The Megyn Kelly Show - Criminalizing Speech, and Performative Outrage, with Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch ｜ Ep. 328

00:00:00.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.360 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:14.620 Oh, we have so much to get through today, and we have the perfect guests to talk about it all.

00:00:19.920 President Biden taking us closer to another potential military conflict with China.

00:00:26.240 This one over Taiwan. Just like a throwaway, here you go. 0.98

00:00:29.620 Oh, we may be going into Taiwan with troops, depending on what China does.

00:00:32.820 Wait, what?

00:00:34.220 The hysterical reaction from the media and the Democratic Party over the terrible Buffalo shooting has only grown stronger.

00:00:43.200 I'm sure you've heard by now what Carl Cameron, my old pal from Fox News, is saying.

00:00:48.000 I had to stop and rewind. I'm like, wait, what?

00:00:52.400 So we'll play you that.

00:00:53.640 And supermodel Kate Moss is scheduled to testify tomorrow in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial.

00:00:59.800 Why is that? We'll get into it. Plus, monkey pox?

00:01:03.120 Joining me now to get into all of it, the hosts of the fifth column, now on Substack.

00:01:09.520 Camille Foster of Freethink Media, Matt Welsh, editor-at-large for Reason Magazine,

00:01:14.680 and Michael Moynihan, a correspondent for Vice News Tonight.

00:01:23.120 Welcome back to the show, guys. Great to have you.

00:01:25.140 Howdy, Mike. Thanks for having me, as always.

00:01:27.000 So much to get into. And I was asking the team, you know, before we started, I'm like, where should I start?

00:01:31.220 You know, because people have, my producers and I sometimes have different, and they had good hard news headlines.

00:01:35.880 And I was like, I don't want to talk about it. I want to talk about Carl Cameron.

00:01:38.600 I want to talk about, like, I saw, I realize it's not the biggest news ever, but I'm shocked.

00:01:46.240 I know, I've known this guy since I was a young correspondent in the D.C. Bureau.

00:01:51.120 He was always a totally straight shooter, right down the middle.

00:01:54.960 One of the things I loved about him was you couldn't tell whether he was left or right in his reporting.

00:01:59.680 You know, campaign Carl Cameron. And you couldn't tell which side of the aisle he was on.

00:02:05.120 And I knew him personally. And he, you couldn't tell. When he talked about politics, he was right down the middle.

00:02:10.520 And then he left Fox News in January of 17. And I could tell I was kind of leaked.

00:02:17.840 And then he gave an interview after. I'm like, OK, I get it. He doesn't like Trump.

00:02:21.600 And he doesn't like the network's direction on Trump. Well, that that wasn't particularly unusual.

00:02:25.320 A lot of a lot of people who, you know, were straight shooters didn't really love Trump.

00:02:29.540 But now to hear him talk, it was like, all right, I guess we'll.

00:02:36.140 Oh, yeah. OK, so this soundbite that we put together has two butted soundbites.

00:02:39.720 The one that I heard him was on MSNBC with Nicole Wallace.

00:02:44.160 And he doubled down on the remarks because a part of me, even after I heard the lunacy, I was like, oh, maybe you had a bad day.

00:02:49.380 No. Then he went on CNN. He talked to Jim Acosta and he doubled down on the lunatic remarks about what should be happening to people who say things he finds incendiary online or on cable television.

00:03:01.680 This was in the context of Buffalo. Here he is in a butted soundbite. Carl Cameron. Take a listen.

00:03:07.660 Tucker has been screaming fire in a crowded movie house for years.

00:03:11.820 If you disturb the peace by starting a riot in a movie theater, cops are going to arrest you and you might end up in jail or you might end up in something worse.

00:03:18.940 The president has to be more forceful. And sooner or later, the law enforcement and the U.S. government is going to have to stop the lying because it's causing people's deaths.

00:03:29.980 It's time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail.

00:03:36.580 What?

00:03:37.020 I can't believe it. Like, I can't believe he's gone that far over to the lunacy side.

00:03:44.620 The police are going to have to start arresting people because of the lies they tell.

00:03:51.160 What? Who wants to take it?

00:03:52.560 The president of the United States has to take charge of the lying.

00:03:55.840 We're going to, like, do something as president to make the lying stop.

00:04:00.180 And that's going to result in people going to jail. 0.69

00:04:02.840 Also, I really hate Trump because he's an authoritarian.

00:04:05.540 Yeah, right, right, right, right. 0.56

00:04:07.320 And of course, Jim Acosta follows that up by saying, you know, Carl, that's absolutely right.

00:04:13.140 I couldn't agree more. And I was like, wait a second.

00:04:15.000 And these are two people pretending to be journalists, saying that another journalist who they don't like, who is lying.

00:04:22.280 And of course, we have to discover who's going to determine what's a lie, should be going to jail for saying things on TV that are unrelated to a tragedy that happened a week and a half ago.

00:04:32.960 Yeah.

00:04:33.280 I mean, I don't know what world we're living in, but it's absolutely terrifying.

00:04:35.920 And at some point, I wonder if anyone will ever get the memo that the whole fire in a crowded theater thing is not what you think it is.

00:04:43.240 It's not.

00:04:44.040 And it's not true. He changed it there.

00:04:46.100 He usually it's used to make a free speech point to say you're not allowed to say that in a crowded theater.

00:04:52.080 And by the way, go ahead and look at the history.

00:04:53.480 If you just Google this online, you'll see you are allowed to say that.

00:04:55.740 Sorry, you are.

00:04:57.520 But it was actually used.

00:04:58.640 He changed it to disturbing the peace.

00:05:00.800 He found another crime to attach to it.

00:05:02.780 So Tucker's disturbing the peace on his cable news show and whoever writes bad stuff online, they're disturbing the peace.

00:05:08.680 That's the new crime.

00:05:10.280 But in a sense, he is actually using it in the first time in a long time in the correct way, because what people don't often understand, and I've sort of been beating the drum about this for many, many years, that that was actually invoked in the arrest of someone selling anti-war newspapers.

00:05:27.600 I think it was in Yiddish during the First World War, saying we should not join the First World War.

00:05:32.860 It is a fool's errand. 0.57

00:05:34.180 The person was arrested and then accused of yelling fire in a crowded theater. 0.97

00:05:38.580 So the origination of that is actually trampling on free speech.

00:05:42.060 It's what's crazy about it is, like, he knows he's got to know.

00:05:47.180 You don't have to be a lawyer to be able to understand that a cable news pundit or the purveyor of a website is not disturbing the peace by offering their opinions, in Tucker's case, on our open border on the South.

00:06:00.700 And I know you guys are in a different position than Tucker is when it comes to discussing the border, but that's his opinion.

00:06:06.440 It's not disturbing the peace.

00:06:08.520 That's not the disturbing the peace that the law aims to capture. 0.97

00:06:11.520 They mean, like, your neighbor won't turn off his damn stereo, like, one in the morning and you can't sleep, like, maybe. 0.91

00:06:19.480 Or, you know, a crazy parade that has no permit that doesn't shut up all day and it disturbs your quiet enjoyment of your home. 0.98

00:06:26.100 This is lunacy, and to me, it's an example of Trump derangement syndrome and how it's like long COVID.

00:06:33.480 It never goes away.

00:06:35.980 It's also the concept of disturbing the peace should be especially chilling to people to hear in the mouths of an American, let alone a journalist or someone who otherwise pretends to care about the First Amendment.

00:06:48.540 Disturbing the peace is a very specific term that's been used in communist countries and authoritarian countries over and over again as a catch-all federal statute to arrest and pressure dissidents.

00:07:01.680 It's the name of a Vaclav Havel book-length interview from, like, 1988, disturbing the peace.

00:07:07.880 It's the statute that they remove as soon as they usher in freedom after totalitarianism.

00:07:13.920 We don't want a federal government at all interested in the notion of disturbing the peace.

00:07:21.060 You know, you can enforce, you know, anti-riot statutes in the District of Columbia, okay, but we don't want the feds saying, you know what, I don't know, this speech is making me feel unpeaceful.

00:07:34.780 That's a terrible, terrible place that we're going.

00:07:36.740 And I think it's not just Trump to your ancient syndrome, it's definitely part of it, but there's a right-left, maybe 10 years worth of creeping, seeing speech as violence.

00:07:49.000 And I wish that it was only on one of those sides, and it's not.

00:07:53.480 It is increasingly on both sides, and it's a terrible place that we're going right now.

00:07:57.200 Speech that I deem unacceptable is not just not okay for someone to say, it ought to be illegal, it ought to be prohibited, it is actively dangerous, and we no longer believe in this principle of free speech in so much as it allows those other bad people to get away with saying what they like.

00:08:16.900 There's a very real sense in which we're talking about criminalizing political opposition.

00:08:21.840 Like, that is what is being flirted with, and it's really important to name it in that particular way, and it is entirely possible to be in a position to, if you believe that this is appropriate, criticize Tucker Carlson, perhaps even criticize Fox News broadly, without crossing that threshold and putting yourself in the position where you're suggesting that the federal government, the president of the United States in particular, ought to be able to use some arbitrary standard to incarcerate people.

00:08:49.240 Incarcerate people who say the wrong kinds of things in public.

00:08:53.520 It's obscene, and it is a dangerous, dangerous kind of crossing of the Rubicon here.

00:08:58.920 And you know what else, guys?

00:09:00.740 Yeah, and I'll give you the floor in one second, but you know, to me, it dovetails perfectly with what was just in the news today and yesterday, which is that National School Board Association, and its now infamous letter to the White House trying to sick the feds, to Merrick Garland's delight, on parents who are objecting to all the nonsense happening at schools.

00:09:17.960 They had originally, it's now come out, asked for the National Guard to be sent in.

00:09:23.020 They wanted the National Guard.

00:09:24.720 The National School Boards Association thought this would be a good idea, and we do know that the letter was coordinated with the White House, so who exactly had proposed that and who took it out?

00:09:34.060 But yeah, it's like this knee-jerk thing to bring in the government and to bring in law enforcement now to crack down on people saying the things that you don't like because you have some argument that their words are violence or might inspire violence.

00:09:46.960 I mean, this is the natural endpoint, and this is what we get for not fighting back against this stuff.

00:09:53.640 And I should say that the fifth column has been fighting back against this stuff for about six years now, but it is a natural endpoint of classifying this as violence.

00:10:00.980 It was done for a very specific reason, right?

00:10:03.220 I mean, if you say that my opponent's speech is so noxious and so odious and I hate it so much that these people must go to jail, everyone on earth will turn on you and say, this is kind of Solzhenitsyn territory.

00:10:15.260 This is authoritarianism.

00:10:16.640 This is fascism.

00:10:17.480 This is communism.

00:10:18.600 But if you reframe it and you say that people are being hurt, nobody likes violence.

00:10:23.700 People are opposed to violence.

00:10:25.180 So how do we stop this violence?

00:10:27.180 We have to stop the speech, which itself is violence and then provokes violence.

00:10:32.080 And then all of a sudden you notice that on MSNBC and on CNN, when you have Carl Cameron saying something that, excuse my language, is completely batshit.

00:10:41.620 I mean, this is beyond anything I've heard a serious journalist say on the air multiple times.

00:10:46.660 I mean, it's important that you put that up twice to say that this wasn't a slip of the tongue.

00:10:50.360 It happened and doubled down.

00:10:52.420 And the thing that's crazy to me is that the journalist on the other end just says, and in the case of Jim Acosta says, that's absolutely right.

00:11:00.260 It's like, no, it's absolutely wrong, both legally, morally, you know, in every possible way.

00:11:05.340 This is not the way of dealing with speech that you don't like.

00:11:07.760 At a minimum, you would expect to get that kind of perfunctory pushback.

00:11:10.300 Well, shouldn't there be some concern about free speech?

00:11:13.920 Don't you think it's appropriate for us to take into consideration that the boundaries are just a little bit fuzzy, aren't they?

00:11:20.560 We know they're terrible, but the boundaries are fuzzy.

00:11:22.960 Not even.

00:11:23.800 We're past that at this point.

00:11:25.320 You know what it reminds me of?

00:11:27.160 It reminds me of when Trump first came in, went down the elevator and, you know, all these sort of Republicans started to be like, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, which is fine.

00:11:36.040 They can support Trump.

00:11:36.800 But there was almost like a zombification to some people where it was like, you couldn't say anything bad about Trump.

00:11:41.960 It was like, you're with him or you're against him.

00:11:43.720 It's like, Trump, Trump, Trump.

00:11:45.420 And I remember thinking like there's like there's like a zombification effect happening here on certain diehard MAGA people.

00:11:52.480 In the beginning, we're like they can't hear any criticism of him without understanding this is politics.

00:11:58.100 Well, he's going to get some criticism.

00:11:59.340 What are you doing?

00:12:00.340 And and now it's happened on the other side.

00:12:03.820 Now it's like Carl Cameron's been zombified. 0.91

00:12:07.120 He's been sucked over into the world of like the liars must be thrown in jail. 0.57

00:12:12.580 They don't tell the truth. 0.98

00:12:13.980 They are bad for America.

00:12:15.560 And it's like there's no getting him back.

00:12:18.780 You know, he's gone.

00:12:19.620 Like they've gotten Carl.

00:12:21.300 You know, it's like Stepford wives. 1.00

00:12:22.460 Like there's there's robotics behind the eyelids now.

00:12:25.220 There's it's too late.

00:12:26.280 We can't get him.

00:12:27.980 What happens as soon as you get into the kind of political catastrophizing of if the opponents win and you're seeing this right now in the run up to the midterms.

00:12:36.460 I've just read a piece in The Nation by the odious Dan Frumkin talking about this, you know, the midterms authoritarianism basically is on the line.

00:12:44.620 The Republicans win.

00:12:45.740 That's it.

00:12:46.240 We're on the slope towards Viktor Orban's Hungary.

00:12:48.720 It's kind of over.

00:12:49.620 And, you know, the press must portray it like that.

00:12:52.620 As soon as you have it in your mind that it's a flight 93 election, as people, as the pro-Trump crowd were saying in October, November of 2016, then you're you're you're ready to go.

00:13:05.560 You are unable then to see that your preferred policy initiative, if given to the other team, would be used against you in the face like that argument no longer works to people who think that if the woke run everything, the cathedral is just going to ram it down our throats and we're going to never see this country again.

00:13:24.500 We're not going to have a country in Donald Trump's words.

00:13:26.260 He said that over and over again.

00:13:27.680 As soon as you believe that on either side and right now there's huge swaths of America.

00:13:31.840 Thank God it's not all of us, but there's a lot of us, nobody in this conversation who think like this.

00:13:37.740 And as soon as you do, then free speech is no longer a principle.

00:13:40.700 It's an instrument.

00:13:41.780 It is.

00:13:42.400 Can I control this zone in such a way to exclude and punish the people who would otherwise do the terrible thing that I don't want to have happen?

00:13:50.560 And it's just too much of America believes that.

00:13:52.000 You know, the quick sort of adjunct point to that is that is that it's the creeping authoritarianism argument, which you've seen from so many people.

00:13:58.220 And again, so many people that I respect in some senses and used to respect academics who said that, you know, we're becoming a fascist country because, you know, like most fascist countries, we have an election every four years and then the guy's gone.

00:14:10.100 And exactly what happened in Nazi Germany.

00:14:12.440 But when all this heavy breathing happens, the irony of it is that it creates another sort of authoritarianism, right?

00:14:20.500 It's like to stop the authoritarianism, we need to throw people in jail for speech.

00:14:24.880 To stop Donald Trump putting people on the Supreme Court, we need to expand and pack the Supreme Court because it's not going our way.

00:14:32.600 So to prevent authoritarianism, we ourselves have to be slightly authoritarian.

00:14:37.000 And it's kind of a weird instinct.

00:14:38.760 And to your point, Megan, about about Carl Cameron being zombified, you know, I see the same thing.

00:14:43.040 I saw this with Trump Republicans, so many people that I respected going just completely drooling and becoming MAGA type so quickly without much thought and changing their mind on so many things.

00:14:54.780 But as you mentioned, the same thing is true with people on the other side.

00:14:57.880 I mean, Bill Kristol appears to, you know, somebody I know appears to have changed his views on everything in a matter of four years.

00:15:05.000 I don't know how that's possible.

00:15:06.560 Like mathematically, is it possible that all of your views, you've been a man in the political fight for your entire life.

00:15:12.940 Your father was the founder of neoconservatism.

00:15:15.460 And then in the space of three and a half, four years, you've decided that everything you previously believed is not something you believe now.

00:15:22.620 I mean, does that maybe suggest that politics is a little more than than just a sort of straight intellectual honesty about what you believed over a certain period of time?

00:15:30.700 Because I suspect it probably is more about team sports at this point.

00:15:33.880 Oh, 100 percent.

00:15:34.900 The the the nonsense with the Lincoln Project lawyers is the same, right?

00:15:38.560 All those guys are in exactly the same boat where I don't know if you saw Steve Schmidt, who I try never to discuss because he's just such a basement bottom dweller.

00:15:47.380 Um, but he came out with a I need to do a mea culpa when I was working for the McCain campaign.

00:15:54.460 We tried to kill a story about him having an affair with a lobbyist and The New York Times was running it.

00:16:00.400 And I I disparaged The New York Times reporters and I said it was lies.

00:16:05.340 And I later found out it was true.

00:16:07.520 So I guess John McCain allegedly had an affair with, you know, some lobbyist.

00:16:10.960 OK, it's like a marital thing, whatever.

00:16:13.020 And like so now to clean, to cleanse his soul all this time later, he he it's like you're now a Democrat just looking to smear any anyone you were ever associated with who happened to be Republican and try to make yourself feel better about all your years as a Republican.

00:16:31.560 And no one is looking to absolve you of that or really wants to hear from you at all.

00:16:37.140 And to keep the paychecks coming, too, by the way.

00:16:39.700 I mean, especially for Steve Schmidt, who makes an enormous amount of money on this.

00:16:43.000 And I know Matt can speak to this as somebody who's wrote wrote a book about John McCain.

00:16:47.100 And I've talked to Matt about Steve Schmidt stuff, but this is somebody who does these hilarious interviews from his palatial kitchen in the in, you know, this mansion that he got from, you know, scamming people from the Lincoln Project and various other things.

00:17:01.860 I don't know where all this money goes, but it's a profession.

00:17:04.200 I mean, the man's professionally sorry.

00:17:06.120 David Brock, professionally sorry.

00:17:07.840 I mean, professionally wrong.

00:17:08.880 I mean, it has become an industry in D.C. to, you know, be somebody who hates themselves for their previous incarnation as a political operator. 0.98

00:17:18.120 Yes, that's Steve Schmidt is just so slimy and disgusting and hateful. 0.98

00:17:25.120 My God, he's so angry. 1.00

00:17:26.680 He's like the angriest guy.

00:17:28.660 And so be coming out with a McCain thing like all these years. 0.62

00:17:31.140 The man's dead.

00:17:32.080 I mean, to Steve Schmidt's credit, he understands that you can't defame a dead person, which is probably also why he waited this long.

00:17:38.540 To come out and say, it's true.

00:17:39.660 It's true.

00:17:40.140 Who knows?

00:17:40.940 But I just think the whole thing is so unseemly and just shows, you know, it's like these these former Republicans who got sucked into their Trump hatred that like made them go crazy are the least attractive of the bunch.

00:17:54.040 And that's saying something, Matt.

00:17:57.280 Steve Schmidt inserted himself into the story.

00:18:00.020 Let's let's remember what the root cause of him having an absolute epic meltdown was.

00:18:04.640 It was, I think, a media story about Meghan McCain's book sales.

00:18:08.060 There is no reason to insert himself into the story unless you start thinking about what he needed, what he needed to do for him because all of his friends now are on the left.

00:18:18.100 He needs to have a story that somehow absolves himself from his role in picking Sarah Palin, who is a figure of hate on the left.

00:18:27.040 So how do you do that?

00:18:28.160 And he ends up doing it in such a way to draw this really absurd idea that John McCain was soft on Russia.

00:18:35.280 That doesn't work.

00:18:36.800 There's no there's no universe.

00:18:39.260 I wrote a book that was critical about John McCain and critical about his foreign policy.

00:18:43.360 And I can tell you, dude, was not soft on Russia.

00:18:46.020 That was not the issue.

00:18:47.240 But that soft on Russia is lines up with where Democratic prerogatives have been in the age of Trump.

00:18:53.460 So how can you absolve yourself of Palin, who Democrats hate and also excite people?

00:18:58.280 Well, you can go after Maine because a lot of people on the left don't like Meghan McCain. 0.56

00:19:01.040 And then just apropos of nothing, throw in an affair allegation that The New York Times tried to prove really, really badly back in I think it was 2008 in a really awful and lawyered story that did not sell the goods at all.

00:19:15.680 So, no, it's it's despicable.

00:19:18.260 It's despicable kind of laundering of a professional hack who has to do something in order to sort of justify his continued existence and good graces on the left.

00:19:28.340 Wouldn't it be fun if we if we picked on John McCain's widow? 0.99

00:19:32.020 That'd be fun.

00:19:32.640 Let's dump a let's dump a whole extra unneeded amount of pain on her. 1.00

00:19:36.660 That's how I'll spend my afternoon in response, again, to an article about Meghan McCain's allegedly weak book sales.

00:19:43.180 OK, sure, that that makes sense.

00:19:45.400 But that's just the whole thing is like these hyper partisans who have been drawn into this lunacy are driving our national conversation.

00:19:53.620 Steve Schmidt is still a contributor on MSNBC, notwithstanding all the covering up for the pedophile who worked at the Lincoln Project.

00:19:59.120 No problem for him.

00:19:59.980 They still he says the most hateful things and therefore he can still have a job there.

00:20:05.580 Carl Cameron, I'll bet you he's going to wind up on on MSNBC's payroll sometime soon.

00:20:10.260 We're going to get an announcement soon.

00:20:11.680 Right.

00:20:12.040 I mean, the media has lost its mind.

00:20:14.580 Jen Psaki, I guess, is officially now at MSNBC.

00:20:18.660 She might wind up being the most sane person over there. 0.91

00:20:21.000 There's there's no longer a standard.

00:20:24.220 There used to be at least some nod towards the standard cable news outlets that you wouldn't want someone who's just brazenly caught in a lie.

00:20:31.720 Maybe even Brian Williams had to go and take a pretty long time out before they welcomed him back based on his sort of, you know, exaggerations of where he was at various key news moments.

00:20:43.900 But they have more serious kind of fabulisms and lies on staff now.

00:20:49.020 And they've stopped caring.

00:20:49.840 It's I mean, there's no way that a fair minded person looking at the record of certain people in that building would say, you know what, they tell the truth.

00:20:58.160 They're being honest about stuff, whether it's, you know, on response to coverage or whether it's covering their own behinds about, you know, people dredging through their past.

00:21:07.180 And that standard is no longer a fireable or distanceable offense in cable news.

00:21:12.920 And it's part of the reason why people don't trust that stuff.

00:21:14.560 Maybe I'm imagining a glorious past that never existed.

00:21:18.560 But I and, you know, Megan, you worked in the cable news industry for a long time.

00:21:21.640 But I imagine and I'd like to think it was true that if it was maybe 15 years ago and Joy Reid went on the air and said that Elon Musk is buying Twitter so he can, you know, sort of celebrate apartheid because he's from South Africa and he loves apartheid.

00:21:38.400 And this stuff is real. I mean, this is so bananas and so defamatory to say that this guy, because he's the richest man in the world and he's going to buy Twitter and nobody likes him at the moment.

00:21:47.080 So go on television and accuse him of being a supporter of apartheid when he is actually on the record many years ago saying that he left South Africa because he didn't want to join the South African army where he'd have to enforce racist policies.

00:22:00.020 That's what he's on the record saying. But she says, you know, he's my political opponent. He supports apartheid.

00:22:04.560 No one blinks. It gets a little clip on media.

00:22:07.920 We talk about it on the fifth column. Thank you for giving us 20 minutes to rail on you, Joy, because you're so easy to beat up on. 0.90

00:22:13.920 And that's it. But one would hope that in a different time, someone would come up and say, you know, it's really a bad idea to accuse somebody of supporting one of the most gruesomely racist systems in the latter half of the 20th century when they're the richest person in the world because they also sue us.

00:22:30.740 But nothing, nary a peep. No one says a word anymore because the expectation is just that, you know, lying is fine as long as nothing matters.

00:22:39.000 Nothing matters. OK, so two points. I want to tell you a story about NBC and standards.

00:22:42.560 But I also want to just you mentioned Mediaite and I mentioned Jen Psaki.

00:22:46.760 Can I just tell you, Mediaite has a piece up today. It's for people.

00:22:49.820 Nobody nobody goes to Mediaite outside of the media industry.

00:22:53.080 But so for our listeners, it's a website that just covers media.

00:22:56.100 And their their headline is just in MSNBC announces Jen Psaki is joining the network. 1.00

00:23:01.140 OK, we know. But there's there's an actual line in the story.

00:23:05.500 Ready? The hire of one of the most admired press secretaries in recent memory is a coup for MSNBC.

00:23:14.480 Say what?

00:23:15.720 What?

00:23:17.760 That's serious?

00:23:19.240 Hello. Swear to God.

00:23:20.700 It's in the piece.

00:23:21.640 That's incredible.

00:23:22.700 That's amazing.

00:23:23.700 You sound like a little parson to me.

00:23:26.840 OK, but the story about NBC, to your point, Michael, that when I was at NBC and their their standards and practices, people, meaning the lawyers who are supposed to look at the scripts and look at the programming.

00:23:38.820 And it applies at MSNBC.

00:23:41.020 It's an arm of NBC.

00:23:42.680 So Fox, we were just kind of on our own.

00:23:44.580 I used to joke, but it's true. 0.99

00:23:46.200 Tom Lowe, my EP and I, our standards and practices was, holy shit, get that off the air. 0.97

00:23:50.420 That's wrong. 0.54

00:23:52.640 Take that down.

00:23:53.560 Right.

00:23:54.360 And we would that's what we would do.

00:23:56.320 It's just the truth.

00:23:58.100 Like, ah, MSNBC is connected to big NBC and they are subject to the same review, ostensibly, that the NBC people are.

00:24:08.500 So there was a story was during the Me Too movement that involved Roger Ailes and his Me Too situation that I I had to report on.

00:24:17.540 And the script, the morning script where I was going to have to read, it was like the opening news report, had to go by standards and practices.

00:24:25.420 And it said like scripts is something like, you know, Roger Ailes was accused by multiple women and he denied ever having harassed anyone.

00:24:35.560 And I remember saying, well, I don't really want to read that or I want to comment on it because I live that like I'm one of the accusers.

00:24:47.820 So like I'm not just going to end that with he denied it, you know, like he was accused by 17 women, including me.

00:24:54.460 And they were like, no, you have to just offer his denial.

00:24:57.880 And it was like, OK, so I wound up reading it on the air, something to the effect of he was accused by 17 women of sexual harassment.

00:25:05.960 He denied that.

00:25:07.400 But it's a fact that I know is true because I was one of them.

00:25:12.800 It seems a fair addition to that.

00:25:15.840 So it's just that my my only point raising it is they're they're tough standards and practices at NBC is tough.

00:25:21.820 It's tough. So how on earth all this shit gets out of Joy Reid's mouth with they must be maybe they've just given up. 0.98

00:25:29.200 I don't know. But she must keep them up at night. 1.00

00:25:32.020 They may they're losing losing hair, losing sleep.

00:25:34.980 There's no way they're signing off on anything that woman says.

00:25:39.620 This is a hangover from the Trump stuff.

00:25:41.580 I mean, it's really interesting.

00:25:42.840 The New Yorker famously has this vaunted fact checking department.

00:25:46.180 And there's a famous story where, you know, somebody wrote that one of the characters in the story was bald.

00:25:50.800 And one of the fact checkers called to confirm that the person was, in fact, bald.

00:25:54.860 I mean, that is how stringent their standards are in.

00:25:58.660 And, you know, I read particularly on the Web site, less so in the magazine, the stuff in the kind of Trump universe now.

00:26:05.000 And, you know, keeping in mind, I'm I have no love for Donald Trump and have been probably as critical as many of the people at The New Yorker.

00:26:10.900 But they get a bit flabby when it comes to that.

00:26:14.700 And despite the fact and we were joking about this right after Donald Trump lost the election and it was about the disappearance of a particular sentence in the media.

00:26:24.360 And I had predicted and rightfully predicted that the sentence without evidence would disappear because that all of a sudden was creeping into every news story.

00:26:34.020 Donald Trump said, comma, without evidence, comma, and then back to the story.

00:26:38.120 Right.

00:26:38.280 And they would say this about every person, every official in the in the administration.

00:26:43.180 And that, of course, has disappeared.

00:26:45.380 But it also started to affect them, too, because if the goal was to unseat Trump, to knock him down, we'll play by his game, his standards, too.

00:26:55.880 And really, we didn't say whatever the hell we want.

00:26:58.140 And, you know, I'm not even saying that Donald Trump started this, but I thought it was kind of ironic that people got so excited about this and said, you know, democracy dies in darkness and truth, truth, truth.

00:27:07.120 And, you know, the woman on CNN who wore the sweater that said, you know, truth matters or whatever during the broadcast.

00:27:13.600 And then all of a sudden, you know, when it comes to the other side, truth matters a lot less because we believe that we have, you know, a goal, like, you know, a goal to save democracy.

00:27:24.720 And it's back to that thing that you become undemocratic when you believe you're a saving democracy, much in the same way that people on January 6th that were storming the Capitol believed because they were, you know, bananas and believed all sorts of conspiracy theories that they had to save the republic from it being stolen by these nefarious forces.

00:27:42.080 You know, that doesn't make it OK because they believe this nonsense.

00:27:44.600 But this is what happens on the other side, too, is that we must take these things.

00:27:49.220 Karl Cameron said we would put people in jail because, look, you know, if we don't, our democracy is over.

00:27:53.700 So, you know, in the process of doing that, we must crush democracy.

00:27:56.940 It's very scary to think about uniform government.

00:27:59.500 Right. This is why we like divided government, which we don't have right now.

00:28:03.000 It's just an argument for exactly the opposite outcome at the midterm election that they're raising the flag on.

00:28:08.540 Like we do. We need divided government because the parties have gotten a little too crazy.

00:28:13.280 Like, look, maybe I'm biased because I'm center right.

00:28:16.580 But I think the left is seriously the problem.

00:28:19.580 And there are definitely problems on the right, too.

00:28:21.300 But I think like the people pushing this nonsense, like the biggest on cracking down a free speech and speeches, violence and all that.

00:28:27.280 Those are lefties. Am I wrong?

00:28:29.380 No, you're right.

00:28:32.480 It does happen on both sides, but I think the majority of it is. 0.77

00:28:36.200 To me, it kind of depends on the day.

00:28:37.520 I think at the moment the president of the United States is a Democrat.

00:28:41.220 That the Democrats happen to control both houses of Congress at the moment.

00:28:46.320 With respect to the federal government, I'd say that we have a unique problem if this particular party isn't committed to defending particular values.

00:28:54.860 And I think for anyone who is a partisan, who is a Democrat, who believes in things like, you know, quaint ideas like freedom of speech.

00:29:01.740 You have to look at the fact that the party you support is in some respects kind of vacating long held principles and self-immolating in some respects over over what might be described as threat inflation when it comes to Donald Trump, who, again, no longer president of the United States.

00:29:17.740 And to the extent he has influence in the party, like we're actually seeing in very real time, it degrade in really material ways.

00:29:25.700 The Pence v. Trump proxy battle that's taking place in the gubernatorial race in Georgia today is something that we ought to be paying attention to. 0.97

00:29:34.120 Kemp might kick Perdue's butt, which is not the outcome Donald Trump wants.

00:29:38.480 And it is going to be another time in very recent memory that Donald Trump has lost on the national stage in election, where he's not proven to be the guy who can deliver victories amongst Republicans. 0.96

00:29:52.600 We're not talking about campaigns where he has to go out and it's a Democrat versus a Republican.

00:29:58.420 We're talking about multiple conservatives who are conservatives who are looking at different candidates and say, oh, this is the guy Donald Trump supports and this is the guy he doesn't.

00:30:06.600 I'm going to go with the guy he doesn't support. That matters.

00:30:09.240 It matters if Democrats are still myopically focused on that particular issue, if there's supposed to be a range of important policy issues they're supposed to be fighting for and defending and a number of different political or philosophical things that you value as an individual.

00:30:22.840 And you say, you know, I'm a progressive, I'm a liberal, I'm a Democrat.

00:30:26.480 It matters if your party can't really be relied upon to do that because they're so obsessed with with Donald Trump, because they're so obsessed with demonizing the other side.

00:30:35.740 That threat inflation is dangerous for for the nation as a whole.

00:30:39.200 But it's also dangerous for the political prospects for Democrats.

00:30:42.340 I want to put in a word for it's like Trump, Tucker, you know, J.D. Vance, sort of this backdraft that they associate with him.

00:30:49.300 Go ahead, Matt.

00:30:49.720 I want to put in a word for how that group, actually, the Trump, J.D. Vance group right now on the right has are starting their own process of threatening freedom of speech for 40 years or more on the right.

00:31:04.220 Broadly speaking, an associate of the Republican Party conservatives were in favor of basically deregulating media.

00:31:11.600 They wanted to dismantle the Fairness Doctrine, which was used as a weapon to exclude voices from political speech.

00:31:17.560 It was used by politicians to pressure, whether it's Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon to pressure newspapers and other people like that.

00:31:24.200 They wanted to free up spectrum and all of this kind of space.

00:31:27.120 That is over.

00:31:28.220 Trump wanted to re he threatened to reuse the Fairness Doctrine.

00:31:31.600 He wanted to use antitrust as a weapon against NBC and other places that he didn't like, that he felt bad.

00:31:38.900 And now this has become widely shared on the right.

00:31:41.560 The idea, again, it's the instrumental notion of what should our media policy be.

00:31:47.180 And I would point this out to people and I would say, hey, look, you're reversing 40 years of pretty good free speech policy on the right with this very petulant.

00:31:56.120 I want to punish things.

00:31:57.120 And people from the Trumpian right would say, yeah, but did you win?

00:31:59.860 You know, people wanted that sense of hashtag winning, which means punishing people.

00:32:05.680 So I'm afraid that when Republicans retake power, which they will, because we live in a two party system, that they're going to use that to rewrite Section 230.

00:32:14.800 The Communications Decency Act is going to be regulation of big tech because big tech almost stole the election in 2020.

00:32:22.920 There's going to be this punitive sense.

00:32:24.820 So I don't see it as a, oh, look, there's a safe harbor in our politics right now.

00:32:29.340 But the point for me is that there's not.

00:32:31.560 That's interesting.

00:32:32.600 But it's right in the sense that they're, you know, both sides are attacking big tech, right?

00:32:38.300 I mean, whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop stuff or, you know, we cannot have Elon Musk take over Twitter because Twitter is a public utility and he's a bad guy who wants more free speech.

00:32:48.820 I mean, the fact that people are arguing against Elon Musk, not because he's a billionaire and the richest man in the world, but because he wants more free speech is rather odd that you wouldn't expect that from the left.

00:32:58.780 If you expect the other, other argument.

00:33:00.160 And from journalists.

00:33:02.580 But I would say, Megan, I agree, particularly on the cultural level, I was just, you know, kind of playing out while Matt was talking, like, what would be the equivalent if, say, at Spotify, you know, a whole number of employees walked out and said, we are not going to work here.

00:33:17.940 We're going to pressure you.

00:33:19.420 And, you know, the company in this case does not buckle, but we've seen a lot of cases where the company does buckle.

00:33:24.240 And those people who are marching out say that we're doing this because we're Christians and because, you know, there's Christian content on here that is or this content that's anti-Christian, et cetera.

00:33:33.960 I mean, the mainstream media, I would imagine, and it'd be right to do so, would be like, what?

00:33:40.680 No, go back to work.

00:33:42.700 You can have, I mean, but when it has something like, you know, I saw this morning, apparently it went online about an hour ago, the new Ricky Gervais special.

00:33:50.280 I mean, his last special was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time.

00:33:53.200 But apparently this one has transphobic jokes.

00:33:56.440 And I put air quotes in that because I haven't seen it.

00:33:58.700 And that is a term that is thrown around pretty loosely.

00:34:01.580 But you will.

00:34:02.560 But you will, sir, because we have a clip pulled.

00:34:05.160 Oh, we do.

00:34:06.200 Oh, really?

00:34:06.760 But you know what?

00:34:07.240 Is it funny?

00:34:08.360 Canadian Debbie says it's time to take a break.

00:34:10.360 So I'm going to squeeze in a little break and then we will play the Ricky Gervais soundbite and get all of your thoughts on it.

00:34:17.760 Michael, we'll start with you.

00:34:18.800 All right.

00:34:19.000 Stand by.

00:34:24.980 All right, Michael.

00:34:25.800 So you were going to react to this new Ricky Gervais special that's about to come out.

00:34:30.400 So I'll tee it up for you.

00:34:32.000 I knew you were coming.

00:34:33.020 So I baked a cake.

00:34:34.220 Here's Ricky Gervais in part.

00:34:36.860 The old fashioned women. 1.00

00:34:38.080 Oh, God.

00:34:38.700 You know, the ones with wombs. 1.00

00:34:43.380 Those fucking dinosaurs. 1.00

00:34:47.140 No, I love the new women. 1.00

00:34:48.700 I know the new women. 1.00

00:34:49.540 They're great.

00:34:50.100 You know, the new ones we've been seeing lately.

00:34:52.260 The ones with beards and cocks.

00:34:54.180 They're as good as gold. 0.68

00:34:57.980 I love that.

00:34:59.900 No, it's the old fashioned women. 1.00

00:35:01.620 And now the old fashioned women. 1.00

00:35:02.680 Oh, they want to use our toilets. 0.81

00:35:04.880 Why shouldn't they use your toilets? 1.00

00:35:06.360 For ladies.

00:35:07.720 They are ladies. 0.93

00:35:08.640 Look at their pronouns. 0.64

00:35:12.380 What about this person isn't a lady? 1.00

00:35:15.120 Well, his penis. 1.00

00:35:16.780 Her penis, you fucking bigot. 1.00

00:35:28.080 What if he rapes me? 1.00

00:35:29.900 What if she rapes you? 1.00

00:35:32.700 You fucking turf whore. 1.00

00:35:34.880 Oh, man. 1.00

00:35:42.220 I am absolutely not laughing at that because it's offensive and horrible.

00:35:46.640 Are you predicting there's going to be backlash to that?

00:35:48.840 Well, I mean, I sent I sent something to a friend this morning and because we always we always talk about these things.

00:35:56.000 And I just sent this is the screen.

00:35:57.200 It was a screenshot from Variety, the industry Bible that the headline was Ricky Gervais Netflix comedy special gets backlash for transphobic jokes.

00:36:05.820 It has been released for about 13 seconds.

00:36:09.000 It was released and they already had the backlash story prepared, which either means the critics are so boring and predictable or they're trying to stoke the criticism themselves.

00:36:17.980 But the great thing was journalism.

00:36:19.680 This is the journalism where they described as is already drawn criticism for a string of graphic and hurtful transphobic jokes.

00:36:27.220 Oh, that's the journalist saying that they're hurtful.

00:36:29.120 I mean, I don't know who it is deciding this stuff.

00:36:31.640 I mean, look, that bit is kind of a predictable bit.

00:36:35.420 But it's funny.

00:36:35.980 I mean, Gervais is funny.

00:36:37.760 And it's I mean, it's not how is it transphobic just to say what 98 percent of the world is having to get used to is, you know, when you say to somebody, you know, my mother, you know, somebody in my family that the person with the beard and the penis is a woman is they don't they're like, what are you talking about?

00:36:56.680 And it requires a bit of readjustment.

00:36:58.640 So making fun of that is itself not transphobic.

00:37:02.660 But it's also just a joke about how quickly the culture has changed when a feminist like J.K. Rowling, I mean, who's a lefty and a feminist and, you know, a philanthropist to so many women's causes, too, can be called.

00:37:18.060 And you heard Ricky Gervais use the acronym TERF, which is the trans exclusionary radical feminist there.

00:37:25.980 Those are the radical feminists that are in the crosshairs of trans activists. 1.00

00:37:30.260 But, you know, the fact that this stuff is considered transphobic before it comes out, number one, and number two, it's like, look, this is reflective of the way a lot of people feel about this stuff.

00:37:42.980 And they'll laugh at it because they're like, yeah, it's so weird that they when you find out that the swimmer from Penn is by like you're not biologically a male, like physically a male.

00:37:52.200 Can I put it that way?

00:37:53.140 I don't know the terminology, so I don't want to get in trouble, but it's physically still a male.

00:37:57.080 Biological.

00:37:57.760 Yeah.

00:37:58.240 Right.

00:37:58.820 Is that what it is?

00:37:59.540 Can I say that?

00:38:00.460 Yes.

00:38:00.660 Megan, am I OK?

00:38:01.700 Am I going to get canceled or fired?

00:38:03.140 Yes.

00:38:03.560 Yes, you are.

00:38:04.520 But what you're saying is correct.

00:38:05.000 I'm making no value judgment on whether that person should be swimming.

00:38:09.320 And notice I said that person.

00:38:10.280 I don't want to screw up the pronouns.

00:38:11.540 But this stuff is like is this minefield of life now is is so perfect for comedy.

00:38:17.220 And this is the thing that bothers me so much about, you know, the late night stuff in all of these like SNL, all these shows.

00:38:23.680 It's such a rich vein for comedy because it's so wild that everything's changed so quickly.

00:38:29.260 And it's just like in some of the bizarro woke things that people get upset about.

00:38:33.560 And it's not it's not being mocked by anyone, which I find totally stunning.

00:38:38.780 Imminently mockable.

00:38:40.060 And by the way, you say we need some time to get adjusted to it.

00:38:43.120 I mean, some of us will never.

00:38:44.460 We're not going along.

00:38:45.540 It's not that I'm I'm not Matt Walsh, who I love.

00:38:47.740 Not not to be confused with Matt Walsh, who's here today.

00:38:50.400 Yeah, he's more transparent over at Daily Wire.

00:38:53.820 He can say what he said on my show.

00:38:55.420 You can certainly say what you just said.

00:38:56.800 Yeah.

00:38:56.940 But but like somebody who, you know, the guy who had like the long hair was on Dr. Phil, super long hair and a beard and a mustache.

00:39:06.120 It's clearly a man.

00:39:07.200 But like with feminine hair, like I don't I don't know.

00:39:11.420 I'm not going to get adjusted.

00:39:12.760 I'm always going to feel uncomfortable.

00:39:14.400 I'm going to root for you as a human, but I'm not going to I don't.

00:39:17.040 That's not a woman. 1.00

00:39:18.080 You got you're a man with long hair and a beard and a penis. 1.00

00:39:22.180 That's not a woman. 1.00

00:39:23.200 OK, sorry that love you and hope life works out great for you.

00:39:27.620 But I know what a woman is and that that's not it. 1.00

00:39:30.940 OK, so what Ricky Gervais is hitting on, though, is real.

00:39:35.960 It's 100 percent real.

00:39:37.020 And we just saw it last week.

00:39:38.340 I asked Canadian Debbie to pull the soundbite because I was her name is Amy Arambide. 0.98

00:39:43.480 And she was testifying before Congress on the Roe versus Wade outcome and what's likely to happen.

00:39:48.460 She's executive director of the abortion rights nonprofit of Vow, Texas, speaking for the U.S.

00:39:54.300 House Judiciary hearing.

00:39:56.740 And she she was asked a bunch of questions about abortion, which she would like to see all the way through pregnancy.

00:40:04.400 And then this question came up of gender and all the stuff we're talking about.

00:40:08.420 Listen, what do you say a woman is? 1.00

00:40:11.740 I believe that everyone can identify for themselves.

00:40:14.620 OK, do you believe then that men can become pregnant and have abortions?

00:40:23.320 Yes.

00:40:25.080 There you have it.

00:40:26.680 Yes, men can get pregnant. 1.00

00:40:28.420 Men can have abortions.

00:40:30.000 No, they can't.

00:40:31.220 Amy, I don't know.

00:40:32.600 You got to go back to square one in your organization because they can't.

00:40:35.960 And it really angers a lot of women like me to say otherwise. 1.00

00:40:40.400 It's one of the unique things that women only can do. 1.00

00:40:43.600 Only we can do it.

00:40:44.480 Sorry, guys.

00:40:45.340 You guys can do a lot of fun things, too.

00:40:46.980 I can't be standing up, but you can't.

00:40:50.300 You can try.

00:40:52.200 It's not going to work.

00:40:54.000 You make all three of them.

00:40:55.120 Look at all three of them.

00:40:56.060 Tell me I can do it.

00:40:57.020 Yeah.

00:40:57.280 I mean, I'm just telling you.

00:40:58.300 Yeah, we believe in you.

00:40:59.820 We believe in you, Megan.

00:41:03.920 Anyway, it's infuriated.

00:41:04.940 So it's the if you create a taboo and it's a big one and it's so new, that's you're creating.

00:41:11.820 That's comedy.

00:41:12.580 Yeah.

00:41:12.900 You're not creating the new rule that everybody is going to follow immediately, although it's completely different than the way everyone talked, you know, two years ago, two weeks ago.

00:41:22.680 Right.

00:41:23.080 Like, how when was Barack Obama still against gay marriage?

00:41:26.400 It was 2013.

00:41:27.440 Yeah.

00:41:27.680 It was Joe Biden. 1.00

00:41:29.500 Like, yeah, well, we'll bomb China and we can we can have gay marriage. 1.00

00:41:32.820 I guess there's some use to it to Joe Biden after all. 0.98

00:41:36.180 But I mean, these these things change so fast.

00:41:39.460 And of course, that is the stuff of comedy.

00:41:41.640 It's about taboos.

00:41:42.860 And it's not even that the comedy is there to mock the new thing.

00:41:47.740 It's it's to mark the taboo.

00:41:50.000 Comedy is part of how that stuff gets lubricated.

00:41:53.160 We had Colin Quinn, the great Colin Quinn live show we did in New York last week.

00:41:57.780 And his the New York story is one of the most amazing, absolutely brilliant specials, sort of comedy, sort of sociology history of New York.

00:42:05.860 And the basic thesis is the way that comedy is used to lubricate social situations between rival ethnic groups in New York to create a commercial and tolerant society, not tolerant like, oh, we all love each other, but like that.

00:42:19.840 We all hate each other.

00:42:20.800 We're going to make fun of each other.

00:42:22.180 And it's kind of cool.

00:42:23.100 So and that to to lose that sense, you're you're you're actually you're making it more difficult for your new taboo to stick because you're you're actually making it a taboo.

00:42:34.780 And people don't like to be told that you can only talk this way suddenly right now.

00:42:40.320 If you it's also not going to be.

00:42:42.360 Yeah, go ahead, Camille.

00:42:42.880 I was just going to say, if you want like durable, social, cultural evolution on an issue, if you want people to have developed and cultivate some sort of empathy amongst people who are inclined to disagree with you, because it's always important in a context like this to say a word for pluralism.

00:42:57.680 The goal is not to live in a society where we all agree with one another on everything.

00:43:02.380 It's to create space enough for us all to exist in our own weird particular way, whatever our particular religious inclinations are, our intimate inclinations are that we can find room for you in this tapestry of America.

00:43:17.600 Like that's that's the goal. And there's something I find just really jarring about one comedy being the place where these battles are playing out now, which is which is very interesting, because in general, I don't think we want to hurt each other.

00:43:29.880 We don't want to offend each other. We may have concerns about one another's behavior.

00:43:33.580 But even that stuff, most people want to talk about in a way that is respectful and that is courteous and arrives at a solution.

00:43:43.080 I think that's the case most of the time. But there's there's something really weird about the the the preemptive and very performative outrage that tends to accompany the release of these comedy specials.

00:43:54.620 I seem to remember Louis CK is sorry special having kind of animating the same sort of concern very recently about the same issue, trans jokes.

00:44:03.120 But I also remember the very first joke in that special happening to be about pedophilia and nobody mentioned it was a it was a what it was a hilarious joke.

00:44:13.740 It was also brutal. Yeah, I'm not a fan of pedophilia and I don't take light of pedophilia.

00:44:19.960 And I think Louis CK would generally agree with that. But this is also comedy. And that's how it works.

00:44:24.620 And we appreciate that on a range of other issues. People make jokes about about rape, about murder, about incest, about a range of things, about war.

00:44:33.600 And we find ways to cope with that. And at least even if we don't find it funny, we can turn the station.

00:44:39.980 We can we can not log into that particular website. We can like Dave Chappelle said, you clicked on my face.

00:44:46.040 Right. Like, what are you doing if you don't like it? And these people at Netflix, if they're upset over, you know, this the Ricky Gervais thing, they're in for quite a disappointment, given the Netflix statement just last week.

00:44:56.300 That if you don't like the things we put out. Yeah. You don't need to work here. Hello. That's exactly the right. There are all sorts of places you can work.

00:45:04.680 You don't have to work at a Spotify or a Netflix or a Sirius XM.

00:45:08.180 If you don't believe in free speech and the different points of view that people want to express that may be diametrically opposed to your own, move along.

00:45:15.360 I always tell my staff, not this particular staff, because they're awesome. But I've said to people who work for me for years for that, there's key bank.

00:45:21.940 You don't want to work the weekends. No problem. You go to the key bank. It's wonderful.

00:45:24.920 Opens up at nine, closes at four. You're good. Nobody bothers you.

00:45:27.680 You choose a certain profession, or in this case, news, you know that your life's going to be a little chaotic.

00:45:32.860 You choose to go work for a company like Netflix, you're going to be subjected to POVs from all across the spectrum if Netflix is doing its job right.

00:45:41.260 And they appear to be determined to do so. At least now. Right. I mean, I think their experiment in wokeification of America has failed as a business matter and they've gotten back on track.

00:45:51.180 To Matt's point about where, why it kind of is playing out in the comedy battlefield, this has become the battlefield, is kind of my issue with the kind of trans conversation in general. 0.90

00:46:04.160 I mean, I've studiously avoided it just because I don't have a huge interest in it. And I kind of watch from the sidelines and say, you know, that is a hockey fight. There's no kind of ballet in that. That's just brutality. And I'm not very interested in the idea.

00:46:18.400 But because it has become so brutal, it has gone to the comedy world because that's the place where you can actually have these conversations, the kind of last place you can have these conversations. And comedians don't really care.

00:46:31.140 In a sense, the more taboo subjects they take on, the better the specials do, which is what you see in the Netflix reaction, which is, you know, it's pretty good for business. I think those Dave Chappelle specials did very, very well.

00:46:44.120 But the main thing with this is that it presumes a lot. It presumes that this stuff hurts people, and it doesn't. And if you go back and look at, you know, Eddie Murphy's specials from early 80s, kind of homophobic. And guess what happened since then? Things got a lot.

00:47:01.060 Yeah, everything's okay.

00:47:03.060 All right. Now, there's so much to discuss. Camille had an interesting exchange with Justice Clarence Thomas that kind of picks up on a discussion I had right here on the program yesterday with Jonathan Haidt about what do you do to fight back against cancel culture?

00:47:19.300 Do you fight fire with fire? Or do you take the high road? We're going to get into that. And plus, Camille's been doing a little reporting on that. Remember the Central Park bird lady? Central Park Karen, they called her. Camille actually did great reporting on this and has a follow-up today. So lots more to go over when we come back.

00:47:38.540 Let's start with your old pal Christian Cooper. Christian Cooper. There's so many Coopers, Camille. I got to try to keep this. It's so confusing. Now, people may have forgotten all about the so-called Central Park Karen. That's Amy Cooper. These two people are not related, but they were involved in an incident that would just blow up online and dominate news cycles left and right for a long, long time.

00:48:05.880 I mean, it was right after George Floyd, wasn't it? Or was it right before? It was May of 2020.

00:48:10.640 It was the same day, actually. I believe that the Christian Cooper encounter happened in the morning. The George Floyd situation happened a little later in the day, in the afternoon.

00:48:20.180 Interestingly, the Christian Cooper story was kind of the bigger of the two stories initially. I think it was, I'm trying to remember who, I think it was Gail King, who kind of talked about these two stories, the Christian Cooper Central Park story and George Floyd.

00:48:35.620 And said, it sounds like, it seems like it's open season on black men. The fact that these two things are happening simultaneously.

00:48:41.260 Wow. All right. So the reason I single out Camille is because he actually did some great reporting on this that he wound up putting on Barry Weiss's sub stack at the time that took a deep dive into this so-called Central Park Karen case.

00:48:53.980 And revealed a lot of facts about this, this case that was sort of the quintessential, quote, Karen case that the media had totally ignored.

00:49:04.940 And now there's an update. And, you know, remember, this is birdwatcher Christian Cooper, who was confronted by this.

00:49:12.080 Well, he confronted this woman, Amy Cooper, Christian Cooper. The birdwatcher was black. Amy Cooper, the dog walker, was white. 0.81

00:49:19.380 She was there with her dog. He was mad. Her dog was in the ramble off the leash.

00:49:24.040 She allegedly said, well, I, you know, this is the only place to walk him. Christian Cooper didn't like that.

00:49:29.600 He wanted to watch his birds in peace. And just to remind people, here's a bit of the original video that went viral that was taken by Christian Cooper midway into his confrontation with the so-called Central Park Karen.

00:49:43.980 We'll get to that in a second. Listen, watch.

00:49:45.820 There is an African-American man. I am in Central Park. He is recording me. I threatened myself and my dog. 1.00

00:49:56.540 I'm sorry. I can't hear you. I'm being threatened by a man into the ramble. Please send the cops immediately.

00:50:03.400 Now, she had, in fact, been threatened by him. He had threatened to hurt her dog, or at least that's how it sounded.

00:50:09.560 But there's more to the story. And I'll just start by this, Camille. And I know you've done a great deep dive on this.

00:50:17.460 The problems I saw for Amy Cooper at the time was not that she described him as an African-American male to the 911.

00:50:23.500 It was that she told him before she called 911, I'm going to call and I'm going to tell them I'm being threatened by an African-American male.

00:50:33.340 That is what made a lot of people say, well, that's different. That's different because it had the feeling of, you know, what might happen when the cops get here and you, this white lady, are saying the African-American male is threatening me.

00:50:49.600 And you you seemed it unnecessarily to him inject race in it. So I'll let you take it from here with the update and your reporting.

00:50:56.920 And I'll start with I'll start with that. I mean, that is certainly the thing that made this interesting to most people.

00:51:03.500 The fact that she says African-American in that context, I mean, obviously, we're jumping into this 30 second video at the at the tail end of a confrontation of some sort.

00:51:12.060 We don't know what happened before the video started rolling unless we listen to an account from someone.

00:51:18.600 And up until last year, a little after now, you would have never really had an account of what happened beyond the one that Christian Cooper provided.

00:51:28.440 And what actually made me inclined to go back and look at this story again was a story I saw published in NBC News last year, this time and last year, this time.

00:51:38.760 Amy Cooper's lawyer was filing a charge, not a charge, but it was filing a case against her then employer for wrongful termination, saying that her her employer rushed to terminate her without really conducting a legitimate investigation.

00:51:53.620 And buried at the end of this story was a disclosure in NBC talking about the legal filing and how it included this letter from a guy named Jerome Lockett, who NBC says describes himself as a 30 year old black man.

00:52:07.280 And Jerome Lockett said that he had not only had a similar confrontation with Christian Cooper, but that there was a physical altercation with Christian Cooper because he felt like Christian Cooper was not merely threatening him, but threatening his dog.

00:52:20.880 And the same NBC story says that NBC spoke to Jerome Lockett at the time they conducted an interview with him, but they never go on to explain why it took them a year to publish the gentleman's name and mention the fact that there were these previous altercations.

00:52:37.480 And that made me want to know a little bit more about what happened with Jerome Lockett, if there was anyone else, and if there might be additional details of this story that had been sat on by other journalists.

00:52:48.300 And the reporting that we went out and did, we were able to uncover a number of facts and anyone interested should go back and listen to that podcast that I recorded with Barry for her podcast.

00:52:57.640 And honestly, but I can say a couple of things at a very high level.

00:53:01.280 What we know for a fact is that Christian Cooper most certainly threatened Amy Cooper by his own admission.

00:53:07.020 He says to her in the park that day, leash your dog.

00:53:10.540 And if you don't, if you're going to do what you want to do, I'm going to do what I want to do.

00:53:14.640 And you're not going to like that's him verbatim saying this is what I said to her.

00:53:18.740 Now, some people will interpret that as a threat and some people won't, but when you're a single woman alone in a park and someone says that to you, I think it's fair to regard that as a threat. 0.98

00:53:27.100 But what makes this even more interesting is that Christian Cooper had a habit of doing this.

00:53:32.180 And over the course of my reporting, I spoke to multiple people who had these encounters with him, nearly all of which wanted to go on background or off the record because they were too afraid to talk about this kind of thing publicly.

00:53:43.620 But we did get to kind of give you the two accounts that we have, one from Amy Cooper and one from Jerome Lockett, which are both on the record and published.

00:53:52.840 And furthermore, we found some additional contests from Christian Cooper himself, admitting that in the several months prior to his encounter with Amy Cooper, he'd had not one but two physical altercations with other dog owners in Central Park in the Ramble.

00:54:10.140 This is a very peculiar thing.

00:54:12.240 I was a New Yorker for almost 10 years.

00:54:15.320 I know all of us had some experience in New York.

00:54:17.380 We've certainly seen fights and arguments break out on the street before.

00:54:20.360 I think it is highly unusual for someone to be the kind of person who, as a vigilante in Central Park, goes around accosting fellow park goers to the point where they feel sufficiently threatened that it results in some kind of physical altercation.

00:54:36.160 And that is the actual context of the story.

00:54:39.000 You know, there are so many stories that have been written recently because Christian Cooper has this Nat Geo show that is going to be airing soon.

00:54:46.040 It's unbelievable.

00:54:46.260 It's unbelievable that he's obtained because of the celebrity he managed to claim for himself as a result of this whole encounter.

00:54:54.460 But the stories, the headlines always say, you know, Christian Cooper, who was falsely accused by Amy Cooper of threatening him or Christian Cooper was falsely accused by a white woman of threatening her.

00:55:05.380 Well, that is objectively false.

00:55:09.460 He did threaten her.

00:55:10.580 We know that.

00:55:11.400 But even worse, there is additional context that at this point, given how much this story was covered, it is very difficult for me to believe that most of these news organizations don't have someone on staff who knows that there are more details here.

00:55:23.780 Who knows that the reason Amy Cooper seemed so hysterical on the phone then might be explained on that 9-1-1 call by the fact that the 9-1-1 operator could not hear what she was saying and was asking her over and over again to repeat herself.

00:55:37.760 So you got that.

00:55:38.520 There are complicating details here.

00:55:40.120 You got that.

00:55:41.020 And it does shed some light.

00:55:43.860 And we actually have it.

00:55:45.100 OK, so here's Soundbite 2.

00:55:46.600 Ma'am, I cannot hear anything.

00:55:57.080 The phone is breaking up really bad.

00:56:03.440 OK.

00:56:06.120 So explain that, Camille.

00:56:07.160 What does that show us?

00:56:08.780 I think what it shows us is that rather than this being a woman who, you know, you can only see one side of the conversation, 0.80

00:56:14.460 who seems to be getting increasingly agitated as though there is a kind of performance taking place,

00:56:19.180 it's at least feasible to believe that if that encounter before the camera started rolling was sort of sufficiently hostile and aggressive from Christian Cooper's standpoint or from Christian Cooper,

00:56:31.800 then Amy Cooper's response when she's calling for help becoming increasingly hysterical might have something to do with the fact that the people she's calling for help aren't actually able to come right away.

00:56:42.840 And, again, very different from the demeanor that Christian had once the camera started rolling.

00:56:49.260 Amy and others insist that when Christian Cooper approached her and he approached her, is what she says, not the way that it's been reported in a number of contexts, that he was yelling at her.

00:57:00.400 He was screaming at her.

00:57:01.960 Not the polite gentleman who kind of was very contained once the video started to roll, but aggressive, angry.

00:57:08.680 She made reference to the fact that he was gripping a bike helmet in a way that seemed kind of aggressive, as did other people I spoke to who had similar encounters with Christian Cooper.

00:57:19.300 Right. Now, the media has totally lionized this guy.

00:57:21.600 It's amazing he has a Nat Geo special.

00:57:23.560 Of course he does, naturally, and because there can't be two sides to a story involving Central Park Karen.

00:57:30.100 Like, she was the start of it all, and therefore the narrative must be upheld.

00:57:33.100 And if her life has to be ruined and thrown away, so be it.

00:57:36.860 I mean, she's now, I understand, like, left the country.

00:57:39.520 She's looking for a new country to live in where they don't even speak English, so there's absolutely no knowledge of this for her.

00:57:46.080 And in the exchange, as recited by Christian Cooper, he says that he said that he made the threat.

00:57:53.340 It's clearly a threat.

00:57:54.300 He said, me, look, you're going to do what you want.

00:57:56.600 I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it.

00:57:58.640 And she said, what's that?

00:57:59.680 And he said to her dog, come here, puppy.

00:58:02.280 And she said, he won't come to you.

00:58:03.980 And he said, we'll see about that.

00:58:06.640 Then he writes, I pull out the dog treats I carry for just such intransigence.

00:58:11.500 I didn't even get a chance to toss any treats to the pooch before Karen scrambled to grab the dog. 1.00

00:58:17.340 Her, don't you touch my dog? 1.00

00:58:19.660 That's when I started recording with the iPhone and when her inner Karen fully emerged and took a dark turn. 1.00

00:58:25.840 Okay, so obviously this guy's tightly wound and he's got problems of his own.

00:58:30.720 But I go back to Camille and I appreciate the full context of all this stuff.

00:58:34.780 But like, and you can explain it.

00:58:36.840 Maybe you can just say, maybe she's just a very descriptive talker. 0.88

00:58:40.440 But like, I just can't imagine myself looking at a man in this situation and say, I'm going to call the cops and I'm going to say an African-American man is threatening me. 0.73

00:58:51.820 Like, that is so loaded.

00:58:54.020 I feel like that's what a lot of us were responding to when we recoiled and watching that tape.

00:58:58.700 And I can, I can appreciate that.

00:59:00.380 And I think what I've, where I've landed on this is I can speculate about what Amy might have meant.

00:59:05.600 And she does provide some context herself for what she insists that she meant in that moment and why she said it that way.

00:59:12.640 But I can only speculate about it.

00:59:14.680 Maybe she meant something nefarious by it.

00:59:16.920 Maybe she was just kind of reaching for something she thought might frighten someone who was scaring her.

00:59:21.900 But what I know is that the situation is infinitely more complicated and nuanced than many of the reports that have been published about this story suggest.

00:59:33.500 And it's worth remembering.

00:59:35.120 We're in New York City right now.

00:59:37.060 This is one of the most extensively covered stories of 2020.

00:59:41.140 And now we're still in 2022 and we're seeing new stories written about this.

00:59:44.760 And media organizations, and I think this is really the most important thing, media organizations either systematically avoided covering the more complicated details or they omitted it from their coverage in order to satisfy a particular narrative.

00:59:59.260 And this isn't my opinion.

01:00:00.800 This is what I discovered after talking to multiple journalists, after finding multiple instances of people who knew about Jerome Lockett, who knew about Christian Cooper's very odd behavior.

01:00:11.140 And I don't think Christian Cooper is a bad person.

01:00:13.080 I mean, it seems to me that Christian Cooper is someone who perhaps doesn't appreciate boundaries and doesn't appreciate the way in which his behavior can make other people feel.

01:00:22.600 Although he also seems like someone who set out to make people feel uncomfortable as a tactic for them to try to force them to comply with park rules.

01:00:31.720 And again, you know, Christian Cooper is a lot of things, but he's not a centric park.

01:00:34.860 He watches the birds and he's very sweet about it.

01:00:38.300 He's a big bird fan.

01:00:40.700 Bird is supposed to be relaxing.

01:00:42.040 It's supposed to be, yes.

01:00:44.660 It's supposed to be.

01:00:45.800 I've always thought.

01:00:46.700 Yeah, he looks like a guy who watches the birds.

01:00:51.020 It's saying he's supposed to bring peace and relaxation into your world.

01:00:54.360 It's not supposed to wind you up like this.

01:00:56.480 All right.

01:00:56.740 So you raise good points about the narrative.

01:00:59.160 We saw it with Buffalo, the absence of nuance, the avoidance of certain facts that may not jive with your preferred narrative.

01:01:05.840 Like the fact that this the shooter in Buffalo, I mean, I've been talking about the mental health issues plaguing men of that age for a while.

01:01:15.300 And very few people are going to the cat.

01:01:18.500 You know, you have to work to find the details about.

01:01:21.420 Do you guys know he beheaded a cat?

01:01:23.820 Mm hmm.

01:01:24.360 I didn't.

01:01:25.540 Yeah.

01:01:25.800 It's because, you know, it hasn't been widely reported.

01:01:28.240 Yeah.

01:01:29.160 This guy, not long before all has happened, in addition to having threatened an earlier mass shooting a year earlier, he beheaded a.

01:01:37.980 I people want to say a feral cat as if like that makes it different than the house pet.

01:01:42.740 I'm not sure that it does.

01:01:44.400 Like, but if you get into the details and forgive me, I did last week just so people could understand.

01:01:48.980 I mean, it's really it was like a torture of a cat and beheading of a cat at his own hands.

01:01:55.760 And the media doesn't really want to go there because it shows you this guy's sick. 0.73

01:02:00.340 I mean, he's probably a sociopath and we don't have anything to do with sociopaths in this country. 0.60

01:02:04.920 We don't know what to do with them.

01:02:05.940 They cannot be therapized out of their sociopathy.

01:02:08.640 And so we've kind of thrown up our hands and said, like, good luck, America.

01:02:12.480 And we move right along.

01:02:14.480 And then you get articles like this.

01:02:16.260 OK, then you get is it Washington, you know, L.A. Times.

01:02:19.340 OK, instead of taking a deep dive into that, like what what should we be doing when young men in particular show show signs of sociopaths being sociopaths?

01:02:29.340 They take a deep dive into.

01:02:33.260 Did the Buffalo mass shooting suspects 90 percent white hometown fuel his hate?

01:02:41.860 This thing is insane, even by our modern day weird media standards.

01:02:45.760 Let me give you a couple of pull quotes.

01:02:48.020 OK.

01:02:52.420 His rage.

01:02:54.760 Yeah.

01:02:55.380 Dot, dot, dot, dot, is becoming an increasing danger in towns like this where extremism is seeping into the mainstream.

01:03:03.280 All right.

01:03:03.380 What's their evidence of that?

01:03:04.660 That extremism is seeping into the mainstream.

01:03:07.340 Yeah.

01:03:08.120 Yeah.

01:03:08.400 In Conklin.

01:03:09.560 Well, 90 percent of Conklin's over 5000 residents are white.

01:03:13.380 That's down from 96.8 percent.

01:03:15.800 They're setting up the white the white grievance line. 0.58

01:03:18.100 Right.

01:03:18.420 They're down.

01:03:19.340 The whites are down in only 90 percent.

01:03:22.340 Right.

01:03:22.740 Like, this is a problem.

01:03:25.040 Then they go on in Conklin.

01:03:27.880 Distrust of media and fear of reprisal for talking freely are common, especially among the older residents.

01:03:33.680 They go on to point out his mother's a registered Republican.

01:03:35.920 The dad's a Democrat.

01:03:37.240 They say, unsurprisingly, as a relatively rural community, Conklin is redder than the Oval County. 0.93

01:03:43.460 Sixty percent of those in his hometown went for Trump.

01:03:47.060 Here in Conklin, even unrelated conversations often turn to the assertion that President Biden and or socialism

01:03:51.960 are destroying America.

01:03:55.100 And then it goes on.

01:03:56.400 Hold on.

01:03:56.720 Where is my page 10?

01:03:57.840 Here it is.

01:03:58.300 At a local bar, Jumbo's, number one, there's a sign next to the liquor shelves.

01:04:03.660 They take that.

01:04:04.140 Try to take down Jumbo's.

01:04:05.740 There's a sign next to the liquor shelves that reads, this place is politically incorrect.

01:04:10.780 Incorrect.

01:04:11.240 The prosecution rests, your honor, and lists several terms that, quote, we say, including.

01:04:17.960 Can you guys guess what any of them are?

01:04:19.180 What would a place like Jumbo's, number one, have under a sign that reads, we're politically incorrect?

01:04:23.760 And we say, I'll give you a clue.

01:04:27.040 Merry Christmas.

01:04:30.560 That's the war on Christmas.

01:04:32.360 It's the war on Christmas.

01:04:33.540 The war on Christmas.

01:04:34.740 I'll give you another clue.

01:04:35.780 The front line is Jumbo's. 0.93

01:04:37.160 Jumbo's clown room.

01:04:38.740 The Jumbo's is directly tied to the Buffalo issue.

01:04:42.000 OK, the next one is one nation under.

01:04:47.480 Yeah.

01:04:48.080 Allah.

01:04:49.020 No, I got that one wrong.

01:04:51.120 Is that where we're gone?

01:04:52.500 One nation under God at Jumbo's, number one, we salute our flag and give thanks to our troops and warns patrons that, quote, if this offends you, leave.

01:05:00.780 Then listen to this.

01:05:01.760 Here's the capper.

01:05:02.280 Here's the capper.

01:05:03.780 The extent of the influence of this place on the shooter and the formation of the extreme views that allegedly led him to carry out the Saturday attack will probably never be known.

01:05:14.440 But.

01:05:15.400 But.

01:05:16.060 An entire town.

01:05:17.600 Gracious, strange.

01:05:18.820 I don't know if this is true.

01:05:20.820 Listen, here's the big.

01:05:22.380 Here's the summation.

01:05:24.120 He grew up in this community.

01:05:26.500 This is the air he breathed.

01:05:29.720 Oh, Lord.

01:05:30.520 Yeah, that is poisonous.

01:05:33.100 Wow.

01:05:33.380 Geez.

01:05:33.660 Let's start with that.

01:05:35.780 I went to a I went to college at it briefly at a place called UC Santa Barbara, which was, I think, ninety nine point eight percent white.

01:05:45.620 So like if I would have ended up being a mass shooter, that would have proved it was the air that I breathe.

01:05:51.400 Was there a Jumbo's? 1.00

01:05:52.740 There was something close to nine miles south.

01:05:54.820 By the way, I went to so many bars that have that sign like across the country over the past like 10 years of reporting.

01:06:03.440 There's one in Manhattan.

01:06:04.840 Yeah.

01:06:05.220 We can go there for lunch.

01:06:06.940 Yeah.

01:06:07.080 You see, you didn't even know that they were trying to make you into white supremacist when you looked at that sign.

01:06:11.780 You just thought it was sort of a tongue in cheek.

01:06:13.240 But so so Tucker is not mentioned in the manifesto.

01:06:16.760 And as far as we know, the 18 year old kid is not drinking at Jumbo's.

01:06:20.420 Right.

01:06:20.880 We're making a lot of connections that are not obvious to the to the air.

01:06:26.340 OK.

01:06:26.880 Yeah.

01:06:27.100 Yeah.

01:06:27.380 Well, that's what I'm saying.

01:06:30.100 Like, there's absolutely nothing in here.

01:06:31.840 There's nothing in here.

01:06:32.520 They have no evidence.

01:06:33.600 This is some lunatic writer's assumption that because the town is split politically and there's a lot of discussion, unrelated conversations off a turn to the association that that the assertion that Biden or socialism are destroying America.

01:06:46.200 Aha.

01:06:47.140 Aha.

01:06:48.100 Conklin is to blame the air in Conklin.

01:06:51.580 This is madness.

01:06:52.700 It's also 60 years since the same line of argument was used for shooting JFK, as Michael can tell you to exhausting detail.

01:07:02.080 Yeah.

01:07:02.340 Sorry about that.

01:07:02.940 Describing 17 of the books behind his right shoulder.

01:07:06.640 I do talk about that often.

01:07:08.220 Yes.

01:07:08.500 That's what that's what people do when they either want to sell a particular thing, which is very much the case after JFK.

01:07:16.440 They want they wanted to use that as a moment to go after the John Birch Society, to go after extreme right wingers.

01:07:22.500 They did this, you know, when Jared Lofner went on this rampage, too, like that was a time to go after the Tea Party, even though there wasn't any connected tissue at all.

01:07:30.880 Or they just they don't want to pursue the truth, which is also the case in JFK.

01:07:37.000 The truth was guy.

01:07:38.720 I don't know.

01:07:39.640 Went in.

01:07:40.200 He had a little bit of a communist.

01:07:41.300 Yeah.

01:07:41.660 No, I'm not mistaken.

01:07:42.140 He tried to kill the General Walker, the head of the John Birch Society before he shot JFK.

01:07:48.220 But the word, the phrase that's always used is climate of hate.

01:07:51.900 Yeah.

01:07:52.500 Because, you know, you don't really have a lot to grab onto.

01:07:55.100 So then you use this kind of, you know, airy term like climate of hate.

01:07:59.860 But, you know, of course, it's unidirectional.

01:08:01.820 I mean, we're talking about the the Netflix special of Ricky Gervais.

01:08:05.360 There was an interview, what, two days ago with the guy who attacked Dave Chappelle on stage.

01:08:10.640 And he said, I did it because I didn't like the trans jokes.

01:08:13.920 A man got on stage with a knife or as it was described in the media, a gun like knife because it was a knife.

01:08:21.520 There's a gun.

01:08:22.140 It was very strange.

01:08:23.200 He couldn't make up his mind.

01:08:24.180 A little schizophrenic, this guy. 0.99

01:08:25.340 And jumped on stage and tried to stab and kill Dave Chappelle. 0.96

01:08:29.440 This is presumably what you're trying to do when you run on stage with a knife and then you're beaten, arrested and then interviewed and said, yeah, I don't like those jokes. 0.97

01:08:38.960 Those trans jokes are very bad for the trans community.

01:08:41.640 Can we establish that a climate of hate has been created around this stuff by consistently refusing, you know, accusing Dave Chappelle as somebody who's creating this nasty climate that's making it dangerous to be trans in America and the world,

01:08:56.460 which will presumably be applied to Ricky Gervais today.

01:09:00.580 But you don't see that happen.

01:09:02.560 And it shouldn't happen, by the way, that we're going to start talking about the climates that are created because people criticize people or people have certain political opinions.

01:09:11.460 Now, if the entire town that he lived in was, you know, a bunch of neo-Nazis, the town council was neo-Nazis, then maybe you're on to something.

01:09:19.720 Yeah, yeah, let's talk.

01:09:49.960 I mean, it's bizarre.

01:09:51.200 I mean, this stuff is like, the guy is like, hey, I, you know, don't like him.

01:09:55.000 He's too anti-communist for me.

01:09:56.220 And they say, you know, but it just does not fit the narrative.

01:09:59.480 Our narrative is serviced in a different way.

01:10:01.560 Michael, this stuff about climate of hate is so, it falls on deaf ears when I listen because it's like, would you spare me when you, this, just this week alone,

01:10:09.940 we took a deep dive into what the left is doing to Professor Roland Fryer at Harvard, absolutely ruined the poor guy's life.

01:10:17.100 He did.

01:10:17.640 He did nothing.

01:10:18.760 I mean, it was like the Me Too trumped up allegations against him were a professional assassination against a brilliant guy whose research didn't toe the party line when it came to, quote, acting white.

01:10:32.020 He had looked into that with black students who maybe didn't want to get straight A's because they thought they would be socially punished if they did for, quote, acting white for police shootings, which he said are not more likely to happen to black men than they are to white men.

01:10:45.020 I mean, there's all this anathema.

01:10:46.600 You're not allowed to say that stuff at Harvard.

01:10:48.520 And he got Me Too'd right out of his job, really.

01:10:51.500 I mean, he's they can't fire him because he's tenured, but they're certainly trying to make it as inhospitable as possible.

01:10:56.620 Then we talked yesterday about this guy, this professor at Princeton.

01:10:59.480 Same thing.

01:11:00.540 He was accused of a Me Too situation.

01:11:02.480 It was a consensual affair with a student many, many years ago, 2006.

01:11:05.740 He already took a year off.

01:11:06.960 They made him a forced year off to pay the penalty for breaking a rule.

01:11:10.200 And now they've trumped it back up because he wrote an open letter being critical of the demands by black faculty members for like an extra paid sabbatical and extra pay for something else.

01:11:20.900 And he disagreed.

01:11:22.320 He said, why should you get these extra benefits based on pigmentation?

01:11:24.900 Well, guess what?

01:11:25.640 The Me Too investigations reopened.

01:11:27.960 Right.

01:11:28.100 So, like, stop me with your culture, with your culture of hate.

01:11:31.580 That's you.

01:11:32.820 You are ruining person after person based on your own political agenda.

01:11:37.700 That is hate.

01:11:38.720 Don't you think Roland Fryer feels it?

01:11:40.660 Don't you think this professor at Princeton feels it?

01:11:44.220 You know, and so this led to a discussion I had with Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, on my show yesterday where I said, you know what needs to be done?

01:11:52.900 We need to we need to bring down the president of Princeton as he tries to ruin this latest professor's career.

01:11:58.640 Literally, I want every student who's ever had an affair with that professor to email me, email me at my company right now.

01:12:05.640 What's our email again?

01:12:06.460 Hold on.

01:12:08.560 What's our email?

01:12:08.860 Like Larry Flint.

01:12:10.160 That's questions.

01:12:11.220 It's questions at Devil May Care Media with an S.

01:12:14.840 Questions at Devil May Care Media dot com.

01:12:16.680 Because I guarantee you this guy's not pure.

01:12:18.480 This guy's done things in his past which are sinful, which he'd like to have back, including in his role as president of Princeton or while a professor there.

01:12:25.280 No one is totally pure.

01:12:26.840 No one can pass these insane purity tests that they're imposing on these guys.

01:12:29.940 And then, yes, make him pay a penalty.

01:12:32.500 This this is this is revenge.

01:12:35.540 You know, this is this is trying to silence viewpoints.

01:12:38.240 So the big build up to Clarence Thomas and Camille who are hanging out together.

01:12:43.960 And and whether you're going to out me, it's not just Republicans.

01:12:49.460 OK, it's just it's reasonable people on the other side of the cancel culture nonsense.

01:12:54.020 And I really feel like we have to fight fire with fire.

01:12:56.780 They won't listen to reason.

01:12:57.980 We have to hurt them.

01:12:59.120 They need skin in the game. 1.00

01:13:00.240 They need to understand that if they pursue this insane behavior much longer, we're going to hurt them.

01:13:04.420 We're going to turn it and do it right back to them.

01:13:06.520 But Clarence Thomas is saying we have to take the high road, Camille.

01:13:11.720 So thoughts on that?

01:13:14.780 Well, I I agree with him.

01:13:16.860 And interestingly, I didn't know that there were cameras in the room that were broadcasting at the time that that conversation was happening.

01:13:22.180 So I asked him a question after he said that I just asked if he thought conservatives were living up to that to that charge to to take the moral high road, to to conduct themselves in political arenas in a way that, you know, comports with their values rather than trying to pursue like the lowest common denominator tactics and saying, well, we'll fight fire with fire and try to get, you know, our opponents fired from their jobs as well.

01:13:49.760 I, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll say this.

01:13:52.520 I think if you have values and if cancel culture isn't what you want, to use a phrase that I have a very complicated relationship with, then I think it is your responsibility to not only model the correct behavior, but to articulate an actual defense that's credible and that is persuasive about why it's important for us to have a political and a social, cultural,

01:14:19.400 contextual context that we can all share together that isn't just something that is governed by you did the bad thing, you must go forever, you know, permanent excommunication from your institution.

01:14:32.100 And I think it is well and good to point out hypocrisy and to the extent there are stories about a dean of a university or a professor who was carrying on illicit affairs with their students, that's newsworthy.

01:14:45.800 It is appropriate to publish those stories and it's appropriate for them to be censored for that behavior to the extent that is inconsistent with the values of the institution.

01:14:55.080 But I think that pursuing those strategies as a way to try and get the other team to kind of back down is misguided.

01:15:03.200 And I think that it is it's one has to acknowledge it's it's at least as likely to inspire a downward spiral as opposed to your values become the ones, the ones that you say are your values anyways, become the ones that we all share together because, you know, it's it's mutually assured destruction.

01:15:21.360 And I just don't I don't think I see a lot of evidence of mutually assured destruction as a value like working in the in the culture war context.

01:15:30.200 What I see is a reactionary spiral and I've seen it play out pretty consistently in the current culture war, quite frankly, where everyone seems to abandon their values.

01:15:40.420 And the only value that matters is whether or not the other team loses.

01:15:43.280 Well, I think there's a way of doing this that is a bridge between what Megan says and what you say, Camille, which is to apply the exact same standards that they use for other people to drag them through the mud and to destroy them.

01:15:55.500 Like what has happened to Roland Fryer, who, by the way, is, you know, not only the nicest, funniest man, he's a very funny guy who's also done research that actually doesn't align with or aligns more with what people on the left think, too.

01:16:08.900 But they ignore that because he's because he said, you know, black black men are stopped more often by the police and they have more aggressive.

01:16:15.340 Everything's short of killing. He said it's worse, even for compliant black suspects. 0.99

01:16:21.080 Exactly. And just saying that other thing was enough to to put him in the crosshairs. 0.97

01:16:25.500 But my my issue with this is, I mean, apply the same standards while trying to change those standards rather than just saying abandoning everything at one time and saying, let's let's destroy, destroy, destroy.

01:16:36.620 I mean, I would say let's apply the same standard to them while we try to undermine their system, because, I mean, I think of something like there was an interaction of a woman and a young black. 0.92

01:16:48.800 He's probably 13, 14 or something. Camille, remember this because we talked about it on the show, who was accused of the woman accused him of stealing.

01:16:55.500 His her phone was at a hotel in downtown New York and he hadn't and the woman was arrested and she was not white, by the way, I believe she was, you know, half Asian, half Hispanic doesn't matter.

01:17:06.620 But she was arrested. Yeah, she was white passing. She was white passing and she was arrested. And this thing went to to court and the rest of it. 0.70

01:17:13.980 And, you know, my thought when I see something like that is, you know, that's a false accusation.

01:17:18.860 That's that she's not being she's not being tried for racism. You can't try somebody for that.

01:17:22.200 It's a false accusation. And I live in observe a universe in which the false accusation of racism is made every day with no sanction.

01:17:30.520 And it's actually encouraged. I mean, there's there's you know, what I hope is that these people can stop doing this sort of thing because there's some sanction on the other end.

01:17:39.840 There's no penalty for falsely accusing somebody of racism. You just say it, fling it out there.

01:17:45.860 If it sticks, it sticks. Great. It's like napalm. It's burning the skin and they're going to be screwed.

01:17:50.400 If it doesn't, ho hum, we'll just we'll just walk on from this. But, you know, that thing is like the woman makes this accusation ends up in court. 1.00

01:17:57.740 I just think these false accusations have to carry more sting because I have seen so many lives destroyed.

01:18:04.240 And you mentioned Roland. I've met him one time. I had a lovely interaction with him.

01:18:08.540 And, you know, but people I do know very well who have gone through this and some of whom I know because they went through this, because they had called me and said, what do I do about this?

01:18:18.660 And I have watched their lives be completely destroyed before any due process.

01:18:24.400 And, you know, the pile on, too, because everybody piles on on Twitter and the rest of it, particularly journalists to say, I'm on the good guy side here.

01:18:31.440 I'm one of the good people. I think this person is bad. I think what they're accused of is bad.

01:18:36.060 I'm not sure what they did it, but the accusation is pretty bad.

01:18:38.940 I'm going to make my objection known that has gone so far in this culture that I think we need to, you know, turn up the heat a little bit on people who make false accusations.

01:18:48.660 Oh, well, I love that. And speaking of false accusations, has one been made against Johnny Depp?

01:18:55.480 Mm hmm. I know the guys are into the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial.

01:18:59.360 We're going to we're going to pick it up there.

01:19:01.440 And guess what? A false accusation was made against your humble anchor.

01:19:07.380 And I'm going to tell you that story, too.

01:19:10.280 Wait until you hear what people accuse me of falsely and wrongly.

01:19:14.600 And I've got the proof that's next.

01:19:18.660 You guys made some big news with the fifth column, by the way.

01:19:23.580 I love that you were at the Comedy Cellar. Spectacular that you did a live show there.

01:19:26.960 So what's the what's the latest? How can people find you?

01:19:29.680 Just go to we the fifth dot substack dot com.

01:19:33.200 Correct. And subscribe right away.

01:19:36.560 Right away. Subscribe. Right away.

01:19:38.060 Subscribe for free. But the really fun way to subscribe is by giving us money.

01:19:41.600 Right. You'll feel better.

01:19:43.580 We'll feel better. It's better for fun.

01:19:45.460 Yes. And you would have gotten access to tickets to the Comedy Cellar show, which we put out to subscribers and they sold out before all the plebs for all the cheapskates could even get to them. 1.00

01:19:55.800 So that's amazing. Yeah.

01:19:58.060 I mean, congratulations. You must have. I mean, especially in New York City. That's not easy.

01:20:01.980 Right. Like how did we we had two of the most New York people on stage with us, which was Colin Quinn and Michael Rappaport.

01:20:08.300 Um, guys who still have New York accents. Michael Rappaport's busy. He just hosted for Wendy Williams.

01:20:14.860 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he took a break to come hang out with us, which was great.

01:20:19.160 I like his career path confuses me. Right.

01:20:21.500 I knew him from the movie. Um, was it, what was the movie he was in? It was so good with Natalie Portman and Uma Thurman.

01:20:31.260 Um, and the, and, uh, oh, come on. Uma Thurman was totally delightful in it. Anyway, he was in that beautiful girls. Is that it? Yeah.

01:20:42.640 Might be.

01:20:43.060 Yes. That was it. Beautiful girls. So good. So worth your time. If you haven't seen it. And then why am I spending all this time on Michael Rappaport? I'm abandoned.

01:20:52.080 It's one of his pretty fast men. And he's a hardworking man. Yeah. Yeah.

01:20:56.040 Well, then he had like an ugly breakup with Dave Portnoy, I think.

01:20:59.600 Yes. I think they're in the middle of the lawsuit.

01:21:01.680 Then he's sitting in for Wendy Williams. Then he's with you guys. Like, I can't keep track of this guy. I don't know what's going on there. But anyway, congrats.

01:21:07.500 Not sure that he can either. One thing we'll say about Substack is part of the reason why he moved is they're really, really good about protecting their partners, their creators, their whatever, uh, from any kind of, uh, free speech battle.

01:21:19.920 Uh, they, they are against cancel culture and the mob. And that is part of their selling attraction and organizing principle. Obviously given the foul mouth of especially Moynihan, but also Camille says a lot of terrible things too.

01:21:32.400 I was about to say something and then I realized that we're on Sirius and I just didn't want to point out.

01:21:38.020 It's like you've never been here before.

01:21:40.680 Sirius, you can say it. That's not true. Because we used to have, the column used to be on Sirius until they stopped syndicating it because Matt Welch was swearing too much. No joke.

01:21:52.600 I swear all the time. What do you mean? My audience, my audience will be the first to tell you. I swear all the time though I tried to stop.

01:21:58.680 I think it was on it like Sunday at like noon or something.

01:22:02.500 It was like right after Cardinal Dolan. Well, that's, yeah, that's a bad form, guys.

01:22:08.420 We tape at night and sometimes get into the supply a little bit.

01:22:11.680 We do get into the supply. That's kind of one of those.

01:22:14.460 Jumbos! Yo! 0.81

01:22:15.880 Yeah, we have jumbos all the time.

01:22:18.680 Politically incorrect. But yeah, no, if people want to pony up and actually subscribe, you can subscribe for free of pay because you get an extra episode every week and it's much raunchier and more horrible.

01:22:28.380 Yeah, and you want to support the guys. We want to see you as well. So yes, I agree. Go and pay and check it out.

01:22:33.940 All right. Now, Amber and Johnny are still at it. She's expected, I guess, to arrest her defense any day now.

01:22:40.620 And then he is expected to bring in Kate Moss, I think, tomorrow in rebuttal because apparently the reports are that she slipped up and she opened the door to Kate Moss testifying by saying she alleges that Johnny almost threw her down the stairs.

01:23:00.820 She, Amber, when she had some one of the infamous exchanges was when he allegedly almost hit her sister and then she hit Johnny and then Johnny, according to the sister's testimony last week, punched Amber several times in the face.

01:23:15.440 That is what the sister claimed. And that Amber said, as I thought I might go down the stairs, I had this flash of like Kate Moss and stairs as if, you know, there had been a report that maybe when he was dating Kate Moss, he threw her down the stairs.

01:23:28.480 But apparently, oh, we have the side of the sister in part talking about the alleged abuse. Here's Amber Heard's sister on the stand last week. Watch.

01:23:39.100 But I'm standing up there talking. I'm standing up there. I'm at the top of the stairs with my back to the stairs. And that's when Johnny runs up the stairs. And my again, I'm facing Amber.

01:23:51.180 Amber, he comes up behind me, strikes me in the back, kind of just somewhere over here. He strikes me in the back. I hear Amber shout, don't hit my fucking sister. 1.00

01:24:01.060 She smacks him, lands one. And then he grabs at that point. That's when Travis runs up the stairs after Amber landed one. 1.00

01:24:10.680 And but by that time, Johnny had already grabbed Amber by the hair with one hand and was whacking her repeatedly in the face of the other.

01:24:18.220 As I was standing there, Travis pulls them apart. I get Amber into mine. I close the doors behind me and lock them.

01:24:26.780 I then hear Johnny's voice shouting. Never mind. Sorry. I hear Johnny's voice shouting.

01:24:35.440 You. I fucking hate you. I hate you both. You fucking cunts. You fucking whores. 1.00

01:24:40.020 So you can swear on Sirius XM. And that's why we could play that soundbite. But let me just finish my point on Kate. 1.00

01:24:48.540 So Kate, Kate Moss is apparently going to take a stand and say she's expected to say Johnny Depp was nothing but a perfect gentleman to her.

01:24:55.100 And that actually she once fell off of like as she was coming down the stairs and he he caught her and tended to her.

01:25:01.740 And, you know, I think his side is looking forward to offering this sort of character witness because there's nobody in his past love life who said he hit them.

01:25:09.820 Ellen Barkin, she took the store stand and said he was an angry guy and got extremely drunk and, you know, intoxicated on drugs and so on and would like throw things.

01:25:19.940 But not at me and so on. Anyway, that witness testimony was pretty compelling because it wasn't Amber and it wasn't Johnny.

01:25:27.700 It was a sister. And I grant his sister blood relative. But I thought she was pretty credible and told a story that was rather disturbing.

01:25:35.200 And I wonder what you guys think about where this case stands and what it means.

01:25:39.480 Seems like a really, really healthy relationship. No matter how no matter what celebrity is on the stand, you're like, God, this is the relationship that I want never to happen in my life.

01:25:50.240 But no, I mean, the thing about it is that watching this play out and I don't want to step on Camille's lines here because there is nobody more interested in this case than Camille Foster.

01:26:01.000 I mean, if you think the the Cooper, the double Cooper stuff, I mean, the forthcoming and the Supreme Court, he's like a legal correspondent at heart.

01:26:10.700 Correspondent. He knows nothing about law. He's never studied law. Drinks too much.

01:26:15.100 Never been in trouble with the law. That's for sure.

01:26:17.600 He's like Amber Heard is lying.

01:26:18.960 By the way, I just want to say separately, she's the reason I haven't seen her in anything is that watching her on the stand.

01:26:26.040 She's a very bad actress and they're just kind of dramatic flair and everything. 1.00

01:26:29.920 I agree with that.

01:26:30.520 I think the case in the reason that it's captured a lot of people's attention is, you know, number one, it's obviously celebrities on the stand weirdly in Virginia and, you know, they're coming up and you get to hear it from from their mouths being televised.

01:26:43.820 But it's also the first time after the kind of Me Too stuff where you hear something being adjudicated.

01:26:50.240 Right. You actually hear in court these people arguing and saying, oh, this stuff is actually complicated.

01:26:54.780 And it looks like the guy might be a drunk idiot, which I think is probably a fair characterization, you know, from a lot of the stories that I've heard. 0.86

01:27:04.520 But maybe not violent or maybe responding to violence or maybe she's actually the one who's precipitating this violence, which is which is kind of kind of kind of different than what we've been talking about. 0.99

01:27:15.140 It's such a he said, she said.

01:27:16.460 It's like one of them is lying to us.

01:27:18.560 And that's what it always is.

01:27:19.740 But we always get the news story about these famous people.

01:27:23.680 The famous people disappear from their Netflix show.

01:27:28.020 The professor disappears from his classes.

01:27:30.900 And that's that.

01:27:32.160 And now you get to see this thing back and forth.

01:27:34.040 And I think that that's why it's so interesting to people beyond the celebrity aspect is actually to see these things adjudicated in the courtroom.

01:27:40.420 Finally.

01:27:41.260 Yeah.

01:27:42.020 Camille.

01:27:42.540 Remember Michelle Goldberg's piece from The New York Times last week, which was Amber Heard and the Death of Me Too.

01:27:49.880 And I remember being struck reading it by a bit of a passage in there where she describes how if if Johnny manages to win, how this will be so terrible because all sorts of men who find themselves accused will want to go and file these defamation lawsuits and essentially put themselves through the same ridiculous, heinous ordeal of having all of your dirty laundry aired in court.

01:28:11.020 Which I just don't think that that's true.

01:28:13.520 And I also don't think that it is an inherently bad thing for people to develop an interest in evidence related to claims of severe abuse.

01:28:25.840 If I am interested in adjudicating whether or not this is factually accurate, that is progress.

01:28:30.840 That is meaningful progress from a place where if women were disbelieved before, if someone was suggesting, well, no, we have to believe all of them.

01:28:38.240 No, the appropriate standard is if something terrible happened here or may have happened here, we as a society, as a culture have a genuine interest in figuring out what went wrong and how.

01:28:47.780 And the person who has been wronged here should be kind of protected and cared for and to the extent some sort of compensation is due, they should earn it.

01:28:56.660 And the person who did wrong, they should be punished.

01:28:58.940 But you have to actually care about the truth for there to be any semblance of justice here.

01:29:03.740 And we, I think, went obviously too far with Me Too as a standard because it isn't a standard in an important respect and now seem to be coming back to a place where we can have an honest appraisal of the facts, the complicated, messy facts.

01:29:19.040 And I think that's a very healthy and good thing.

01:29:21.700 Me Too has been weaponized to take down men who are unpopular for one reason or another.

01:29:27.040 That doesn't mean it never happens and that every Me Too accuser is lying and weaponizing it.

01:29:32.440 But the same thing with the race, you know, with the race situation.

01:29:35.420 Race, too, has been weaponized to take down people. 0.61

01:29:37.440 Doesn't mean it's never a factor.

01:29:39.940 Well, we're really no more clear on that case than we were.

01:29:43.120 I mean, the jury is going to go one way or the other, but I don't think we're going to walk away knowing the truth.

01:29:47.740 People have their minds made up.

01:29:49.100 They're going to believe what they believe right now, no matter what that jury says.

01:29:52.860 But listen, back to my case, OK, because this is really what I wanted to talk to you guys about.

01:29:57.040 Let me tell you something.

01:29:58.300 I moved to Connecticut, right?

01:29:59.960 We're new.

01:30:00.500 We're new to Connecticut, new to our schools and so on.

01:30:02.900 Trying to make friends.

01:30:04.340 Well, not long ago, a friend of ours came to us and said, hey, did Megan see a bunch of seniors, senior guys in this restaurant boozing it up while underage and call the cops and call the head of the school on the boys?

01:30:21.500 And Doug was like, hell no.

01:30:23.840 He's like, we haven't even been at that restaurant.

01:30:25.660 And then he asked me, he was like, you weren't at this restaurant calling the cops and call it like right now.

01:30:31.020 I'm like, of course not.

01:30:31.780 What is it?

01:30:32.100 What is this?

01:30:32.960 And he said, all we know at the school is that it was a mom, a Connecticut mom who has a podcast.

01:30:40.500 And I'm like, well, I agree that I meet those two criteria, but I did not do any of this.

01:30:47.940 And so I apparently the rumor spread that it was me.

01:30:51.460 It was me.

01:30:51.760 It was me.

01:30:52.100 And I'm trying to make new friends here.

01:30:53.480 Meanwhile, half the people are running around thinking you called the cops on my kid for having an underage drink. 0.99

01:30:57.860 Screw you. 0.98

01:30:58.460 So I'm like looking at everybody now like, it wasn't me. 0.99

01:31:01.400 It wasn't me.

01:31:02.160 It wasn't me.

01:31:03.300 Well, guess what?

01:31:04.280 Now America knows it wasn't me because guess who it was?

01:31:08.780 Oh, no.

01:31:09.720 She outed herself on her podcast.

01:31:13.100 It was real housewife, Bethany Frankel. 0.72

01:31:16.040 Oh, my God.

01:31:17.160 The lady who doesn't she make booze? 1.00

01:31:20.700 She makes like skinny margarita booze. 1.00

01:31:22.180 Yes, she makes booze, but she doesn't want underage men drinking it, apparently. 1.00

01:31:27.260 I wonder if people drink her booze, underage kids. 0.96

01:31:29.740 She went at this whole thing on her podcast.

01:31:31.940 Here's just a snippet.

01:31:32.860 Listen.

01:31:34.480 There was a group and they were drinking these large cocktails and they all just look so young to me.

01:31:39.300 Right.

01:31:39.480 And boys sometimes look younger.

01:31:40.680 They're not wearing tons of makeup and promiscuous clothing.

01:31:42.800 They just look so young.

01:31:44.120 So those drinks came out.

01:31:45.240 I checked it.

01:31:45.860 I thought about it.

01:31:46.460 I remember saying, like, how is this restaurant serving them?

01:31:49.680 And my daughter heard that. 1.00

01:31:50.300 And they're so stupid. 1.00

01:31:51.240 They're talking about the prom at a restaurant. 1.00

01:31:52.780 They're consuming alcohol.

01:31:54.380 And I see them get into cars and drive away. 0.99

01:31:57.740 Now you just fucking put me over the edge. 0.98

01:32:00.340 Like we went from the giant cocktail to the beer back, to the bottled beer back, to the shot. 0.99

01:32:08.480 So, by the way, I took a picture of the table three times.

01:32:13.060 These guys drive away.

01:32:14.060 I take a picture of the car and the license plate.

01:32:15.760 I find myself on the phone calling the police.

01:32:18.640 I'm like, these guys drank excessively.

01:32:21.680 They're underage.

01:32:23.440 But I make an agreement with myself and I say to my friend, here's what I'm going to do.

01:32:27.040 I'm going to call the headmaster of the school.

01:32:30.060 So I told the story and I said, I have a picture.

01:32:32.720 I'm going to send you a picture.

01:32:33.500 Can you tell me if these are students from your school?

01:32:36.460 And they said, these are students from my school.

01:32:38.800 But they said, we will not expel these kids, but there will be very serious ramifications.

01:32:44.420 Like, I'm down for the parents knowing possibly something legal.

01:32:51.520 So it wasn't me.

01:32:54.020 It was Bethany Frankel.

01:32:55.980 And I have to say, you know, she said she didn't want them expelled.

01:32:59.060 But I have to tell you, not only was it not me, but I would never do that.

01:33:02.560 But that if I saw if I actually saw a bunch of underage kids in a bar boozing, I would

01:33:07.820 ignore it probably, to be perfectly honest with you.

01:33:10.320 And then if I saw them to get getting behind the wheel of a car, I would probably say either

01:33:16.320 you're calling the Uber or I am or we can call your mom.

01:33:19.880 That would be another plan.

01:33:21.360 But she's being mad at the restaurant, by the way.

01:33:23.840 She she was like, I'll handle the restaurant, she said to the head of school.

01:33:26.460 But like to call their school, to call the cops, to try it.

01:33:29.100 Like, I know she says she didn't want them expelled, but you really can blow up the

01:33:32.100 kid's life over doing something that honestly, let's face it, the vast majority of us all

01:33:37.040 did not drink and drive.

01:33:38.620 But she doesn't know if there was a designated driver and so on and so forth.

01:33:41.200 What do you make of my wrongful accusation and the fact that I've been vindicated?

01:33:46.220 And how did Bethany handle it in your view?

01:33:48.820 Well, first of all, you're wrong about not all of us not drinking and driving because

01:33:51.840 Moynihan's from Boston.

01:33:53.140 I've never done that.

01:33:54.300 I didn't say driving.

01:33:55.680 I said underage drinking.

01:33:57.440 I never underage drank.

01:33:59.300 Yeah, yeah.

01:34:00.100 Never at a restaurant that I can give you the address of.

01:34:03.040 Jumbos.

01:34:03.220 Can somebody get jumbos on the back of the line?

01:34:06.060 Yeah.

01:34:06.460 But I mean, by the way, she that voice, by the way.

01:34:09.980 Good Lord.

01:34:11.480 And just for the record, your clothing cannot be periscuous.

01:34:16.700 She's like, they've got the clothing. 1.00

01:34:19.140 They dress like whores. 1.00

01:34:20.580 I'm like, let them have fun. 1.00

01:34:22.740 Good Lord, woman. 0.99

01:34:23.760 But yeah, I mean, it is crazy that your thing is to rant on random kids that you don't even

01:34:30.340 know if they go to school there.

01:34:31.940 You're trying to track them down.

01:34:35.040 She's like, I mean, I mean, the headmaster assure me they weren't getting expelled.

01:34:38.860 Well, did they get kicked off the sports team?

01:34:41.060 Did like like this is a very aggressive.

01:34:44.300 Again, you don't know.

01:34:45.580 Did all of them drink the same?

01:34:46.700 Maybe one stayed sober.

01:34:47.880 But like, are you sure that like this is to me beyond.

01:34:51.320 And so I just really wanted to get on the record with it.

01:34:53.220 And she blames it on you.

01:34:54.320 I had nothing to do with it.

01:34:56.640 Blame Megyn Kelly. 1.00

01:34:57.940 She'll take the fall. 1.00

01:34:59.540 I don't know why she sounds like that, but close enough.

01:35:01.940 Guys, thank you so much for the legal correspondence and in-depth reporting.

01:35:07.060 And we look forward to paying for more of you at Substack.

01:35:10.620 Camille, Matt, Michael, to be continued.

01:35:15.140 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

01:35:17.060 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:35:21.320 Thank you so much.

01:35:46.100 I'll see you next week.

The Megyn Kelly Show - May 24, 2022

Criminalizing Speech, and Performative Outrage, with Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch ｜ Ep. 328

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