Dem Party Imploding, Michelle Obama's Failing Podcast, and Debating Khalil Deportation, with Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 1028
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 54 minutes
Words per Minute
177.98192
Summary
New polls show record-low support for the Democratic Party. Plus, a former first lady steps into the world of podcasting and totally bombs. We ll get to that with Michelle Obama. Happy St. Patrick s Day!
Transcript
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
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Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.
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It's the start of a busy week as tensions on the Democratic side of the aisle are rising by the day.
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By the way, we're back. We were on vacation last week.
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My kids are still on vacation and I am at the beach, but working.
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So we will be here all week, both for The M.K. Show and for the AM update.
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Thanks to all of you for watching our baby Lisa special.
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We really appreciated it and we're really determined to help find that little girl, if at all possible.
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Check it out on our YouTube feed if you haven't seen it already.
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And by the way, happy St. Patrick's Day from Megyn Kelly.
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Meanwhile, they're not celebrating over on Team Blue because the tensions on that side of the aisle,
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And quickly, by the day, there's like there's a civil war happening right now within the Democratic Party.
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And there are calls to oust longtime Senate leader Chuck Schumer.
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New polls show record low support for the Democratic Party.
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Plus, a former first lady steps into the world of podcasting and totally bombs.
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Okay, so this is very interesting, what's happened to the Democrat Party.
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This morning on the New York Times is the daily podcast.
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They likened it to what happened with Republicans in 2009, 2010, after Barack Obama won in a
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sweeping victory and won all, you know, the House, the Senate, and the White House.
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And the Tea Party was born and, you know, healthcare was shoved down our throats.
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And the Republicans just wanted one thing, which was to fight, fight, find some way to fight
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these guys, and they were likening that to what we're seeing now with Dems.
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Here are the numbers, according to the polls we saw over the weekend.
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First, there's CNN saying that, okay, let's see, the Democratic Party's favorability rating
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stands at just 29%, a record low dating back to 1992, and a drop of 20 points in just four
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years since January of 2021, a drop of 20 points and a record low at 29%.
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We saw similar numbers out of NBC, so it's not a one-off.
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NBC shows the Democratic Party with just a 27% positive rating, 55% negative, so they're
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underwater by 28 points, a record low for the Democrat Party in more than 30 years of polling.
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It's possible that some of that is being generated by this kind of liberal onks, this kind of
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dissatisfaction with Democratic Party leadership, but this perception that they're, quote-unquote,
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not fighting hard enough, not fighting Trump hard enough, whatever that might mean.
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So maybe if you ask liberals now, what do you think of the Democratic Party, they'd be
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more inclined, many of them would be, to say, we don't approve of that.
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The problem is, if you ask me what was the worst problem with the Kamala Harris campaign,
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it'd be very difficult to answer given how many problems that campaign had.
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But if I were forced to choose the worst, I would say that she never committed to believing
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Americans, by the end of the campaign, would be like, I don't even know who she is, let
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With Trump, you always know, for better or for worse, from people's perception, he doesn't
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And I think in the Democratic Party more broadly, basically going back to 2015, 2016, they've
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defined themselves by being horrified by Donald Trump, by being aghast by Donald Trump, by being
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fearful of Donald Trump, by not being Donald Trump.
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There's no affirmative agenda that Americans can look at and say, oh, this is what I like.
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So even if you see a softening in approval ratings for Trump and you see it a little bit,
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not very much, but on certain issues at least, it doesn't translate into higher support for
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the Democratic Party because they don't provide an alternative.
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Based on what set of values or policies or even ideology, nobody knows.
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And that is actually also reflected in the CNN poll because they asked, name the Democratic
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leader you feel best reflects the core values of the party.
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No one best reflects the core values of the Democrat Party.
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The next in line with just 10 percent was AOC, who's just about tied with Kamala Harris at
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These are clearly not the party leaders if you're only getting nine or 10 percent.
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But interestingly, coming in at four percent is Barack Obama, who is tied with Jasmine Crockett.
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Yes, Jasmine Crockett, who nobody ever even heard of six months ago, but is out there doing
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her like dancing videos and trying to be like a new version of AOC.
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But unbelievably, Obama and Jasmine Crockett are tied for who best reflects the core values
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of the party, which which tells us what I will.
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I think if you look at the people you named, obviously, other than Obama, who's there because
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he was the president and Kamala, who's there because she just got done being the nominee.
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But nine percent is pathetic or whatever it was, eight percent.
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The three people that you named AOC, Bernie and Jasmine Crockett for all the intense disagreements
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I have with them are people who, in contrast to what I just got done saying, do actually
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believe in things and do actually say the things that they believe in.
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And I think most of all what they're doing now is creating this kind of perception, this
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branding, this posture like we are going to fight Trump on everything.
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And on some level, what the Democratic Party wants, what Democratic Party voters want,
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I think this poll shows it, is not just fighting with Trump, but somebody who at least believes
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And that was, you know, Bernie's campaign in 2016 and 2020 stood for a clear, affirmative
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agenda, which a lot of people disliked and a lot of people like.
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And I think that's what this is showing above all else.
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You've had this like faceless, kind of soulless, very consultant driven, artificial set of
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Democratic Party leaders who are petrified of saying the wrong word, going off script
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And then you have Donald Trump just riffing every day on everything without the slightest
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regard for how people are going to react to the things that he's saying.
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And I think that that is what has made the Democratic Party, which is just like this very
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limp, neoliberal, vaguely kind of trying to be a center-left party, but never really saying
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I think that's what you're seeing in these polls among Democratic Party voters is at least
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the people who are out there making a mock, you know, a mockery of themselves like Jasmine
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Limp is a rough word, but I think you're right.
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That is kind of how you how you feel when you look at the Democrats today.
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Both of these polls, CNN and NBC, seem to try to get at why.
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And it is not because Team Blue refuses to compromise with Trump, who has a mandate to
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They want their party leaders to get in there and fight and stop Trump.
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There is some still some strain within it that is very, very TDS afflicted.
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Most Democratic aligned adults say the party should focus on trying to stop the GOP agenda.
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So so the majority want that in just 2017, when Trump began his first term, 74 percent of
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the Dems thought the Dems should work with Republicans.
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OK, now it's only 42 percent who want Dems to work with Republicans and just doing the
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It must be somewhere over, you know, 50, 58 percent who say fight, stop the GOP agenda.
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Um, 52 percent of Democratic aligned adults say the Democratic Party is taking the wrong
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direction with the Republican Party and then jumping to the NBC poll, similar numbers where
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Uh, almost two thirds of Democrats, 65 percent say they want congressional Democrats to stick
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to their positions, even if that risks sacrificing, sacrificing bipartisan progress.
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Just 32 percent want them to make legislative compromises with Trump.
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It was almost exactly the opposite in April of 2017.
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59 percent of Dems said they wanted to make compromises with Trump again.
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Now, 65 percent say no, no compromises, which leads us to Chuck Schumer, whose behavior was
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somewhat ill-timed when you when you look at these polls, which came out after he announced
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he would vote for the continuing resolution to make sure that the government stayed open for the
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It's really just kicking the can for a bit before they can have the real fight.
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But in any event, he and a handful, eight Democrats came forward to say, we'll vote through
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to make sure that the government doesn't shut down.
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And now there's actual talk of bouncing him out as party leader, Glenn.
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I mean, here's the thing you had referenced earlier, the fact that a lot of Republicans
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under the Obama, especially the second term of Obama, wanted absolutely no compromise with
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the Obama administration, wanted nothing but pure resistance to everything that he did.
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John Boehner, when he was the House Speaker, used to feel boxed in because he wanted to do
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But a lot of the base were were what was vehemently opposed to any attempt to work with Democrats
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And on some level, Democrats are now in this same position where they don't want to do deals.
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They don't want to join hands with the Republicans and reach compromises.
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I think the big difference is, is that if you go back and look at the Republicans in the
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first term of Obama, the second term of Obama, they had it an agenda.
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Everybody understood what Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney or John McCain, what these people stood
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for, like what their values were, what their agenda was, the reason why they wanted to
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I go back to the fact that the Democrats have none of this.
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They just don't have any kind of affirmative agenda.
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And this is the thing that's different to the polling, I think, is so interesting between
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2017 and now, because ever since Trump got elected to that first term, Democrats and liberals
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have been feeding now on almost a decade of not just Trump has a wrong ideology or Trump
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And if you really start feeding on those kinds of ideas and that kind of demonization and come
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to believe it, I think it makes sense to feel like, oh, we shouldn't be cooperating with
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The problem is, is that all of the things that liberals seem to want in these polls,
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What did we hear throughout the last three to four months of the 2024 election?
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These things have all been all over the place and they don't work.
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This idea that we need to attack Trump even more.
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The Democratic Party has been doing that, and apparently they just want to double down
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on this strategy that clearly isn't working for them.
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Yeah, I think that the Democrats don't necessarily, I don't, I can't tell, but I don't think they
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necessarily want just to hear about orange man bad.
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They don't like, you know, certain things that Trump is doing.
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I mean, I'm sure they do want Trump fought on certain key things.
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You had Elon telling Larry Kudlow that we have to take a look at entitlements.
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That led to all sorts of meltdowns in many corners, including Republican ones.
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Anyway, I can see how they might oppose Trump's agenda, real or perceived.
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But what we hear out of Democrat leaders is so much is just orange man bad.
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It's just, OK, so there's very little to attach to in that.
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But here's a montage of the Democrats and pundits melting down over Chuck Schumer.
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And by the way, in Chuck Schumer's defense, the reason he and some eight other Democrats
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decided to vote for the continuing resolution is they were worried that if the government
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shut down and the government workers got divvied up into essential and non-essential workers,
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which is what happens, the essential ones have to keep working, even though there's a
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shutdown, that it would be like waving the red flag at the bull with Doge and Elon.
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Like, here's everybody who's essential and everybody else is not.
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And, you know, that's just like putting it all on the line.
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But the Democrats are so mad and so determined to fight Trump.
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Here's some of the punditry around Schumer over the past couple of days.
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I've never seen this level of volcanic anger at a Democrat ever.
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We want somebody who's going to stand up to this bully.
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Like, Dems don't just have a messaging problem.
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The Chuck Schumers of the world, the Hakeem Jeffries, they should all step down.
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This is a real black mark of stain on Chuck Schumer's leadership.
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Hakeem Jeffries, who's, of course, the Democrats' leader in the House, was asked on Friday,
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is it time to switch him out to find a new Senate leader?
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That's significant that he just said, next question.
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Now, by the next day, he had softened that and stood behind Schumer.
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But the fact that his instinct was not to support Chuck Schumer is very telling.
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I think here's the reality, though, that for me, at least, is underpinning all of this,
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which is and this is something that actually Donald Trump said often and loudly in the 2016
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campaign throughout 2015 in the primary and then into 2016 in the election, which is that
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the Republican Party establishment and the Democratic Party establishment, which is absolutely
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represented by people like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, have a great deal in common
00:17:38.960
They have differences like on social issues with abortion and trans issues and some of
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They definitely have differences there that make it seem like they're constantly at each
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But when it comes to economic policy, foreign policy, their differences are really not that
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Obama said that, too, that, you know, the Republicans are trying to depict him as this radical.
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And in reality, the Republican Democratic Party's fight within the 40 yard line.
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So when it comes to these demands that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats or whatever,
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do more to fight Trump and attack Trump, it seems like they just want this kind of this
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sort of imagery of fighting, this kind of surface fight.
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But there's nothing for them to really fight on.
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Now, Trump won in 2016, in my view, because he ran against both the Republican and the
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He had to do because his main opponent in the primary was Jeb Bush, the ultimate figure of
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So there definitely are some differences Democrats have with Trump.
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The problem is that what are Democrats going to pretend to stand for?
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They they they are very much shaped by their big donor base that has a lot of views that
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have a lot in common with the Republican Party establishment.
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And I think they're just very confused about who they are.
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It's like if you don't know who you are or you're afraid to say who you are, you can like
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wave your fist in the air and fight and say you're going to do this and that to resist.
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But ultimately, no one really finds it convincing because you're not really fighting for anything.
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And I don't think I think that's what makes the Democrats kind of pathetic right now in
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the eyes of most people is that they're just afraid to stand for anything.
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They're confused about what they stand for, whose interests they serve.
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Yeah, it's a turnoff and you don't want to be associated with losers like people who
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But people who, as you say, appear like limp, like a limp party that's afraid.
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And self-flagellating, it's like, I don't that doesn't inspire me to put on the team
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jersey, even if, you know, these these voters who are answering these polls happen to be
00:19:58.280
Democrats when you look at, you know, their partisan leanings and their ideology.
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Here is a man who got one percent in that poll asking who the who who represents our party
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best, like who actually does stand for our values.
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You might know him as the recent vice presidential ticket candidate underneath Kamala Harris,
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I would argue that Democratic officials should hear the primal scream that's coming from America
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OK, well, OK, but like what specifically and why is he getting one percent?
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This is like these people, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, ran for president, vice president
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as the Democratic nominee just three months ago.
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And three months later, my God, the vice presidential candidate is getting one percent
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of the vote among Democrats as to who represents the party.
00:21:04.220
I haven't looked, but I would be willing to stake a lot on the fact that when somebody
00:21:12.660
becomes the nominee of a major party, even then they lose the election a few months after
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that, if you ask people who's the face of the party, a lot of people are going to say
00:21:22.580
But I think Democrats do feel that loser vibe like they need to do something else or they can.
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I think they're embarrassed about themselves and their party and they should be.
00:21:30.540
And like even in this in in that clip, like Tim Walz is like, you know, we have to fight
00:21:39.600
But how and for what, you know, and I think like they you know, when they originally presented
00:21:46.640
Tim Walz, it was like a gift to the left wing of the party, like to the Bernie AOC wing.
00:21:50.980
But you didn't really see much of that during the campaign because everything that Kamala
00:21:58.120
And I think even before senators, what she always except in that one area that she really
00:22:02.300
knows well, which is criminal law, because of her being a prosecutor, every time she
00:22:05.980
speaks, she feels like she's extremely afraid of saying the wrong thing.
00:22:11.620
And there's a lot of Democratic Party leaders who have that sort of hesitation when they speak.
00:22:17.720
And even the ones who are now trying to say, like, let's fight, let's fight is an easy
00:22:31.760
And they still seem just very petrified to say out of fear of offending voters and donors
00:22:39.560
And that ultimately is a thing that not political junkies, but just like ordinary citizens who
00:22:44.620
pay some attention to politics, but not constantly.
00:22:50.700
So two men sensing an opportunity and clearly maneuvering to exploit it.
00:22:56.380
That would be Gavin Newsom of California, who's now launched this podcast where he's
00:23:13.480
I'll talk to him about it, but I just think what's happening now is he's training for
00:23:22.140
Vance and every conservative who goes on that podcast is helping him.
00:23:26.520
I don't it's like training Drago instead of Rocky.
00:23:32.420
This person actually doesn't respect you or your ideals.
00:23:35.580
You're not going to change the minds of the people who listen to his show.
00:23:42.940
He's trying to look like he's, you know, moderating toward the center.
00:23:48.660
He's taking more reasoned positions on things like boys and girls sports and so on.
00:23:53.900
And then there's Chris Murphy from my adopted home state of Connecticut, who is an absolute
00:24:01.760
But then he apparently fell in love with some hard left media company wannabe executive who's
00:24:11.140
backed by Soros, and she's helping him on his social media.
00:24:20.380
He says he separated from his wife in November.
00:24:26.300
And yet he's reportedly, according to Semaphore, in this relationship with this young hotshot female
00:24:31.880
In any event, his social media presence has certainly shot up, gotten better.
00:24:39.240
And now he's suddenly gone from this milquetoast, oh, gee, golly gee willikers guy, to fucking
00:24:47.180
bad day, which he said the other day, tweeted out after the Chuck Schumer thing.
00:24:56.580
And here's a post that he made on Election Day.
00:25:04.660
One of them is that I eat lunch at the same Burger King in Torrington every single year.
00:25:09.440
It's worked every election so far, so I'm not stopping.
00:25:24.200
And if that happens, we need to mobilize not thousands of Americans, not tens of thousands
00:25:30.280
of Americans, but hundreds of thousands of Americans.
00:25:34.200
We will have to be out there in the streets in a way that America has maybe never seen
00:25:41.420
And the only way that Americans are going to decide to take that kind of risk is if they
00:25:50.100
OK, the name of the woman is Tara McGowan, the CEO of the Left Wing Network of Digital
00:26:02.740
And now his social media presence, numbers and style have all changed dramatically.
00:26:10.040
His ex post from Friday after Schumer caved is, hey, I just got home.
00:26:23.120
I mean, the contrast between these two things is really interesting, right, because Gavin
00:26:27.400
Newsom is actually angering the liberal base, because while you are looking at this from
00:26:32.280
the perspective of like people like Charlie Kirk or or Steve Van, I guess you have Michael
00:26:38.320
I have someone else coming on shortly in that vein that they're helping Gavin Newsom from
00:26:44.980
Gavin Newsom is not inviting them on to fight with them or to be confrontational with them,
00:26:49.500
but kind of placate them, almost be friendly with them in a way that, as you said, is designed
00:26:58.940
I don't think Gavin Newsom, he may be helping himself in terms of general election prospects,
00:27:02.920
but in terms of the primary where you need like the real hardcore militants.
00:27:07.480
He's alienating a lot of people who just a couple months ago were very open to supporting
00:27:12.860
But I guess, you know, his strategy is I have to convince Democrats that not just that I'm
00:27:19.760
the candidate they want, but that I'm the candidate that can win.
00:27:22.620
Whereas, as you say, Chris Murphy has been told like, oh, this the the great the approach
00:27:29.040
is to go online and sound like, you know, a hardcore social media fanatic.
00:27:35.800
And, you know, Megan, you see this so much like I don't know if you saw like when Chuck
00:27:42.200
He has this new book out about the crisis of anti-Semitism.
00:27:44.420
But of course, like in the course of doing this book, he's mostly being asked about this
00:27:49.860
this controversy that he's fallen into and he'll do things like I saw this in three interviews
00:27:55.460
at least where he'll be like, and these guys in the White House, he's bastards.
00:28:00.020
And then he's like, oh, sorry, I didn't mean that.
00:28:01.620
Like as though he's just so enraged that he accidentally called the bastards.
00:28:05.480
And but he did it like three times proving that it was scripted.
00:28:17.480
And, you know, he had that like thing where he went and did that chant like we will win.
00:28:22.160
We will win with those like elderly Democratic members of Congress around him, one of whom
00:28:29.200
And, you know, like, you know, like all these things that they keep asking, like, you know,
00:28:39.220
And therefore they think that they have to use profanity, too, to relate to the ordinary
00:28:45.580
Like the reason Joe Rogan became so popular is because he's so authentic.
00:28:52.000
He just he you know, and he's open to all different things.
00:28:56.620
And the reason people like Trump is because they know that even if they don't agree with
00:29:01.860
him, he's never trying to deceive them or bullshit them by like presenting a mask to
00:29:09.040
So when you have, you know, politicians like Kamala who suddenly change accents based on
00:29:13.740
who she's speaking to or Democratic members of Congress who never used this kind of language
00:29:18.920
before, who now suddenly want to sound like they're social media influencers, it just it's
00:29:25.880
Yes, some hardcore Democrats will respond, but mostly it's just embarrassing.
00:29:33.820
Like I at the as the audience knows and, you know, I'm not I'm not above swearing myself,
00:29:44.980
No, my Nana, my mom's mom, she had a she she swore like a sailor and passed it down to
00:29:50.920
me and skipped a generation because my mom doesn't really do it and doesn't love when
00:29:54.580
But it has to be authentic to you, you know, or or you just sound kind of sad and pathetic
00:30:02.000
There is a question of whether he if Chris Murphy is not going to be the answer to 2028 and
00:30:09.480
the Democrats problem, maybe he'll be the answer to the Schumer problem, which is a
00:30:16.060
Like Schumer's 200 years old and, as you say, represents this wing of the party that's really
00:30:20.960
anachronistic and kind of just young people in general are are over the Mitch McConnell's
00:30:27.560
Chris Murphy at least has the advantage of relative youth at 51.
00:30:31.780
And this came up when he was on Meet the Press yesterday.
00:30:34.740
Any of your supporters responded online saying you should replace Leader Schumer.
00:30:45.780
I mean, I don't think anybody's having that conversation right now.
00:30:53.500
And what I'm telling you is that if we continue to observe norms, if we continue to engage in
00:31:00.160
business as usual, this democracy could be gone.
00:31:03.940
I don't think we have a year to save American democracy.
00:31:07.480
I think the way the president is acting, using law enforcement to target dissidents, harassing
00:31:15.400
TV stations and radio stations that criticize him, endorsing political violence, puts our
00:31:22.800
So that there's another like that's been the message for the past few days.
00:31:32.720
Like, I'm not sure we're ever going to be able to vote again.
00:31:34.980
Like the Democrats need to do something drastic right now or we're going to lose the country.
00:31:40.720
I mean, I don't agree with that in any way, shape or form.
00:31:43.380
But I I actually think that message is going to resonate with the blue base.
00:31:51.060
I mean, first of all, I just I have to say I find it so funny when you ask a politician
00:31:57.880
Oh, do you think would you be willing to step up into this and like this this promotion into
00:32:06.120
They have to pretend like this is not something I've been thinking about.
00:32:08.660
Like Chris Murphy is drooling about being the Senate minority leader.
00:32:13.820
And he has to be like that entire something worth the two of them.
00:32:23.180
But here's the problem, Megan, is that I can show you in 2016 and 2017 and 2018, all throughout
00:32:30.800
the first Trump campaign, the first Trump presidency, all throughout the campaign again in 2020 and
00:32:36.780
then in 2024, Democrats saying exactly the same things.
00:32:40.520
We're not going to have a democracy if Trump wins in 2020.
00:32:45.560
If you ask Chuck Schumer what he thinks about Trump, he would say exactly what Chris Murphy
00:32:50.260
said there, which is like, yeah, I think Trump's an authoritarian.
00:32:56.560
So this is I think the Democrats problem is this is what the base of the party wants to
00:33:03.440
And if you want to boost your social media numbers, if you want to get more cable hits,
00:33:07.960
you know, if you want to seem like you're more influential in the party than you were
00:33:10.840
previously, these are the things that you have to say.
00:33:13.140
But in terms of actually defeating Trump and not just Trump, but the Trump movement, the
00:33:22.300
People don't believe that Trump is a threat to democracy.
00:33:25.420
Now, maybe with some of the things that they're doing that I actually do find controversial,
00:33:29.700
but not huge departures from the tradition of presidents, that message will resonate more
00:33:38.700
I don't think they will ever come to see Donald Trump as some sort of like Mussolini figure
00:33:43.960
or Hitler figure or someone threatening American elections.
00:33:48.000
That's just not how the American people, by and large, perceive Trump.
00:33:54.900
They've been using it for a decade, though, and it's just not working.
00:33:58.060
And I don't understand why they think it's going to work now.
00:34:02.620
So you mentioned Joe Rogan and there has been this sort of weird panic on the left and
00:34:07.440
Of course, the irony being Joe Rogan was their Joe Rogan.
00:34:13.540
They drove him out of the party with their insanity, their woke insanity, the lies about
00:34:19.300
COVID, the crackdowns on Joe for his truths about COVID, all sorts of things, you know,
00:34:24.440
that drove a lot of us further to the right, including Rogan.
00:34:28.700
But the answer to their absence now of Joe Rogan in their party does not appear to be Michelle
00:34:39.460
She got no percentages whatsoever as the leader of the party, which is interesting because
00:34:45.320
think of all the buzz around her when we thought Joe had to step down after that June
00:34:56.600
She was one of the main names, if not the main name mentioned.
00:35:03.500
And apparently Michelle Obama does not see herself as a party leader because when she
00:35:10.040
talks about like her time in the White House, Barack running, it's all negative on this new
00:35:16.700
I mean, it's exactly what we thought, that it's very clear she hated being first lady.
00:35:23.360
She doesn't like the fact that Barack was president.
00:35:25.040
I mean, she just has nothing but negative things to say.
00:35:29.900
She doesn't like openly get, you know, caustic, but she makes it pretty clear that this has
00:35:38.140
Here's SOT15 with her and her brother, Craig, who's her co-host.
00:35:41.100
I couldn't have gotten through eight years in the White House without my big brother.
00:35:46.160
That's another sort of unusual aspect to our lives.
00:35:50.680
Our relationship was this whole, you know, being married to the president of the United
00:35:55.740
States thing that none of us kind of banked on.
00:35:59.100
I mean, we knew Barack was smart and, you know, ambitious.
00:36:02.560
But, you know, I think, but you, you talked me into supporting his run.
00:36:09.200
And he was smart enough to know that he needed to come to you and sell you on the idea.
00:36:14.800
Barack came to me and he's like, you know, I can't convince your sister to go along with
00:36:24.360
It's like, I think I'm going to run for president.
00:36:27.360
But I convinced you to not penalize him for being really good at what he does.
00:36:39.480
That does not sound like somebody who is in favor of his run for president or frankly,
00:36:49.700
Think about if that's how, like, that's why you thought that your spouse was going to run
00:37:04.740
I want to heal the country, hope and change what like she wasn't buying it.
00:37:09.140
And it doesn't sound like she buys it to this day.
00:37:12.640
You know, I have to say there's a part of that with which I can empathize, because if you run
00:37:21.120
for president, your entire family is subjected to immense amount of public scrutiny, every
00:37:27.440
aspect of your life is picked apart and disclosed.
00:37:30.360
And the role of first lady is not necessarily the freest role.
00:37:34.880
There's expectations of what you're supposed to do and can't do the decorum that limit to
00:37:45.500
I think it's outrageous that that wasn't something that she wanted for her life or expected for
00:37:51.300
But if that's really how she feels, and there's been reports for a long time that that is how
00:37:55.320
she feels, it has to produce a lot of resentment.
00:37:59.220
I mean, he ended up doing what she insists she didn't want him to do.
00:38:03.500
And she did end up being first lady for eight years.
00:38:06.600
And if that really is the kind of thing that she disliked doing, you have to kind of think
00:38:11.920
that there's something in her that's probably pretty angry about that.
00:38:15.560
You know, I also should say that she got immense benefits from having had that role.
00:38:23.460
I mean, she was kind of very regal and one might say queen like in her behavior.
00:38:28.240
But since then, too, both of them got extremely rich.
00:38:33.040
They spend most of their time on, you know, Richard Branson's yacht or in Martha's Vineyard
00:38:38.940
at their sprawling estate or in their, you know, multimillion dollar D.C. townhouse.
00:38:43.720
So this kind of like I wasn't sure I didn't want this seems unconvincing to me as well in
00:38:52.040
And she's also out on David Geffen's yacht with Oprah.
00:38:59.120
Look how look at me becoming with her big face on the front.
00:39:02.740
Like, OK, you know, she's a little drunk on her own wine, but not on Barack's, which is
00:39:08.040
just interesting to me at this point after having been first lady twice.
00:39:13.960
Michelle Obama was not some star in her own right.
00:39:17.160
I think it's Sidley in Austin in Chicago, which is fine.
00:39:28.860
So she took her Harvard law degree and like got a job with a corporate law firm.
00:39:33.560
Would literally nobody would have known her name if that's how she had chosen to spend
00:39:37.640
We know who she is because of him, because he became president.
00:39:41.400
He was a character and had a lot of there were a lot of reasons behind his election.
00:39:48.400
And even knowing that divorce rumors and, you know, she's not showing up for him, whether
00:39:54.320
it's at the Jimmy Carter funeral or the Trump inauguration basketball game he just went and
00:39:59.340
went to in L.A. when visiting their daughters and then dinner with the daughters was not there.
00:40:06.080
I would if it were me, I would say something nice about him.
00:40:11.520
It was it was meant to be he I knew he could heal the earth in the way he did.
00:40:20.460
Then she gets on to talking a little bit about him personally.
00:40:25.900
When a girlfriend comes to visit, it's usually like you've got to stay for two days because
00:40:32.520
it's going to take us so much time to check up.
00:40:38.080
Now, Barack has come in, he's come out and he's like, y'all still talking?
00:40:41.220
He'll sit down for five minutes, be like, how are the boys?
00:40:43.880
And the flip side of my husband, right, because he golfs and golfing takes as long as the first
00:40:49.280
session of our, you know, it takes five hours to golf.
00:40:52.260
He'll golf with his buddies, come back and be like, how's X?
00:41:00.140
OK, so can I just say she stole that from a comedian who's all over Instagram that that
00:41:07.300
And forgive me, I can't remember the guy's name, but he does his whole bit about how he
00:41:11.200
He goes golfing with a guy whose wife just died and he comes home and the wife's like,
00:41:23.680
But my point is simply that to me, none of the clips, because we have 10 of them, I'm
00:41:28.640
not going to go through all of them, sound to me like a person who looks at the husband
00:41:37.820
I can attest to that to still have stars in your eyes for your loved one.
00:41:43.240
You know, I like I first of all, like I do often want to be a little bit humble about
00:41:52.240
I mean, there were certainly all kinds of speculation that the Clintons were going to
00:41:57.640
And here they are, you know, in the mid 70s and they're still married.
00:42:03.440
Oh, there was all kinds of, you know, speculation about Melania hating Trump and wouldn't even,
00:42:08.780
And the reality is, like, even if you do love your spouse, there are times you're going
00:42:13.700
The only reasons that you get those negative emotions is because you love them and care
00:42:17.760
What I find weird, Megan, is I can't imagine going on a podcast publicly and talking about
00:42:26.660
what obviously I do think those presentments are real that she's sharing, like these kind
00:42:31.040
of like complaints about your husband, not like, you know, you could do it in a light
00:42:35.460
way, in a humorous way, like the differences between a husband and wife or whatever.
00:42:40.040
But she seems like that is pretty, I don't know, pretty intimate and pretty deep about
00:42:46.280
what she seems to find unsatisfying about her her marriage to Barack Obama in a way that
00:42:54.340
Like that's the sort of thing that you work on with a marriage counselor or in therapy or
00:42:59.880
Why is she saying so much, as you say, like that's very negative?
00:43:04.160
The only reason we know her is because of her husband.
00:43:09.300
You know, I went work for a major law firm when I graduated law school on Wall Street.
00:43:14.580
And, you know, I left in two years because it was so soul crushing.
00:43:18.400
And all of this that she's complaining about is what lifted her into this figure that she
00:43:26.320
Like she writes books and they go to the New York Times bestseller list because she was
00:43:32.620
Like you have to have a lot of negative resentment inside of you toward your husband if you start
00:43:37.480
a podcast and you immediately start kind of complaining about what happened inside your
00:43:48.060
She's constantly negative and full of grievance, notwithstanding the enormous riches that this
00:43:56.700
This country has done nothing to her other than treat her, as you point out, like royalty.
00:44:01.300
Even though she said this is the first time in my adult life, I'm actually proud of my
00:44:04.700
country when he got either nominated or elected, whichever doesn't make a difference.
00:44:09.980
First time ever, really, this country where you got you went to Princeton, you went to Harvard
00:44:13.720
law school, you wound up a successful lawyer, you never found a way to be proud of your country
00:44:20.700
And ever since has been bitching about her life on the yachts and in the multimillion
00:44:26.880
dollar home in Martha's Vineyard and the homes in Hawaii and Chicago and D.C. and the still
00:44:33.120
controlling the levers of power and going up as the star speaker at the DNC.
00:44:41.400
But there's no amount of money or political power or success or number of memoirs called
00:44:46.020
becoming, maybe we should just say it, beautiful, stunning, that'll be the next, the follow-up,
00:44:56.180
And honestly, like this podcast, now it's getting, I don't know, the second episode had 14,000
00:45:01.200
views with, where she had Issa Rae on there, 14,000 views a couple of days into it.
00:45:05.960
That, I realize she's just getting started, but that's, that's embarrassing for the former
00:45:09.500
first lady, for the woman who was almost president being talked about as to step into the Joe
00:45:16.660
I think with the Barack Obama at 4%, Michelle Obama not even on the list, and this podcast
00:45:21.420
struggling to put real numbers on the board, I think the Democrat Party is over the Obamas.
00:45:26.300
Yeah, that, honestly, that, that really struck me too.
00:45:30.680
I mean, I'm, you know, over the last, I think like six years now, it's kind of almost been
00:45:35.800
like a conservative paranoia that the Democratic Party was maneuvering constantly to get rid
00:45:42.380
of whoever was going to be their nominee and replace him with Michelle Obama.
00:45:45.540
That was in 2020, what we heard in 2024, what we heard, because a lot of polls showed that
00:45:51.120
But I think it was very surface level, like it's easy to be popular if you've never run
00:45:55.280
for office before, if you haven't really staked out a lot of positions and haven't had to.
00:46:00.200
We saw that with Kamala Harris, the way, you know, at first she seemed like she was this
00:46:03.820
cultural phenomenon, and then she had to say what she believed in and couldn't, and it
00:46:10.900
It's like, I could see huge numbers of people turning into Michelle Obama's podcast at the start
00:46:17.680
And we're, we find this person interesting and then tailing off and she becomes less
00:46:21.800
The fact that it's starting with these pathetic numbers, you know, I think it does illustrate
00:46:29.600
I saw a clip where she and her brother were debating whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich
00:46:34.480
and trying to, you know, it's like, and again, this is what I mean.
00:46:37.640
It's like Michelle Obama lives the ultimate jet setting life.
00:46:42.900
She's at the most, you know, like ostentatious gala.
00:46:47.480
She's wearing, you know, 50,000 and a hundred thousand dollar gowns everywhere.
00:46:51.540
And so then I'm trying to try and be relatable by talking to your brother about such a boring,
00:47:00.040
This is, I just, no one's going to listen to this.
00:47:07.200
I'll give you one more soundbite of Michelle with brother Craig and why they wanted to
00:47:14.360
You know, some people react like, you're doing a podcast with your brother.
00:47:25.720
I think there are plenty of siblings who have great relationships.
00:47:29.480
But, you know, I think when we think back to where that came from, we think about, I think
00:47:39.260
I mean, we were, we weren't wealthy and dad was working class.
00:47:44.500
We lived in the same apartment our whole lives and had to grow into that.
00:47:48.220
And as a result, you and me, we were, we were physically close growing up.
00:47:53.300
But because they lived in a small apartment, you see, now this is why brother Craig is the
00:48:00.320
co-host of this podcast, which let's face it, no one cares about brother Craig.
00:48:05.180
If she were doing this with Barack, she might actually get some numbers on the board or with
00:48:10.320
You know, I think people are mildly interested in the daughters, but brother Craig, I'm sorry.
00:48:15.360
No, don't care that you were physically close, whatever that means under a roof growing up.
00:48:20.580
Um, I, I just feel like, look, maybe this is the new Joe Rogan thing.
00:48:25.640
Maybe she too, like Chris Murphy dropping a fucking tough day.
00:48:29.640
And this is Michelle Obama trying to be like her authentic self to be the new Rogan Glenn.
00:48:34.960
But to me, the whole thing is just evidence of, you know, Democrats, uh, uh, untethered,
00:48:41.420
Like not understanding the way forward and just kind of throw the board.
00:48:46.240
I'll give you the last word before we go to break.
00:48:48.840
There's nothing charismatic about Craig, brother Craig.
00:48:51.460
Although I will say like, that is why I kind of thought she was being authentic in these
00:48:59.320
They, she does seem to be talking to him in this way that maybe is more intimate.
00:49:02.540
She'd be willing to say things to him that she wouldn't be willing to say to a generalized
00:49:07.420
So I don't know, maybe that's what they thought was going to be the appeal of the podcast,
00:49:14.320
Like just these two siblings talking about themselves and their relationship.
00:49:20.200
Talk about something that matters to the rest of us.
00:49:22.840
Like talk about the news, talk about policy, talk about something that matters to other
00:49:27.320
By the way, it's very interesting without her speechwriters.
00:49:29.960
She's a shadow of the woman we saw on stage at the DNC and elsewhere where she gives these
00:49:36.980
She pauses it right the most, just the right moment when it's just her.
00:49:43.920
We'll get into Mahmoud Khalil on which Glenn and I disagree.
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00:51:44.420
We just sort of covered the Dems on Team Red and what Donald Trump is doing.
00:51:48.740
The most recent legal controversy is not Mahmoud Khalil, which we'll get to, but these deportations
00:51:59.400
So Trump and Tom Homan and Kristi Noem got some 250 or so alleged gang leaders onto a plane
00:52:11.160
to be deported to El Salvador because the president of El Salvador has agreed to take them.
00:52:17.660
We were paying him some $6 million, and he's agreed to take these folks, which most, I think,
00:52:24.160
Um, but not, not these particular people because they filed the legal challenge and said, you
00:52:32.060
Um, we are challenging your deploying the quote alien enemies act against us.
00:52:39.900
So what happened was Trump signed a proclamation to deploy this thing.
00:52:45.700
Uh, it's been deployed for the first time since World War II to remove these alleged gang
00:52:51.800
It's only been used three times before to bar citizens of hostile enemy governments from
00:52:56.640
And only during a declared war, Trump alleged that this gang is conducting irregular warfare
00:53:04.640
Um, he's declared them a terrorist organization, them and the court and the cartels.
00:53:08.300
And he's also claimed that they've conducted an invasion against the United States and therefore
00:53:13.780
says he can deport them without really doing anything.
00:53:16.620
You can just stick them on planes and send them out of the United States.
00:53:20.780
Then they went into court, the ACLU and this group representing them, democracy forward filed
00:53:26.520
a lawsuit on behalf of, uh, these alleged gang members at 2 a.m.
00:53:35.320
And a judge, this judge, James Bosberg, chief judge in the district of Columbia appointed by
00:53:42.180
Barack Obama, sided with the plaintiffs saying, you cannot do this.
00:53:49.240
And as he heard that there were three flights departing, like at that moment or within moments
00:53:54.560
to take these immigrants to, um, El Salvador, he said, you, you have to stop it.
00:54:00.980
You have to immediately halt the removals and return the flights to the United States.
00:54:05.920
Any flights that are in the air, my head is going to explode.
00:54:08.900
This is so beyond the pale that he does not have this authority.
00:54:16.460
And the Trump administration said, uh, I got a whole lot of, uh, for you, which is I'm giving
00:54:21.240
you the Italian sign under the chin for no, to put it politely, um, the flights have already
00:54:31.160
There's a dispute about in particular, whether the third flight had in fact already left U S
00:54:36.380
airspace, the first two look like they actually had.
00:54:39.000
In any event, then the president of El Salvador posted a picture of these now prisoners coming
00:54:44.140
into his jail saying, oopsie, too late to this judge.
00:54:50.400
And, um, as I review this alien enemies act, Glenn, there's been, it's old, but there's Supreme
00:54:55.780
court precedent on it saying there is no right for judicial review, um, for good reason, because
00:55:01.700
they do not wish the president's powers in this particular department, when it comes
00:55:11.200
And the high court said like pretty explicitly, well, we know that that will lead to, you know,
00:55:17.380
some, some, you know, some bad decisions or some bad results.
00:55:25.180
Uh, the alien enemy act precludes judicial review of removal orders.
00:55:31.920
They wrote, um, in a case, such great war powers may be abused, no doubt, but that is a bad
00:55:37.100
reason for having judges supervise their exercise, whatever the legal formulas within which such
00:55:45.520
Accordingly, we hold that full responsibility for the just exercise of this great power may
00:55:49.300
validly be left where the Congress has constitutionally placed it on the president of the United States.
00:55:56.240
Not only did this guy review what Trump did, he's calling back flights of alleged gang members
00:56:07.940
So there's some things I agree with in, in what you said and some things I don't.
00:56:11.680
So you repeatedly said, and I think it's totally appropriate that these are alleged gang members.
00:56:17.160
One of the reasons I stopped practicing law and started writing about politics and became
00:56:23.180
a journalist in 2005, 2004, 2005 was because there were a lot of what I regarded as excesses,
00:56:32.340
attacks on civil liberties in the name of the war on terror.
00:56:35.120
One of the leading ones of which was that they were putting people in Guantanamo.
00:56:38.460
None of those detainees at Guantanamo ever had any, even one time right to go into court
00:56:45.760
and contest the allegations against them that they were part of terrorist organizations,
00:56:49.560
that they had participated in Al Qaeda or any attacks on anyone.
00:56:53.500
And as it turns out, a lot of them, even the US government admits, were actually innocent.
00:56:58.100
That's why we ended up letting them go in so many cases, because they actually were not
00:57:03.660
They were not part of members of terrorist organizations, and yet they were snatched away
00:57:08.480
from their countries, brought to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, put in very repressive
00:57:15.400
And I understand that in wartime, some of those things are going to happen.
00:57:21.300
You are going to bomb someplace where a lot of the enemy combatants are, and you're going
00:57:27.940
And of course, you're going to end up imprisoning some people unjustly.
00:57:30.940
But I think we have to be very careful for that reason about when we really declare something
00:57:36.220
as a war and when we don't precisely because the powers of the government escalate dramatically.
00:57:42.400
Are we really at war with these gangs or are these gangs more like horrific and violent
00:57:51.000
And I think one of the things we have to realize is that human institutions, by definition, are
00:57:57.640
And these are not people just being deported, which would be fine if they were sent back
00:58:02.860
They're being put into a prison that is probably five times worse than Guantanamo in El Salvador.
00:58:09.440
And if some of them are not actually gang members and there's no opportunity for them to contest
00:58:14.620
the charges against them, you have to say that is an unjust outcome.
00:58:18.660
And the question is, if it's not a judge who who decides when a president is acting
00:58:24.600
unconstitutionally, exceeding his powers under the Constitution, who is it who judges that?
00:58:34.100
If the judge doesn't have the purview to step in, as the Supreme Court has made it clear
00:58:41.180
Then the remedy is impeachment against the president.
00:58:45.440
Except there were a lot of times in every Democratic presidency, including Joe Biden's, when
00:58:51.340
conservatives went into a district court to argue that Joe Biden was exceeding his powers
00:58:56.760
under the Constitution, like when they were coercing big tech companies to censor American
00:59:03.680
That's different because this is why, as I understand it, as I understand it, the reason
00:59:08.440
that this was given, you know, the sort of no judicial review blessing is because it speaks
00:59:17.500
So that's when the president's foreign power, foreign policy powers are at their peak and
00:59:23.240
You can't like a judge cannot review President Trump saying, I'm going to bomb the Houthis
00:59:34.680
And that like there are limits to the separations of powers and where a president can be checked.
00:59:38.520
And when it comes to foreign policy, he's at the apex of his independent power.
00:59:48.100
I mean, in 2008, the Supreme Court in the Bumadini case actually did rule that the detainees
00:59:53.860
at Guantanamo had a one time right of habeas corpus to go into a federal court and argue
00:59:58.880
that their detention was unjust, even though we basically were treating that as a war, the
01:00:04.400
I guess what I'm saying is if all a president has to do is treat any kind of criminality
01:00:09.820
or any kind of social problem and just declares it to be a war, like an actual invasion or
01:00:14.940
a war, I don't think this is the sort of thing that most Americans think of when we think of
01:00:19.980
wars being at war or the kind of precedent that has traditionally recognized this power.
01:00:25.680
I agree with you on the term war, but he's also declared it an invasion.
01:00:32.260
I mean, he declared this an invasion, given the fact that we had between 10 and 20 million
01:00:38.740
And that's I mean, that's covered in the Alien Enemies Act invasions.
01:00:44.480
And he's using that declaration to say, you're out and I'm not going to cross T's and dot
01:00:51.580
And it's not like they don't know anything about these guys today.
01:01:04.800
They I like the government is saying these are gang members.
01:01:09.880
But the government is saying we've done our homework.
01:01:12.780
Tom Homan is saying and they're one, definitely illegals.
01:01:16.160
And two, members of criminal gangs that we've declared terrorist organizations.
01:01:24.580
They're there's a they're allegedly part of this war and they're allegedly part of this
01:01:28.940
I just think there's no question that Trump is going to be upheld here.
01:01:34.340
And I actually think this judge could be in serious trouble.
01:01:37.080
I actually think this judge may get admonished by the D.C.
01:01:44.380
I don't necessarily disagree with your prediction about what the court's going to do.
01:01:49.440
This is a Supreme Court that has given great deference.
01:01:52.100
To presidential power, especially when it comes to foreign policy and war, not just
01:01:55.580
now, but as you say, historically, the one thing I want to quibble with, though, is that
01:02:00.240
I remember being told that we don't need to worry about Guantanamo because it was only
01:02:04.340
the worst of the worst that were being put there.
01:02:08.760
And it turned out a lot of the people, not just a few, but a lot of the people who were
01:02:12.940
put there ended up being falsely accused, which is always going to happen.
01:02:16.920
But now maybe we say, look, we don't care between, you know, allowing people to be in
01:02:22.820
our country and just punishing them unjustly based on false accusations.
01:02:29.120
But I do think, you know, because deportations usually, which nobody objects to, that's what
01:02:33.420
Trump ran on, means taking these people and sending them back to their country of origin,
01:02:38.140
Here, they're being sent to, on purpose, one of the most repressive prison systems in the
01:02:43.200
world, which is the drug dealing and terrorism prison in El Salvador.
01:02:46.680
And if they're not really gang members, if they're just in the country illegally, is that
01:02:52.500
And is that an outcome that even if it's unjust, we're willing to live with for the ability
01:03:00.180
I don't like people being unjustly accused or punished.
01:03:07.360
As you know, get out, but not necessarily to an El Salvadorian prison.
01:03:18.580
Like, don't come here illegally or you could wind up on a midnight flight to El Salvador.
01:03:25.720
And if Tom Homan has reason to believe you're part of Trenda Aragua, so much the worse for
01:03:31.360
Like, don't do anything that's going to make Tom Homan think that because it got so out of control
01:03:36.440
under Joe Biden that we're now at this point, invasion, extraordinary powers, flight, you're
01:03:47.660
So the audience, I think, knows my stance on this because I did a weekend podcast.
01:03:52.480
If not, the short stance is I believe the government has every right to deport him, notwithstanding
01:03:58.700
the fact that he's a green card holder and married to an American, which is really kind
01:04:04.200
Um, but the green card is not an irrelevance and, uh, he's, he's deportable under several
01:04:11.580
He's done a number of things that can get him deported.
01:04:14.620
I think some of his speech is grounds enough, but he's actually behaved in a way that could
01:04:20.480
You can get deported for a lot of things, even when you're a green card holder, it's a privilege.
01:04:25.080
And Trump had every right to say you're out of here.
01:04:29.440
Uh, and you think it's a first amendment case, which I don't think.
01:04:32.880
So explain why you think that and why you defend him in general.
01:04:38.520
I mean, first of all, you know, I, I've been defending free speech is probably my most important
01:04:42.520
value, not just as a journalist, but as a lawyer for 30 years.
01:04:45.900
I remember being inspired by what the ACLU did in Skokie, Illinois, where they defended
01:04:49.960
the right of American Nazi party members to march through Skokie, which was a town of
01:04:54.320
Holocaust survivors wearing Nazi uniforms, even though the lawyers who did that were Jewish
01:05:02.460
And they still defended the right of free speech of the people who are Nazis, who only
01:05:06.660
30 years before had tried to exterminate Jews from the earth, because I think the principle
01:05:11.500
And I've seen many times people say they believe in the principle when it comes to their
01:05:14.540
own allies, and then suddenly start finding ways to justify censorship by saying it's
01:05:19.600
incitement or it's something else when it comes to the views they most disagree with.
01:05:22.880
And I think that's what is important to recognize here is the Trump campaign, the Trump
01:05:27.120
administration made very clear that they intend to go after and punish in a lot of ways people
01:05:32.480
who are protesting the Israeli war in Gaza or Israel itself because the Trump administration
01:05:39.180
So we have to recognize the people they're going after have views that the Trump administration
01:05:45.460
In the case of Mahmoud Khalil specifically, I've heard a lot of accusations about him, that
01:05:51.140
he is a supporter of Hamas, that he engaged in intimidation of violence.
01:05:56.780
It is true that some of the protesters at Colombia engaged in bad acts, but you can't
01:06:05.200
And there was, I don't know if you saw, there was a Wall Street Journal reporting yesterday
01:06:11.280
And a lot of the Jewish students at Colombia who are part of these encampments, part of
01:06:15.160
these protests, and they did have a ton of American Jewish students as part of them.
01:06:18.880
I've interviewed them, all stood up for Khalil and said, the reason he was the mediator
01:06:23.940
between our group and the administration is because he's trusted by all sides.
01:06:31.460
If he hears an anti-Semitic claim, he'll denounce it.
01:06:34.420
He's actually been at the Shabbat standards that they were holding.
01:06:38.820
I'd like to know specifically on the record what he has done that makes this claim that he's
01:06:45.100
a Hamas supporter or incited harassment and violence against Jewish students justifiable
01:06:49.400
because I've looked very carefully and I don't see anything.
01:06:52.540
He went on CNN and said his vision of the world is to do it.
01:06:56.100
Well, he works for UNRWA, which is basically a branch of Hamas.
01:07:00.660
Megan, the UNRWA was funded by the U.S. government for decades under both political parties.
01:07:09.240
But more recently, it's been very aligned with Hamas.
01:07:11.620
I mean, if you're going to say that people who go work for the UN are now suspect of
01:07:18.840
being terrorists or whatever, you know how many employees of the UNR and of UNRWA specifically?
01:07:23.860
Even Joe Biden cut ties with UNRWA because it was working with Hamas post 10-7.
01:07:35.980
Joe Biden fed Israel the arms and the money that they used to wage the war in Gaza.
01:07:40.920
Joe Biden has long been one of the most stalwart supporters of Israel in all of Washington.
01:07:49.800
But we're getting sidetracked because even though the guy worked for UNRWA, which I do
01:07:53.360
believe is working for Hamas, we can table that.
01:07:58.040
I don't think there's any question this guy supports what Hamas did on 10-7.
01:08:07.700
Second of all, he referred to it as armed resistance, what the Palestinians did.
01:08:13.480
It's on tape that we aired it on the show on Saturday.
01:08:25.840
So let's just look at what he did as the spokesperson for this group, Columbia University Apartheid.
01:08:34.660
I can't remember the acronym, but it's, you know, the group, C-U-A-D, I think it was, Divest.
01:08:43.060
That was the group that took over Hamilton Hall and engaged in the encampments on Columbia
01:08:49.620
Hamilton Hall alone had so many crimes we could spend all day talking about.
01:08:54.560
He was, not that we know of, we don't believe he was there, but he was the chief negotiator.
01:09:01.300
When you're the spokesperson, that's literally written into the immigration and the terrorism
01:09:05.420
If you are the spokesperson for a group that espouses or supports terror, you're out.
01:09:15.000
And he was the spokesperson by every account that you hear of his behavior.
01:09:19.420
He was going in there daily to speak with Columbia University administrators saying,
01:09:24.780
You need to divest entirely from Israel or you're going to get more Hamilton Halls.
01:09:31.880
OK, let me just say this is so important about what these protests were in general and
01:09:36.860
what the one at Columbia was, because I've interviewed a lot of Columbia students who
01:09:39.900
participated and even organized these protests.
01:09:41.860
Once again, many of whom are Jewish, many of whom are American Jews.
01:09:46.200
There's tons of American Jews who were vehemently opposed to the Israeli war in Gaza and who
01:09:52.660
But a lot of the ones who show up are like Jewish voices for peace, which is as Hamas
01:10:03.200
Let's not pretend that they represent the dominant Jewish voice on the issue.
01:10:06.040
No, but they represent a significant they represent a significant minority.
01:10:10.040
They had Shabbat dinners inside the encampment at Columbia because of how many Jewish students
01:10:18.840
Khalil is someone who would even step in front of an aggressor to protect Jewish students.
01:10:24.960
And here's what an American Jewish woman at Columbia said.
01:10:27.720
I can state with full confidence that Mahmoud has never expressed support for Hamas.
01:10:32.500
And she said she's an American Jewish woman who believes in the importance of Israel
01:10:36.720
And it talked about how often he would attend the Shabbat dinner inside the encampment.
01:10:42.200
I think like, let me just use January 6th for a minute.
01:10:46.500
So yes, he would go and participate in this probably Jewish Voices for Peace Shabbat dinner,
01:10:51.420
which again, they're hard partisan Hamas supporters.
01:10:56.100
While he was stopping, while this group that he was affiliated with was stopping Jews from
01:11:00.440
attending the buildings they wanted to attend, crossing campus when they wanted to cross
01:11:04.460
campus professors to like, I'm sure I'm super glad he had Shabbat dinner while he was stopping
01:11:10.200
Jews from exercising their rights on the campus.
01:11:13.420
He who you have no proof that he was ever stopping Jews from his group.
01:11:19.560
So that means like what I've spent, you know, two or three years arguing with liberals by arguing
01:11:24.900
that they had wildly overstated what January 6th was and had unjustly prosecuted the people
01:11:31.120
who were there, especially the ones who never engaged in violence.
01:11:34.420
And what they would tell me is, what do you mean?
01:11:36.620
Here are the people who are beating police officers.
01:11:41.080
And I would say, OK, we'll punish the people who used violence against the police officers.
01:11:58.220
You can't charge somebody with crime by like thought or by affiliation unless it's an actual
01:12:03.760
But we don't have to prove that he committed a crime.
01:12:09.200
If he's the spokesperson for this group, then you could prove you could allege extortion.
01:12:16.920
But that doesn't mean crimes haven't been committed by this guy.
01:12:22.060
They're looking into that right now, including the DOJ.
01:12:27.900
If he if he did these things, if he acted as a spokesperson for this group that did
01:12:32.840
commit crimes on the campus of Columbia, he's out.
01:12:37.860
You can get him out under numerous provisions under immigration law for criminality, for
01:12:45.420
And then ultimately for the Marco Rubio secretary of state thing that says if you're a threat
01:12:50.460
That's you don't have to prove anything other than Marco Rubio reasonably believes that.
01:12:55.540
The Bill of Rights still restricts what Marco Rubio can do, even though he's the secretary
01:13:00.120
The Bill of Rights applies to green card holders.
01:13:04.120
And if Joe Biden had said, I'm deporting Jordan Peterson because he's expressing a lot of dissent
01:13:09.160
to my views and participating in protest against our policy.
01:13:14.120
Every conservative in the country would have said that is a threat to the Constitution to
01:13:21.440
But OK, well, there's nothing unreasonable about saying being the spokesperson for an on
01:13:26.120
campus terror group means you violated your terms of staying here and your green card
01:13:31.040
is getting I think you're what I think you're wildly mischaracterizing the point of this
01:13:35.060
I remember, you know, very well in 2002, people who are opposed to the U.S.
01:13:38.800
invasion of Iraq were told, oh, they were Saddam Hussein supporters.
01:13:41.980
And they would say, no, we're not Saddam Hussein supporters.
01:13:44.140
We just don't think the U.S. should invade Iraq.
01:13:47.140
If you don't support financing Ukraine, you're you're told, oh, you're a Putin supporter.
01:13:52.820
I just don't want the U.S. involved in this war.
01:13:54.760
That's a strong protest were about that's a strong because these protests were against
01:14:11.740
That they bought the the anti-Israel protesters modeled themselves after the student movements
01:14:18.580
in the 1980s that were against the apartheid regime, the main demand of which was we demand
01:14:31.420
The American students, the American students cannot be deported for having done that.
01:14:35.100
But someone here on a green card can be if they had he's Trump is not running around trying
01:14:41.640
to deport people who protested on behalf of the Palestinians in Dearborn, Michigan without
01:14:50.260
The reason this guy and he's not going to Glenn, let's be honest.
01:14:53.760
The reason this guy got caught in the crosshairs is because they unleashed hell on that Columbia
01:15:02.920
His group, of which he was a spokesman, whom he was defending and making demands on behalf
01:15:12.020
That's why he's getting deported, not because he's pro-Palestinian.
01:15:15.600
I just I'm having trouble about this issue of is criminality necessary.
01:15:23.060
Megan, hundreds of Columbia students, hundreds, maybe thousands were arrested throughout 2024
01:15:28.820
when the administration would call the NYPD on them.
01:15:31.780
Khalil was never even arrested as part of those protests.
01:15:38.800
He was somebody that the administration trusted, that the protesters trusted to try and bridge
01:15:56.660
He looks like a Hamas supporter to you, but that doesn't make him one.
01:16:02.500
I'm talking about the T-shirt, which has some guy with the head exploding and his behavior
01:16:13.460
But there are there there is evidence that he's a Hamas supporter, but to prove that
01:16:17.620
so I there's it's pointless to spend too much time here.
01:16:21.640
We've pulled somebody's green card because he has schizophrenia.
01:16:24.720
Tell me we can pull people's green cards for things like that for violating the terms
01:16:32.320
You violated the terms that we gave you the permission to stay here.
01:16:35.920
But we can't pull it for somebody who's the spokesperson for a group that's banging down
01:16:40.640
the doors, that's smashing windows with hammers, that's intimidating Jewish students
01:16:52.620
You can do it whether he's committed a crime or whether he hasn't, whether he's just in
01:16:58.000
And by the way, just because he wasn't charged, Alvin Bragg doesn't mean he did not commit
01:17:03.420
extortion or he wasn't ever arrested, even though hundreds, hundreds of New York, of
01:17:11.620
I think it matters a great deal, because if you're not then deporting him because of
01:17:15.600
criminality, you're admitting that you're you're deporting him because of his views
01:17:24.840
Trump, no, but but there's no but these that if that's these claims, they have to be
01:17:31.200
If you're saying, oh, that's right, but a conspirator would not have been.
01:17:37.620
A conspirator would not have been in Hamilton Hall necessarily.
01:17:57.380
It's pointless for us to keep going back and forth.
01:17:59.200
What I'm saying is that, of course, the cops wouldn't have arrested him.
01:18:05.700
He was the one in there with Columbia saying, sure is a nice university you have here.
01:18:17.380
He violated the terms of his permission slip to be here, and he can be deported for that
01:18:24.240
alone, never mind whether he actually crossed a criminal line, actually espoused or supported
01:18:30.600
The reason you need to turn him into a Hamas supporter is because Hamas is a designated
01:18:35.660
terrorist organization, and that's how you then complain that he is deportable.
01:18:44.140
His argument is, is that that war has been incredibly indiscriminating, that it's a war
01:18:49.440
The International Criminal Court agrees with him.
01:18:51.840
Many countries around the world agree with that view.
01:18:54.100
He was protesting against a war, not in favor of a terrorist group.
01:18:58.340
And that is why you think Jewish students are in favor of Hamas?
01:19:04.700
I don't know a single one of them who thinks that what Hamas did on October 7th is justifiable.
01:19:11.060
Jewish voices for peace is almost indistinguishable.
01:19:14.140
It's a weird name they've chosen for themselves, then, if they support Hamas, Jewish voices
01:19:20.900
He's, Alan Dershowitz goes off about this group every other day, what they've done to
01:19:26.240
Look, it's, don't say like, oh, well, they're Jewish voices and they're against, they're
01:19:32.580
If they're Jewish voices for peace, they're totally unpersuasive to me.
01:19:39.360
He doesn't, I do think he's a Hamas supporter, 100%.
01:19:42.600
I believe that, but it's not necessary to my argument.
01:19:45.680
If he associates with terror, if he poses a threat to the United States, either or, he
01:19:50.800
If he endorses or espouses terrorist activity, he can be deported.
01:19:55.600
If he violates the term of his visa, he can be deported.
01:19:59.460
Or if the secretary of state has reasonable grounds to believe that he poses a serious adverse
01:20:04.420
foreign policy consequence to the United States, he can be deported.
01:20:11.540
And his hopes of becoming an American citizen are over.
01:20:15.360
I do think it's important to note that support for Israel was one of the top two or three
01:20:24.660
Miriam Adelson and other pro-Israel groups gave them a ton of money to make sure that
01:20:29.420
And I think it's a huge coincidence to believe that they just suddenly found immigration problems
01:20:34.540
and exactly the group that most opposes the policy that they most cherish.
01:20:39.900
And I think that's where the free speech issues come in.
01:20:42.420
I'm going to give you a point on our earlier discussion about the trend to Aragua alleged
01:20:51.040
Because I did ask my team, like, what happens to them when they go to El Salvador?
01:20:55.560
Which is, I confess, a question I had not asked myself.
01:20:58.460
And here's what the Associated Press is reporting, that the El Salvadorian justice minister has
01:21:07.420
said that those held at this facility will never return to their communities, but will
01:21:13.680
only be held for a period of one year, but it's renewable.
01:21:19.300
So, you know, if you're going down the lane of they may not be guilty, I can see this is
01:21:25.060
potentially problematic with the justice that they'll be facing on the other end.
01:21:28.200
But I stand by the fact that Trump had had the right to do it in any event.
01:21:32.500
But I concede there's some problems there on the due process and over in El Salvador.
01:21:39.940
OK, let's move on, because we have problems of our own here in the United States, and they
01:21:50.240
Unbelievably, unbelievably, The New York Times comes out with a piece dated yesterday, March
01:22:00.260
We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives.
01:22:08.500
Somebody online changed it to, we badly misled you about the event that changed our lives.
01:22:16.260
And that's a much more accurate headline from The New York Times.
01:22:24.680
The whole thing is about stuff you've known, your audience has known, me and mine too.
01:22:31.960
And most people who have been independent thinkers are certainly as part of right wing media,
01:22:43.440
But here they are, 2025, with an aha moment on the lab leak as the origin of COVID and how
01:22:57.280
I'll just give you a couple of highlights from the piece and then let you take it.
01:23:01.700
So she starts by pointing out, in 2020, when people started speculating about a lab accident
01:23:07.180
being the spark behind the pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks.
01:23:19.140
Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory,
01:23:27.400
And when EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was doing this so-called gain-of-function
01:23:32.620
research, no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend
01:23:43.160
So the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural
01:23:50.160
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials
01:23:55.300
and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter—she's speaking
01:24:04.400
of Don McGahn, who worked for The New York Times—orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent
01:24:11.580
voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications.
01:24:15.500
The reason she wants us to know that it was probably a lab leak and that we were so grossly misled is
01:24:25.760
because people need convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, basically
01:24:34.040
now that RFKJ is in charge of HHS and she's seeing measles and other problems that she cares
01:24:41.540
So she really, really wants us to trust our public health entities again—not him, but like the
01:24:48.320
scientists and the Nobel laureates and the Dr. Fauci's of the world—because they must have
01:24:53.580
credibility in the wake of all these online influencers or bad-faith actors who she later refers to as
01:25:02.620
And I think she means you and me and others like us.
01:25:04.860
Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren't just earnestly making inquiries.
01:25:11.500
They were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate,
01:25:18.680
beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention.
01:25:25.080
These have-truths and strategic deceptions made it easier for people with the worst motives
01:25:31.580
to appear trustworthy while discrediting important institutions where many earnestly labor in the
01:25:43.980
I think you picked out the most important section, which is, in that last one, it's sort of an attempt
01:25:50.200
to acknowledge that the people questioning and then dissenting from the pronouncements
01:25:55.980
of Dr. Fauci and that entire establishment he leads ended up being correct.
01:26:00.960
But she still has to preserve the idea that the only trustworthy views are found in places
01:26:06.240
like the New York Times, not in that dirty sewage of independent media.
01:26:10.320
So she has to say, even though they were right, they kind of were—had bad motives and were
01:26:16.720
trying to discredit institutions, obviously, the people who discredited these institutions,
01:26:22.500
these scientific institutions, are the people who led them.
01:26:28.100
It's that they—the whole thing, you know, starting all the way back in 2020 with that
01:26:32.600
Lancet letter that was engineered by Peter Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance, who had a financial
01:26:37.420
interest and a reputational interest in ensuring that nobody thought it was a lab leak, since
01:26:42.820
he himself had money to work with Wuhan on the very research that likely caused the leak.
01:26:48.020
They allowed that person to be the sort of objective source.
01:26:53.140
And that's the letter that said, anybody suggesting a lab leak is engaged in racist disinformation
01:26:58.600
and conspiracy mongering against our Chinese colleagues.
01:27:01.540
And they pretended to have a certainty about the origins of the COVID virus that they knew
01:27:07.320
they didn't have, because internally, all these people, including some of the ones who
01:27:11.740
signed that, were saying, actually, I think a lab leak is more likely.
01:27:16.320
And Fauci convinced them all that, like, for the sake of science or something, they have
01:27:23.640
And even though I'm not going to sit here and say I knew from the very beginning that it
01:27:27.480
was a lab leak, I'm not a scientist, I'm not an epidemiologist, I did observe and complained
01:27:32.140
about the fact that there was no permission to debate these questions.
01:27:36.760
If you had raised the issue of a lab leak, including from Wuhan lab, you would have been
01:27:41.480
censored off the internet by every major big tech platform.
01:27:45.600
They didn't permit any questioning or debate about them.
01:27:50.700
And as it turns out, they were the ones who were wrong, and not just wrong, but corruptly
01:27:55.720
Now, this particular op-ed writer has had some instances where she was deviating from COVID
01:28:01.700
orthodoxy, but you cannot write an op-ed like this in the New York Times without acknowledging
01:28:06.540
that the leading institution preventing this discussion, destroying people's reputations
01:28:12.280
based on their correct opinions, was itself the New York Times and corporate media outlets
01:28:17.760
It's this attempt to rewrite history and say, oh, we're here to tell you the truth now so
01:28:22.940
you can trust us when it's very easy now to say all this now that intelligence agencies
01:28:28.140
have come out and said they think it's a lab leak.
01:28:29.700
And that's what's going on, is an attempt to salvage reputations, not to be truthful.
01:28:38.180
I mean, even other mainstream news organizations have published this kind of piece years earlier.
01:28:44.500
Like, they are literally the last to the party.
01:28:47.200
And now they want credit for saying, oh, we were misled.
01:28:51.960
And you mentioned the Times' own past sins, Apoorva Mandevelli, who is, she's their COVID
01:29:01.660
I think his last name is McGann, if memory serves.
01:29:07.460
I think McGann might have been a White House lawyer.
01:29:14.020
In 2021, not only did she dismiss the possibility that this thing came from a lab, but she claimed
01:29:23.700
She tweeted out the following, someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe
01:29:33.080
Guess who's not mentioned in Zeynep Tufekci's piece?
01:29:39.900
I mean, it's insane what they've done to us here.
01:29:43.320
I mean, it was such grotesque politicization of the science.
01:29:46.340
I'll never, ever forget how they said you have to stay at home.
01:29:50.160
You cannot leave your home under any circumstances, even if it's to go to your parents' funeral.
01:29:59.240
And then the Black Lives Matter protests erupt in the middle of 2020, four months later.
01:30:03.520
And they're like, not only can you leave your home, you should leave your home because
01:30:06.880
it's a huge public health risk to allow racism to fester.
01:30:10.800
And they just radically revised their quote unquote expertise based on their political
01:30:16.440
And this is exactly, you know, it's so ironic, Megan, because their view of how COVID spread,
01:30:22.900
which was, oh, these Chinese people have filthy, disgusting, unsanitary wet markets and
01:30:30.820
And that's how this actually escaped was a much more racist theory than the view that,
01:30:37.960
The Chinese have a very sophisticated research lab that we in the United States fund and work
01:30:43.300
And perhaps they used, you know, insufficiently careful procedures.
01:30:47.320
And that was the way more racist view, the one they were pushing.
01:30:51.100
But ultimately, it didn't matter which was the racist view or not.
01:30:54.060
The only thing that mattered was what actually happened.
01:30:58.320
And by exploiting racism and xenophobia against the Chinese, these journalists prevented the
01:31:05.440
truth from even being discussed, let alone being let out.
01:31:08.100
And I hope nobody falls for this now that The New York Times is on the side of truth.
01:31:11.600
They're just engaged in reputational rehabilitation.
01:31:15.900
I mean, you read this piece and it's just, it's so infuriating.
01:31:18.840
And she writes, only an honest conversation will lead us forward.
01:31:24.300
So you need to get honest, New York Times, about your role in all of this.
01:31:32.200
At no point, it doesn't acknowledge any of its own bad reporting or mistakes.
01:31:36.800
I mean, the number of the, I just went, I just did like a quick search of New York Times
01:31:49.080
We already knew about the conspiracy behind that Lancet piece and the other nature piece
01:31:55.440
and the collaboration amongst Fauci and these virologists to say it's definitely not the
01:32:02.920
But in July of 2023, once again, they're saying, oh, two virologists testified that they
01:32:09.420
remained convinced that the coronavirus was natural in origin and said Fauci did not exert
01:32:16.160
And they're completely on the side of those virologists trying to tell us that this originated not in a lab, but in nature, just like Fauci maintained.
01:32:28.920
I was a little spicy today, but it's great to disagree.
01:32:31.360
And I love that our audience gets to hear your POV.
01:32:33.720
Yeah, we're both very passionate and spirited advocates of things we believe.
01:32:37.280
And I love the fact that we can have those conversations.
01:32:40.320
And it only, for me at least, enhances my respect for you.
01:32:43.260
So I really appreciate having me on to do that.
01:32:46.340
And I totally I love hearing that point of view, especially from the point of Palestinian protesters,
01:32:52.160
because that you are allowed to support Palestine, you are allowed to be against Israel.
01:32:58.460
Those are all fine things to do and be and say.
01:33:00.760
It's just, you know, now when you cross over into, you know, potentially more Hamas support, but that's in dispute.
01:33:07.500
And when you're not a citizen, things change because there's not equal rights between green card holders and American citizens.
01:33:48.740
So they know exactly which agents to deal with and which ones to avoid.
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01:35:09.360
I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.
01:35:14.880
It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.
01:35:22.640
You can catch The Megan Kelly Show on Triumph, a SiriusXM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love.
01:35:30.440
Great people like Dr. Laura, Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey, and yours truly, Megan Kelly.
01:35:36.920
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01:35:47.160
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01:35:55.680
Go to SiriusXM.com slash MKShow to subscribe and get three months free.
01:36:01.980
That's SiriusXM.com slash MKShow and get three months free.
01:36:13.740
I'm going to stay for a minute on this New York Times thing.
01:36:16.020
Okay, I've just got to talk to you about this for a minute because my blood is boiling over this.
01:36:21.840
They, they, of course, it wasn't the New York Times.
01:36:26.040
The Post has got a great piece from last June, I think it was, where they just ripped these folks to shreds.
01:36:32.200
Because there, too, a New York Times writer was blaming partisan politics for the lab leak cover-up.
01:36:39.020
There was a piece by an op-ed person back then.
01:36:42.220
They ran a molecular biologist essay, Alina Chan, back then talking about this.
01:36:46.520
So this person blamed partisan politics for covering up that this was a lab leak.
01:36:53.600
And the Post pointed out at the time, it wasn't just New York Times.
01:36:59.860
They called the lab leak a debunked conspiracy theory.
01:37:03.420
NPR falsely asserted, quote, scientists debunk lab accident theory of pandemic emergence.
01:37:11.240
Reading here from the New York Post, again, June of 24, social media companies outright censored lab leak claims.
01:37:19.240
Facebook banned a post-opinion column by Stephen Mosier for speculating on the possibility that it was a lab leak.
01:37:27.840
They write as recently as Monday, again, in June of 24, an AP story bizarrely claimed, quote,
01:37:34.380
Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature, end quote,
01:37:39.900
There's no scientific information backing the lab leak explanation.
01:37:45.500
It's just, it's unbelievable how we were gaslit.
01:37:51.000
And the New York Times wants to pretend that it was just the experts.
01:38:05.040
Now they're desperate to try to cleanse their own hands because they need to have credibility going into the Trump years,
01:38:11.800
especially under the awful, evil RFKJ, to tell you when our leaders are misleading us.
01:38:27.100
No, not those experts who ran these institutions under Joe Biden.
01:38:30.840
I believe public health and the trust in it will resurrect slowly now under RFKJ, at HHS, under Bhattacharya, at NIH, and under McCary at FDA.
01:38:44.600
I believe it will resurrect, but it's going to take some time.
01:38:48.420
And by the way, the election of President Trump was a middle finger to all these institutes, too.
01:38:52.820
In part, it was America saying, F you and what you did to us.
01:38:57.660
You lied to us over the most consequential things affecting our lives, our health care, our loved ones dying and our ability to see them, our children and their wellness in schools, the masking on toddlers nonstop.
01:39:18.780
And now the New York Times has to try to whitewash what it did.
01:39:22.500
So you'll believe it when it tells you that Kennedy's evil and you need to trust them, need to trust the Times.
01:39:34.740
Because the Times comes to this realization in what are we in now?
01:39:40.300
It's literally been five years since these lies were told.
01:39:50.960
It was June of 21 that we had on our show Josh Rogan, who worked at The Washington Post, did work at The Washington Post and does.
01:40:04.920
But he wrote a book on his own that took a dive into this, and he did some articles in The Post also raising questions about whether this was from a lab and the Wuhan lab and how secure it was and the so-called bat lady there and how she was working with EcoHealth Alliance, which was U.S. government funded, on gain-of-function research, which is the very same kind of research that caused the coronavirus.
01:40:38.420
And The New York Times is like, oh, we think it was from a lab.
01:40:48.540
How did all these experts mislead us on EcoHealth Alliance?
01:40:51.960
It's just willful blindness at best on their part.
01:40:57.940
More than likely, it was an active cover-up because they had a vested interest in the messages that were being handed down.
01:41:09.260
They were pro these over-the-top so-called health procedures, and they didn't want anything undermining the message.
01:41:17.280
And just like this accidentally happening, you know, could accidentally happen to anyone, anywhere, worked with their narrative.
01:41:25.580
And plus, they couldn't have their experts undermined at any part of the message.
01:41:28.800
If Fauci was wrong about this being a naturally-caused virus, then he could be wrong about masks.
01:41:36.040
He could be wrong about lockdowns and school closures, right?
01:41:40.900
And by the way, she doesn't even fucking mention Fauci in her piece.
01:41:44.340
She mentions Francis Collins, but she keeps Fauci's fingers squeaky clean, which they're definitely not.
01:41:53.680
All the stuff she mentioned with Francis Collins, Fauci did too.
01:41:59.880
He can come sue me if I'm saying the wrong thing.
01:42:02.660
He is also outed in the Francis Collins emails that Republicans got their hands on in 2022 that showed all this coordination with the virologists behind the scenes.
01:42:13.280
They both were in there trying to get them to not say lab leak.
01:42:20.860
It was January of 2022 after the Republicans found those emails.
01:42:36.020
Steve, find me the number of that episode if you have time.
01:42:41.200
It was one of the best pieces we ever did on the show.
01:42:49.560
How they whitewashed lab leak right out of the conversation or tried.
01:42:52.580
How they pressured these virologists who the early signs from all of them and emails were saying,
01:42:56.900
Holy shit, this looks like lab leak that we manipulated this thing in the lab.
01:43:09.920
It was all there in the emails, black and white.
01:43:20.320
You spent the next three years doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on natural origin.
01:43:28.860
And now she wants credit for being the one to speak truth to power and kind of own how they've been misled.
01:43:37.520
She doesn't even go over the Times' sins, even to say we were mistaken, we were misled.
01:43:49.800
House Republicans finally got their hands on emails between doctors Fauci, Collins, and some of the world's top virologists.
01:44:00.100
It turns out the very officials who dismissed that as a fringe conspiracy theory in the press were being told exactly the opposite by the world's top experts as early as February 2020.
01:44:13.140
They had studied the virus's genetic makeup, you see, and found the insertion of a genetic sequence that makes a virus more transmissible, a furin cleavage site.
01:44:25.580
One of those scientists on that call with Fauci and Collins, a Brit, Sir Jeremy Farrar, sent a follow-up email to Collins and Fauci the next day, expressing support for the lab leak theory.
01:44:38.080
He relayed the thoughts of two more experts, Robert Gary of Tulane University and Michael Farzan of the Scripps Research Institute.
01:44:45.840
Robert Gary, he said, can't think of a plausible natural scenario.
01:44:51.400
And Farzan was, quote, bothered by the furin site and having a hard time explaining that outside the lab.
01:44:58.160
Christiane Anderson of the Scripps Research Institute put the lab leak theory at 60 to 70 percent likely.
01:45:04.380
Two days after those scientists went to Collins and Fauci and told them this thing likely came from a lab, five of them authored a paper.
01:45:12.920
They did a complete 180, concluding that this virus was clearly, quote, that's a quote, clearly not from a lab and clearly not manipulated by man.
01:45:29.580
He later called it a shiny object, reassuring colleagues it would go away.
01:45:34.800
Fauci was behind much of the U.S. funding in China.
01:45:37.600
He admitted, approving grants for EcoHealth Alliance, a group that researched coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab.
01:45:44.940
EcoHealth's CEO, Peter Daszak, was one of the first to beg officials to reject the lab leak theory.
01:45:51.820
And tellingly, he warned that the public release of the virus's genetic sequencing would bring, quote, very unwelcome attention.
01:46:06.880
If you're a New York Times reader, you're reading it in March 2025 for the first time.
01:46:12.620
I'm sorry, but this is just such a dereliction.
01:46:17.900
You heard me talking back then about Jeremy Farrar.
01:46:22.960
The authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar.
01:46:25.440
Now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization.
01:46:27.500
Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly.
01:46:34.700
She talks about Christiane Anderson, who you heard me mention there, and how he wrote internally in the Slack messages between them.
01:46:40.920
The lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.
01:46:54.860
Three years after this was known, thanks to those House Republicans who got their hands on the emails, who I'm sure she just totally ignored as, what, some of these terrible influencers acting, quote, in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate beneficial science to inflame public opinion.
01:47:18.740
That's her just trying to justify why they didn't do any of this.
01:47:25.420
She writes, that's also why it might be tempting for these officials or the organizations they represent to avoid looking too closely at mistakes they made, at the ways that while trying to do such a hard job, they might have withheld relevant information and even misled the public.
01:47:42.540
Like, okay, look at her, look at her still bending over backward to run cover for these people who 100% actively misled us.
01:47:55.800
What sparked Bobby Kennedy's resurrection from the disinformation dozen leader to the health secretary right now?
01:48:05.500
It was his book, the real Anthony Fauci, again, who she still doesn't mention when she's going over the list of people who misled us.
01:48:14.140
Even Francis Collins just gets barely a passing mention.
01:48:22.460
It was all these virologists who were being controlled by Collins and Fauci.
01:48:39.740
We were stunned he agreed to come on, quite frankly.
01:48:44.900
Well, forgive me, wasn't it just days, wasn't it just two days later that you reversed yourself and said, actually, no, okay, I forget what I said about it coming from a lab.
01:48:58.480
You know, we have, you know, private conversations.
01:49:02.480
I mean, that's pretty much what I was doing in that one email, you know.
01:49:11.340
Well, it looked at the genomes of the viruses more closely.
01:49:14.920
That, too, is a spicy interview where I really pressed him on his sudden reversal and how much influence Fauci and Collins had over him.
01:49:24.260
I mean, literally, Fauci, I think, has one mention in this piece.
01:49:31.400
And look, as Glenn said, it is, this isn't like some long infomercial for independent media.
01:49:36.560
It's just the facts of why nobody trusts the New York Times or CNN or MSNBC anymore.
01:49:47.420
They failed us at one of the most consequential moments in U.S. history.
01:49:57.120
And instead of doing a true mea culpa, like a true, we screwed it up and we're sorry, they just now want to say we were misled.
01:50:12.640
He could have come out with that book and said, I want to own all my own mistakes, my own failure to question the lies being pushed on us by officials at the White House about Joe Biden's health.
01:50:23.560
But instead, he just tried to join on with the we were misled crowd.
01:50:28.160
I was, you know, I was one of the innocent without acknowledging.
01:50:33.640
I misled you when whole swaths of other media got it.
01:50:41.180
They happened to be right of center or independent who got the issue with Joe Biden's health because we could see it with our own eyes.
01:50:48.940
Who got that this thing likely came from the Wuhan lab where they were studying that coronaviruses and how to make them more dangerous to humans.
01:50:59.320
It's just there can be redemption after massive fails, including in journalism.
01:51:06.540
But there must first be an acknowledgement of the failure of the of the sin in the case of The New York Times here.
01:51:22.020
And you've made no progress with us whatsoever.
01:51:27.460
We distrust you more than ever when you do things like this.
01:51:33.180
To end it on a happy note, and this is likely one of the many reasons why we officially became an award winning podcast recently, because even some outsiders are recognizing the good work that goes on here at the MK show.
01:51:49.020
And frankly, just the trust that we have with our audience, which is thanks to all of you.
01:51:53.800
Wanted to mention last week, we were nominated for an iHeart podcast award.
01:51:58.760
I have to say I know some of them and they are good people.
01:52:04.280
And we were nominated for best political podcast.
01:52:07.700
We were up against some interesting competition.
01:52:17.800
Breaking points with Crystal and Sager and the Native Land podcast.
01:52:21.700
The winner was determined by a vote of a, quote, panel of blue ribbon podcast industry leaders, creatives and visionaries.
01:52:32.040
Two of our great, great producers who helped make the MK show possible.
01:52:36.320
Lauren and Allison were down there in Austin, Texas to accept the reward there.
01:52:54.000
These are two of the great people who make the show possible.
01:52:57.000
We thought it'd be great to send them down there because why shouldn't they receive the award if we want it?
01:53:02.660
And those are some of sort of the, you know, the sort of nameless folks who you guys probably don't know as well.
01:53:11.200
But Lauren LaBruna and Allison Jordan are just two of the many others who help bring you the show every day.
01:53:16.260
And I'm thrilled they got to be there and have fun in Austin.
01:53:18.620
And they ran into Zach Levi, among others, down there and had a great time.
01:53:22.080
So in any event, thanks to all of you for making that possible.
01:53:24.780
Thank you to the I Heart Voters and the I Heart Crews for thinking it up in the first place.
01:53:33.380
Looking forward to asking him about going on Gavin Newsom's podcast.
01:53:41.360
Would love to hear from all of you before Charlie comes on.
01:53:51.040
And then listen to our discussion with Charlie tomorrow.