38:29.340
say the, I started it by saying it's gaslighting along the lines of what they did with defund the
00:38:34.200
police and that policy pushed by Democrats had exactly the same effect. It, it endangered many
00:38:40.720
communities and, and people lost their lives as a result of this, but in particular black and
00:38:45.360
brown communities. So both of these policies, which were 100% pushed by Democrats resulted in real
00:38:51.320
losses to black and brown communities across America. Hence the one 80 in positions being taken right
00:38:59.640
now by the Democrats and the lie that they were always on the right side. Go ahead.
00:39:05.620
I, first of all, I object to wrong death Santus because it just doesn't really work. It's just a
00:39:10.580
D E like, but you remember those times, by the way, in which anybody that had the kind of slightly
00:39:16.180
heterodox view on COVID, many of which turned out to be right, by the way. So heterodox at the time,
00:39:21.960
uh, were accused of, uh, confining grandma to the, uh, the gas chamber, basically like the people,
00:39:29.580
everything that you're doing is going to make people die. So Matt brings up the politics. Well,
00:39:33.500
let's look at the politics of this. Of course, we were told we should not politicize science.
00:39:37.160
You know, this is a smart thing to say, but it never actually happens. Well, if we look at the
00:39:43.240
politicization of science and you know, how it relates to schools, Matt is also correct that
00:39:48.120
most all of Europe didn't close schools. Sweden, where I used to live, I don't think closed schools
00:39:52.580
for a single day, right? They didn't even have lockdowns. So now is the time after a couple of
00:39:58.420
years of this, you know, two and a half years to actually look at the evidence. If not, you're
00:40:04.100
engaged in a political campaign. If you're up there as the president, the white house practice
00:40:09.200
secretary talking about this stuff in these ways, why are you not, if you don't care about the
00:40:14.600
politicization of science, you don't want it to happen. Why are you not addressing the American
00:40:17.800
people and saying, okay, so here's actually what we know about COVID in schools. What happened with
00:40:23.600
kids? How many kids died? How many teachers were, you know, confined to their deathbeds because
00:40:29.520
of a transmission from a child, because we have a lot of evidence about this now, but instead it's
00:40:35.620
a political blame game and a political blame game only. I'm fine with that because there were some
00:40:40.260
really bad and shitty politics that we all saw during this time. But I also want that adjunct point
00:40:46.400
to say, by the way, you were all wrong about this. And, you know, whether or not you like Ron DeSantis,
00:40:52.080
want him to be president or, you know, hell, want him to even be in elected office in Florida.
00:40:56.540
He was right. And Sweden was right. And Europe was right about this. And this idea that kids were
00:41:03.140
going to be dropping like flies and their teachers, of course, too, because they were vectors of
00:41:07.860
disease. These kids turned out what? Not to be true. And you can look at the evidence. I'm not
00:41:13.120
just making this up, but the problem is no one wants to talk about the evidence. And no one at this
00:41:17.100
point is going back and saying, what do we know about COVID? What do we know about who is dying from
00:41:21.540
it? What do we know about transmission rates? Why are we still asking professional tennis
00:41:25.380
players to come to America when the vaccine doesn't prevent the damn thing from transmitting?
00:41:30.640
That's why we did it before. And this is still affecting policy. This is still affecting policy.
00:41:35.240
We saw it in D.C. where the mayor suggested that she was going to hold students out of school,
00:41:40.480
not give them any options to attend unless they were fully vaccinated. When we know all of the
00:41:45.560
things that you just underscored, Moina, it's the this is the reason we have to talk about the
00:41:50.020
profound failures that happened during the pandemic and our unseriousness about trusting
00:41:55.960
the science. But the thing is, Camille, I can I can I am OK with the failures in some senses
00:42:01.840
because there was a lot of stuff we didn't know when we were feeling this through as a
00:42:05.300
nation. You know, scientists are trying to figure it out. There's debate amongst scientists.
00:42:09.340
There's no settled science. That's that's ridiculous. But, you know, when we're not actually
00:42:13.720
correcting the record about this stuff and actually telling people, like, why on earth would we have
00:42:19.900
a mandate for a vaccine of, you know, playing in a tennis tournament? You can't do this. Well, why?
00:42:27.960
I mean, that's his problem, isn't it? It's not mine, because he can transmit it and he can acquire
00:42:33.060
that whether or not he's been vaccinated. He's just going to have a much better time if he is.
00:42:36.740
That's that's the position all of our children are in, all of our children in that. My kids are facing
00:42:40.720
vaccine mandates at both of their schools. And for what? For what? If God forbid they got some
00:42:46.500
terribly severe case of covid and had a very negative health outcome, that would be between
00:42:51.680
me, my child, my husband and our doctor, our pediatrician. That is not for the school to weigh
00:42:56.940
in on. The school doesn't pay our hospital bills. The school really just needs to worry about
00:43:01.320
transmission. And the vaccine doesn't affect that at all. And yet still, they're going to expel my
00:43:05.760
children at age 16 unless they get the vaccine. That policy is still in place. And it's absolute
00:43:12.800
madness. But to your point, they've been dishonest all along. The reason they won't do, you know,
00:43:17.140
a full, open, honest retrospective look is because they've been dishonest all along. As we saw, the
00:43:25.020
masking was driving me nuts, as you guys know. As we saw the CDC do studies like the 90,000 kids in
00:43:31.460
Atlanta that showed the masks did nothing, they ignored it. Then they would do another study.
00:43:37.720
And then we'd have honest journalists come out and say, no, that one's flawed, too. Here's the
00:43:41.420
and they would continue touting the study despite serious methodological issues. And then a study
00:43:47.560
would come out of Europe proving, no, the masks don't work in reducing transmission. And they would
00:43:52.100
ignore it or try to discredit it. It was all agenda driven. So, of course, now the one retrospective
00:43:57.660
moment we're having at the CDC, oh, Rochelle Walensky is going to take a look at what went
00:44:01.540
wrong, is focusing on how we are too academic. We're just too smart. Well, we had too many
00:44:07.620
academic papers. Shut up, Rochelle. That's not it. Not it. You need to go the way of that Connecticut
00:44:13.620
Cosco Elementary School teacher, vice principal, whatever he is. You need to go the way of all
00:44:18.600
these lunatics who won't accept reality. Never forget that that in February 2021, the CDC came
00:44:27.240
out with new revised science based guidelines for schools and who sat at those meetings and helped
00:44:33.840
shape those guidelines. Yes. Randy Wingard. Randy Wingard. Who does not have an MD. Not last time I
00:44:40.440
looked. No, that's not really her area of expertise. And those guidelines, if interpreted strictly by school
00:44:47.380
districts, would have had 90 percent of schools closed continuing from that point on. And some of
00:44:52.400
those guidelines, they've reversed most of them by now, but some of them are still in service. And so
00:44:58.220
in the deepest, bluest places like Washington, D.C., you have this kind of insane interpretation of
00:45:05.440
them. New York City right now, public schools, you can't engage in extracurricular activities. You can't
00:45:10.000
play in the football team if you're not vaccinated. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. We're already
00:45:14.560
facing restrictions on field trips and so on. And ours is not the only school unless your kid is
00:45:18.860
vaccinated. And it truly is like, what business is that of yours? There was one school, they did hit
00:45:25.200
the news this weekend that now they're implementing a mask mandate for if you haven't gotten the flu
00:45:29.140
vaccine. These people are drunk on their own power. They love it. They'd like to see us masked all
00:45:35.080
day, every day for everything. Right. I mean, monkeypox now it's like kids are looking at mask mandates
00:45:41.340
potentially on that. It's like, unless they're having gay sex in like the second grade, I think
00:45:46.100
they're fine. What? Is that happening? Can you reveal that in his latest video?
00:45:58.080
Well, I mean, we'll get to that story later about this lunatic who wrote a book who's like
00:46:02.640
celebrating exactly that at the very young, at the 12 year old and up and schools are allowing her
00:46:08.320
book to be everywhere. But all right, this is a good place to pause it because I do want to do
00:46:11.300
dark Brandon. We've come up with a just short, brief montage of Joe Biden's dark Brandon moment.
00:46:16.000
And now he's trying to walk it back as if we didn't hear everything he said last week. And
00:46:21.480
then he goes out on the campaign trail and he goes back to dark Brandon again. So it's really it is
00:46:25.060
more like a Superman figure or like, I guess, like a Batman. Wait, who? No, Superman. Who's got
00:46:29.460
Clark Kent. He's got the one character and he's got the other character and really kind of depends
00:46:33.300
in the setting. What what message you're going to be hearing? It's like a new superhero character
00:46:38.680
who's got that same thing in common. Dark Brandon, as the fifth column host, come back with us right
00:46:43.540
after this quick break. And remember, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM
00:46:48.420
Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to
00:46:53.400
our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash Megan Kelly. Thank you so much for getting us over the 500,000
00:46:59.160
subscriber mark. That was our goal by August 31st. And thanks to you guys. We did it. Very grateful.
00:47:06.120
If you prefer to get your news via audio podcast, follow and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher
00:47:12.260
or wherever you get your podcasts for free. And there you'll find our full archives with more than
00:47:18.180
380 shows, many of which feature these three brilliant guys. I love their perspective. More libertarian.
00:47:25.060
Love to hear from everybody right on these issues and and the respectful disagreement. Always fun as
00:47:30.580
well. All right, so Dark Brandon came and went and then came back again. And I can't quite keep track
00:47:41.240
of whether he's Dark Brandon or is it Light Brandon? I'm not sure what the opposite of just Brandon,
00:47:46.800
just Brandon. It's like when I had my first date with Doug, it went great. And I was calling him
00:47:52.540
Dream Date Doug, you know, shortly after they're there after. And then like he kind of like blew me off or
00:47:59.980
didn't call when he said he was going to and he just got downgraded to just Doug.
00:48:07.780
Just Doug. And that's kind of what's happening with Dark Brandon and just Brandon. For those who missed it
00:48:16.980
last Thursday night, Dark Brandon appeared before the red, the black columns and the red lighting and
00:48:24.000
the I'm not a big Star Wars person, but it's the Star Wars thing, I guess. This is what a lot of people
00:48:33.020
My Republicans represented extremism. My Republicans do not respect the Constitution.
00:48:39.300
MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards. MAGA Republicans have made their
00:48:46.740
choice. They embrace anger and MAGA Republicans are to destroy an American democracy. MAGA Republicans
00:48:54.940
look at America and see carnage and darkness and despair. The MAGA Republicans believe that for them
00:49:11.880
They don't respect the Constitution we had in there. But he also added they don't believe in the rule
00:49:15.740
of law. They he'd spent a lot of time and they refused to accept the results
00:49:19.740
of a free election. I mean, this is like one of those therapy sessions where, you know,
00:49:23.840
you go in, you say all these things that are actually true about you and your therapist is
00:49:27.760
like the person starring in this story is not your, quote, friend, sister. It is you heal thyself.
00:49:35.760
I mean, just to go down, like, first of all, respect the Constitution. It's like what he just
00:49:40.180
did with student debt, which he clearly doesn't have the authority to do, and it's going to be
00:49:43.040
struck down. OK, so we that we remember that one because it was recent. The eviction moratorium,
00:49:48.400
which even he said he did not have the power to do. The Supreme Court had already said
00:49:51.740
this is unconstitutional and he knew is unconstitutional, but he thought he could get
00:49:55.480
us through the summer by doing it. He didn't care that it was unconstitutional. He doesn't
00:49:59.060
have respect for the Constitution. It's his party that's talking about packing the Supreme
00:50:02.140
Court so they can get better rulings, rule of respect, the rule of law. They're the people
00:50:07.060
who will they want to protest outside the Supreme Court justice's households, despite the law
00:50:11.720
on the books. He can't do that. And they knew nothing when one of them almost gets assassinated.
00:50:16.000
It's just a shoulder shrug. They still want to circulate the guy's addresses online. No problem.
00:50:20.340
Not to mention his vaccine mandate, which was struck down in part by the U.S. Supreme
00:50:23.500
Court. So don't lecture me about this Constitution, Dark Brandon, because just Brandon is violating
00:50:29.260
it every other day. Right. The rule of law, of course, it's like, don't get us started.
00:50:34.940
And he's upset about the January 6th protests, but we've got the Black Lives Matter two year
00:50:38.540
event to look at and the riots, which he didn't care about. His party didn't care about. So it's
00:50:42.880
like he's in no position to cast these stones. But the one I want to start with is that how
00:50:47.800
MAGA Republicans look at America and see carnage and darkness and despair. I mean, truly, it's his
00:50:54.880
party that's been trying to inject messages like that into every textbook, every speech about how
00:51:01.980
bad we are and how awful and what sinners and how we can never atone. That's his party. Who would
00:51:08.940
like to take it? We've had a problem with apocalypticism in American politics for a while
00:51:15.100
now. It predates Trump. Trump supercharged it in many ways. But Bernie Sanders is part of that.
00:51:20.300
Hillary Clinton is part of that. Joe Biden is part of that. Democrats. Populism loves, loves,
00:51:25.660
loves to say at every given moment that this is the inflection point. He said that in the speech.
00:51:32.640
Right now is the inflection point. Our future of our country depends on what we do right now
00:51:37.740
about this speech that just for some reason had to happen in September of 2022. I'm not really sure
00:51:44.060
what the timing of that was all about. So we've been living through this for a while. And you're
00:51:50.640
right that he's talking about his own party. He's also talking about Republicans, not all of them.
00:51:55.900
The problem is that the tone of the speech and the language of the speech was this constant
00:52:01.300
conflation. And so then he's like, well, no, I'm not talking about all Republicans.
00:52:04.780
You faded out the constant. What you constant? What conflation of MAGA Republicans with every
00:52:11.420
everybody who doesn't believe in gay marriage or has a different idea about abortion? Are those
00:52:17.080
maybe he kept he was talking about MAGA ideology, but he never really flushed it out beyond talking
00:52:22.000
about contraception for some reason and and gay marriage and abortion rights. That's not really
00:52:28.800
MAGA ideology. You should know who you're talking to. I'm not sure there's a big, strong MAGA ideology,
00:52:34.340
but I can tell you that one part of it, a fundamental part of it, that through line in
00:52:37.720
Donald Trump's ideological career. And it's held by a lot of the people who support him the most
00:52:42.660
is against trade agreements. And Biden like extended that in the piece. He's like, we're going to make
00:52:49.560
stuff in America again. OK, so you are actually extending part of the MAGA ideology that you're
00:52:55.120
talking about as such a threat to democracy. That's a great point. Including, you know, the Labor Day
00:53:01.360
speech, which was in Wisconsin, which was the site I think everyone forgets. And I covered at the time
00:53:07.380
one of the great Trump administration boondoggles of getting Foxconn to come and make screens.
00:53:13.640
Initially, they're going to come make iPhones and they're going to make screens. And then that's been
00:53:17.460
downgraded. And they've backed out of this thing from, you know, thousand jobs to 100 jobs, that sort
00:53:22.440
of thing. But so, yeah, no, it's very similar. And that's economically, you know, one of the things that I
00:53:27.440
think all three of us disagree with Trump on most vociferously is the economic policy, which I think
00:53:33.100
has been uniquely bad. But it's really interesting. Megan, you said at the beginning that people are
00:53:37.960
saying this is a Star Wars kind of imagery. You know, Star Wars is pretty straightforward and George
00:53:43.040
Lucas is pretty straightforward, but this was borrowed from the Nazis, from Lenny Riefenstahl's
00:53:48.120
film, Triumph of the Will, you know, all the red and all the columns and the rest of it.
00:53:51.960
So it seems to me that it was, dare I say, semi-fascist, because it wasn't fully fascist.
00:53:59.520
It was like the minor leagues of fascism. So it was a semi-fascist.
00:54:04.040
But, you know, it is so crazy to suggest that, and you were right when you said, you know,
00:54:11.400
the riots two years ago, and Camille has talked about this, you know, ad infinitum on the fifth
00:54:15.860
column. And we liked to bang on about it. But I was in Kenosha the day after the shooting,
00:54:23.520
the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting, all this stuff being burned to the ground. And Trump was there,
00:54:28.940
and he met with the person whose lot was burned down, or whose furniture store was burned down.
00:54:34.040
And then later in the day, Joe Biden showed up. And he went and visited Jacob Blake. And he said
00:54:40.840
that Jacob Blake, the officers involved in that shooting should be arrested. Now, the stories we
00:54:46.860
found out about Jacob Blake were the opposite of what we initially were told, was that he was
00:54:50.680
unarmed and he was there to help. He was violating a restraining order, and he had a knife in his hand.
00:54:55.240
So it's like, you know, these are two parties. And then, you know, look, yesterday, I turned this on,
00:55:00.020
I was thinking about this, and I turn on TV, or it was on the internet or something,
00:55:03.540
and I see Roland Martin in one of his ridiculous outfits. And he said, the Trump voters, like,
00:55:13.460
we're at war with these people. We're at war with them. And he said, then, you know, the next line
00:55:18.800
was, these folks are evil. I mean, don't tell me that there is one dark force in America.
00:55:25.940
I didn't vote for Donald Trump twice. I didn't vote for Donald Trump, and I wouldn't vote for him
00:55:29.560
again. And, you know, I would never, I'm not a fan of the guy. Our podcast has been very critical of
00:55:34.960
him. But at the same time, let's keep in perspective here, that this thing, and he said,
00:55:40.540
you know, in the speech the other day, in Wisconsin, that we used to be a nation of unity and hope and
00:55:46.940
optimism. Bullshit. I mean, does anyone remember the Clinton years, the Obama years, the Bush years? I
00:55:54.800
mean, everyone's been called a Nazi, everyone's been called a fascist. This is the same as American
00:56:00.860
politics has ever been, but with a different way of transmitting information, which is Twitter and
00:56:06.140
getting it real time and getting a warped perception of what the world is about. And this warped perception
00:56:11.000
is being fed by Joe Biden, who's pretending that he's not conflating the 70, 60 odd million people
00:56:17.940
that voted for Donald Trump with these dark MAGA Republicans. He is doing just that. So they must have
00:56:23.400
some sort of internal polling that suggests that banging on about this stuff is going to help them,
00:56:28.860
you know, repeal or push back this red wave, because it is just endless at this point. I mean,
00:56:34.940
this, this idea that there are fascists at the door, which is obviously ridiculous.
00:56:40.900
Well, can I tell you, I had Chris Dierwald on the program last week, you know, very smart political
00:56:45.960
prognosticator. And he was saying the smartest thing for Joe Biden to do right now is to SDFU.
00:56:51.940
He said maybe he could borrow Joe Biden's basement, you know, like, or wait, yeah,
00:56:57.720
yeah. He was saying, be quiet. He was like, go back to your basement because he was saying
00:57:01.140
he, the Democrats numbers are getting a little bit better and he doesn't need to be out there
00:57:06.400
making speeches like this because things are going a little bit more his way. So this is not a good
00:57:10.720
time to be out there giving what, this is my take on it, his deplorable speech, right? Like it didn't
00:57:17.320
help Barack Obama to call Republicans bitter clingers. It certainly didn't help Hillary Clinton
00:57:21.500
to call Republicans deplorables. And dark Brandon is not going to help his own chances or those of
00:57:27.120
his party. But with his deplorable speech, which is why I think he's decided to try to dial it back
00:57:35.060
a little, either that or he just got off prompter and he says different things when he's off prompter.
00:57:38.660
You know what I mean? He denounced the American carnage speech in his own American carnage
00:57:43.220
speech, by the way. Very bizarre. So he gets caught. But Peter Doocy was like,
00:57:47.360
do you really think this about all Trump supporters? And he was like, how dare you? Here it is. Watch.
00:57:51.760
Mr. President, do you consider Mr. President, do you consider all Trump supporters to be a threat
00:57:59.600
to the country? No, everyone. Come on. I don't consider any Trump supporters to be a threat to
00:58:11.040
the country. Do you hear it? I don't consider any Republican a threat to the country. Well,
00:58:18.880
you just said MAGA force is determined to take the country back or back or to an America where
00:58:23.160
there's no right to choose, no right to privacy. MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.
00:58:26.700
They don't believe in the rule of law. MAGA Republicans embrace anger. They thrive amongst
00:58:31.140
chaos. MAGA Republicans look at America and see carnage and darkness and despair. Like,
00:58:36.240
it certainly sounds like you're not like a big fan of Trump Republicans. I don't like,
00:58:40.960
you might have to explain. I mean, MAGA Republican is a self-servingly vague
00:58:48.020
slur that is being directed at his enemies. It does not mean anything in particular. And precisely
00:58:53.680
the same way that semi-fascist doesn't mean anything in particular. It means we generally
00:58:57.960
don't like you and think that you're bad. And I think Moynihan's point is very vital for us to
00:59:03.260
focus on. The notion that we've always had substantial division in our politics. There's
00:59:08.360
always been disagreement. And in many respects, it's probably always been cheap demagoguery deployed
00:59:16.480
against your political opponents. But there was a time when it was punctuated by kind of civility
00:59:21.740
and respectability. And at a moment when there are criminal prosecutions of members of the January
00:59:28.820
6th riots that took place at the Capitol, someone may want to call it a fracas. I would accept either
00:59:35.620
one of those answers. And people are getting long jail sentences at a time when the President of the
00:59:40.520
United States is being investigated by the intelligence agencies for potential crimes that
00:59:45.780
land him in a courtroom, if not in a prison. The former President, Camille, I know he's still your
00:59:51.920
president. The former President. I'm just... Well, they're always... Okay, Dinesh.
00:59:56.600
They were always the President at some point. So I can say the President of the United States.
00:59:59.800
I think it takes on a very different tone. And Joe Biden knows this. Joe Biden talked incessantly
01:00:07.680
about the fact that he was going to bring us together. And we have, in the same week that this
01:00:13.380
speech was given, the President's now press secretary suggesting that if you disagree with
01:00:20.120
the majority, then you're an extremist. This is absurd, hysterical hyperbole. And I would say that
01:00:27.580
when it comes from the President, as opposed to Roland Martin wearing a Dragon Ball Z-themed
01:00:32.600
dashiki, this is bad. It's unacceptable. And it's something that we should all be genuinely
01:00:38.980
concerned about. And I will say that I was heartened to see plenty of people in the media,
01:00:44.540
plenty of people on the left side of the political spectrum expressing concern about this,
01:00:49.180
because it was a bad speech, for one, but it was also just decidedly in very poor taste for this
01:00:55.340
administration. It was in poor taste. Exactly right. And it ran a real risk at a time when
01:01:00.160
his poll numbers are getting a little better. They're at 42% approval rating, according to the
01:01:04.800
latest poll. They were at 36 not so long ago, because his base is getting a little riled up.
01:01:09.540
He's gotten a couple of legislative agenda items through. They're feeling like, OK, maybe he's going
01:01:13.780
to fight for us. Maybe he's thinking, this is me fighting for you even more. I'm going to say all the
01:01:18.900
things that make Mary Trump get chills, which is what she said. Why is Mary Trump a commentator again?
01:01:24.460
Anywho. So he maybe he's trying to get that up to 43, 44 to drive midterm results. But you got to
01:01:33.120
factor in what it's going to do to the other side. Right. Like deplorables hurt her way more than it
01:01:39.800
helped her. And I got to feel like it's way better for him to have Roland Martin say the crazy things
01:01:45.900
than for him to say them. I mean, luckily for him, I suppose Donald Trump is giving no shortage of
01:01:53.860
crazy himself over the last couple of days. Oh, my God. Just like matching the retweet button on
01:02:04.620
Arrestees. And then also just like randomly spitting out like redo the election.
01:02:14.220
It's almost like he thinks you can you can take the little void stamp and like put it on the,
01:02:18.320
you know, the ink pad and then just stamp it on Joe Biden's head. It's not the way it works.
01:02:22.540
I think that that points to an interesting little thing, which is, I believe at this point,
01:02:29.160
cynically, it's cynical. I don't want to be that because I want to be idealistic ish. But that
01:02:34.940
it serves Joe Biden's interest to make the midterm elections about Trump, because that's going to
01:02:40.860
rile up his base. And also because Trump, even though he's really popular among Republicans,
01:02:45.040
is not popular among Americans. Right. Or independence in particular.
01:02:50.320
Independence in particular, two thirds of which don't whom don't want him to run for president
01:02:54.420
again. Right. So if we make this about democracy and this is the inflection point and because of
01:02:59.620
Trump, even though he's not running in this election, then you can nationalize it and give
01:03:04.840
people this sense of of glorious purpose. I think that's cynical. It's the same way that the
01:03:10.500
Democrats poured forty four million dollars into five races, close races of GOP primaries
01:03:17.460
in order to try to influence it so that the MAGA Republican won, as opposed to the more
01:03:24.280
competitive, saner people like Peter Meyer, a subscriber to our podcast.
01:03:30.200
But like if you really really believed in what you say about democracy, that's not the behavior
01:03:39.040
that what you would do. You just think back of or, you know, work yourself backwards with
01:03:43.400
what would you do if you were actually trying to create unity behind shared principles of
01:03:48.960
Americans of all stripes to say that, you know, this political violence is bad, not respecting
01:03:55.680
elections is bad, not respecting court decisions or whatever is bad. You wouldn't do it like
01:04:00.300
this. You wouldn't suddenly start talking about the infrastructure bill. That has nothing to
01:04:03.880
do with it. Why are you bringing it up? You'd be bringing up specific things like, oh, we
01:04:08.180
should back the Electoral College Reform Act or, you know, this this vision of how to fix
01:04:13.900
the system next time. But that's not what he was doing. He was trying to nationalize an election,
01:04:18.260
even create, you know, a MAGA force. That sounds cool. I want to join the MAGA force.
01:04:27.940
Holy cow, Matt. The colonel in the MAGA force. Oh, Lord.
01:04:32.880
He wants to run against Trump because he thinks he can win. And that's you're flirting.
01:04:37.080
And how do you do? I mean, look, they're doing a very good job at one thing. What are we talking
01:04:42.080
about? We're talking about this absurd idea that, you know, American democracy is heaving and dying
01:04:47.920
and, you know, taking its last breath and talking about fascism and all this stuff rather than
01:04:53.140
talking about, you know, pocketbook, kitchen table issues that are affecting everyday Americans
01:04:58.380
that they have no answer for. Right. I mean, you know, gas prices are down a little bit
01:05:03.580
and there's some suggestion they might go back up again. But, you know, to say that they've gone down
01:05:09.500
to, you know, like three dollars and seventy five cents a gallon. I mean, that's still a lot more
01:05:14.300
than it was a year ago. Right. Or a year and a half. Not to mention our electric bills.
01:05:17.920
Electric bills. I mean, you know, food bills, everything. I mean, these are, of course,
01:05:21.720
people that are having these conversations that don't give two shits about this, that
01:05:25.180
don't actually comparison shop, don't actually know, you know, famously like, you know, George
01:05:30.700
H.W. Bush, like in the scanner and how much how much a thing of milk costs these people
01:05:35.500
truly. And I'm talking about people not in politics, but people, you know, in the media
01:05:39.720
who, you know, shop at bodegas in New York where things are 18 times the price that they
01:05:44.260
are at Walmart, they're not price sensitive and they don't care about this stuff. But
01:05:48.700
everyday Americans do. The poll numbers, you know, bear this out. So why not just talk about
01:05:53.400
how American democracy is collapsing and get into the weeds of these debates and say, you
01:05:58.800
know, people just turn off and tune out. It's just you don't have to have a conversation
01:06:03.020
about real things that actually matter. You still have people heckling Joe Biden. They're
01:06:07.660
heckling him on these issues. They're actually following his lead and saying, are you saying all
01:06:11.600
MAGA people are fascists or semi-fascists or whatever? It's like, well, no, you should heckle
01:06:16.500
him about the things that are actually ruining and have been ruining the American economy,
01:06:21.200
including spending massive amounts of money, which seems to be his solution to most everything.
01:06:25.920
I think you're right. It's strategic. More inflation. I think you're right. It is strategic.
01:06:31.180
That makes sense to me. You know, talk about MAGA instead of talking about inflation and gas prices
01:06:36.260
and all the rest of it. Immigration. You could go down the list. But I also think I don't know about
01:06:40.760
Joe Biden, but those around him are true believers in what he said.
01:06:44.520
Oh, for sure. There's no doubt about that. Yeah. Yeah. And we talked about like the teachers who
01:06:49.500
can't even countenance a quote, normal Republican speaking at their schools where we kicked it off
01:06:56.100
today. And another example of that is the lunatics on MSNBC. And I don't run Joy Reid soundbites every
01:07:03.820
day because, I mean, you could you could do this with her every day. But this next one is truly
01:07:10.340
insane. Like, I really think MSNBC needs to answer for what she said on her program. I guess it was
01:07:18.040
last night. I'm not sure. I don't watch her show. So it was. Yeah, it was Monday. So she decided to go
01:07:24.860
out there and talk about in the context of the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the seizure of Trump documents,
01:07:31.640
which, you know, you remember what we don't know how much of it is classified. We don't know how
01:07:36.480
much of it is top secret exactly. But we're hearing all sorts of reports in The Washington Post
01:07:40.400
and other Trump hating outlets. So who knows? We'll find out. In any event, this is the context
01:07:47.340
in which the following discussion came up. Listen to this lunatic.
01:07:51.260
We know that in 2021 that there was a rash of deaths of American spies. They were being caught.
01:08:00.260
They were being killed. This is a very real and exigent circumstance. And the CIA has admitted
01:08:06.180
to that now. And we are not saying that we know that there is some connection between the purloin
01:08:11.700
documents and that and those events. But they did happen at a time when Trump did have custody
01:08:16.880
of some really sensitive information that he shouldn't have had.
01:08:20.700
You know, both our intelligence community and our law enforcement community must be beside
01:08:25.100
themselves right now because Donald Trump absolutely has information and evidence about
01:08:32.140
how those documents that he stole and unlawfully concealed at Mar-a-Lago might have compromised
01:08:38.600
national security. The reason I state that definitively is because he knows who he showed them to,
01:08:45.600
who he let copy them, who he let take a snapshot of them, who he might have given or worse sold
01:08:53.120
the information that was in those 43 empty classified documents folders.
01:09:00.340
I wish the audience could have seen your three faces. I wish the audience could have seen all three
01:09:05.600
of you reacting to that. Oh, my God. Do you think it's connected to the person that hacked her blog
01:09:10.680
and made her be homophobic? I don't know. I'm just asking questions, Megan. I don't know.
01:09:16.320
I don't have the same team. It has to be the same team.
01:09:21.520
Yeah. It involved words on paper or at least represented in pixels. You know what it reminded
01:09:27.480
me of? That Don Lemon clip where they were talking about, was it a Malaysian flight 370?
01:09:33.440
The black hole. He's like, you know, this flight just disappeared. And some people are talking
01:09:37.400
about black holes and Bermuda triangles and lost. I mean, it's absurd. But is it absurd?
01:09:43.840
Yeah. No, it's absurd. Segment is over right there. You could just stop this. This doesn't
01:09:48.700
make any sense. He was the president for four years, privileged access to top secret information.
01:09:56.920
Selling it out of a box in his basement. It's like a swap meet. He's got bootleg DVDs. He's
01:10:04.000
got some intelligence. Look, the guy's not a billionaire. I think he's probably overstating
01:10:07.980
that, but I don't think he's selling stuff out of the back of his car in Palm Beach.
01:10:12.800
And he would be a billionaire if he were selling those kinds of secrets.
01:10:16.760
But by the way, you should fire anyone. This is a journalistic rule who hides behind the
01:10:22.920
just asking questions trope, which is the way that you say, like, I don't know how many people
01:10:28.460
died in the Holocaust. I'm just asking questions. I'm just asking the question is the bad thing
01:10:36.160
oftentimes because you are suggesting that this thing is real. She's not just saying that because
01:10:42.140
it just popped into my mind. This is a network who has told you for four and a half years, five
01:10:47.500
years, maybe six years, that Donald Trump was an active agent of Russian intelligence. Did he do
01:10:53.200
stupid things vis-a-vis Russia? Yes. Was he somebody who was on the payroll of the Russians?
01:10:58.780
Well, if you'd watched MSNBC, you would be forgiven for thinking that that was true.
01:11:04.420
Yeah, but if you've watched any of the related court proceedings at which people were under oath,
01:11:08.420
you would know that it was all bullshit. Now, can I tell you, it's even worse than we know. I mean,
01:11:13.500
we know it's bullshit what she said, but it's even worse than that because for the listening audience,
01:11:18.320
what she put on the board as her evidence of, you know, these CIA agents dying, which that is true,
01:11:25.240
was a New York Times article from October of 2021. All right. And in her graphic, she actually had the
01:11:33.080
date wrong. She had it October of 2022, which obviously hasn't happened yet. So we know it was
01:11:38.660
wrong, but the actual New York Times banner job, MSNBC banner job. So but the actual article that
01:11:44.620
she was referring to was from October 2021. And it talked about a breach of the CIA's communication
01:11:52.720
system that led to CIA agents being captured, killed or compromised and losing dozens of informants.
01:12:01.460
And guess when that happened? I mean, this is an October 2021 article talking about the fact that
01:12:08.160
it did happen and there were consequences to it. And guess when it happened? It happened between 2009
01:12:15.080
and 2013 when Barack Obama was president. OK, it didn't even happen during President Trump's presidency.
01:12:25.080
So that is what this idiot is citing as her proof that Donald Trump sold secrets out of the Mar-a-Lago
01:12:32.540
document containers. She's too stupid to be on television.
01:12:39.780
According to, by the way, I just looked this up because I remembered it, that from 2013,
01:12:44.760
when she was on the Eric Wemple from the Washington Post pointed this out that she was raising questions,
01:12:49.800
not suspicions, just questions about the Guardian, then Guardian's Glenn Greenwald in his
01:12:54.940
behavior, behavior vis-a-vis Snowden, and if he was an intelligence agent or something like that.
01:13:00.000
But she was raising questions. So she's been doing this for, you know, a good part of a decade
01:13:04.820
of anybody she disagrees with, of saying, I'm just going to raise some questions of whether or not
01:13:09.160
you are a Rosenberg-like spy and you should be executed. I mean, it is total madness. And one would
01:13:15.220
expect, I mean, one wouldn't expect from MSNBC, but any journalistic outlet saying this kind of stuff
01:13:20.300
of, you know, raising questions, but I'm not raising suspicions, is, uh, is uncalled for and
01:13:25.520
is totally, totally unforgivable. And Megan, can I raise a question?
01:13:29.180
Can I, I'll, I'll give you the floor in one second, but I just, a quick point. Michael Hayden
01:13:33.200
liked a tweet of somebody saying this, that the Trump Mar-a-Lago situation was like the Rosenbaums,
01:13:37.960
like somebody who sold secrets, nuclear secrets to the bad guys. And Michael Hayden,
01:13:42.340
both of whom were executed, by the way. Yeah. He, he liked that saying pretty much
01:13:47.520
yeah. Like, Oh yeah, sure. It's exactly like that. So go ahead, Matt.
01:13:50.700
You're saying that Michael Hayden has a veracity problem to the core. Um, no, uh, not everyone
01:13:59.060
understands Megan and, and you do, uh, I don't know how much you want to, or can talk about it,
01:14:04.820
but NBC news is a news gathering operation and it has like some quality professionals in it.
01:14:12.340
It's an advantage that MSNBC theoretically has that exceeds the advantage that other cable
01:14:18.880
networks have. I have to imagine that there's a whole department in NBC, NBC news that just pulls
01:14:25.980
out its hair every single day. Like, Oh my God. What happens? They've got to be, by the way,
01:14:31.840
to correct Rosenberg, um, the NBC sort of standards and practices group. That's what they call them.
01:14:39.460
They're legit. I mean, that is a real group of people that takes what they put out on the air
01:14:44.260
very seriously to the point where I would get very frustrated with, you know, their nitpicking
01:14:49.460
on anything. That's a script. They can't control you as the anchor in your questions. At least they
01:14:54.340
couldn't with me because unlike everyone else there, I read my own questions. I came up with my own.
01:14:59.960
I came from cable where it's like, you got to think of them yourself newsflash. You got to use
01:15:05.540
your mind and come up with it on your own. But the, the system there is the anchors just ask the
01:15:10.580
questions that the producers write down for them. And the producers have those questions screened by
01:15:14.600
standards and practices before they even get in front of the anchor. Okay. Um, it's not to say they
01:15:19.420
never ad lib, but I'm just saying that that's the approach. MSNBC is not that way. All right. So like
01:15:23.960
somehow the standards are very different over there, but it's still controlled by the same
01:15:28.640
group of people who I think are honest and legitimate and they may be biased, but they're
01:15:32.080
not looking to allow bullshit like this out on their airwaves. But I mean, look, it's going to be
01:15:38.580
up to the network president, right? Does he care? Does he care at all? He didn't give a shit about her
01:15:42.120
lies about the FBI or her blog, same guy, you know? So, and I don't mean the MSNBC, I mean the head of
01:15:47.960
NBC, like they oversee MS. So do they care about this kind of egregious misstatement of fact
01:15:53.340
citing a newspaper article that was talking about events from 09 to 13 and trying to blame that on
01:15:58.580
Trump, trying to say that that event somehow led to Trump, like it's nonsensical and it's an
01:16:04.380
embarrassment. And as we're talking about network embarrassments, I might as well pivot to this.
01:16:08.300
Um, in the news today is the fact that CNN during dark Brandon's presentation, you know,
01:16:15.180
for the star Trek Nazi situation lightened the background. Okay. I, why they did,
01:16:23.340
it remains unclear. Our executive producer, Steve Krakauer called them to ask about this.
01:16:27.180
They claimed there was a problem with the feed, but every other network had it in red. CNN had it in
01:16:34.720
pink. Watch, watch. It was red. And then you're going to see it turn. Oh, there it is. It's fuchsia.
01:16:43.860
It's hot pink now. And it's unclear about whether that really was a feed problem or somebody just
01:16:53.260
said, maybe it'll look prettier and less imposing and inappropriate if we make it fuchsia.
01:16:58.200
Did they make it into a gay rights flag? Is that what they were trying to do? Just with a press of
01:17:02.540
a button just to, you know, be inclusive. Do you remember, we've talked about this on the fifth column,
01:17:08.240
which is the greatest podcast in Christendom, semi-cover issues like this, that Newsweek,
01:17:13.440
do you remember Newsweek during the OJ trial was accused of darkening his skin?
01:17:18.560
And the cover store, and there was two covers with the same mugshot.
01:17:21.340
Was it Newsweek or Time? I'm trying to remember.
01:17:24.140
It was one of, it might've been Time that did it, but it was Time and Newsweek both had the same cover.
01:17:27.660
And, uh, one was considerably darker. And, but it was just kind of a VN that they put around.
01:17:32.560
And it was like, of course, the neo-Nazis at Time were like, let's just make it lighter.
01:17:38.520
Yeah, it was Time. Steve is, I just watched this. I just watched The People vs. OJ Simpson,
01:17:43.780
which is the only reason I had that in my head.
01:17:45.740
It's fantastic. And it includes the, everyone's favorite masturbator, Jeffrey Toobin, who I think
01:17:52.260
Time off from pleasuring himself to write an amazing book.
01:17:58.100
I feel like Louis C.K. might be my favorite masturbator. I don't know if I agree.
01:18:04.340
He's funny. He's got, like, he's at least got good moments.
01:18:07.320
I don't know about the CNN thing. At a minimum, like, they made him look like an Oompa Loompa.
01:18:13.480
Like, the contrast of his skin gets, like, very orange.
01:18:16.620
Oh, let's see it again. I didn't even look at that. Let's check that out.
01:18:23.200
All right, let's see. I was looking at the walls. I wasn't looking at him.
01:18:28.700
He looks a little more orange to me as this goes on.
01:18:32.380
Yeah, his tint changes too. I'm not sure. I guess I'll have to give them the benefit
01:18:37.200
of the doubt on this, but it's raising all sorts of, you know, just asking, just asking
01:18:46.920
I'm going to give CNN the benefit of the doubt on this. It's just a weird thing to be like,
01:18:52.820
It is all weird that it just happened with them. If it's the feed, this shouldn't have happened
01:19:00.180
Or maybe the presumption of some producer is like, this looks ridiculous. This cannot
01:19:04.960
be right. Like we have to try to tune this a little bit to see what it actually looks
01:19:09.980
like because who would decide that this was a good idea?
01:19:13.160
I wish I had that producer on the days where I've used too much bronzer or got a little bit
01:19:17.700
too much sun. I could use, hello, my producers. Hello. I could use your help.
01:19:22.000
Yes, producers. When she looks too much like Hitler, do something.
01:19:27.840
All right. Stand by. More with the fifth column right after this.
01:19:31.900
In all your busy lives, this may have slipped by you and I forgive you for that. And I really just
01:19:41.520
wanted to do you a solid and let you know that there's an exciting new show coming out
01:19:46.500
by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. And it's about gutsy women, gutsy, which they, they know because
01:19:56.740
they themselves, as you see, um, are gutsy. And in case you just need a little bit more of a
01:20:03.160
description, here's a part. I won't make you watch the whole, a part of the trailer for gutsy.
01:20:15.200
We're hitting the road to shine a light on women who inspire us to be bolder and braver.
01:20:21.140
Leadership doesn't look one way. It's a giant rainbow.
01:20:25.260
You're not going to break me down. You'll get worn out before I do.
01:20:27.360
Women who push us outside our comfort zone and make us laugh.
01:20:32.320
I'm in deep Georgia and they might have never met a Muslim.
01:20:42.860
You have a marriage that has been on public display since the beginning.
01:20:46.360
You said the gutsiest thing you ever did was stay in your marriage.
01:20:52.280
To throw someone's life away when people really do make changes.
01:21:06.420
For the listening audience at home, what we have is Chelsea Clinton boxing and having dinner.
01:21:14.900
At the beginning, I thought they were going to do that karaoke thing.
01:21:17.580
When they got in the car at that first scene, I was like, oh, shit.
01:21:20.900
Just in case you're wondering, just in case you're wondering, their only Democratic women are gutsy.
01:21:29.620
And by the way, everyone in Georgia is an Islamophobe, in case you didn't.
01:21:40.560
No, it's just like Georgia is known for being particularly friendly and multiracial.
01:21:54.840
I think the gutsiest thing that was not discussed, but kind of tangentially mentioned, was Bill Clinton cheating on his wife.
01:22:15.840
She was asked about this, Hillary, when she was promoting her show on CBS This Morning by Nora O'Donnell, about that comment about Bill and his affair.
01:22:25.740
And, I mean, at least the one affair, I should say.
01:22:29.060
I guess I was surprised that you said that staying in your marriage was gutsier than running for president.
01:22:35.220
Well, it was, in terms of my private life, it was really hard.
01:22:41.960
And as you know, everybody had an opinion about it.
01:22:44.280
People who I'd never met had very strong opinions about it.
01:22:47.740
And it took a lot of, honestly, prayer and thoughtfulness and talking to people I totally trusted to really think through.
01:23:25.600
Like, you know, he was the president having sex with a 20-odd-year-old intern.
01:23:31.720
And the bravery of staying with him is not about Monica Lewinsky.
01:23:35.940
It's during the campaign he got caught having sex with Jennifer Flowers.
01:23:45.780
And we all know they had some weird political professional relationship that they've housed in a marriage.
01:23:57.760
The only risk she had to assess was, is this going to hurt my husband's political chances if I leave him?
01:24:04.400
I have zero belief that they're in a true, loving marriage.
01:24:27.620
Meghan Markle, I believe, Spotify and Netflix, too.
01:24:33.320
So, all of these companies are just giving enormous advances to insufferable politicians and Meghan Markle, who is not a politician, but just insufferable.
01:24:44.840
Like, it is incredible that, like, everyone gets upset about Joe Rogan.
01:24:48.200
It's like, be a shitty politician and, you know, they'll give you $50 million to make shows that nobody wants to watch.
01:24:53.680
Why is it like getting the daughter in there, too?
01:24:56.940
It's like, why would I listen to Chelsea Clinton about anything?
01:25:00.680
What does she know about anything other than being born into this enormous privileged family, having all sorts of buckets of money thrown at her and becoming a national figure for nothing she's done?
01:25:11.980
Who gives a shit what she thinks about gutsy anybody?
01:25:14.700
Well, it's gutsy to have the presumption that anyone would care about your privileged perspective in a television show like this.
01:25:29.940
Because she's, like, on TV and she's like, oh, my God, these cupcakes are delicious.
01:25:36.480
She's not like, here's the thing about black women.
01:25:46.320
This time, Chelsea actually has to produce something.
01:25:49.080
Didn't she get paid, like, $240,000 a year by NBC News to produce, what, six somethings that no one ever watched or listened to?
01:26:06.920
I have learned from your podcast that you do have musings on somebody who is a very famous figure, not named Chelsea Clinton, but Michael Jackson.
01:26:17.320
And I'll never listen to the song Thriller the same way.
01:26:33.620
Oh, see, everybody home is like, yeah, we're in the fall.
01:26:55.460
Camille's like, no, you've been mishearing, misunderstanding.
01:27:09.420
And in those particular lyrics, Michael Jackson is clearly singing about his genitals.
01:27:25.520
I mean, they talk like the funk of 40,000 years.
01:27:36.340
You're a little afraid because you're not sure if you can.
01:27:46.380
We have to listen to it one more time now, understanding.
01:28:04.340
You see a sight that almost stopped your heart.
01:28:18.960
You know, I was sitting in an airport in New Orleans.
01:28:21.440
I was actually just leaving a public radio conference.
01:28:24.460
Where I did a debate on whether or not public radio was still relevant.
01:28:34.540
And I think it was, there was a song from Thriller that came on.
01:28:39.300
And I can't remember which one it was right now.
01:28:44.540
But it brought, like, it was clear that everyone in the airport was a little more joyous in that moment.
01:28:49.660
And I thought to myself, one, Thriller's an amazing album.
01:28:54.620
And three, I started thinking about Thriller because I was, like, listening to the album again.
01:28:59.160
And it just dawned on me that this was Michael Jackson's sexual healing.
01:29:11.140
Also, for, it does not appear that he actually molested those two guys in that movie.
01:29:21.360
I know Camille and I have talked about the, was it HBO movie?
01:29:32.480
I don't know what happened in the rest of Michael's career, but I've looked enough at those two guys and their story that I do not believe them.
01:29:39.420
But I will say, honestly, that I would be more inclined to believe them if Thriller was a really shitty album, but it's not.
01:29:45.700
So, I am more inclined to be like, I don't know.
01:29:48.860
And I did want to raise a social justice issue, or just a justice issue, they're all the same thing, that I mentioned on the show.
01:29:57.160
Eddie Van Halen never got paid a nickel for his guitar solo on Beat It, and that is a tragedy.
01:30:12.940
Did you literally just say that you didn't know Eddie Van Halen played guitar?
01:30:24.260
That's the best part of the song, and he didn't get paid for it.
01:30:26.800
Rest in peace, Michael Jackson and Eddie Van Halen.
01:30:33.840
He was just a nice guy, and Quincy Jones asked him to come to the studio, and he was like, all right, came down, played the solo in one take, then left.
01:30:39.940
And it was the biggest song on the planet for 10 years and forgot to get paid.
01:30:45.640
Your point about lyrics matter and the singer, only the singer, that reminds me of this comedian who I saw once at, I don't remember where, but he did this bit about how he was playing his guitar during his act.
01:30:55.140
And he was saying, he was very good, but he was like, I'll never make it as a musician because the lyrics matter.
01:31:00.500
And lyrics matter, and I can't come up with any good lyrics.
01:31:02.520
And this has been proven to me time and time again.
01:31:04.020
And he's like, you know, I thought I was on my way up and I was going to get more gigs and money was starting to come in.
01:31:08.220
And then I realized, you know, I'll never be as great as like, are you going to Scarborough Fair?
01:31:29.760
Well, we're going to have a debate on the Michael Jackson case very soon because-
01:31:37.280
I like to go to the place that hurts in case you guys weren't aware.
01:31:41.860
And I really think HBO ought to be ashamed of itself for putting that on as a documentary and using Oprah once again with her, you know, sort of seal of approval to bless it without any challenging POVs.
01:31:54.020
They should have had somebody come on at the end to say, here's a problem with what you said.
01:31:58.780
A lawyer for the Jackson estate, maybe somebody to push back on the problems in that documentary.
01:32:07.040
And I seem to remember one of the kids like was wanted to be a dancer in like his later shows and then was like rejected.
01:32:17.400
You know, basic things that, as you know, Megan, in a court of law, a defense attorney would bring up and you would want to put into documentary to like, you know, at least be fair to the guy.
01:32:28.680
It's so much more like that's the least of the sins of of that, quote, movie and quote documentary.
01:32:34.720
And what they did was like here or there, they throw in like one fact that wasn't good for them.
01:32:38.520
But they left out the huge, giant credibility problems that I believe those guys had.
01:32:43.560
So we'll get into that at some point in the not too distant future.
01:32:49.240
We had this debate last week just just with Michael Knowles.
01:32:54.320
My friends at Sirius are very anti pumpkin spice latte.
01:33:26.220
I just sit in my Ugg boots drinking pumpkin spice lattes and reading O Magazine.
01:33:36.780
Watching Bravo weeping and wondering what's happened to the real housewives.
01:33:41.520
Who I saw one of them the other day in a yogurt store.
01:33:56.440
Pumpkin spice latte is for communists and fascists.
01:33:59.360
I'm happy that American free market capitalism has granted us enough choice to throw up all
01:34:05.380
kinds of horrible things that I've never used in any way, shape, or form.
01:34:16.780
I'm going to drink it right here live in the air.
01:34:20.600
Maybe all four of us can do it together at the same time and see if it changes our opinions.
01:34:30.240
As always, Matt, Michael, Camille, to be continued.
01:34:33.760
Go subscribe to them at wethefifth.substack.com.
01:34:43.400
Download the show in the meantime on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.