The Megyn Kelly Show - Cultural Drift From Reality, and Depp Fallout, with Red Scare Podcast Hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova

00:00:00.520 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.640 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.

00:00:16.300 Coming up, we have the hosts of the Red Scare podcast here. Judging by the comments on social

00:00:20.940 media over the weekend, you're as excited for this conversation as I am. But first,

00:00:26.160 we need to bring you an update, a very big follow up this morning to our exclusive interview

00:00:31.100 just this past Friday with Ilya Shapiro. Now, in case you missed it, he's a constitutional law

00:00:36.900 expert who sent a poorly worded tweet about President Obama, President Biden's decision

00:00:42.680 to select a Supreme Court nominee based on race and gender. He was arguing that they should have

00:00:48.340 chosen another guy from the D.C. Circuit who happened to be an Indian American and that

00:00:54.920 anybody else would be lesser qualified. And in lamenting that it wouldn't be this one judge,

00:01:00.460 he suggested and instead we're going to get a lesser black woman. And the left ran with it,

00:01:06.120 not the left, but just sort of the woke left was completely ungenerous in their interpretation of

00:01:10.040 it, even though he immediately deleted it and explained what he had meant. He just meant anybody

00:01:15.100 other than this one judge, in his view, would be lesser qualified. Well, they smelled blood.

00:01:19.800 He was about to take over this big legal center at Georgetown and they tried to kill him. I mean,

00:01:25.940 they just got him completely on the ropes. He was vilified for it. No one would accept his

00:01:32.040 explanation, even though this guy has a totally professional, laudable, admirable history as a

00:01:37.500 commentator. But he's a conservative. He's a he's a classical liberal. And he was put into a kind

00:01:43.460 purgatory by his new employer, Georgetown Law, while Georgetown took four months to determine if

00:01:51.460 that one tweet should lead to the end of Ilya Shapiro's stint at Georgetown before it even began.

00:02:00.320 All right. Finally, they determined, OK, you didn't actually even work here before we foisted this misery

00:02:07.720 on you. This four months investigation and never mind when you actually sent out the tweet. So we're

00:02:13.900 going to let you start at Georgetown Law. Well, Ilya had just received that news the day before he came

00:02:21.320 on our show and listening to him talk about what the requirements were going to be for him at Georgetown,

00:02:29.240 what the dean had said publicly, even in announcing he could join Georgetown after all this and Ilya's

00:02:35.380 commitment to stand by his more originalist views of the Constitution, which they knew about in

00:02:40.180 advance. It's a little bit more conservative leaning, more like Justice Scalia than it is like

00:02:44.220 Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We were forecasting with him in that interview. This is going to be a hell of a

00:02:50.400 bumpy road even from this point forward. Keep in mind, of course, there's been huge outbreaks of

00:02:55.880 upset on the Georgetown campus, the Black Student Law Association demanding reparations

00:03:01.980 because of this one demanding that they not be criticized for their criticism of Ilya because

00:03:09.720 they she claimed that they were the descendants of slaves. I mean, it got absolutely absurd. One

00:03:15.400 demanding a cry room for students in the wake of that one tweet. It was insane. But in the end,

00:03:22.160 not really because they supported his right to freedom of speech, but because they found a technicality

00:03:26.720 saying he didn't yet work there when he sent it, Georgetown said, OK, Ilya, you can come. Well,

00:03:32.120 today, unbelievable news on it. Before we get to that, let me set it up with a bit of Friday's

00:03:38.080 interview. The dean put out a statement attacking me and calling me an appalling racist. It was honestly,

00:03:44.000 Megan, the probably the second worst day of my life, the worst being when my mom passed when I was in

00:03:49.020 college. There were physical manifestations in my health, great personal and professional

00:03:54.280 instability. And today I'm with you the day after that purgatory ended. My whole team was talking

00:04:02.060 in the break like this isn't going to last. How can this last? Whether that is going to be feasible now,

00:04:08.920 you know, the proof will be in the pudding. That is an interesting question. And I'll I hope to make

00:04:16.040 a go of it. But if it becomes the environment becomes truly hostile, then I'll have to see

00:04:23.920 what the next step will be. Well, just 72 hours later, Ilya Shapiro is out at Georgetown. He resigned.

00:04:32.560 He resigned after that interview, writing in a letter to Georgetown Dean William Traynor that upon

00:04:40.160 consultation with counsel, family and trusted advisors, it's become apparent that his remaining

00:04:45.820 at Georgetown has become untenable, saying there's now a target on his back, making it impossible for

00:04:52.580 him to do the job that he had been hired to do in, quote, a hostile work environment.

00:04:59.300 We called it. I'll say that we called it. And this is part of a growing and very disturbing trend.

00:05:05.840 We covered a couple of weeks ago the turfing of lauded Professor Roland Fryer at Harvard. He got

00:05:13.240 sidelined. His entire research lab got taken away from him, even though he had tons of money in

00:05:17.840 there, millions of dollars in there. They didn't care because he a black professor, the youngest

00:05:23.320 tenured black professor in Harvard history. He had the nerve to do studies on policing and whether

00:05:29.240 it leads to a disproportionate killing of black men and concluded it did not. And that, among other

00:05:35.300 equally provocative studies, got him turfed. Now, they blamed it on some trumped up Me Too

00:05:40.640 allegation, but they've turfed him. They can't fire him. But he's effectively been rendered feckless

00:05:47.300 at Harvard. And then it just happened to Professor Joshua Katz at Princeton. Roland's at Harvard.

00:05:53.580 This guy, Josh Katz, is at Princeton. Same thing, by the way, a trumped up Me Too charge from years

00:05:59.300 ago, 2006. He had a consensual affair with a student. It was adjudicated. He was turfed for a year

00:06:03.880 to pay for his crime. He was brought back now because he wrote an article objecting to some of the demands

00:06:09.660 being made by the black professors, like an extra paid semester of sabbatical versus the white and

00:06:14.800 the other race professors. He spoke out, said that that's ridiculous. We shouldn't do that.

00:06:20.140 Suddenly, the Me Too thing reared its head. The same case. They want to go back, go back over it again.

00:06:24.840 And he just got fired for not being cooperative in that investigation. Now you see Ilya Shapiro,

00:06:30.500 one one poorly worded tweet, which he immediately deleted and apologized for and explained the context of,

00:06:34.900 effectively subjected to a hostile work environment to where Ilya, a very smart guy, realized I'm walking

00:06:41.420 in the lion's den. This is all set up. And by the way, the words he chose, I'll tell you, as a lawyer,

00:06:46.420 a hostile work environment, I consulted with counsel. Remaining in my job was untenable.

00:06:51.960 I would suggest to you, Ilya being a talented lawyer, he's setting himself up for a lawsuit,

00:06:56.340 as he should, because your boss can fire you by saying you're fired. And then if you have grounds,

00:07:01.980 you can sue him or her. But they can also make it absolutely impossible for you to work at the

00:07:08.200 place. All these guys, I mean, Roland Fryer might have that, too, where you it's like, sure, come on

00:07:13.980 to Georgetown. It'd be great for you. You're going to have to meet with every upset student and explain

00:07:18.880 to them all why you're such a racist. And you're going to have to go through DEI training from now

00:07:23.740 to the cows come home. Enjoy. Good luck on your research and running the law center. So we will see

00:07:29.540 whether that's where this goes. But I'm glad I'm glad he's gone. I'm glad he did it because

00:07:35.440 they don't deserve him. Ilya Shapiro is too good for Georgetown. They ought to be ashamed of

00:07:40.780 themselves. Princeton, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Harvard, you ought to be ashamed of

00:07:45.060 yourself to lose guys like this. Brilliant professors who offer a little, a little ideological

00:07:52.140 diversity. And every time they try to, you cut off their hand. You tell them you find some other

00:07:58.740 reason why they have to be silenced. And Georgetown, you were the most disgusting because while you did

00:08:03.820 this to him, you touted your free speech policy, which I pointed out to Ilya on the show on Friday,

00:08:09.540 an episode you should go back and listen to. It made no sense. Well, I found a way, the dean said,

00:08:14.560 I found a way to uphold our free speech policy, which allows for diversity of viewpoint, but also

00:08:21.160 reminding everyone that you must be cautious in such speech and sensitive not to offend.

00:08:29.200 Well, in today's day and age, that's a silencer. It's a total silencer. He saw it. I saw it. The dean

00:08:35.800 understood. And Ilya was going in there like a lamb to the slaughter. So we'll continue to follow that.

00:08:42.140 And the other nonsense that happens on these college campuses, I'll tell you what, my, my eldest

00:08:46.060 is only in sixth grade, just finished sixth grade today. I'm glad we have a few years to figure out

00:08:52.180 what comes next. It's no longer clear that you want to send them to any of these universities, any of

00:08:58.480 them. So I'm glad we have a few years to figure it out. All right. And I'm glad today to be joined by two

00:09:05.140 very smart and interesting thinkers. In addition to being smart, it's almost better to be an interesting

00:09:10.400 thinker who are here by popular demand, including my own. We have got somebody different for you

00:09:16.340 today. Dasha Nekrasava. I hope I didn't screw it up, Dasha. And Anna Kachian, the hosts of the Red

00:09:24.600 Scare podcast, known to me as Dasha and Anna, are with us today. They are uncommon unifiers in the most

00:09:31.320 ironic way possible. Their cynicism and loyalty to no one has brought together people of all ideologies

00:09:37.940 as their growing audience embraces their heterodox and often unpredictable points of view.

00:09:48.100 We're excited to have them on the show and to bring you their perspective. Dasha,

00:09:51.700 Anna, thank you for being here. Thanks for having us.

00:09:55.920 You know, I can we just start now? You don't need to know Ilya Shapiro to comment on the on the opening

00:10:00.680 story. But isn't it infuriating? I mean, I know you two often describe yourselves as people who with

00:10:07.680 Russian origins originally are unoffendable. That's how I feel, too. I always say that about

00:10:12.680 myself. It's my Irish roots, just basically unoffendable. It's really, really hard.

00:10:18.420 And yet this crowd running around demanding cry rooms because of his stupid tweet

00:10:23.120 has effectively now made it impossible for this great guy to take over this law center.

00:10:28.500 And it's such a waste. Yeah, I mean, I don't I guess I don't buy that anyone really is offended.

00:10:35.700 Yeah. And I but also on the flip side, you have to remember that things that seem like

00:10:40.300 horrible travesties or errors are often blessings in disguise because they kind of lay bare the

00:10:46.900 underlying mechanisms and alienate people, make them rethink things and turn them away from

00:10:52.780 these massive institutions that are now coming under a crisis of credibility.

00:10:58.500 That's very true. That's that's actually very true. I mean, I I laugh because like there was a

00:11:04.260 young student. I'll let her remain nameless for purposes of this discussion, because I'm not sure

00:11:09.200 she wants this public. But actually, she wrote an article about it on Barry Weiss's Substack, so it's

00:11:13.860 fine. But she wrote she wrote an article about me for Brown University. And then Brown University

00:11:21.000 didn't want to publish it because they don't like me. What a shock.

00:11:23.960 Mm hmm. And they thought she should have been harder on me, what have you.

00:11:28.600 And she wrote a piece for Barry Weiss saying this is ridiculous. You know, we have to have

00:11:32.720 opposing viewpoints represented. And I think this young woman who definitely was, you know,

00:11:37.760 more of the left has had a metamorphosis of her own as she sees viewpoint censorship pop up perfectly

00:11:44.660 normal mainstream views be labeled as racist or sexist or unspeakable. So you're right, Anna. I

00:11:51.240 mean, this kind of thing writ large, which it is now, can have the opposite effect of the one they

00:11:56.100 intend. And you have to remember that, you know, haters are just fans who don't know it yet. And so

00:12:03.000 any kind of critique or pushback from the peanut gallery has to be weighed with like a grain of

00:12:10.580 salt. Often, it's a major, major compliment. But I think the trick is also to not play into those

00:12:16.640 dynamics to not accept the terms or premises of the argument, which so many of us are guilty of doing.

00:12:24.600 Like how? Give me give me an example.

00:12:25.760 Well, in in sort of agreeing to gin up the conflict, I'm not sure myself if there's an easy

00:12:32.800 way out, because sometimes you do owe people like a response or defense. But it seems that

00:12:38.540 people are playing into this kind of like toxic attention economy, which is why Ilya leaving

00:12:46.080 Georgetown is ultimately kind of an alpha. Yeah, it's just sort of opting out of, of the discourse at

00:12:54.960 large, which is an option that I don't think people realize they, they have.

00:12:59.820 Well, they had said, I think it was Roland Fryer at Harvard, could have been, it could have been

00:13:05.720 the other guy at Princeton, but one of them, both of them facing these sort of trumped up me too things.

00:13:11.100 The conditions of staying were basically, you have to pull aside the students at the beginning of

00:13:15.960 every year and confess to them all your sins. Oh, I'm sure that's going to happen. They want that.

00:13:23.120 Right. Even, even that we know doesn't work because the minute that you start issuing

00:13:27.640 confessions or apologia, they smell blood. Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, sometimes

00:13:35.020 it's a condition of you maintaining your employment and you realize there's no other way forward. I mean,

00:13:41.500 we've seen that happen many times. I'm thinking, oh, and it didn't work, but I'm thinking of Chris

00:13:46.060 Harrison of the bachelor. Remember his, it was the saddest apology of any apology I've ever seen

00:13:53.200 because it was so clearly just rehearsed and repeated by like a hostage. And then they fired

00:14:00.180 him anyway, that ABC fired him anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and you have to know, like in the case of,

00:14:08.500 um, Ilya Shapiro, I don't know much about the specifics, but, um, he has the privilege,

00:14:13.960 the option to opt out, um, which is a good thing because it sets a powerful example.

00:14:19.920 That's true. But most people don't know exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. Well,

00:14:25.620 it's funny. It's like, I feel like my own, my own dustup with NBC happened so early in this whole curve.

00:14:32.060 It was just, everything was so much less clear than, you know, it was like less clear what was

00:14:36.640 happening in our society, less clear how these things were being used. Um, and one of the first,

00:14:42.200 on our very first episode, we had somebody, I know you guys both admire Glenn Greenwald on the program.

00:14:47.240 I love him too. And, um, he's also an unpredictable thinker. And, um, he asked me, are you, are you sorry?

00:14:55.120 Would you take back your apology now? You know, a couple of years later. And I said no, because

00:15:00.620 the messaging had gone out from so many corners that were not my fans that I had said this terrible

00:15:06.480 thing that basically I wanted blackface to be revived. You know, I was like a pusher of it

00:15:12.540 as opposed to just saying, Hey, when did we go from A to B? Cause this used to be done

00:15:16.480 without problem. And now we have such a recoiling to it. And, um, and I, so I said, no, I wouldn't

00:15:22.920 take it back, but I sure would handle it differently. You know what I mean? Today's day and age, I definitely

00:15:26.940 would have handled it much differently. Like the first thing I would have done was gone out there and showed

00:15:30.080 the 50,000 shows on NBC where people were actually wearing blackface within the past few years

00:15:35.440 of them claiming to be, um, offended. And that's kind of what Ilya did in his, um, piece in the

00:15:41.840 wall street journal, which he announced, announced this today. He goes through not for nothing. Um,

00:15:46.960 just a couple of examples of the professors at Georgetown who have received no trouble.

00:15:51.140 They're fine. Whose speech was defended. Professor, uh, Carol Christine fair school of foreign service

00:15:56.420 back in the Kavanaugh hearings. Look at this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapists

00:16:01.980 irrigated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last

00:16:07.540 gasp bonus. We castrate their corpses and feed them to the swine. Yes. George said this was protected

00:16:14.500 in speech. No problem. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, the talk about cred, the credibility problem in

00:16:22.820 academia. Right. I mean, I went to a women's college, uh, where I was, you know, sort of indoctrinated with

00:16:31.420 kind of extreme feminist rhetoric. Um, and now that school is now like defunct and doesn't exist anymore.

00:16:38.420 I would like to think that's where these are going, but I, you know, the endowments are so big, but I do kind of

00:16:45.920 think that, you know, Victor Davis Hanson, I love him. He's a great commentator. You guys should consider

00:16:50.600 talking to him. He's an independent. Um, he publishes in more conservative publications, but he really is an

00:16:56.740 independent thinker. And he had a piece out, um, today, which I want to talk to you about because, well, you'll see

00:17:01.900 why, but the title of it is the Sovietization of American life. I think you'll like it and you'll

00:17:07.620 understand what he's saying, but he points out how now these universities and these institutions do

00:17:14.140 this at their own peril, because what does it mean now in today's day and age to get a degree from

00:17:18.600 Harvard? Does it mean you're brilliant or does it mean you walked the perfect line on the necessary

00:17:25.380 woke boxes, you know, like you played that game just right. Yeah. Or your parents went to Harvard.

00:17:32.900 Yeah. Or your parents went to Harvard. He said that, or you're so, that was actually his second

00:17:37.280 point. I'll, I'll, I'll read it to you cause you'll, you'll appreciate this. Um, he says,

00:17:43.880 stand by, well, I don't know where it went, but it was perfect. You got to find it. It's

00:17:48.640 Victor Davis Hanson, that piece, uh, today in American greatness.

00:17:51.980 I love that this is also a show, um, where you, uh, struggle to find quotes on air when we all

00:17:58.640 can encounter that problem. So much information. I try to cram in before you come on, but, uh,

00:18:05.560 sometimes the little hamster stops running on the wheel when it's actually go time. Um, so now I,

00:18:11.620 I think, yeah, go ahead, Dasha. We were actually just talking sort of about the Sovietization of the

00:18:18.160 way in which America is kind of mirroring the late Soviet period when things were starting to

00:18:24.300 sort of fall apart and people were like, um, at least on the surface, pretending to participate

00:18:30.620 in, you know, the ideology of, of socialism, but no one actually really, really believed it.

00:18:37.000 Wow. I wonder if Victor Davis Hanson is a listener to Red's care. It's, you never know.

00:18:43.620 Um, yeah. So let's talk about that because this is how he puts it. Uh, he begins the piece as

00:18:49.300 follows. One day historians will look back at the period beginning with the COVID lockdowns,

00:18:54.320 uh, of spring of 2020 through the midterm elections of 2022 to understand how America for over two

00:18:59.780 years lost its collective mind and turned into something unrecognizable and antithetical to its

00:19:05.720 founding principles. Sovietization, he says, is perhaps the best diagnosis of the pathology.

00:19:11.560 It refers to the subordination of policy expression, popular culture, and even thought

00:19:17.300 to ideological mandates. Ultimately, such regimentation destroys a state since dogma wars

00:19:25.280 with wars with and defeats meritocracy, creativity, and freedom. The subordination of policy expression,

00:19:33.940 pop culture, and even thought to ideological mandates, man, that's so true. That's exactly what

00:19:39.940 we're going through now. Yeah. And that's exactly right. But I would also point out that ideological

00:19:44.480 mandates exist in some shape or form in all societies and in all cultures. The problem occurs

00:19:51.500 when the general underwriting ideologies are, are decoupled from the sentiments of most people

00:19:58.720 to the point that they start to feel, um, gaslit or manipulated.

00:20:03.620 Like, give me an example of that. Like the idea, the kind of extremely progressive, like racecraft

00:20:11.600 and gendercraft ideology circulating in elite spheres right now, which I think are confusing

00:20:18.160 and alienating, alienating to the vast majority of people. Right. But people feel as if they're meant

00:20:24.780 to say, if you don't think, for example, that children should be taking purity blockers, that you're

00:20:28.960 somehow like condemning trans people at large to like a life of indignity and death or something.

00:20:34.940 Yeah. There's like plenty of examples. The idea that kind of white supremacy is our greatest sin

00:20:40.700 as a nation. Um, I think that these kinds of ideas don't jive with the sentiments of, you know,

00:20:47.420 like 80% of the American populace across kind of demographic lines.

00:20:54.320 Defunding the, defunding the wholeheartedly. Yeah, exactly. That's why on the show, I'm always

00:21:00.400 just make, trying to make a distinction between the left and the woke, because it's not the same

00:21:05.920 group. And I've talked to crystal ball about this many times. And she, she, she wants me to stop

00:21:09.660 saying even like extreme left because she, like you is a Bernie gal, you know, like, she's like, I,

00:21:15.560 I guess you could call me extreme left, but I, she's not woke and she's sensible. She just has an

00:21:21.140 attachment to certain economic policies that she think will help the working class and others in

00:21:24.980 a way that they haven't so far, but she's, she's, she doesn't push this nonsense and she sees what a

00:21:30.880 lie it is. I think, yeah. And the, the, um, chief aim there is really to create a sense of moral fatigue

00:21:40.140 and people to make them give up, to make them lose energy. And in that way, the, the United States

00:21:48.400 in the present day does, uh, resemble a great deal, the USSR on the eve of collapse. I'm very

00:21:55.160 fond of that line that's attributed to Mark Twain, that, that history doesn't repeat itself, but it

00:21:59.520 rhymes. Yeah. Like the, the DEI committees and stuff are very reminiscent of like Soviet era culture

00:22:09.120 commissars that were like, you know, approving things that fell in line with the dominant ideology,

00:22:15.040 except in America right now, it's the sort of, yeah, woke liberalism, which is why me too gets

00:22:20.960 weaponized the way that it does. Yeah. I'm dying to talk to you about that and about some of the

00:22:25.660 writings we've seen in the wake of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard verdict last week. Uh, before we get

00:22:31.980 to that though, I definitely want to just, can you guys just explain your backgrounds for people who

00:22:36.780 are not familiar with Red Scare or Dasha, in your case, Succession, which is where I very,

00:22:42.660 I saw you for the very first time, um, which you play an amazing role in that very popular show,

00:22:47.620 but just give us a bit of your background, uh, and, and why it's called Red Scare.

00:22:53.080 Uh, uh, I was born in, in Minsk, Belarus. Um, and I moved when I was three in the early nineties to,

00:23:02.960 uh, Las Vegas where I grew up. Um, yes, big change. Yeah. Go ahead, Anna.

00:23:11.500 And I was born in Moscow, uh, and I came to the United States, uh, when I was five years old and

00:23:19.960 settled in New Jersey with my family. Also big. So you have parents who were born and raised,

00:23:27.860 uh, over in what used to be the USSR. And, and in my experience, people of that generation,

00:23:34.840 uh, with those roots really object to what's happening right now in our society because they've

00:23:40.780 lived it and they, they can see where it's going. So, I mean, how are you, are you imparting,

00:23:47.620 have they imparted that knowledge to you or do you have any independent memories of what things were

00:23:51.880 like when you were really little? Um, my parents are fairly young. My parents are sort of Gen X.

00:23:59.840 So they grew up, like they were what was called the thaw generation. Um, cause they were born,

00:24:06.360 my mom was born in 70. Right. So, um, so they didn't really, they, they're not as, uh, right wing

00:24:13.520 as a lot of like older people from, uh, the post-Soviet States are. Um, but definitely, I mean,

00:24:19.660 when COVID COVID, I think is a good marker of time. Cause I remember, yeah. Like not being able to buy

00:24:24.940 flour at the grocery store and, um, yeah, really having this feeling of like, wow,

00:24:31.640 my parents sort of fled this post-Soviet regime for me to just kind of like end up back in this

00:24:38.360 situation again. Right. Right. Yeah. I think lockdowns were eerily similar. Yeah. Go ahead,

00:24:44.640 Anna. No, I think if you look at the situation, it is very parallel. My parents are a little bit

00:24:49.660 older than dashes. They're boomers. I think they came to the United States, um, hoping to reach some

00:24:57.580 sort of freedom and prosperity that wasn't available in the Soviet union. And I think that

00:25:02.680 they were sorely disappointed. Uh, and this was a great tragedy. Um, I do, for example, count my

00:25:10.160 father as a death of despair. He died when he was 53 in the United States, but I think he very much

00:25:15.860 belongs to the Soviet lost generation of people roughly his age who were outlived by their parents

00:25:23.240 from the war generation. So, you know, three of my grandparents lived into their nineties. And

00:25:28.920 meanwhile, my father and two of my uncles are gone. Hmm. That's awful. Um, and we have that here and we

00:25:38.160 have that there as well. And the deaths of despair in America's that's, that's a shame of ours that we

00:25:43.620 continue to not address. Um, so how did the two of you connect? Because you've formed this podcast

00:25:50.480 Red Scare, which becomes very, very popular and very interesting corners. I mean, it wasn't just,

00:25:55.260 was it just your Soviet background or how did you find each other? On Twitter? Yeah. We were friends

00:26:02.360 on Twitter. We had some mutual friends in New York. I used to live in LA when I moved to New York in 2018,

00:26:08.000 we started the podcast. Yeah. Partly because we had this, a similar, um, Russian American identity,

00:26:16.300 but also we had been talking about similar things as they pertain to like burgeoning me to movement

00:26:22.600 and like feminism on, on Twitter. I wonder, did you realize at that point that your sensibilities

00:26:29.700 were more heterodox? I know that word gets overused. And did you connect it to your family heritage?

00:26:35.760 I have never seen, um, my sensibility as heterodox. I see it as, you know, very boilerplate and common

00:26:44.060 sense. Um, but yeah, it was certainly like a culture shock coming here and, um, being confronted

00:26:50.720 with like a different value system or like ideological paradigm. I've always said, um, you know, not that I

00:26:58.420 want to do my greatest hits, but maybe I will that, um, you know, Russians are optimists masquerading as

00:27:04.280 cynics and Americans are cynics, uh, masquerading as optimists. And that's not to deny that there's

00:27:10.040 obviously a market streak of like cynicism and melancholy running through the Russian sensibility.

00:27:17.020 But I think because they acknowledge it and own it, they can more openly envision or imagine certain

00:27:26.320 optimistic potentials where, whereas in America, I think the kind of confrontation with reality is

00:27:32.580 habitually ignored. Hmm. Well, it certainly seems to be the news of the day. I mean, that's how it feels

00:27:39.340 like reality staring us in the face, but we refuse to acknowledge it. We, we, we keep getting forced

00:27:44.580 upon us, this alternate reality that you know is not true. And yet so many of our institutions have

00:27:51.640 been captured by people saying the same thing. You start to wonder whether you're the crazy one and,

00:27:56.420 you know, am I the crazy one? Um, all right. So I mentioned that Dasha's on succession. What I didn't tell

00:28:01.720 you is that her, I don't know if it was your first big on cam moment, but just the very first thing

00:28:06.600 that a lot of people saw of you. And it was at a Bernie Sanders rally or event at which she happened

00:28:14.800 to get cornered by a correspondent. I'm going to use that term generously, um, of info wars. And they had

00:28:23.100 an exchange that went totally viral. Dasha became known as, um, sailor socialist or something about

00:28:30.240 like your sailor outfit, which is also worthy of discussion, but that's just a tease to keep them

00:28:35.600 tuned over this quick commercial break. You will see Dasha and her little sailor outfit and, uh,

00:28:40.500 see how she handled herself when confronted by this woman. All right, don't go away. More with Dasha

00:28:46.640 Nana right after this. All right. So there you are minding your own business, Dasha at a Bernie event.

00:28:56.700 And this is before, uh, it wasn't not a Bernie event. I was not at a Bernie event. No, I was at

00:29:02.000 South by Southwest. Um, okay. Promoting that I co-wrote and starred in called Wobble Palace.

00:29:08.700 Why was she bothering you about Bernie then? Like I thought like her whole premise was I'm going to

00:29:12.920 embarrass a Bernie supporter. He was doing a, he was doing a rally at South by Southwest,

00:29:17.740 but I couldn't go to it cause I had to go to the Getty images, like portrait studio to get my photo

00:29:23.000 taken, which is why I was, um, wearing that like anime sailor top. Um, because the film Wobble Palace

00:29:32.720 takes place on the eve of the 2016 election. I thought, um, if I dress like an anime character,

00:29:39.940 it would sort of appeal to maybe like a 4chan demographic that might like the movie was my

00:29:46.920 thinking. That's brilliant and provocative and fun. So she singled you out and she decided to,

00:29:54.100 to get into, um, Bernie and his ideas. And here's how that went. Uh, soundbite one.

00:30:01.940 Hi, are you a fan of Bernie Sanders? Yeah, I am. What do you like about him?

00:30:06.200 Um, that he's a socialist. Why is socialism good? Are you like, uh, um, I don't really want to do

00:30:15.680 this. What is this for? Um, we're asking people why they like Bernie Sanders? For info wars? Yes,

00:30:23.280 we are info wars. Um, I think he has a lot of integrity. I like his value system. I like what

00:30:27.800 he stands for. Exactly what values. Um, eating the rich. Eating the rich. Well, are you aware that

00:30:34.120 Bernie Sanders lives in $3 million homes? Uh, no, I was not aware of that. I just want people to

00:30:39.620 have health care, honey. I don't want, like, well. Same thing Hugo Chavez. Oh my God. When he was

00:30:46.940 taking power and basketball. People have, like, worms in your brain, honestly. I mean, you're the one

00:30:51.800 who can't answer the question. What question? The question is why you support socialism. You can

00:30:56.640 have, you can have health care without socialism. I want people to have free health care. Why free?

00:31:01.120 Why would the government pay for it? Because I think everyone has a right to have health

00:31:05.380 care. Okay. So what happened after that clip, Dasha? Um, we went our separate ways. Uh, we

00:31:17.400 were both, I, we were both very scared. I was definitely like very afraid, um, and could

00:31:23.160 sense that Ashton was as well. And then, yeah. And then I guess info wars hosted it. Um, and

00:31:29.920 then it, someone tweeted it and it started to circulate online and then it was on John

00:31:35.180 Oliver or something. Um, so yeah, it went quite, it went quite viral.

00:31:40.400 I feel like what was so compelling about it was just your, your manner, your affect. There's

00:31:45.720 something different about you in a really compelling way. Like you don't know what you're going to

00:31:51.920 say next. And yet you really do project. I don't know if this is real, extremely comfortable

00:31:57.580 in your own skin, even though you say I felt nervous and you said, I don't want to do this.

00:32:02.060 You, to me, project very comfortable in your own skin.

00:32:05.200 Thank you. Yeah. I, um, I, part of me definitely didn't want to do it, but then part of me,

00:32:10.560 you know, being familiar with info wars did, uh, want to seize on the, on the opportunity.

00:32:17.180 Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

00:32:18.840 I just want people to have healthcare, honey. That went totally viral. Everybody was like,

00:32:23.160 who is this magnificent creature in the sailor outfit who speaks this way? Even people who

00:32:28.420 disagreed with your points were fascinated by you. And that's what led to a viral moment,

00:32:33.640 but this was not the beginning of your Hollywood career. This was just in the midst of it.

00:32:38.080 That this, yeah, sort of. Yeah. I was like an indie actress at the, at the time.

00:32:42.900 Um, so now you two, once you came together and formed red scare would go on, as I understand it

00:32:49.020 to form kind of a friendship, at least a professional relationship, but definitely kind of

00:32:54.640 seemed like more of a friendship with Alex Jones, who's, you know, the creator and founder of info

00:32:59.100 wars. Yeah, we went to Austin to interview Alex Jones. Uh, and how did that go? And how did you

00:33:08.820 wind up spending time with him? Well, when we started the podcast, um, my boyfriend had a

00:33:16.320 premonition that it would end up with us shooting skeet with Alex Jones and he was a hundred percent

00:33:22.220 correct. It happened very organically. Yeah. Um, well, Alex Lee Moyer made a documentary called Alex's

00:33:34.360 War. Um, and his boyfriend did the score for, he also did the score from, for my film. Um,

00:33:41.680 and she sort of brokered, brokered the interview and we took, took her up on the, on the opportunity

00:33:48.400 to talk to him. Um, of course, cause yeah. Now, what were your, what were your impressions of him?

00:33:56.340 He's a very friendly, charismatic, affable guy. I'm sure there's a part of him that's very troubled

00:34:05.260 and tortured, especially with the colossal amount of fame that he has, which would make anybody go

00:34:10.380 crazy. Um, but I think that he's a fundamentally well-meaning guy and primarily important as an

00:34:19.560 artist who works in the mold of like a sad clown rather than like, as like a political pundit.

00:34:25.660 Hmm. What's fascinating. Yeah. He, on, you know, he's wrong about a lot of things, but he has a lot

00:34:32.280 of like clarity. Well, I'll tell you something funny about Alex Jones. Um, so I went to interview

00:34:38.400 him as you may know, and, um, he said all sorts of crazy things. Like they sounded crazy. We didn't

00:34:46.600 air most of them. It wasn't really about, you know, his theories on frogs and so on, but I did have my

00:34:51.740 team go back and check and like, check it all out. And NBC, they have like lots of fact checkers.

00:34:56.700 And can I tell you like 98% of the stuff checked out? It was like, it was kind of crazy. You know,

00:35:02.160 like the number of things he actually is right about was pretty stunning to me. But of course,

00:35:08.300 all of that sort of falls away, um, because of what he did on the new town thing and not just new

00:35:15.240 town, but there have been, there've been a few sort of targets of his that have been way,

00:35:18.560 way off. And so it's changed the way a lot of people look at him and certainly info wars.

00:35:25.520 Yeah. And you have to remember that, um, he much like Glenn Greenwald began his career

00:35:30.360 as a critic of conservatism from the kind of liberal side. He very much has a kind of underlying

00:35:40.860 social justice ethos, like all Aquarius's. And like Glenn, yeah, I think they both love, uh,

00:35:48.100 truth as like an ideal to aspire towards, even if they, you know, Alex Jones uses, um,

00:35:55.700 hyperbole and conspiracy to sort of get at larger spiritual truths. Yeah.

00:36:00.540 Like I will give you that on the way he presents information on things like, you know, the,

00:36:06.000 there's like a, a goat with a human face. I'm trying to remember some of the,

00:36:09.440 some of the things that we looked into. Um, but there's just no getting around,

00:36:14.400 you know, the, the lies that he pushed on Newtown and how pernicious they were and how,

00:36:19.500 how much pain they heaped on these families. You know, that was one of the reasons why I wanted to

00:36:24.440 interview him. One of the reasons why our interview was very contentious and, you know,

00:36:29.160 it's still something that a lot of the Newtown families, they will never forgive Alex Jones for

00:36:33.020 trying to say that they, that their children were not shot in the heads while they went to first

00:36:37.800 grade on, uh, December 14th, 2012. And he's, you know, it went out, when I went down there

00:36:43.840 going to interview him, I, I thought he was going to disavow it and he didn't, he did not disavow it.

00:36:49.960 He stuck by it and continued even that interview to suggest that the parents may have faked it.

00:36:55.280 Well, when did you interview him?

00:36:57.280 It was in 2018.

00:36:59.280 Okay. Yeah. Well, when we interviewed him, he seemed very contrite and remorseful,

00:37:03.380 but I completely understand people who maybe don't buy what he's selling and feel like he's not

00:37:09.100 being genuine or authentic. And, you know, it's not up to us to tell them that their feelings aren't

00:37:15.200 valid, but I, I do believe for my part that, um, he does feel apologetic over that incident.

00:37:23.500 Well, and I have absolutely no problem with you going and talking to him. You know, that,

00:37:26.700 that was one of the crazy things when I interviewed him was there was all this blowback for just talking

00:37:29.720 to him. And we did a very hard hitting interview. Like nobody has done with Alex Jones. I put that

00:37:35.500 interview up against anything that's been done with him, but there was tons of blowback just for

00:37:40.620 quote platforming him, right. Just for platforming him. Right. Exactly. Um, that's crazy too. Like

00:37:46.640 that's, we really got no place where I, as I've said many times, like we don't get to interview

00:37:50.380 only like the perfect people, right. The people who like are totally the Dolly Partons, the queen of

00:37:56.020 England's, you know, like people who have no blemish on their record whatsoever. And he's a,

00:38:00.580 you know, a massively influential thinker. So he's, you know, worth interrogating and worth talking

00:38:07.440 to and worth. Yeah. Well, he certainly was back then. I mean, when I talked to him, the white house

00:38:13.140 was retweeting info wars, um, press releases and, and, you know, pieces. So it was, it was

00:38:19.580 extraordinary though. He's not as influential today. Um, I think rightfully some attention

00:38:26.160 has been called to the hurt he's caused as well. In any event, that's Alex Jones. Let's talk about,

00:38:30.720 um, what you guys think is sort of the big story right now. Cause my understanding is

00:38:35.340 you are focused more on the class struggle in America at the moment than you are on the race

00:38:41.820 struggle, the gender struggle, the LGBTQ struggle that is in all the news right now because of pride month.

00:38:48.300 Um, is that correct? First of all, am I, am I right?

00:38:54.500 Um, uh, I don't know that I would frame it exactly that way as like class reductionist.

00:39:01.340 Yeah. They would be called, I think I'm, I'm focused on, um, reality rather than utopianism.

00:39:10.480 So where do you think we're going on?

00:39:12.100 Yeah. It's more being like cultural criticism. I guess you see that you sound, can you repeat

00:39:18.360 that? It's more cultural criticism than like political analysis. Now I think, um, for me,

00:39:25.980 at least it's like, uh, uh, an aesthetic critique and aesthetic project.

00:39:30.700 Well, how do you guys think we got this way? You know, in the way Victor Davis Hanson says,

00:39:34.200 we lost our ever loving minds from the beginning of COVID forward. And we're sort of, you know,

00:39:39.760 like the astronaut who gets disconnected from the rocket ship, sort of being pulled out into this

00:39:45.100 black hole and reality is the ship. Then we seem to be farther and farther away from it as a country

00:39:50.460 in the way we talk about things and see things. What, what are those divides? What's pulling us apart?

00:39:55.460 What, what are we doing that we shouldn't be? Um, I don't, I don't know that, that COVID is really

00:40:02.960 the watershed moment where we lost our way. I think COVID much like Trump laid bare certain processes

00:40:10.940 that were already in place. Um, there's a great article that reminds me of the one that you just

00:40:17.100 mentioned by, um, RS Racinos in Unheard magazine about, um, the decline of American empire in the age of

00:40:24.800 COVID and BLM. And he makes this comparison between, um, collapse era USSR and present day USA and

00:40:34.660 talks about how, um, there are certain similarities, for example, the depths of despair, the radically

00:40:41.380 lowered health outcomes and life expectancies, um, the, the rule, the symbolic rule by like a

00:40:49.560 gerontocracy, um, the capture of the state and academic institutions by, uh, uh, he calls them

00:40:58.940 a rapacious oligarchy. So I think those things were, were already in place at least since, you know, the

00:41:06.240 seventies.

00:41:10.220 Sorry, Dasha, were you going to add to that?

00:41:12.500 Yeah. Well, yeah. And COVID merely like Excel accelerated those processes.

00:41:16.520 Mm-hmm. So what do you, I mean, what is the solution to all of that in your view? I mean,

00:41:21.280 is it Bernie Sanders type Democrat socialism or what, or is it not a political solution? Is it,

00:41:26.860 as you point out, some sort of cultural rebuke?

00:41:31.240 Well, well, I, yeah. So I was a registered independent, um, prior to the first Bernie Sanders

00:41:37.660 campaign where I, I, I registered as a Democrat to vote in the primaries. Um, and then I've talked

00:41:44.400 about this on the podcast before, but, um, the way that like the Bernie campaign was just sort of

00:41:50.100 funneled into the DNC, which is what I have a problem with, um, made me feel very disillusioned

00:41:58.040 with, with left-wing politics as well. It's like, you know, you could call it purity policing,

00:42:03.560 right? Like being told constantly that I was like inadequate as a leftist or some kind of like

00:42:08.900 crypto fascist or something. Um, I think certainly has alienated me from any sort of like leftist

00:42:17.340 democratic socialist political project. I don't think, um, I don't see that anymore as a, as a

00:42:23.500 successful or viable political strategy. And I think also the left wing, um, habitually sort of

00:42:30.020 disavows its real role in American politics, um, which is not to act as a critic of, um, establishment

00:42:39.660 politics or the binary party system, but basically, um, to, to drum up, uh, votes for the democratic

00:42:48.860 party by pretending to launch a legitimate critique against them. And I think that that's where a lot

00:42:56.060 of people felt disillusioned and betrayed by somebody like Bernie felt disillusioned by, by Bernie

00:43:03.440 because why? Well, because it turned, I mean, he, when he came in, right, he spoke, he was very plain

00:43:10.660 spoken. He spoke in this very no frills way. He focused on class rather than all these kinds of

00:43:16.300 identitarian struggles and movements. And as time wore on, um, he began to what people perceived as

00:43:24.640 like capitulate to the demands, the identitarian demands of what you called the woke left. I'm not

00:43:31.420 sure that there's a useful distinction to be made between the woke left and the, the, the not woke

00:43:36.600 left. Yeah. Interesting. I, you know, I, I see what you're saying, but I've always made a distinction

00:43:43.100 in, in my mind, hard distinction between AOC and Bernie, right? Because if you look at their economic

00:43:48.760 policies, a lot of them might overlap, but he just never sounded like her on the woke ism, she's all

00:43:55.200 about identity politics. And that really wasn't his jam, but she, she just, now I look at her, I'm like,

00:44:01.480 you're on an Island by yourself with your so-called squad mates and have absolutely no support.

00:44:06.640 Yeah. But Bernie, you know, empowered the squad. It was, you know, the, the Bernie movement, I think

00:44:15.460 that was parlayed into this, uh, yeah, new enthusiasm, enthusiasm for this like conflated

00:44:21.980 category of identitarian politics with like so-called leftism. So who does that leave you? If you know,

00:44:28.120 if you can't vote for Bernie now, who's, who does that leave you? I'm a non-voter. Yeah,

00:44:33.420 that's a great question. I mean, now you see like a resurgence of like the populist, right? You see

00:44:40.060 guys like, um, JD Vance and Blake Masters making, um, bids for political office and their platform

00:44:48.460 sounds very reassuring to a lot of people, but I'm unconvinced that anyone can really make a

00:44:55.220 difference in, in a system where the kind of left liberal ideology is the dominant one,

00:45:02.100 because we all have to agree to play by those terms. That's depressing. Well, yeah.

00:45:10.740 Yeah. And I often wish that I was, um, you know, a political theorist and not merely a podcaster,

00:45:18.480 because I think all of us struggle to come up with a solution. Right. Well, maybe it's the,

00:45:26.560 it's the one we began the hour with, right? Disillusionment from those who tried to believe,

00:45:31.380 but got burned bit by bit by bit, who then, those are the people who become revolutionaries.

00:45:37.280 And if there are not enough of them, maybe there's some way of recapturing institutions. And

00:45:42.380 I mean, certainly there's a way of recapturing government. That's for sure. Though too often,

00:45:48.200 it's been in with somebody who's not going to do that much to change it or in with somebody who's

00:45:52.220 going to do a lot to change it, but it's further going to divide the nation. You know, it's just,

00:45:56.300 I don't even know what the quote savior looks like anymore.

00:45:59.900 Hmm. I mean, I almost have nostalgia for the Trump era as hysterical as it was because it gave,

00:46:06.780 you know, the woke left or whatever you want to call it, like a very clear target of their ire.

00:46:12.880 You know, they can kind of, they had their women's marches. They have their like orange man is bad

00:46:17.120 rhetoric. And I think in the Biden administration, it's been more like diffused and incoherent.

00:46:23.920 Yeah. Like to centralize. Yeah.

00:46:26.200 It's a good point that now in the same way that, uh, you know, our guys went off to Afghanistan and

00:46:31.480 they fought the terrorists over there so that they didn't come attack us at home. It's like

00:46:34.520 Trump was there dealing with these lunatics from the white house and they weren't focused on

00:46:38.640 regular people. They weren't trying to destroy the lives of, you know, McDonald's workers back then.

00:46:43.660 Uh, and now they are. That's now that's where all their ire is.

00:46:47.320 Well, that's also very Soviet, the snitching, like when the phenomenon of people filming people

00:46:52.580 having like politically incorrect, nervous breakdowns on their phones and stuff is very

00:46:57.460 reminiscent of like Soviet snitching on your neighbors. Yeah. And you see these like public

00:47:03.040 morose of incident incidences where, um, children are like deputized to snitch on their parents or

00:47:10.920 teachers or whoever. Um, but you mentioned the question of class and to me, the real political

00:47:16.820 binary is the one between the elites and the masses, which is very obvious and trite to say,

00:47:24.520 but I think a big problem that we do have is elite capture of all institutions that, that are,

00:47:33.160 you know, globally spanning. All right. I got to pause you there,

00:47:36.820 but much, much more of the ladies of Red Scare right after this.

00:47:40.920 Guys, I have to ask you, is it true to your knowledge that the creator of the White Lotus,

00:47:50.880 HBO's, the White Lotus based those two teenagers who were the stars of it on YouTube?

00:47:58.740 Um, yeah, it's, uh, 100% verifiably confirmed as true. We have the receipts. We got a care package

00:48:05.840 out of it. Amazing. Getting royalties right now for those who haven't seen the White Lotus, which is

00:48:10.880 an amazing, amazing, uh, show except for it's very disturbing ending, uh, which Dasha and Anna have

00:48:17.880 absolutely nothing to do with. Um, here is a clip of these two teenagers. One of them is like the

00:48:22.540 daughter of the main star on the trip. And the other one is her friend. And, uh, here's just a

00:48:27.740 little bit. So, you know, we're talking about, where'd you meet him? Three friends.

00:48:32.900 Not Raya.

00:48:34.920 Raya? No.

00:48:37.620 How long is the engagement?

00:48:39.740 We actually just met last September.

00:48:42.500 Oh, wow. That was really fast. Yeah. Like, how'd you know he was the one?

00:48:47.560 Oh, I don't know. Um,

00:48:49.620 Shane, the chemistry was there and his deck's not small. Yeah. I don't know. Shane really wanted to

00:48:57.180 get married and he's very decisive and pretty convincing. So it just felt right.

00:49:06.840 So do you see any similarities there? Um, totally us fellow teens. Yeah.

00:49:12.920 I can't really relate to those girls. Um, yeah. Mike White, who is the creator of White Lettuce.

00:49:19.780 They're not, they're not based on us really explicitly, but he is a big fan of the show.

00:49:25.840 And so I think.

00:49:26.340 Inspired. Inspired.

00:49:27.640 Yeah. He, the, he implemented sort of the post Red Scare voice.

00:49:31.400 Yeah. I think he incorporated our vernacular and our bibliography, just like our sources,

00:49:37.820 which is kind of surreal to watch.

00:49:40.540 Yeah. You know what I, to me, it's also that you don't suffer from something I suffer from,

00:49:47.280 uh, which is you feel no need to fill the space. You're happy just to like, let the thoughts sit.

00:49:54.660 Yeah. Well, we don't edit our show. So that's, that's partly how we've developed a rapport,

00:50:01.760 uh, to minimize the amount of editing that we have to do.

00:50:05.320 Mm-hmm. But there's a searching, there's a searching nature to the way you speak to each

00:50:10.960 other and in general, and that's actually captured in these two girls too. They're very good

00:50:14.960 interrogators, but they're kind of sneaky about it. You don't see it come. It doesn't hit you over

00:50:19.020 the head until it does. Yeah. They're very well written.

00:50:22.880 So this is near and dear to your heart. I imagine Dasha is somebody who's actually in Hollywood.

00:50:28.680 And I guess I should ask you up front, how are you in Hollywood and you're not woke and you're,

00:50:33.780 and you say all these provocative things. How, how have you not been kicked out yet?

00:50:36.980 Um, I don't know. I'm waiting for them to kick me out any day. Um, and it's, I mean,

00:50:44.040 it's hard to say really what professional opportunities I've, you know, I've been precluded

00:50:50.520 from because of my political beliefs, but at the end of the day, it's, you know, it's too late for me

00:50:57.180 to like course correct now and pretend to be woke. Um, and the podcast has probably also afforded me

00:51:05.400 other opportunities that I wouldn't have had, had otherwise. Well, and you're doing the smart

00:51:09.660 thing. You're becoming a creator of content, not just in the podcast, but making your own films now.

00:51:14.940 And that's, that's really the way forward, right? Where you maintain control because you can go

00:51:18.420 directly to the audience and the audience is there. Well, I think, yeah, like academia,

00:51:23.800 Hollywood is another institution, um, that is sort of bolstered by, uh, this paradoxical kind of like

00:51:34.500 unreality. I mean, like the Oscars this year, like, I don't really know anyone who saw any of those

00:51:39.660 movies even. Hmm. Exactly. Right. But I think like the, the silver lining of this, um, crisis of faith

00:51:48.800 and institutions that we're experiencing is that there's a real opportunity for independent creators

00:51:54.460 to come to the fore and cultivate their own large and diverse and organic audiences.

00:52:00.520 Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, we're seeing that more and more and it's nice to see

00:52:04.840 that the audience is there. And then you see these institutions try to crack down on it.

00:52:09.560 They try to crack down on Substack or Patreon or, um, whatever podcast and, you know, Joe Rogan over

00:52:14.940 at Spotify, you could go down the list. Even now there's talk about how, well, you know, at Substack,

00:52:19.960 nobody edits you. You're sort of the mainstream elitist journalist. Well, no one, no one's there to edit.

00:52:24.960 Oh, sure. Cause that's worked out so well at places like the New York times,

00:52:28.300 which claimed something like 987,000 children had been killed in America from COVID. Um, hello.

00:52:36.280 No. Yeah. Yeah. The COVID reporter, the COVID reporter printed that in one of her reports

00:52:42.140 as if the editor is some magic button without which the rest of us are untrustworthy.

00:52:46.300 Yeah. And I think the, the silent majority does deal the crisis of, of legitimacy in media,

00:52:55.760 academia, Hollywood, all of these institutions.

00:52:58.880 Yeah. And obviously, I mean, the rise of fact checkers and experts is an attempt by the institutions

00:53:06.000 to issue a corrective to the fact that, um, they are getting more and more competition

00:53:12.420 from extra institutional sources. And I mean, you tell me how this, if, if it all relates to,

00:53:19.820 you know, the old Soviet union, um, while they're doing the fact checks and the, the attempts at

00:53:26.200 speech control, they're manipulating us like Facebook and Instagram, you know, and the whistleblower

00:53:33.000 that came out. And then the, what we've learned about how they're really just amassing data on us

00:53:37.820 to try to further manipulate us to, to really hurt our mental health without one care for that.

00:53:46.420 And I think like the chief distinction, we mentioned the similarities between the USSR and the USA.

00:53:51.840 The chief distinction is that, um, in the USSR, at least this was nominally enforced from a top-down

00:53:58.600 authority in the United States, it's much more decentralized. So nobody has ever really held

00:54:04.220 accountable for spreading misinformation or for smearing others or abusing facts.

00:54:13.040 And it's done through, I think like, um, what looks like a coordinated attempt, but not,

00:54:18.880 but need not be between like the state and various corporate entities.

00:54:23.760 Yeah. You look, just look at the shit storm that's come the way of Elon Musk,

00:54:27.600 since he said he wanted to buy Twitter, you know, it's like the pile on this guy,

00:54:32.060 the demonization of him, the New York times basically called him a white supremacist because

00:54:36.740 when he was seven, he wasn't marching in South Africa. He's crazy.

00:54:41.420 Well, he just offends their, yeah, their liberal sensibilities, but, um, with social media, I mean,

00:54:47.740 like Anna said, it's about, it's designed to demoralize you to sort of overwhelm you with things

00:54:52.700 that, um, trigger and upset you so that you become invested in using and ultimately, yeah,

00:54:59.980 your mental health deteriorates. And I think we've really seen that post COVID, um, happen in the

00:55:07.600 extreme because people are like sequestered in their homes and only really have access to what

00:55:11.800 they perceive as reality through social media. Hmm. What if that's why the, you know, the left

00:55:17.700 seemed to lose its mind more than the right during COVID because most Republicans are people who are

00:55:22.420 not established left did not listen to all those mandates. They, they did go out, they did see their

00:55:27.860 friends. They had social gatherings. They basically thumbed a middle finger at the most

00:55:31.720 extreme lockdown policies, whereas the left was extremely compliant and I think paid a dear price

00:55:36.380 for it. Yeah. Um, I don't know. I think, um, I think by the way, Elon Musk, I want to tell the

00:55:45.200 audience there was an update on that today, which we thought was important to get, uh, disturbingly for

00:55:49.340 those of us. I was just going to ask you, is he buying Twitter? Is he not buying Twitter?

00:55:53.080 It took a turn in the wrong direction today. He, um, asserted that he has the right not to consummate

00:56:00.660 his acquisition of Twitter and that he has a right to terminate the merger agreement, according to a

00:56:06.720 letter from his lawyers to the Twitter lawyers that was sent today. Um, he's ostensibly disputing

00:56:14.540 data. Uh, he wants Twitter to provide him with information that will help facilitate his

00:56:18.560 evaluation of spam and fake accounts. He says that they've understated the number of fake

00:56:22.340 accounts on Twitter. They say it's only 5%. He says it could be as high as 20 plus,

00:56:26.520 uh, which would mean he's buying a product that's less valuable, right? If it's 20% bots. So he wants

00:56:31.420 the real data. And, um, is, as I understand it, he signed a deal that said, I'm basically buying

00:56:37.460 Twitter as is, which anybody who's ever bought a car or a house that way knows it means you don't get

00:56:42.380 to kick the tires. You don't get to back out because of due diligence or because you find out the

00:56:46.760 house has termites. And if the Twitter house has termites and he actually signed such a deal,

00:56:51.760 that's not gonna be helpful. But anyway, he's saying he does have the right to back out a right

00:56:56.820 to terminate the merger agreement. And that's sad, especially because Tesla stock now is suffering

00:57:01.240 and there's going to be a layoffs over there. So he's kind of, you know, he needs that money.

00:57:05.100 Anyway, I want to see him buy it. I think Twitter will be a better place if he takes it over.

00:57:08.720 So I, I want all these problems to clear up. And of course, these people who write about

00:57:12.100 Elon feel exactly the opposite. Yeah. Well, I used to be interesting.

00:57:16.680 I think it would be interesting. Yeah. He, I mean, I don't think it is about the bought

00:57:20.920 accounts for him. I think it is. It does have to do more with the, the economy and it no longer

00:57:26.260 maybe being the wisest purchase. Right. Exactly. It's too bad though. I mean, he has it to burn,

00:57:31.480 so he should burn it, but easy for me to say. Or let's talk about me too, because this is back in

00:57:38.840 the news now. And I know you've been very outspoken and I, I get it. I, I like your thoughts

00:57:44.340 on a lot of these issues, but boy, oh boy, there's a meltdown in the wake of that verdict for Johnny

00:57:49.460 Depp, uh, in the, and it was a verdict for Johnny Depp. I love how these newspapers are like split

00:57:53.440 decision. No, it wasn't. He won five out of the six counts that were at issue. And the only one she

00:57:59.880 won was some, some small allegation that he defamed her when he said she messed up their apartment to

00:58:05.920 make it look extra bad. When the cops came on time, the jury said, we don't believe she did

00:58:09.760 that. So we're going to say she was, and people are like split decision. He said, she said, we'll

00:58:14.240 never know. Well, no, I mean, we may never know, but we certainly know how the jury felt about this

00:58:19.100 and it was not split. Um, here's a sampling. This is from Michelle Goldberg, uh, opinion columnist for

00:58:25.100 the New York times. And the Amber Heard verdict was a travesty. Others will follow the verdict in this

00:58:31.940 case is difficult to explain logically. She says, I guarantee you, Michelle Goldberg watched none of

00:58:37.200 his trial. She writes the confounding part. Isn't that the jury sided with him over her?

00:58:41.760 This is the country that elected Donald Trump. Uh, as she goes on, um, to say the explosion of

00:58:50.620 defiant, desperate feminist energy that was me too has now been smothered by an even fiercer reaction.

00:58:57.980 Me too was a movement of women telling their stories. Now that Heard has been destroyed for

00:59:02.000 identifying as a survivor, other women will think twice. That's not why Heard was destroyed

00:59:06.760 because she identified as a survivor. She was destroyed because they did not believe her.

00:59:10.860 Her claim was not found credible. She says as a first amendment issue, this verdict is a travesty

00:59:17.740 because the New York times cares deeply about everyone's ability to speak freely their opinion.

00:59:23.860 The first amendment, this is a joke, right? This is the, these same forces are the ones who try to

00:59:29.040 shut anybody up. If they say there's a difference between trans women and biological women, you know,

00:59:34.160 the biological sex is real. I like that's, does she support my first amendment? Right. To say that

00:59:39.080 I'm going to venture no. Um, even if Heard had lied about everything during the trial, even if she'd

00:59:44.840 never suffered domestic abuse, she still would have represented it. So she's defending her statement

00:59:50.700 in the Washington Post that I've come to represent a figure of domestic abuse. We should slice that.

00:59:54.920 She, who cares if it was true? She represented it. Like Jussie Smollett came to represent victims of

01:00:01.880 racial hate crimes. It doesn't matter whether it actually happened. You know, when you look at him,

01:00:06.000 you think of that. And then she concludes in part with, if there's one thing the American people hate

01:00:10.340 more than decadent Hollywood elites, it's mouthy women. It's mouthy. So that was her takeaway

01:00:17.340 from the verdict. What do you make of it? Um, well, it seems that everyone, whether they're,

01:00:26.860 um, an advocate or critic of me too, seems to think that this verdict, uh, it signals the death

01:00:33.800 knell of me too. And I don't see it that way. I think it's probably a rebirth of me too in a more

01:00:41.020 diffused and ambient and arbitrary way. Like now you no longer have to be a man accused of sexual

01:00:49.240 offenses to be me too. It everybody's basically fair game. And I think, you know, from the start

01:00:56.560 for me, it was apparent that me too was this like dress rehearsal for this overall erosion of due

01:01:02.480 process. Yeah. And what did you make of it, Dasha? As somebody, you know, who sees the way Hollywood in

01:01:09.620 particular works and I'm, I'll give her the point that he had more power than she did for sure. I

01:01:13.680 mean, he had more, part of that was charm. Part of that part of it was star power, but what do you

01:01:18.640 make of it? I mean, and there were, you know, problems in Hollywood with the old like Weinstein

01:01:24.960 model, which was functionally an open secret. When I moved to LA, I was told like, Oh, you could be a

01:01:31.160 Weinstein girl. You know? And then it was like, then all of a sudden it wasn't sanctioned anymore.

01:01:38.420 And everyone sort of had to fall in line with these new behavioral guidelines, which, you know,

01:01:44.600 maybe had some like ripple positive effects, but basically it was a net negative because I always

01:01:49.840 saw me too, basically as like a cynical power grab that wasn't actually going to correct me, like

01:01:55.920 power imbalances within the film industry. It was just going to make the most like

01:02:02.100 vocal shrill minority of, of women more powerful.

01:02:10.020 The, the composition of the power structure would change, but the distribution would stay the same

01:02:15.880 basically. Yeah. Like your Amber Heard's, your actresses, you know, like who come to symbolize

01:02:21.680 domestic abuse survivors actually, I think do a real disservice to women who actually are

01:02:26.840 invulnerable, uh, physicians who people don't pay attention to because they're like waitresses

01:02:31.960 or hotel maids or something like that. Right. And the fact that a verdict, a jury who listened

01:02:36.700 to this case for six weeks found against her has to be reduced to, I think it was, um, Tarana Burke

01:02:43.520 who coined the phrase me to something like our, our fascinating, our fascination with violence,

01:02:48.420 you know, like our permissiveness toward violence. Why can't it just be this particular claim

01:02:52.940 was not found credible? So many women's claims have been found credible and have been adjudicated

01:02:57.400 in the court of public opinion or in a legal court. Why is it just because of this one case

01:03:02.720 now it's America's fault. It's the patriarchy. It's like she was rejected. Sorry, but these people

01:03:11.140 didn't watch it. And I did a whole talking points memo last week on how when I watched her testify,

01:03:16.880 I actually was one of the few who thought I believe a lot of these claims of abuse. I think she's

01:03:21.640 telling them in a way that I find compelling and I can believe this. And then I went on to listen

01:03:26.500 to her when she got cross-examined, lie about the small, the medium and the large all around those

01:03:33.340 claims of abuse and concluded, this is not a credible person. This is not a truth teller.

01:03:37.540 She's lying about things she does not need to lie about. And therefore I rejected her testimony

01:03:40.780 as a whole, which is exactly what you are typically instructed in jury instructions. That is your right

01:03:46.500 to do as a juror. If you think they lied about one thing, you can reject the testimony in,

01:03:50.000 in full. Instead, you get things like this from the co-founder of ultraviolet. You know,

01:03:54.720 they sort of jump into situations like this and typically advocate on behalf of the alleged

01:03:58.700 abused person, which is interesting because in this case, it was both. He was alleging he was the

01:04:03.460 abused person. She writes as follows. I was served an unbelievable amount of content from so-called

01:04:10.960 survivors and feminists during this trial. She means taking depth side. There was nothing authentic

01:04:18.260 about it. So now the actual quote, survivors and feminists, people who've been working in this

01:04:24.520 field, people who say they've been through it, they get dismissed because they sided with the wrong

01:04:28.620 person. You have to, when they're both claiming victimhood and abuse, you're only allowed to side

01:04:33.520 with the woman. You see, otherwise you're inauthentic.

01:04:36.540 Yeah. I mean, I think believe women does ultimately a disservice to women because it ignores, like you

01:04:46.980 said, credibility and privileges like a victim status and then mines women for their trauma content

01:04:55.480 to like gain footing. So one establishes a victory according to a bad faith precedent.

01:05:07.000 Well, the precedent it's being righted right bit by bit, like due process is a good thing.

01:05:13.800 Having one's claims tested with evidence demands is a good thing.

01:05:18.740 Yeah. And I think you'll find that probably most people agree with you and agree with us that

01:05:25.140 the verdict was correct in this case. But you got these kind of like proxy battles about race or

01:05:32.360 gender, I think, to paper over the fact that very often the elites don't find the democratic result of

01:05:43.860 a trial or a political process to be legitimate. They find it intolerable.

01:05:50.460 Well, it's like, I think I've heard you and I make this point about abortion,

01:05:54.240 about how the vast majority of of the American voters want to see it legal in the first trimester,

01:06:01.500 do not want to see it legal in the last trimester and don't want a lot of latitude in the second

01:06:06.800 trimester. But, you know, to see the way like that, that vote that the Democrats put up to sort of

01:06:11.900 nationalize abortion as a right, which would have been a disaster for them anyway, because it just

01:06:16.660 would have gotten reversed if the Democrats have the power to to make it a national right when they

01:06:21.060 have control of Congress. Republicans have the power to make it a national ban when they have

01:06:25.260 the power. They're much better off asking for a federalist system where some states allow it and

01:06:29.640 some states don't. But apparently they were too stupid to realize that or they were smart enough to

01:06:33.500 realize it, but just decided to do naked pandering on the issue of abortion by forcing through a

01:06:37.640 vote that they knew they'd lose. In any event, I've heard you say, you know, like the messaging

01:06:41.420 is really just it's so craven, right, because it's just meant is similar to the conversation we

01:06:49.000 just had. It's meant to stir upset as opposed to stir action. Yeah, it's meant to browbeat and

01:06:56.820 gaslight people because I think most people, again, the abortion issue is something that probably

01:07:02.860 follows the bell curve distribution. Eighty percent of people are somewhere in the middle and not

01:07:07.580 abortion zealots in either direction. But judging by what you see on social media and mainstream media,

01:07:15.300 you would think that we live in some like handmaid's tale scenario.

01:07:20.740 Well, then, yeah, and then they utilize the rhetoric of like free abortions on demand without apology,

01:07:26.360 like up until birth basically. Which is alienating. Yeah, which I don't think, you know, most people

01:07:33.040 agree with or would want. Most liberals. Yeah, but it becomes like this refrain of the politically

01:07:40.320 correct sort of opinion to hold. That was in their bill that basically abortion on demand through

01:07:46.020 the entire pregnancy. And a lot of Democrats are already on record as saying it should just be up to

01:07:49.600 the woman all the way up to the moment of birth, which is extreme. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think

01:07:55.660 happens if, as we expect at some point this month, we get the Dobbs decision, which we've already seen

01:08:01.700 the draft of, and it lands the way the draft lands where Roe versus Wade is overturned and whether a woman

01:08:08.780 has a right to an abortion goes back to the states for them to decide.

01:08:12.500 Um, well, I want to know what the likelihood is that the final verdict will actually mirror the

01:08:22.280 draft. It's not 100 percent right, but it will. Correct. But the latest reporting was that no one

01:08:28.860 had changed their mind. So we right now, other than just speculation, we have no reason to believe

01:08:33.540 that the 5-4 decision or it could be as many as 6-3 Roberts hadn't yet revealed. It sounded like

01:08:39.800 it was going to be 5-4 to overturn Roe. Yeah. But I feel like Roe v. Wade gets invoked all the time

01:08:45.420 to sort of whenever there was like a, you know, a midterm coming up or something that's like,

01:08:50.100 yes, they, they invoke the threat of repealing. They've done it so many times that I would be,

01:08:55.040 you know, surprised to see it, to see it actually happen.

01:08:58.280 Yeah. What do you mean? What do you mean by the Supreme Court or by the states after the

01:09:01.420 decisions handed down? Uh, I don't know. I mean, I think if, if the issue, um, we're really political

01:09:11.460 heavy hitters. No, no, no worries. Um, I think that if the issue, if abortion does inevitably or

01:09:18.840 not inevitably eventually go to the states, um, uh, Freudian slip there, it will become virtually

01:09:25.500 impossible of course, in some states. Um, but I think that this will actually be a blessing in

01:09:31.200 disguise for the democratic party because they could always, um, do more fundraising and, um,

01:09:38.320 whip up morale for their kind of complex of NGOs, which can literally, will literally create kind of

01:09:45.420 an underground railroad to red states to provide women with abortions. So I think even in that case

01:09:52.020 scenario, everybody wins by which I mean, uh, the, um, two parties of our political system and not

01:09:59.840 actual people. Right. Right. So what did you make of the, the, the people dressing up like the

01:10:05.820 handmaid's tail, you know, characters and protesting outside of the Supreme court justices homes and so on.

01:10:13.220 Yeah, well, it's like, um, you know, the resistance liberals and, and Trump, I think people

01:10:19.220 are really attached to this fantasy that they are living in some kind of like neo-fascistic,

01:10:26.600 uh, oppressive tyranny, um, which is not, you know, is, is not really the case.

01:10:34.180 Now, when Trump was president, did you support him or how did you feel about him?

01:10:39.860 I loved him.

01:10:41.320 Um, you're definitely losing that Hollywood position now. That's it.

01:10:47.700 I mean, I didn't vote for him. I'm an, I'm a non-voter as I've said, but I, yeah, I thought he was very

01:10:53.800 funny. I thought he, uh, you know, was kind of this, uh, like as a, he was like a work of art, you know?

01:11:00.980 Um, um, uh, and I, I definitely think he was a better president than Joe Biden.

01:11:07.560 Definitely. Yeah. And he, he was, he had a pulse.

01:11:11.360 Yeah, he was alive.

01:11:16.020 Go ahead, Anna. Sorry, I interrupted you.

01:11:17.880 No, I think we were not nearly as horrified or offended by, um, Donald Trump as many people around us were.

01:11:28.340 Um, I think we could intuit that he would be a fairly standard establishment precedent,

01:11:33.920 president and that what really offended, um, you know, both the liberals and the never Trump

01:11:42.340 conservatives was this conflict of sensibility and not really anything he did because they did this.

01:11:49.080 They were happy to do the same stuff.

01:11:51.720 Hmm. Well, that's so clear of you to have seen that in the moment, even though you're not of the

01:11:57.820 right, you weren't natural, like knee jerk conservatives or Republicans are on the MAGA train for political

01:12:03.900 reasons. You were just observing it as this, as sort of a societal dynamic. What's happening?

01:12:09.840 When he was elected, I was surprised. Um, but I remember feeling almost vindicated. Like I was like,

01:12:17.520 oh yeah, like reality feels like it's actually reflecting the things that I know to be true about it.

01:12:23.420 Um, which might even have to do a little bit with me being from like Las Vegas, from being from this very,

01:12:29.400 like, kind of like late capitalist, very like Trumpian landscape to me. I mean, like a lot of sense that he

01:12:35.560 would be the president of the United States.

01:12:37.840 Yeah. Well, uh, that leads me to my questions I have for you about Joe Biden, which I will save until after this

01:12:43.860 break. And then we've got to talk about succession and a couple of scenes that I need answers to.

01:12:47.780 I have a question for you, Dasha. This is from a piece. I think that was, let's see, actually,

01:12:59.220 I'm not sure where this Q and a came from, so forgive me. But the question was, uh, or the,

01:13:03.320 the statement you made was the infatuation with consent back on the me too stuff is a good example

01:13:08.760 of something that's very black and white, which feminist and American thinkers have brushed onto.

01:13:12.680 It's this very American liberal idea wherein everything is permitted as long as it is consensual,

01:13:19.440 which is a very contractual framework that lacks nuance. Now I can see that because I'm,

01:13:27.180 I'm the same age as your mom. I too was born in 1970 and we were back in the day where it was like,

01:13:34.360 you know, long before they said no means no, we were kind of like, well, no might mean yes.

01:13:39.320 See, try to push it a little and we'll, we'll decide together. But now it's like,

01:13:45.020 you say that they're like, you want abuse, you want rape. Well, no, it's just like a sexual dance

01:13:48.860 between men and women is complicated and layered. Uh, so I'm impressed that you say that because

01:13:55.660 your generation, it's yet another reason they're going to disown you. You're going to be kicked out

01:14:01.880 of the young female club for acknowledging such an obvious reality. Right.

01:14:07.280 Mm-hmm. Yeah. Uh, that power dynamics are implicit in seduction and, you know, in relationships,

01:14:16.580 um, to me feels, feels very self-evident. Yeah. Like that's what, you know, that's what it means to

01:14:22.620 seduce someone. It means that, you know, something they don't, which is that you're going to sleep with

01:14:29.460 us. So what, can I ask you, you two have found each other and you have similar worldviews, so it

01:14:37.620 works, but you must interact with other people in this world. And did they find these views okay to

01:14:45.260 talk about like what's happening with people your age? And I don't, I'm just curious, like for a

01:14:50.840 window into your world and whether you can speak freely like this. I mean, I know you do it on your

01:14:55.380 podcast all the time, but maybe they don't listen. Yeah. I mean, in New York, people are very

01:14:59.460 reactionary. Yeah. It's funny because I think there's a perception that, um, New York is like

01:15:06.100 overrun with liberals, but I don't know anybody who thinks like that. All of our friends are basically

01:15:13.000 conservative and they're kind of artists and creatives. Um, and I think, what was the question?

01:15:21.400 This is whether there are other people who, you know, your age.

01:15:26.540 Well, and I think also in like, in real life, we are normal, well-adjusted adult people who don't,

01:15:34.560 um, can consistently and aggressively inject politics into everything. Yeah. Yeah. I actually

01:15:41.620 think it's rude to talk. So if I'm like on, on, on set, if I'm like amongst like colleagues or

01:15:48.400 something, or I just won't really broach the subject of politics because I don't find it

01:15:53.700 to be appropriate. Good call. I'll tell you, I, well, I, I've been living in New York up until

01:15:57.960 recently, 17 years. I had a very different experience when it definitely felt the very

01:16:01.780 strong liberal bias, but of course my views are outspoken and people have known, you know,

01:16:06.520 where I stand on a lot of things, but I'll tell you something. I just went into the city on Saturday

01:16:10.080 night with my husband, Doug, and we went to see Macbeth, which is having a 15 week run starring Daniel

01:16:16.440 Craig. And we wanted to see Daniel Craig without that'd be cool. And he was great, but boy,

01:16:21.340 oh boy, that was an interesting experience. So it's sort of the woke of vacation of Shakespeare.

01:16:26.820 They, we, you know, this Macbeth, I guess was written around 1606 someplace around there,

01:16:31.920 a long, long time ago, right? 400 plus years ago. And, um, in Scotland where there wasn't a lot of

01:16:38.420 diversity, but the cast was definitely majority, majority, minority, but only, only black actors

01:16:46.320 because, you know, in the American Indian or, uh, Indian or, um, you know, any other like Hispanic,

01:16:54.580 forget it, Asian. No, none of that rates on Broadway, only certain kinds of minorities rate.

01:16:59.720 There was somebody playing the son of the King who totally unnecessarily was a woman,

01:17:04.160 like who owned her. You know, it wasn't like they tried to disguise her to make her, it was like,

01:17:09.180 she was a woman and showing us that she was a woman who got cast as the son. And there were

01:17:13.920 plenty of women in the, in the play. I mean, the, the two female leads or the three leads basically

01:17:19.640 after Daniel Craig and two of them are women. So it's like, why then we had the mask Nazis running

01:17:25.100 up and down the aisles going mask up, mask up with signs that read mask up. And then if they see that

01:17:29.520 it's dipped below, cause you're still masking for some reason, all these same people were at a

01:17:32.980 restaurant right across the street, packed in like sardines right before the show. But magically you

01:17:37.160 cross into the theater and the mask is going to protect you from one another. And then the yelling

01:17:41.440 at people, pull it over your nose, over your nose. I've stepped in and there was a woman at the front

01:17:45.700 door. And then five steps later was the guy who take your ticket, takes your ticket. And the woman

01:17:49.520 at the front door was like, excuse me, where's your mask? Where's your mask? I'm literally holding

01:17:53.260 my hand, putting them. I'm like, it takes a second to get it from my bag onto my face. You're in the

01:17:57.020 building now. It needs to be on your face, over your nose and mouth. Like, what am I doing? Why am I here? Why am I

01:18:02.040 doing this to myself? We go at the intermission to the bathroom and we get this sign outside the

01:18:08.180 bathroom, making sure, just in case you weren't sure that you were at a woke Broadway theater

01:18:12.240 that reads as follows. Gender diversity is welcome here. Please use the restroom that best fits your

01:18:17.820 gender identity or expression. Like, okay, I don't need to deal with that either. Well, I'm just trying

01:18:23.640 to have a bathroom break over the corner. And on top of everything, there were no costumes and there

01:18:29.380 were no, there was no set design, nothing, absolutely nothing. They said this is trying

01:18:34.240 to get back to the original Shakespeare, but apparently they did this at West Side Story

01:18:37.780 too. I think it's just a budget thing. So you're looking at a guy like in a Yankees cap trying

01:18:44.480 to do Shakespeare. It was bizarre. The guy, there was a guy in a wheelchair who opened it up.

01:18:50.640 Perfect. Um, with some, I don't know, lecture on, but he broke the fourth wall and talked to us

01:18:55.340 about Macbeth. It was the most bizarre two, four, 10 never ending hours of my life. And I thought

01:19:01.080 this, this may be a harbinger of things to come, not just in Broadway, but in entertainment writ large,

01:19:06.120 certainly America writ large, perhaps.

01:19:08.580 That's crazy that they still make you mask on Broadway if they're not even masking on planes

01:19:13.160 anymore. But what this screams to me is that Broadway is really hard up for cash. If they

01:19:18.700 can't even invest any of me in costume and set design, I mean, it also sounds like it could

01:19:22.740 have been a really good psychedelic postmodern. Yeah. I mean, I like experimental theater,

01:19:29.620 but magic of acting, but Broadway is like a bastion of like elite liberal values. So you've got

01:19:37.120 the virtue signaling is really in the, in the extreme and the, the impulse to sort of like

01:19:42.340 over correct, um, I think is especially strong with Broadway because mostly, yeah, affluent elite

01:19:49.440 liberals go to the theater.

01:19:51.360 Yeah. And they feel so guilty. It sounds like they squandered their entire budget on DEI

01:19:56.580 for design costumes.

01:20:00.200 It's a good point. They should have invested a lot. I wanted to see like a King's robe.

01:20:03.780 That's I didn't ask for much, uh, just like something King Lee, Prince Lee. And I would

01:20:09.220 have appreciated if the sun had been played by a woman. I mean, by a, by a man, not a woman,

01:20:13.360 but I don't call the shots and that's obvious. Um, what do you make of feral girl summer? Have

01:20:20.860 you heard of this?

01:20:22.400 I've heard a little bit of the new summer trend.

01:20:26.680 It's the new hot girl summer, which they've gotten rid of. That was, I guess, last summer

01:20:31.160 after COVID. And now here's a clip. Um, this is from Tik TOK. Somebody named Molly is explaining

01:20:37.820 what it means to have feral girl summer nights out.

01:20:43.480 I am convinced there are two separate versions of a feral club rat night out. Version number

01:20:48.100 one is a night when you were being obnoxious as fuck. Your Instagram story is like five minutes

01:20:53.220 long. You're documenting yourself screaming, just overall posting on his shit. And for version

01:20:58.260 number two, there is no fucking trace of you. You don't post a single thing. You run away

01:21:03.060 from your friends and there is just like no evidence of your night out. There is no way

01:21:07.200 to predict which type of night you're going to have. And I honestly cannot tell which one's

01:21:10.700 better.

01:21:12.240 Okay. Now there's, now there's blowback to feral girl summer saying it's setting a standard

01:21:18.660 that no woman actually wants to meet. And you know, one of these girls, I, I can't keep

01:21:23.600 up with the intra-feminist culture wars. What do you make of it, Dasha or Anna? Either

01:21:28.160 one, take it. Whoever feels something in response.

01:21:32.260 Uh, yeah. A feral girl summer, I guess it's like, it's sort of a, a, a wish of like for

01:21:39.560 whimsy or something. They want, uh, maybe a kind of nihilistic reverie in their femininity

01:21:50.600 or something. I don't know. I can't, I can't entirely really parse.

01:21:55.400 It is unclear.

01:21:56.340 What's going on.

01:21:57.160 Yeah.

01:21:57.800 Yes. The independent says, as for what it actually entails, the spectrum is broad, wearing

01:22:04.960 tiny outfits, getting free drinks and quote, dancing naked around a fire under the moon

01:22:13.420 are all definitions that have been bandied around social media. There's also a theme of

01:22:18.860 subverting beauty norms, like not shaving your legs or brushing your hair. The general

01:22:23.940 theme is unhinged chaos. So what do we do this or do we not do this, Anna? What are you?

01:22:30.020 It's very pagan, but I think all the, the beauty norms were already subverted by COVID.

01:22:36.460 Good point.

01:22:39.540 It's true. They can't take credit for that.

01:22:41.880 Yeah.

01:22:43.060 Yeah. To me, it's, I mean, it sounds a lot like hot girl summer.

01:22:48.100 I think, yeah, every summer there's this sort of fetishization of Bacchanalia revelry or something.

01:22:59.940 Who is looking into like TikTok for their instructions on just how to be over the summer?

01:23:05.100 Yeah. And every summer there's like a new TikTok catchphrase, um, that, um, allows people to be

01:23:15.260 disgusting and sweaty.

01:23:17.840 And generally, and generally, it's all about, yeah.

01:23:20.420 Yeah. Um, I'm not sure why one needs permission for any of that, right? It's like,

01:23:24.760 there are something disturbing to me about, I don't know, just these trends where it's like,

01:23:30.280 okay, now this is what we're going to do. And this is the hot trend and it involves no longer

01:23:34.080 shaving. I, I don't get it. Um,

01:23:36.960 I'm doing, uh, I'm doing fertility girls. Um, what does that mean?

01:23:42.720 Um, I'm eating a lot of like organ meats and like drinking raw milk and taking root supplements.

01:23:48.760 Organ meats are as fertile as possible.

01:23:51.560 Way to go. Organ meats are the way to go. We just had a couple of nutritionists and doctors

01:23:55.600 on the show a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. Big on the organ meats.

01:23:59.340 We're big on organ meats.

01:24:00.780 How do you can, may I ask how you eat them? Because I haven't yet tried and I'm a little

01:24:05.180 scared. With your bare hands.

01:24:07.280 You tear it out of the animal. Um, fried liver. I mean, pate is a great way to get your.

01:24:14.420 Do you get it at the store or do you, do you cook?

01:24:17.960 Um, I just buy pate at the store or at one of Keith McNally's great, great restaurants.

01:24:24.520 Okay. This is good to know because I haven't yet tried it. Although I will say on our little

01:24:28.700 date night in the city, I, I don't eat any seafood. I'm like anti-seafood. It's a psychological

01:24:32.820 thing. Um, they're big on caviar. So I ordered the caviar $150 later. I was like, I'm going

01:24:43.240 to have to find a cheaper option. It was pricey, but it was good. You couldn't tell that it was

01:24:49.300 fish. So thumbs up.

01:24:51.200 Yeah. Why don't you like caviar now?

01:24:53.600 Yeah. I feel Dasha that I suffered a childhood trauma in my grandparents' boatyard in Pyramont,

01:24:59.140 New York. Can't really say exactly what it was, but I had an older brother, half, and he loved

01:25:05.800 to fish. And so I was immersed in like smelly fish from the Hudson river during the time that

01:25:11.240 GE was dumping tons of chemicals into the water. And I was also swimming in it. And, um, I do

01:25:17.620 recall an incident with one of his friends and it was a dead fish and someone put a firecracker

01:25:22.480 in it. It didn't end.

01:25:24.280 Oh, well, that'll tell.

01:25:25.920 Wow. Yeah.

01:25:26.720 I think that was immersive.

01:25:28.000 Yeah. Yeah. And you know what? It's really like, if you, like a friend of mine recently

01:25:33.820 tried to get me over this and she made me this beautiful halibut and it had like panko crust

01:25:40.240 on the top. And I actually did like it. It did not taste like fish, but then my husband

01:25:45.980 who likes fish and likes to cook fish, apparently something I didn't know about him in our 15 years

01:25:50.660 together. He's like, I can redo it. So he redid it and he served it to me and he left the bottom

01:25:55.720 skin on it. Yeah. Total game changer. I was like, Oh no, hell no. Like this slimy fish just

01:26:05.460 is just a reminder that it's a fish.

01:26:07.280 Mm-hmm. Yeah. The scales, but they are, it is healthy for you. If you can overlook all those

01:26:14.100 chemicals that Alex Jones was right about, it'll really plump your skin.

01:26:20.320 I know I need to do it. I just fix that baby steps. What would you recommend be my next try?

01:26:26.500 I tried the halibut. I did fish eggs. What's the next most gentle?

01:26:33.040 I was going to say oysters, but that's a bridge too far.

01:26:35.940 Well, maybe smoked oysters.

01:26:38.400 What's that gentle? Is that really fishy?

01:26:39.900 Yeah. Fish girls being slavic as well. So, but that's very, that's a very, going to be a very

01:26:44.620 fishy, messy, abject experience.

01:26:47.620 That's master's degree fish. All right. I'm going to work still on my little like GED and then

01:26:52.940 I'll get back to it. Yeah. And oysters. Okay. So we've got to discuss succession because I've

01:26:58.660 teased it and now America wants to know what it's like to be across from Greg, the great Greg from

01:27:03.700 succession. Who's everybody's favorite character. They brought on your character. Comfy, right?

01:27:10.920 Comfrey. Okay. Comfrey. She, she was new like over the past season and she's on team Kendall Roy,

01:27:19.060 who's against the patriarch Logan Roy, uh, played by Brian Cox and you're, you're his PR advisor and

01:27:27.440 he's dealing with a shit storm of PR and you're similar to the way you are in real life. Kind of

01:27:32.680 deadpan, not overly emotional, total scene stealer. And here's just a clip of you and, uh, forgive me.

01:27:41.060 What's the actor who plays Greg? What's his name?

01:27:43.180 Nicholas Braun.

01:27:44.300 Nicholas Braun. You and Nicholas Braun in a little bit of TV magic.

01:27:47.600 What's up?

01:27:49.960 Hey, I'm glad I ran into you.

01:27:52.160 Yeah. Yeah. Me too.

01:27:54.100 Right. Because I might have to brief the press against you.

01:27:58.820 Oh, the, the, the whole press.

01:28:02.340 Yeah. Just Kendall's really going balls to the wall and you know, you're on the other team,

01:28:07.880 but I'm going to try to keep it targeted rather than terminal.

01:28:13.320 Thank you kindly, ma'am.

01:28:14.660 It goes on from there, but I love that targeted instead of terminal. I read that you knew of what you spoke

01:28:23.780 when you delivered that line because you were going through your own PR, whatever, some stupid Twitter

01:28:30.300 dust up at the time. And it was, you were managing both your own PR and the role of a PR, um, guru.

01:28:36.760 Yeah. There was some meta irony in me playing a crisis publicist. And, uh, my first day on set was

01:28:44.780 when we got in trouble for our ISIS t-shirts. And I remember, yeah, like on my breaks, like looking

01:28:50.980 at my phone and being like, wow, I made it to HBO and they're definitely going to can me after

01:28:56.100 after these ISIS t-shirts.

01:28:59.000 You seem so unflappable. It doesn't seem like even that would upset you.

01:29:04.940 Uh, so, you know, sometimes the pylons can be overwhelming. Sure. But they, we've been through

01:29:11.140 the, the outrage cycle so many times now that we're just desensitized to it. Yeah. So what

01:29:16.860 happened with the ISIS t-shirts? Uh, nothing, nothing, nothing. It was like a joke based on

01:29:23.780 not exactly ISIS as I remember. It was based on like, you did a t-shirt based on something else.

01:29:28.880 It was a sticker, um, that, um, the MAGA bomber put on one of his like defective or maybe it was

01:29:37.960 on a band or something, but that's where we got the design from. Um, and we just thought it was

01:29:44.020 kind of clever and funny. So you don't care. It doesn't affect you anymore. Cause I know when you

01:29:48.740 first come into the public eye and people start attacking you as a terrible person. I mean, they

01:29:53.580 really, you know, they, they don't just say, Oh, that was, I disagree with her. It's a complete

01:29:58.300 personal attack and attempted takedown. Does that not bother you gals anymore?

01:30:04.060 I think you have to keep in mind that it's actually not personal and you have to be like

01:30:09.060 understanding and empathetic for the people who are angry at you. Um, when they go low, we go even

01:30:16.640 lower. Um, yeah, we, yeah. And understand that you're just like an F, uh, avatar or an average,

01:30:23.460 an effigy for them that they don't seriously hate you necessarily as much as what you symbolically

01:30:31.960 represent. Yeah. Which to them is, uh, a kind of alienating cynicism, or I think that people just

01:30:41.740 don't really not respond that well necessarily to our like brand of humor.

01:30:47.260 It's good. You have that perspective. I read a few of the things it was like, one of them was

01:30:52.200 something like leftist deadbeats or something. I'm like, now that I don't even get, I don't even

01:30:56.780 understand that. Dirtbag leftist. That's what it was. The American conservative, I think did a great

01:31:02.200 piece on you. They said, that's what some of your detractors got. It's kind of like a badge of honor.

01:31:06.820 I don't know. Dirtbag kind of like that one. I'm not sure if that would even upset me at the,

01:31:11.760 at the first blush. Well, that term was coined by our friend Amber Lee Frost and she meant it in a

01:31:18.280 positive, not like a wave of, of leftists who came up after Bernie. But I've always maintained

01:31:25.380 that we're too glamorous to be, uh, dirtbags and too conservative to be actual life.

01:31:31.700 I agree with you. I agree with you. So what's, I can't, I can't end without asking you about what

01:31:37.480 the past, you know, three months has been like as people who come from Russia originally or Belarus,

01:31:44.420 there's been so much anti-Russian sentiment here, this craziness of not letting the Russian players

01:31:48.720 play. And I, one of the big tennis matches was the, the Australian open. And now like at the French

01:31:54.320 open, they, his, his name was up there, but the flag was blacked out. Has that been affecting you

01:31:59.960 in your lives at all? Or what do you make of it? Well, there's always been anti-Russian sentiment,

01:32:05.940 you know, even going back to like the Russiagate stuff with, with Trump. Um, I think the, the cold

01:32:14.200 war mentality still kind of holds strong in Russia, much like us, we just sort of represent something

01:32:20.640 amoral or detestable, uh, to people. But in my, no, in my, in my life, it hasn't, I haven't really

01:32:29.500 felt, felt the impact of, of Russophobia more than I usually do. Yeah. And of course I think,

01:32:34.360 while it's like preposterous that Russian people who don't even sympathize with Putin for the war

01:32:40.800 are, um, punished, uh, by these kind of institutions and associations, or even if they do sympathize

01:32:48.300 with Putin in the war that shouldn't affect, you know, their standing as professionals. Um, at the

01:32:53.480 same time, it's not something that we've experienced personally. I mean, you can't, it's not like you can

01:32:58.420 tell off the bat that somebody is Russian as you can with somebody who's like Asian or black. It's

01:33:03.900 a different kind of thing. Um, and also more importantly, I think our haters would even reject

01:33:10.700 the allegation that they're, that we're Russian. They think that we're like LARPing for clout.

01:33:15.340 So I only recently learned what LARPing is. Um, do you think, cause I, you know, I went over to

01:33:21.440 Russia a couple of times to interview Putin and just was totally delighted with the people there.

01:33:26.100 And I, I think of them all the time as we pile on the sanctions and all this. And I,

01:33:31.060 my hope is that when this is over, however it ends there, there'll be a way where we,

01:33:35.980 the American people can connect with them, the Russian people, you know, in an authentic,

01:33:40.280 like meaningful way where we say these people running our countries are assholes. You know,

01:33:45.080 it's a bunch of bullshit. We're humans. We, you may want to go to your DACA and I may want to go

01:33:49.840 to the Jersey shore, but we both want, you know, our kids to be raised well and safely and to have

01:33:56.020 healthcare and to have some basic things. And I don't know, do you, do you have hope for that

01:33:59.960 still, notwithstanding what we're doing right now? Yeah, absolutely. But I think that that

01:34:04.340 connection is already there. And I think like the people of any country can understand and

01:34:09.980 sympathize with the people of another country and don't judge them by their leaders.

01:34:15.200 I hope you're right. I mean, when we like ban Russian vodkas and kick, you know,

01:34:20.440 Russian artists out of their productions, unless they say exactly the following words,

01:34:25.400 I start to worry that we're going to create, you know, a generation of hate. We're doing it on a

01:34:31.920 number of fronts, but look, you are part of the war pushing back against all of that. And a couple of

01:34:37.500 fascinating broads. Thanks so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure support the ladies by going

01:34:43.620 to patreon.com slash red scare. They always talk like this. They're really interesting to listen

01:34:49.740 to. And you've got like a nice car ride or whatever. Just put it on, sit back, relax. And I

01:34:54.460 promise you, you'll learn tomorrow on the show. David Sachs of the PayPal mafia back on the show.

01:34:59.560 Don't miss it. See you then. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS,

01:35:04.760 no agenda and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - June 06, 2022

Cultural Drift From Reality, and Depp Fallout, with Red Scare Podcast Hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova ｜ Ep. 336

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