Today on The Megynkellek Show: Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook says she s not stepping down, the Democratic National Committee s summer meeting kicks off with an apology to Native Americans, and more! Plus, the IRS is cracking down on back taxes and there s still time to get your tax forms in on time.
00:03:34.380It's really, it's an unbelievable thing when you actually sit there for it.
00:03:37.600I think I told the audience this, but a couple years ago, I went to this muckety-muck, like, conference where they want you to go and speak to the luminaries of today and tomorrow.
00:03:45.760And first they paraded out General Michael Hayden as some sort of an expert on Trump.
00:03:50.940Meanwhile, he's like one of his chief antagonists.
00:04:51.500The DNC acknowledges and honors the Dakota Oyate, the Dakota people, who are the original stewards of the lands and waters of Minneapolis.
00:05:00.520The Dakota cared for the lands, lakes, and the Wakatanka, the Great River, the Mississippi River, for thousands of years before colonization.
00:05:29.900I mean, there's always something about those land acknowledgments that reminds me of just how out-of-touch Democrats have the capacity to be.
00:05:36.060I mean, it's not just that this is kind of pretentious and frequently ahistorical.
00:05:40.260It just really does expose the vanity of their political project to the extent they're talking about this stuff and not willing to abandon the land completely.
00:06:00.600It's like Bernie Madoff beginning a speech with, like, I just want to acknowledge all the people who I hurt and whose money built this mansion from which I'm speaking to you.
00:06:35.680Doesn't necessarily have to be the beginning of every political gathering.
00:06:38.880But if you take any patch of land, including the patches that we're all in in our various places right now, there's a lot of weird ownership disputes.
00:06:47.360So this patch of land, the French owned it for a while.
00:06:50.100And then there was like they went across the border and slit some throats, Champlain or whatever.
00:06:57.100You know, this land was seized by eminent domain as part of the urban renewal phrase of the 1960s and dispossessed a lot of people without a vote.
00:07:09.780It is in a way to to show, you know, maximum penance and minimum action.
00:07:14.840Well, you could be concerned with Native American lot in modern day America of all the things that made me mad about the 1619 project is why are we ignoring the people on this continent right now who we screwed over pretty bad and left with pretty bad arrangements?
00:07:31.980Generally speaking, they got a claim and those people are patriotic as hell.
00:07:37.060So we should be leaning in that direction and embracing all of that rather than just in a unidirectional way saying, I have the greatest morality by, you know, crying at the right moment.
00:09:03.620And I cannot believe when we say kind of wokeness or whatever you want to call it is dead.
00:09:07.680It's clearly not dead in the sense that they are not giving up in the universities and in local town councils and blue states, etc.
00:09:15.140But this idea that history, they want to imbue you with the sense that everything you do, you owe a debt to somebody always and you should always acknowledge it.
00:09:24.840As Matt pointed out, you can do land acknowledgements as far back as the fossil record.
00:09:30.220I mean, this is land swapping and fighting and warring and slitting people's throat is really across the board, right?
00:09:39.520So, truly, so, Moynihan, why are they doing it?
00:09:42.820Like, truly, why—how does today's DNC sit down, understanding the problems they have and the electoral beating they just took, and say, let's do it.
00:09:52.640Well, I think one of the reasons is that you have an age shift, and the people who are the kind of, you know, middle-aged people, people in sort of my age cohort now, grew up with this thing.
00:10:05.000And I certainly grew up with this, that this country has this original sin.
00:10:10.120And to be a liberal, you have to acknowledge constantly the original sin of this country, which is both stealing land and the institution of slavery and racism.
00:10:18.800And so, to keep on this kind of religious, you know, it's kind of like a religious mantra.
00:10:25.600You have to say it at the beginning of everything that you do to say, well, we are, in our original state, a bad country and bad people.
00:10:35.300In the rest of time, in perpetuity, we have to try to cleanse ourselves of that sin, which is burning down white supremacy, burning down the current structure of the government.
00:10:44.760It's a destructive, almost revolutionary way of thinking.
00:10:47.840Yeah, and you're gesturing towards these impossible-to-conceive-of, almost, invisible enemies that can't be defeated.
00:10:56.300It's so much easier than actually having to do something about the things that are materially impacting the quality or lack thereof of people's lives.
00:11:04.100So that's why you get all of this performance politics.
00:11:18.720Like, basically, every corner is a land acknowledgment.
00:11:22.240We're terrible because they need us to believe we're terrible, that the United States is terrible.
00:11:27.820That's why the flag is, like, a dirty symbol now, and he's left his houses.
00:11:31.240I've told a story before, but when I was at NBC, we were doing a story—it was a charity story.
00:11:35.040It was, like, we were surprising a widow whose husband had died suddenly with, like, a special gift, and NBC was like, don't have that flag in the background.
00:11:55.700It was like, what's so controversial about the flag that NBC doesn't feel comfortable having it in the background of a widow's—it was her flag at her house.
00:12:04.340But that's—it's the same—all part of the same thing, which is we're terrible.
00:12:12.040And there are original sins and then sins on top of those original sins, beyond which we never can move.
00:12:17.840And we're the better people because we recognize it.
00:12:21.620And—but to your point that you just made, Camille, so right.
00:12:24.780But our willingness to do something about it stops at the word because we're not actually going to take a look at South Chicago and do something to help those guys.
00:12:55.380That actually happened this morning on MSNOW when Joe Scarborough had on the Chicago mayor.
00:13:03.780Brandon Johnson, who's ridiculous, a ridiculous person whose approval rating, you have more toes than he has approval ratings and numbers in his approval rating.
00:13:32.760You've talked about the other things you want.
00:13:34.840Would 5,000 more police officers on the street in Chicago be helpful to go along with all of those social programs?
00:13:43.120Here's the best way I can put it, Joe.
00:13:45.640Is that in the 90s when I was in high school, we had 3,000 more police officers and we had 900 people being murdered every single year in Chicago.
00:13:57.660I know it's not policing alone, but do you believe that the streets of Chicago would be safer if there were more uniformed police officers on the streets of Chicago?
00:14:09.280I believe the city of Chicago and cities across America would be safer if we actually had, you know, affordable housing.
00:14:39.780And then explain contextually why you think it's not going to be the entire solution.
00:14:44.200But, yeah, I think it would be great if the federal government would give us money because this is what mayors of big blue cities want, more and more money.
00:14:52.680They believe money can always solve the problem.
00:15:23.480No, he does not think the police are a solution to anything.
00:15:26.820I suspect if you asked him a question on Democracy Now! or an appropriately kind of left-wing thing, would you take—if I gave you $50 million to get rid of entirely your police force, he'd probably immediately say yes to that.
00:15:40.240To the point that Camille was making is that this is a thing where the culture battles loom large because the solutions don't exist, right?
00:15:49.660Because you would have to deal with something like, you know, what are we going to do about policing on the ground?
00:15:53.780What are we going to do about policy and policy-oriented things to say affordable housing?
00:15:59.060Number one, total, complete, and utter bullshit.
00:17:01.180Because Brandon Johnson doesn't want to send police in there, even if they're free.
00:17:05.960I mean, Trump, frankly, saying, do you want me to send a bunch of National Guard troops in to help with this problem or other law enforcement?
00:17:14.240It's almost the same feeling I had when he wanted to create Gaziera or Mara Gaza, right?
00:17:19.240Where it's like, oh, this is going to be a really tough one.
00:17:26.720But certainly there should be the same response in both circumstances.
00:17:30.640Those who are in the midst of this turmoil should say, please, God, yes, yes, I would like some help with law enforcement and order.
00:17:38.760But no, Brandon Johnson would rather see everyone shoot each other.
00:17:42.900He does not give a shit about the three-year-old girl who got shot in her parents' car this summer by some gangbanger that he doesn't care.
00:17:52.680I think that may have happened in Washington, D.C.
00:17:54.680But trust me, I could find 10 cases where it happened in Chicago.
00:17:57.400So that's what's so annoying about their stupid land acknowledgements.
00:18:01.640I await the DNC's tough talk about what's actually happening in our cities.
00:18:08.540Part of the issue with Democrats in general, and this also applies to Gavin Newsom, who's out there trying to meme his way into the national political conversation,
00:18:19.140is that they don't have a lot of governing success examples to point to.
00:18:25.080And, in fact, they have quite a staggering number of failures.
00:18:30.960And, you know, including these failures, this Brandon Johnson is probably the best example of this in the country where, you know, you have sort of zombie 2020-ism.
00:18:40.020He still can't just bring himself to talk about policing without going into affordable housing.
00:18:45.700And it's like, you know, we remember 2020.
00:18:50.060Everyone lost their minds, some of us a lot less than some other ones, perhaps.
00:18:55.100But we shouldn't be talking like that anymore.
00:18:57.780But you still find that in places like Chicago, where last time I looked, of the 50 members on the Chicago City Council, there were zero Republicans.
00:19:07.220There were, I think, 46 Democrats and then, like, four socialists.
00:19:11.900The place has been absolutely dominated by Democrats and the left for a really, really long time, and as such is arguably the worst-governed big city in the country.
00:19:22.140Part of the reason why he answered the question that he did, besides the fact that he's awful, really, really awful, he's just like literally a cutout for the teachers' union, which he used to work for,
00:19:30.160is that even, you know, the free money to do a thing, he can't hint in that direction because his overwhelming priority is to try to get the, not just the city, but the state,
00:19:44.980and if he could, the federal government, to bail out the gaping holes in the teachers' union pensions.
00:19:59.300I understand the argument against having the National Guard and certainly the military come into a city.
00:20:07.400I don't think the federal government should be doing that in places where it is not invited and where there is not a riot or a crisis on the ground.
00:20:15.920No, the legal authority is very sketchy.
00:20:18.680It's sketchy and it's a bad precedent, and our federal government right now spends $7 trillion a year, and 25 years ago we spent $1.8 trillion a year,
00:20:28.120partly because we decided that the federal government and national politics must solve every issue, every local issue.
00:20:35.780The framers of this genius governing structure, the greatest and longest surviving in the world in a constitutional republic, understood that the federal government shouldn't be in charge of fixing local government failure.
00:20:48.660That is what we're planning to do right now, and it's a recipe for all kinds of conflict.
00:20:55.460I mean, we have our 50-state experiment, and it's kind of what makes us great, where we have a federal government, and there are certain federal laws that we all have to abide by.
00:21:03.680There's, of course, the U.S. Constitution.
00:21:04.920But what drew the original founding colonies into this union was, so we get to be ourselves still, right?
00:21:12.800Like, we're not going to have to abide by, like, some master king rules, right?
00:21:17.100Like, we can be different in Virginia than you guys are going to be up there in Connecticut.
00:21:22.800And the more Trump seizes control in state after state, whether it's the police power or cashless bail, you know, all things—I'm a very, very pro-law and order person, so I'm on board with more cops, less crime, no more cashless bail.
00:21:40.760That failed, but forcing it by a president on states that have either ruled against it, specifically with legislation or, you know, against their will, is a different story.
00:21:53.060Like, it kind of Fs up the 50-state experiment that is really at the bedrock of our foundational principles, Camille.
00:22:00.700And I think it does contribute to the appearance that some of this is, in fact, performative.
00:22:04.900I mean, you've got D.C., which has had historically, like, lower crime in different periods but had an explosion in crime during 2020.
00:22:13.580It hasn't quite gone back down to pre-2020 levels, so there is a reason for concern.
00:22:18.180But at the same time, there's a bit of a kind of strange dynamic when National Guardsmen are coming from states that may, in fact, have higher crime rates to patrol the streets of D.C.
00:22:27.700And the deployments are only in the safest areas, the kind of tourist centers of D.C., not in the neighborhoods that have actually had the highest levels of violence, which is probably for the best because I don't necessarily want National Guardsmen deploying to southeast and kind of shooting it out with young kids or something like that.
00:22:47.100That would be a very, very bad look for 100,000 different reasons.
00:22:50.620But the question becomes, like, how do we get to actually sustainable transformation of these communities that meaningfully lowers violence?
00:22:56.860As you alluded to a moment ago, Megan, like, part of the reason that it doesn't – it's odd to see people like Johnson talk about white supremacy as the actual danger in Chicago when Democrats have been in charge of every facet of Illinois politics for generations now.
00:23:15.440Those can't be the things that are to blame.
00:23:17.500And the people who are dying on the south side, it's black-on-black crime, it's Hispanic-on-Hispanic crime, or Hispanic-on-black, blah, blah.
00:23:24.000That area is not suffering from a white supremacy problem.
00:23:39.140And one has to actually have empathy for the people who happen to live in these neighborhoods who are not a party to the crime, which is most of the people who live in these neighborhoods,
00:23:48.960So I think you're right to call into question kind of the morality and the judgment of the political leadership who are looking at the day-to-day suffering of their citizens, of the people who voted them into office.
00:24:52.340And they know there's an overwhelming likelihood they're either going to get shot or they're going to get imprisoned before their 21st birthday.
00:25:00.480And there's a pipeline right into that gang system.
00:25:02.720And they look at the little girls and just have to pray they don't get caught in the crossfire.
00:25:05.680I mean, it's just it's an incredibly effed up way of living.
00:25:09.280And Brandon Johnson doesn't seem to care at all.
00:25:13.300He's more interested in his progressive bona fides saying, oh, no, like I'm against cops.
00:25:18.520He's probably like, Mom, Donnie, I want more social workers like the social workers going to go on to the south side of Chicago and put herself in between the drive by guy and the porch and do an intervention.
00:25:30.660So we can center blackness and have a more meaningful conversation, Moynihan.
00:25:36.040Well, I mean, a couple of things about this.
00:25:37.980First of all, you say it's black on black crime in Chicago.
00:25:40.640Let's not forget Jussie Smollett, who that was.
00:25:43.820He was the victim of a Chicago racist attack.
00:25:48.260That too turned out to be black on black.
00:25:53.920The thing that drives me crazy about this is you start this as a nice kind of bookend of it.
00:26:02.000Is it Democrats talking about history?
00:26:04.540Let's talk about history a little bit.
00:26:06.240I mean, as Camille pointed out, so many of these cities have or Matt pointed out, have, you know, city councils that are 100 percent Democratic, Democratic mayors for long stretches.
00:26:16.040Well, you know, New York City had a very similar thing.
00:26:19.760And when it had Republicans, it had Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay, who are essentially Democrats.
00:26:24.320And then they decided after David Jenkins to give a try to someone named Rudy Giuliani, obviously a very different Rudy Giuliani than what we see today.
00:26:38.700But if you look at history, what does it tell you that smart policing, and this is, by the way, one of the reasons beyond the Constitution that I object to the National Guard being, is if you talk to cops, and I just was doing this, they are like, no, no, we have very specific things in intelligence, that we have people in the communities, and we do this stuff in a real net.
00:26:58.800We just need more funding and more of us.
00:27:00.880And I would highly, highly, highly recommend to listeners and viewers the new book from Peter Moskos.
00:27:06.560Peter was a Baltimore City cop and is now a professor at John Jay College here in New York City.
00:27:13.820And it's basically an oral history called Back from the Brink about how New York, through policing, brought New York City back to a normal place, from a place that was like, honestly, like South American, Central American levels of violence.
00:27:27.880And as he says, it's not entirely policing, but there was a lot of it was.
00:27:31.640And if they want to look back in history, don't go so far back and say, land acknowledgement, that does nothing for anyone.
00:27:38.560Go back to New York City in the 90s, talk to Peter Moskos, and say, okay, we don't want to flood the zone with, you know, 30,000 cops.
00:27:45.100But what can we do with more cops and smarter policing to get violence levels down in this city?
00:30:11.100You could look at one Nashville, Tennessee.
00:30:13.420You're going to look at one red state after another, Bessemer, Alabama.
00:30:17.560And you will see violent crime rates much, much, much higher per capita than Chicago, Illinois, San Francisco.
00:30:27.740Send those troops to Shreveport, Louisiana.
00:30:30.980Send them to Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee.
00:30:33.400Send them to red states where they need them.
00:30:35.060Okay, so first of all, Stephen L. Miller on X pointing out that the current mayor of Monroe, Louisiana, is an independent who has served for five years.
00:30:47.020The previous mayor is a Democrat named Jamie Mayo.
00:31:43.540I mean, governors can't and shouldn't in ways, and I don't think presidents should either.
00:31:48.220And, you know, if Joe Scarborough thinks we should be sending the military to other places, just not the places where his viewers live, I think he's wrong.
00:31:56.000No, he's trying to make it sound like this is a Republican problem, not a Democrat problem.
00:32:03.000It's a soft-on-crime Democrat mayor and governor problem.
00:32:06.700I think, so I think that's the right way of framing it in the sense that even if, and it is often the case, you can have a case in which you have a Republican-run city that has out-of-control crime.
00:32:17.960I mean, sometimes it's very, very hard to get a handle on these things, and you have to, you know, bring all the people in.
00:32:23.160The thing is, wanting to bring all the people in, wanting to solve these problems, thinking about policing, because it is an essential component.
00:32:30.820If you don't have a robust police force that is actually tackling gang violence and tackling crime, then you have – I mean, there's not a lot that, you know, a Republican governor or a Republican mayor of a state can do about a city that has 95 percent fatherlessness.
00:33:29.140So I've talked about this before on the show.
00:33:30.580But, you know, for example, Tucker is constantly talking about the shitty state of American cities right now, and I agree with him 100 percent.
00:33:38.860But I see this as a Democrat-run city problem.
00:33:43.680I think if these cities would elect more Giuliani's or Bloomberg, who was also very good when it came to law and order, they would do better.
00:34:06.720It's not so different from the broken windows theory, you know, where it's like clean up the broken windows, even though nobody's like using that building because it's like order.
00:34:15.060Like go after the guy for public urination because it's about law and order and sending a message and then like starting small and then going big.
00:35:12.000And it's not OK because of our 50 state experiment and federalism.
00:35:14.820And there are important principles behind these bands, these laws, these boundaries that we have.
00:35:20.740But it is a very interesting experiment on whether we're just going to talk about fascist Trump and his overreach or we're going to get to the underlying problem that has gotten his attention.
00:35:34.120You know, I think it's not it's not far afield from what he's doing with this with the flag, you know, executive order.
00:35:42.000We can get into the details of that, too.
00:35:44.220But I think in both cases, what Trump really wants to do is call attention to the underlying problem.
00:36:52.520We are organizing our hatreds of the left who deserve it.
00:36:55.740In some cases, I don't like to hate because I'm a hippie.
00:36:58.680We're organizing our hatred against the right because they're overreaching and doing other things that I don't like.
00:37:03.020But again, I don't like to hate because I'm a hippie.
00:37:04.620But I would suggest the people who are invested in either as a consumerist or practitioner of politics, we are trying to like organize ourselves being really mad at fellow Americans.
00:37:16.360And I got to say, someone who's been driving around a lot for the last like four or five months.
00:38:12.860What I want is for places to be governed better, beginning with the place that I live in.
00:38:17.080One of the problems that we have in modern politics – you mentioned de Blasio, and you mentioned like rats and things running well.
00:38:23.260De Blasio the first time around, who was a non-entity who wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for Anthony Weiner not being able to handle himself.
00:38:28.900Or maybe handling himself a bit too much.
00:38:40.560He ran against a really capable New York City guy named Joe Loda, who had run the MTA well.
00:38:47.160He'd worked under both a Republican and Democratic administrations, like being, by all accounts, a very good and dedicated public servant.
00:38:56.380And he lost by 50 percentage points because Democrats living in New York were thinking to themselves, how embarrassing is it that in our biggest city, the most important city in the country, we've been run by Republicans and independents for 20 years.
00:39:10.220We want to express our sense of national politics by voting for a Sandinista, who we don't know, don't care.
00:39:18.140And if he throws out a first pitch at a Mets game, we're going to boo him because he sucks.
00:39:21.380But we're still going to vote for him as opposed to a competent person.
00:39:24.880When you fixate constantly about national politics and the people that you hate, whom you think their hearts are bad, then that fixation is going to prevent you from seeing what's around you.
00:39:35.320And what's around you is you're being misgoverned, especially so in big cities, but not only.
00:39:40.240And that sort of harnessing of that sense of national-focused hatreds is blocking you from actually finding a solution that all of us here want to see.
00:39:50.040Well, yes. I mean, that last point I agree with.
00:39:52.560But I would say that Trump is not a hippie and definitely not going to share a roach clip with you, Matt Welsh.
00:40:39.580In any event, I think that he's trying to call attention to not necessarily that they're now going to burn flags, but that that's what they do.
00:40:45.400And that they're now going to defend it in a way that's going to be like, yeah, I'm going to burn it and fuck America and this, that.
00:40:50.860And, like, he calls attention to something bad about them that irritates the vast majority of Americans and puts them in the awkward spot of having to be like, are pedophiles so bad?
00:41:00.760You know, like, over and over, he puts them in this terrible place and they take the bait, Camille.
00:41:06.820It's been almost a decade of Donald Trump being at the center of American politics, and it is the case that Democrats continue to fall for exactly the same ploy with respect to what you just described.
00:41:19.280They are framed in a particular way that, to the extent you're actually disagreeing with him, you do seem a little bit like a lunatic.
00:41:27.780Like, you're opposed to federal dollars for policing.
00:41:31.500You're opposed to trying to do something to kind of promote American pride.
00:41:36.180But it's possible that you could talk about things in a more sophisticated way, my friends on the political left, that you could say, for example, that, well, policing is.
00:41:49.740But also a national-level solution to this problem probably won't work.
00:41:54.480Like, we should maybe think about some of the more practical things that we could do.
00:41:57.580Closure rates, clearance rates for cases in Chicago have always been historically low, and it's one of the things that is a commonality across the most crime-impacted regions of this country.
00:42:08.800Police departments that just don't work well.
00:42:11.120It's not just that they're underfunded in many instances.
00:42:13.820It's not just that they don't have enough police officers.
00:42:16.080The police officers who are there aren't necessarily doing a great job.
00:42:19.720Like, you actually need better engagement with the local community in order to work on that.
00:42:23.460You need better staffing in those departments with respect to the leadership, and you also need political officials who are interested in doing more than just making these kind of preposterous statements about national politics and posturing with respect to Donald Trump.
00:42:38.800If you are the political leadership of St. Louis, you should not give two shits what's happening in Washington, D.C.
00:42:44.360It has absolutely no impact on the quality of the lives of the people in your community.
00:42:48.560The stuff that matters to them is closer to the ground, and that's what you should be talking about.
00:42:52.820And you can defend those reasonable policies and talk about policies in a substantive way without getting completely captured by the national political hysteria.
00:43:06.460Like, our desire to perhaps foment this kind of contempt of the other, which is great for politicians, but is oftentimes really, really bad for the citizens who they're supposed to be serving.
00:43:15.800Okay, so what Camille is calling for is a more sophisticated, substantive messaging coming from our Democrat politicians, all politicians, that is not necessarily about personal destruction or insults of the other side.
00:43:30.440You should have a little chat with Tim Walz.
00:43:36.660The privilege of my lifetime was stand beside someone we know was the most qualified and would have been a fantastic president in a President Harris.
00:43:47.280And look, we wouldn't wake up every day to a bunch of shit on TV and a bunch of nonsense.
00:43:56.980We would wake up to an adult with compassion and dignity and vision and leadership doing the work.
00:44:03.260Not a man-child crying about whatever's wrong with him.
00:44:06.520May his fat ankles find something today.
00:52:06.620And President Trump fired her because he says she's been credibly accused of committing mortgage fraud, which is a problem for really anybody, but certainly for someone in her position.
00:52:20.440And her case has been referred to the Department of Justice by this guy, Bill Pulte, who oversees the mortgaging industry.
00:52:28.860Trump posted to Truth Social, on Monday, he posted to Truth Social the letter that he sent to Lisa Cook that reads,
00:52:37.320Pursuant to my authority under Article 2 of the Constitution and the Federal Reserve Act, you are hereby removed from your position on the Board of Governors, effective immediately.
00:52:45.520The Federal Reserve Act provides that you may be removed at my discretion for cause.
00:52:49.560Trump noted that the DOJ's inquiry into whether she lied on mortgage applications amounted to sufficient cause to remove her.
00:52:55.920In light of your deceitful and potentially criminal conduct in a financial matter, they cannot, and I do not, have such confidence in your integrity.
00:53:02.360Her term set to expire by its terms in January 2038.
00:53:07.540So she gave a statement to Politico as follows.
00:53:11.900President Trump purported to fire me for cause when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.
00:53:17.360I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy, as I have been doing since 2022.
00:53:24.020Her lawyer, Cook's attorney, Abby Lowell, again, he's the ubiquitous when it comes to Democrat candidates and causes.
00:53:31.300President Trump has taken his social media to once again fire by tweet, and once again his reflex to bully is flawed,
00:53:35.760and his demands lack any proper process, basis, or legal authority.
00:53:38.600We will take whatever actions are needed to prevent his attempted illegal action.
00:53:42.600We believe that he's now filing a lawsuit to stop this attempted firing.
00:53:49.940What the media wants you to know about Lisa Cook is black woman, black woman, black woman, black woman, first and only black woman on the board of governors,
00:53:56.780which somehow is supposed to mean that you cannot be fired.
00:53:59.760I guess I have superior abilities to avoid getting fired, so does Camille.
00:54:04.360You two guys are effed, because we have superpowers.
00:54:08.600Mine are from below the waist, and Camille's are all over him, and these give you the ability to never, never get fired,
00:54:15.460even if you've committed a criminal fraud, as she's now being accused of.
00:56:52.780You don't have any sort of criminal charge that's been filed.
00:56:55.160An allegation on its face is perhaps not enough to justify a reasonable cause for dismissal here.
00:57:02.220But one can suspect that the likelihood of a charge happening in this particular case,
00:57:07.120given the interest of the president and given the fact that the Justice Department seems to have an interest in prosecuting cases like this,
00:57:15.040it could very well happen, in which case then the dismissal actually happens.
00:57:19.100And the dispute and questions about whether or not the president has the authority to do this goes away.
00:57:23.980But there are still some lingering concerns, and I'll come to that in a moment.
00:57:28.060But I will say that the defense of this particular woman has not been particularly glorious.
00:57:33.200The profile that the New York Times wrote up over the weekend really does have, and it's almost, like, it feels like comedy.
00:57:39.860She's draped in one of those, like, kinte cloth sashes.
00:57:43.560And it's, like, emblazoned in the headline is, first black woman.
00:57:47.560And I just, these facts don't matter to me whatsoever.
00:57:50.980I am actually interested in if a federal official, or at least here, an appointee at the Federal Reserve,
00:57:56.880is engaged in some sort of financial fraud.
00:57:59.340Even a rather small-ish thing that lots of Americans, I imagine, have been guilty of,
00:58:04.240which is somewhat lying on mortgage or loan applications,
00:58:07.140which, interestingly, has a weird parallel to a legal drama that Donald Trump himself found himself caught up in,
00:58:13.620which I was personally quite skeptical.
00:58:17.420And, in fact, I think we probably talked about it on this show a couple of times.
01:01:55.800They must suffer, or we're just going to go through this again, but only with Republicans.
01:02:00.520So I think, really, you have to take the nose and rub it in the crap in order for these people to learn that it's a really unfortunate, unpleasant process.
01:02:24.200I'm not in the box your way towards peace camp.
01:02:28.800When I associate myself with the comments of the economic historian Philip Magnus, a pretty good follow on Twitter, who said, I opposed, although I didn't, but just because I didn't know her, I opposed her appointment to begin with because she's mediocre and bad.
01:02:45.000And I oppose Trump being the one to fire her because I don't want the president to have that much authority over the Federal Reserve Board.
01:02:54.440It's better to have a quasi-independent or fully independent Federal Reserve if we are going to have a Federal Reserve than it is to have something that's being impacted by the president.
01:03:08.020I think there's a problem that Democrats have here and the media by extension because it's a lot of the same sort of initiatives.
01:03:16.620And again, I'm saying this is someone who thinks that Trump shouldn't do this and that, you know, as Harvey Silverglades pointed out in a book of the same name, the average American commits three felonies a day because there's so many things that have been classified as a felony.
01:03:28.260If you want to find me doing a crime and I don't even smoke pot, Megan Kelly, you can probably find me doing a crime.
01:03:34.540And I certainly don't smoke mortgages for crying out loud. People are crazy owning property.
01:03:39.740But the problem is that Democrats in their sort of spaces, in their administrative state, in their kind of just sort of soft neoliberal sort of governance of things, they are constantly appointing people who aren't great.
01:03:54.380I mean, I don't like RFK. I know you do, Megan. We won't argue about that right now.
01:03:58.620But everyone's up in arms about RFK being appointed as head of HHS.
01:04:04.260Tell me how much greater Javier Becerra was.
01:04:08.940An absolute total political hack with zero relevant experience appointed by a president in 2021 when, I don't know, was there something going on with health, public health in 2021 that was of concern?
01:04:22.520And he was nominated in part because he was from California, but also because he's Latino and COVID, you know, obviously affects our Latino American communities, blah, blah, blah.
01:04:32.600Didn't make any sense at the time. And it did not excite anything like the same level of outrage.
01:04:37.520It's just sort of understood that we'll have mediocre people like, I don't know, Kamala Harris, the vice president, you know, and Karen Bass was on that short list, a career mediocrity.
01:04:49.540Well, who had never been in any election where she didn't win 80 to 20, as it was on the short list of being there.
01:04:59.340So there's this sense of like, yes, Donald Trump is assertively trying to break norms and create more power for himself to do as he pleases in the presidency.
01:05:10.020He does that literally every single day.
01:05:11.440He's signed more executive orders in his presidency than any president in history, with the exception of FDR in his first term.
01:05:19.900This is for those of us who are opposed to an overly vigorous executive branch.
01:05:27.620And he's trying to do this in such a way to expand his power.
01:05:30.740He clearly has been jawboning Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve all his second term, trying to get rates lowered because that's going to juice the stock market and make the bad effects of tariffs seem probably less bad.
01:05:44.240It's kind of obvious what he's trying to do.
01:05:46.580I don't have any faith that he is he's approaching or that his Department of Justice is approaching this in a fair manner.
01:05:53.740I don't I don't have faith in any politician, turns out, and let alone him while he's dunking the football, dunking the football, spiking, spiking, spiking basketball, dunking football and even the baseball.
01:06:10.840They tried to go after Donald Trump for writing payment for legal services in payments to his lawyer around the Stormy Daniels thing.
01:06:20.800If that is a 34 felony indictment and conviction, actually saying two residences at the same time are your primary residence is fine by me.
01:06:32.220That that is a crime. It actually is a crime, unlike the shit that they were pulling against Trump.
01:06:36.520Her what she did if she did this, it actually is mortgage fraud. So it's OK.
01:06:42.140Maybe we wouldn't have prosecuted it in, you know, 10 years ago, but it is a new day thanks to the Democrats.
01:06:50.180And now they must suffer to learn. And she's as much a part of all of it as anybody.
01:06:55.220She's been such a hyper critic. She's been on board with Trump and the white supremacy and all the like.
01:07:01.060She was fine with everything that happened to him. So suck it, Lisa Cook. You're fucking fired.
01:07:06.520Deal with it. She's fired. And by the way, he does have the authority. He has the authority to fire her for cause.
01:07:13.200The statute does not define cause. You've been accused credibly.
01:07:17.780And by the way, Bill Pulte of the mortgage organization is saying he has great cause to fire her.
01:07:25.140Alleged felonies in when it comes to mortgage fraud, when you're sitting on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors is 100 percent cause.
01:07:32.940You actually don't need to be convicted. It'd be nice if he let her have a trial and be convicted before you.
01:07:38.480But he doesn't have to. She's calling the organization into disrepute.
01:07:42.160There have been multiple news stories about whether she committed mortgage fraud.
01:07:45.660It's she can be fired right now. And that's what's going to happen.
01:07:49.060And that's what a court is eventually going to hold. Maybe not the district court, depending on the judge they pull.
01:07:53.560But I have no sympathy for her. Zero. And I and she's not the only one.
01:07:58.740I don't have sympathy for any of these people if they committed crimes.
01:08:01.800And we'll see what happened with John Bolton. I don't know what happened with John Bolton.
01:08:04.760If he did something, I'd like to see the evidence. But if he actually crossed the line legally, then him, too.
01:08:09.520I don't care. If you committed a crime, you opened this Pandora's box.
01:08:14.880The Trump critics, mania ridden Democrats must suffer. OK, that's it. Go ahead, Camille.
01:08:24.760I just want to ask what happens if the next election cycle Democrats sweep into power?
01:08:30.560I mean, again, stranger things have happened. I'll just put it that way.
01:08:34.600And they aren't thinking to themselves, you know, we got it so bad the last time they're thinking we are really going to stick it to him this time.
01:08:42.080It seems to me that the most likely outcome is not they learn their lesson.
01:08:45.960It's that the lesson that they learn is that we need to be about retribution twice as much as we were before.
01:08:52.680And I just think that there was an opportunity.
01:08:54.140Then we're on the course that we have to that we must play out before this stops.
01:08:58.840I mean, I practice law for 10 years. I love law and order. I love the law.
01:09:04.860I actually think it's the one thing still binding us together.
01:09:08.140Like the honest judges out there who are still interpreting the law and upholding it, no matter where the chips fall politically, are like a really important piece of what's holding us together still 250 years after we were formed.
01:09:18.980But in this particular instance, and I would never advocate charging somebody who didn't do anything, but if somebody actually violated the law and it's a crime that we normally wouldn't prosecute because it's just too small ball for us, we're just in a new era.
01:09:30.680And so the Republicans are doing the right thing right now. And if if what is required to get us back to normal, which was, let's say, 10 years ago, is more pain and suffering on both sides, then so be it.
01:09:42.400Then that that I'm sorry, but it's what the country has to go through. We can't we are going to die.
01:09:47.360We are the country will end if we become if lawfare is just a new tool that's in the political arsenal of whatever power, whatever party is in power.
01:09:56.920Lawfare. How do you know this isn't lawfare itself, Megan? No, I don't know. But my point is, I'm fine with it if it is.
01:10:02.820If she committed a felony and we normally wouldn't prosecute it, but the reason we're really prosecuting it is because we're done not we're done with the exercise of discretion that would have been in their favor.
01:10:14.660Then that's fine by me. I mean, we we didn't prosecute Hillary Clinton. We did not go after her. We did not lock her up.
01:10:21.040We tried to take the high road. They didn't accept the olive branch. They tried to ruin Trump personally, Trump professionally, Trump's presidency and many around him.
01:10:33.260You know, they're the ones who locked up Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress, Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress.
01:10:39.260We didn't try to lock up Merrick Garland when he committed it. It's it's time.
01:10:43.680I'm fucking done taking the high road. They have to suffer.
01:10:47.740They have to have real skin in the game before they will accept reality, which is this move by them, repeated, repeated move by them is ruining our foundational basis.
01:11:00.300So until they know that on a visceral level, like the kind you get when you're looking between bars, they're not going to behave differently.
01:11:09.080So that's I mean, in a nutshell, where I am on it.
01:11:19.360No, I mean, look, I you know, you know, us dumb libertarians and our obsession with the Constitution.
01:11:25.800I mean, I'm obviously nothing unconstitutional about it.
01:11:30.000You violate the law. You can be put in jail if there are if there's a basis for the prosecution.
01:11:35.860I mean, if if I was fired from my job and they didn't allow me to respond to the charges, I'd probably file a lawsuit for wrongful termination.
01:11:42.720But I like what we would say at the beginning of the Bush at the middle of the Bush administration, libertarians are quite loud about this, is that executive power and the growth of executive power is going to turn on us.
01:11:55.940Essentially, essentially and eventually. And in 2008, that's what happened.
01:12:10.740The problem is, is that when you respond to the expansion of executive power under George W. Bush with the massive expansion under Barack Obama and then you see where it's gone, it keeps on going, keeps on going.
01:12:25.260And my concern with this is that we become Latin American in if you look at any Latin American country, particularly, you know, Argentina is a great example with economic policy of firing people that, you know, just, you know, if we keep doing this forever, where does it stop?
01:12:39.780Does it ever stop? Number one. And number two is that, do I want to live in a world?
01:12:44.980And I don't know about the John Bolton stuff, as you just said, Megan, it's unclear what this is.
01:12:50.280But had John Bolton written a hagiography of Donald Trump, would the FBI have been at his house last week?
01:12:58.080No. I mean, is that, this is a question we have to ask ourselves. And, you know, it is a question that cannot be answered. But if this woman, I would prefer, by the way, when you point out, I have no idea about her qualifications, but I believe you, Camille has looked into this.
01:13:11.080If that is the case, I want to get to the point where we stop hiring people. And there are ways of doing this legally. It is against federal law to be hiring people on the basis of, for instance, the color of their skin and to, quote, Camille, the shape of their genitalia.
01:13:27.580But that is something that we should be attacking every day.
01:13:33.880Right? I agree with that. But I do worry about this cycle of lawfare. And it's like, well, you use it against us. And just to be totally clear to listeners and viewers who have not been paying attention, they should have, when we've been on the show for many years now, and we were full-throated in our denunciations of this shit against Donald Trump.
01:13:58.000Yeah, but I worry that there's no way of going back if we keep going on this, and that it's just lawfare, political lawfare forever.
01:14:05.580I get it. I totally hear you. It's a valid point. Like, it doesn't sound like a crazy rebuttal to me at all. I just maintain, just based on my life experience, the only way they will learn is if they feel pain personally. Like, they must be made to feel personal pain.
01:14:21.900Their heroes, for example, the ones who perpetrated Russiagate, and those around them, must be put through this same meat grinder, or it will continue in perpetuity.
01:14:36.200They have to feel like, to quote Edward the Longshanks, that could be my head in a basket, or they'll just keep doing it. They'll just keep doing it.
01:14:45.940So, I know—I hear you. I mean, we're at an impasse, but I think Trump sees it as I do, and I think we're going to be spending the next three years talking about the legal cases that have been brought against people like John Brennan, Jim Comey.
01:15:01.320Maybe—potentially John Bolton didn't have that one on my bingo card, but okay, I'm open-minded to what he may or may not have done. Let's see.
01:15:09.120Going after somebody for whom you have no colorable base is something that seems clearly made up.
01:15:14.620I will speak out against, but so far I have not seen that, and I don't know what John Bolton did or didn't do.
01:15:19.020So, you know, the reporting yesterday was that the CIA called something to the attention of the FBI about something he had disclosed overseas.
01:15:29.020No idea. So we'll just hold our—keep our powder dry until we know more about that one.
01:15:33.060Okay, I do want to get this soundbite in, because we've spent a lot over the first hour and 20 minutes talking about the left's obsession with identity politics,
01:15:40.340and why are they still doing this, and this is not a winning strategy.
01:15:42.880And you won't be surprised at all to learn that Tiffany Cross, who was probably the biggest racist after Joy Reid,
01:15:50.800or she might have been ahead of Joy Reid, depended on the day, over on MSNBC,
01:15:55.080she got fired from MSNBC, allegedly because she was, like, committing shenanigans with the company, like, reimbursements.
01:16:01.540I don't know. But she denied all that.
01:16:03.380I think it was because she was a racist hack who had no ratings.
01:16:06.060But that's what gets you invited onto Abby Phillips' panel.
01:16:10.060And she went on and had some pearls of wisdom to offer about Stephen Miller, deputy assistant to the president,
01:16:20.080who's been behind a lot of these executive orders, who is brilliant, who is very much behind the immigration policy,
01:16:27.980who was very much involved in writing the executive order on the gender madness, which was wonderful,
01:16:33.520and is one of the left's favorite villains.
01:16:37.660And here she is talking about him in Sot 9.
01:16:42.160Anytime that we play something from Stephen Miller, it would be journalistic integrity to point out that he is a white supremacist,
01:16:47.800and he is the brainchild behind this policy.
01:16:50.140That's not my opinion. That's actual fact.
01:16:52.540And for him to purport lies from the Oval Office as a white supremacist, it should be pointed out.
01:16:58.800Oh, the Wall Street Journal reported that he's, it's a fact.
01:17:07.360He's a Wall Street. Poor Arthur Idala, who goes on there.
01:17:11.400She's an idiot, and that's actual defamation.
01:17:13.800If I were Stephen Miller, I actually would file a lawsuit against her.
01:17:16.420If I were Trump, I would file a lawsuit against AOC for saying over and over that he's a rapist.