The Megyn Kelly Show - Charles C.W. Cooke on Biden's Broken Promises, COVID Craziness, and Police Reform

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00:00:30.980 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:33.160 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:42.520 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.800 Today on the program we've got Charles C.W. Cook.

00:00:49.700 He's so smart and he's so easy to understand.

00:00:52.840 And I listen to him all the time and read his great work over at National Review.

00:00:57.520 But I'm proud to be bringing him directly to you here on The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:02.620 He's an editor of nationalreview.com and writes a lot for them and does a lot of podcasts for them

00:01:08.320 and just has a great take on where we are right now as a country.

00:01:12.620 And I have to tell you, I'm concerned.

00:01:15.720 I'm concerned.

00:01:17.160 You'll hear us get into it.

00:01:18.240 But I really just feel like there's been a lot of government overreach in the first 100 days of this presidency.

00:01:22.840 A lot.

00:01:23.600 Biden's been way more active with the powers of his post, or at least the perceived powers, than even I expected him to be.

00:01:32.040 And we're going to get into whether that's going to come back to haunt him as we get closer and closer to the midterms.

00:01:37.420 And whether he really has the mandate he seems to think he has.

00:01:41.940 He's doing a lot.

00:01:43.280 Are we really going to be paying reparations?

00:01:45.440 Are we really going to stack pack the Supreme Court?

00:01:48.500 Are we going to make D.C. a state?

00:01:51.560 Charles has got some common sense answers on all of these.

00:01:54.960 And I know you're going to love him.

00:01:56.180 So we'll get to him in one second.

00:01:58.140 But first, this.

00:02:04.880 Charles C.W. Cook.

00:02:06.440 Thank you so much for being here.

00:02:08.060 Thank you for having me.

00:02:08.940 I feel like there's so much to talk about.

00:02:11.160 Thursday marks Biden's 100th day in office.

00:02:15.620 He's got a 53 percent approval rating or so.

00:02:18.140 Only two presidents in the last seven decades have been lower.

00:02:20.980 Trump and Gerald Ford.

00:02:22.540 According to Chuck Todd, however, 53 is the new 60.

00:02:25.580 So he's 53 percent approval.

00:02:27.000 And my impression, I want your impression because I know you're a libertarian.

00:02:30.540 But my impression, I have a healthy libertarian streak in me, too, is that Joe Biden absolutely

00:02:35.740 loves putting the thumb of the federal government on the American people.

00:02:40.780 He loves it.

00:02:41.700 He does it at every turn.

00:02:43.460 And I am starting to feel it.

00:02:45.800 I'm feeling the constricted thumb on me, whether it comes to COVID or spending or my children's

00:02:53.500 education and their their future pocketbooks, because they're going to be paying back the

00:02:57.880 10 trillion in spending he wants to push out there with no accountability.

00:03:01.720 I'm I'm alarmed at what we got because I don't think this is what we were promised.

00:03:06.880 And I want your take on it.

00:03:08.200 What do you think?

00:03:08.560 I think that's the key point, is that it's not what we were promised.

00:03:13.000 There is, it seems, no area in which Joe Biden has libertarian instincts.

00:03:17.440 He's not, for example, even in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

00:03:21.600 He's not a complicated politician.

00:03:27.540 He is in favor of state power.

00:03:32.020 But I think why it feels so disconcerting outside of the fact that as a conservative,

00:03:38.660 I don't like his policies is that he was careful throughout the primary and the general election

00:03:46.780 election to cast himself as a moderate.

00:03:50.540 Certainly, he talked about decency and honor and tried to contrast himself with President

00:03:56.060 Trump.

00:03:57.000 But he also pushed back against his own party.

00:04:00.820 And there was a famous moment in the prime meet where he said, well, I am the Democratic

00:04:05.100 Party now.

00:04:08.020 And I don't think that's true.

00:04:10.480 I think he has given in on every topic to the far left within his coalition.

00:04:19.960 It did not strike me as likely, given his rhetoric during the general election, that he would

00:04:26.460 immediately try to spend six trillion dollars.

00:04:29.820 That's one and a half times the entire spending for last year.

00:04:35.880 He has pushed hard on a whole range of social issues.

00:04:43.960 He abandoned his support for the Hyde Amendment, for example.

00:04:48.020 He nominated Xavier Becerra to Health and Human Services.

00:04:53.320 He's gone in on gun control.

00:04:56.000 And he's indulging some of the most illiberal parts of his party's platform, packing the Supreme

00:05:03.460 Court, statehood for D.C.

00:05:08.240 This isn't a moderate president.

00:05:10.060 Now, of course, he's allowed to do what he wants.

00:05:12.080 There's nothing in the Constitution that holds a politician to his campaign promises.

00:05:17.600 But perhaps one of the reasons it feels so alarming is that it is a different presidency than the one

00:05:25.420 that was previewed.

00:05:27.300 Can we talk about the spending?

00:05:28.320 Interesting because the spending, you know, I'm old enough to remember, as they say, when

00:05:34.820 like excessive spending that wasn't funded would be a major news story that could dominate

00:05:40.160 the headlines for days and weeks, especially on Fox News.

00:05:43.480 And I feel like maybe there's just so much going on with all the social engineering he's

00:05:47.640 doing and so on that they're not paying as much attention to it.

00:05:50.000 But you mentioned the numbers.

00:05:52.200 There's been so much.

00:05:53.660 I spent like an hour and a half this morning just trying to lay it all out.

00:05:56.520 OK, I'm losing track of the trillions.

00:06:00.880 We've got his latest two point two trillion infrastructure bill as far as I can see.

00:06:08.240 That's what he's calling his jobs plan, the American jobs plan.

00:06:12.040 But that's only the first half.

00:06:13.700 Another two trillion is going to come in infrastructure proposals.

00:06:17.360 So he's got, you know, and all all told about four point two trillion coming our way in, quote,

00:06:22.160 infrastructure spending, which isn't infrastructure at all.

00:06:25.240 That's on the heels of one point nine in covid relief, which, by the way, followed Donald

00:06:30.060 Trump's four point one in covid relief.

00:06:31.880 Right.

00:06:32.020 So he came into the office.

00:06:33.040 We've spent four point one trillion in covid.

00:06:35.720 He drops another one point nine in covid relief.

00:06:38.660 Then he's got his he's got I'm trying to keep track.

00:06:41.540 OK, so then he's got his two point two trillion infrastructure.

00:06:46.120 Part one later, another two trillion will come in part two.

00:06:49.800 And now on Wednesday night, he unveils his one point eight trillion in his family's plan.

00:06:57.300 I can't keep track of all this.

00:06:59.500 None of this other than the than the covid relief has been approved and is in the process of being

00:07:05.440 set sent out.

00:07:06.680 But it's a lot of trillions, Charlie.

00:07:08.940 A lot of trillions.

00:07:09.800 It's a lot of money and it is, for the most part, being fraudulently sold.

00:07:17.720 I was not doctrinaire in my approach to some of the spending in the midst of the coronavirus

00:07:26.700 crisis.

00:07:27.600 And indeed, some of it I thought was necessary, especially given that the government had been

00:07:34.040 instrumental in shutting down the country and thereby depriving people of their liberty

00:07:38.400 and livelihood and so on.

00:07:39.600 But this most recent bill, I think it was debatable whether any relief was necessary.

00:07:47.040 But the vast majority of the spending had nothing to do with covid anyhow.

00:07:52.480 So in a sense, what Biden did is he came in, he grasped the mantle of this crisis and he

00:08:01.340 put in a whole bunch of pork that really was not relevant to covid.

00:08:10.040 And you know how I know that, Megan, because the second that it passed, Fox and the New York

00:08:15.320 Times and the New Republic started saying this wasn't really a covid bill.

00:08:20.120 This was an anti-poverty bill.

00:08:21.580 This was a progressive bill.

00:08:23.220 This was a bill that did this, this, this, this and this.

00:08:26.520 And only a small part of it had to do with covid.

00:08:29.500 And from what I can see, that is also what Biden is doing with the infrastructure bill.

00:08:34.480 There is money in there for infrastructure.

00:08:36.780 But a lot of it is not what we would traditionally regard as infrastructure.

00:08:42.600 And conservatives have taken to mocking this.

00:08:44.680 You know, these people, they say everything is in forestry is infrastructure.

00:08:49.320 But there's a good reason for that.

00:08:50.720 I mean, this bill is is another progressive wish list.

00:08:55.900 So I think a couple of things explain this.

00:08:58.500 The first is the president is obviously frustrated by Congress in that the filibuster is still

00:09:04.800 standing in his way.

00:09:06.320 It doesn't look as if for the moment, at least, the Democratic Party has the votes to get rid

00:09:10.660 of it.

00:09:10.960 And much of the Democratic Party's agenda doesn't have 50 votes anyway.

00:09:16.220 HR1, the voting bill, doesn't have the votes.

00:09:19.320 HR8, the gun control bill, doesn't have the votes.

00:09:22.180 There aren't the votes for D.C. statehood.

00:09:23.980 There aren't the votes for packing the court.

00:09:25.680 There aren't the votes for most climate change ideas.

00:09:28.480 And the one thing that there are the votes for and that can be done without the filibuster is

00:09:34.520 spending gobs of money.

00:09:36.960 And so Biden has retreated into this mode where he just suggests spending over and over again,

00:09:44.260 because that's what he can get through the Senate, thanks to the Byrd rule.

00:09:48.720 But that doesn't make it any less alarming, and especially given that we're not actually

00:09:54.580 in a depression.

00:09:56.620 We're not in a crisis.

00:09:59.200 It has been a terrible time for many, many people.

00:10:01.600 But if you look at the economy, it's beginning to hot up.

00:10:04.220 And any news story, in fact, that you read on the economy says that we may be on track for

00:10:13.180 record explosive growth.

00:10:15.400 Traditionally, we don't spend trillions of dollars that we don't have further indebting

00:10:21.520 our children when we're about to see explosive growth.

00:10:25.220 And I think that underscores that this really isn't about COVID relief or infrastructural jobs.

00:10:31.260 It's about trying to crowbar in longstanding progressive priorities through the back door.

00:10:39.680 There's somebody who's clearly doing construction in the apartment right above me, which is what

00:10:44.380 we're hearing in the background.

00:10:45.360 So we'll have to muddle through.

00:10:46.580 It's the infrastructure plan writ large.

00:10:50.180 Exactly.

00:10:51.340 So we'll see what we can do about yelling at my neighbors.

00:10:53.360 That always goes over well.

00:10:55.000 I couldn't agree with you more, right?

00:10:56.440 This is like, this is just a, it's a wish list of democratic causes.

00:11:00.220 And they use, they use good terms like education funding, childcare funding.

00:11:04.220 This is in the newest family plan.

00:11:06.480 Pre-K instruction.

00:11:07.460 Who doesn't want, who doesn't want more of that?

00:11:09.700 And yet we have zero plan on how to pay for it other than tax the rich, tax the rich.

00:11:14.460 That's what all he keeps saying is tax the rich.

00:11:16.520 I don't, do you believe this is just going to be paid for by taxing the rich?

00:11:20.700 No.

00:11:21.100 And in fact, this morning, the Biden administration has made it clear that the spending element

00:11:28.480 of this is, is a bit of a game by saying, oh, well, one other thing we're going to do is

00:11:34.300 we're going to increase enforcement at the IRS, which is a little bit like waste, fraud

00:11:39.460 and abuse never actually happens.

00:11:42.800 I mean, I think, I think a couple of things are worth saying on the, on the paying for it

00:11:46.660 front.

00:11:47.040 The first is that although it is not the case that everyone in the democratic party has

00:11:52.800 lost his mind, um, there is a theory that is percolating in progressive circles that

00:12:00.980 holds that it doesn't actually matter whether you can pay for spending or not because the

00:12:04.540 federal government is able to print money.

00:12:06.940 And this is called modern, modern monetary theory.

00:12:10.440 Um, I'm not convinced that Joe Biden is a devotee of it, but enough progressives are,

00:12:15.120 uh, that the pressure on a lot of the caucus to pay for the spending that they want is

00:12:22.180 diminished.

00:12:23.440 Um, but the, the second point is that they look at what the Trump administration did with

00:12:30.380 its tax cut, uh, bill in 2017, and they see a chance to raise a lot of money by simply

00:12:39.260 changing the, um, the rates, especially on, on corporations.

00:12:44.140 And that's popular and people like the sound of it when you say, Hey, we're going to tax large

00:12:50.780 corporations more than we have been.

00:12:53.680 Um, but I think people often forget that that does ultimately affect them.

00:12:59.600 And I wonder whether there will be a backlash against those tax increases that people can't

00:13:07.680 anticipate now, but that will affect their pocketbooks ahead of the midterms and, and do

00:13:14.200 some damage to the Democrats standing in Washington.

00:13:16.600 Mm-hmm.

00:13:17.920 The, the union gifts in this money alone, um, you know, should shock the conscience of

00:13:23.540 most conservatives.

00:13:25.220 The, uh, the New York post put it as follows.

00:13:27.800 Um, every single push from this president is for a total transformation, a massive expansion

00:13:34.060 of government, union power, democratic control, and green new deal boondoggles all financed via

00:13:40.600 trillions in debt and redistributive new taxes to please far left socialist leaning progressives.

00:13:46.260 If Biden and co get their way, say goodbye to America as we once knew it.

00:13:52.240 Thanks, Georgia.

00:13:53.200 I think about that all the time.

00:13:55.720 It's, it's, it's a little bit like remembering a sporting event that your team lost because

00:14:01.960 the runner just didn't quite get to the base or, uh, or into the end zone.

00:14:09.480 And then you just sit there for days, just imagining one final push and you could have

00:14:14.780 had the world series.

00:14:16.460 I mean, yes, the difference between, um, winning and losing in Georgia seems to have been $6 trillion.

00:14:26.320 Oh my gosh.

00:14:27.460 Um, look, I, I think the odd thing about Biden, uh, is that he is acting in a way that presidents

00:14:34.400 typically only act when they are the beneficiaries of landslide victories.

00:14:39.640 Right.

00:14:40.340 There've been a series of Axios pieces on Biden's FDR.

00:14:45.440 It's, uh, a designation that this president seems to like, uh, and if they're feeling a little

00:14:53.620 more modest, they'll use LBJ instead.

00:14:57.220 But the point here is that Franklin Roosevelt won in 1932 in a landslide victory, uh, that

00:15:04.160 was echoed and increased upon in 1936.

00:15:07.920 Uh, by the, the January of 1937, Franklin Roosevelt had a super majority in the Senate.

00:15:19.200 He had more than three quarters of the senators in the United States.

00:15:24.580 Uh, Lyndon Johnson likewise won a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, one of the most

00:15:30.440 lopsided in American history, uh, and had large congressional majorities to boot.

00:15:36.300 Joe Biden beat Donald Trump.

00:15:39.020 The idea that the election was stolen is false, but he didn't beat him by much.

00:15:44.100 I mean, if 90,000 votes had gone the other way in the United States in 2020, the Republican

00:15:51.400 party would control the house of representatives, the Senate and the white house.

00:15:56.020 And this was a squeaker of a victory.

00:15:58.520 Uh, the majority in the house, the Democrats enjoy is I think six seats and they don't have

00:16:04.940 a majority, uh, in the Senate, but of course, functionally they do because the vice president

00:16:10.080 breaks ties.

00:16:11.580 And yet all of this rhetoric we're hearing is fundamentally transformed when there isn't

00:16:17.920 a mandate or an enthusiasm for it.

00:16:20.840 And there's no real legislative mechanism for it.

00:16:24.960 Um, so again, I'm, I'm baffled.

00:16:29.300 It feels disconcerting because this is neither what we were promised nor what people seem

00:16:35.140 to have voted for.

00:16:37.100 When you hear AOC say that she's enthusiastic about his first 100 days, she's really pleased.

00:16:42.940 I get concerned, right?

00:16:44.640 She's, she's the last person I want to be, to see enthusiastic about him and his agenda.

00:16:49.540 I think there's one other element here though, that we should mention, and that is that the

00:16:55.500 Republican party has brought much of this on itself, uh, not just, uh, electorally, uh,

00:17:01.780 but by having forgotten that it is supposed to be the party of smaller government and of personal

00:17:12.340 responsibility, and it is supposed to be worried about deficits and debt and Republicans have

00:17:19.040 never been perfect on this.

00:17:20.400 They weren't while Ronald Reagan was president.

00:17:22.360 They weren't while George W. Bush was president.

00:17:24.260 And they certainly, um, weren't while Trump was president, but they have always been better at it

00:17:30.360 than the Democrats.

00:17:31.480 And they used to be able to speak this language fluently and in a way that appealed to people.

00:17:36.900 They used to be able to marshal their voters and many, many independents and even fiscally

00:17:42.240 conservative Democrats, uh, against endless spending and irresponsibility.

00:17:49.340 And at the moment, at least, I just don't see them doing it especially well that they did not make

00:17:54.600 a great case against this pork laden COVID bill.

00:17:58.180 They are struggling to make a case, uh, against the infrastructure bill.

00:18:02.980 And perhaps because they were so happy to spend money, leave aside COVID for a moment during the Trump

00:18:09.160 years, um, they are less credible on it.

00:18:11.920 And that's bad.

00:18:13.120 That's bad for America.

00:18:14.140 I was just going to ask you that.

00:18:15.060 I was just going to ask you why, why are they so silent?

00:18:17.140 They just, it just seems like there is no warrior on the opposite side.

00:18:20.560 It's like they lost, they fell out of practice and how to argue when Trump was in there.

00:18:23.820 They couldn't argue with him and he was their best spokesperson in arguing against the Democrats.

00:18:28.720 And now they're just these weak little silent lambs.

00:18:31.980 Yeah.

00:18:32.660 And look, that, that should alarm people.

00:18:35.940 Well, I'm sorry, I'm a conservative.

00:18:38.160 I ideologically want a smaller government.

00:18:41.480 I think that that works better in the long run.

00:18:44.460 I think it is a virtue to spend only what you have, but everyone should be worried, irrespective

00:18:51.080 of their politics, irrespective of what sort of government they would like to see.

00:18:55.520 Everyone should be worried.

00:18:57.080 The idea that because we haven't yet had a debt crisis, we will never had one is absurd.

00:19:02.620 I mean, we are just habitually as a matter of active policy, spending money we don't have.

00:19:10.200 And I'm not just talking about the COVID bill, about the coming infrastructure bill and anything

00:19:15.800 that comes after it.

00:19:16.840 That's discretionary spending.

00:19:18.440 Just entitlements.

00:19:20.240 You cannot forever spend money that you don't have.

00:19:24.840 Eventually, something will break, and it will be far, far worse if it breaks outside of our

00:19:32.680 control and anticipation than if it breaks within it.

00:19:37.060 That, you know, if you look back 10 years to 2008, 9, 10, 11, I had many, many disagreements,

00:19:47.140 of course, with President Obama and with the Democrats.

00:19:50.060 But at least they were willing to acknowledge, along with the Republicans, that there was

00:19:56.580 a problem.

00:19:57.360 At least they were forming commissions and having negotiations.

00:20:01.420 Now, nothing came of it.

00:20:03.280 But Barack Obama was willing to stand up and say, we have a bit of a problem with deficits

00:20:08.960 and debt and our entitlements.

00:20:11.540 The Republicans were too.

00:20:13.920 And now I just don't see it.

00:20:16.880 And that doesn't mean that it's gone away.

00:20:19.200 It means that we're more likely to face a catastrophe than we were.

00:20:26.520 And meanwhile, the money goes toward things that half the country doesn't support.

00:20:31.860 You know, that like there will be hundreds of billions to big labor if his infrastructure

00:20:36.520 bill goes through.

00:20:38.600 And there was a great article in the Post that I quoted from saying it's designed to promote

00:20:42.860 above market rates for union wages.

00:20:44.900 Mandatory union membership, trying to make that as easy and prevalent as possible.

00:20:50.800 Hundreds of billions, of course, to green energy companies.

00:20:53.020 We saw how that worked out with Solyndra.

00:20:55.520 Everybody's going to be driving green cars.

00:20:57.540 They want $350 billion for state and local governments that have spent irresponsibly, like

00:21:02.620 my state, New York.

00:21:03.580 They want all the federal cars being driven to be electric cars.

00:21:08.300 I mean, like this this really is like Joe Biden just got drunk on the nation's cash and just

00:21:15.760 rolled around in the money and on some White House bed saying, oh, my God, this is wonderful.

00:21:20.660 What can I do to make everyone on my side happy?

00:21:23.280 And they just came in with their lists.

00:21:25.280 And he he never said no.

00:21:26.880 And on top of that, though, like the thing that's demoralizing is on top of all this irresponsible

00:21:33.480 spending and Democratic wish list gifts, the demoralization of the police, the attacks on

00:21:42.500 any white person just for having white skin, the the online climate of bullying.

00:21:49.780 You know, I'm thinking right now of that horrible video, some he describes himself as some as

00:21:55.240 a black activist took of the Holiday Inn employee who clearly had special needs.

00:22:00.160 He got in his face, accused him of some unknown slight.

00:22:03.560 And the kid who says he has bipolar disorder and a young man winds up hitting himself in the

00:22:08.960 head over and over and then smashing his head against the computer.

00:22:11.440 And still, the activist circulates it in an effort to attack him for his alleged racism.

00:22:16.920 It's all of it is demoralizing.

00:22:20.080 It makes me sad.

00:22:21.540 I don't know what to wish for.

00:22:23.020 I never thought I'd be thinking about the Obama years as sort of the reasonable, you know,

00:22:27.740 government restraint time.

00:22:31.260 But it's that's kind of how I'm feeling these days.

00:22:35.340 Yeah.

00:22:35.520 And again, it goes back to the difference between what we're seeing in office and what we saw

00:22:40.440 during the election in that all of the policies that you just described are divisive, to use

00:22:48.840 a favorite term of the left.

00:22:52.000 It is divisive to send money to unions to which most people do not belong.

00:22:58.920 It is divisive to bail out San Francisco and to encourage its profligacy and irresponsibility.

00:23:05.860 People who live in Texas and Florida and North Carolina and states that have balanced their

00:23:14.420 budget and have made hard choices are sending money to states that will not and that will

00:23:23.420 upset people and it should.

00:23:26.120 And on the police, I mean, look, I'm a libertarian.

00:23:31.380 And I have a healthy skepticism of government and to some extent of the police.

00:23:36.500 But there is a considerable difference between saying, let's look at how policing works.

00:23:43.800 Let's look at who it affects.

00:23:45.600 Let's look at whether we need fewer laws or different laws.

00:23:49.080 Let's look at the rules surrounding the use of force and saying that the police should be

00:23:56.800 abolished or that they are the leading cause of death for black men in America, which one

00:24:02.400 guest on CNN said recently, or to suggest, which is just not true, that police officers

00:24:10.400 in the United States are just constantly wandering around executing minorities for the sake of

00:24:17.860 it.

00:24:18.000 And it's especially offensive to propose that, given how many police officers are themselves

00:24:22.600 minorities.

00:24:23.920 And, you know, one of the promises of Joe Biden, and I mean that quite sincerely, not

00:24:29.420 as a concern troll, one of the promises of Joe Biden, one of the things that I thought

00:24:37.260 was possible if he became president was that this sort of rhetoric would be tamped down, that

00:24:45.000 he would serve as a mediator between those sorts of activists and the Republicans.

00:24:52.700 But he hasn't.

00:24:54.760 I mean, he even put out a statement the other day after the shooting in Columbus, in which

00:25:04.240 a police officer saved a young black woman's life from another young black woman who was

00:25:09.540 wielding a knife.

00:25:12.260 A Joe Biden that was truly interested in healing the nation or in uniting people would not have

00:25:18.240 put out the statement that he did.

00:25:19.780 A Joe Biden that was truly interested in healing the nation or uniting would not have weighed

00:25:26.420 in on the Derek Chauvin verdict before it came out.

00:25:32.200 And I don't like the idea he's this doddering old senile guy, because although he is clearly

00:25:39.820 older and less sharp than he was, he doesn't seem to have completely lost his mind.

00:25:43.780 But he has demonstrated that he doesn't really believe in anything.

00:25:48.360 And that's increasingly a problem.

00:25:51.380 I mean, the thing, the Michaela Bryant case out of Columbus, Ohio, has been just disgraceful

00:25:56.420 on so many levels.

00:25:57.380 And I know you did a very, very smart piece in National Review, tongue in cheek, talking

00:26:03.120 about, you know, how so many people ran to make light of the knife fight.

00:26:08.000 Like, oh, it's just a good old fashioned life, a knife fight.

00:26:11.060 You know, who hasn't, who didn't spend their days, I think you said something like playing

00:26:14.660 Nintendo, going out for an afternoon knife fight.

00:26:19.500 Well, it was just preposterous, wasn't it?

00:26:21.560 I mean, the knives are extremely dangerous.

00:26:23.860 The idea that we just leave teenagers alone to stab each other is absurd.

00:26:28.100 Yes, and it made me that I don't know if you saw Gad said, who's brilliant on Twitter, he

00:26:34.300 he had a little bit where he did something similar.

00:26:37.120 And I wanted to play you just a bit of it because you have to it's laugh or cry these

00:26:40.920 days.

00:26:41.200 And so here's a chance for a laugh.

00:26:42.980 As someone who is an expert in human behavior, I can tell you that the way she was about to

00:26:47.620 plunge the, you know, long blade knife into the other woman's heart was in a playful

00:26:57.360 way.

00:26:57.820 Kids taunt each other.

00:26:59.220 They're horse playing, right?

00:27:01.120 You're using a knife to kind of tease and tickle someone else's heart by stabbing a six inch

00:27:08.140 blade into her heart.

00:27:09.500 And as she's in midair about to plunge the knife in a playful way, again, you got to remember

00:27:15.700 like these were just kids playing, just like a lot of people at MSNBC and a lot of pundits,

00:27:21.140 a lot of critical race people said, kids play with knives.

00:27:24.720 They stab each other to death.

00:27:27.060 And that's just part of growing up.

00:27:29.020 Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist said that, you know, you have different cognitive

00:27:32.840 developmental stages.

00:27:34.280 One of the stages is when kids, you know, knife each other to death.

00:27:37.820 That's just, you know, you progress.

00:27:39.300 You know, I've probably killed and been killed by at least maybe 30, 40 kids that I've killed

00:27:45.860 or have been killed by.

00:27:46.980 It's like horse playing, just having fun with knives.

00:27:51.940 Oh, gosh.

00:27:53.720 I mean, we're laughing at the absurdity of that because that's actually what people like

00:28:00.060 Joy Reid and the BLM woman.

00:28:02.580 What's her name?

00:28:03.400 The crazy one.

00:28:04.320 Brie.

00:28:05.320 Is it Brie Newsome?

00:28:06.780 Yeah.

00:28:07.040 Have been saying that's actually what they've been saying to attack police because they've

00:28:12.000 never seen a situation in which they don't think the police are wrong.

00:28:14.820 Um, even just the other day, I saw somebody on CNN saying 17 black men have been killed

00:28:21.220 by police just so far this year.

00:28:23.100 Well, I don't know.

00:28:23.940 I haven't seen the tracker, but the truth is that there are about a thousand people killed

00:28:29.080 by police in any given year, black and white and other races, and about 10 million people

00:28:35.880 are arrested by police in a year.

00:28:38.100 And so at this point, we probably have about nearly three and a half million people who have

00:28:42.520 been arrested, three and a half million arrests.

00:28:44.820 And if 17 black men have been killed, I'd like to know more about the circumstances.

00:28:50.260 Were they armed?

00:28:51.020 Did they resist arrest?

00:28:52.620 The numbers of black men who are killed who are unarmed, not resisting arrest?

00:28:57.000 They're almost none.

00:28:58.120 I mean, there'll be almost none that have that haven't resisted arrest.

00:29:01.500 But in any event, this is where we're at now.

00:29:03.380 We have this sort of running clock.

00:29:04.840 We don't add context.

00:29:06.480 We don't add whether somebody resisted.

00:29:08.100 We don't add whether they fired on the officer first.

00:29:10.160 We don't add the fact that it's 10 to 11 million arrests.

00:29:13.500 It's just 17.

00:29:14.600 And when a cop gets caught on body cams, which they're supposed to have, shooting another

00:29:19.600 young black woman to protect the life of a second young black woman, they get attacked

00:29:24.640 for that because that's just horseplay that the cop is supposed to know in a moment's notice

00:29:28.560 is like Nintendo, as you put it.

00:29:30.680 Well, this one was particularly strange in that clearly the initial report trickled into

00:29:37.640 newsrooms and editors thought, aha, we'll tie this to the George Floyd verdict.

00:29:44.720 And so you saw headlines that said, mere hours before the verdict in the George Floyd case,

00:29:53.640 a white police officer killed a young black woman in Columbus.

00:29:58.260 And then within a few hours, it turned out that she had a knife and not only that she

00:30:05.840 had a knife, but that the footage showed that she was about three feet away from the person

00:30:11.800 she was attacking with her arm raised in the air about to stab her.

00:30:19.540 And instead of saying at that point, ah, well, actually, that's not quite what we thought

00:30:23.180 it was.

00:30:23.620 Maybe we shouldn't link the two together.

00:30:25.160 The people who had made the initial connection said, no, we'll still go with it.

00:30:31.380 And so they've tied themselves into these absolutely ridiculous knots.

00:30:35.200 And there was a quote from a Black Lives Matter activist in the Washington Post recently

00:30:40.040 in a story about this incident.

00:30:44.260 He said, everything about Makaya's death and the reaction to her death shows we don't believe

00:30:49.200 black girls and children have the ability to make mistakes.

00:30:52.340 Now, in order to believe that, you have to say that the girl who was saved by the police

00:31:01.020 officer should not have been.

00:31:03.300 That's what the word mistake means there.

00:31:05.700 Mistake means that an unarmed woman has a knife driven into her body by someone else.

00:31:14.540 This really is not more complicated than that.

00:31:17.360 The police officer had two options.

00:31:20.380 The first option was that he opened fire.

00:31:23.400 The second option was that he didn't.

00:31:26.100 And if he didn't, then he would have been witness to and in some ways an accomplice to

00:31:33.300 an attempted murder and very probably, given the size of the knife, a murder.

00:31:38.940 This was not a situation that could be de-escalated, that there are situations that can be de-escalated.

00:31:45.020 I'm in favor of de-escalation.

00:31:47.080 If you show up and someone looks as if they might be a threat to themselves or someone else,

00:31:53.100 there are ways of de-escalating that.

00:31:55.000 But this was an attempted murder in progress.

00:31:58.240 The knife was upturned.

00:32:00.220 She was three feet away from her.

00:32:02.620 And at that point, you really do have only one of two choices.

00:32:05.840 And unless you believe that we should privilege the safety of attempted murderers rather than

00:32:13.660 attempted murderees, which I don't, then it seems quite clear that the officer made the

00:32:18.060 right decision and that there was nothing racist or unfair about his having done so.

00:32:23.120 Up next, the Democrats in the Biden administration have some sweeping ideas for how to reform the

00:32:29.200 police.

00:32:29.880 No thought for actual criminality and how to stop that, right?

00:32:33.180 No thought for seven-year-old Jaslyn out in Chicago who was gunned down with 45 shell casings

00:32:37.900 found outside of her car.

00:32:39.300 It's all about police reform.

00:32:41.100 That's next.

00:32:45.340 Right now in Minneapolis, we're about to see the trial of Derek Chauvin's co-police officers,

00:32:50.900 three of them, who are on trial for assisting, abetting attempted murder, abetting murder,

00:32:57.060 just because they stood by while Chauvin had the knee on the neck, right?

00:33:00.880 Because they didn't do anything to help George Floyd.

00:33:04.340 Think about this white cop in Columbus, Ohio.

00:33:07.760 If he had just stood there while another woman, much more than Derek Chauvin, was actively in

00:33:14.380 the process of murdering somebody.

00:33:16.440 It was much, much more clear in the tape that we saw in the McKay O'Brien case because it was

00:33:22.120 on tape and it was about to happen within seconds.

00:33:25.440 There was no ambiguity.

00:33:27.680 But yeah, it's everything that matters when it comes to race, you know, the race of the

00:33:32.540 person involved and whether it's a police officer, right?

00:33:35.320 It's like that even if that had been a black cop, there'd be outrage.

00:33:39.020 And even now they're admitting, like Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota,

00:33:42.820 admitted that there was zero proof in the Chauvin trial, zero, that Chauvin had any racial

00:33:48.640 animus whatsoever toward George Floyd or any other black person.

00:33:52.600 It just doesn't care.

00:33:53.480 It just now if a police officer encounters a black suspect or any sort of crime involving

00:33:59.160 a black person, they're in a lot of potential danger.

00:34:02.920 The police officer is because now, I mean, especially if we see the bill passed that Biden

00:34:07.780 is pushing for, right, the George Floyd act, they want things like get rid of qualified

00:34:15.100 immunity. They they want no chokeholds or carotid holds whatsoever.

00:34:19.320 I mean, that that's going to lead to more violent options, not fewer.

00:34:22.700 That's that's just the truth.

00:34:24.320 You take away cops immunity.

00:34:26.660 They probably won't intervene.

00:34:28.280 The girl in the pink in the McKay O'Brien case, she probably would have died.

00:34:31.860 If you want to make it easier, as this act does, to prosecute police, to prosecute them

00:34:36.580 by lowering the legal standard to go after them from willfulness to just recklessness.

00:34:40.940 Good luck recruiting police officers who are already quitting in droves in places like

00:34:45.980 New York.

00:34:46.460 I just there's no what does it take?

00:34:49.860 Does it take the numbers of deaths and murders in the inner cities, which are already skyrocketing?

00:34:54.880 We went over this the other day to quintuple instead of triple, like before they realize

00:35:01.900 that it's not a good idea to blame all this criminality on police.

00:35:07.340 So I'm probably less conservative on the question of policing than you.

00:35:15.000 I've heard you.

00:35:15.600 Yeah, I've heard you on that.

00:35:17.020 And I and I have far more interest in in ending qualified immunity.

00:35:23.020 Now, that that is a federal concern.

00:35:25.300 But one of the reasons I object to the George Floyd bill, nevertheless, is that I don't think

00:35:30.900 the federal government should be micromanaging policing.

00:35:33.000 And one of the reasons that I don't think the federal government should be doing that, other

00:35:37.080 than that it is by the text of the Constitution, not its job, I don't believe it has the power

00:35:42.500 to do that, is that I think when we look at what we can do to reform police in cases where

00:35:52.300 policing isn't working.

00:35:54.460 And I'm absolutely with you in that I don't think the police are the primary problem here.

00:35:59.920 But, you know, they're not perfect either.

00:36:01.920 So insofar as we look at how to change that, you have to look at the local level.

00:36:11.200 There is no one size fits all rule that is going to change this.

00:36:16.700 I think police reform is really boring.

00:36:19.440 I don't mean it's a boring topic to talk about, but I mean it's a grind.

00:36:23.600 It's like anything.

00:36:25.000 Education reform, there is no one line answer.

00:36:28.660 There is no sexy solution.

00:36:32.260 It's going to be a matter of trial and error, of minor changes in training.

00:36:41.780 And it's not going to be fixed by one law at the federal level.

00:36:46.960 Now, qualified immunity is a little bit different because that is a federal concern.

00:36:50.580 It's also a doctrine that was determined by the Supreme Court and obviously, therefore,

00:36:54.920 has been federalized.

00:36:57.540 But I think that the Biden approach here is the wrong one because of that.

00:37:05.020 And I'd also point out that from what I understand about the police reforms that the Biden administration

00:37:10.440 is pushing, they also have an awful racial component to them that leads to absolutely absurd outcomes.

00:37:20.840 The difference between, say, the way that Senator Tim Scott looks at this and the way that the Biden administration looks at this

00:37:29.160 is that the Biden administration's ideas are infused with this disparate impact theory

00:37:35.420 that essentially says that if there is any difference in the outcomes statistically between races,

00:37:42.680 then that must be a problem caused by the police.

00:37:47.060 And I'm afraid that is nuts.

00:37:50.060 You know, there is an enormous disparate impact difference between, say, men and women

00:37:55.860 because men commit all the violent crime.

00:37:58.820 It's like 98% of violent crime is committed by men.

00:38:01.980 And the vast majority of that is committed by young men, not older men.

00:38:07.260 Now, that's not the product of bias.

00:38:10.120 That's not the product of police prejudice.

00:38:13.160 That's the product of what the police are responding to.

00:38:18.500 It's supply driven.

00:38:20.400 Right. I mean, you look at the race, look at the numbers already, right?

00:38:24.420 You could just just look at today.

00:38:25.480 You don't even have to track anything.

00:38:27.060 You've got black people who are about 13 percent of the population.

00:38:30.680 Black men are about six, six and a half percent of the population.

00:38:33.580 But black people, and it's almost always men, commit 60 percent of the violent crimes in the major cities.

00:38:40.320 So it is going to be a disproportionate arrest rate.

00:38:43.100 It absolutely is.

00:38:44.220 And instead of saying, well, why don't we take a look at why those crime numbers are so high?

00:38:48.160 It's let's take a look at what's wrong with police.

00:38:51.280 So it's such absurd problem solving.

00:38:54.380 You know what it reminds me of?

00:38:56.100 When I was at Oxford, I went to a debate about education.

00:39:00.880 And one of the participants in the debate said that Oxford should be taking far more people who didn't make the grade.

00:39:11.540 Because otherwise you would never see, what's the fancy word we use now?

00:39:16.420 Equity.

00:39:16.820 And professor after professor stood up and said, no, that just won't work.

00:39:23.040 This has been tried.

00:39:24.980 You cannot fix what is wrong with education or what is wrong with society at age 18.

00:39:29.780 You can't do it.

00:39:31.220 And it doesn't help anyone.

00:39:32.320 It just frustrates everyone involved and makes nothing better.

00:39:36.380 So I'm absolutely open to the idea that we should fix education at the age of seven.

00:39:44.020 And I'm absolutely open to the idea that there's a lot unfair about our society that leads to people taking divergent paths when they hit 18.

00:39:54.120 But as with education, you can't fix the reality that the police operate in at the point at which they're operating in it.

00:40:04.700 You have to go much further back than that.

00:40:07.880 So if it strikes you, as it does me, as a pretty big problem, that, as you said, 13% of the population is black, but 60% of the violent crime is committed by mostly black men,

00:40:20.280 then we should, as a society, really try to change that.

00:40:25.660 But you can't do it at the point of policing.

00:40:28.420 It's too late.

00:40:29.140 That's right.

00:40:29.560 Much too late.

00:40:30.000 And I think that's also one of the reasons that the Biden approach is a mistake, because it is putting a pressure on police officers that however talented they are, however open-minded they are, they're never, ever going to be able to respond to.

00:40:51.140 Absolutely right.

00:40:52.220 I mean, can you imagine how demoralized and how scared they are right now?

00:40:55.420 And I've said this many times, but, you know, you're probably not going to be the one that suffers in your presumably nice neighborhood in Florida.

00:41:03.200 I'm not going to be the one who suffers in my, you know, high rise on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

00:41:08.180 It is mostly women and children in the inner cities who are going to pay the price for this.

00:41:14.040 And the black community writ large is in support of keeping the policing, the number of police, at least the same, or increasing the number of police in their communities.

00:41:25.080 That's not to say they can't make improvements in how they approach arrests and so on.

00:41:29.840 But let's get real.

00:41:31.720 Resisting arrest leads to bad results for most people, black or white.

00:41:35.940 And what we're seeing, for example, now out of North Carolina, there's a case out of North Carolina now where they've only released 20 seconds of the video to the family and not yet to the public.

00:41:48.200 But already the police are having to defend a case down there in the case of it's Andrew Brown Jr.

00:41:52.760 who was shot and killed to death in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

00:41:57.240 Without knowing anything, all we know is that they did kill a man, right, that he did.

00:42:02.540 They did kill a man.

00:42:03.320 And he was, according to the reports, a drug dealer.

00:42:06.840 You're not allowed to say that because then you're demonizing the person.

00:42:09.240 Well, it's relevant to the police's level of fear, to the police's understanding of what they were dealing with.

00:42:13.740 The man was 42 years old and he was shot, according to the family, with his hands on the steering wheel.

00:42:20.060 They said he was driving away.

00:42:21.540 The witnesses on CNN, the family, was saying he was driving away from the officers.

00:42:24.880 He wasn't trying to kill the officers.

00:42:26.460 He was trying to drive around them.

00:42:28.160 Like, well, we need to know more.

00:42:30.860 Shouldn't we, before we jump on every single thing that the police do, yes, they have deadly encounters.

00:42:36.740 Yes, it's about a thousand a year.

00:42:38.380 Yes, that's too many.

00:42:39.720 But we don't, each situation is different and depends upon the facts going into it.

00:42:44.860 And now we're at the point where CNN puts the family on the air just to say, this is a racist cop.

00:42:49.940 This is a racist system.

00:42:51.140 We have to redesign the entire police.

00:42:53.580 We don't even know any facts at all about what happened to this man.

00:42:58.560 To me, it's very frustrating as a lawyer because due process, don't make me laugh.

00:43:03.540 The most we can hope for is that it remains in the system, but it's certainly not being provided or even any attempt provided by the media, which covers these cases like they're clickbait.

00:43:13.340 Yeah, and I don't think you have to be a lawyer.

00:43:15.580 I think if you just believe in elementary classical liberalism, it should always bother you when people judge a case without knowing the facts.

00:43:23.300 I mean, if we get to a point at which a significant portion of the major players in the press hear any account of a police shooting and immediately assume that it is the cop's fault, they are committing the same error as if they immediately assumed it must be the person who was shot's fault.

00:43:50.240 It's the same error.

00:43:51.040 I mean, if you say, oh, well, if there is an altercation between a white person and a black person, I bet it's the white person's fault.

00:43:59.060 You are committing the same error as if you do it the other way around and say, I assume it must be the black person's fault.

00:44:04.080 I mean, it's the same error and it leads to the same problems.

00:44:08.780 And as you say, you know, maybe this is a bigger problem in the press than it is in the judicial system.

00:44:18.380 But one eventually leaks into the other.

00:44:22.500 You cannot for too long sustain an illiberal culture or a culture that doesn't care about due process or facts without it beginning to affect the practical side of your society.

00:44:37.580 And this is one reason that I have never been convinced by the argument that don't worry about the craziness you see on college campuses.

00:44:47.680 Don't worry about what Harvard professors say.

00:44:51.100 Don't worry about what you read in the newspapers because that's area A and area B is fine.

00:44:59.100 Look at the Supreme Court.

00:45:00.000 It's really good on free speech.

00:45:01.040 Yeah, that's true, except that college campuses and newspapers and the faculty at Harvard in 40 years will be the ones filling the Supreme Court and they will be the ones running the judicial system and they will be the ones setting expectations within the actual institutions of power.

00:45:22.140 And, you know, I thought this while Trump was president over and over again.

00:45:25.520 Of course, people say, oh, you're just defending Trump.

00:45:27.500 No.

00:45:27.980 Oh, you just love Russia.

00:45:29.240 Really, no.

00:45:31.500 The casual illiberalism that so many people in the media highlighted and exhibited about and around Trump was a problem.

00:45:43.940 Anyone who pleads the fifth must be guilty.

00:45:46.920 Anyone who wants a lawyer when they talk to the FBI must be guilty.

00:45:50.380 You know, taking allegations as facts, taking rumor as facts.

00:45:56.280 That's not really going to hurt Trump.

00:45:59.940 He's a really rich guy and he was president of the United States.

00:46:03.000 But if that becomes normal in our society, it does hurt people at the margins who don't have the same level of protection.

00:46:09.600 And so I worry enormously about this sort of illiberalism, especially when it comes to due process, because I do think it will have real world consequences.

00:46:18.020 Mm-hmm.

00:46:18.960 I'll just, as an aside, because I want to pick up on your point, but as an aside, there is a very interesting case going up to the Supreme Court this week.

00:46:26.700 And it's got my concern as a free speech, almost absolutist, not entirely, but I'm pretty close.

00:46:33.060 And it involves a ninth grader.

00:46:35.040 Now she's in college, but at the time she was in ninth grade, Pennsylvania High School, found out she didn't make the varsity cheerleading team and that she's going to stay on JV.

00:46:43.360 And she went on Snapchat and dropped a couple of F-bombs.

00:46:47.860 It wasn't that bad.

00:46:48.640 It was like F-school, F-softball, F-cheer, F-everything, right?

00:46:52.100 She was T-O, P-O'd.

00:46:53.480 She didn't make it.

00:46:54.700 And she got punished.

00:46:56.340 She basically got banished to the JV squad in perpetuity.

00:47:01.860 And this, you know, she suffered in school for a comment she had made out of school.

00:47:07.400 Her parents sued.

00:47:09.400 A federal appeals court ruled, look, she posted something off campus.

00:47:15.400 She's beyond the reach of the school authorities.

00:47:17.380 This wasn't a disruptive message inside the school, because sometimes if it's off campus, but it's really disruptive to something in school, they can reach you.

00:47:25.020 And then the appeals court said, so for that reason, she can't be punished.

00:47:29.160 And the Supreme Court took the case, which I don't like.

00:47:32.520 Why did they take it?

00:47:33.460 I would have much preferred to see them leave that ruling stand.

00:47:38.500 And I do think that's something we should be watching, because you're right.

00:47:42.380 Traditionally, the Roberts Court in particular has been very pro-First Amendment.

00:47:46.260 And I've been looking at the courts as one of our last vestiges of reason when it comes to things like the First Amendment.

00:47:52.160 They're not woke.

00:47:53.220 They follow the law.

00:47:54.280 The First Amendment is sweeping intentionally in its reach and protection.

00:47:58.740 And I think it's one thing we need to keep our eye on, because we can't start losing them, right?

00:48:03.880 Like, if they start saying schools can crack down, and I understand there's bullying and so on, but they start saying schools can crack down on speech they don't like off campus in a much more sweeping way, guess who's going to get targeted?

00:48:16.820 Yeah, it's funny.

00:48:19.200 It's funny, because if you look at the First and Second Amendments, they're sort of opposites of each other in the way they're treated in society and in the courts.

00:48:28.120 And the First Amendment, there is a real push at the moment against free speech.

00:48:32.720 An awful lot of people, majorities sometimes, believe there is such a thing as hate speech and that it's illegal when it's not.

00:48:38.540 Right. And want to make it illegal.

00:48:41.000 When they find out it is protected by the First Amendment, they want to change that.

00:48:45.480 Exactly, exactly. And yet the Supreme Court has been a bullock here.

00:48:50.200 Every speech case it sees yields a 9-0 or 8-1 result.

00:48:58.220 And yet the Second Amendment, despite Heller, has largely been ignored by the Supreme Court, has definitely been ignored by the lower courts.

00:49:04.780 And yet it is extremely healthy politically.

00:49:08.640 All of the gains that have been made in the restoration of the right to bear arms in the last 20, 30 years have been political.

00:49:16.580 They've been at the state level and through Congress.

00:49:19.800 And if you had to ask me, you know, which one would you prefer in the long run?

00:49:24.320 I take the political support for the Second Amendment, because as you say, if the First Amendment starts to fall in the court, there's not much bolstering it underneath at the moment.

00:49:34.000 And that's that's deeply alarming.

00:49:36.680 Can I ask you about the Second Amendment?

00:49:38.620 Because Biden dropped a whopper on that.

00:49:40.500 And I saw you wrote about it saying what he wants to do.

00:49:44.060 He's pushing now to end gunmaker liability protections.

00:49:49.480 He says, this is an outrage.

00:49:51.040 This is the only industry, the gun manufacturers, that cannot be sued.

00:49:55.760 And it's wrong.

00:49:58.440 So this is this is just not true.

00:50:00.380 And it's something Hillary Clinton used to say a great deal, too.

00:50:05.740 Gun manufacturers are subject to the same liability as any other manufacturer.

00:50:11.480 If their product doesn't work, if it's faulty, if it is dangerous to its user, then they can be sued.

00:50:22.460 They can be sued in precisely the same way as Ford can be sued if the brakes on their truck doesn't work.

00:50:29.120 What it cannot be sued for is if somebody buys a gun and then goes and murders somebody with it.

00:50:35.180 Now, the reason that Congress got involved in the first place was that a number of courts prompted by legal activists were trying to do an end run around statute and the Second Amendment by asking judges to rule that a given product, a legal product,

00:50:58.320 i.e. a pistol or a revolver or a shotgun or a rifle, was dangerous.

00:51:05.420 Yep, they are their guns and that they should therefore be prohibited.

00:51:11.800 Congress said, no, we're not going to allow this.

00:51:16.240 It really had reached fever pitch.

00:51:18.060 And so in 2005, it passed a law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

00:51:24.760 It passed with a bipartisan supermajority.

00:51:31.820 One of the senators who voted for it was Bernie Sanders.

00:51:36.420 It was a common sense initiative that was designed to do nothing more dramatic than to set into stone the common law taught rules that had obtained in America and before that in England for hundreds of years.

00:51:54.440 It was not a departure.

00:51:56.280 All it did was formalize the idea that if you are a manufacturer that sells knives or guns or battery acid or hammers and then somebody uses your product for evil, that you aren't liable.

00:52:09.960 It did not give gun manufacturers special protections.

00:52:12.500 It didn't set them apart from any other manufacturer and it didn't change the rules as they've always been understood.

00:52:19.180 It just prevented frivolous lawsuits that are designed to do judicially what cannot be done by statute, that is to ban guns.

00:52:31.940 And Biden and Hillary Clinton, they just lie about it.

00:52:34.880 I mean, Hillary Clinton was even worse than Biden.

00:52:36.920 Hillary Clinton used to say, if you buy a toy for your child and then your child chokes to death because it's badly made, you can sue them.

00:52:44.760 But you can't sue them if somebody, you know, it's just not true.

00:52:49.040 The same rules apply to that toy manufacturers do to gun manufacturers.

00:52:53.540 And I see Biden has picked up this lie.

00:52:57.280 I don't think it will get very far because it does, I think, strike people as a good rule.

00:53:04.660 It was supported by almost every major manufacturing group in the United States.

00:53:09.600 It was supported by a huge number of Democrats as well as Republicans.

00:53:14.900 But it is annoying because it leaves tens of millions of people with a false impression of how the law works.

00:53:23.200 Up next, COVID and whether we can finally take off our masks.

00:53:27.280 But first this, I want to bring you a feature that we call Sound Up here in The Megyn Kelly Show,

00:53:32.120 where we run a soundbite that we think may be of interest to you.

00:53:34.920 And this week, it's going to be Tyler Perry from the Oscars that no one saw.

00:53:40.940 This is the one moment that was good.

00:53:43.620 And it literally might have been the only moment that was good.

00:53:46.380 As you may or may not know, since no one gives to you know what's about the Oscars,

00:53:51.300 including yours truly, I didn't watch one moment of it.

00:53:53.380 So, you know, I just watched the clips or read the news reports about the clips,

00:53:56.820 which is what I get my information from, that there weren't great moments.

00:54:00.520 In any event, the Oscars ratings are down 58% in the overall, 64% down in the Younger Audience demo.

00:54:09.040 That is death on TV.

00:54:10.760 That's what that is.

00:54:11.480 Death on TV.

00:54:13.080 That's less than 10 million people watching, which is like a perilous fall from just 10 years ago, let's say.

00:54:20.600 And there's many reasons for it.

00:54:22.220 Certainly, this wasn't a great year for movies because of the pandemic.

00:54:25.220 But let's be honest.

00:54:26.760 It's awful for all the reasons that Bill Maher's been saying.

00:54:29.900 It's awful.

00:54:30.460 Hollywood's awful.

00:54:31.180 And Piers Morgan has been saying it's awful.

00:54:32.980 They only make films now that depress you.

00:54:35.800 They pick some woke cause.

00:54:37.820 They try to depress you into supporting it.

00:54:39.800 They make you feel like a bad person.

00:54:40.880 And if you don't, somebody's downtrodden life.

00:54:43.620 Brit Hume used to call it Destitution Derby, where you'd hear somebody just go on at political events about me.

00:54:48.880 Well, we used to hear it in these primary candidate debates like, what about my poor sad story?

00:54:53.320 What about mine?

00:54:54.040 What about mine?

00:54:55.080 Well, all the movies are Destitution Derby now.

00:54:57.080 And nobody wants to see that.

00:54:58.560 Nobody wants to watch that pandemic year or not.

00:55:00.660 But in particular, in a pandemic year where we need to laugh.

00:55:03.980 So that's why they stank.

00:55:05.440 And then there's other reasons, too.

00:55:06.560 I think these Hollywood celebrities are overexposed.

00:55:09.080 And that has not inured to their benefit.

00:55:12.060 Right.

00:55:12.560 It's like some people, their stock goes up when you get to hear them talk more and you get to know them better.

00:55:18.140 For most of these Hollywood celebrities, it goes down precipitously down.

00:55:22.080 We'd rather just imagine that, you know, you are that character in Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise, and not some weird dude talking about thetans.

00:55:30.380 Right.

00:55:30.700 It's it doesn't tend to work out well.

00:55:32.640 And especially these days where, you know, the industry that propped up Harvey Weinstein wants to lecture us all about what bad people we are.

00:55:39.780 We don't want to hear it.

00:55:40.960 Right.

00:55:41.380 I mean, you want to know where racism is actually a problem in Hollywood.

00:55:44.740 It actually is a big problem out there.

00:55:46.560 They don't hire black people for technical roles, for the prominent acting roles.

00:55:52.500 We talked about this with Eli Steele.

00:55:54.780 Right.

00:55:55.180 He's this deaf black filmmaker.

00:55:58.540 So hard for him to get anybody to pay attention to him.

00:56:01.640 And God forbid you add conservative in there.

00:56:03.840 Forget about it.

00:56:05.400 So anyway, now, like everybody, to overcompensate for all of that, they institute quotas.

00:56:10.280 Right.

00:56:10.540 You have to have this number of black people in your cast or in your crew.

00:56:14.260 Nobody understands how to fix anything.

00:56:15.740 They really don't.

00:56:16.760 It's such I just think it's a group of dishonest brokers.

00:56:19.280 Nobody wants to watch them.

00:56:20.780 It's certainly not in their native setting.

00:56:22.400 That is Hollywood congratulating themselves.

00:56:24.760 And now it's transferred over to not even on screen.

00:56:27.960 We don't want to watch you because we know who you are.

00:56:29.720 And we don't want to watch your stupid, boring, sad movies that lecture us because we know you're terrible people.

00:56:34.020 So that's my summation of why the numbers are down.

00:56:36.820 As I said, 64 percent with younger audiences and almost 60 in the overall audience.

00:56:41.980 However, like anything, there are stars in the sky.

00:56:45.940 And that brings me to Tyler Perry, who is the guy who basically saved Oprah's channel, which was going down the toilet until he brought a bunch of programming over there that people actually wanted to watch.

00:56:57.320 And I think he understands the black community very well because that's pretty much the programming that he brought to Oprah's network that's been so successful.

00:57:06.340 Obviously, he's a black man.

00:57:07.460 He's been very successful in his own right and was given the microphone at the Oscars the other night and took a moment to make this point.

00:57:15.740 Listen, my mother taught me to refuse hate.

00:57:19.780 She taught me to refuse blanket judgment.

00:57:22.480 And in this time, and with all of the Internet and social media and algorithms and everything that wants us to think a certain way, the 24-hour news cycle, it is my hope that all of us would teach our kids, and not only to remember, just refuse hate.

00:57:37.220 Don't hate anybody.

00:57:38.380 I refuse to hate someone because they are Mexican or because they are black or white or LBGTQ.

00:57:47.420 I refuse to hate someone because they are a police officer.

00:57:50.200 I refuse to hate someone because they are Asian.

00:57:53.660 I would hope that we would refuse hate.

00:57:56.240 And I want to take this Gene Herschel Humanitarian Award and dedicate it to anyone who wants to stand in the middle, no matter what's around the wall, stand in the middle, because that's where healing happens.

00:58:07.440 That's where conversation happens.

00:58:08.920 That's where change happens.

00:58:10.120 It happens in the middle.

00:58:11.940 Tyler, hi.

00:58:14.160 How are you?

00:58:15.760 I'm here, too.

00:58:16.660 That's where most of us are, in the middle.

00:58:21.980 You could lean left.

00:58:22.700 You could lean right.

00:58:23.460 All of it's fine.

00:58:24.640 But we're not on these polarized extremes like these lunatics who run our media and have these very powerful microphones.

00:58:31.860 Screw those people and their divisions.

00:58:34.020 And screw these politicians trying to divide us, too.

00:58:36.040 And the Hollywood celebrities who act better than while they commit all their sins behind their gilded mansion doors.

00:58:43.600 I love that message.

00:58:44.680 And for him to do it in front of that audience was brave, right?

00:58:48.100 To slip in.

00:58:48.980 What did he say?

00:58:49.720 White people.

00:58:50.740 And police.

00:58:51.860 Police.

00:58:52.920 Good for him.

00:58:54.140 Because sadly, it's become OK to demonize those groups.

00:58:56.760 We talked about that opinion piece the other day from that lunatic professor out of University of Colorado, Boulder, who was saying even the black on Asian crime spike we've seen in New York City and other places, you know, those are documented hate crimes.

00:59:09.960 They're based on race, based on the ethnicity of the Asian people.

00:59:13.000 Those are white people's fault.

00:59:14.420 Everything is based on white supremacy.

00:59:16.040 Anything negative is based on the white people.

00:59:18.740 And, you know, you are a white supremacist if you're just born with white skin.

00:59:21.460 So this is my point for him to say, sadly, for him to say, don't hate white people was brave for him to say, don't hate police was brave.

00:59:28.520 Police are the ones we need most when things go seriously wrong and we're out on the streets.

00:59:34.060 Doesn't mean they're perfect, but they shouldn't be demonized just because they have the courage to put on that badge.

00:59:39.040 Anyway, good for Tyler Perry.

00:59:40.280 It's a feel good moment.

00:59:41.320 There's still hope in the world.

00:59:42.640 Not everyone's a lunatic.

00:59:44.900 You guys aren't.

00:59:45.880 I'm not.

00:59:46.960 And I think long term, I still have to hold on to this.

00:59:50.660 We're good.

00:59:51.840 We're going to be good.

00:59:53.780 All right.

00:59:54.200 Back to Charlie.

00:59:55.060 One second.

00:59:55.660 But first this.

01:00:02.260 Back to the overall theme here, which is Biden putting the thumb of the federal government on the American people, which is just how I've been feeling when it comes to spending our money indiscriminately and bolstering up a bunch of unions that the American people don't seem to want.

01:00:17.620 If you see things like what happened with the Amazon plant down in Alabama and funding the Green New Deal secretly, which is basically sneaking into the infrastructure plan and taking control of police officers and loves to crack down on the First Amendment and the Second Amendment.

01:00:33.560 On top of all that, we haven't even mentioned COVID.

01:00:36.940 And this week, we're going to get the gift of a CDC recommendation on whether fully vaccinated people while outside can take off their masks.

01:00:47.820 I can't.

01:00:49.880 Who like who are these people who need to be told that by the CDC?

01:00:55.360 And why are we still even debating this nonsense?

01:00:59.540 And I say this from New York City, which I'm quite certain is the most masked up city in the nation still.

01:01:06.060 Well, it's already already now you're seeing people take off their masks outside.

01:01:10.520 But is it love of fear, you know, leaning into fear that there's still support for nonsense, inch by inch progress in the lane of COVID?

01:01:20.940 Like, why won't why don't people look at Florida and Texas and other places that have taken down the mask mandates and the other mandates and opened up their societies and say, send your kid to school without a mask.

01:01:30.560 You walk around outside without a mask, the federal government's going to get off your back now because the pandemic is ending.

01:01:36.980 It's ending.

01:01:37.900 And and we are at herd immunity in many of the states or so it appears.

01:01:42.800 Yeah, it's it's baffling, especially as somebody who spent the entire pandemic here in Florida.

01:01:49.400 I mean, I say what I'm about to say as somebody who took COVID seriously, who does not think that it's just the flu.

01:01:56.140 It's not who wore a mask when asked to buy private companies and who later today is enthusiastically going to get his second Pfizer injection.

01:02:07.820 You know, I'm pro vaccine and pro mitigation.

01:02:13.220 But I think we've lost our minds at the same time.

01:02:21.360 I think it's happened for a couple of reasons.

01:02:23.320 The first is that it, like all other things in our country at the moment, it became politicized.

01:02:31.780 And so when Democrats learned that Republicans were skeptical, they became even more enthusiastic.

01:02:39.120 And when Republicans learned that Democrats were enthusiastic, they became even more skeptical.

01:02:43.680 And so we could fall back on our usual fights and disdain for one another.

01:02:49.180 But but but the second part is that because of that, you actually do have a group within the United States dominated by urban progressives that has a completely false conception of the risks involved.

01:03:09.800 Now, again, I'm not downplaying COVID.

01:03:12.480 I think it was a big deal.

01:03:14.100 It was a once in a century pandemic.

01:03:16.100 But they've done some research on this.

01:03:20.180 Progressives, especially people who say that they're very left wing, think that coronavirus is far, far more deadly than it is.

01:03:30.540 And I think 50 percent of people who call themselves liberal or very liberal thought that it hospitalizes between 20 and 50 percent of the people that it infects, which is crazy wrong.

01:03:48.720 I mean, just off the charts wrong.

01:03:52.120 And of course, if you believe that, which huge swathes of the country seem to, well, then you probably are in favor of double masking and wearing masks on the beach and staying locked down forever.

01:04:06.800 I mean, if I thought that I had a one in two chance of being hospitalized if I got COVID, then I would likely have a more draconian attitude.

01:04:15.780 But the thing is, is it's just not true.

01:04:19.940 And more importantly, that the facts here are actually easily attainable because the states have kept very good data on this.

01:04:28.560 The risks are relatively low.

01:04:31.600 And we know how much masks do and don't help in different circumstances.

01:04:38.720 And we know the likelihood of contraction and transmission when you've been vaccinated.

01:04:45.780 And so there's no need for us to live in endless fear.

01:04:50.140 It's it's, as you say, on the way out.

01:04:52.180 This is a good thing.

01:04:52.880 We should celebrate it.

01:04:54.240 There was a great bit on Twitter.

01:04:55.540 I retweeted it the other day.

01:04:57.180 It was a it was a mom at a local community government meeting.

01:05:01.240 And she was great.

01:05:03.560 She she was, you know, as they say, my spirit animal going off on her local politicians about why her littles have to wear a mask, endless masks and how, you know, of course, we know the children aren't transmitting it, that there's basically zero percent risk of the children transmitting it to one another in schools.

01:05:22.240 You're not going to get it in the schools.

01:05:23.600 And she she wants the people who are in charge to say our young children can take off their masks, our young children.

01:05:32.080 And frankly, now, most, if not, I would say all children in school should be able to take off their masks and they shouldn't have to run around at recess and run around the track during P.E.

01:05:44.140 Wearing masks.

01:05:45.580 And if they if their mask drops below their nose by, you know, one millimeter, they get chastised.

01:05:52.280 Pull your mask up.

01:05:53.100 By the way, our pediatrician said that's dangerous.

01:05:55.300 Don't let your kid run with a mask over his face.

01:05:57.400 Way more dangerous than any chance he could contract or give covid.

01:06:00.660 Um, I listened to her and I thought, you go, girl.

01:06:05.540 Her name is Courtney Ann Taylor.

01:06:08.300 She's out of Georgia.

01:06:09.680 Take a listen.

01:06:10.560 Every one of us knows that young children are not affected by this virus.

01:06:14.620 They're not.

01:06:15.740 And that's a blessing.

01:06:17.000 But as the adults, what have we done with that blessing?

01:06:19.940 We've shoved it to the side and we've said we don't care.

01:06:22.160 You're still going to wear a mask on your face every day.

01:06:24.100 Five and six year olds.

01:06:25.780 You still can't play together on the playground like normal children, seven and eight year olds.

01:06:29.660 We don't care.

01:06:30.660 We're still going to force you to carry a burden that was never yours to carry.

01:06:35.500 Shame on us.

01:06:37.320 It has to stop.

01:06:38.560 Take these off of our children.

01:06:40.100 So what do you make of the push, at least for our children in the schools, to let the masks come off?

01:06:46.980 I think one of the strangest parts of this whole saga has been the chasm between the rhetoric that we hear, especially from teachers unions, and the reality on the ground.

01:07:01.840 One of the saving graces of this whole affair has been that it doesn't seem to affect children too badly.

01:07:10.740 When it started, that was what terrified me, especially having read a little bit about the Spanish flu, where it affected children and the elderly the most.

01:07:21.840 I mean, we would be living in a very different country with a different culture and a different approach to one another right now.

01:07:27.500 If children were the primary victims of coronavirus, people would be screaming at each other in the supermarket and they'd be living in bunkers.

01:07:36.320 But thankfully, that has not been the case.

01:07:39.500 In fact, the opposite has been the case.

01:07:40.980 There really is not a great risk posed to, thankfully, or by children.

01:07:45.060 But there is with the flu, and we managed that without putting masks on children just fine.

01:07:50.740 Nobody ever even suggested it.

01:07:52.700 Right.

01:07:53.180 So I have never understood from the ground up why we have been so keen to close the schools or to set such draconian rules in place in the schools.

01:08:05.600 And again, I say that as somebody who spent the pandemic in Florida, which has 100% school attendance right now, including my own children.

01:08:15.060 So, yeah, that's a really baffling, baffling development.

01:08:20.240 And you didn't quite ask about this, but I want to say this anyway.

01:08:23.100 I have been really, really disappointed with the teachers unions because I think that they've tried to have it both ways.

01:08:30.880 On the one hand, all we ever hear is how it's absolutely vital to fund education and to prioritize and cherish education because it is the key to everyone's future.

01:08:42.960 And if they miss even a little bit of it or if they have a bad time, then they will damage their prospects.

01:08:50.880 And yet at the same time, now we're being told that it doesn't really matter if they miss one year or possibly two of schooling.

01:08:58.120 And all the socialization elements, you know, they don't matter.

01:09:01.080 And I say this because I just think we've come to all of the wrong trade-off conclusions.

01:09:09.880 It is very clearly not worth what we are putting kids through and continuing to put kids through.

01:09:16.420 And yet somehow we're still here and it's what?

01:09:20.620 It's April 2021.

01:09:22.360 It's a year and a bit after we all shut down and a lot of kids are sitting at home.

01:09:27.440 And I used to think it's a disgrace.

01:09:28.920 On that front, there was a report out of the San Francisco Chronicle just this week talking about how 500 San Francisco educators, 500, have been granted medical exemptions that will allow them to teach from home.

01:09:43.300 The students will be physically in class.

01:09:44.940 The teachers will be at home.

01:09:48.200 Another substitute or some random staffer will have to supervise the class.

01:09:52.520 This is expected to cost San Francisco more than $40,000 a day for the substitutes to supervise the students or at least $1.5 million before summer break alone.

01:10:05.740 The teachers can't even just go into the class and stay six feet away from the children.

01:10:11.440 They insist on staying at home remotely.

01:10:13.440 And the reason, I mean, look, if somebody's got a legitimate disability or, you know, significantly high risk of COVID, I'm sure they've been double vaccinated, right?

01:10:22.920 Those teachers, you can mark money, will have been double vaccinated.

01:10:26.920 Still, I might put them into a special category.

01:10:29.660 But given the fear we've seen from some of these teachers unions, the totally irrational fear or at least claims of fear, I don't believe them.

01:10:37.340 I don't believe those 500 teachers, some maybe, but I don't believe all of them.

01:10:42.140 Not since I saw those Chicago teachers leaping through the air in dance to protest the decision that the mayor there was trying to make to send them back into the classroom, showing us how enfeebled they were, how they couldn't get in front of young children who don't spread it.

01:10:56.420 They decided to do interpretive dance.

01:10:59.260 Not since then do I put my full trust in these teachers who say they won't return.

01:11:05.320 I'm from a family of teachers.

01:11:06.760 I don't bear teachers any ill.

01:11:08.740 My mother is one.

01:11:09.800 My sister is one.

01:11:10.820 My sister's husband is one.

01:11:13.580 But I still have to ask the same question as I asked when the schools were shut down in the first instance, which is why are they so special?

01:11:21.400 I mean, I get it.

01:11:24.460 It can be a tough job.

01:11:26.660 But everyone else is back at work.

01:11:28.960 I mean, lots of people in less well-paid, less well-respected jobs are back at work.

01:11:36.140 As you say, if somebody is particularly susceptible or they have comorbidities, fine.

01:11:42.300 But I don't know quite why we are allowing teaching, which is a vital profession, to vote itself an exemption to which no one else is entitled.

01:11:58.220 It's true.

01:11:58.760 Can you see the grocery store clerk saying, I'm going to do my job remotely?

01:12:02.720 I'll zoom in from home.

01:12:04.680 Good luck.

01:12:05.320 I mean, after a point, it's the job, right?

01:12:07.360 The job is to teach children.

01:12:09.000 And the job is to teach children in person.

01:12:11.280 And we're not, I hope, going to suddenly pretend that there is no difference between in-person tuition and remote tuition.

01:12:19.020 There is.

01:12:20.100 And for maybe a few months, if we needed to work out what was going on and take the cautious approach, so be it.

01:12:28.220 But in the long run, if you don't want to be a teacher anymore, then don't be one.

01:12:32.340 But we're going to have to start teaching our kids again.

01:12:35.480 And that is the job.

01:12:37.460 So do it.

01:12:38.080 Let me tell you something else.

01:12:40.000 I guarantee you, guarantee that if some great protest on a cause those teachers believed in swept by their San Francisco apartments, they'd be out on the streets with BLM or to mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg or any one of the other causes like Joe Biden's election.

01:12:57.520 Because all the teachers who said they were too afraid to go inside the classrooms and teach over the worst of the pandemic came out for those events.

01:13:04.240 And it's the things have only gotten better in terms of our country's health and COVID since then.

01:13:09.360 And now on that same subject, I've got to ask you about this, because I'm heartened to hear you say, and I think you're right, we're not going to see D.C. become a state.

01:13:18.680 We're not going to see the Supreme Court get packed.

01:13:22.020 He may be doing Biden, you know, study groups on these issues, but they don't have the votes.

01:13:27.880 So that's he's thrown a bone to, you know, his his far left constituents.

01:13:32.180 But I agree with you that that stuff's not likely to happen.

01:13:35.280 He's studying reparations.

01:13:36.600 I don't think that's going to happen, though.

01:13:38.780 There's that term is ambiguous.

01:13:40.900 You know how to reparations can mean many things.

01:13:44.480 However, I do want to ask you about some of these proposed new rules for the Department of Education.

01:13:49.920 There's all sorts of stuff he can do, Biden.

01:13:52.040 And some with Congress's approval and some without.

01:13:55.520 And one of the things that he's proposing now for the Department of Education is a new rule that will establish priorities for federal grants.

01:14:03.760 And that's I mean, that's basically a carrot and a stick.

01:14:06.340 Like, would you like your federal money?

01:14:07.960 Well, here's all you have to do.

01:14:09.460 And the two things that were mentioned were the 1619 Project and the teachings of Ibram X. Kendi.

01:14:17.260 And then there is an actual bill being proposed called this called the Civics Secures Democracy Act has a nice name.

01:14:24.780 They always give him a nice name.

01:14:26.420 So I like civics.

01:14:27.420 I want civics taught.

01:14:28.920 And it has things like grants for internships for students who decide to lobby and advocate for various organizations.

01:14:40.480 They can get course credit for out of class political protests for directing teachers to discuss current social and political controversies.

01:14:52.320 That's what I really want these far left teachers to discuss every social and political controversy with my single digit age children, because I'm sure they're going to do it a very fair and balanced way.

01:15:02.900 All this stuff is seeping its way every day in a more in a more pernicious way into K through 12 education.

01:15:10.900 And I just I don't know how we stop it in the states that aren't run by Republican governors.

01:15:17.100 Well, even those that are run by Republican governors, because as you say, if you can threaten people with their own money, you wield an enormous amount of power.

01:15:25.020 So this is a hobby horse of mine.

01:15:28.360 We hear so much about money in politics and the implication that if a corporation or a charity gives money to this or that, then they're in some way corrupting it.

01:15:43.720 And we ignore that compared to the federal government, corporations and charities, advocacy groups, they're ants standing next to an elephant.

01:15:59.100 If you look at the federal government as it was designed by the founders, it was supposed to have a charter of enumerated powers and be very small, have very little to do.

01:16:10.420 To do what it was supposed to do with energy and efficiency, but not to do a great deal.

01:16:20.260 And two things changed that.

01:16:22.120 One of them was the New Deal, where the formal powers of the federal government were grown far beyond the limits that are set in the Constitution.

01:16:29.720 But the other was the introduction of the income tax and the growth of cash in the hands of legislators and subsequently presidents.

01:16:41.500 And cash is power.

01:16:44.040 The federal government does this all the time.

01:16:46.340 Why do we have a national drinking age of 21?

01:16:50.740 There's no law that sets it at that.

01:16:53.500 There can't be under the enumerated powers doctrine.

01:16:57.700 We have it because the federal government in the 1980s tied it to highway funding.

01:17:04.960 They said to states, if you don't set your drinking age at 21, we won't give you the highway funding that you need.

01:17:13.320 And a lot of states simply couldn't afford to say no.

01:17:17.320 Well, what do we have with education?

01:17:18.800 Since the Department of Education was created in, I think, 1976, 7, we have increasingly tied funds to federal priorities.

01:17:32.160 And this rides roughshod over the will of the states.

01:17:36.620 But it also allows for an enormous amount of social engineering.

01:17:40.540 And that's one reason conservatives have long been against the Department of Education as it's currently constructed.

01:17:47.180 And what you are seeing now with the proposals from Joe Biden that you just outlined is exactly that social engineering.

01:17:55.120 And it does make it difficult for states.

01:17:57.500 Even if you have a governor who has strong views on education and a spine, a willingness to implement them, it's tough to say to people, hey, you know all those taxes that you paid?

01:18:11.160 You don't get to not pay federal taxes because you live in Texas.

01:18:14.640 All those taxes you paid, we're going to decline them being sent back to your child's school.

01:18:19.900 That's a tough position to put him in.

01:18:21.560 And so I think this is exactly why we need to reform this system.

01:18:29.020 We need to limit the power of Washington, because what you're going to see increasingly is what you always see when government takes power.

01:18:36.620 And that is competing nationalized views of how things should be run, undermining the states and cities and localities and making education less local and more national, which, I mean, I agree with you entirely that Biden's plan is insane.

01:18:57.580 But even if it weren't is a problem, because what you're essentially doing is cutting out parents.

01:19:02.740 That's right. You're taking it up to the federal level instead of leaving it at the local.

01:19:06.960 And some of this he can do, as Obama infamously said, with his pen and his phone.

01:19:11.700 That's how we got the rollback of due process rights on college campuses.

01:19:16.120 And some of it he does need congressional approval for, like this Civic Secures Democracy Act is something, it's a bill that's being proposed.

01:19:22.900 And it's funny because I'm sure the grants that they that they'll give, you know, to see students attend out of out of class political protests and lobbying, I'm sure I'm sure they're going to give those same grants to, you know, the future MAGA type students, the ones who want to show up at the Right to Life March.

01:19:40.900 You know, 100 percent is going to come down to what causes May 1 lobby for and still get the great grant and not get in trouble with the Fed.

01:19:51.200 So that'll be a nice block of litigation coming our way.

01:19:54.080 I just to me, the government's growing and it's growing at such a rate and under this president in just the first 100 days that my eyes are as big as silver dollars.

01:20:05.480 I just I can't keep, as I said at the top, I can't keep track of the numbers that he's proposing to spend.

01:20:11.340 And he's trying to seize control in so many areas that it is it is downright alarming.

01:20:17.320 So one of the solutions is maybe a more moderate president.

01:20:21.280 I don't get a Democrat or Republican, somebody more moderate because this guy's turned out to be a fan and aligned with AOC and the way he governs.

01:20:29.240 Another solution, at least for short term, would be divided government.

01:20:33.420 And so on the subject of thanks, Georgia, what do you think with the 53 percent approval?

01:20:40.180 The new 60.

01:20:41.820 Thanks, Chuck Todd.

01:20:44.900 How do you think he's looking to hold on to control the Democrats of the House and the Senate in the midterms?

01:20:52.420 I think at this stage, it seems likely that he's going to lose the House.

01:20:56.360 And they have a majority of six.

01:20:58.040 They have just lost a few seats thanks to reapportionment.

01:21:07.640 Florida got an extra one.

01:21:08.880 Texas got two.

01:21:10.260 New York lost one.

01:21:11.100 California lost one.

01:21:13.000 Seems likely that will marginally benefit the Republicans.

01:21:16.460 And I think that even though Biden remains somewhat personally popular, although you did say at the outset, not especially, the only two presidents who were less popular at this point were Donald Trump and Gerald Ford, both of whom lost re-election.

01:21:34.260 Right.

01:21:34.500 In 70 years.

01:21:35.460 But I think even though he remains personally popular, and even though polling shows that the COVID bill was popular and infrastructure might be, I think it's more complicated than that, just as an aside.

01:21:52.840 Because I think when you ask people, well, do you want to spend money on infrastructure?

01:21:55.440 They say yes.

01:21:56.540 Do you want to spend money on COVID relief?

01:21:58.600 They say yes.

01:21:59.220 I think if you then say, did you know that you're bailing out San Francisco, they're probably less into it.

01:22:03.060 But over time, that will become clear.

01:22:06.260 But even if you assume that he's a popular and his spending is popular, Biden does seem to have sat down and tried to work out how to activate the various parts of the Republican base and independents to who are annoyed with him.

01:22:26.680 I mean, as you say, you've got a president who is not only failing to disavow court packing, but who has created a commission to study it.

01:22:38.240 You've got a party which has introduced this into Congress, and not just anyone, but the chair of the Judiciary Committee wants to pack the court.

01:22:47.320 You've got a president who has got on board with the addition of Washington, D.C. as a state.

01:22:57.340 It was wildly unpopular.

01:22:59.440 You've got a president who stood in front of the country and called for more gun control, told a bunch of lies about it.

01:23:05.760 You've got a president who abandoned the Hyde Amendment, upsets pro-life voters.

01:23:11.720 You've got a president whose performance on the border is so damaging to him that I don't think we've quite grasped the likely consequences.

01:23:24.240 I mean, the approval rating for Biden's handling of the border among Hispanic voters is 27 percent.

01:23:31.020 And just to add to that, yeah, I just I just pulled those numbers because it was overall his approval on immigration is at 33 percent, according to NBC, 59 percent disapprove.

01:23:44.020 Absolutely. Absolutely.

01:23:45.380 And these are, to borrow a cliché term, these are hot button issues, and they're the sort of issues that that lead people to go out and vote.

01:23:56.580 And it's really not much of a climb for Republicans to take back the House.

01:24:02.080 Now, the Senate, I don't know.

01:24:03.320 There's a lot of retirements.

01:24:04.740 There's some vulnerable seats that Republicans will have to defend.

01:24:09.740 But, of course, the advantage of the way our system is constructed is that there are a lot of veto points.

01:24:15.620 So if Republicans do take the House, even if nothing changes in the Senate or the Democrats increase their majority in the Senate,

01:24:22.360 the chances of court packing or the abolition of the filibuster or what you will are off the table because it won't get through the House.

01:24:29.240 And then you've got a couple of years in which you can really make the case that you've outlined.

01:24:34.340 Look, we are spending more money than we have.

01:24:36.680 And this guy is not who he said he would be.

01:24:39.740 I picture it like a cartoon, like there's this giant thumb and it just keeps coming down.

01:24:44.700 And like I and the rest of the people, most of us, I think, because I think most Americans don't want the federal thumb on us, just keep dodging.

01:24:53.180 We're just running to the left, running to the right.

01:24:55.180 And the thumb's getting bigger and we feel smaller.

01:24:58.780 And it's just like some animated, terrifying monster series that I would tell my children they can't watch.

01:25:05.140 Yeah.

01:25:05.540 Anyway, it's one of the many reasons I love listening to you, because you always in these departments, for the most part, I share a lot of your views.

01:25:14.060 And it's it's it's great listening to you express them over on the editors.

01:25:17.340 That's where you can check out Charles C.W. Cook.

01:25:20.260 And also you have your you have a second podcast.

01:25:23.880 What's that one called?

01:25:24.820 I have it downloaded on my phone.

01:25:26.040 Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

01:25:27.780 Right.

01:25:28.760 Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

01:25:29.800 I was the Englishman.

01:25:30.760 And it should probably be changed since I became a citizen, but I have the accent, I suppose.

01:25:35.960 All right.

01:25:36.220 Good luck on your second covid vaccine.

01:25:40.100 I'm right behind you.

01:25:41.080 I haven't gotten even my first yet, but I'm going to New York.

01:25:43.680 It's been tougher to get an appointment.

01:25:45.840 And thank you, as always, for the wisdom and expertise.

01:25:50.080 Thanks so much for having me.

01:25:51.200 It was a pleasure.

01:25:51.580 Our thanks to Charles and don't miss Friday's show because we've got the guys from the fifth column, one of the most popular podcasts out there.

01:26:01.480 You guys are going to enjoy it.

01:26:02.660 Talk to you then.

01:26:04.000 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

01:26:06.120 No BS, no agenda and no fear.

01:26:10.480 The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

01:26:14.840 The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care Media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

The Megyn Kelly Show - April 28, 2021

Charles C.W. Cooke on Biden's Broken Promises, COVID Craziness, and Police Reform ｜ Ep. 95

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