On this episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, host Meghan Kelly is joined by the hosts of The Fifth Column, Camille Foster, Matt Welsh, and Michael Moynihan to discuss the latest in the media's hysterical reaction to the shooting in Buffalo, New York. Plus, a special guest joins the show to talk about Kate Moss s testimony in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial.
00:00:53.640And supermodel Kate Moss is scheduled to testify tomorrow in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial.
00:00:59.800Why is that? We'll get into it. Plus, monkey pox?
00:01:03.120Joining me now to get into all of it, the hosts of the fifth column, now on Substack.
00:01:09.520Camille Foster of Freethink Media, Matt Welsh, editor-at-large for Reason Magazine,
00:01:14.680and Michael Moynihan, a correspondent for Vice News Tonight.
00:01:23.120Welcome back to the show, guys. Great to have you.
00:01:25.140Howdy, Mike. Thanks for having me, as always.
00:01:27.000So much to get into. And I was asking the team, you know, before we started, I'm like, where should I start?
00:01:31.220You know, because people have, my producers and I sometimes have different, and they had good hard news headlines.
00:01:35.880And I was like, I don't want to talk about it. I want to talk about Carl Cameron.
00:01:38.600I want to talk about, like, I saw, I realize it's not the biggest news ever, but I'm shocked.
00:01:46.240I know, I've known this guy since I was a young correspondent in the D.C. Bureau.
00:01:51.120He was always a totally straight shooter, right down the middle.
00:01:54.960One of the things I loved about him was you couldn't tell whether he was left or right in his reporting.
00:01:59.680You know, campaign Carl Cameron. And you couldn't tell which side of the aisle he was on.
00:02:05.120And I knew him personally. And he, you couldn't tell. When he talked about politics, he was right down the middle.
00:02:10.520And then he left Fox News in January of 17. And I could tell I was kind of leaked.
00:02:17.840And then he gave an interview after. I'm like, OK, I get it. He doesn't like Trump.
00:02:21.600And he doesn't like the network's direction on Trump. Well, that that wasn't particularly unusual.
00:02:25.320A lot of a lot of people who, you know, were straight shooters didn't really love Trump.
00:02:29.540But now to hear him talk, it was like, all right, I guess we'll.
00:02:36.140Oh, yeah. OK, so this soundbite that we put together has two butted soundbites.
00:02:39.720The one that I heard him was on MSNBC with Nicole Wallace.
00:02:44.160And 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.
00:02:49.380No. 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.
00:03:01.680This was in the context of Buffalo. Here he is in a butted soundbite. Carl Cameron. Take a listen.
00:03:07.660Tucker has been screaming fire in a crowded movie house for years.
00:03:11.820If 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.
00:03:18.940The 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.
00:03:29.980It's time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail.
00:04:07.320And of course, Jim Acosta follows that up by saying, you know, Carl, that's absolutely right.
00:04:13.140I couldn't agree more. And I was like, wait a second.
00:04:15.000And these are two people pretending to be journalists, saying that another journalist who they don't like, who is lying.
00:04:22.280And 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.
00:05:10.280But 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.
00:05:27.600I think it was in Yiddish during the First World War, saying we should not join the First World War.
00:05:34.180The person was arrested and then accused of yelling fire in a crowded theater.
00:05:38.580So the origination of that is actually trampling on free speech.
00:05:42.060It's what's crazy about it is, like, he knows he's got to know.
00:05:47.180You 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.
00:06:00.700And I know you guys are in a different position than Tucker is when it comes to discussing the border, but that's his opinion.
00:06:35.980It'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.
00:06:48.540Disturbing 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.
00:07:01.680It's the name of a Vaclav Havel book-length interview from, like, 1988, disturbing the peace.
00:07:07.880It's the statute that they remove as soon as they usher in freedom after totalitarianism.
00:07:13.920We don't want a federal government at all interested in the notion of disturbing the peace.
00:07:21.060You 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.
00:07:34.780That's a terrible, terrible place that we're going.
00:07:36.740And 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.
00:07:49.000And I wish that it was only on one of those sides, and it's not.
00:07:53.480It is increasingly on both sides, and it's a terrible place that we're going right now.
00:07:57.200Speech 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.
00:08:16.900There's a very real sense in which we're talking about criminalizing political opposition.
00:08:21.840Like, 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.
00:08:49.240Incarcerate people who say the wrong kinds of things in public.
00:08:53.520It's obscene, and it is a dangerous, dangerous kind of crossing of the Rubicon here.
00:09:00.740Yeah, 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.
00:09:17.960They had originally, it's now come out, asked for the National Guard to be sent in.
00:09:24.720The 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?
00:09:34.060But 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.
00:09:46.960I mean, this is the natural endpoint, and this is what we get for not fighting back against this stuff.
00:09:53.640And 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.
00:10:00.980It was done for a very specific reason, right?
00:10:03.220I 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.
00:10:27.180We have to stop the speech, which itself is violence and then provokes violence.
00:10:32.080And 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.
00:10:41.620I mean, this is beyond anything I've heard a serious journalist say on the air multiple times.
00:10:46.660I mean, it's important that you put that up twice to say that this wasn't a slip of the tongue.
00:10:52.420And 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.
00:11:00.260It's like, no, it's absolutely wrong, both legally, morally, you know, in every possible way.
00:11:05.340This is not the way of dealing with speech that you don't like.
00:11:07.760At a minimum, you would expect to get that kind of perfunctory pushback.
00:11:10.300Well, shouldn't there be some concern about free speech?
00:11:13.920Don't you think it's appropriate for us to take into consideration that the boundaries are just a little bit fuzzy, aren't they?
00:11:20.560We know they're terrible, but the boundaries are fuzzy.
00:11:27.160It 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.
00:12:27.980What 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.
00:12:36.460I'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.
00:12:49.620And, you know, the press must portray it like that.
00:12:52.620As 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.
00:13:05.560You 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.
00:13:24.500We're not going to have a country in Donald Trump's words.
00:13:42.400Can 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?
00:13:50.560And it's just too much of America believes that.
00:13:52.000You 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.
00:13:58.220And 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.
00:14:10.100And exactly what happened in Nazi Germany.
00:14:12.440But when all this heavy breathing happens, the irony of it is that it creates another sort of authoritarianism, right?
00:14:20.500It's like to stop the authoritarianism, we need to throw people in jail for speech.
00:14:24.880To 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.
00:14:32.600So to prevent authoritarianism, we ourselves have to be slightly authoritarian.
00:14:38.760And to your point, Megan, about about Carl Cameron being zombified, you know, I see the same thing.
00:14:43.040I 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.
00:14:54.780But as you mentioned, the same thing is true with people on the other side.
00:14:57.880I mean, Bill Kristol appears to, you know, somebody I know appears to have changed his views on everything in a matter of four years.
00:15:06.560Like mathematically, is it possible that all of your views, you've been a man in the political fight for your entire life.
00:15:12.940Your father was the founder of neoconservatism.
00:15:15.460And 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.
00:15:22.620I 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?
00:15:30.700Because I suspect it probably is more about team sports at this point.
00:15:34.900The the the nonsense with the Lincoln Project lawyers is the same, right?
00:15:38.560All 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.
00:15:47.380Um, but he came out with a I need to do a mea culpa when I was working for the McCain campaign.
00:15:54.460We tried to kill a story about him having an affair with a lobbyist and The New York Times was running it.
00:16:00.400And I I disparaged The New York Times reporters and I said it was lies.
00:16:07.520So I guess John McCain allegedly had an affair with, you know, some lobbyist.
00:16:10.960OK, it's like a marital thing, whatever.
00:16:13.020And 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.
00:16:31.560And no one is looking to absolve you of that or really wants to hear from you at all.
00:16:37.140And to keep the paychecks coming, too, by the way.
00:16:39.700I mean, especially for Steve Schmidt, who makes an enormous amount of money on this.
00:16:43.000And I know Matt can speak to this as somebody who's wrote wrote a book about John McCain.
00:16:47.100And 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.
00:17:01.860I don't know where all this money goes, but it's a profession.
00:17:04.200I mean, the man's professionally sorry.
00:17:08.880I 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.
00:17:18.120Yes, that's Steve Schmidt is just so slimy and disgusting and hateful.
00:17:40.940But 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.
00:17:57.280Steve Schmidt inserted himself into the story.
00:18:00.020Let's let's remember what the root cause of him having an absolute epic meltdown was.
00:18:04.640It was, I think, a media story about Meghan McCain's book sales.
00:18:08.060There 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.
00:18:18.100He 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.
00:18:47.240But that soft on Russia is lines up with where Democratic prerogatives have been in the age of Trump.
00:18:53.460So how can you absolve yourself of Palin, who Democrats hate and also excite people?
00:18:58.280Well, you can go after Maine because a lot of people on the left don't like Meghan McCain.
00:19:01.040And 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.
00:19:18.260It'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.
00:19:28.340Wouldn't it be fun if we if we picked on John McCain's widow?
00:20:24.220There 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.
00:20:31.720Maybe 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.
00:20:43.900But they have more serious kind of fabulisms and lies on staff now.
00:20:49.840It'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.
00:20:58.160They'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.
00:21:07.180And that standard is no longer a fireable or distanceable offense in cable news.
00:21:12.920And it's part of the reason why people don't trust that stuff.
00:21:14.560Maybe I'm imagining a glorious past that never existed.
00:21:18.560But I and, you know, Megan, you worked in the cable news industry for a long time.
00:21:21.640But 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.
00:21:38.400And 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.
00:21:47.080So 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.
00:22:00.020That's what he's on the record saying. But she says, you know, he's my political opponent. He supports apartheid.
00:22:04.560No one blinks. It gets a little clip on media.
00:22:07.920We 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.
00:22:13.920And 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.
00:22:30.740But 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.
00:22:39.000Nothing matters. OK, so two points. I want to tell you a story about NBC and standards.
00:22:42.560But I also want to just you mentioned Mediaite and I mentioned Jen Psaki.
00:22:46.760Can I just tell you, Mediaite has a piece up today. It's for people.
00:22:49.820Nobody nobody goes to Mediaite outside of the media industry.
00:22:53.080But so for our listeners, it's a website that just covers media.
00:22:56.100And their their headline is just in MSNBC announces Jen Psaki is joining the network.
00:23:01.140OK, we know. But there's there's an actual line in the story.
00:23:05.500Ready? The hire of one of the most admired press secretaries in recent memory is a coup for MSNBC.
00:23:26.840OK, 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.
00:23:58.100Like, ah, MSNBC is connected to big NBC and they are subject to the same review, ostensibly, that the NBC people are.
00:24:08.500So 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.
00:24:17.540And 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.
00:24:25.420And it said like scripts is something like, you know, Roger Ailes was accused by multiple women and he denied ever having harassed anyone.
00:24:35.560And 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.
00:24:47.820So like I'm not just going to end that with he denied it, you know, like he was accused by 17 women, including me.
00:24:54.460And they were like, no, you have to just offer his denial.
00:24:57.880And 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.
00:25:42.840The New Yorker famously has this vaunted fact checking department.
00:25:46.180And there's a famous story where, you know, somebody wrote that one of the characters in the story was bald.
00:25:50.800And one of the fact checkers called to confirm that the person was, in fact, bald.
00:25:54.860I mean, that is how stringent their standards are in.
00:25:58.660And, you know, I read particularly on the Web site, less so in the magazine, the stuff in the kind of Trump universe now.
00:26:05.000And, 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.
00:26:10.900But they get a bit flabby when it comes to that.
00:26:14.700And 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.
00:26:24.360And 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.
00:26:34.020Donald Trump said, comma, without evidence, comma, and then back to the story.
00:26:45.380But 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.
00:26:55.880And really, we didn't say whatever the hell we want.
00:26:58.140And, 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.
00:27:07.120And, you know, the woman on CNN who wore the sweater that said, you know, truth matters or whatever during the broadcast.
00:27:13.600And 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.
00:27:24.720And 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.
00:27:42.080You know, that doesn't make it OK because they believe this nonsense.
00:27:44.600But this is what happens on the other side, too, is that we must take these things.
00:27:49.220Karl Cameron said we would put people in jail because, look, you know, if we don't, our democracy is over.
00:27:53.700So, you know, in the process of doing that, we must crush democracy.
00:27:56.940It's very scary to think about uniform government.
00:27:59.500Right. This is why we like divided government, which we don't have right now.
00:28:03.000It's just an argument for exactly the opposite outcome at the midterm election that they're raising the flag on.
00:28:08.540Like we do. We need divided government because the parties have gotten a little too crazy.
00:28:13.280Like, look, maybe I'm biased because I'm center right.
00:28:16.580But I think the left is seriously the problem.
00:28:19.580And there are definitely problems on the right, too.
00:28:21.300But I think like the people pushing this nonsense, like the biggest on cracking down a free speech and speeches, violence and all that.
00:28:37.520I think at the moment the president of the United States is a Democrat.
00:28:41.220That the Democrats happen to control both houses of Congress at the moment.
00:28:46.320With 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.
00:28:54.860And 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.
00:29:01.740You 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.
00:29:17.740And to the extent he has influence in the party, like we're actually seeing in very real time, it degrade in really material ways.
00:29:25.700The 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.
00:29:34.120Kemp might kick Perdue's butt, which is not the outcome Donald Trump wants.
00:29:38.480And 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.
00:29:52.600We're not talking about campaigns where he has to go out and it's a Democrat versus a Republican.
00:29:58.420We'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.
00:30:06.600I'm going to go with the guy he doesn't support. That matters.
00:30:09.240It 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.
00:30:22.840And you say, you know, I'm a progressive, I'm a liberal, I'm a Democrat.
00:30:26.480It 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.
00:30:35.740That threat inflation is dangerous for for the nation as a whole.
00:30:39.200But it's also dangerous for the political prospects for Democrats.
00:30:42.340I 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.
00:30:49.720I 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.
00:31:04.220Broadly speaking, an associate of the Republican Party conservatives were in favor of basically deregulating media.
00:31:11.600They wanted to dismantle the Fairness Doctrine, which was used as a weapon to exclude voices from political speech.
00:31:17.560It was used by politicians to pressure, whether it's Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon to pressure newspapers and other people like that.
00:31:24.200They wanted to free up spectrum and all of this kind of space.
00:31:28.220Trump wanted to re he threatened to reuse the Fairness Doctrine.
00:31:31.600He wanted to use antitrust as a weapon against NBC and other places that he didn't like, that he felt bad.
00:31:38.900And now this has become widely shared on the right.
00:31:41.560The idea, again, it's the instrumental notion of what should our media policy be.
00:31:47.180And 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.
00:31:57.120And people from the Trumpian right would say, yeah, but did you win?
00:31:59.860You know, people wanted that sense of hashtag winning, which means punishing people.
00:32:05.680So 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.
00:32:14.800The Communications Decency Act is going to be regulation of big tech because big tech almost stole the election in 2020.
00:32:22.920There's going to be this punitive sense.
00:32:24.820So I don't see it as a, oh, look, there's a safe harbor in our politics right now.
00:32:29.340But the point for me is that there's not.
00:32:32.600But it's right in the sense that they're, you know, both sides are attacking big tech, right?
00:32:38.300I 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.
00:32:48.820I 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.
00:32:58.780If you expect the other, other argument.
00:33:02.580But 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.
00:33:19.420And, you know, the company in this case does not buckle, but we've seen a lot of cases where the company does buckle.
00:33:24.240And 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.
00:33:33.960I mean, the mainstream media, I would imagine, and it'd be right to do so, would be like, what?
00:33:42.700You 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.
00:33:50.280I mean, his last special was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time.
00:33:53.200But apparently this one has transphobic jokes.
00:33:56.440And I put air quotes in that because I haven't seen it.
00:33:58.700And that is a term that is thrown around pretty loosely.
00:35:57.200It was a screenshot from Variety, the industry Bible that the headline was Ricky Gervais Netflix comedy special gets backlash for transphobic jokes.
00:36:05.820It has been released for about 13 seconds.
00:36:09.000It 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.
00:36:37.760And 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?
00:36:56.680And it requires a bit of readjustment.
00:36:58.640So making fun of that is itself not transphobic.
00:37:02.660But 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.
00:37:18.060And you heard Ricky Gervais use the acronym TERF, which is the trans exclusionary radical feminist there.
00:37:25.980Those are the radical feminists that are in the crosshairs of trans activists.
00:37:30.260But, 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.
00:37:42.980And 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.
00:41:12.900You'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.
00:41:50.000Comedy is part of how that stuff gets lubricated.
00:41:53.160We had Colin Quinn, the great Colin Quinn live show we did in New York last week.
00:41:57.780And his the New York story is one of the most amazing, absolutely brilliant specials, sort of comedy, sort of sociology history of New York.
00:42:05.860And 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.
00:42:23.100So 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.
00:42:34.780And people don't like to be told that you can only talk this way suddenly right now.
00:42:42.880I 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.
00:42:57.680The goal is not to live in a society where we all agree with one another on everything.
00:43:02.380It'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.
00:43:17.600Like 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.
00:43:29.880We don't want to offend each other. We may have concerns about one another's behavior.
00:43:33.580But even that stuff, most people want to talk about in a way that is respectful and that is courteous and arrives at a solution.
00:43:43.080I 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.
00:43:54.620I 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.
00:44:03.120But 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.
00:44:13.740It was also brutal. Yeah, I'm not a fan of pedophilia and I don't take light of pedophilia.
00:44:19.960And I think Louis CK would generally agree with that. But this is also comedy. And that's how it works.
00:44:24.620And 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.
00:44:33.600And we find ways to cope with that. And at least even if we don't find it funny, we can turn the station.
00:44:39.980We can we can not log into that particular website. We can like Dave Chappelle said, you clicked on my face.
00:44:46.040Right. 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.
00:44:56.300That 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.
00:45:04.680You don't have to work at a Spotify or a Netflix or a Sirius XM.
00:45:08.180If 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.
00:45:15.360I 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.
00:45:21.940You don't want to work the weekends. No problem. You go to the key bank. It's wonderful.
00:45:24.920Opens up at nine, closes at four. You're good. Nobody bothers you.
00:45:27.680You choose a certain profession, or in this case, news, you know that your life's going to be a little chaotic.
00:45:32.860You 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.
00:45:41.260And 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.
00:45:51.180To 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.
00:46:04.160I 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.
00:46:18.400But 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.
00:46:31.140In 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.
00:46:44.120But 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.
00:47:03.060All 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?
00:47:19.300Do 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.
00:47:38.540Let'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.
00:48:05.880I mean, it was right after George Floyd, wasn't it? Or was it right before? It was May of 2020.
00:48:10.640It 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.
00:48:20.180Interestingly, 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.
00:48:35.620And said, it sounds like, it seems like it's open season on black men. The fact that these two things are happening simultaneously.
00:48:41.260Wow. 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.
00:48:53.980And revealed a lot of facts about this, this case that was sort of the quintessential, quote, Karen case that the media had totally ignored.
00:49:04.940And now there's an update. And, you know, remember, this is birdwatcher Christian Cooper, who was confronted by this.
00:49:12.080Well, he confronted this woman, Amy Cooper, Christian Cooper. The birdwatcher was black. Amy Cooper, the dog walker, was white.
00:49:19.380She was there with her dog. He was mad. Her dog was in the ramble off the leash.
00:49:24.040She allegedly said, well, I, you know, this is the only place to walk him. Christian Cooper didn't like that.
00:49:29.600He 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.
00:49:43.980We'll get to that in a second. Listen, watch.
00:49:45.820There is an African-American man. I am in Central Park. He is recording me. I threatened myself and my dog.
00:49:56.540I'm sorry. I can't hear you. I'm being threatened by a man into the ramble. Please send the cops immediately.
00:50:03.400Now, she had, in fact, been threatened by him. He had threatened to hurt her dog, or at least that's how it sounded.
00:50:09.560But 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.
00:50:17.460The problems I saw for Amy Cooper at the time was not that she described him as an African-American male to the 911.
00:50:23.500It 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.
00:50:33.340That 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.
00:50:49.600And 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.
00:50:56.920And I'll start with I'll start with that. I mean, that is certainly the thing that made this interesting to most people.
00:51:03.500The 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.
00:51:12.060We don't know what happened before the video started rolling unless we listen to an account from someone.
00:51:18.600And 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.
00:51:28.440And 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.
00:51:38.760Amy 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.
00:51:53.620And 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.
00:52:07.280And 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.
00:52:20.880And 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.
00:52:37.480And 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.
00:52:48.300And 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.
00:52:57.640And honestly, but I can say a couple of things at a very high level.
00:53:01.280What we know for a fact is that Christian Cooper most certainly threatened Amy Cooper by his own admission.
00:53:07.020He says to her in the park that day, leash your dog.
00:53:10.540And 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.
00:53:14.640And you're not going to like that's him verbatim saying this is what I said to her.
00:53:18.740Now, 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.
00:53:27.100But what makes this even more interesting is that Christian Cooper had a habit of doing this.
00:53:32.180And 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.
00:53:43.620But 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.
00:53:52.840And 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.
00:54:12.240I was a New Yorker for almost 10 years.
00:54:15.320I know all of us had some experience in New York.
00:54:17.380We've certainly seen fights and arguments break out on the street before.
00:54:20.360I 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.
00:54:36.160And that is the actual context of the story.
00:54:39.000You 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.
00:54:46.260It's unbelievable that he's obtained because of the celebrity he managed to claim for himself as a result of this whole encounter.
00:54:54.460But 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.
00:55:11.400But 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.
00:55:23.780Who 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.
00:56:08.780I 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,
00:56:14.460who seems to be getting increasingly agitated as though there is a kind of performance taking place,
00:56:19.180it'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,
00:56:31.800then 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.
00:56:42.840And, again, very different from the demeanor that Christian had once the camera started rolling.
00:56:49.260Amy 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.
00:57:01.960Not the polite gentleman who kind of was very contained once the video started to roll, but aggressive, angry.
00:57:08.680She 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.
00:57:19.300Right. Now, the media has totally lionized this guy.
00:57:21.600It's amazing he has a Nat Geo special.
00:57:23.560Of course he does, naturally, and because there can't be two sides to a story involving Central Park Karen.
00:57:30.100Like, she was the start of it all, and therefore the narrative must be upheld.
00:57:33.100And if her life has to be ruined and thrown away, so be it.
00:57:36.860I mean, she's now, I understand, like, left the country.
00:57:39.520She'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.
00:57:46.080And in the exchange, as recited by Christian Cooper, he says that he said that he made the threat.
00:58:36.840Maybe you can just say, maybe she's just a very descriptive talker.
00:58:40.440But 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.
00:59:14.680Maybe she meant something nefarious by it.
00:59:16.920Maybe she was just kind of reaching for something she thought might frighten someone who was scaring her.
00:59:21.900But 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.
00:59:37.060This is one of the most extensively covered stories of 2020.
00:59:41.140And now we're still in 2022 and we're seeing new stories written about this.
00:59:44.760And 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.
01:00:00.800This 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.
01:00:11.140And I don't think Christian Cooper is a bad person.
01:00:13.080I 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.
01:00:22.600Although 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.
01:00:31.720And again, you know, Christian Cooper is a lot of things, but he's not a centric park.
01:00:34.860He watches the birds and he's very sweet about it.
01:00:56.740So you raise good points about the narrative.
01:00:59.160We saw it with Buffalo, the absence of nuance, the avoidance of certain facts that may not jive with your preferred narrative.
01:01:05.840Like 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.
01:01:15.300And very few people are going to the cat.
01:01:18.500You know, you have to work to find the details about.
01:02:16.260OK, then you get is it Washington, you know, L.A. Times.
01:02:19.340OK, 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?
01:04:52.500One 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.
01:05:03.780The 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.
01:06:33.600This 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.
01:07:08.500That's what that's what people do when they either want to sell a particular thing, which is very much the case after JFK.
01:07:16.440They want they wanted to use that as a moment to go after the John Birch Society, to go after extreme right wingers.
01:07:22.500They 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.
01:07:30.880Or they just they don't want to pursue the truth, which is also the case in JFK.
01:08:25.340And jumped on stage and tried to stab and kill Dave Chappelle.
01:08:29.440This 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.
01:08:38.960Those trans jokes are very bad for the trans community.
01:08:41.640Can 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,
01:08:56.460which will presumably be applied to Ricky Gervais today.
01:09:02.560And 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.
01:09:11.460Now, 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.
01:09:56.220And they say, you know, but it just does not fit the narrative.
01:09:59.480Our narrative is serviced in a different way.
01:10:01.560Michael, 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,
01:10:09.940we took a deep dive into what the left is doing to Professor Roland Fryer at Harvard, absolutely ruined the poor guy's life.
01:10:18.760I 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.
01:10:32.020He 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.
01:11:06.960They made him a forced year off to pay the penalty for breaking a rule.
01:11:10.200And 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.
01:11:38.720Don't you think Roland Fryer feels it?
01:11:40.660Don't you think this professor at Princeton feels it?
01:11:44.220You 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?
01:11:52.900We need to we need to bring down the president of Princeton as he tries to ruin this latest professor's career.
01:11:58.640Literally, I want every student who's ever had an affair with that professor to email me, email me at my company right now.
01:12:11.220It's questions at Devil May Care Media with an S.
01:12:14.840Questions at Devil May Care Media dot com.
01:12:16.680Because I guarantee you this guy's not pure.
01:12:18.480This 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.
01:13:16.860And interestingly, I didn't know that there were cameras in the room that were broadcasting at the time that that conversation was happening.
01:13:22.180So 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.
01:13:52.520I 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,
01:14:19.400contextual 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.
01:14:32.100And 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.
01:14:45.800It 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.
01:14:55.080But I think that pursuing those strategies as a way to try and get the other team to kind of back down is misguided.
01:15:03.200And 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.
01:15:21.360And 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.
01:15:30.200What 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.
01:15:40.420And the only value that matters is whether or not the other team loses.
01:15:43.280Well, 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.
01:15:55.500Like 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.
01:16:08.900But 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.
01:16:15.340Everything's short of killing. He said it's worse, even for compliant black suspects.
01:16:21.080Exactly. And just saying that other thing was enough to to put him in the crosshairs.
01:16:25.500But 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.
01:16:36.620I 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.
01:16:48.800He'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.
01:16:55.500His 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.
01:17:06.620But 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.
01:17:13.980And, you know, my thought when I see something like that is, you know, that's a false accusation.
01:17:18.860That's that she's not being she's not being tried for racism. You can't try somebody for that.
01:17:22.200It'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.
01:17:30.520And 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.
01:17:39.840There's no penalty for falsely accusing somebody of racism. You just say it, fling it out there.
01:17:45.860If it sticks, it sticks. Great. It's like napalm. It's burning the skin and they're going to be screwed.
01:17:50.400If 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.
01:17:57.740I just think these false accusations have to carry more sting because I have seen so many lives destroyed.
01:18:04.240And you mentioned Roland. I've met him one time. I had a lovely interaction with him.
01:18:08.540And, 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?
01:18:18.660And I have watched their lives be completely destroyed before any due process.
01:18:24.400And, 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.
01:18:31.440I'm one of the good people. I think this person is bad. I think what they're accused of is bad.
01:18:36.060I'm not sure what they did it, but the accusation is pretty bad.
01:18:38.940I'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.
01:18:48.660Oh, well, I love that. And speaking of false accusations, has one been made against Johnny Depp?
01:18:55.480Mm hmm. I know the guys are into the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial.
01:18:59.360We're going to we're going to pick it up there.
01:19:01.440And guess what? A false accusation was made against your humble anchor.
01:19:07.380And I'm going to tell you that story, too.
01:19:10.280Wait until you hear what people accuse me of falsely and wrongly.
01:19:43.580We'll feel better. It's better for fun.
01:19:45.460Yes. 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.
01:20:43.060Yes. 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.
01:20:52.080It's one of his pretty fast men. And he's a hardworking man. Yeah. Yeah.
01:20:56.040Well, then he had like an ugly breakup with Dave Portnoy, I think.
01:20:59.600Yes. I think they're in the middle of the lawsuit.
01:21:01.680Then 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.
01:21:07.500Not 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.
01:21:19.920Uh, 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.
01:21:32.400I was about to say something and then I realized that we're on Sirius and I just didn't want to point out.
01:21:38.020It's like you've never been here before.
01:21:40.680Sirius, 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.
01:21:52.600I 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.
01:21:58.680I think it was on it like Sunday at like noon or something.
01:22:02.500It was like right after Cardinal Dolan. Well, that's, yeah, that's a bad form, guys.
01:22:08.420We tape at night and sometimes get into the supply a little bit.
01:22:11.680We do get into the supply. That's kind of one of those.
01:22:18.680Politically 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.
01:22:28.380Yeah, 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.
01:22:33.940All right. Now, Amber and Johnny are still at it. She's expected, I guess, to arrest her defense any day now.
01:22:40.620And 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.
01:23:00.820She, 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.
01:23:15.440That 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.
01:23:28.480But 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.
01:23:39.100But 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.
01:23:51.180Amber, 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.
01:24:01.060She smacks him, lands one. And then he grabs at that point. That's when Travis runs up the stairs after Amber landed one.
01:24:10.680And 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.
01:24:18.220As I was standing there, Travis pulls them apart. I get Amber into mine. I close the doors behind me and lock them.
01:24:26.780I then hear Johnny's voice shouting. Never mind. Sorry. I hear Johnny's voice shouting.
01:24:35.440You. I fucking hate you. I hate you both. You fucking cunts. You fucking whores.
01:24:40.020So you can swear on Sirius XM. And that's why we could play that soundbite. But let me just finish my point on Kate.
01:24:48.540So 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.
01:24:55.100And that actually she once fell off of like as she was coming down the stairs and he he caught her and tended to her.
01:25:01.740And, 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.
01:25:09.820Ellen 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.
01:25:19.940But not at me and so on. Anyway, that witness testimony was pretty compelling because it wasn't Amber and it wasn't Johnny.
01:25:27.700It 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.
01:25:35.200And I wonder what you guys think about where this case stands and what it means.
01:25:39.480Seems 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.
01:25:50.240But 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.
01:26:01.000I 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.
01:26:10.700Correspondent. He knows nothing about law. He's never studied law. Drinks too much.
01:26:15.100Never been in trouble with the law. That's for sure.
01:26:30.520I 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.
01:26:43.820But it's also the first time after the kind of Me Too stuff where you hear something being adjudicated.
01:26:50.240Right. You actually hear in court these people arguing and saying, oh, this stuff is actually complicated.
01:26:54.780And 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.
01:27:04.520But 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.
01:27:32.160And now you get to see this thing back and forth.
01:27:34.040And 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.
01:27:42.540Remember Michelle Goldberg's piece from The New York Times last week, which was Amber Heard and the Death of Me Too.
01:27:49.880And 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.
01:28:11.020Which I just don't think that that's true.
01:28:13.520And 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.
01:28:25.840If I am interested in adjudicating whether or not this is factually accurate, that is progress.
01:28:30.840That 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.
01:28:38.240No, 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.
01:28:47.780And 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.
01:28:56.660And the person who did wrong, they should be punished.
01:28:58.940But you have to actually care about the truth for there to be any semblance of justice here.
01:29:03.740And 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.
01:29:19.040And I think that's a very healthy and good thing.
01:29:21.700Me Too has been weaponized to take down men who are unpopular for one reason or another.
01:29:27.040That doesn't mean it never happens and that every Me Too accuser is lying and weaponizing it.
01:29:32.440But the same thing with the race, you know, with the race situation.
01:29:35.420Race, too, has been weaponized to take down people.
01:30:04.340Well, 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?