The Megyn Kelly Show - April 11, 2023


Bud Light Learns "Go Woke Go Broke," and Famous Female Athletes Go Anti-Woman, with Emily Jashinsky and Eliana Johnson | Ep. 526


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 35 minutes

Words per Minute

176.73381

Word Count

16,865

Sentence Count

1,229

Misogynist Sentences

74

Hate Speech Sentences

47


Summary

Bud Light is in the midst of a bloodbath. We dig into the story, and the truth is even crazier than what you may have seen. Plus, the drama inside the Tennessee Statehouse continues with one representative who was expelled already being sworn back in, and we take a little dive into his past.


Transcript

00:00:00.520 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:11.940 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Tuesday.
00:00:16.020 Have you seen the video of the Bud Light marketing exec talking about how she wants to change the perception of the company?
00:00:23.620 Heck of a job, Brownie. Great job. You nailed it.
00:00:27.040 We dug into the story here on our team, and the truth is even crazier than what you may have seen.
00:00:33.660 We'll show it to you. Plus, the drama inside the Tennessee Statehouse continues with one representative who was expelled already being sworn back in.
00:00:43.480 And we took a little dive into his past and wait until you see what we found.
00:00:50.320 You're going to love this. So much happening, so today is the perfect day for the EJs.
00:00:54.440 Emily Jaschinski is culture editor at The Federalist and host of The Federalist Radio Hour.
00:00:59.420 And Eliana Johnson is editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon and co-host of the podcast Ink Stained Wretches.
00:01:08.420 EJs, great to have you here.
00:01:10.560 Good to be here.
00:01:11.820 Good to be here.
00:01:12.700 I don't even know where I want to start, but I guess I'll just take them in that order.
00:01:15.320 So Bud Light is in the midst of a bloodbath.
00:01:19.000 It's a bloodbath for Bud Light in the wake of its ridiculous marketing person's decision to expand the brand by catering to a segment of the population that is less than 0.01%.
00:01:30.740 They've completely abandoned their actual core base of buyers.
00:01:36.120 And Fox Business has an article posted right now talking about they went out and spoke to various distributors, various bars, various restaurants, and so on.
00:01:46.320 Consumers Nationwide revolted is their headline after this bloodbath against the nation's top-selling beer brand after it stepped recklessly into the culture wars last week with its new spokesperson, TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney.
00:01:59.000 For those not paying attention, this is what happened.
00:02:01.840 This new Bud Light marketing executive, this woke, young Harvard grad, decided to completely change the face of Bud Light by creating Bud Light cans to celebrate trans activist Dylan Mulvaney, who's somehow managed to become the face of womanhood, even though Dylan has a penis.
00:02:22.160 They talked to bar owners and beer industry experts talking about how, and just giving you some examples.
00:02:29.000 Filters Bar was one of them in not far from, yeah, it's in Missouri.
00:02:34.660 And Bud Light, Anheuser-Busch is headquartered in St. Louis.
00:02:39.260 Catastrophic decrease in sales.
00:02:41.700 30% in bottle products down over the past week.
00:02:45.380 Drought beer plummeting 50%.
00:02:48.160 Similar stories around the country.
00:02:50.880 Bud Light normally outsells rival products Miller Lite and Coors Lite 25 to 1 at the Braintree Brewhouse in Massachusetts.
00:02:55.780 Not this week.
00:02:57.320 80% of Bud Light drinkers ordered something else.
00:03:00.380 The owner says the 20% who did order Bud Light were not on social media and hadn't heard about the new transgender pitch person.
00:03:07.640 They didn't order it again after they found out.
00:03:10.880 One pub in Hell's Kitchen, a New York City neighborhood known for its large and vocal gay community, reported Bud Light draft sales dropped 58% this week.
00:03:18.480 Bud Light bottle sales were down 70%.
00:03:19.780 Down in Texas, where Bud Light has sponsored a large weekly dart league with 100 plus players each Thursday night, the bar, which typically sells three kegs of Bud Light at the event, sold a total of four bottles this week.
00:03:35.440 Four.
00:03:36.200 Okay?
00:03:36.440 And I could go on.
00:03:37.060 I mean, they continue going across from person to person.
00:03:40.320 So before I play the pitch person on this podcast talking about her brilliant plan, I feel this is a really empowering moment, Emily.
00:03:47.760 I feel like, great!
00:03:50.040 You know, finally the go broke thing is working.
00:03:54.480 And the question is whether they will learn Bud Light and other brands.
00:03:57.880 And it depends on their strategy, because sometimes their strategy is they know there is a slice of the population that loves this stuff.
00:04:09.240 You saw this with Nike and Colin Kaepernick.
00:04:11.380 There's a huge swath of the country that absolutely despises what Nike did with Colin Kaepernick.
00:04:16.680 But because there's a small group of people that they could create a very loyal fan base out of, the Colin Kaepernick stuff kind of worked for them.
00:04:24.540 They actually saw sales increase as part of that.
00:04:27.180 Now, they have different fan bases, of course, than Bud Light.
00:04:30.460 It's a really broad company, and Bud Light is too.
00:04:33.660 But for the most part, Bud Light drinkers are probably more similar than the Nike demographic.
00:04:40.620 And so is Bud Light's strategy to spend this much so that it gets favorable ratings on DEI ESG scores, that it'll allow it to get better investments?
00:04:52.760 Do they even care if they take a hit in business over a month?
00:04:57.840 Of course, they should care, and the people who invest in them should absolutely care.
00:05:02.480 But at this point, do executives see themselves as people who can sacrifice a tiny bit for the activism that allows themselves to show their faces at the Manhattan cocktail party circuit?
00:05:12.840 That's actually an open question, because we've seen companies in the past spend a ton of money just to do DEI PR pushes.
00:05:20.440 They might not even believe in any of it, but that's the strategy.
00:05:24.060 It's like advertising, and it's this sort of personal penance.
00:05:28.320 It's this personal thing that they're paying to feel good and to feel like they're virtue signaling, and they've bought themselves that virtue signal.
00:05:37.180 So I wonder how much the executives at Bud Light care about these really stark numbers that you just outlined.
00:05:42.640 I hope they do.
00:05:43.760 People who are invested in them should help them.
00:05:44.800 This is not going to be like the Nike.
00:05:46.380 I don't think, Eliana.
00:05:48.460 Bud Light doesn't know who its audience is.
00:05:50.900 They don't know who their consumers are.
00:05:53.000 These guys at the NFL football games who are ordering Bud Light en masse as they watch the Sunday game, the guys who are playing darts down in Texas, you've seen the videos online.
00:06:03.620 They're renting out bulldozers and excavators to roll over huge cases of Bud Light that people are throwing out.
00:06:13.980 Nike, yes.
00:06:15.060 Nike, it's a trickier situation because Nike has a large fan base, a large athletic fan base, a lot of black people.
00:06:23.000 And that that resonance that that message from Colin Kaepernick may have resonated with them.
00:06:28.060 OK, so I can see how that they took a bet that that one paid off.
00:06:31.220 There is not a huge base drinking Bud Light that wants to see Dylan Mulvaney celebrated.
00:06:37.180 It's a shoot, a shot and a miss.
00:06:40.080 I'm with you on that, Megan.
00:06:41.660 I the closest analogy I could come up with is when a primary campaign ends and the candidate needs to pivot to the general.
00:06:50.320 If you listen to the Bud Light marketing director talk, she essentially said we need to broaden the reach and the appeal of this brand beyond our core users.
00:07:02.760 Well, any political candidate would know you could pivot to the center, but you can't lose the primary voters who backed you.
00:07:10.780 You got to you got to keep your base if you want to pivot.
00:07:14.780 Otherwise, the pivot is pointless and you come out behind.
00:07:17.880 You're going to lose that election.
00:07:19.020 And I think the same is true here.
00:07:20.360 You can pivot to the to the transgenders.
00:07:24.340 You're going to lose your core base who are not a huge fan of of that sort of thing.
00:07:30.260 Right.
00:07:30.480 Exactly right.
00:07:31.320 Especially right now.
00:07:32.260 And especially with this nasty woman's messaging about how shitty Bud Light's existing base of customers is.
00:07:38.600 She doesn't like the people who buy their beer.
00:07:41.180 She shouldn't work for Bud Light.
00:07:42.580 She should take her story walking and go work for a woke corporation instead of ruining the one that employs her.
00:07:49.000 There was another guy who was the chief marketing executive there for 43 years who got it.
00:07:53.940 He understood who the customer base is.
00:07:55.640 Then for some reason, he either retired or quit or got fired.
00:07:58.340 I don't know what happened to him.
00:07:59.200 But they brought in this woman, Alyssa Heinerscheid, who is now the VP of marketing, who said they really needed to update their fratty and out of touch branding with inclusivity.
00:08:12.980 Here she was three days before the Dylan Mulvaney thing launched, before anybody had seen it.
00:08:18.880 And she still thought it was safe for her to do podcasts and say what she really thought.
00:08:25.100 But she apparently didn't see the shitstorm that was about to rain down on her and her brand thanks to her stupid marketing campaign.
00:08:32.780 Listen to her.
00:08:34.580 So I had this super clear mandate.
00:08:36.540 It's like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand.
00:08:41.060 And what I brought to that was a belief in, okay, what does evolve and elevate mean?
00:08:49.040 It means inclusivity.
00:08:50.440 You've got to see people who reflect you in the work.
00:08:53.800 And we had this hangover.
00:08:55.480 I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out of touch humor.
00:09:03.720 And it was really important that we had another approach.
00:09:09.160 So.
00:09:11.180 So she went this way and went on to say it's essential that the brand attract more female and younger drinkers.
00:09:20.480 Otherwise, there will be no future for Bud Light.
00:09:22.340 Because this, this, Eliana, is what she thinks women will support.
00:09:27.840 That women want a fake pretend woman who mocks us at every video Dylan Mulvaney releases to be the face of our beer.
00:09:38.520 That's that's her understanding of what women want.
00:09:41.840 There is something, I think, really offensive about saying that this transgender person, Dylan Mulvaney, who is an adult man, is a spokesperson for women, will appeal to women.
00:09:58.600 And, you know, and I think, I do think, like, there, there is a social stigma against saying that because you're accused of transphobia.
00:10:09.160 But it is wrong for adult men to take the place of speaking on behalf of and marketing to women, if that is the point.
00:10:17.960 Mm hmm.
00:10:18.520 No, it's absurd.
00:10:19.540 I don't care how much of a social stigma there is.
00:10:22.200 That's a man.
00:10:22.980 We're looking at a man on camera right there.
00:10:24.560 That is a man, a man, a man.
00:10:26.700 At best, it's a trans woman.
00:10:29.560 Dylan Mulvaney isn't a woman and will never be a woman.
00:10:32.000 And I don't care how many surgeries Dylan has.
00:10:34.380 There's only one way to become a woman, and that is you're born into it.
00:10:38.520 And the absurdity of not just Bud Light, Emily, but oil of of Olay is now using Dylan Mulvaney as.
00:10:46.320 So what if I if I put oil of Olay on my skin, I'm going to get man hair.
00:10:50.560 Am I going to grow a beard like Dylan clearly has in the close up shots?
00:10:53.740 Because oil of Olay, you can take your story walking.
00:10:56.740 I don't want your brand.
00:10:57.680 You know what?
00:10:58.240 I love my non facial hairy face, which doesn't have any stubble because I'm a woman.
00:11:05.920 You know, I don't want to pivot to Tampax, but I feel as though I must.
00:11:10.700 Because Dylan Mulvaney is also hawking Tampax at this point, which you could not write.
00:11:16.260 I mean, you can't make satire that ridiculous.
00:11:19.100 And so, yeah, I mean, it's completely offensive.
00:11:21.740 Apart from sounding a little bit like I imagine Eliana sounded when she took over the free beacon, that marketing director is hilarious because it's some real millennial bullshit.
00:11:31.540 Like they don't realize how that's going to age.
00:11:34.680 Gen Z is already way more heterodox on this question of trans identity because they've seen a lot of their friends suffer from it.
00:11:40.940 This is like the caricature of a millennial trying to check or trying to connect with young people like the hello fellow kids thing.
00:11:47.660 And the other part of this I wanted to mention is that when you have people out there, you know, like Kid Rock shooting the Bud Light cans, everything like this, they're not necessarily always offended because they're just completely, you know, conservative Republicans, although that's absolutely the case.
00:12:02.700 It's the signal that Bud Light doesn't give a damn about them.
00:12:06.660 It's like CMT last week with the drag performance after the shooting in Nashville.
00:12:11.800 It's a signal that we think you're outdated.
00:12:15.340 We think you're fratty and gross and backwards.
00:12:17.880 And we're trying to move away from that because we don't have respect for you.
00:12:21.660 So even if in some cases it's not like that their politics might differ, you know, somebody who decides not to order Bud Light, it's that they feel like they're, you know, getting like something, a slap in the face to the way that we're there from, how they grew up and the way that people they love think.
00:12:37.520 So it's not even just that like one narrow political issue.
00:12:41.040 It's just this cultural sign that you don't like the people who buy your product.
00:12:46.040 It's so true.
00:12:47.420 And she, this is obviously some woke activist, this woman.
00:12:51.760 She's Harvard Wharton School grad, 39 years old.
00:12:56.600 Her LinkedIn profile proudly states she is the first female to lead the largest beer brand in the industry.
00:13:01.700 And soon it's going to state to drive it out of business.
00:13:04.720 I mean, she's going to be fired.
00:13:06.140 I predict right now this woman will be fired.
00:13:08.400 She'll be relieved of her duty.
00:13:09.360 And they'll, and they'll make a thing out of it, right?
00:13:11.840 Because they need, Bud Light needs people to know that she was, she went rogue and that they, they were not.
00:13:17.900 A martyr for her cause, Megan.
00:13:19.660 Great.
00:13:20.340 Good for her.
00:13:21.140 She can go run for the legislature down in Tennessee.
00:13:23.040 Um, so she went on in this interview to talk about how she thought Bud Light's former marketing strategy was dated and male focused.
00:13:33.120 And she was very proud of one of the Superbowl ads that she put together.
00:13:38.240 It featured, uh, Miles Teller who was in Top Gun Maverick and it featured Miles and his wife, whose name I think is Kaylee.
00:13:46.960 Keely, we'll listen to it.
00:13:48.800 Kelly.
00:13:49.260 Okay.
00:13:49.580 Kelly, but it's spelled weird anyway.
00:13:51.580 So the ad is all about Miles Teller.
00:13:53.900 It's about Miles Teller.
00:13:55.100 It features his wife a bit, but listen to her describing the ad.
00:13:58.600 Alyssa Heinerscheid.
00:14:02.240 I cast an incredible female choreographer who just brought incredibly positive, amazing energy to the spot.
00:14:09.960 We cast Miles Teller and his wife, Kelly Teller.
00:14:12.440 But it was really crucial to me that if you see that spot, Kelly is, Kelly is the heartbeat of that spot.
00:14:20.900 You're seeing this whole experience through Kelly.
00:14:24.060 She's the beating heart.
00:14:25.600 She, I would sort of argue, is sort of what propels you through that experience.
00:14:29.040 And that was intentional.
00:14:32.880 My God.
00:14:34.740 I'm so sick of this nonsense, aren't you?
00:14:37.340 See, the woman, the ad is about the actual one who's famous.
00:14:40.620 But it was through the eyes and the heart of the woman.
00:14:44.060 And it was choreographed by a woman.
00:14:46.600 That is, to my credit, that's really what she's saying, Eliana, right?
00:14:51.860 Like, I, it's sort of like the Disney executive.
00:14:54.960 I sneak my secret woke agenda in wherever I can.
00:15:00.220 There are a lot of layers here.
00:15:01.860 First of all, I love the rainbow children's art over, it's like coming out of her head in the image.
00:15:07.420 And it's perfect.
00:15:08.840 But then, even before you said she was Harvard and Wharton educated, you know, my thought was, this is clearly a woman who is a product of elite institutions on the East Coast.
00:15:19.340 She is part of the crowd that was certain Elizabeth Warren would be the Democratic Party's nominee in 2020, who uses, and who uses terms like Latin X, and thinks that the rest of the country thinks and talks the way they do.
00:15:34.280 And if they don't, they're backwards people.
00:15:36.080 And who doesn't have the self-awareness to realize they live in an elite bubble and need to check their biases.
00:15:43.020 Look, I'm part of that same kind of elite.
00:15:45.800 You know, I live on the East Coast.
00:15:47.640 I'm a product of the same institutions.
00:15:49.380 I realize I may not have my finger on the pulse of, you know, rural America.
00:15:53.560 I think a little self-awareness would have taken this woman a long way.
00:15:59.260 It's not that hard.
00:16:00.340 You know, if you bother to care, you know, if you read certain publications, if you listen to certain reporters on this show, we take callers.
00:16:08.220 You know, it's like they don't have their finger on the pulse because they don't care, Eliana.
00:16:13.000 You care.
00:16:14.020 And while you may not be living in rural America, I've listened to you long enough and read you long enough to know you do care.
00:16:19.280 You make an effort to learn.
00:16:20.720 They don't because they think these people are losers.
00:16:23.560 They think they're gross.
00:16:24.840 She's embarrassed that Bud Light is the drink of choice for Kid Rock supporters.
00:16:30.240 She's grossed out.
00:16:31.140 She wants it to be the people who are at Harvard and Wharton who are drinking that product.
00:16:35.280 And she's going to change that single-handedly right before she gets her ass fired, which is going to happen again.
00:16:40.680 She's going to have to pry those top-shelf liquor martinis out of their cold, dead hand.
00:16:47.400 It's so true.
00:16:49.600 Here's the thing.
00:16:50.340 You mentioned, Emily, the score, like the DEI scores that these companies.
00:16:55.660 Because why?
00:16:56.120 Why is Oil of Olay and Bud Light and Nike sponsoring Dylan Mulvaney now for fucking sports bras, okay?
00:17:05.480 I'm sorry.
00:17:07.160 Dylan doesn't have breasts.
00:17:09.040 Dylan's been taking some sort of a hormone that has turned Dylan into some, I don't know what's happening there, but those are not breasts.
00:17:16.460 And Dylan doesn't need any sort of a bra, never mind a sports bra.
00:17:20.460 The three ladies on this program right now have six boobs between us.
00:17:25.140 And we actually know what it's like to wear a bra.
00:17:27.300 And no one would be inspired to buy one based on non-breasted Dylan Mulvaney prancing around in a Nike sports bra.
00:17:34.820 By the way, Dylan also appears to have an eating disorder.
00:17:37.000 I'm just going to say it.
00:17:37.980 But Dylan is about 40 pounds soaking wet.
00:17:40.240 So this should not be anybody's spokesperson for anything.
00:17:42.220 If there were a woman who looked like that, she couldn't get an endorsement because they'd say she clearly is unwell.
00:17:46.420 Okay, so why are they doing this?
00:17:49.520 You touched on it, Emily, that they get these scores.
00:17:54.440 They get these sort of, they're CEI or DEI scores, Corporate Equality Index.
00:18:00.980 This is from a New York Post report.
00:18:02.600 A lesser known part of the burgeoning ESG score system, environmental, social, and corporate governance is ESG.
00:18:10.160 And we already knew that a lot of these big investment firms, BlackRock and so on, will look at your ESG score as a company before deciding whether to invest in you.
00:18:19.300 But this is something a little different.
00:18:21.600 It's subsumed inside that movement.
00:18:24.840 And it's being pushed by the country's top investment firms.
00:18:28.840 The scores are handed out.
00:18:29.940 Here's the problem.
00:18:30.860 How do you get a good ESG score or a good CEI, Corporate Equality Index score?
00:18:35.260 You have to please the human rights campaign.
00:18:39.160 The human rights campaign, that's the organization that was headed by Alfonso David, who was secretly advising Andrew Cuomo on how to bury all the women who were accusing him, right?
00:18:52.400 It's supposed to be like, yay, pro-gay and pro-LGBTQ.
00:18:57.120 And secretly this guy was like, screw those women, let's bury them.
00:19:00.800 All right, so he was forced out.
00:19:02.060 But this is a hard left organization, Emily.
00:19:04.380 And so no wonder if you need to get their approval, of course you're going to use Dylan Mulvaney and the like.
00:19:12.000 It's this amazing alliance that's developed over the last decade, I would say, between the far left sort of activist class and cultural activist class, not economic activist class, but cultural activist class and big business.
00:19:26.420 It's incredible to see their marriage come to fruition, and that's exactly what this is when you have firms like BlackRock, and not just BlackRock, but they will actually score companies.
00:19:36.520 You can see it on the human rights campaign website.
00:19:39.560 They score these companies, and then that's used for investors to determine where they're steering capital.
00:19:45.420 And this is like incredibly important because it's a great glimpse into how divorced a lot of the decisions these big, big companies make, especially investment firms make.
00:19:57.560 They're not divorced.
00:19:58.860 They're not in touch with the market.
00:20:00.500 They're completely divorced from market forces.
00:20:02.480 This is not free market capitalism.
00:20:04.520 This is something completely perverted and distorted that prioritizes the opinions of this elite group of investors, D.C. activists, politicians.
00:20:17.420 And you have really good luck doing something about this.
00:20:20.100 I mean, some people are trying and you have Vivek Ramaswamy is now running for president out there, like trying to blow the horn and wave the red flag and say this is happening.
00:20:28.020 But good luck.
00:20:29.200 It's not like you can just stop going to that store that you really like going to in your small town because they did something you don't like.
00:20:37.060 It's not a boycott that's as easy and connected as that.
00:20:40.180 It's completely a distorted market system that prioritizes the ideology of people who are completely out of touch and who have this binary where you are either fully culturally progressive or you are necessarily a bigot.
00:20:53.200 We have heard this out of the mouth of the president of the United States, who's talked about Jim Crow 2.0 and a Georgia voting law that's not even as strict as his own states and Delaware's.
00:21:02.640 We've heard him talk about Jim Eagle and all of that stuff.
00:21:05.580 If you are not fully on board with their cause, you are a bigot.
00:21:08.840 You will be penalized and you will be penalized even if you don't proactively support them.
00:21:13.580 Maybe you just quietly support them.
00:21:15.100 No, it has to be proactive.
00:21:17.320 Otherwise, you will be penalized.
00:21:18.800 So it's just extortion that has completely shifted the incentive system in the market and in society.
00:21:26.660 It's like I don't get it because you're right.
00:21:29.360 You can't avoid the companies that take the knee to this human rights campaign and scoring system.
00:21:33.860 They include the top scores go to in the following order.
00:21:36.920 Number one, Walmart, Amazon, Exxon, Apple, CVS.
00:21:41.320 I mean, as much as I'd love to tell you, I'm going to throw out my iPhone and not get my scripts filled at CVS anymore.
00:21:45.440 I'm not doing that.
00:21:46.280 I'm not stopping using Amazon.
00:21:49.240 So, yeah, we're already doing business with those who have been captured by this.
00:21:53.500 And I don't totally understand how it works because does Walmart really need the money of BlackRock at this point?
00:22:02.320 They're making their own money.
00:22:04.260 I don't get why they'd be on the knee for one of these scores in the Corporate Equality Index.
00:22:10.580 The woman who's now running it after they bounced out Alfonso is named Kelly Robinson.
00:22:18.420 She worked as a political organizer, Eliana, for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.
00:22:23.200 She's the one who decides whether a corporation gets a thumbs up or down.
00:22:25.880 Gee, I wonder how that's going to go.
00:22:28.400 She's a black woman who identifies as queer.
00:22:30.540 She said this week she hopes to lead a broad intersectional coalition for change.
00:22:37.820 I am a community organizer through and through.
00:22:41.640 And I kind of look at the fight that's in front of me, I guess, through that lens.
00:22:46.180 Some of the tweets she sent out lately, discriminating against transgender athletes is wrong and a violation of federal law.
00:22:56.280 Trans women are women.
00:22:58.680 That's it.
00:22:59.800 That's the tweet.
00:23:01.300 No, Ms. Robinson, they're not.
00:23:03.840 Sorry.
00:23:04.820 I mean, I I know I'm being vulgar today, but this this whole topic is bringing it up like trans women really are chicks with dicks.
00:23:12.420 It's true.
00:23:13.260 So it's a short, catchy catchphrase, but it's really what's happening.
00:23:17.900 They're not women.
00:23:19.300 They're fake women.
00:23:20.260 They're biological men masquerading as women.
00:23:22.060 And most of them we would get along with and we'd be kind to and we use their pronouns.
00:23:26.300 But this activist activist class must be defeated and shamed.
00:23:31.820 Those I will fight all day long.
00:23:33.720 And she's one of them.
00:23:35.040 She's one of the people out there who's now influencing these massive corporations, Eliana, and changing the face of the brands.
00:23:43.260 You know, I read the New York Post report with great interest, Megan, and I did think that the missing piece in that report was some kind of reporting indicating how closely these companies watch this index and pay attention to them.
00:23:57.620 And then how they change their actions in order to game it, because there is a chicken and egg question for me in this.
00:24:04.960 Is Bud Light doing what it did here and are other companies doing these things because they're staffed like people like the marketing executive from Harvard and Wharton?
00:24:15.300 Or are they doing it from outside incentives?
00:24:18.240 Or are they, in fact, hiring the people from Harvard and Wharton to game this index?
00:24:22.660 I still think there's a lot we don't know about the causal mechanism here.
00:24:26.520 But part of me does think that the people at the top echelons of corporate America think this way anyway.
00:24:33.980 They don't need to be beaten with a stick or have some, you know, outside incentive like this index put on them to behave this way and to lecture others in this way and to try to change their companies.
00:24:46.300 And also they're beholden. We've seen a million times over and over again.
00:24:50.400 They're beholden to the 22, 23 and 24 year olds who fill their ranks from Ivy League schools on the East Coast and from the best schools on the West Coast and who come in demanding this stuff or they face an uprising.
00:25:03.480 So I do think we don't quite know the causal mechanism here.
00:25:07.300 The whole thing. Right. Exactly.
00:25:08.600 I mean, all I know from the post report on those on those companies, they say the 20th anniversary edition of the CEI Corporate Equality Index now includes over twelve hundred participants and more than eight hundred top scorers.
00:25:21.380 And then they go on to list that they say this means employers at over twelve hundred companies agreed to have their policies and benefits analyzed by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
00:25:29.900 And that includes those five that I just listed.
00:25:33.420 Now, this could be and probably is if it's been going on for 20 years, something that began with, are you hiring gay people?
00:25:40.440 Are you providing, you know, spousal or partner benefits for people who are in a gay relationship or marriage or committed relationship, whatever?
00:25:47.740 That's I can understand that this is morphed into something very, very different.
00:25:53.580 And the Bud Light partnership with Dylan shows it right shows just how far it's swung.
00:26:00.360 We are not yet at the point where America's behind that.
00:26:04.640 Two thirds of the American people do not agree with this Kelly Robinson that trans girls should be allowed to play trans sports.
00:26:15.160 The majority of Americans are against that.
00:26:17.900 And even of the, you know, percentage that say they're in favor, I'd love to know what they would actually do if it were their daughter.
00:26:24.680 Right. I mean, it's like one thing when you tell the pollster it's something else when it's actually your kid.
00:26:28.540 So I don't know, but it's a real problem.
00:26:30.640 And I think the Bud Light moment is going to be an important one because that in particular, they misjudged the fan base that you got Kid Rocks fans out there.
00:26:38.740 They're not going to be quiet.
00:26:40.240 You know, Travis Tritt, he got rid of all the Bud Light on his tour.
00:26:44.080 He said he knows a lot of other country Western stars, country music stars who are doing the same, who are just not being public about it.
00:26:50.380 But it may not be the same as Oil of Olay because most women who use Oil of Olay are not on Twitter all day or TikTok or even aware of what the hell the brand is doing with Dylan.
00:27:00.800 By the way, is TikTok's audience really like those women?
00:27:04.480 You know, is it aren't they more like with the I don't know, the bum bum cream founder?
00:27:08.820 I'm not sure.
00:27:09.840 I'm not exactly sure they're using.
00:27:11.860 Anyway, it leads me to my next question, which is speaking of the TikTok influencers.
00:27:15.360 Emily, now this is apparently Joe Biden's re-election plan.
00:27:19.120 We are being told that the White House is trying to curry favor with this group of influencers.
00:27:25.140 They're teaming up with TikTok influencers to help tout Biden's record on social media, that his digital strategy is an army of influencers is the way Axios says it, because he needs to sort of connect with young people.
00:27:41.500 It doesn't seem entirely stupid to me because his numbers with young people are great.
00:27:49.980 He definitely does better than most Republicans with young people.
00:27:55.300 And it's just like when you look at these the lists of some of these influencers in the Axios report, just deeply, deeply unserious political commentary.
00:28:04.100 One of them is like a current NYU student.
00:28:05.880 And I watched one of the videos was like unbelievably dumb.
00:28:09.900 But at the same time, you can say there's a there's a case to be made that Republicans, conservatives are just completely behind the curve on this and should have their own influencer army of people going out to, you know, say, vote Trump or whatever it is, making dumb videos to get people to vote for Trump.
00:28:28.420 Because maybe there's an argument that works with people on TikTok, maybe there's an argument that you can, like, inject yourself into the discourse more easily if you use TikTok.
00:28:36.340 I don't think anybody should be using TikTok, period, but that's another conversation.
00:28:40.300 So I actually see maybe there's an argument that they're just being smart.
00:28:44.420 And there's they're they're also talking about bringing influencers in for potential daily White House briefings, which I don't think that's super smart, but maybe conservatives should be doing something similar.
00:28:57.680 And Joe Biden just gets it.
00:28:59.240 But at the same time, when I watch these examples, they're so cringy.
00:29:03.180 I don't know if they're actually going to work.
00:29:05.340 The thing is, Eliana, I say they're great.
00:29:07.860 They're not great.
00:29:08.340 I mean, the young people want Joe Biden replaced.
00:29:10.580 If you ask them who they want to be, the Democratic nominee, they say someone else, someone other than Joe Biden.
00:29:15.320 But when it comes to the issues, they support him way more than they support the Republican Party.
00:29:21.260 Abortion's been a huge motivator for the young vote.
00:29:24.020 These social issues, you know, social and cultural issues like we're discussing, young people tend to lean more left.
00:29:30.900 There was just a poll out over the weekend that showed that that was one of the areas in which liberals were beating.
00:29:35.280 And conservatives, Democrats were beating Republicans by some three points.
00:29:38.460 So he's trying to gin up that base, especially as we see some of his core constituency, namely Hispanics and some black voters migrate over to the Republican Party.
00:29:52.680 Absolutely.
00:29:53.660 The best part and the best detailing from that Axios piece that Emily alluded to is that they're considering having a briefing room for influencers, a special briefing room and a special briefing.
00:30:05.280 But I think Biden is trying to do a little bit of a two step here ahead of announcing his reelection, which in itself is interesting that he hasn't announced he hasn't actually announced yet.
00:30:16.840 The first is you do see him talking to the middle on some issues.
00:30:19.700 He vetoed that the crazy D.C. crime bill where the counts, the D.C.
00:30:26.260 City Council had overridden the mayor's veto and crime in in the District of Columbia is out of control.
00:30:32.140 And Biden came in and supported the veto of that bill.
00:30:36.860 That was an interesting move.
00:30:38.700 And he rebuked the far left flank of his party in doing that.
00:30:42.860 At the same time, you do see him courting.
00:30:45.560 You know, Dylan Mulvaney has cozied up to the Biden administration.
00:30:49.580 The Biden administration has used Dylan Mulvaney to get his message out.
00:30:52.600 But they're trying to do both of these things at the same time because the vote of these young people who are the most unreliable voters but are ardent supporters of the Democratic Party is incredibly important to what is likely to be a pretty close election from where we see it now.
00:31:08.740 Biden is weak on the Democratic side and young people like the rest of the Democratic Party would rather not have Biden atop the ticket.
00:31:17.460 But Republicans aren't exactly sitting pretty either.
00:31:20.820 Their leading candidate is under indictment in New York.
00:31:24.420 Whatever you think of the merits of the indictment, it's a pain in the butt to deal with that.
00:31:29.360 And the rest of the field isn't, you know, right now looking like a bunch of a bunch of rock stars who are ready to defeat Biden.
00:31:36.580 Well, and that's I mean, there is a real question about whether abortion is going to be the game changer in the next election, you know, whether what happened in the 2020, 2022 midterms is going to happen again when we get to the next presidential race.
00:31:52.640 We have not yet had a presidential election post Dobbs.
00:31:55.400 And, you know, I heard my pals over at commentary this morning talking about this, Emily, saying, you know, you got Ron DeSantis, who was about to sign a bill changing the abortion statute in Florida from, I think, 15 weeks to six, six.
00:32:09.860 And I understand, you know, the pro-life audience is like, keep going, but it'd be nice for the pro-life audience, I'm sure, to win elections.
00:32:18.360 And this could actually seriously impact Ron DeSantis's ability to do that on the national level.
00:32:26.240 There's a big difference, especially for young women between 15 and six weeks.
00:32:31.000 It's going to be really interesting to watch how the different Republicans handle that question.
00:32:36.640 And Ron DeSantis, another issue young voters care about a lot is climate.
00:32:40.420 I mean, that's one of their biggest priorities if you look at polling.
00:32:43.360 And DeSantis is actually kind of interesting as a Republican, a little heterodox as a Republican on climate issues.
00:32:48.920 But then on the abortion question, yeah, I have a different perspective on what's moral versus what's politically expedient.
00:32:55.320 And there's just no way that six weeks is politically expedient.
00:32:58.740 But the one way that can be, if Republican candidates want to stand by that, is to be completely unapologetic and bold about it.
00:33:07.360 Because I work with young people a lot, and what they're missing, and they sort of have this fuzzy concept of it, is moral clarity.
00:33:15.880 And if you talk to them about that, they've been brought up in this totally postmodern world.
00:33:20.900 And when people come to them with something that is clear, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pretty good about this.
00:33:27.580 She's very bold and confident in what she believes is right.
00:33:32.400 She's not like wishy-washy.
00:33:33.980 That's really attractive to young people.
00:33:36.600 And Republicans often sort of take the left's bait and muddle their message on these different things.
00:33:41.920 So if you're going to do it, you better be prepared to not apologize, to defend it, and to be completely shameless about it.
00:33:49.700 And there's an argument, and I can see Ron DeSantis doing that, but it's much, much more difficult.
00:33:55.420 There's no question about it.
00:33:56.640 That is huge with young voters, though, because they just, it's why Ben Shapiro is so, like, extremely popular with young people.
00:34:02.900 Even a lot of young people on the left listen to Ben Shapiro because they want to know the best argument.
00:34:07.560 And they want to know something that's sort of rooted in research and truth.
00:34:10.840 Because right now it's just truth is relative.
00:34:13.180 Everything is what you feel.
00:34:14.780 Like the Bud Light executive, I just did this.
00:34:17.740 This was important.
00:34:18.580 And so to come with that sort of grounding is really helpful.
00:34:24.780 I love, AOC should have business cards made that just read, dumb but certain.
00:34:30.580 That's a great calling card.
00:34:32.060 That nails it.
00:34:33.120 Sums her up perfectly.
00:34:34.040 All right.
00:34:34.320 When we come back, I have got to show you this video of one of those Tennessee lawmakers, the so-called Tennessee Three.
00:34:40.120 And I'll ask you whether he is having a Hilaria Baldwin moment.
00:34:47.120 There's a tease.
00:34:48.040 More with the EJs coming up.
00:34:49.120 So the story of the so-called Tennessee Three continues to make headlines.
00:34:57.220 I have to say, I'm not miffed at all about what the Tennessee legislature did to those guys and that gal.
00:35:04.760 Fine.
00:35:05.180 You broke the rules.
00:35:06.040 You were rude.
00:35:06.820 You obstructed debate because you didn't get your way.
00:35:09.100 You took the bullhorn.
00:35:10.280 You're out of here.
00:35:11.080 I have no sympathy.
00:35:12.480 Now one of them's back in because that's the way the protocol works.
00:35:15.420 Some city group gets to decide who fills the vacant seat.
00:35:18.340 And they put him back in.
00:35:19.580 I think that was Justin Jones.
00:35:21.240 There's Justin Jones and there's Justin Pearson.
00:35:23.780 So Jones is back in.
00:35:24.720 All right, fine.
00:35:25.380 I mean, the left is talking about this truly like it, like these guys are Martin Luther King Jr.
00:35:29.340 I mean, it's crazy the way they're making stars out of them.
00:35:32.140 My team told me that they went from something like 20,000 followers on Twitter to 240,000 followers on Twitter.
00:35:37.680 You're seeing all these media people talk about one of them marched through the streets with about a thousand people like that's how it's done.
00:35:45.740 This is democracy in action.
00:35:47.420 Oh, come on.
00:35:48.580 It's like, OK, nothing's going to change in Tennessee.
00:35:51.180 There's not a single Tennessee voter who voted Republican who last time who's not going to vote Democrat.
00:35:56.080 You're kidding yourselves if you think otherwise.
00:35:57.840 That's my take on it.
00:35:59.040 But here's the best find of the day.
00:36:01.380 OK, and I'm going to tell you where I found it because I got it off of Twitter and then my team looked into it.
00:36:06.500 But I want to give credit to the gal who called it to my attention online.
00:36:10.800 Justin Pearson is one of the faces of the new movement.
00:36:15.680 All right.
00:36:16.020 He's one of the ones who took the bullhorn and went up there and yelled to the congregation.
00:36:19.580 I mean, I should say the legislature and got the people riled up in the balcony.
00:36:24.120 And this guy has become a star.
00:36:27.200 So this is Representative Pearson, who says we're now way more powerful than the NRA and won't say whether he's going to break the rules of decorum again once reinstalled on the floor of the Tennessee legislature.
00:36:40.700 But he is also a preacher.
00:36:43.160 And we have video of Justin Pearson.
00:36:47.080 And by the way, he sounds exactly the same.
00:36:48.920 I could give you five clips of him sounding exactly this way on the floor of the Tennessee legislature.
00:36:52.560 But we pulled a clip of him preaching about this whole thing.
00:36:56.700 Take a look.
00:36:57.180 Let us go into the house of the Lord.
00:37:00.600 I'm so glad to be in the house of the Lord with you this morning.
00:37:05.240 Would you mind going ahead and praying with me now, Mother God, Creator God, loving God, Holy God.
00:37:11.320 The movement lives or dies in Memphis.
00:37:14.500 The movement lives or dies in Memphis.
00:37:18.400 The movement for justice lives or dies in Memphis.
00:37:22.140 The movement for democracy lives or dies in Memphis.
00:37:25.700 Let them expel.
00:37:27.680 Let them kick out.
00:37:29.340 Let them do what they must.
00:37:31.640 There's a promise that Sunday's resurrection is on the way.
00:37:38.140 OK, that was Sunday.
00:37:40.120 Just a few years back in 2016, here was Justin on camera speaking to potential followers at Bowdoin College.
00:37:51.040 Hey, everybody, I'm Justin J. Pearson and I'm running for president of BSG.
00:37:56.200 Dissenting voices, voices that may be more liberal or more conservative in order that we can reach a point of sort of the radical middle where conversation and dialogue happens and growth happens.
00:38:10.100 Can you believe there was Peachy Keenan on Twitter, by the way?
00:38:14.720 Can you believe Emily?
00:38:16.720 I'm sorry.
00:38:17.360 He's a faker.
00:38:18.380 He's a faker.
00:38:19.140 This is what our society does to young men who said how he sounded like Obama in the original video.
00:38:25.900 Right.
00:38:26.280 And now he sounds like Jeremiah Wright.
00:38:30.540 Yes.
00:38:31.200 It's a fine line between Obama and Jeremiah Wright.
00:38:34.460 Except, Megan, back in the day, Obama had to dissociate himself from Jeremiah Wright.
00:38:39.300 And now this guy becomes Jeremiah Wright to get popular.
00:38:42.120 We've gone in the wrong direction.
00:38:43.900 And get more followers.
00:38:44.980 Yeah, he's getting a decent amount of engagement on social media.
00:38:48.820 And what's amazing, this is a classic case of what we at the Federalists refer to as Selma Envy.
00:38:54.140 One of our writers, Hans Feeney, came up with that, where it's just this deep desire to be a part of something meaningful and purposeful in a world that has none of it.
00:39:03.160 So you just LARP, you put on a costume, you act, instead of actually doing something of similar substance.
00:39:11.060 This is stupid.
00:39:12.240 This is substance-less.
00:39:13.820 They put on this, like, I mean, they could call it an act of civil disobedience, but it was just a superficial bullhorn protest that democracy's greatest cheerleaders have suddenly decided is totally Democratic to disrupt Democratic proceedings.
00:39:28.420 They were punished.
00:39:29.420 They were punished.
00:39:30.340 I maybe would have censored them before kicking them out, but like you, Megan, I'm not miffed by it.
00:39:34.100 It doesn't bother me that much that they weren't just censured and instead were expelled.
00:39:38.100 That's the political game that everybody plays.
00:39:41.120 And to see the most sanctimonious people now championing these guys is unbelievable, but in some respects totally believable.
00:39:49.920 Because when you have nothing real of substance to cling to, you just create nonsense and act like you're part of something more important.
00:39:58.600 And in a sense, I mean, it's hilarious.
00:40:00.060 I usually try not to laugh when you're playing sots, but I could not help it.
00:40:03.600 It's amazing.
00:40:04.020 Burst out into laughter on that one because the contrast is so stark and incredible.
00:40:08.160 At the same time, though, it's really sad because there's so many people looking for meaning who have to find it in stupidity like this that's doing nothing to help the world.
00:40:17.980 He's a faker.
00:40:19.480 He's a poser.
00:40:20.660 He's the male Elaria Baldwin.
00:40:22.640 I need to see it again.
00:40:23.660 Can we see a little short versions?
00:40:25.040 Let's play 2016 Pearson first.
00:40:28.900 Hey, everybody.
00:40:29.600 I'm Justin J. Pearson, and I'm running for president of BSG.
00:40:33.480 Dissenting voices, voices that may be more liberal.
00:40:35.780 Okay, that's good.
00:40:36.480 Now let's play a little preacher Pearson from literally last Sunday.
00:40:41.660 Memphis, the movement for justice lives or dies in Memphis.
00:40:46.280 The movement for democracy lives or dies in Memphis.
00:40:49.840 Let them expel.
00:40:51.800 Let them kick out.
00:40:53.460 Let them do what they must.
00:40:55.740 There's a promise that Sunday's resurrection is on the way.
00:41:03.280 He went to Bowdoin.
00:41:04.940 I mean, he's in a blue blazer at Bowdoin.
00:41:10.280 His next job will be at Bud Light.
00:41:11.780 Or he could get her job at the human rights campaign, maybe.
00:41:16.960 This is absurd.
00:41:18.160 This is the person like, oh, I will lead the movement.
00:41:20.940 Oh, okay.
00:41:21.840 Wait.
00:41:22.760 Right after I finish with Chess Club and American Musical Theater.
00:41:26.220 So we've learned a little bit more detail on Kamala Harris and her little speech down in Tennessee.
00:41:34.280 She went down there and getting all sorts of plaudits from the press for, you know, it was a game day call.
00:41:42.180 And her staff, they didn't know which plane to take.
00:41:45.320 And it was so exciting.
00:41:46.400 They'd been thinking they were going to have a day off thanks to Good Friday.
00:41:48.720 But no, they had to go support the boss as she went down there for this, you know, making history.
00:41:53.740 And now it comes out.
00:41:55.940 Okay, this is in, I'm trying to find the site, political, political reports.
00:42:00.000 Listen to this.
00:42:00.940 Because, you know, she went down there.
00:42:01.880 She met with the Tennessee Three.
00:42:03.420 But she did not have time to meet with the families of the six who were killed at the Christian school in the first place.
00:42:09.420 That was just a bridge too far for her because the focus needed to be on race.
00:42:12.860 That was what her speech was about.
00:42:14.260 It was about race and it was about guns and the people who were actually killed by the trans activists with the gun.
00:42:21.520 She didn't care.
00:42:22.580 So here's what Politico says.
00:42:25.120 Worth noting.
00:42:26.900 Although some conservative commentators have criticized Harris for not meeting with the families affected by last month's shooting at Nashville's Covenant School,
00:42:34.160 a White House aide tells Playbook that the families were invited to Kamala Harris's speech,
00:42:42.180 which was at one of those historically black community colleges or historically black colleges.
00:42:47.880 So she didn't even have it.
00:42:49.580 She had it at a college.
00:42:50.640 And she invited, apparently, the families of the six to come listen to her rant.
00:42:56.740 But they couldn't make it.
00:42:58.020 So this I mean, the fact that Politico would offer this like that's a real thing, like screw you and your invitation to the grieving families that they need to get off of their couches and come to you.
00:43:10.440 They need to come to you.
00:43:12.160 It's offensive.
00:43:13.760 But this is what she needs to be celebrate for her last minute decision and taking control and how she threw out the speech that the staff gave to her, Eliana, because she's wanted to keep it simple.
00:43:24.080 And if you watch her speech, she was fired up for the first time.
00:43:26.760 We saw an actual, genuine, authentic Kamala because it was about race and woke ism and all that crap.
00:43:33.580 And while looking for credit for saying to the families, you come to me and maybe I'll maybe I'll pat you on the head.
00:43:40.580 I love that she wanted credit for her nimbleness and agility and just hopping on that private plane and getting down there and putting herself in the middle of the action all the while, you know, not being able to fit into her busy preaching schedule.
00:43:55.580 I'm going to schedule a meeting with the families of the victims affected by this school shooting.
00:44:02.900 It is all, I think, very on brand for Kamala Harris, who was one of the first candidates, if not the first to drop out of the 2020 primary.
00:44:11.120 And is the reason I think as many Democrats as as do support Joe Biden's bid for reelection because they fear they will be left with Kamala Harris if Biden either, you know, takes a misstep and trips or anything happens to him or declares he's not running because she she is not a nimble political actor.
00:44:35.540 Sure. This has definitely become a political issue for the left.
00:44:39.400 They love this. And I think one of the reasons they love it, of course, Emily, is as they don't want to talk about the fact that a trans person went in there and murdered six Christian people, including three, three nine year olds.
00:44:49.960 We immediately had to pivot to how the shooting by a trans person put trans people at risk.
00:44:56.940 The real victims here were the trans people. Everybody's concerned about transgender people in Nashville.
00:45:02.140 Well, not a word about the fact that maybe the Christians in Nashville and Christian schools are the people who were the victims here, that that they are at risk, that they were targeted for a reason.
00:45:14.480 Got to remember, you know, the real victims here are the transgender community of Nashville.
00:45:19.460 And the real villains, of course, are, as always, Republicans.
00:45:23.820 Right. And I think that's why this is such a pathetic LARP, because and it's just stupid, because at the end of the day, the substance here,
00:45:30.980 we're not even talking about it because the media is so easily distracted, like you dangle a shiny object in front of it and they're like a baby.
00:45:37.080 They can't stop themselves from, you know, paying attention to that instead of the substance, which here is that the vast majority of gun violence in this country is illegal gun violence.
00:45:48.640 That does not look at all like what happened in Nashville.
00:45:52.240 The bills at hand have absolutely nothing to do with the vast majority of gun violence and gun deaths.
00:45:59.460 And the Tennessee three don't actually want to deal with policies that would really start taking a chunk out of those problems.
00:46:07.280 They don't want to talk about that. They don't want to deal with any of that.
00:46:10.600 So they're doing what's easy and they're just going to play act and they're going to latch on to something so that they can have their Selma envy and pretend to be doing something that is deeply meaningful and substantive because they can't actually latch on to anything difficult because they don't really have the courage.
00:46:28.080 They don't have the courage to take on the political issues that would actually matter.
00:46:32.360 So they're pretending and they're acting like people in the past in our history that did have courage to make themselves feel courageous and like they have something real when they absolutely don't.
00:46:44.400 And that's where I think this is just absolutely a tragic statement on the country, because when you peel back the layers, there's nothing there.
00:46:51.900 Yeah. To me, it's infuriating because it's like your anti-gun agenda.
00:46:55.840 And I am not some gun activist.
00:46:57.180 I mean, if they passed an assault weapons ban tomorrow that the Constitution would allow, I'd be fine with that.
00:47:02.780 I'm not some big gun enthusiast. It's just I recognize the futility of that lane.
00:47:08.320 All right. There's 400 million guns in America, the vast majority of which are automatic weapons and semi-automatic guns.
00:47:15.620 And even if you take out all the AR-15s, you're not going to get rid of the most lethal handgun.
00:47:20.360 And so what are we doing this for? You're still going to have homicidal maniacs who want to kill.
00:47:23.980 Why can't we fucking focus on that? Why can't we focus on mental illness?
00:47:26.680 Why can't we fortify soft targets like schools? Why can't we do what we know will work?
00:47:30.820 And people like these guys who lose in the debate on the on the House floor, who were allowed their say, but lost there in square,
00:47:38.480 who then tried to hijack the debate ought to be kicked out.
00:47:42.640 Zero problem with what the Tennessee legislatures did.
00:47:45.080 And if he does it again, he should be booted a second time.
00:47:50.720 All right. So Stormy Daniels continues to be lauded by the media.
00:47:57.280 A normally good reporter, Olivia Nuzzi, writes a very bizarre article about Stormy in New York magazine.
00:48:07.940 I'm not sure what went on here. I'd actually love to talk to Olivia about what the hell went on here.
00:48:12.640 Um, the title is how Stormy Daniels sees it ending.
00:48:18.080 The article begins with Stormy performing a tarot card like reading for Olivia.
00:48:24.120 Um, this is from the piece.
00:48:26.660 Daniels doesn't claim to be a fortune teller.
00:48:29.320 Nobody can predict the future, she said.
00:48:31.180 We all have free will.
00:48:32.700 But she can for sure identify fortune's fool.
00:48:36.080 She raised her hands and pressed the empty space between her palms.
00:48:39.360 She spoke quietly.
00:48:40.580 What can you tell Olivia about Donald Trump?
00:48:44.980 She waited for a moment.
00:48:46.780 Nothing.
00:48:48.040 What the fuck?
00:48:48.900 She said.
00:48:49.600 That's weird.
00:48:51.260 She was having trouble connecting to the realm of the spirits.
00:48:55.080 She shuffled the deck again.
00:48:56.640 There.
00:48:57.460 Between her palms, the force field of energy swelled.
00:49:00.120 She dealt the cards.
00:49:01.500 As if by magic, the room shifted.
00:49:04.360 My ears began to ring.
00:49:06.100 This is Olivia.
00:49:07.320 Tension spread across my forehead.
00:49:09.840 My eyes filled with tears.
00:49:12.160 I looked across the table and met the dealer's gaze.
00:49:15.900 She was crying too.
00:49:18.060 The cards confirmed what she already knew.
00:49:22.320 And then here's why she goes on to describe what happened.
00:49:24.860 Okay, this is what the cards read and why they cried.
00:49:28.280 First, she saw the past.
00:49:30.800 This is the unity card, she said.
00:49:32.280 It's normally very beautiful.
00:49:33.760 It means everything is connected, but not today.
00:49:35.720 When the card landed on the table, it was upside down.
00:49:38.220 Reversed, it means everything's coming apart.
00:49:40.640 Next, she saw the future.
00:49:41.780 Have you ever watched Harry Potter, she asked.
00:49:43.720 This is the golden snitch.
00:49:45.680 It is chaos.
00:49:46.680 Fucking chaos.
00:49:47.840 Energetic chaos.
00:49:48.700 This is the outcome.
00:49:49.680 Shit going crazy.
00:49:50.560 Potential for good.
00:49:51.720 But needs to be harnessed.
00:49:53.280 Olivia writes, I was bewildered by the wave of emotion that seemed to wash over both of
00:49:57.180 us at once.
00:49:57.820 Why did we cry?
00:49:59.300 Because it's real, she said.
00:50:01.100 It's chaos and death and destruction.
00:50:04.820 For clarity, she drew one more card.
00:50:06.340 She inhaled sharply.
00:50:07.160 The worst card in the deck, she said.
00:50:11.200 The sickle.
00:50:12.300 The image was a sharp, curved blade.
00:50:14.580 Sudden shock, trauma, wounds.
00:50:17.260 Think of a sickle.
00:50:18.080 You slice everything apart.
00:50:19.760 She shook her head and waved her hand over the cards.
00:50:22.320 This isn't good, she said.
00:50:23.940 It's not good.
00:50:25.800 She threw her face into her hands.
00:50:27.720 To me, she said, this is the perfect combination for a riot or a civil war.
00:50:34.740 What's happening?
00:50:38.720 Eliane, I'll start with you as somebody who is the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free
00:50:42.820 Beacon.
00:50:43.120 What's happening?
00:50:44.300 Olivia is not a crazy person.
00:50:47.020 She's normally a very good sound writer.
00:50:50.640 To me, I think this is sort of part of the madness of living under the Trump era with some
00:50:57.420 touch of Trump derangement syndrome and being in the presence of this woman who is being
00:51:01.640 treated as a deity by many in the left wing right now, as the single woman who's going
00:51:06.600 to bring down Trump.
00:51:10.380 I think that's one explanation.
00:51:12.440 It does also seem like there's a little bit of tongue-in-cheek going on here, because hearing
00:51:18.480 you read that, it's pretty clear to me that Stormy Daniels is out of her mind.
00:51:22.820 And there is a comical aspect to the fact that this woman has caused Donald Trump so many
00:51:28.960 problems, and he really has been this Teflon figure in American politics.
00:51:33.360 And there is something sort of humorous about the fact that this lunatic is the person who
00:51:40.480 is casting this long shadow, not only over his presidential bid, his first presidential
00:51:46.020 bid where he paid her off, but now his second presidential bid where he's tied up in court
00:51:51.400 with her.
00:51:51.880 I mean, talk to her.
00:51:52.960 She's not the world's greatest genius, as you can tell from Olivia's reporting.
00:51:56.620 And my sense is that's kind of the upshot of this piece.
00:51:59.700 Also, you can tell if you've watched Summer Hummer, she's not.
00:52:06.600 Sorry, we did a deep dive into her movie history.
00:52:12.600 So, but Emily, I have to say there's something a little strange to me about Olivia crying with
00:52:17.480 Stormy Daniels over tarot cards.
00:52:19.780 And I do think it is, Olivia is definitely of the left.
00:52:22.880 She is a good reporter.
00:52:23.700 She's a great reporter, but she is of the left.
00:52:25.960 And I do think what this reveals is just the deep trauma that people feel on all things
00:52:32.120 related to Donald Trump, the people who hate him.
00:52:35.620 I think that's as good of an explanation as any.
00:52:38.960 It's also, I think, an interesting example of how like when you're they're crying in the
00:52:44.340 moment.
00:52:44.580 But when you read what Olivia wrote down, this is just like nonsense.
00:52:49.000 It's so general, it's a civil war, it's just like so incredibly general that it could be
00:52:56.080 absolutely anything.
00:52:57.420 You can just slot it in there.
00:52:59.180 And it's a I think the horoscope of how you're right of how smart people can get sucked into
00:53:05.560 really stupid things.
00:53:07.100 I don't know.
00:53:08.000 I'm not going to like venture to guess about Olivia's faith background or anything.
00:53:10.760 I think that's typical more in general now when people are sort of untethered from something
00:53:15.800 deeper and more meaningful.
00:53:17.460 But I also I mean, Olivia's interviewed her before and I assume has like some sort of
00:53:22.320 pre-existing relationship that goes back to like at least 2018.
00:53:25.080 So maybe it's also a little bit of like the new journalism, you connecting with your connecting
00:53:30.460 with your source.
00:53:31.640 But it's just a really weird emotional thing that I wouldn't write about.
00:53:36.980 Honestly, I honestly wouldn't write about because I don't really think it's that interesting
00:53:40.060 so much as it's just strange.
00:53:41.980 I don't think we learn anything that moves the ball forward from this conversation.
00:53:45.840 I don't think it's particularly entertaining so much as it is makes you, you know, sort of
00:53:50.260 question anything that comes out of Olivia's.
00:53:53.820 See, I think it's interesting and entertaining, but perhaps not for the same reasons others
00:53:57.740 do or that were intended.
00:54:00.100 She goes on to say this.
00:54:02.360 This one jumped out at me for reasons you'll understand.
00:54:05.000 She's speaking about what it's like to be, you know, on the other side, the wrong side
00:54:09.060 of Donald Trump, writing about it.
00:54:11.380 Few people know what this is like and the few who do stick together.
00:54:16.040 Kathy Griffin, Mary Trump and E.
00:54:19.880 Jean Carroll.
00:54:20.440 That's a woman who's suing Trump, have all remained in close contact, sharing an understanding
00:54:26.100 of this particular type of traumatic chaos.
00:54:30.460 Quote, I would say strange bedfellows, but I don't want to.
00:54:34.080 Mary Trump joked.
00:54:35.420 It's like the weirdest incarnation of Charlie's angels ever.
00:54:40.160 Mary Trump admires Daniels for her strength in the face of these strangest of circumstances.
00:54:44.500 Quote, it's not just that she's handled it well, but that she's handled it very intelligently.
00:54:49.720 You can't tear down a woman who has no fucks to give about this.
00:54:53.580 Kathy Griffin, quote, history will see her not just as an adult film actress first, but
00:55:00.100 as a warrior.
00:55:02.720 She's a real cog in the wheel of his attempt to climb to fascism and goes on from there.
00:55:08.520 But Eliana, I have to say, so to me, as soon as I see a quote of Mary Trump, I tune out.
00:55:14.220 As soon as I see anything involving Mary Trump, I click off.
00:55:16.960 Mary Trump knows nothing about anything.
00:55:18.260 She barely knew Trump and she's been treated like the biographer of that Trump book, Art
00:55:22.260 of the Deal, like she's been his psychiatrist for 50 years.
00:55:25.940 Is she like this woman is a glomer who just wants to see her face on TV?
00:55:30.640 That's what's obvious.
00:55:31.660 They treat her like she knows everything.
00:55:33.000 It's Jesus Melania.
00:55:33.780 So, OK, they're they're strange bedfellows.
00:55:37.820 What, Kathy Griffin, who held up the decapitated Trump head?
00:55:41.000 She's in the same club as Mary Trump, who hates Trump and E.
00:55:45.640 Jean Carroll, who sued him.
00:55:46.900 You know what?
00:55:48.060 It is possible to be on the wrong side of Donald Trump and to not be his number one fan and
00:55:53.280 to move on with your great, beautiful life and to not harbor your bitterness and let it
00:55:58.920 ooze out of every pore and to actually be fair when talking about the man.
00:56:03.420 And not just suffer interminably from Trump derangement syndrome.
00:56:06.940 I can tell you that personally, some of us are mature enough to get beyond petty political
00:56:12.160 squabbles and to move on in this world.
00:56:15.020 Maybe that's what these three women have in common, that they are not capable of that,
00:56:18.660 that they've chosen to mire themselves in this toxic stew of hatred, which biases every
00:56:24.100 single thing they say.
00:56:25.040 And that's why they get all this airtime talking about their hatred for Trump.
00:56:29.500 To me, it's sort of absurd.
00:56:30.920 They're inviting you to their seances, Megan.
00:56:34.300 There might actually at this point be a little voodoo doll of me there, Emily.
00:56:39.560 Too real.
00:56:40.240 I don't know.
00:56:41.260 But anyway, to me, this is like it underscores everything that's wrong with the media because
00:56:44.540 they're celebrated for their little club, as opposed to the recognition that these are
00:56:48.980 Trump haters.
00:56:50.060 And aren't you just admitting that the number of features you do on them undermines your
00:56:54.000 attempt to paint yourself yourself as objective?
00:56:59.380 Oh, this is ridiculous.
00:57:01.860 The idea that I got crosswise with Trump and now I'm a victim.
00:57:06.240 I mean, nobody knew Mary Trump's name before she came for no one forward and made herself
00:57:10.680 a celebrity and established her identity as a Trump foe.
00:57:14.440 The same is true of Stormy Daniels.
00:57:16.240 Nobody knew who any of these women were.
00:57:17.960 And the result of becoming Trump's foe is you get profiled in New York magazine and
00:57:22.180 you get to be on every cable television news show and you get a contract here and a contract
00:57:26.380 there.
00:57:27.080 What a load of garbage.
00:57:28.840 Give me a break.
00:57:29.600 I will say I appreciate Olivia, including information about Stormy Daniels, weird doll, Susan, who was featured in an episode of Kelly's Court.
00:57:42.080 We'll get to the episode number.
00:57:44.040 We took a deep dive on Susan.
00:57:45.920 We were hot on this trail.
00:57:47.300 All right.
00:57:47.780 Long before Susan became a household name.
00:57:52.300 I'm so proud.
00:57:53.500 Uh, OK, she writes across the room on a small high chair in the corner was Susan.
00:58:02.540 Sometimes I love the news cycle.
00:58:04.380 Go to YouTube, people, and look at the pictures that we are putting on the board.
00:58:07.980 A doll possessed, Stormy said, by the spirit of a child from the 1700s.
00:58:15.000 A friend of another child who had died of cancer.
00:58:18.260 Before Daniels read the cards, she handed me the doll.
00:58:21.580 Its eyes startled me.
00:58:22.940 Blue and alive.
00:58:25.340 As we processed her reading, she nodded over to the corner.
00:58:29.720 Susan's crying, too, she said.
00:58:33.560 This is the woman who's going to be the chief witness in the Alvin Bragg case against Donald Trump.
00:58:42.160 Emily, I I sense trouble ahead.
00:58:44.960 You might think it's all it's weird how so many of these conflicts come back to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal because the left has latched on to them as their excuses to build these like insane disproportionate cases against Donald Trump.
00:59:02.060 Now, it is, though, amusing just from an outsider standpoint that these women are giving Donald Trump such a headache.
00:59:08.000 And I mean, I just I find it absolutely hilarious that someone who has a doll named Susan that is apparently crying.
00:59:15.380 You can sense this doll crying along with you while you're doing horoscopes with a reporter.
00:59:20.820 That this is the person at the center of Donald Trump's so far, actually at the center of an unprecedented moment in American politics.
00:59:28.960 She is not the hero we need, but truly the hero that we deserve at this point.
00:59:34.800 It's so deeply unserious.
00:59:38.020 Susan could be a witness at the trial.
00:59:39.820 Susan could be the surprise.
00:59:41.100 Got you.
00:59:41.520 Susan saw it all.
00:59:43.160 She witnessed.
00:59:44.660 She saw that everything that went down.
00:59:47.960 She probably has more credibility than Michael Cohen.
00:59:50.420 I'll give her that.
00:59:51.180 So in any event, that's kind of fun.
00:59:53.800 I was into that story.
00:59:54.680 Now, before we leave the topic of controversial women, can we spend a minute on Megan Rapinoe, who has decided to weigh in on whether biological men, trans women should be able to compete in female sports?
01:00:08.460 All right.
01:00:08.600 Megan Rapinoe, one of the stars of the USA team, soccer team, women's soccer team.
01:00:15.120 And she decided, along with Sue Bird, who's a former Olympian professional basketball player, to sign a petition trying to stop the Protection of Girls and Women in Sports Act.
01:00:28.040 They've decided now that they're on the bench, Eliana, and not playing, to ruin sport for my daughter and yours and everybody else's out there.
01:00:38.860 They've decided you're a bigot if you don't think that biological men should participate in sports like soccer.
01:00:46.380 Okay, sure.
01:00:47.520 That would be totally safe.
01:00:49.120 Like Megan Rapinoe would have ever given up her spot to a transgender player.
01:00:53.780 And like she wouldn't have objected if she had to play a transgender player on the other team from Brazil or some other country who would have kicked the you know what out of her.
01:01:02.640 This is where I've drawn the line of my swearing in professional play.
01:01:08.880 Any professional male player, biologically male player, could absolutely crush the female player across from him, both athletically and physically, and it would be a danger.
01:01:16.880 But she wants my daughter to go out there, who is a soccer player and happens to love people like Megan Rapinoe, because I don't inject my politics on sports athletes who she admires.
01:01:26.080 She'd sick that person on my daughter in a New York second just to bonify her woke credentials and make herself look.
01:01:32.640 Laudatory in the eyes of her colleagues.
01:01:36.380 It is amazing.
01:01:37.720 Like we've really come full circle on the feminism thing where we had the movement in the 1960s and 70s.
01:01:44.980 And now today's feminists are arguing that really we need biological men competing in women's sports.
01:01:52.020 And the, you know, the troglodyte right wing position is to say, no, this space should be reserved for women.
01:01:59.160 You know, that's an argument that feminists once would have made.
01:02:03.280 And Megan, I'm sure you and I are old enough to remember, and maybe Emily, there was a huge deal about Title IX and carving out space for women's sports and having a separate space for women to compete in athletics that was separate from men.
01:02:17.560 And now the women who, because of these rules, have risen to the height, to the heights of fame in this country, to the top of their professions, are re-erecting those boundaries to say, no, we're going to put men back in and take away the space for female athletics that allowed us to reach the fame and fame and fortune.
01:02:43.440 It's true. And, you know, Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird, from what I can tell, have a lot of medals and a lot of money.
01:02:50.720 And you know what they don't have? Daughters.
01:02:53.040 So they can take a seat because those of us who do and need to worry about their safety and their fair play object to your desire to push men into women's sports.
01:03:04.400 And I don't give a damn, and most people don't, what you call me or others who feel as I do.
01:03:10.560 I will fight you. I will fight you tooth and nail as you try to endanger my child and take away her fair shot at a medal, at winning, at the wonderful feeling of crossing the finish line first or winning in a fair game,
01:03:26.480 which Megan Rapinoe benefited from and Sue Bird benefited from.
01:03:30.940 But again, to assuage their own colleagues, their own fan base, they now want a different rule.
01:03:37.120 They want a different rule from my kid than they had to play under. It's disgusting.
01:03:41.560 And by the way, what does this act do? It seeks to clarify Title IX by classifying athletes by biology.
01:03:47.940 That's it. It seeks to say sex, meaning male or female, means what we think it means.
01:03:53.920 It doesn't include what you identify as, Emily. I think they ought to be ashamed of themselves.
01:03:58.700 They should be. It's completely regressive and backwards.
01:04:01.500 And as Eliana notes, it's not just sports that the women's movement, the second wave of feminism fought for.
01:04:07.200 They fought for separate spaces in general. They fought for women's bathrooms.
01:04:11.460 They fought for women's locker rooms. They fought for women's categories like best actress, best female artist, all of these things so that women would achieve.
01:04:20.900 And, you know, maybe they don't make perfect sense in the actor-actors category.
01:04:24.860 But when you're looking at things like separate spaces, women's shelters, these are accomplishments for the women's movement that are now being completely yanked away by people whose success is built on a fairer system.
01:04:36.820 And one question I always make sure to ask any time I interview an athlete who's, you know, Riley Gaines.
01:04:43.040 Last time I talked to her, when I talked to the two Connecticut track athletes who have been on the losing side of this.
01:04:50.080 That's still on appeal.
01:04:51.780 Right. Yeah.
01:04:52.460 Every time I talk to them, I ask them one question.
01:04:54.380 Are people's scholarships being affected by this?
01:04:57.140 Because the left purports to care about income inequality.
01:04:59.920 They purport to care about the middle class.
01:05:02.220 But actually what this does is take elite interests and then subjugate working class girls who are getting or middle class girls who are using scholarships to get an education so that they don't have to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt because of the government's dumb subsidies.
01:05:17.000 Subsidies the left is supported for years.
01:05:18.800 So it's completely regressive on so many different layers.
01:05:23.120 Safety, fairness, financially.
01:05:26.720 It's just you can keep going down and it's completely backwards.
01:05:29.960 But people like Megan Rapinoe have absolutely no incentive to stop saying this nonsense, anti-woman stuff because the media cheerleads them.
01:05:39.960 That small group of people in the media believe the exact same way.
01:05:43.140 And it puts them at odds with the rest of the country and just sows further division instead of allowing us to just turn the page on the stupid, stupid backwards chapter.
01:05:51.580 Mm hmm.
01:05:52.440 You mentioned Riley Gaines, of course, very much in the news, given what happened to her at this San Francisco State University.
01:05:59.200 She complained about it, of course.
01:06:00.880 You know, she was physically assaulted by a trans woman, she says.
01:06:04.940 And we saw the mob attack her and chase her into a room where she had to stay for three hours.
01:06:09.800 They were threatening that she wouldn't be released without money being paid to them and so on.
01:06:13.640 She tweeted about it.
01:06:15.300 And Eliana, the woman who runs the university who spoke out about it, blocked Riley Gaines on Twitter.
01:06:24.300 She blocked her.
01:06:26.060 I mean, the absolute cowardice of the people running our universities.
01:06:32.640 Oh, Megan, don't get me started.
01:06:35.560 I will.
01:06:36.080 You know, get her started.
01:06:38.900 It is not limited to athletics.
01:06:43.660 We the same people who are running Bud Light Marketing are running our universities.
01:06:48.860 OK, you know, at the Free Beacon, we've spent the past three, four years reporting on these controversies that have overtaken the top law schools in the country.
01:06:57.900 We're producing the best federal judges, Supreme Court justices, Yale Law School, Stanford Law School.
01:07:03.480 We've gotten a close up look at who the administrators are at these schools.
01:07:07.540 It just happened at Stanford Law School where an administrator there got up, took the mic from a federal judge and asked the federal judge, who was an invited guest of the Stanford Law School, to consider whether the juice was worth the squeeze of the harm that he was causing by hurting the feelings of transgender activists in the audience.
01:07:27.100 And by the way, they took issue with the fact that this federal judge had denied the motion of a transgender.
01:07:35.900 Defendant to be called by female pronouns, they were incredibly aggrieved by this and shouted the judge down as a result of this and the Stanford University administrator intervened on the behalf of these protesters.
01:07:48.060 So that is who's right. Can I just say, can I just add something to that and that the transgender inmate that the judge refused to acknowledge the chosen pronouns of if memory serves was a convicted pedophile?
01:08:00.140 And yet this is the poster child for the activist cause.
01:08:04.460 You will call the pedophile by the pronouns of choice or you will be shouted down at Stanford Law.
01:08:10.480 Keep going. And and you will sit in jail with the pedophile or you will sleep next to this man at a women's shelter after you were just abused by a man.
01:08:21.560 And that's exactly what you're running from. It's just so progressive.
01:08:24.640 Mm hmm. Right. Exactly. Sorry, Eliana, I interrupt you. Keep going.
01:08:29.360 Those are the people who are running the country's top universities who are blocking Riley Gaines on Twitter.
01:08:36.880 And it's no wonder that to see the quality of and the way of think ways of thinking of the people running our university, who, again, I'm going to come full circle here, are the same people who are in senior management positions at top corporations and companies across the country.
01:08:56.840 Harvard University graduate, the the Bud Light marketing woman.
01:09:00.380 Exactly. There was an article not long ago, early April, April is this dated April 2nd, New York Post at the lower level, not not yet college was happening more and more in high schools.
01:09:11.140 And Project Veritas under James O'Keefe did a great job of calling attention to some of this Massachusetts school superintendent candidate says his job offer was rescinded after he addressed two women on the school's committee in an email as ladies.
01:09:24.720 He emailed two women and began the email with ladies and then went on from there and they rescinded his offer.
01:09:31.880 It was a microaggression. You see, Emily, and you're not allowed in their weird Massachusetts world to refer to two women as ladies like I, I don't know people who would be offended by that.
01:09:45.560 I think I may have called you gals, ladies at some point in this podcast. It doesn't it. Who who in their right mind finds that kind of thing so offensive that they pull a guy's job offer?
01:09:57.720 Well, and it's the same thing. You can't say guys. You can't say ladies. You can't use gendered terms at all. And if you look back at universities, you can find this stuff as long as like 10 years ago.
01:10:09.720 It was like the university. I forget. I shouldn't say because I forget the specific case study. But one of the universities put out this insane guide back in 2015 that sort of blew people's minds.
01:10:19.320 But even then, it had already been happening for like at least five years. These microaggressions had started to become really mainstream.
01:10:26.120 And some of these theories had started to sort of move from the fringes of academia into the bureaucracies where they were being taught as the only acceptable sort of guide and manual to interpersonal relationships at the universities.
01:10:37.640 All that is to say this isn't going away anytime soon. There were a bunch of articles just last year about the so-called vibe shift.
01:10:45.360 And I bought into it a little bit and I still do. You know, that there is at least on the surface level, there is something changing.
01:10:51.140 Like you have Bill Maher going on rants against wokeness and you have all of these people that are increasingly comfortable sort of speaking out against the far left excesses of it.
01:11:01.040 But the problem is you have a generation of people my age and a little bit older and a little bit younger who have been taught nothing else.
01:11:08.860 They've been taught this is the bedrock of interpersonal communications, interpersonal conduct.
01:11:14.460 And so that's imported into the workforce now. And it's not you can't just pull it up.
01:11:18.720 It's like deeply rooted into their concepts of what's right and wrong, because the universities, you know, first of all, they got rid of truth.
01:11:26.980 You know, it all became relative or truth was a white supremacist concept.
01:11:30.480 Another thing that's actually taught at certain universities. So once you get rid of all of that bedrock, they planted this new foundation really, really deep.
01:11:37.920 And you can't just, you know, say there's a vibe shift and it'll go away.
01:11:41.480 It is going away a little bit, but it's never going to go away for a very, very long time.
01:11:46.000 It's going to we're going to be dealing with this for decades to come, not just years to come, because this is very deeply rooted in their sense of self, their sense of morality.
01:11:54.000 We're in big trouble for years to come because it was happening under everybody's noses.
01:11:57.900 This is why the two frontrunners for the GOP nomination are the most outwardly un-woke, anti-woke warriors in GOP, in the GOP field.
01:12:12.720 Right. I mean, and Vivek, you mentioned Vivek. He's definitely anti-woke, too.
01:12:17.200 He's not one of the frontrunners, but I'm just saying, like, there's no accident that he was attracted to the GOP and is running as a Republican.
01:12:22.220 Um, they're sick of it, Eliana. I think normal people are sick of this.
01:12:28.520 Ladies and you're you're fired. You know, you lose your job opportunity.
01:12:33.440 You get blocked as a biological woman who gets physically attacked for sending out a tweet about what was done to you.
01:12:41.420 The university statement apologizes to your attackers.
01:12:46.620 A trans person shoots up a Christian school, including three nine year olds, to death.
01:12:51.800 And the left turns it into a story about how the trans community is under attack.
01:12:57.620 They're sick of it.
01:13:00.900 Megan, it goes so far beyond not being able to say, hey, guys or hello, ladies.
01:13:06.440 Um, while you were talking, I just Googled the, uh, the Stanford Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, which when this got news covered, Stanford, Stanford had to pull it back.
01:13:16.520 But, um, don't say basket case because it originally referred to one who has lost all four limbs and needed to be carried around in a basket.
01:13:25.460 Don't say committed suicide.
01:13:27.380 You must say died by suicide.
01:13:29.360 Don't say crippled.
01:13:30.680 You must say person with a disability.
01:13:32.480 Don't say handicapped for the same reason or handicapped parking space.
01:13:37.180 Cannot use any of these terms.
01:13:38.640 This is a list.
01:13:39.400 It's like a new dictionary.
01:13:40.660 Okay.
01:13:41.160 Literally a new dictionary.
01:13:43.140 George Orwell is like turning over in his grave right now.
01:13:46.340 But, uh, it, it goes so far beyond the gendered language.
01:13:49.860 Oh, he can't say go off the reservation.
01:13:51.560 Can't say crack the whip.
01:13:52.980 Can't say abusive relationship.
01:13:54.720 Need to say relationship with an abusive person and on and on and on and on.
01:13:59.280 Can't say rule of thumb.
01:14:00.160 Can't say rule of thumb.
01:14:01.100 Rule of thumb.
01:14:01.540 Um, master bedroom.
01:14:02.740 Minor attracted persons.
01:14:04.540 Oh, okay.
01:14:05.440 That minor attracted person leads me perfectly into my next segment.
01:14:09.260 And that would be the Dalai Lama.
01:14:12.240 Oh my God.
01:14:13.940 So the Dalai Lama, I think this happened in Tibet, is over there in some sort of a ceremony.
01:14:21.240 And I mean, literally, I don't think I've ever done any Dalai Lama news.
01:14:24.400 It's like he talks to Oprah and other people who call him the spiritual leader, whatever.
01:14:28.840 And the next thing you know, these children are going up to the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader, and we can play you the clip.
01:14:37.300 He kisses his young boy.
01:14:38.720 And then in English, he sticks out his tongue, and he asks this young boy to suck his tongue.
01:14:47.840 And suck my tongue.
01:14:49.780 It's absolutely disgusting.
01:14:58.140 I will never look at this man the same again.
01:15:00.100 I am done with the Dalai Lama.
01:15:01.780 Not that I had any relationship with him.
01:15:03.400 But this is sick behavior.
01:15:05.020 I don't care what I don't.
01:15:06.020 This is not defensible.
01:15:07.400 And yet we are seeing some defense of it.
01:15:09.520 Um, the Dispatch today, which is, you know, Jonah Goldberg's publication, Steve Hayes, they put it in their newsletter as presented without comment.
01:15:20.120 Why?
01:15:21.380 Why?
01:15:22.020 Fucking comment.
01:15:23.000 It's disgusting.
01:15:24.220 That's pedophilic behavior.
01:15:26.660 That deserves a you're disgusting and somebody needs to investigate whether you've done more behind closed doors.
01:15:33.340 That's not presented without comment.
01:15:35.020 What are you doing, Jonah Goldberg?
01:15:36.240 Um, it got worse today over on CNN.
01:15:40.960 A reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, Jay Michelson, um, said the following.
01:15:49.280 Listen.
01:15:51.080 Jay, you've met the Dalai Lama many times.
01:15:54.260 Have you such a song?
01:15:55.480 I have not.
01:15:56.660 Uh, the Dalai Lama is a very playful human being.
01:15:59.940 And we may see this in a weird kind of gross sexualized way.
01:16:06.240 But this is about as sexual as a bowl of plain rice.
01:16:09.600 There is nothing sexual or erotic or erotic happening in this encounter.
01:16:13.480 As you can see by the reaction of the people who were there, this was clearly something that was at best, you know, insensitive to how this would be seen by a large swath of the world population.
01:16:24.580 But it seems clear from the video.
01:16:26.780 And look, I'm biased.
01:16:27.800 I mean, the Dalai Lama is one of my spiritual heroes.
01:16:29.780 I have met him.
01:16:31.080 Being in his presence is really one of the most powerful experiences I've had in my life.
01:16:37.020 Oh, my God, Jay.
01:16:38.220 Snap out of it.
01:16:39.240 Sometimes we get disappointed by our spiritual leaders.
01:16:41.320 Take a look at what we've gone through in the Catholic Church, for God's sake.
01:16:44.500 That was disgusting and it's inexcusable.
01:16:46.760 I can't believe, Emily, that people are out there.
01:16:49.880 I can't believe the CNN panel didn't stand up and walk out saying, what's wrong with you?
01:16:54.320 You're sick, too.
01:16:55.080 I can't believe Alison Camerata joked about it, honestly.
01:16:59.320 Did you suck his tongue?
01:17:00.380 I mean, that really was not funny in any way whatsoever.
01:17:03.520 I'm embarrassed for him to have said that on television.
01:17:06.100 It's going to age very poorly because, as you said, Megan, there needs to be an investigation into whether something deeper has happened behind closed doors because this looks like something that is extremely alarming.
01:17:16.420 It should be a red flag.
01:17:17.820 I don't know what mechanisms exist for an investigation like that to happen, but it's just like there's no good explanation for it.
01:17:26.160 There's no way to frame that and say, well, maybe this, well, maybe that.
01:17:29.940 It's not sexual at all.
01:17:31.800 I mean, what are you talking about?
01:17:33.200 There's a child involved.
01:17:34.500 To sit back in your little comfy chair on a CNN panel and make that determination for the child, this is just like a really, really disgusting place to go.
01:17:46.320 And, again, I suspect it may not age well because maybe there's more that we're going to learn under the surface of this.
01:17:51.120 It makes absolutely no sense.
01:17:52.860 There's no way to sugarcoat what happened there.
01:17:54.960 And I think a lot of things should be called into question because of it.
01:17:58.020 Maybe it's an aberration.
01:17:59.140 Maybe this is a one-off.
01:18:00.980 Maybe, but I just have a hard time believing that and at least think that somebody should be digging deeper now because, you know, if it is a one-off, that's very, it seems to me that would be an exceptional case.
01:18:13.940 How dare he try to normalize this obviously sexual encounter between the Dalai Lama and this young boy?
01:18:22.500 It was an exploitation by the Dalai Lama of a young boy who didn't know any better.
01:18:27.140 And you could see the boy looked uncomfortable when the Dalai Lama asked him to suck his tongue.
01:18:31.840 I'm told that in Tibet it is usual, it is common for people to stick their tongues out at other people.
01:18:38.260 It doesn't mean what it means over here.
01:18:40.340 That's not an unusual practice as it is here.
01:18:42.800 Sucking somebody else's tongue, I'm told, is not usual at all.
01:18:47.040 And what the Dalai Lama did was inarguably inappropriate, Eliana, to the point where the Dalai Lama had to come out and apologize.
01:18:54.740 The international community was horrified by what they saw there.
01:18:58.160 It's stunning to me that there's any hesitancy to call it out for what it is.
01:19:05.740 I think that's the key thing.
01:19:08.960 This is something that the Dalai Lama has already come out and indicated wasn't right.
01:19:14.120 And what raised my spidey sense was if this is something that he's comfortable doing in public, it does raise some questions about what is happening in the places that we can't see.
01:19:25.120 Because it is a very strange and abusive thing to do to a child in the public eye.
01:19:31.840 But apparently he didn't anticipate the blowback of that.
01:19:34.820 And that raises, I think, a lot of other concerning questions.
01:19:39.600 I feel like this is too close.
01:19:43.160 Anybody who defends this, you're getting us closer and closer to the normalization of the exploitation of children.
01:19:50.060 And that is just a hard line we don't cross.
01:19:53.860 Jonah, I'm sorry, I like Jonah.
01:19:56.820 I like the dispatch.
01:19:57.760 I'm one of the founding contributors to the dispatch.
01:20:00.840 It's not that I agree with all of his positions, but I like his newsletter.
01:20:04.380 You don't know it.
01:20:06.200 The answer to this problem is not presented without comment.
01:20:09.080 The answer is you comment, you condemn, and you make sure we of the sane and rational minds hold a hard line against this kind of behavior.
01:20:18.320 Or you get more of it, Emily, or you get more of it.
01:20:21.080 We are seeing tiny buds of this on far corners now in our discussion, though.
01:20:30.180 I'm seeing more and more of it.
01:20:31.540 What was the term that you used?
01:20:33.420 The minor attracted people.
01:20:35.720 That's becoming a thing.
01:20:37.860 Quickly.
01:20:38.600 It's quickly becoming a thing.
01:20:39.180 It's actually probably on that Stanford list.
01:20:41.140 You can't say pedophile.
01:20:42.260 You have to say minor attracted people.
01:20:44.740 Right.
01:20:45.080 And so I just I went back and looked at what I was referring to from 2015.
01:20:48.800 It was at the University of New Hampshire, and they said you couldn't use the word American.
01:20:52.380 And that caused all kinds of consternation at the time.
01:20:55.220 But look at how quickly that's moved to now very seriously.
01:20:58.880 There is a push from academics.
01:21:01.740 And folks can Google this.
01:21:03.540 They're very serious academics with some traction in leftist fringe circles who are now making some of the same arguments we saw made about gender identity, but in minor attracted persons language, where they're sugarcoating and attempting to destigmatize pedophilia in an effort, they say, to help people better deal with it and thus eradicate it.
01:21:24.900 Get it out of the get it, you know, make people less likely to act on it, which is a ridiculous and disgusting argument.
01:21:32.440 We've already seen the results, the fruits of those efforts in other corners of society.
01:21:36.060 We have run this experiment.
01:21:37.440 We know it is a horrible idea.
01:21:38.880 Not only does it sound like a horrible idea on its face, it's illogical, but in practice, it will not work.
01:21:44.100 It will not work.
01:21:45.540 And it'll again bring us to just examples exactly like this one.
01:21:49.860 And I think, by the way, when your sort of faith isn't rooted in this idea that people are bad, inherently fallen, that we are all sinful, it makes it really easy to get caught up in looking at someone like the Dalai Lama, who you've had really profound spiritual experiences with, as he was saying, and just not believe it.
01:22:07.960 You don't believe it because you have way too rosy of a perspective on human beings.
01:22:12.160 And that's true of a lot of academia.
01:22:14.080 It's true of a lot of the media.
01:22:15.580 They just don't understand human nature.
01:22:17.560 They think they can cure it somehow by changing to these totally Orwellian, to Eliana's point, terms like minor attracted persons that de-stigmatize something that deserves intense stigma.
01:22:29.280 A healthy society stigmatizes pedophilia.
01:22:32.380 Yes.
01:22:33.360 OK, so that leads me to what's going on in the UK.
01:22:35.900 I have to do a quick break, and then we will discuss this naked education that's being foisted on kids over in the UK two minutes away.
01:22:44.920 Stand by.
01:22:45.280 More with Emily and Eliana after this.
01:22:47.560 Over across the pond, the UK's Channel 4 has decided it would be a great idea in the spirit of sex education and talking openly with teens and tweens about what's coming their way through puberty, etc.,
01:23:06.380 to put a bunch of naked adults in front of them so they can check out the naked adults' normal bodies and just everyone's going to be super normal.
01:23:17.560 Here's a clip.
01:23:19.560 Here's a clip.
01:23:20.560 Sad 11.
01:23:24.560 Physical?
01:23:25.560 I couldn't look at them.
01:23:27.560 I don't think my cat's even got that much hair.
01:23:30.560 You're giggling quite a lot by the way.
01:23:34.560 I'm always the one that giggles.
01:23:35.560 Bobby, how do you feel?
01:23:37.560 I feel fine.
01:23:38.560 How do you feel?
01:23:39.560 Not even bothered.
01:23:41.560 I mean, I've never been in a room with four naked people.
01:23:45.560 They've never been in a room with four naked people.
01:23:47.560 Maybe Dr. Alex has.
01:23:49.560 I'm not sure.
01:23:51.560 Elliot, you've got naked people standing in front of you.
01:23:54.560 Yes.
01:23:55.560 Is this a new thing?
01:23:56.560 A new experience?
01:23:57.560 I'm guessing it probably is.
01:23:58.560 Yeah, it is.
01:23:59.560 Oh, my God.
01:24:00.560 Look at that kid.
01:24:01.560 I guess you can get on beginning at age 14.
01:24:05.560 For the listening audience, they were fully grown adults, male and female, completely butt naked right in front of the kids, full frontal nudity standing there just lined up against one another for four of them, I think.
01:24:18.560 And they say the show is about body positivity.
01:24:21.560 The program aired in Britain last week, they say they're going to discuss things like the first topic was body hair, talking about when they developed pubic hair, how much they shave and so on and so forth.
01:24:38.560 I, Emily, thoughts on whether this is a this is going to encourage body positivity and or anything else.
01:24:46.560 I have no idea what the consequences of this will be, other than completely messing up these children, like, traumatically, even if they seem like they're just nodding along happily.
01:24:58.560 Because when you think about it, one of the more disturbing elements is how many layers of sort of bureaucratic control something like this has to go through until it hits the public.
01:25:06.560 Think of all of the production, the people who commissioned this, the parents of the children, everyone who just said, yeah, this is a good idea.
01:25:17.560 Let's go ahead with it. And then it hits the public. I mean, so many people had to be behind that effort.
01:25:22.560 And nobody thought to say, maybe let's pause.
01:25:26.560 Maybe people did and they got kicked out and, you know, were unsuccessful.
01:25:29.560 But think about all of the people who were just comfortable participating in this.
01:25:33.560 It's really hard for children with developing brains to process the consequences of this at the moment.
01:25:39.560 You know, that's we all know that they might think something is fine and cool and edgy in the moment.
01:25:44.560 Ten years down the road, 20 years down the road, which we're not even thinking about.
01:25:48.560 As a as an adult, you look back and realize that your brain wasn't fully developed and that that really had an effect on your relationship with the opposite sexist body or your relationship with sexuality in general, because it's abnormal.
01:26:02.560 It's not normal. It shouldn't be normalized.
01:26:05.560 And these poor kids are now blasted all over the Internet forever having this experience.
01:26:11.560 It's true. Like what what parent would put their child on set like two feet away from some some random stranger's naked penis and cameras, let that be their first exposure to a naked man or a naked woman.
01:26:24.560 And by the way, that doesn't even account for the children at home who are channel surfing, looking for Britain's Got Talent's latest performance and stumble across naked people.
01:26:36.560 Eliana.
01:26:37.560 I don't really know where to begin with this, except with the parents and what the hell were they thinking here?
01:26:45.560 There is something so there is something sort of pornographic about it.
01:26:50.560 And I don't know, like, call me old school.
01:26:52.560 You know, when I was growing up, it was before everything was on the Internet, but it was like kids used to like sneak Playboy magazines behind lockers.
01:27:00.560 And like, you know, that that's good enough.
01:27:04.560 Like this is not, you know, the real the real nuts and bolts of sex are never weren't learned in sex education in sixth grade.
01:27:12.560 OK, and so I really do question the benefit of like all of this adult teaching children about this stuff.
01:27:19.560 That's just not it is not a reflection of the way the real world works.
01:27:23.560 Can I tell you, too, like I've seen enough B-roll of those ugly naked bottoms.
01:27:29.560 I don't need to see any more.
01:27:30.560 So it also has like it has the weird effect of I realize, yes, there's Playboy.
01:27:35.560 Doug used to tell me that he and his buddies would steal the Playboy off of whatever their dads or somebody's dad's, you know, yeah.
01:27:41.560 And they used to text. I guess Playboy was always eighty eight pages and they used to just text each other, not text, but like call or say to the other other person, eighty eight pages.
01:27:50.560 And then they'd know that somebody had gotten their hands on a Playboy.
01:27:53.560 That's the American way. That's the old fashioned way. That's the way it should happen.
01:27:57.560 But as a as a young girl, I never saw a male naked body until it was by choice in an appropriately sexual situation where, you know, I was intentionally seeing the male naked body.
01:28:11.560 I wouldn't want to see that fat, hairy, disgusting man in front of me as representative of what my future held.
01:28:17.560 I'd probably go asexual. You're like depriving these young people, Emily, of the opportunity to discover all of this for themselves in a what can be a totally magical, great, exciting, nerve wracking, but fulfilling setting.
01:28:33.560 Why do I want to look at somebody's disgusting cellulite ridden back yard with a hairy front?
01:28:39.560 I don't want to see that as my future if I'm a 14 year old girl sitting there.
01:28:44.560 Really, Megan, I think like this stuff is supposed to happen in private spaces and so much with social media and other things in our culture is dragging out what was once happening in private spaces out into the public.
01:28:59.560 And this is not only in a classroom, but then broadcast on television.
01:29:02.560 And it is not right. Like private things, including sex and the discovery of sex should be private.
01:29:08.560 And it really should be left to parents to decide, you know, some parents don't talk to their kids about this stuff at all.
01:29:13.560 Other parents talk to their kids about it all the time. It should be up to parents how to educate their children about this.
01:29:20.560 But like, keep it private and appropriate.
01:29:25.560 I wonder what Camille Polly would say about this, because, you know, the wonderful philosopher, art critic, writer, because to your point, Megan and Eliana, this stuff is typically done in private.
01:29:36.560 It's human nature. There's a reason for that.
01:29:38.560 And there's something about the mystery of sex that's incredibly powerful and intoxicating for men and women and to completely demystify sex.
01:29:51.560 Polly has written about when Hollywood had the code and how Hollywood movies were so much sexier when they had to obey different rules because they really had to work to make sexual dynamics appealing and interesting and entertaining and intriguing.
01:30:06.560 And when you demystify all of that, she's written by the Kardashians, for example, just being completely bare, but all of that stuff, you're really taking the mystery out of sex in a way that's harmful, not just to the culture, but for people who later have to experience it.
01:30:22.560 And for kids, first of all, to see this, like this is on another level of insanity, obviously, and danger and all of that.
01:30:31.560 But just imagine growing up in a culture that has demystified sex to this point where you're seeing basically bare butts.
01:30:38.560 Lizzo just posted a naked photo. When you're seeing all of this, you're inundated with it.
01:30:43.560 Our relationship and younger people's relationships with with sex and sexuality are absolutely going to be hurt by this for, you know,
01:30:51.560 a long time in the future.
01:30:54.560 So can I give you a defense of it, Eliana?
01:30:56.560 There was an op ed published in the UK's Independent by a woman named Katie Edwards.
01:31:02.560 She writes, we can all get puritanical about it and say that there's never an appropriate context for teenagers to see naked adult bodies.
01:31:09.560 Teenagers is like as if they're all 18 and not 14.
01:31:12.560 And there is a difference as the mother of a 13 year old. Significant between those.
01:31:16.560 We can willfully block out reality and pretend that teenagers are innocents who know nothing of real naked bodies or issues around sex, sexuality and consent.
01:31:24.560 But seriously, who are we kidding?
01:31:26.560 Our kids are taught that child sized waists alongside large, perfectly smooth round buttocks are not only normal, but desirable.
01:31:36.560 No wonder body dysmorphic disorder is increasing among teenagers.
01:31:39.560 That's the reality for kids today. That's what's considered normal.
01:31:43.560 Naked education might be a bit of a gimmick.
01:31:45.560 It might not even be it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
01:31:48.560 But isn't there something positive to be gained in having conversations about real bodies, body image, sex and consent?
01:31:55.560 Isn't it important to discuss how many of the normalized body grooming behaviors such as women's removal of body hair beyond the head and eyes have been imported from pornography and what this means for young people's sense of self worth.
01:32:10.560 Did you know that you were shaving your legs because of the patriarchy?
01:32:13.560 Did you understand that's what had happened?
01:32:16.560 That's why.
01:32:17.560 Anyway, forget that last bit of feminist offering.
01:32:20.560 But what about her defense of real bodies?
01:32:23.560 They already seen that fake Kim Kardashian bottom out there like it's real and it's a lie.
01:32:28.560 Why not show them real people and disabuse them of those notions?
01:32:32.560 Well, the article posits that this would be an interesting discussion to have, and I think that that's fine.
01:32:39.560 You know, it's a fine discussion to have.
01:32:41.560 But I I don't think I object to the idea that to combat body dysmorphia and to realize that the idealized version of the female body is not exactly what what each one of us.
01:32:53.560 And I say this as, you know, I'm not Stormy Daniels over here trotting around, you know, but that like you don't need to see people naked to realize that.
01:33:05.560 I think it's sort of a ridiculous argument.
01:33:07.560 And there's plenty of conversation to be had without trotting out for naked adults in front of children.
01:33:12.560 And she said, like, oh, let's not pretend 14 year olds are are so innocent.
01:33:16.560 Nobody's pretending that like it's totally I think it is for each parent to decide how permissive they want to be with their kids.
01:33:24.560 But like, you know, your husband, Megan, was texting 88 to his friends.
01:33:28.560 Like, of course, this is what the kids are doing and what they've always been done.
01:33:31.560 But there is a certain propriety that like they've got to sneak behind their parents' backs to do it.
01:33:36.560 And that this is not this is not a society sanctioned thing.
01:33:40.560 It happens behind closed doors.
01:33:43.560 And, you know, both when you discover it in the pages of Playboy and when you really do it, like we don't sanction people having sex in parking lots and office buildings.
01:33:52.560 Yeah. And there and also like the weirdness that the normalization, Emily, of having a naked man stand in front of your minor child, you know, like we we don't need to normalize inappropriate behavior.
01:34:04.560 Yeah. Like it's the same thing as saying, yes, you should have a discussion with your child as you feel best.
01:34:09.560 Not a TV station, but you should have a discussion with your child about sexual norms as opposed to letting them watch Hollywood.
01:34:16.560 Fine, fine. But that's like saying you should just put your kid and like take them to watch people have sex.
01:34:23.560 It's like that's the equivalent of that argument. It is idiotic and stupid, let alone the fact that you're rolling cameras and broadcasting this to a national now international audience.
01:34:33.560 And it's just stupid and wrong. Right.
01:34:37.560 I'm going to have to ask Doug exactly how they communicated 88 pages because he like I grew up in the 80s before texting.
01:34:42.560 So it must have just been like a phone call must have been like alert, red alert, 88.
01:34:46.560 I was always 88 or was just their favorite, their favorite edition of I don't know.
01:34:51.560 I'll find out. I'm sure he remembers perfectly, Megan.
01:34:54.560 Great to see you, ladies. It's been a pleasure.
01:34:59.560 Thanks for having us.
01:35:01.560 All right. Now, I want to mention to you that tomorrow we're going to be joined by Sam Harris for the full show.
01:35:06.560 You heard him mentioned earlier this week he got in trouble for saying whatever needs to be done to get rid of Trump is worth it.
01:35:12.560 We'll talk about that and so much more excited to have him back on the program.
01:35:16.560 We will see you then.
01:35:20.560 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.
01:35:22.560 No BS, no agenda and no fear.