Don Lemon's Misogyny, Trans Activists Attack NYT, and Murdaugh Latest, with Jim Geraghty, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Peter Tragos ｜ Ep. 495
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 35 minutes
Words per Minute
191.77025
Summary
CNN's Don Lemon says a woman should take a competency test if she's over 65 years old, and then tries to argue that a woman is past her prime when she's 51 years old. Guest: National Review's Michael Brendan Doherty.
Transcript
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live again on day two from Las Vegas, Nevada.
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President Biden is undergoing a physical as questions swirl about candidate age and fitness for office.
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We expect to get the results of the president's exam later today.
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If it comes during the show, we will bring it to you.
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Meantime, Don Lemon has stepped in it yet again.
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This time, going after Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley over her age.
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Joining me now are senior political correspondent Jim Garrity, the co-host of the Three Martini Lunch podcast,
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and Michael Brendan Doherty, a senior writer at National Review.
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You can find their work and much, much more by becoming an NR Plus subscriber.
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You get extra content and you don't have to deal with the ads.
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So he has been stepping in it time and time again over at his new fledgling, failing CNN
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And the latest comment that he has made, I would submit to you, is just the latest in
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I don't know how much longer CNN can allow this to go on, but here was him, here was Don
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Lemon reacting to Nikki Haley, suggesting that if you're over 75 and you want to be in
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political office, you might need to do a competency test.
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And here was Don Lemon reacting to that on CNN.
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This whole talk about age makes me uncomfortable.
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I think that, I think it's the wrong road to go down.
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She says people, you know, politicians or something are not in their prime.
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When a woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.
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If you look it up, it'll, if you look, if you Google, when is a woman in her prime,
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So I think she has to be careful about saying that, you know, politicians aren't in their
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Are you talking about prime for like child caring?
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Or are you talking about prime for being president?
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And I'm just saying Nikki Haley should be careful about saying that politicians are not in their
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prime and they need to be in their prime when they serve because she wouldn't be in
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her prime according to Google or whatever it is.
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OK, so if you don't shoot the messenger, if you Google it, Google tells you a woman is
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past her prime when she's after 20, 30, maybe 40.
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He says if you Google CNN, it comes up as the most trusted news source.
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And I have to tell you, I'm so irritated by this guy and honestly, his misogyny.
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And I don't use that word about a lot of people, but there's a pattern with him.
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The absurdity of suggesting that a woman is past her prime when she is 51 years old, like
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I just pulled just for fun, just for kicks, because you guys are both historians.
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Some of the best known women on Earth in modern history.
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Margaret Thatcher, she was 54 when she became prime minister of Great Britain.
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Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House for the first time when she was 67.
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Kamala Harris was 55 when she became the vice president of the United States.
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Katanji Brown Jackson is 52, newly placed on the US Supreme Court.
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While we're on the subject of Supreme Court, Eleni Kagan was 50 when she was confirmed.
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Mary Barra, CEO of GM, was 53 when she took over that role.
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Suzanne Scott over at Fox News became CEO of Fox when she was 51.
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And by the way, what an insult to people like Dana Bash, who's 51, and his colleague at CNN.
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The co-anchor had an instinct that this was offensive, but frankly, wasn't effective enough
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to actually shove it down his throat and recognize, are you referring to childbearing years?
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Because that is something women can mostly only do in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.
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But just childbearing is not what determines whether a woman is in her prime.
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What an ancient, anachronistic, stupid way of evaluating a woman's worth.
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The truth is, all those women I just mentioned, most of them did have kids when they were in
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And then they went on to achieve huge professional success after they did all of the things that
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women are capable of doing, raising families, having babies, which only we can do, right?
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And instead of getting credit for that, for doing it all and achieving huge career heights
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in their 50s, they get reduced to you're a nothing.
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Now you're over because you're not at the age where you could service a man in having
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This is blatant sexism and shame on him for doing this on the air.
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And frankly, those other women on set with him were pathetic and weak in calling him out.
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He was he deserves it now from the colleagues at CNN.
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He deserves it from the colleagues in the news industry and the bosses at CNN.
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And it's not the first time it was a couple of months ago that S.E.
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Cupp was on the set with Don Lemon and forgot her words not long after having a baby.
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13 percent of Republicans want a total ban on abortion.
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Is it fair to say this because I'm not a mommy, but is it mommy brain?
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No, I forget what I'm talking about all the time.
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Remember when he asked whether a Bill Cosby female rape victim who said she'd been forced
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She should have just gotten out of it by biting down.
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He doesn't understand anything about women, about America, about prime.
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I guess he'd be the first to tell you he's still in his prime.
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But the Internet says that we women, we're well past our prime.
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I mean, he's live on television and he doesn't seem to understand that Nikki Haley is running
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for president, not the hundred yard dash in the Olympics.
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I mean, that's something where, you know, prime age might be between 18 and 40.
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And he must he deals with executives and female executives at CNN.
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Does he think they're they're past their prime, that they shouldn't be in those jobs, that
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that they can't raise questions about 80 year olds in the job?
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I think he knew he stuck his foot in it a little bit.
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I mean, no, hang on, guys, I think we should give Don Lemon a little bit of credit.
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We should recognize that if there's anybody on Earth who knows what it means to not be
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Now that he's hosting the morning show, you do kind of wonder how much look there's new
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I did love the body language of the two women co-anchoring with them, that you kind of see
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them backing away, almost as if he had set off some sort of radioactive self-cancellation
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And they didn't even want to be that close to him.
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It was like one step short of Mike Myers when Kanye West said that George Bush doesn't care
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That kind of sense of like, this is a moment that's going to get viral and I don't want
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You kind of wonder though, like if you really, if you really like working at CNN and if you
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like your coworkers and if you like women, like people above age 40, do you say things
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Or are you in some sort of effort to not be working at CNN as quickly as possible?
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Because I'm trying to imagine what else you could say that would be more likely to make
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the executive sit up and say, oh, oh, we've got a maniac on our morning show.
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It is part of a pattern and it ties in with the allegations that have been made against
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him recently that he was screaming at his co-host, Caitlin Collins, because she had the temerity
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It's hard to be demoted from the primetime solo anchor to the morning show co-anchor having
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to sell, share your set with these annoying women.
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At least he wasn't subjected to that indignity.
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And so he was screaming at her to the point where the cast or the crew was uncomfortable
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and Caitlin Collins reportedly ran out of the studio.
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Then he had another meltdown with his colleagues the other morning where he was he staved off
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going to break because he was upset that his female colleague didn't excoriate a congressman
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for mentioning the New York Post as a reliable source.
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He was upset that that had been referenced as a reliable news organization and staved off break
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because he needed to get out the fact that it's not in his view.
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This is over the Hunter Biden reporting, of course, which his own news network later confirmed.
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If any reporter worth their salt would actually do some digging, call CNN, do it.
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Find out whether he's got a history of harassing his female colleagues.
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I'll do it today after the show and I'll get back to you on what they say.
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He views women who are over the age of 40 as past their due date.
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And this is who they have covering Nikki Haley.
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How how how are we supposed to look at him as viewers and take anything he has to say
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about female politicians, never mind Republicans?
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There's also a larger problem, a cultural problem at CNN, I think.
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I mean, we had, you know, I think the story of what Mary Catherine Hamm was just a few months
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ago where she was suspended because she had made negative comments about a man who was
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who unfurled himself on a Zoom meeting and got suspended for it.
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And then they they thought she was too sensitive because she was pregnant at the time and couldn't
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That's I've never heard the situation described.
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Is it for furling and unfurling something you do with like a sail on a boat?
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I was like, Megan, you've spent a lot of time in the world of cable news and network news.
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And the vast majority of people I've interacted with seemed sane at the time.
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Perhaps they went off and did crazy things afterwards.
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But in my presence, they did not seem like lunatics.
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But you look at the history, you look at all the events of Me Too, the infamous stories about Matt Lauer.
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Michael referred to Jeffrey Toobin, the man who lived down to his surname.
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I know there's a lot of stress, a lot of changing rapid changes and moving parts and all that.
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But I kind of wonder if like this is an environment where someone who's who's, you know, a few fries short of a happy meal, as they say, necessarily stands out or gets noticed.
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It's almost an environment where someone who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and who has this kind of intense emotional outbursts and inappropriate treatment of others.
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Sometimes those people seem to thrive in that kind of environment.
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So I'm sure you can talk, you know, I'm sure you have horrible war stories to tell.
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But it does seem weird that we keep seeing this coming up in an environment that's always all smiles and more with this after the break, kind of, you know, friendly, jovial.
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Everyone's having a nice time type environment.
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Well, I mean, television news is a toxic industry and it's not just cable.
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Trust me, because I worked at the broadcast channels, too.
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And it is there's something very disgusting about large elements of it.
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It's not to say there's no nobility left in media and including in broadcast journalism.
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But it's largely overshadowed by these personalities that get drunk on their own wine and then get this permission slip to run roughshod over the workforce, over their colleagues.
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And you like at Fox, at least, let's take Bill O'Reilly.
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He had a huge ego and wound up being a problem in some ways.
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But the guy was extremely talented and was the number one rated show in cable for many, many years.
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Like you could see why they tried to put up with him.
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It's because literally as he went out and reminded them when there was the shift in management, he's a black gay man.
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He went on the air when Chris Licht took over and reminded him and everyone, I'm black and I'm gay.
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And Jeff Zucker was the first man to put me in prime time.
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And this can be used in newsrooms now as a threat.
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Like if you try to fire me or demote me or do something that I'm really going to find upsetting, I'm going to go public with how you dislike people like me.
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And you need a boss who's got a pair to say, go ahead and do it.
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Go ahead and do it because you've embarrassed yourself.
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You've embarrassed this network long enough that people will believe me that it was your performance, not your skin color and not your sexual orientation that led to this.
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Yeah, I'm realizing we've talked this long and we haven't even mentioned the name Chris Cuomo and the glaring problem of having the brother of the New York governor being the primary interviewer of the New York governor during that pandemic and all of the inappropriate stuff.
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Look, I mean, a lot of this traces back to Zucker and the mentality that he had his guys or his gals.
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Zucker had his own issues with coworkers, as I'm sure people remember the news reports about.
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And so it kind of turned into almost mafia-esque that for a certain level, you were a made man.
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And when that kind of, you know, when that signal is sent down from on high, we probably shouldn't be all that surprised that people start thinking, I'm a made man.
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You know, this is unfortunately, you see it well beyond media environment.
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You probably see this in almost any corporate environment, that if the leader sends a signal that treating your coworkers or other people badly is acceptable if you're a big enough name, well, then not only does it, you know, make other people who are big names say, okay, I can do that.
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It makes everybody want to be one of those big names.
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So they're no longer accountable for, you know, acting terribly.
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No, you mentioned Chris Cuomo, who's in the news yesterday, Michael, because he he gave an interview on Scaramucci's new podcast.
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And in this interview, he is indignant about the fact that he was canned from CNN.
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He is still very angry and is blaming everyone other than himself and came out with a bizarre comment saying after it happened, he wanted to kill a bunch of people and include it.
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I had to accept because I was going to kill everybody, including myself.
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I mean, I can understand a little bit being angry after a forced separation from a job that you feel is unjust, but you want to you want to kill people?
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But when you hear it in context, he's really pissed off about being separated from CNN as a result of his own behavior.
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And now he's just sitting there in a pit of his own bitterness.
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He not only doesn't take responsibility for that, he didn't even take responsibility for that bizarre statement that he wanted to kill everyone and himself.
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Because he immediately attributed that statement to his Italian-ness, quote unquote, right?
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He said, maybe it's I'm passionate because I'm Italian, but this is how I felt.
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And it's like, OK, so this is, again, you're seeing in Cuomo and Lemon this really crude casting couch stereotype understanding of themselves and everyone else around them, right?
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Like, they view it as like, well, the script calls for a gay black man, a passionate Italian, because all Italians have to be passionate.
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And, you know, and then the women are totally replaceable.
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You know, once they turn 30, just get a new one, because there's a million on the bus on the way here.
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And none of them are worth what they're what the work they actually do.
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I mean, it's it's repellent, I think, to the audience.
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The audience picks up on this kind of contemptuous understanding of the audience that's at play when people understand themselves this way and the contempt they have for each other when they understand themselves this way.
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So it's not a surprise that CNN just keeps sinking.
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And by the way, this just off the presses, Nikki Haley just responded.
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She launched a presidential campaign yesterday.
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This is that was the context in which this came up.
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Because she was saying, look, it's time for a new generation of leaders and so on.
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And Don Lemon thought that was an appropriate time to say she's passed her prime.
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She just responded in a tweet that reads as follows.
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Liberals can't stand the idea of having competency tests for older politicians to make sure they can do the job.
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By the way, it's always the liberals who are the most sexist.
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And she included the video of Don Lemon just to remove any doubt about what she was referring to.
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It's always the liberals who are the most sexist.
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So you tell me whether he will get a pass on this, which I, as I pointed out, is part of a series of comments for this guy.
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Well, whether he will get a pass or whether he will be forced to address it, he will be forced to get out of CNN as he should have been a long time ago, or whether this will just go off into the ether of the Internet.
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I predict he'll address it on the air in a kind of slimy way of, I didn't mean to offend anyone, and just kind of try to end the story in a two sentence non-apology.
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But because of the pattern of behavior, he will explode himself on a landmine eventually.
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I mean, when he, you know, if you go back just to December, you know, liberals started to show their lack of patience with him when he mansplained.
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So they said, why female athletes get paid less than male athletes.
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So I think, you know, the knives are starting to sharpen, but he'll get out of this one just with a, you know, a whiff of an apology.
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I'm still stuck on the fact, Jim, that what kind of a man, you guys are married, you have families, what kind of a man looks at a woman and says, you've got these three decades to be in your prime?
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Really, it's two, because he was like maybe 40.
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And by the way, he's a gay man, so not him, but a man.
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You will service me by having a baby or several babies, and that's what will make you valuable.
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You see, that's how you should think about yourself and how you matter.
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And when you're no longer capable of doing that, you're past your prime.
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So truly, why don't you just take up knitting, go sit in a field, and think about your glory days when you were servicing me as a wife or as a mom, only, only, only if you're capable of having a child.
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And by all you women out there who didn't have a child, screw you, because you never had a prime.
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You didn't even use your uterus the way God intended.
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It's absolutely outrageous if you think about what he's actually saying.
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And he's so stupid, he can't even articulate it.
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He's just got to say, well, the Google says so.
00:22:06.100
Megan, I'm glad you pointed that out, because I was going to say, I'm pretty sure Don Lemon and Michael and I see women pretty differently.
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Look, he has been in a situation where he's been able to play this card of being a minority.
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And that has worked as a get out of controversy, get out of consequences free card enough times in the past.
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I do think that card is probably reaching its expiration date.
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I suspect right now at CNN, they're probably having meetings of, do we want the headache of the reaction from women viewers of having our anchor spout off about these things?
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Or do we want the headache of letting Don Lemon go?
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And he will inevitably accuse us of being racist and homophobic and things like that.
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And it couldn't possibly be that he's turned into this walking controversy machine.
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By the way, when Michael was talking about Chris Cuomo's comments and how he said, ah, you know, my desire to kill everyone and myself was just my Italian-ness.
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I was reminded about when Andrew Cuomo was accused of sexual harassment, one of the unofficial slogans was, I'm not perverted, I'm just Italian.
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The idea that he was very hands-on, very touchy-feely, and that this was a cultural expression and that some way too sensitive women were, you know, taking offense or responding and just not understanding this was a cultural tradition of his.
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Now, obviously, both of them seem eager to live down to the stereotypes of Italian-Americans.
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I'll let you insert the Chris Cuomo Fredo joke wherever you like somewhere in here.
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And I just kind of observe that they really are hot-tempered and threatening to kill people and touching people inappropriately.
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Look, first of all, I think a lot of Italian-Americans say, no, that's not what we are.
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But simply, just wouldn't it be nice if everyone could be as even-tempered, calm, and rational as Irish-Americans like us?
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We're famously not even-tempered and calm and rational and all of that.
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I'm Italian and Irish, and therefore, so is my brother.
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And he's never touched anybody inappropriately or chalked any of it up to, you know, any bad behavior up to that, right?
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Like, if you're Irish, if you're Italian, you're fiery.
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You're not running around touching people's genitals inappropriately.
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That's not the thing, as Andrew Cuomo was accused of doing.
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And Chris Cuomo defended it and worked to smear the women behind the scenes while he lied about it to his audience.
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And then he was accused by a couple of women of his own Me Too situation, situations.
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And so we had a woman on our show who accused him of Me Too-ing her, Shelley Ross, who accused him of grabbing her ass in a public place, who was his executive producer.
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And so, look, that was Chris Cuomo, not the brother Andrew.
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And none of this is to say that anybody shouldn't have, you know, a mistake or a moment where they fall down and they do something stupid and they come out and say, sorry, I'm human.
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We don't want to live in a world in which that's not possible.
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And, you know, CNN is really saying something to America if they stick by him after this.
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We'll see how new management feels about this kind of behavior.
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First, she did this video, which I thought was kind of lame.
00:25:20.200
But then she did a better job, I thought, at her rally.
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You know, she had the flags and people were waving and there was more energy.
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And she sort of made her point about wanting to run and how it's time to move on.
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She did, I was happy to see, address, like her video said, like, and it's so much better when you do it in stilettos.
00:25:39.860
And I was like, come on, you know, like you're not running as a Democrat.
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Stop like Republicans don't want to hear that nonsense.
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They're over all this BS about like, I'll be tougher because I'm a woman.
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And she kind of made the following point, which I think was well done.
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As I set out on this new journey, I will simply say this.
00:26:04.880
All kidding aside, this is not about identity politics.
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Take it from me, the first minority female governor in history.
00:26:28.660
So I thought that was a good parlay of like, instead of buying into identity politics, sort of using her diversity to say, no, this Democratic narrative about our country is BS.
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And it was a much stronger foot forward overall, just the whole message, I thought, when she got live in front of the crowd.
00:26:46.060
But what do you guys make of Nikki Haley's official entrance into this race, Jim?
00:26:52.480
Look, there's no getting around the fact that she has an uphill climb, right?
00:26:55.680
That, you know, Donald Trump is the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
00:26:59.180
Ron DeSantis has been the challenger that has climbed up in the polls most frequently.
00:27:03.360
But I don't think Nikki Haley should be dismissed.
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I think she brings a really unique set and combination of experience to the role.
00:27:10.560
I think your point is a good one, which is that, look, we know she's a woman.
00:27:19.060
That's never been kind of the centerpiece of her political rise through power.
00:27:25.220
Certainly not the way Kamala Harris has emphasized being a minority and being a woman in her political career out in California.
00:27:32.540
So, you know, I think the best argument for the Nikki Haley is like, look, you're talking about someone who has both domestic experience of being governor, being a state legislator, and also taking on her own party when she thought there was an old boys network that was protecting wasteful spending.
00:27:48.520
She didn't want to have recorded votes in the state legislature for a whole bunch of years.
00:27:56.440
And, you know, under President Trump, a lot of folks, people thought they'd have difficult, she would have difficulty working under him.
00:28:03.160
Managed to get rave reviews from folks like the New York Times editorial board.
00:28:06.900
Folks who you would not think would be giving any credit to anybody.
00:28:10.500
And then you point out the fact she's, you know, her husband was in Afghanistan for a year.
00:28:17.000
She served on the board of Boeing and then stepped down from the board when she thought it was taking too much in COVID relief money.
00:28:22.640
She's on the board of trustees of Clemson University.
00:28:25.020
It's a really wide ranging experience in life that I think will be very helpful if she ends up becoming presidency, the president.
00:28:33.660
Michael, she was on Hannity last night and he was trying to get her to say, how, how are you going to be different from President Trump when it comes to policy?
00:28:44.540
Like, why would you be a better choice than the guy who already has the huge base and support and so on?
00:28:53.200
What specific policy areas would you, would you say part with Donald Trump?
00:29:07.240
You said that if former President Trump was going to run, you wouldn't run.
00:29:11.780
It's been reported that a couple weeks ago you call your former boss.
00:29:19.180
And he said that you you called him the greatest president.
00:29:29.980
I told that I thought that we needed to go in a new direction.
00:29:33.220
But when I first said I wouldn't run against him, Afghanistan hadn't fallen.
00:29:37.680
We didn't see the rise in inflation like we've seen.
00:29:40.580
We didn't see what was happening in our schools the way it was.
00:29:43.260
And we didn't see the results of the midterms that we just had.
00:29:50.100
You shouldn't have to be 80 years old to get to Washington.
00:29:57.380
Yeah, I don't think she wants to make the policy contrast yet.
00:30:00.400
I don't because I don't think she wants to alienate Trump's voters in a strong way yet.
00:30:09.380
I mean, when she was, you know, at the UN, she made a big deal in almost all of her public speeches about how the job of a political appointee in an administration is to execute the boss's policy.
00:30:25.660
And what she was doing was she was basically drawing a contrast between herself as a loyalist and all of the people in D.C. and in the White House itself that were leaking Donald Trump to death during his administration and, you know, had Maggie Haberman on speed dial.
00:30:42.060
She was saying, I know who's boss and I know the order here.
00:30:46.060
So I think she's always been careful about raising Donald Trump's ire.
00:30:51.060
And I think she wants Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis to duke it out and for her to be the person who doesn't get bruised in that fight.
00:30:59.800
And if she doesn't want the campaign talk, I think, though, she has a problem in that if she doesn't want her campaign talk to be about her identity as a woman or as an Indian American, she actually has to run on policies.
00:31:15.080
Right. And it's just not true that she's only running against Joe Biden.
00:31:20.040
Donald Trump already declared his intention to run in this race.
00:31:23.780
And now she's declaring she is running against Donald Trump.
00:31:33.220
I mean, if I were advising her, I would say that she should flip around the script that she had when she was working for him and say one of the things that chief executive has to do is discipline the people who are leaking him to death, is exert control and take control of the office.
00:31:50.600
And then that was a persistent problem with Donald Trump's administration that he never quite got control of his own White House.
00:31:57.240
And it had to depend on the extraordinary loyalty of servants like her to get through the ship unscathed or without sinking.
00:32:06.320
If she doesn't make that case, then all the talk is just going to be about how she's a woman and she's a minority.
00:32:12.220
And this is a different take on America, but it it will be the identity politics that she said she doesn't want to get into.
00:32:18.900
Yeah. If anything, she should she should play that stuff down and just say, let's move on.
00:32:25.380
I mean, that would be the most effective way of handling it.
00:32:28.220
But she you know, there are no unique situations.
00:32:30.860
She, DeSantis, anybody else who's thinking about running, because normally you don't run against a guy who was already president for the nomination.
00:32:39.260
It's just such a unique situation for these GOP years where to the dynamic you just said, MBD, she's got to be careful because he does have a huge piece of the Republican base already with him who would be somewhat offended if you go after him too hard.
00:32:54.360
It's not like 2015 where they were all running and they were all equals.
00:32:59.160
And I think at this point in the contest, Donald Trump had like single digit support in 2015 at this point.
00:33:07.280
And Jeb Bush was the favorite at that. Right. Remember those days? Jeb Bush.
00:33:11.340
Right. And look how that got turned around. So it's a tricky maneuver for anybody coming into it.
00:33:17.260
She's first. Well, John Bolton technically declared on Good Morning Britain, but she's the first real one to have to navigate it.
00:33:24.640
Yeah. And one of the oddities is that you'll have not just a former president running for another term.
00:33:31.720
Trump conceivably could be running against maybe three former cabinet officials.
00:33:36.600
Haley, as you mentioned, John Bolton, if he chooses to run, he's kind of, you know, been been hinting, but not before.
00:33:42.160
And Mike Pompeo certainly looks and sounds like a man who's interested in running for president,
00:33:45.900
which puts all of them in this odd situation where if any of the three say, you know, Trump,
00:33:53.220
you shouldn't vote for Trump because of X, people would say, well, wait a second.
00:33:55.760
Why did you go work for the guy? And if Trump goes out and says, ah, you know, Nikki, she was the worst or Bolton,
00:34:01.160
as Trump has at certain points in social media ripped into Bolton, et cetera.
00:34:05.400
The question was, well, why did you hire them? Well, you know, that this is this bizarre situation.
00:34:10.160
All these people who were former teammates would be in a situation in which they have to say, no,
00:34:14.820
I'm a better choice than that person. I think there was a subtle criticism or maybe not so subtle
00:34:19.640
criticism of Trump in the age points. He would point out that he would qualify for that cognitive test that
00:34:26.500
she was calling for. Clearly it was aimed at Biden, but also he's old enough to qualify for it.
00:34:30.700
And all of the comments about how we can't win the challenges of the 21st century by going with
00:34:35.520
the leadership of the 20th century, that probably would apply for Trump also. He's only a couple
00:34:40.520
of years younger than Joe Biden is. So there's this probably, I think the easiest argument against
00:34:45.440
Trump for a Republican party that is in most cases voted for him twice and is still at least open to
00:34:52.120
the possibility of voting for him again is to say, it's time for a fresh, it's time to thank him for
00:34:57.780
his service. It's time for a fresh face. It's, we can't, you know, we've already run that candidate
00:35:02.160
and lost a race in 2020. Although there's some Republicans who insist he didn't lose.
00:35:06.280
And just to say, why do we want to rerun this? It's time for something new. It's time for something
00:35:10.280
fresh. It's time for Trumpism without Donald Trump himself.
00:35:14.980
Well, it's kind of exciting to see it start to happen. You know, here we are February.
00:35:18.680
It's underway. I mean, the next 2024 is officially underway. The Trump announcement was so
00:35:23.340
early. It was a little odd. Um, now she's announcing Tim Scott is at some 2024, uh, group
00:35:29.780
gathering where, you know, there's potential donors Bolton, as I mentioned, Mike Pence is
00:35:35.060
definitely sniffing around it. So this is in the next couple of months, we're going to have a much
00:35:38.340
better feel for who exactly is in or about to declare that they're in. All right, let me take
00:35:43.220
a quick break. And on the opposite side of this, we're going to talk about Joe Biden making a comment.
00:35:48.000
Many have deemed racist. It's not the first time Jim and Michael stay with us.
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00:36:26.620
Okay. So guys, Joe Biden has got a long history of making racist comments, right? Remember Barack Obama's
00:36:35.520
vice president after saying stuff like that? And it could go on, right? You know, put you all back in
00:36:46.960
chains and blah, blah, blah. So now he comes out and he made a comment about Maryland's new governor,
00:36:55.100
who is black, Wes Moore. And here is how that went. And you got a hell of a new governor, Wes Moore, I tell you.
00:37:08.760
He's the real deal. And the boy looked like he still play. He got some guns on him.
00:37:15.580
Okay. Did you hear that? The boy, the boy looked like he could still play. Now, if Donald Trump did
00:37:20.580
this, it would be the lead on every cable news show in America, including definitely Don Lennon's
00:37:26.360
bubkiss though, right? So far, no problem. And by the way, it's not the first time that Joe Biden
00:37:31.580
is referred to a black man as boy. So what do we make of it?
00:37:37.280
Um, well, this is actually, there's a funny read on this. I mean, he he's done this forever. I mean,
00:37:43.240
in 2006, he said something like, you cannot even go to a seven 11 or a Dunkin donuts unless you have a
00:37:49.100
slight Indian accent. Um, he plays with stereotypes these way outdated ones. And, and actually, I, I,
00:37:59.580
I hate to say this. I actually think it works to his advantage somewhat. Um, it's, it's disrespectful
00:38:06.840
in my view, but it actually is one of the reasons why the woke brand doesn't stick to him, right? It is,
00:38:13.780
his, his administration may be doing everything it can to promote wokeness in education, higher
00:38:19.540
education in, you know, in employment through civil rights, uh, you know, title seven, uh, litigation,
00:38:28.320
et cetera. Uh, but he is obviously one of these old school politicians who thinks that the way to,
00:38:36.940
to get to office is to flatter ethnic stereotypes, wherever you find them. And no matter how crude they
00:38:42.320
are, and it's not going to change because of his age, but I actually, I, I weirdly think this plays
00:38:49.600
to his advantage. I, people, you know, no one ends up actually taking offense except Republicans who
00:38:56.520
think like, if we had said this, we'd never get away with it. But he does. I mean, like he, he said all
00:39:02.620
those crazy things, um, about black Americans and yet black Americans were his strongest constituency
00:39:09.320
in the, the primaries that led to his nomination. Um, possibly because they too are attached to kind
00:39:17.320
of an older cultural politics. Um, so I, I think this is a weird double-edged sword for him. Like,
00:39:23.720
I, like, I can't believe it. Like my jaw hits the floor just like everyone else, but there's this weird
00:39:30.780
way where, you know, people let him get away with it partly because he's a decrepit old man,
00:39:36.380
right? Like what else do you expect from him? And also, also because most of this wokeness is
00:39:43.040
performative, Jim Garrity. Like they, they only use it to hurt people they want to hurt. And generally
00:39:48.820
it's somebody across the political aisle. Most of it is an act used to punish one's enemies as opposed
00:39:54.820
to genuine indignation over a comment. That's why these woke leftists are not going to say anything
00:40:02.160
about him referring to a black governor as boy. Yeah. Look, you know, many folks on the right
00:40:08.940
have observed accurately in my opinion, that once you have that D after your name, you have this
00:40:14.420
magic shield that protects you from all the consequences of your actions and things that you
00:40:17.980
say. Uh, Michael mentioned that, uh, rather infamous one during his 2008 campaign where, uh,
00:40:24.300
he talked about, you cannot go into a seven 11 unless you have a slight Indian accent.
00:40:27.940
I'd urge people to go back and watch the CNN, the C-SPAN clip of this, because it's not like the,
00:40:34.040
the Indian American gentleman he's speaking to brought up his heritage or ethnicity or anything
00:40:39.320
like that. He just has a Biden sign and he clearly just wants to talk to Biden. And the first thing out
00:40:45.180
of Biden's mouth is seven 11. Yeah. It really is kind of this like hideously stereotype. Like,
00:40:52.300
like you can only imagine how that guy must've felt that he's meeting Joe Biden and clearly wants to
00:40:57.440
talk to him about something related to politics in the campaign. And Biden wants to talk to him
00:41:02.520
about convenience stores. It's really kind of this, you know, obnoxiously condescending thing.
00:41:07.480
But I think that the common thread that runs through all of Biden's, um, comments that are
00:41:12.740
at minimum racially insensitive and tin-eared and others would argue racist is that Joe Biden walks
00:41:18.640
around convinced other people just love him, just adore him, can't get enough of him and that
00:41:24.320
everything he says is golden. And so that's why he can say to Charlemagne, the God, who was
00:41:29.920
during that infamous interview during the most recent presidential campaign, that radio host was
00:41:34.300
saying, you know, you really haven't answered all my questions. I'd really like to have you back on
00:41:37.740
the show so we can discuss this further. And that's when Biden unloads the, if you ain't voting for me,
00:41:43.320
you ain't black. And Biden is just convinced he can get away. We're all buddies. I can decide who's
00:41:50.120
black and who isn't. Me, you know, extraordinarily white Joe Biden. Um, and you know, that's what I
00:41:56.300
suspect why, uh, Jill Biden can give speeches where she talks about Mexican Americans as burritos or
00:42:02.780
something like that. Like they're really little tacos and they can get away with anything because
00:42:07.400
of that. It's crazy. Well, while we're on the topic of sort of woke agenda items, I'm interested
00:42:14.040
in what's happening with the New York times in this trans pushback. I don't know if you guys saw
00:42:17.660
this, but all these groups like glad and all these trans activist groups wrote this scathing letter to
00:42:25.160
the New York times. They're very angry that the times is making an attempt at sort of fair and
00:42:33.400
balanced coverage on the trans issues in particular transitioning children. Like they've, they've done
00:42:39.080
a couple of pieces that come close to being fair. That's as generous as I could be. Cause I read the
00:42:44.380
pieces, uh, and the activists are angry and demanding action. They, they're, they think that the times has
00:42:52.260
gone bigoted. Um, they want a real change. They want him of course, to appoint a bunch of trans
00:42:58.820
writers at the New York times. This is always the solution. Like we demand you hire five trans people
00:43:03.440
and so on. Um, they say things like this, uh, plenty of reporters at the times cover trans issues
00:43:10.160
fairly. Their work is eclipsed however, by what one journalist has calculated is over 15,000 words
00:43:14.560
of front page times coverage, debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the
00:43:20.400
last eight months alone. We won't stand for the times platforming lies, bias, fringe theories,
00:43:26.160
and dangerous inaccuracies. We demand folk fair coverage. We demand the times platform trans voices
00:43:32.400
as both sources and full-time writers and editors. And we demand a meeting between times leadership and
00:43:37.580
the transgender community. So what is the times going to do? Right? I mean, I feel like if,
00:43:43.660
if this happened at NBC, they'd be on the knee doing exactly what was demanded of them.
00:43:49.360
But interesting. And the, and the times may yet do that, but interestingly, the times,
00:43:55.120
was it today? Yes. This, this Thursday in a piece from Pamela Paul in the op-ed section,
00:44:01.420
uh, supports JK Rowling. So, I mean, you could read this as a middle finger to the activists
00:44:08.480
because what did they do in response to their, in the critique that they're too fair on these issues,
00:44:13.320
they got even fairer and put Pamela Paul in there talking about, I'll give you a segment from it.
00:44:17.940
They said, she writes, if more people stood up for JK Rowling, they would not only be doing right
00:44:22.240
by her, they'd also be standing up for human rights, specifically women's rights, gay rights,
00:44:26.360
and yes, transgender rights. They'd be standing up for the truth. Wow. All right. So what is this
00:44:32.640
telling us? I was going to say, I'd also note that late last night, apparently the New York Times PR
00:44:38.240
department issued a short statement that basically amounted to, we're proud of our reporting.
00:44:42.820
Uh, we hear you, we sympathize, but there was no retraction or apology or anything like that.
00:44:47.940
I think my favorite part of the complaint, Megan, is that, uh, they had identified a, a terrible
00:44:54.800
anti-trans dangerous right-wing extremist who had recently joined the New York Times.
00:44:59.860
And that of course is the former colleague of Michael and myself, David French. And as we all
00:45:04.680
know, when you think right-wing extremism, when you think hate, when you think, uh, frothing at the
00:45:10.060
mouth, furious denunciations and no empathy whatsoever, you think of David French. Now,
00:45:15.820
No, it's like Alex Jones and, and David French. That's, that's what you think.
00:45:20.220
Yeah. Well, you know, David French is, uh, has he written things that I'm sure trans activists
00:45:25.040
disagree with strongly? Yes. Does he hold opinions that they disagree with? Yes. Do I agree with
00:45:30.160
everything David French has ever written? No. But the idea that, you know, the New York Times is
00:45:35.140
going to turn into some sort of, you know, dangerous right-wing propaganda stirring up hate crimes
00:45:40.560
because of the presence of David French is probably one of the most absurd claims they possibly could
00:45:45.800
have made. And I think it gives away the game, which is that they're, they're not interested in
00:45:49.720
having a debate or discussion on this. They really think that the count of the argument or other
00:45:54.460
perspectives should not be heard and should not be seen. The New York Times is their territory,
00:45:59.020
not anybody else's. And that anybody who disagrees with the party line must be expunged and driven
00:46:04.420
out as quickly as possible. But it seems like Michael, this is like the, this is an important
00:46:10.360
moment for the times and so far they're handling it pretty well. Yeah, this is interesting. I think the
00:46:15.540
letter itself was evidence that something had changed at the times because previously what,
00:46:21.880
you know, in the, the last big controversy, which was the Tom Cotton op-ed, uh, sending the National
00:46:28.340
Guard to stop the rioting during 2020, uh, that controversy began as an internal revolt on the internal
00:46:38.520
chat rooms of the New York Times, uh, then leaked out as, uh, you know, a series of organized tweeting
00:46:46.240
by New York Times employees. And it resulted in the firing of the New York Times, uh, opinion editor,
00:46:52.860
James Bennett, after a day long struggle session in front of the entire staff. Uh, and you know,
00:47:00.400
then it led swiftly to Barry Weiss leaving the New York Times, a couple of other conservatives that were
00:47:06.020
involved in the op-ed page left as well. This looks like an internal revolt already failed. And so the
00:47:12.940
New York Times staffers went outside, recruited as many outside contributors as possible, and went to
00:47:19.600
GLAAD, an outside activist organization. And this was a mistake that the times, you know, institutionalists
00:47:26.920
really took advantage of by saying, well, GLAAD is an advocacy organization. We're a news organization.
00:47:32.640
Uh, in fact, the times rebels, I think, uh, handed an easy victory, uh, to the, the old school New York
00:47:42.040
Times staff that still wants to retain some legitimacy as a news organization. And we have to
00:47:47.960
be honest that the two or three stories that these activists are complaining about are really milquetoast
00:47:54.480
stuff. I mean, it just, you know, just raising questions, just giving examples of a detransitioner in
00:48:01.840
one space or a parent who was deceived by their school district in another case. But the, the
00:48:08.580
activists can't see it and they can't imagine themselves being wrong in the issue, right? They
00:48:13.300
just don't, you know, one of the arguments they give is that, well, gender transition surgery and
00:48:19.180
drugs have been accepted for decades. Well, one, it's not true that this has been accepted for decades,
00:48:25.920
especially puberty blockers. That's entirely why we're having this controversy. It's because this
00:48:31.300
is, this is new. And to just two decades of evidence, it would, would have said, if you were
00:48:37.400
just going by that, you'd say that we should still be doing lumbotomies, you know, 50 years after we
00:48:41.640
stopped doing that. Exactly. Modern medicine has advanced. All right, let me pause you right there.
00:48:45.140
I actually want to continue this, but we're going to squeeze in a quick break. Um, I find this a very
00:48:48.940
hopeful sign that maybe some of the pushback on what we're doing to these children is starting to take
00:48:53.820
hold. It's starting to work. So, uh, a note of optimism. All right, guys. So just a final question
00:49:01.860
on the, um, New York times thing as, as Rich Lowry would put it exit question to you. Um, what, uh,
00:49:08.880
does this signal a new era in the times is coverage, at least of the trans issue, because the way that
00:49:16.900
a paper like that covers this issue when it comes to children is important. The people we need to
00:49:22.100
convince that what they're doing to these kids is insane, is insane, are times readers. They're not
00:49:26.840
wall street journal readers. So does this signal a new era? Go ahead, Michael. It does. Um, you know,
00:49:34.000
three years ago, the times basically went on a pro trans campaign and did hundreds of stories,
00:49:40.580
you know, mainstreaming the issue. Uh, and now I think we're seeing blowback, uh, and we're seeing
00:49:48.000
a lot of center right, uh, and center left people, you know, suburban people confronting madness at
00:49:56.900
their local public school level. And they're demanding some way of understanding it. And the
00:50:02.420
times basically is meeting that demand with some sympathetic reporting that maybe this is getting
00:50:08.480
out of hand, that gender clinics are under-regulated, that the studies purporting to justify puberty
00:50:15.380
blockers or surgeries on minors are basically junk or non-existent and that European countries have
00:50:23.120
moved away from this. So I, I think, I think it is a change in times, but I do think it's demand driven
00:50:29.120
more than driven by the decision makers, you know, sudden growth of a conscience. Uh, I think,
00:50:37.060
I think the times is being dragged here by their readers, not, uh, not dragging the readers themselves.
00:50:42.200
And of course, Jim Garrity, there'll be no accountability for the damage already done.
00:50:48.680
No, I doubt that. I do think Michael's observation about the contrast between the way the New York
00:50:54.580
Times is handling this criticism versus the criticism of the Tom Cotton piece is a very sharp
00:51:00.460
and useful one. Uh, I always kind of wonder, and I've been thinking this back since, you know, when,
00:51:04.780
um, uh, the Atlantic magazine under Jeffrey Goldberg decided that Kevin Williamson was too shocking and
00:51:12.060
dangerous to have on their staff, who wants to run an organization where your employees can form a mob
00:51:18.440
and force you to change your decisions? You know, I thought the whole point you wanted to climb the
00:51:22.660
ladder and run an organization was you wanted to be the person in charge. You wanted to set the
00:51:26.580
direction. And if the New York Times wants to put out a more even handed coverage of young people who
00:51:32.740
choose to transition, that's their right. And it's not, you know, it's not going to have,
00:51:36.480
it's not GLAD's job to run the New York Times. It's not these outside activists and it's not some,
00:51:40.940
you know, entry-level copy editor's job either. The New York Times is going to cover this issue the
00:51:44.880
way it feels like it. So I do kind of feel like, I wonder if there's this reassertion of authority
00:51:49.260
and to say, well, you're free to feel that way. And we hope you appreciate our coverage,
00:51:53.860
but we're not going to change for you. And we're not going to bend over backwards just
00:51:58.320
We've seen it happen. The Wall Street Journal did it when a bunch of their employees got upset about
00:52:03.520
Heather McDonald op-eds, which were spot on factually. Even at the journal, there was a
00:52:08.880
threatened walkout, et cetera. And the journal said what you just said, basically, we understand you
00:52:13.740
object. Bye. You don't have to work here. Take care. And then we saw Netflix reverse itself saying
00:52:20.360
we're, we are going to cover, we're going to take content from people. You may find controversial
00:52:25.020
people like Dave Chappelle. And if you don't like it, bye. Right. Spotify stood by Joe Rogan,
00:52:30.480
even though those morons, Harry and Megan tried to threaten them into pulling him because of his
00:52:36.300
COVID coverage. They decided to be the arbiters of what was disinformation on COVID. These two morons.
00:52:41.780
Anyway, Spotify stood up to them. I just, you know, little by little, we're seeing these left
00:52:47.460
leaning media organizations push back. They're finally getting it. It's like a little light bulb moment.
00:52:53.240
But I, it's like shoots of promise, right? That's how I'm feeling after all these years of like
00:52:58.920
these, this crazy ass wokeness that's driving us all insane. And people like you guys out there
00:53:04.660
fighting the good battle all, all the time. And me too. It's nice to see some of these people coming
00:53:10.060
over, you know, it's like the point is to win. It's not, it's not to keep the fight going. The point
00:53:15.720
is to win. And I see signs of winning. So I like that. Okay. Let's shift gears. Cause one thing we did
00:53:20.100
not win on is, um, restoring sanity when it comes to the CDC, the WHO, these organizations have taken
00:53:27.940
a massive hit to their credibility. And it's really damaging because when, when we do have
00:53:31.780
another pandemic in which we do need to listen to them, we won't, right? We want who, who would
00:53:36.340
listen to Rochelle Walensky on anything other than how to panic in a crisis. I would listen to her on
00:53:42.580
that. How do I do it? How do I work myself up into tears when giving congressional testimony?
00:53:47.060
So we learned this week that the WHO is abandoning its investigation into how COVID started.
00:53:57.200
Basically, as I understand it, the Chinese weren't cooperating. So bye. It's done. They're going to
00:54:04.320
give up. Like what we know is what we know. Peace out. Enjoy your next pandemic. So Michael, I'm thinking
00:54:10.820
this is going to be unsatisfactory to people like you, but no one's going to really complain much.
00:54:19.080
Listen, this was always going to be an uphill challenge. Um, I think right from the beginning,
00:54:25.220
when I, when Jim and I both began to suspect that a lab leak was at least possible, uh, a possible
00:54:33.060
origin of, of COVID, if not the probable one, I started writing, you know, it'll be hard for
00:54:38.880
big institutions to accept that something so globally disastrous, whether the disease itself
00:54:45.800
or the lockdowns that followed from it, the authoritarian health policies that came in its
00:54:52.020
wake. It'll be hard for people to accept that this could be the fault of a handful of people
00:54:58.180
whose names we could discover. Um, you know, it's very rare in history for a handful of people
00:55:03.860
to be the cause of death of, you know, potentially millions of people globally and the cause of
00:55:10.060
misery for billions more. Um, so it was always going to be uphill to get people to take the idea
00:55:16.580
of a human cause seriously. And, but the fact is China has almost made it obvious that it's human
00:55:25.060
caused with the way they've covered up and bumbled. They couldn't have had a more sympathetic
00:55:29.780
world health organization. China basically had appointed the president Tedros who investigated
00:55:35.620
them the first time with the intent of clearing them and found that he couldn't, but now, you know,
00:55:42.820
the who still can't get there and they're still referring back to the original sin of COVID, which
00:55:49.380
is we won't offend the Chinese, right? In the first weeks of the outbreak in Wuhan, the world health
00:55:56.920
organization refused to declare it a public health emergency, refused to look at the evidence that
00:56:03.080
the virus was airborne, which was already abundant. And they did so because they were trying not to
00:56:10.060
offend China, right? The basically China's bullying of international institutions is accepted by international
00:56:18.120
institutions. And, uh, they, what we see then is total dysfunction. I mean, the, the world health
00:56:26.360
organization is now worthless as an organization.
00:56:31.420
That's, and we need them. I mean, that's the problem, Jim, is that as much as we like to think COVID was the
00:56:36.000
last pandemic, there's going to be another one. It could be intentional, could be unintentional, but we no longer
00:56:41.680
have public health authorities in this country who the majority of the country trusts.
00:56:47.960
I was going to say, Megan, in the last, you know, two, three years, you see the likes of, um, Bill Gates come out and
00:56:53.640
say, well, we need a better early warning system for pandemic outbreaks. Well, we already have it. I mean,
00:56:58.760
most doctors are pretty quick to share information when they say, Hey, I've got a patient with these
00:57:03.340
strange symptoms. It's not matching anything I'm familiar with. What do you guys think this is?
00:57:07.600
The difference is this one was in China. If COVID-19 had first jumped into a human being
00:57:12.440
in France or Canada or Brazil, or almost anywhere else on earth, the reaction would have been faster and
00:57:19.560
better. And we were basically held back by a, both first a local government in Wuhan and then a larger
00:57:25.000
national, uh, Chinese government that wanted to insist it wasn't that bad and spent, depending on
00:57:30.840
when the first infection occurred, anywhere from three weeks to six weeks, insisting this is not
00:57:36.100
contagious. There's no evidence of human to human spread, even while doctors were catching it from
00:57:41.920
their patients. Right now, if we'd had further, if you're going to try to stop a pandemic, you got to do it as
00:57:47.220
early as possible. The more it spreads, the harder it gets. And oh, by the way, China did not restrict
00:57:51.880
travel. It had kept having international travel flights leaving from Wuhan all around the world
00:57:56.920
for the first couple of weeks of this pandemic. We didn't have a chance because the Chinese government
00:58:01.040
was too secretive. And that's even assuming this was a natural outbreak from a, uh, animal at a wet
00:58:07.040
market to a person instead of a lab leak. Now, look, I, I am, you know, but I want to point out way back
00:58:12.740
when Michael sent me this video, this guy who was speculating about, uh, Wuhan being the home of not
00:58:18.400
one, but two national laboratories that were, happened to be researching coronaviruses found in
00:58:23.780
bats. And oh, by the way, we now know that they were doing gain of function research, which is where
00:58:28.060
you take naturally existing coronaviruses found in bats and try to make them more virulent and more
00:58:33.580
contagious. Not one, but two. That's pretty amazing, pretty astounding coincidence there. And most of us
00:58:39.160
look at this. And from day one, we're like, well, God, that's an amazing coincidence. And the first
00:58:44.740
outbreak was just down the road. What are the odds of that happening? Um, now we, you know, we basically
00:58:50.680
spent, and from the very beginning that Wu, the, the world health organization, that first
00:58:56.060
investigation spent like an hour or two in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They spent like a day or two
00:59:01.180
in there. They said that even during this, the Chinese scientists and virologists were extraordinarily
00:59:05.740
combative, extraordinarily uncooperative. There are still reams of data that the Chinese have not
00:59:10.940
turned over to the Wu's request. I mean, in my mind, that's effectively a guilty plea. That's
00:59:16.140
basically saying we have something to hide. I suppose it's possible that it's some other factor
00:59:21.520
that like what was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was somehow connected to biological weapons
00:59:26.660
research or something like that. Um, that's not to say that COVID-19 was a biological weapon, but the
00:59:31.880
idea that there was something going on inside that laboratory that they did not want the rest of the
00:59:36.360
world to see. But in the end, the entire world, you know, from the moment, the U S intelligence
00:59:41.760
committee community under Biden was directed to find the origins and came back with a report that
00:59:47.920
basically said, nah, we don't know. We, we looked at it. We have the, we give us a billion dollars of,
00:59:53.820
of the year. We have unprecedented signals intercepts ability. We have unprecedented experts. We have the
00:59:59.540
best technology in the whole wide world. We just can't figure it out. The whole wide world is going
01:00:03.480
to have to just accept it as a mystery. There was a letter to the editor from someone who early in the
01:00:09.780
controversy who basically said that, uh, you have to stop Trump saying this could be a lab leak because
01:00:16.020
this will lead to war with China. And I suppose if you believe that the inevitable, imagine we found
01:00:22.040
the smoking gun, imagine you found incovertible evidence, the memo from one virologist to another at the
01:00:27.880
Wuhan Institute that said, Oh geez, I dropped a vial. I inhaled it. I coughed on my wife. I went to the
01:00:34.680
market. I was touching everything. I probably started a pandemic. Let's imagine we found that
01:00:39.120
kind of smoking gun evidence. Then yeah, there'd be a heck of a lot of rage around the world at the
01:00:43.860
Chinese government. Deservedly so. And maybe that rage would turn violent. Maybe you'd see protests
01:00:49.620
outside embassies or, or something that would really get ugly and could lead to open conflict between
01:00:54.800
China and the rest of the world. I don't know something that's likely it would lead to, to all
01:00:58.420
out war, but it would get up. You know, it would be bad. I think there are some people who believe that
01:01:03.400
the lie is easier, that the lie is better, but the lie is safer.
01:01:07.260
This is, this is a perfect segue. This is a perfect segue because the question I have now is, are we doing
01:01:12.800
the same thing on balloon gate? Right? Because the latest reporting on balloon gate first, there was the
01:01:18.000
Chinese balloon that we eventually shot down over the South, the ocean off of South Carolina. And we
01:01:23.060
had three more, which may or may not have been balloons, but they're definitely unmanned aerial
01:01:27.100
objects. Shot three of them down over the past week. Four things shot out of the sky over the past
01:01:31.500
week. No word from the president at all. And now today the reporting takes a turn. Well, it came out
01:01:37.320
Tuesday in the Washington post saying not to worry. We tracked that spy balloon. The first one, the big
01:01:44.060
one from China from its launch. We were on it guys. Fear not. America was on it. We tracked it for
01:01:50.460
nearly a week before it reached us airspace and suggesting that the flight path, it was meant to
01:01:57.700
go over Guam. It was going to, it was headed for Guam. Fear not, not United States, not Montana and the
01:02:04.240
nuclear site. It was meant to go over Guam, but it took an unexpected Northern turn. And now the U S is
01:02:09.280
looking into the possibility that China never intended for it to fly over the continental
01:02:14.340
United States. It may have just been pushed by strong winds. It was definitely not going over
01:02:21.840
the minute man three launch facilities in Montana, where we have intercontinental ballistic missile
01:02:28.260
stored over 13,800 square miles of central Montana, making it the biggest new complex of nuclear arms in
01:02:35.600
the Western hemisphere. It wasn't that. And when I read this, I think they don't, we don't want to
01:02:40.980
have a fight. We're afraid of China. We were already involved in Ukraine. We can't have another big
01:02:46.020
fight. We can let the proxy war with Russia. We don't have the bandwidth for this right now. And so
01:02:50.520
it was a weather balloon. It was meant for Guam. We're good. Pay no attention to the three
01:02:56.120
additional balloons that came over. We have no idea where those came from either. We don't hear from
01:02:59.200
the president, just be the mushroom. Let us feed you the shit in the basement, take it and grow.
01:03:05.300
I mean, it's a preposterous story because we saw the balloon, you know, we already had reporting that
01:03:11.860
officials saw the balloon as it was headed toward the Aleutian islands. So they had ample time where
01:03:17.680
this was known about, at least by the military. And if that's true, then either the military didn't
01:03:23.300
report this all the way up the chain to the commander in chief, or the plan was, we're just
01:03:29.800
going to let this thing traverse the entire continental United States and send Tony Blinken,
01:03:35.280
our secretary of state to his, his meeting with the Chinese as if nothing had happened, except
01:03:40.920
shoot. Someone actually saw and photographed the balloon over Billings, Montana. Well, now,
01:03:47.460
now people are calling for us to shoot it down. So finally we're going to shoot it down.
01:03:52.000
And it is, it is the most backwards, fearful. I mean, you can detect the sweat off of administration
01:04:04.160
officials when they're talking about this. They don't know what to say to us because they're,
01:04:07.700
they are obviously intending not to give us the whole truth. And, you know, and by the way,
01:04:13.600
it does not look good if now they're saying these three other objects probably aren't foreign in origin.
01:04:21.300
They're probably not Chinese anything. There's some kind of other non-threatening balloon.
01:04:26.100
So you're saying that now we're just going up and shooting, you know, $400,000 missiles at
01:04:32.460
what space, you know, garbage in the science projects. I mean, yeah, it's like, this is absolutely
01:04:42.700
backwards and it's already caused the diplomatic incident. You know, the, the trip was already
01:04:48.440
canceled with China. China's already starting to shoot its own, you know, things out of the sky,
01:04:54.440
just to prove that it can do the same thing that we can do. Uh, but the administration looks like
01:04:59.420
fools and unless they come out with a better explanation, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm absolutely
01:05:04.120
fearful that they're just trying to like hide the mess under a rug because you're right. They,
01:05:08.780
they don't have the bandwidth for it right now. They're overwhelmed with what's happening in Europe.
01:05:13.780
And, you know, we're, we're, we're almost $20 billion behind on weapons deliveries to Taiwan.
01:05:20.120
I mean, like when, when people look at our actual preparedness in the Pacific and now we're finding
01:05:26.480
out that we're not even prepared to defend our own airspace from some Chinese experimental airship.
01:05:32.980
I mean, that's a huge problem. I mean, that's like a, that is a cold war level problem,
01:05:40.660
a Sputnik level event. You know, I was joking the other day that the best case scenario for us all
01:05:46.380
right now on these balloons or whatever they are is, you know, the scene in Jaws where they see the
01:05:52.480
fin and they send everybody, Chief Brody sends the boat out there and it turns out to be the two
01:05:56.580
teenagers like playing a joke, right? That's our best case scenario. Now that it is a kid's science
01:06:02.660
project, some kids, some teenagers who are really smart in science are just messing with us now in
01:06:06.520
the wake of the first balloon. Um, but it doesn't appear to be because when you listen to the pilot,
01:06:11.120
there's actually, it released the audio over the weekend of the pilots encountering the objects.
01:06:15.920
And, uh, here's the one. It's kind of interesting. I just short clip of the pilot describing when he
01:06:20.460
saw this object over Lake Huron, which was the fourth of four that got shot down. Listen to this.
01:06:25.620
This is baffling the pilots, Jim Garrity, which is disconcerting. And you've been pointing out,
01:06:44.520
I think better than anybody. Wouldn't it be great to hear from the president? Wouldn't it be nice
01:06:48.920
to, to get some sort of an update from him? Yes. Uh, reportedly president Biden will be addressing
01:06:54.320
the country on these matters in the near future next day or so. And hopefully he'll stay on topic
01:06:59.560
and not bring up any old stories about corn pop. Um, what I, I do, by the way, that audio,
01:07:04.900
Wait, I lost you there. Not bring up any old what? A corn pop, you know, and any old stories of,
01:07:10.440
you know, my dad used to tell me, you know, um, or that audio from the pilots does sound like the
01:07:16.100
first act of a sci-fi invasion movie, right? That, you know, we're at a base. We're not sure
01:07:21.180
what that is. That's, you know, a little bit unnerving. Um, kind of echoing what Michael said,
01:07:26.300
I, I'm not, if the Billings Gazette had not had a photographer in the right place at the right time,
01:07:31.620
it's entirely possible these past two weeks would have proceeded completely differently.
01:07:35.700
And I do think this is something of a mini Sputnik moment. We are used to being protected by,
01:07:40.800
uh, not only a, the, you know, what we believe is the finest military in the world,
01:07:44.340
the most technologically advanced military in the world, NORAD, which does more than track Santa
01:07:48.980
every Christmas, uh, and two large oceans. We're not used to knowing, oh, there's a foreign,
01:07:54.320
there's a hostile foreign countries, spy surveillance, uh, device floating over your
01:07:59.300
heads, America, nothing to worry about. Um, it certainly seems like the administration plan was
01:08:04.280
not to tell anyone, uh, as this was occurring. And now this claim that this, oh, it was really aimed
01:08:09.360
for Guam. It's amazing how the air currents took it over the illusion islands, which is where we
01:08:14.920
have one of our most strategic located airfields and bases for dealing with a threat from the
01:08:19.080
Pacific. The only missile defense facility in Western, in Eastern Alaska, which is our only
01:08:24.240
shot to shoot down an ICBM from North Korea or say any other country in Asia that has a nuclear weapon.
01:08:30.180
Uh, then it went down through, as you mentioned, the ICBMs in Montana, then went down to Missouri,
01:08:35.920
which is where the B-2 bombers are. And then finally back out across the, it's amazing how it
01:08:41.180
just happened to go near all of these key U.S. military facilities that the Chinese might be
01:08:45.620
interested in. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's just remarkable. It's really lucky break for the
01:08:50.020
Chinese on that one. Um, right. Exactly. They should have more errant balloons.
01:08:53.800
You know, this is a, look, for the, for the last six years during the Trump administration,
01:09:03.600
Russia was the root of all evil. Everybody was secretly a, uh, agent of the Russian government
01:09:09.380
and all that stuff. And, and, you know, uh, and then Biden takes office and all of a sudden he
01:09:14.040
starts talking about, he wants a stable and predictable relationship with Russia.
01:09:18.000
It almost turned on a dime. All of a sudden we were not eager to, you know, there was a little
01:09:21.960
bit of, we're going to enact more sanctions and all that.
01:09:23.800
But Biden had his sanction, had his summit with Putin and talked about how they wanted
01:09:28.160
stability and predictability and how, you know, uh, Biden said he believed Putin really
01:09:33.400
understood and wanted the same thing. And then Putin invaded Ukraine. Uh, go figure the
01:09:38.200
octogenarian did not accurately assess the intentions of the former KGB colonel. Um, you
01:09:43.820
add, so I think with China, again, Biden likes to talk a tough game, but when push comes to
01:09:49.180
shot, I mean, look, think about it, that balloon or that spy craft was over our territory.
01:09:54.200
And until it was photographed, the plan was for the secretary of state to go and have a summit in
01:09:59.040
Beijing. And I think that in the end, the cancellation of that summit was out of a fear
01:10:02.700
that this was going to all break while, uh, Blinken was over in Beijing and it was going to look very
01:10:07.480
bad. Uh, now the interesting question will be, when is, you know, Blinken going to go back?
01:10:11.840
This subsequent messaging up, it just got blown off course. We're not even sure the Chinese meant
01:10:17.840
to do this. Sounds to me like, boy, we'd really like to have that summit again. We'd really like
01:10:22.720
to have normal relationships with China, even though on front after front, it's very clear
01:10:27.440
China's not that interested in having normal relationships with us.
01:10:30.900
Yeah. Guam, Guam, by the way, I've got to ask you, did you see this soundbite? Speaking of NORAD
01:10:37.180
from Corrine Jean-Pierre earlier this week, this is the soundbite of the week bar none. Listen,
01:10:42.580
why is, why is the American military shooting something out of the sky over Canada? Because
01:10:50.220
it's part of a NORAD. There is a, the NORAD is part of like a part of a, it's a, it's a,
01:10:56.460
what you call a coalition, a consortium, a pact, exactly. And so that's why we were able to do
01:11:01.600
that again. We didn't do it on our own. We did it in, in, uh, in, uh, clearly in, in, in,
01:11:07.020
in step with, uh, Canada. I mean, yeah, the, the NOR in NORAD is for North America. Uh, it would be
01:11:17.840
not possible for us to have an effective air defense system that only protected America.
01:11:22.860
And we said to the Canadians, you guys have hockey sticks, you guys have poutine,
01:11:26.800
you guys are on your own. We're not going to know, obviously for reasons of geography
01:11:30.500
and the longstanding. The NORAD, the NORAD, we worked in conjunction with
01:11:36.340
Canada, which I said the other day, sounds like, you know, a bad disease you get when
01:11:41.000
you're in college and you're a little too free and footloose.
01:11:45.560
You know, the, you know, the white house has had a bad week when Justin Trudeau looks like
01:11:50.160
the firmest, most standup and toughest leader in the Western world. I mean, uh, he's the one
01:11:57.440
who kind of came out right away when that, when that object was shot down and explained like
01:12:02.940
that he won't tolerate any violation of Canada's, uh, sovereign airspace. Um, and probably not
01:12:10.760
Canada's either. Uh, so right. Not Canada. It's the best thing. I'm only referring to it as
01:12:16.760
Canada from now on. Um, while we're on the subject of people, not necessarily from Canada,
01:12:22.600
but who have lived in Canada, you don't get to discuss fun topics like Harry and Megan on the
01:12:27.620
national review podcast, the editors, which is well worth everybody's times to eye time. I love it.
01:12:31.520
I listen to it every week. Comes out twice a week. I would like more. Um, but Megan and Harry,
01:12:37.260
uh, we've all been wondering how did their PR tour go? How did the spare, uh, autobiography
01:12:42.560
help Harry's approval rating? How did the Netflix documentary do for them? Well, you know, it's bad
01:12:48.540
when your PR tour lands you a little skit, a great skit on South park, which did the following bit on
01:12:56.960
those two. You can hear their fake voices, uh, in this little skit, which I have to show you some of
01:13:01.080
watches. It has been several months now since our beloved queen has died. All Canadians are
01:13:06.880
finding it hard to go on all Canadians. That is, except for our first guests, the prince and his
01:13:11.140
wife. Thanks for having us on the show. It's so awesome to be. It's great. So let me start with
01:13:23.940
you, Sam. You've lived a life with the Royal family. You've had everything handed to you,
01:13:27.280
but you say your life has been hard and now you've written all about it in your new book.
01:13:30.740
When? Yes, that's right, friend. You say my wife and I are totally like you should write a book
01:13:35.860
because your family's like stupid and then so are like journalists. So you hate journalists.
01:13:41.080
That's right. And now you wrote a book that reports on the lives of the Royal family.
01:13:44.080
Right. So you're a journalist. Well, I just think some people might say that your Instagram-loving
01:13:50.280
bitch wife actually doesn't want her privacy. How dare you, sir? My Instagram-loving bitch wife
01:13:55.520
has always wanted her privacy. And you know what else? To hell with Canada. We are leaving.
01:14:04.480
And then there's a little like signs with them going through all these countries saying privacy,
01:14:09.820
privacy, and everybody, just the disdain for them. They've jumped the shark. Garrity,
01:14:14.080
I saw you laughing during the bit. You tell me, is it over for them in terms of their hopes for being
01:14:18.600
the next Barack and Michelle Obama or, you know, political leaders or influencers here in the
01:14:23.740
United States? All right, Megan, this country was founded by men who were willing to shoot other
01:14:28.960
people in the head so that they wouldn't have to care about what the British Royal family was doing.
01:14:34.380
So you're right. We don't talk about the British Royals very much on the editors or write about
01:14:38.360
them at all. I do see them as roughly akin to the 1980s game War Games because they desperately want
01:14:44.500
attention that even if you denounce them, you're giving them the attention that they want. So
01:14:49.820
much like that talk about nuclear war, the only way to win is not to play. So I try not to think
01:14:55.540
about it as much as possible. I am pleased to see that more and more of the public, not just here,
01:14:59.840
but apparently around the world, is coming around to my position.
01:15:02.840
I feel this is a pronouncement, MBD, that they have jumped the shark. They are not beloved. And her
01:15:10.400
hopes of running for president, reported hopes, are all but dashed. That's not happening. When South
01:15:16.780
Park turns on you, there's no recovery. Right. There was a moment where it seemed like
01:15:22.580
Harry and Megan were going to become the latest thing that Americans polarize over, where
01:15:27.560
all conservatives are critical of them. And so all liberals have to embrace them. But now it's like
01:15:32.940
they're just so cringeworthy and so unsympathetic in a fundamental way that like they're of no use
01:15:42.340
to anyone, but they're overpaid publicists. Right. I mean, and the kind of grifters trying to sell,
01:15:49.080
you know, kitsch attached to their names. You know, the whole result of their giant
01:15:56.880
publicity campaign has been to raise the popularity of Prince William and Kate in the
01:16:03.460
United Kingdom. Right. I mean, they didn't, they, you know, they may do, you know, some tiny bit of
01:16:09.460
damage to Charles, but I think even his popularity has gone up in the United Kingdom as his coronation
01:16:14.440
is coming up soon because people feel, feel bad for him that, right. That this, this child and her,
01:16:21.480
his monster wife get to say whatever they like about the Royal family and the Royal family has all sorts
01:16:27.400
of restrictions, formal and informal about how much they can fire back and defend themselves.
01:16:32.680
And by being quiet, they are subtly, subtly winning the game. And it's amazing that Harry and Markle
01:16:39.100
and whoever is advising them can't figure this out yet. Um, yeah, but they, they can't. And I'm sure,
01:16:45.720
you know, there's too much money to be made by the agents and other publicists for Harry and Markle
01:16:52.740
to shut up. I mean, Harry is already talking about coming out with another book, but what does he have
01:16:58.200
to say other than poor me? Right. Only stories about the Royal family do well for them. It's just
01:17:06.220
their connection to the Royals that makes them interesting. Nothing beyond that, which is yet
01:17:10.360
another reason why King Charles should not include them at the coronation. Can you imagine sidling
01:17:15.560
up to them at the coronation? As if you're a member of the Royal family, you wouldn't want to say
01:17:19.380
anything. You'd be terrified that that pen sticking out of the pocket is recording you live, the little
01:17:23.660
flower coming out of the dress. No, right. You know that the whole thing is a recon mission for the
01:17:28.040
next book and the next Netflix project. And by the way, they've insulted at least half of the British
01:17:32.680
people by saying everybody who voted for breakfast is racist. So just out of protection for his fellow
01:17:37.860
countrymen, King Charles should not allow this, but he's going to, according to the reports,
01:17:41.240
we'll see. They'll go to, they've never seen a camera they don't want to be in front of.
01:17:44.840
Uh, it was a mistake. I've said it before. I'll say it again. I'll be there,
01:17:47.860
not necessarily physically, but I'll be booing from whatever spot. See, you don't get to see
01:17:51.760
rich Lowry. He leaves such goodness on the floor. Look at these interesting comments. You guys are
01:17:55.760
able to make on pop culture and figures in it. Markle, Markle will be there. She wants the drama.
01:18:01.420
I mean, she, she wants the big fight with the Royal family and, uh, and you know, in some way she's
01:18:08.140
going to get it. This is going to be what they do for the rest of their lives. And maybe every five or 10
01:18:12.360
years, the media will turn back and, you know, kind of dip in and see if this, you know, this
01:18:17.640
lemon has any more juice in it to squeeze. But, uh, I think they've gotten the worst of it.
01:18:23.860
You know, um, you know, they've made, I think the big payday that they're going to make, uh,
01:18:29.640
until they're, you know, until the divorce, right. I mean, until the emotional divorce, when she has,
01:18:35.360
you know, she's separated him from all the traditions of his family, separated him from his family.
01:18:40.080
Uh, and he's going to increasingly have less interest to her over time, unless the drama is
01:18:46.500
kept up. So money's been turned off and the Royal connection is going to be turned off and well done
01:18:52.820
MBD, both starting and ending the segment on a lemon. We appreciate that. That's why you're a
01:18:58.680
professional guys. So fun to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here. Jim Garrity, Michael
01:19:03.180
Brendan Doherty. You guys are the best go check out NR plus it is well worth the time coming up next.
01:19:09.200
We get to the latest from the Alec Murdoch trial with somebody who's been following it very,
01:19:14.460
very closely, massive ruling against the prosecution yesterday. This is a big one.
01:19:22.200
The state is expected to rest its case this week in the double murder trial of disgraced
01:19:27.540
South Carolina attorney, Alec Murdoch. Murdoch is accused of killing his wife, Maggie and their
01:19:33.020
youngest son, Paul, who was 22 at the time at their home on June 7th, 2021. If convicted Murdoch
01:19:39.880
faces 30 years to life in prison. Last week, testimony of Alec's financial crimes, uh, was
01:19:45.940
allowed to be brought into evidence, excuse me, as potential motive for the killings. His life was
01:19:51.420
imploding. He was under enormous stress. And the belief by the prosecutors is he killed his family,
01:19:55.800
uh, two of, of members of his family in order to create sympathy for him. This week brought
01:20:02.120
additional bombshell evidence, including an interview from August of 2021 in which Alec
01:20:07.000
Murdoch is confronted and asked point blank. If he committed the murders, it's very clear. He thought
01:20:11.380
he was manipulating the police in the days and weeks after the murders. And now we are learning
01:20:15.900
very clearly the police were onto him and we're not being manipulated at all. Joining us now to discuss
01:20:22.380
the latest is Peter Tragos. Peter's been listening to the trial every day. He's been covering it
01:20:26.460
closely on his YouTube show called the lawyer, you know, he's also managing partner of a law firm
01:20:31.760
in Florida. Peter, thanks for being here. Hey, thanks for having me. Okay. So can we start with
01:20:37.740
yesterday? The judge issued a devastating ruling toward the prosecution. I mean, look, there's,
01:20:44.620
they still have a good case, but this bizarre thing happened with Alec Murdoch after the murders
01:20:50.780
in which somebody shot him on the side of the road when he was allegedly pulled over, like fixing a
01:20:57.220
car and the, but the person only skimmed his head and he didn't die. It turned out this was allegedly
01:21:06.320
his drug dealer and employee and longtime contact. And Alec Murdoch has admitted that this was arranged
01:21:13.020
by Alec. He claims because he wanted his, his surviving son Buster to get an insurance payout.
01:21:18.860
Many believe this was just yet another scheme to create sympathy for him and lead people to believe
01:21:23.860
that there was this mass killer on the loose, trying to kill off Murdoch's. And, you know,
01:21:28.060
he came within an inch of his life. In any event, he's now admitted he was behind it, but the jury,
01:21:32.680
the judge ruled, we'll never hear about that because it would be too prejudicial and it doesn't
01:21:37.140
really go to motive. And it really just kind of makes him look bad as opposed to makes it more
01:21:41.100
likely he committed the murders or not. And yet there was a glimmer of light for the prosecution
01:21:46.640
on this. Um, it was, I don't know if it was late in the day yesterday, but I think it was where
01:21:51.440
there's a question about whether after getting this great ruling, the defense, they opened the door
01:21:57.360
by touching on this subject, which would be a massive error. So can you get us up to speed on
01:22:03.620
what what's going down here? Sure. I mean, this case has so many different angles to it that make
01:22:09.680
it just more than they would even write in a movie because it's so unbelievable. And this side of the
01:22:14.040
road incident might take the cake, setting it up with your drug dealer, getting shot, making up a
01:22:20.100
story, talking to a sketch artist, and then eventually not very long after just admitting
01:22:24.260
you made the whole thing up. And that was not going to come in, which I think would have been great
01:22:29.520
for the defense because when you realize that he's capable of doing something like this and lying
01:22:33.940
straight to law enforcement's face, then you're probably going to think he's very likely going
01:22:38.940
to do that in other cases where someone may have died, um, at his hands potentially. And the judge
01:22:44.840
said it was a bridge too far. The financial stuff came in as potential motive for the murders.
01:22:49.280
This was a bridge too far until the defense did in fact open the door. The judge clarified his order
01:22:54.880
this morning. That door is open. How far the prosecution is going to walk through that door.
01:23:00.320
We still don't know as they haven't called the witnesses, um, to that case. And I've heard they
01:23:04.480
are not going to call Curtis Eddie Smith, who is the person involved, the drug dealer who apparently
01:23:09.800
Alec Murdoch was paying $50,000 a month for pills, but instead they're going to try to get it in through
01:23:15.400
the law enforcement officer who did multiple interviews, did that investigation and who eventually Alec
01:23:20.240
Murdoch admitted that he lied about the entire thing too. Seems like the defense and the
01:23:24.860
prosecution are working together to try to streamline this story, but it is going to come
01:23:29.320
in front of the jury in more ways than kind of the cryptic way it already has through Maggie's sister
01:23:34.100
and, uh, through the last agent, Owen, the lead investigator on the case, they both kind of
01:23:38.780
mentioned and talked about it, but it was kind of vague. And the judge said in order for the jury to
01:23:42.560
not be misled and to get the whole story, the prosecution now is allowed to talk about it. And I
01:23:47.420
gotta be honest, the defense didn't look that upset about it. So maybe they are going to try to use
01:23:51.480
this to their advantage as they have with a lot of the other prosecution evidence.
01:23:55.800
How, how would this be? I thought it was a massive ruling for them, the defense and getting this
01:24:00.180
kept out. I mean, I hear if I'm a juror and I hear not only did he allegedly kill his wife and
01:24:04.380
his son, but a couple of months later he tried to arrange his own bogus, you know, alleged killing
01:24:09.420
on the side of the road. This is what he does. He gets in trouble and he tries to create sympathy
01:24:13.680
for himself. Um, only when it comes to his life, he protects it. You know, he's quick, quick to take the
01:24:19.440
life of family members in order to preserve himself. But this is obviously orchestrated to just look like
01:24:26.220
an attempt on his life. And his story about, I was just going to get the suicide. I was going to,
01:24:30.040
I was going to get the, um, insurance policy for my son is obvious BS because if this guy wanted to
01:24:35.100
kill him, he would have fired a second shot. It was very clear to the shooter that Alec Murdoch was not
01:24:40.200
dead. So it's like that, that whole story of, Oh, I was just being this altruistic guy trying to get
01:24:44.680
buster an insurance policy. That's never going to fly. So this was a devastating ruling for the
01:24:50.080
prosecution. It wasn't a good ruling for them. Why would the defense open the door? What did they do?
01:24:54.160
What did they say in front of the jury that led the judge to think about reversing this?
01:24:58.560
So the very clear intent, I think the defense has to potentially open the door based on their
01:25:02.460
questions yesterday, crossing agent Owen is to provide an alternate killer. Uh, Eddie was apparently
01:25:09.280
skimming the money that Alec was giving him for the drugs. And this is all according to the defense
01:25:13.960
attorneys testifying during cross-examination, which they're allowed to do. So that's fair game,
01:25:17.620
but they have asked very pointed questions about certain drug gangs and drug deals and skimming the
01:25:22.660
money and how they're a very dangerous gang and how Alec Murdoch has even prosecuted this gang and
01:25:28.480
how Eddie was stealing money without Alec Murdoch knowing. And Alec Murdoch was the one that they were
01:25:34.200
going to come after. And they weren't worried because they knew they were going to get paid because
01:25:37.520
everybody knows the Murdoch name apparently in this small town, really statewide probably.
01:25:44.800
Wait a minute, wait a minute, but let me ask you something, Peter.
01:25:46.040
Isn't, didn't Murdoch admit, he's already admitted that he set this up, right?
01:25:53.940
Yes. But they're saying those gang members came and killed Maggie and Paul, Alec's wife and son.
01:26:00.860
They're trying to point the finger at the drug dealers as potential killers, um, for the Moselle
01:26:06.660
incident that he's on trial for. Now the murder trial, I know it can be hard to keep track.
01:26:09.640
What are we here on trial for? We've heard about a boat case. We've heard about financial crimes.
01:26:13.640
We're going to hear about a side of the road incident. And we've also, of course,
01:26:16.400
heard a little bit about a murder that took place at Moselle.
01:26:19.600
So you're saying it helps, it potentially helps the defense to have the testimonial come in
01:26:24.560
about the drug dealer who he hired to allegedly shoot him. It helps Alec Murdoch because even though
01:26:31.740
it will come in that Alec arranged that whole thing, it introduces this sketchy character into the
01:26:37.720
jury's narrative who was connected with drugs and potentially bad guys. And so it's good for
01:26:43.100
the defense, even though Alec did this ridiculous thing and they're going to know Alec put him up to
01:26:46.680
it. Um, it shows Alec was connected with nefarious characters.
01:26:51.420
That's, I think their goal. And I, you and I sit here and we think how wild this is and what a liar
01:26:56.900
he is and how bad he seems to be of a guy. The defense is basically willing to stipulate that
01:27:01.220
he's a liar. They even said it yesterday in court. You want us to stipulate that he's a liar and not go
01:27:04.940
through all this. And the prosecution was like, Oh, that sounds good. If you'll stipulate that he's
01:27:08.180
a liar, but they want to go into this evidence just to hear how horrible it actually was.
01:27:12.320
And now he was able to do it with a straight face and no issue. And again, the defense is also going
01:27:16.300
to argue right after this fake suicide incident, he went to rehab. That's when he came to that's
01:27:22.000
when stuff started changing for him. But I mean, it definitely does not look good for him in this
01:27:26.600
case at all with all of these other bad acts coming in.
01:27:29.160
What do you think was the biggest testimony we got this week? I know they introduced some
01:27:36.420
police interrogation tapes that we had never seen before. It definitely seemed like the cops knew
01:27:41.340
early on he had changed outfits on the day of the murder and that he wasn't necessarily being
01:27:46.360
forthcoming about that. They showed him the Snapchat video, his son, Paul, a murder victim,
01:27:53.240
one of the two had taken in which you can hear Alex voice. They seem to know Alex was guilty or
01:28:01.320
at least a suspect early on. But what stood out to you is like the most interesting piece of
01:28:06.500
evidence introduced this week. So we're talking this week that the biggest piece of evidence is
01:28:10.700
definitely that video that puts him at the scene at eight forty four, which is right around when the
01:28:14.860
murders occurred. But this week to me and I'm on an island a little bit talking about this case
01:28:18.920
because, you know, as a lawyer looking at our criminal justice system, beyond a reasonable
01:28:23.440
doubt is important and prosecutors need to be held to that standard. And this was one of the worst
01:28:27.520
investigations I've ever seen for SLED. Now, why that happened? Who knows? Alex Connections.
01:28:32.360
Was it a good old boys club where they try not to let it happen or did they just drop the ball?
01:28:36.140
I don't know. But the most important evidence this week was from the lead investigator.
01:28:39.700
I think Owen was his last name. And during the cross-examination, they basically went through the
01:28:45.100
entire defense's theory of the case, how they really didn't do anything that they were supposed
01:28:51.240
to. In this case, they didn't protect the crime scene. People were walking through it. There was law
01:28:55.180
enforcement bloody footsteps throughout. They didn't search the house appropriately. They just kind of
01:28:59.940
walked through and didn't gather any real evidence. They didn't search the mom's house, which was his
01:29:04.040
entire alibi. He said he was at the mom's house when the murders occurred. They never searched it.
01:29:08.560
He was cooperating fully with them. They had this video where you mentioned he had different clothes
01:29:14.740
on. That seems really important to you or I, right? So it would be important to try to find those
01:29:18.700
clothes, right? We find out they never did anything to try to find those clothes. They never asked where
01:29:22.800
those clothes were. They never looked for those clothes. Yeah, they never found them, but that's
01:29:27.220
because they never looked for them. And when we talk about the missing weapons, they didn't walk the 16
01:29:32.640
minute drive from Moselle where the murders occurred to the mom's house in Alameda. They dropped the ball
01:29:37.720
left and right. And even so far as to say, they thought the white shirt that we all know now has
01:29:43.700
no blood basically and no DNA on it. An expert said there was blood spatter. The chief lead
01:29:49.340
investigator told the grand jury there was blood spatter to indict Alec Murdoch. Now we know confirmed
01:29:54.500
by state witnesses, there was no blood spatter on that shirt, which is why it seems like they've kind
01:29:59.620
of switched their angle to, he must have changed because for a long time in this investigation,
01:30:04.240
they thought that white shirt he was wearing that looked so clean to the naked eye had blood spatter
01:30:09.500
on it to prove that he must've been close enough to pull the trigger to get the blood or biological
01:30:13.860
material on his shirt. The investigation was, was pretty piss poor. If you ask me,
01:30:18.100
I, this, the sled, uh, maintenance of the murder scene in the wake of the crime was absolutely
01:30:25.660
abhorrent that they've done a good job of bringing that out even through the state's witnesses.
01:30:29.260
And you raise a good question about why, why is that? Because Alec Murdoch is a very,
01:30:33.640
very well-connected man. His family basically ran this town for a century and, um, there might've
01:30:40.080
been a, Oh, you know, let's take care of him and not suspecting him. But soon they got onto his trail
01:30:47.240
and we're hearing some of that in the examinations of Alec Murdoch hasn't taken the stand, but they,
01:30:52.720
he did give interviews. And this one was from August 11th, 2021. That's, uh, two months after the
01:30:58.440
murders where they're asking him about the Snapchat video that his son took that he,
01:31:03.660
Alec clearly did not know that his son had taken the Snapchat video of him. There's two videos.
01:31:07.680
There's one in which Alec is, uh, I'm sorry, Paul, the murder victim is handling dogs and you can
01:31:12.880
clearly hear Alec in the background. It places Alec at the dog kennels where the murders took place,
01:31:17.260
something Alec denied he'd ever went to on the day of the murder. And, and then there's a, um,
01:31:21.800
Snapchat video that shows, um, it shows Alec Murdoch with his son on scene the day of the
01:31:28.200
murder in a different outfit from the one that he would later be talking to police in. So here they
01:31:33.100
are, the cops on, um, August 11th asking Murdoch about the Snapchat video and his change of clothes.
01:31:39.600
It's sat 18. There was a video on Paul's phone of, um, you and him on the farm that night and you
01:31:49.000
were in khaki pants and a dress shirt. You were playing with a treat. Um, but I mean, the, the question
01:31:56.360
in that is when I met you that night, you were in shorts and a t-shirt. At what point in that evening
01:32:01.680
did you change clothes? I'm not sure. Uh, you know, it would have been before dinner or after
01:32:13.820
dinner? No, it would have been, what time of day was that? I would have thought I'd already changed.
01:32:20.960
Uh, there's not a time, but I want to say it's, it looks to be about dusk. So that would have been
01:32:27.040
seven 30 o'clock. I guess I changed when I got back to the house.
01:32:33.780
That change of clothes is going to be important. He's clearly, there was a change of clothes.
01:32:37.560
His defense is going to argue what it was hot. It's South Carolina. He was doing yard work. He
01:32:41.360
changed, but you could see he's on his heels there. He didn't realize there was a video showing
01:32:45.600
the change of clothing. We've had testimony by the housekeeper finding the shower and the wet towel
01:32:50.640
in the house. And those clothes are the first, the first clothes have never been found. And you say
01:32:54.860
the prosecution, you know, they should have introduced something about it. It's their burden
01:32:58.180
of proof. But you know, the truth is for us, if he's really innocent, why wouldn't he just go find
01:33:03.780
those clothes and say, here they are. They have no blood on them. He doesn't have the burden of proof,
01:33:07.460
but you and I know as commentators, if he had those clean clothes with no blood on them, we'd be seeing
01:33:11.680
them. Yeah. And some, some other stuff has come out that potentially could be good for them.
01:33:16.100
That's coming out during the trial with some of his GM data on his car. And I believe you're right
01:33:20.480
about that, but this was an exact question asked to agent Owens in, I think redirect where he said,
01:33:26.040
they didn't tell you to go search Alameda, which was where he was during his alibi, the mother's
01:33:29.920
house. They didn't give you the clothes, things like that. And then on recross, the defense attorney
01:33:34.200
made a good point. Is it the suspect's job to do this investigation for you? And I think on,
01:33:39.140
in closing argument, we've made closing arguments like this in, in cases where we've defended in
01:33:42.840
criminal defense cases where they can sit there and point the finger at us all day. But if they didn't do
01:33:47.140
their job, improve the case, the law says you've got to come back with not guilty. If you have
01:33:51.120
reasonable doubt based on that. And that's the big issue in this case, we can sit here and he's
01:33:55.600
going to prison for the rest of his life. We have seen the financial crimes, evidence entered into
01:33:59.940
this case, slam dunk, absolutely beyond a reasonable doubt. He's going to get convicted for those. So
01:34:05.300
he's going to prison forever. I'm just not so sure they can prove he did this.
01:34:10.360
You also have the testimony of Maggie's sister who got up there and said he lured her back to the
01:34:15.140
house. They were not living together. She was at another location. He lured her back saying,
01:34:18.980
please come with me to go see my father. And then she gets there. He doesn't even take her to go to
01:34:22.460
the father. She was emotional. She was powerful. She had encouraged her sister to go. She didn't,
01:34:28.160
Maggie did not want to go back to him. And she's like, you should go. It's his, you know, parent.
01:34:33.200
It was like the prosecution needs a very solid closing right now because they put in enough
01:34:37.540
evidence to sew this story together. But the jury's, it's been very disjointed. And so the jury's heard,
01:34:42.500
as you point out, stories about a lot of different events, they need a very strong
01:34:46.540
closing to, to lead them right to the water and the defense even more so. So right now,
01:34:51.780
if you had to handicap it, Peter, would you say that this is going to be a guilty verdict or not?
01:34:58.040
I would say, yeah, I would put it stronger on the guilty side, mostly because of the other bad acts
01:35:02.800
more than what they can actually prove with the murder. But I think the prosecution needs to pick a
01:35:06.620
theory that the evidence actually points to and proves and not possibilities or maybe happen and just
01:35:12.360
stick to that one theory and go with it and say, you know, they're going to get up and put up a
01:35:15.840
dog and pony show for you, but we know he did this and we know why and go through all the financial
01:35:20.560
crimes and things like that. Peter, thank you so much. We'll be back tomorrow.
01:35:27.660
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.