The Megyn Kelly Show - Elon Musk Buys Twitter, and Free Speech Under Attack, with Charles C.W. Cooke and Yascha Mounk

00:00:00.400 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.540 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:15.260 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis remains in the headlines as he's now signed a bill revoking Disney's special tax status into law.

00:00:25.360 Now, it doesn't officially happen for another year, so there's time for negotiation, but it's on.

00:00:32.340 I mean, it's definitely on.

00:00:34.260 Disney has operated like its own city in Florida since 1967.

00:00:38.160 Following Disney's campaign against the bill that its critics are calling the Don't Say Gay Bill, even though that's a lie,

00:00:44.500 leaders in Florida are pushing back and taking away its special privileges.

00:00:48.760 But is this a good decision?

00:00:50.440 Is it a good decision for the state of Florida, for Republicans, and does it set potentially a dangerous precedent?

00:00:56.100 For when it comes to government coming after corporate entities for their opinions.

00:01:01.140 We're going to get into all of that.

00:01:02.820 Also, less than a month into the launch of CNN Plus, the company is no longer.

00:01:07.600 It's shutting down.

00:01:08.800 Leaders at CNN are now fighting the narrative of failure, arguing, oh, this is just, this is corporate.

00:01:13.540 It's just a corporate decision.

00:01:15.040 The platform just wasn't given enough time.

00:01:17.000 See, they were thriving.

00:01:18.000 It's just unfairly, the plug was pulled early.

00:01:21.720 Okay, we'll talk about it.

00:01:24.140 Also, it's looking increasingly likely that Elon Musk will buy Twitter.

00:01:29.520 Got to get Peter Schiff back on to talk about, he told us it wasn't going to happen, that he couldn't afford it.

00:01:34.520 Guess again, because it looks like Morgan Stanley is behind him and he's partnering with other financial firms.

00:01:40.240 And they're saying we could get an announcement that it's happening as early as today.

00:01:45.440 But there are a couple of wrinkles.

00:01:50.300 Joining me now to discuss all of it is our friend Charles C.W. Cook, senior writer for National Review.

00:01:56.460 Charles, welcome back.

00:01:57.420 Let's start with Twitter.

00:02:00.380 Yeah, it looks like he's getting the money from a various group of people and that they could be announcing, as really as later today, that his $54.20 per share offer, best and final, he dubbed it, will be accepted.

00:02:15.880 As the board has met to recommend the transaction to Twitter shareholders.

00:02:20.660 Yeah, I mean, I think this primarily should remind us that markets change.

00:02:26.960 And quickly, who had this on their bingo card a month ago, at least outside of a fantasy?

00:02:33.320 There's a strange tendency to look at the tech sector as if it were, you know, U.S. Steel in 1960, but it's not.

00:02:45.140 You know, even Facebook, this big giant, has had two predecessors, both of which are dead, Friendster, then Myspace.

00:02:52.720 And if we get Twitter 2.0, it will be the second iteration of a service that essentially lived for 11, 12 years.

00:03:06.860 So, you know, we ought to remember that things move fast in free markets, but they especially move fast in the tech sector.

00:03:13.100 And Elon Musk, who has had a remarkable career, I mean, if you go back to the beginning, he was behind PayPal.

00:03:23.400 He owned the bank that was bought and incorporated into PayPal.

00:03:26.860 Obviously, when all he's done with SpaceX and Tesla and other services, will be its new owner and will hopefully change it a great deal.

00:03:34.020 Hmm. They say there's still the potential things could go south for a number of reasons, one of which is Twitter would apparently be allowed to accept an offer from another party if it pays Elon a breakup fee under the deal they're considering.

00:03:49.600 So there could be what the left would view as a white knight that comes in and saves Twitter and the world from the horrible fate of Elon Musk actually owning Twitter.

00:03:58.960 And, you know, given the ideology of some people on the left, who knows? That could happen.

00:04:03.660 I remember I met Jeffrey Katzenberg at a party in 2016 before the election, and he said he would donate or spend every dollar he's ever made to stop Trump.

00:04:15.140 Then he invested in Quibi and it went off a cliff.

00:04:18.200 So I don't know how many dollars he has left for social media, but the left is determined to not let Elon get his hands on Twitter or any other social media.

00:04:26.680 They say he's lining up partners for the acquisition.

00:04:29.500 He's continuing to speak to potential co-investors, again, backing from Morgan Stanley, among others.

00:04:35.880 And he spent the weekend meeting with several shareholders over the weekend outlining specifics of the deal, according to Reuters, forcing the board to seriously consider this bid.

00:04:45.760 He's offered a detailed financing plan.

00:04:47.980 That's what Peter Schiff was saying.

00:04:48.940 He's saying even Elon Musk doesn't have the money, nor would he want to risk his shares of Tesla, you know, which is really his cash cow for this.

00:04:59.540 But guess again, it looks like he's ready to put his own, you know, real wealth behind this.

00:05:05.720 And I think it's for a greater principle.

00:05:07.420 Yeah, well, that would be really strange if someone came in and white knighted the progressive movement and took this away from Elon Musk, because then you would essentially have a bidding war or at least a contest between two groups that seem to be interested in Twitter with its commercial value and potential as a secondary concern.

00:05:33.560 One of the conservative critiques I've seen of Musk is that this isn't what corporations are for and that it's no more what corporations are for when someone does it, you know, quote unquote, from the right than when someone does it from the left.

00:05:48.180 There's a Milton Friedmanite approach that says corporations are there to make money and if they try and do anything else, they'll fail.

00:05:54.800 And as a result, Elon Musk will end up losing money here.

00:05:59.160 He's going to overpay for a service that has never made any money and that doesn't have great prospects and do so for ideological reasons.

00:06:08.360 And if someone else came in and did that even more, it would be it would be strange.

00:06:14.660 I mean, I know Elon Musk because he thinks he can make this profitable and that Twitter's lack of confidence in free expression is holding it back.

00:06:24.160 Maybe. But it would be very strange indeed if if the guy who is essentially buying it as a hobby was pipped at the post by someone else or a group of other people who were essentially buying it for a hobby.

00:06:38.580 Mm hmm. I think, you know, conservatives obviously like this because it feels like fighting back against the left's complete domination of all big tech and the information superhighway these days.

00:06:49.600 Conservatives own absolutely nothing, no part of it and are sick of being censored.

00:06:53.920 And so it's you know, I think I heard on you guys was either your podcast or somebody else's but talking about how this couldn't be done with Facebook.

00:07:01.160 You know, it's too big. It can't be done with Amazon. It's too big. But Twitter's just the size that it's gettable for a guy like Musk.

00:07:09.440 So you can't help but cheer him to say, OK, there's one they don't control.

00:07:14.620 But, you know, your point is is well taken about whether can he really save it?

00:07:19.140 And if if most of the people on Twitter are liberal, as we're told, like, will conservatives then flock to it?

00:07:26.060 Is it going to become a new conservative magnet if he controls it?

00:07:31.740 I don't I'm not sure. We're we're not like in the practice of making that our space.

00:07:37.100 Those of us who are center right or on the right.

00:07:40.140 Well, I mean, I certainly think he can help it. And and I quite like him to buy it.

00:07:45.620 And the thing is, is that at the moment Twitter is not being run especially well as a business.

00:07:49.100 So why not try a new approach, even if it's not an approach that would be, you know, taught at a business school?

00:07:59.060 I think that the strangest thing here and perhaps the most alarming thing here is the freak out that met the announcement from Musk that he might try and make it more of a free speech zone.

00:08:10.460 You would normally expect the opposite or the sane people would expect the opposite, that they would be worried someone would come in by an Internet communications company and then want to moderate it more, want to censor it more, want to slant it more.

00:08:26.340 Musk said the opposite. Musk said, well, I don't think that this is run very well.

00:08:30.760 I think it's over moderated, over censored. I think it's capricious and biased.

00:08:34.020 And about two weeks ago, when the idea was first muted, we had this day of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

00:08:40.800 It's a little more muted today, probably because all of that energy has been spent.

00:08:45.100 So I think he can absolutely improve it and he can improve it by doing very little, by setting down a set of neutral rules.

00:08:53.440 You don't have to completely refuse to moderate it.

00:08:56.060 I mean, if you want to say that people can't threaten to kill each other, for example, that's fine.

00:09:00.540 What's happened with Twitter that is so pernicious is that it has set up this set of ostensibly neutral rules, but then it has used them in order to enforce whatever is fashionable in San Francisco this week.

00:09:15.780 And so, you know, if you wake up one morning and you see someone has been suspended for saying, you know, men can't have babies or something.

00:09:23.500 That really is not neutral. That's not a question of decorum or civility, at least not properly understood.

00:09:33.300 And it's also impossible to anticipate because it changes so fast.

00:09:38.460 If Musk can knock that off, then he will do a great service indeed.

00:09:43.000 Well, let's not forget, it was Twitter that that shut down the New York Post first on its Hunter Biden reporting, shutting down their account, not letting anybody retweet their article and so on without taking accountability for that.

00:09:54.740 And even once it was pronounced not Russian disinformation more recently, as we seem to be looking at a possible Hunter Biden indictment in the mainstream press had to report something because the White House sees it coming and they see it coming as well.

00:10:09.380 Speaking of the left wing freak out, this guy used to be at CNN, Dean Obidala, and he tweets out, wonder if Elon Musk will copy the apartheid rules of his home country, South Africa, and give us check marks based on our skin color.

00:10:27.420 The whiter the check mark, the more rights you have on Twitter.

00:10:31.260 Hashtag asking for a friend.

00:10:33.920 What?

00:10:35.520 What is he talking about?

00:10:37.140 You know, that's bigotry.

00:10:40.820 There's no other way of putting it.

00:10:42.500 That is, it's not only unhinged.

00:10:44.840 It's not only illogical.

00:10:47.380 It's not only a non sequitur.

00:10:49.420 That is bigotry.

00:10:51.200 That is going to the well and pulling out a bucket of collective guilt.

00:10:59.520 Elon Musk is originally from South Africa.

00:11:02.260 There is no indication whatsoever that the guy is in favor of apartheid.

00:11:07.140 There is no indication whatsoever that the guy has ever treated anyone badly based on the color of their skin.

00:11:15.760 There is no indication that he shares any of the guilt for what happened in that country.

00:11:21.420 You might as well look up someone on Wikipedia, find out that they were born in Mississippi, and ask them if they owned slaves.

00:11:30.820 That is bigotry.

00:11:32.320 And I'm afraid that's exactly what I would expect from Dean Obadiliya, who has never found a cheap shot he wouldn't take.

00:11:39.900 It's amazing how the CNN reporters continue to fail to connect on every level.

00:11:46.780 We'll get to CNN Plus in one second.

00:11:48.360 But along the lines of people love it because they see it as fighting back, right?

00:11:54.700 Like the liberals control, progressives control everything.

00:11:57.920 They control everything.

00:11:58.680 That's how it feels.

00:11:59.260 Right now, they control the White House.

00:12:00.480 They control the House.

00:12:01.060 They control the Senate.

00:12:02.060 They control big tech.

00:12:03.320 They control sports and so on and so forth.

00:12:04.920 This brings me to the Florida situation, which I know you've been writing about.

00:12:09.920 And I heard the editors on Friday where Rich Lowry asked you if you'd felt sufficiently beaten up by guys at the bar over your position on DeSantis' latest move.

00:12:20.260 But I respect it.

00:12:21.180 I respect it because you said, yes, you have been getting beaten up over it.

00:12:24.360 But you said it's okay because I'm right.

00:12:26.660 And I think we should talk about it because I've been loathe to get into this in too much depth thus far because I wanted to really look at it before opining.

00:12:37.380 And I share some of your concerns, though I'm not sure it makes me think this is a bad move strategically.

00:12:44.960 I'm actually more concerned about what DeSantis is doing from a First Amendment perspective.

00:12:49.380 I actually think there's a very decent chance a court is going to strike this down as viewpoint discrimination by the government against a corporation, which is not lawful.

00:13:00.440 And again, it doesn't mean it's the wrong strategic move, right?

00:13:04.280 He's punching the bully in the nose.

00:13:06.560 Might have to go to the principal for it.

00:13:08.400 Might get suspended.

00:13:10.560 Doesn't necessarily mean it was the wrong thing to do.

00:13:13.380 But you seem to have a more macro problem with its approach as well.

00:13:18.120 So let's talk about why you think this isn't necessarily the best move for DeSantis.

00:13:24.520 Well, I have a number of problems with it.

00:13:27.880 I'm sorry, Charles, forgive me.

00:13:28.980 We should define for the audience what we're talking about because I failed to outline the Reedy Creek situation.

00:13:35.640 Sure.

00:13:35.980 So Florida in 1967 created an independent special district for Walt Disney World.

00:13:43.060 Since that time, the independent special district program has grown enormously.

00:13:49.260 There were six that were created before 1968, one of which was Disney's.

00:13:53.220 Now, there are 1,288 of them.

00:13:57.080 And on top of that, there are 1,844 special districts.

00:14:00.400 They're slightly different.

00:14:01.200 The district that Disney enjoys essentially gives it many of the powers of a county.

00:14:09.880 It has the ability to own its own municipal debt, levy its own taxes, and build its own construction without applying for permits or zoning waivers.

00:14:25.920 Now, this has worked extremely well.

00:14:30.540 And my first issue here is that it is obvious that the reason this is being revisited is not because there was a groundswell against the status quo,

00:14:41.420 but because the Disney Corporation, incorrectly, in my view, came out against the parental rights and education bill that's been disparagingly and erroneously called the Don't Say Gay Bill.

00:14:54.080 People who are defending DeSantis' move here, and that move is to rescind as of next year, Disney's independent district here,

00:15:04.120 we'll come on to the consequences of that, have said, well, Disney has no right to this status.

00:15:10.220 And that's true.

00:15:11.440 But Disney had no right to it in 1967 or 1980 or 1990 or 2001 or 2015 either.

00:15:19.500 The reason that Florida has kept this going is because it works.

00:15:24.000 It's a really effective way of dealing with a strange problem.

00:15:27.560 That problem being, what do you do with an enormous enterprise that is the size of San Francisco, that's twice the size of Manhattan,

00:15:38.900 so big that it has 175 miles of roads inside it that's spread across two counties in Florida, Orange County and Osceola County.

00:15:46.560 Do you hand all of the normal functions of government over to those counties?

00:15:53.780 Do you push the taxes on the taxpayers, which is less of a problem now, but was a huge problem in 1967 because there's no infrastructure there?

00:16:01.480 Do you allow the debt to be held by Disney or do you allow the debt to be held by property tax holders?

00:16:10.760 You know, these are difficult questions and they were solved with this system, which has worked pretty well.

00:16:15.320 And the reason that it's been revisited is not because the Florida legislature has suddenly decided that this is a bad idea or that it's unfair.

00:16:24.600 It's not really unfair.

00:16:25.860 SeaWorld doesn't want or need this status.

00:16:28.200 It's because the Disney Corporation spoke out against the DeSantis administration.

00:16:33.060 Now, I like the DeSantis administration.

00:16:35.140 I agree with almost everything that it's done.

00:16:37.220 I like the Florida Republican Party.

00:16:39.060 I think he's an excellent governor.

00:16:40.420 I support the underlying bill strongly, and I like the fact that DeSantis signed it and did so defiantly and told Disney to pound sand.

00:16:50.880 I just think that making public policy worse in revenge for the politicking of a corporation is a really bad idea.

00:17:02.040 Maybe it has the First Amendment implications that you proposed.

00:17:05.120 I read an interesting piece by Eugene Velok, a professor at UCLA, saying it doesn't because of the special nature of the special district program.

00:17:13.380 They're not retaliating in a classical sense.

00:17:16.580 They're taking away a special privilege.

00:17:18.400 Maybe.

00:17:19.060 But morally speaking, they are retaliating.

00:17:21.320 This is vengeful.

00:17:22.260 This is retribution.

00:17:23.700 And it's a really unusual move for DeSantis, who is very careful.

00:17:28.060 He does his research.

00:17:29.160 He doesn't enter into this sort of rash, Twitter-driven politics that we see so much of.

00:17:35.900 And I fear that here he has.

00:17:38.700 I love Eugene Velok.

00:17:40.120 And yes, he's almost always right on all free speech issues.

00:17:43.280 My concern is that DeSantis has been very clear on the reasons he's doing it.

00:17:48.580 Usually you try to get out of a free speech challenge by saying,

00:17:51.460 I just wanted to revisit special status of these districts.

00:17:56.120 That's all.

00:17:56.700 It was a good time to do it.

00:17:57.760 That we're going to relook at the special status of the villages.

00:18:01.260 I'm going to relook at the special status of Disney.

00:18:03.700 And, you know, I'm the chief executive now, and I thought it was a good idea.

00:18:06.140 But he's made very clear this is in retaliation for their viewpoint.

00:18:11.640 I mean, he said specifically, I'm just not comfortable having that type of agenda get special

00:18:16.660 treatment in my state.

00:18:17.900 I'm talking about its position on the don't say gay bill, so-called don't say gay.

00:18:22.400 And it's wokeness.

00:18:23.560 I mean, it is shoving its wokeness down our throat.

00:18:26.040 You're against it.

00:18:26.740 I'm against it.

00:18:27.780 He's against it.

00:18:29.120 And so it's pretty clear if a legal challenge were to come, he wouldn't be able to get out

00:18:32.800 of it by saying it wasn't retaliatory.

00:18:35.140 It was very clearly retaliatory.

00:18:37.800 It's just the fact that they were starting with special privileges is what Balak is saying,

00:18:42.600 you know, would make this fall outside of the First Amendment.

00:18:45.140 I'm just worried because it seems to me the left, if there's some newfound way of punishing

00:18:52.280 corporations for their, you know, political views, and usually that's expressed through

00:18:57.320 contributions, the left is going to do this every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

00:19:02.780 You know, I mean, they're going to be doing it at the federal level, too.

00:19:05.300 So if this is paving that road, I think we should pump the brakes a little.

00:19:11.380 Well, I think that's right.

00:19:13.720 Conservatives who disagree with me, which seems to be almost all of them, will say, yeah, you

00:19:19.080 don't understand.

00:19:19.960 They already do this.

00:19:21.140 They already tried to crush us.

00:19:23.100 The corporations are already infested by this DEI woke agenda, and we have no choice but

00:19:30.260 to use every tool at our disposal.

00:19:33.220 And then they suggest that anyone who opposes this particular move, this tangential secondary

00:19:38.900 move, is in some way opposed to winning or opposed to Governor DeSantis or conservatism or

00:19:45.800 the advancement of social conservative ideas.

00:19:48.560 But of course, that's nonsense.

00:19:49.800 And if you look at Florida in the last four years, I think I've come on your show and

00:19:55.580 said this, the transformation has been dramatic.

00:20:01.460 Ron DeSantis has not been sitting around doing nothing.

00:20:05.780 You know, in the last month alone, the administration has endorsed constitutional carry that will probably

00:20:11.100 come up next year in the legislature, has debated and passed and then defended this parental

00:20:17.220 rights and education bill, has removed critical race theory from school curricula, has signed

00:20:25.320 a 15-week abortion ban ahead of the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade.

00:20:31.380 You've got the last two years of American life marked out by really the approach that most

00:20:38.960 of the country took to COVID and the approach that Ron DeSantis took to COVID, that Florida

00:20:43.660 took. Florida was singled out. And I think it got an awful lot right. And my view is that

00:20:48.820 you win by winning. I mean, if you're going to do this, then do so in a much more considered

00:20:54.020 way. But you win by winning. And Florida has been winning. Governor DeSantis has been winning.

00:21:01.040 Conservatism has been winning. This was not the response to Disney having successfully overturned

00:21:07.660 or had repealed this parental rights and education law. This was a response to Disney having lost.

00:21:15.960 Disney was already vanquished on this issue. The law was signed. Polling showed that it was popular,

00:21:23.100 even among Democrats and popular nationally. And DeSantis had managed to isolate and marginalize

00:21:30.180 Disney and tell them that he was in charge, the legislature was in charge, the people were in charge,

00:21:34.780 not the Disney corporation. And I think that to hold this up as the shibboleth, to hold this up as the

00:21:41.740 thing that determines whether or not Florida is succeeding, conservatism is succeeding, or one is

00:21:48.220 willing to fight for principle, is bizarre, especially because, as you say, it's destined to be messy.

00:21:55.520 I don't know whether it will even happen. I don't know whether it will get bogged down in legislative

00:22:00.000 dealmaking. I don't know whether a court will strike it down on First Amendment grounds.

00:22:04.280 As you suggest, they might, and they might. I do know that DeSantis had a really good record of

00:22:10.860 clean, firm wins. And this just strikes me as a petulant mistake, even if I understand totally

00:22:17.760 the motivations and the need to try to get corporations who are supposed to do things,

00:22:23.020 run amusement parks, sell sneakers, make oil, to shut up for once.

00:22:27.340 Mm-hmm. Yeah. Your point is take the W. You had the W. There's no point in picking the scab off and

00:22:32.800 doing more. I mean, I think it's the reason people are pushing back on that is it's not just about

00:22:40.120 Disney in the view of conservatives who are writing about this and thinking about this. It's such a

00:22:44.320 pleasure to see somebody fight back against this, you know, woke corporate bullying. They really,

00:22:51.140 they are bullies. And so it's almost like, as Ben Shapiro said in his podcast, fool around and find

00:22:57.360 out, right? Although he said, use a different word. I didn't quite say that. Yeah. It was a

00:23:01.960 different F word. You know, like you continue to mess with the agenda that is backed by the majority

00:23:09.520 of the populace. Continue to push it on us. And one that's probably not even backed by the majority

00:23:14.100 of Disney employees, right? It's just a few woke activists. This woman who's at the top,

00:23:18.260 she's the president. And then the CEO who got pressured into it by Bob Iger, Iger, who's no

00:23:22.640 longer even running Disney, but doesn't like the current CEO from what I hear and sent out like an

00:23:27.940 annoying tweet, like, Oh, you're not backing the employees. And then that guy got scared. I was

00:23:31.940 like, Oh yes, I am. Oh, I'm against this whole thing. Let me, let me become an activist too.

00:23:36.360 And anyway, the point is send a message, send a message to Disney, send a message to Coke,

00:23:41.800 send a message to all of these corporations that we're going to do whatever it takes. And maybe it will be

00:23:47.440 messy and it'll be ugly. And it's going to cost you tons of money. And we're going to publicly

00:23:50.280 humiliate you. And maybe we'll, we'll lose eventually in the courts or maybe even the tax

00:23:55.380 burden, what have you, it's going to get ugly because we're sick of sitting back and taking it.

00:24:03.540 And I absolutely understand that. Um, and, and I feel pretty much the same way myself. I would just

00:24:10.300 say that, you know, as someone who spent a lot of time arguing in favor of the second amendment

00:24:15.160 and against gun control, um, it is possible. And it's in fact, necessary sometimes to separate out,

00:24:22.640 um, the, the instinct, the motivation, the frustration and a given policy. You know,

00:24:29.500 when I debate gun control, I'm often told, well, this is a real problem. We have a real problem in

00:24:35.180 America. I agree. Uh, I'm shown a particular case. Maybe a child has been killed. Maybe lots of children

00:24:40.780 have been killed. And then the policy comes up and, you know, more often than not, I don't think the

00:24:47.480 policy is good. I think it might be unconstitutional. I think it might be messy, difficult to implement,

00:24:52.740 um, perhaps ill thought through. And when I say that eventually gun control advocates will say,

00:24:58.980 you don't care about the problem, or you don't care about this child or these children who've been

00:25:03.440 killed. Um, that's the only reason to oppose this policy. And it's not, um, it is entirely possible

00:25:10.420 to share the motivations of a movement, which I do, uh, being a conservative, um, but not to think

00:25:17.200 that every policy that is, uh, proposed as a means by which to fight it is good. And that's where I am

00:25:23.060 here. I mean, I don't know how much we've talked about Rhonda Santos or Florida on your show, but you

00:25:27.300 listen to the editors. We talk about Rhonda Santos. You're a big fan. Well, I mean, I don't agree with

00:25:32.920 him on everything, but I I'm pretty much on board with his agenda. I mean, I, I, you know, he is a,

00:25:37.920 he is a conservative and, um, right. He he's a Florida man. And, um, I just think this one,

00:25:46.680 this individual policy, um, has a lot wrong with it. And, um, I think that on balance, it is a bad

00:25:56.120 idea. The other thing is this, I think conservatives, you know, it's exciting to see a governor fight back.

00:26:02.380 I get it. I get that. But the, the, when, as you point out, yes, it had happened legislatively,

00:26:07.280 they got the bill passed and it's law now in Florida that you can't indoctrinate kids.

00:26:11.060 And it's not about speaking about one's partner in, you know, a casual conversation at a young

00:26:16.780 level. It's about curriculum, not pushing sexual agendas or gender ideology on children who are

00:26:24.380 basically between the ages of five and eight. Um, so I, what I think people are missing is

00:26:29.820 like the wind was even bigger than the legislation getting passed because Disney's stock price,

00:26:35.560 as I understand it had already started to go down. It's down now 15%. That's not all because of this,

00:26:40.920 this pushback by DeSantis on Reedy Creek. It's because of Chris Ruffo outing the videos

00:26:48.200 of the executives on tape saying they sneak their, you know, queer agenda in wherever possible.

00:26:55.360 And the American public has been horrified to find out how woke they are, how agenda driven

00:27:02.760 they are with our very young children. That's, that's what's happened to Disney in the past month.

00:27:08.680 That's the biggest thing. You know, it's great to see an extra punch in the face,

00:27:12.700 but the bully had already started to stumble and the real punishment will be when, I mean,

00:27:18.480 genuinely people are going to turn away from Disney. This isn't like, don't eat French fries.

00:27:22.880 This is like, that has been, has gone from a company that had our implicit trust to one we now

00:27:28.840 view as dangerous. Yeah. And two days before I wrote my piece objecting to this particular policy,

00:27:37.720 I wrote a magazine piece that was published at national review in which I said,

00:27:41.980 Disney is losing this fight badly and it deserves to. Um, and one of the reasons that it was losing

00:27:47.720 is that it's wrong. Uh, it was wrong on this policy and it was wrong on this policy in a way that is

00:27:55.520 damaging to its core offering. You know, if AT&T put out a statement saying we really like abortion,

00:28:03.440 it would annoy me, but abortion hopefully is not that relevant to what AT&T does, which is provide

00:28:12.580 cell service and lease phones. But with Disney, you know, to see someone within the company saying

00:28:19.480 we have a not so secret agenda and we're using our programs to advance it is obviously a disaster for

00:28:27.520 because Disney has programs on Disney plus on commercial television, uh, that people watch with

00:28:35.680 their children. Um, Disney has amusement parks that people visit with their children. Um, the analogy

00:28:42.800 that I drew is if say someone high up at Coca-Cola said, we're putting something in our product,

00:28:49.060 not so secretly that will change you. And our aim is to change you. Well, I think people would say,

00:28:54.000 well, I don't want to drink Coca-Cola anymore. Um, Disney has hurt itself. It deserves to be in

00:29:00.500 the position that it's in. It's stock deserves to be going down. Um, uh, it deserved to be lambasted

00:29:06.780 as it was by governor DeSantis for, um, it's interference, not because it spoke out. I don't

00:29:13.900 have a problem with, with corporations or anyone speaking out, nor if they're honest to most

00:29:18.520 conservatives. And if they did, they wouldn't have cheered the citizens United decision,

00:29:21.760 right? Because Disney did so in an inappropriate, unrelated and fundamentally dishonest way. It

00:29:28.520 miscast the law. It lied about the law. It bought activists, false premise when talking about the

00:29:36.300 law. And that makes our politics worse. And you know, if the governor of Florida or anyone else wants

00:29:41.260 to use his first amendment rights to respond and say, you know what, screw off, then that's fine with

00:29:47.000 me. Um, so I mean, I, I absolutely agree with you. I think Disney has hurt itself here and I hope,

00:29:53.420 um, that, that this will cause it to reconsider because our aim here should not be to destroy

00:29:58.320 all American corporations. Um, it should be to incentivize them not to behave like this and to

00:30:03.100 save them. I mean, I'm, I don't want to burn everything in America down. Um, I just think this

00:30:07.840 particular policy, uh, was not the way to do it and actually made public policy worse, which is a very

00:30:14.080 rare thing to say about a policy put out by governor DeSantis. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly

00:30:19.040 right. When you, most of us have taken our children to Disney world and it's a delightful

00:30:23.460 experience and you, you know, you give your kids memories that will last a lifetime and we don't

00:30:27.440 want it to change. We don't want a weird agenda pushed on them or us or any agenda pushed on them

00:30:33.200 or us other than happiness, which used to be the sole goal. But God bless Chris Rufo for outing

00:30:39.260 what the real agenda is now. And we'll see whether Disney ever grows the stones to respond to that.

00:30:46.220 Uh, there's much more to talk about with Charles, including we've got to discuss, okay, Patrice

00:30:50.000 colors. One of the BLM founders is apparently shocked and stunned and quote triggered by the tax laws

00:30:56.540 governing her organization. Well, Charles is triggered too, and we'll get to it.

00:31:01.760 So before we get to Patrice colors and her, her being triggered, it's amazing. Um, I want to ask

00:31:14.440 you about the failure of CNN plus because already the spin is starting the new spin by the CNNers

00:31:21.460 themselves is this was just a corporate decision. It had nothing to do with the, the strength of our

00:31:28.300 performance or its promise. It only had to do with the fact that now CNN has new ownership and they

00:31:35.560 just had a different corporate vision than Jeff Zucker in terms of streaming. P.S. It's a difficult

00:31:41.320 time for streamers and that's what this is their narrative. And so that's why they had to pull the

00:31:46.720 plug. Here is, uh, as an example, let's see, Brian Stelter. This is soundbite four on how this is,

00:31:54.240 this failure is just about a clash of strategies. All the sources I've been talking to the last 24

00:31:59.840 hours. They say this is just a crazy clash of strategies. Warner media, the old team,

00:32:05.400 Jason Kyler, Jeff Zucker had one vision. The new team has a very different vision and the new team

00:32:10.780 won. That's it. And lest you be confused, um, it we'll never know whether CNN was a success or a

00:32:19.620 failure because well, listen, soundbite five, let me try out a theory on that, which is it's too early

00:32:25.080 to know if this product or this service was a success or a failure. I've, you know, you got all

00:32:29.780 the haters today saying this thing was a failure. I don't know if we can even ever assess that because

00:32:34.220 it just simply didn't have enough time because of the management change in direction. And at the end

00:32:39.260 of the day, if you buy something, if you buy a giant media company, you get to do whatever you want

00:32:43.960 with it, but it does mean there's a lot of suffering, uh, for employees and frankly,

00:32:48.380 disappointment among subscribers as a result. Disappointment among subscribers. Those three

00:32:54.280 people are crying in their soup today, Charles. Don't forget about them. I love it when Brian Stelter

00:33:01.140 says, according to the sources I've been talking to, when he's talking about his own network,

00:33:05.600 I just love it. He tries this every day. Uh, I mean, yeah, there probably was a shift in priorities

00:33:17.620 and a change in visions and that the people who were coming in probably didn't want to throw

00:33:22.500 hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet and the people who were going out did. And I asked

00:33:29.700 this in a piece before CNN plus was canceled, but when it was clear that it was, uh, in trouble,

00:33:36.340 who told them that there was a demand for this? And the answer seems to have been McKinsey,

00:33:43.080 uh, whom they hired to, to do their due diligence, but why, who believed this for, for a single

00:33:50.620 moment? CNN is a network that struggles to get a million viewers in prime time on cable,

00:33:57.180 which is bundled for most people, which takes no effort, uh, to see. And they thought there were

00:34:04.980 going to be 14 and 15, 16, 17 million people in four years time, uh, who were watching this

00:34:13.620 regularly. You know, major league baseball has an app MLB TV that, that I subscribe to, um,

00:34:21.260 for $120 a year, you can watch every single baseball game in America. And it has about two

00:34:27.860 and a half million subscribers. Uh, there are 2 million people who subscribe to Sunday ticket,

00:34:34.040 the national football leagues, um, every game package, 15 million. I don't think we needed to

00:34:41.500 wait to find out whether that was a realistic proposition. It wasn't one. I mean, even Fox,

00:34:47.860 CNN is of course completely obsessed with maxes out on its biggest night at 5 million, 15 million.

00:34:57.380 It's lunacy. Yeah. That's insanity. Truly. I mean, I, I love that you tweeted out or wrote

00:35:03.380 in one of your pieces. Actually, this is part of a piece, the CNN plus catastrophe. And I quote,

00:35:07.900 as for the network slogan, the most trusted name in news, one might as soon call Chris Cuomo a wit.

00:35:13.720 I mean, like, I'm sorry, but this is, this is who they've built their brand on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:35:23.160 I mean, they had 10,000 regular viewers, 10,000. Right. And, um, you know, that, that is about

00:35:30.620 as many people who go to the, um, Durham Bulls minor league games.

00:35:38.160 Uh, I've been to those. They're actually quite fun. Yeah. But that, that is, um, as many people

00:35:47.340 who go to the mermaid conventions. No, but literally I get more likes on a tweet than that.

00:35:54.720 I mean, and my tweets are free. You can enjoy them for free on Twitter, at least for the time being.

00:35:59.320 Um, so it's crazy that anybody thought this would grow in a way that would be meaningful and would

00:36:04.620 line the pockets of the bosses. But, you know, I did the same thing last week. I talked to the

00:36:08.300 audience about my views on this. CNN proper is failing. It's failing. It's been failing for a

00:36:13.220 long time. 700,000 in the overall number and 165,000 in the prime time demo. I used to get 700,000 in

00:36:21.560 the demo that I would get that in the demo. The demo is a harder number to get 25 to 54 year olds.

00:36:26.700 And they're getting it in the overall, you should be getting over 3 million in the overall on cable.

00:36:31.660 That's the number of households sitting down to watch your, your show. The fact that they're

00:36:35.540 at 700 and one 65 is disgraceful. It's an embarrassment. And the, it questions the entire

00:36:41.220 CNN business model. I mean, they should be having serious conversations at discovery about whether

00:36:45.300 they should be wrapping this up as an, as an experiment that has now failed, not adding more

00:36:50.180 of a, some of the same, and then be the same light, like stupid programs by the same failing

00:36:57.140 anchors on food or parenting or a talk show.

00:37:03.100 I mean, the first thing that they can do, frankly, is stop listening to Brian Stelter.

00:37:08.020 They gave us five days a week. He was, he has a show five days a week now on CNN plus,

00:37:12.800 but, but just in general, um, now I've been writing about CNN for a long time.

00:37:17.020 Brian Stelter is, is the contemporary mainstream media's janitor. His job is to, at every point,

00:37:26.980 cast journalists as heroes and, uh, make it seem as if what they're doing is worthwhile and that

00:37:35.440 whatever their peccadilloes might be, um, they're correct. Uh, he does it with his own network,

00:37:41.100 which I find mortifying, but he does it more broadly for pretty much everyone who isn't Fox

00:37:46.220 and, uh, clearly he's wrong. You know, it is simply not the case that everyone in America

00:37:54.660 loved the mainstream media until Donald Trump came down the escalator. Trump, if anything,

00:38:00.780 was a symptom of mistrust in the mainstream media, uh, or the corporate media as people have taken to

00:38:08.360 calling it. CNN, uh, is a disaster. Um, it is not what it once was. If you, if you went back to the

00:38:17.400 nineties and you brought anyone who worked there forward 20 years and said, this is CNN now,

00:38:23.500 they'd just be astonished. They'd be astonished by the bias, by the laziness, um, by the frivolity.

00:38:30.960 Uh, there was just no way you could expand it as you say, and expect that to work that the new owners

00:38:38.240 need to go back to basics. They need to clear out a lot of the existing staff. They need to remember

00:38:44.820 what CNN was supposed to be. And then they need to take the real opportunity that exists. And it does

00:38:49.980 exist to be that, um, to be an actual news network that isn't more focused on politics, uh, than on

00:38:57.920 current affairs. I, I do wonder, I mean, remember the Bernard Shaw, Aaron Brown days of CNN where,

00:39:05.300 you know, big days like nine 11, that was what made Aaron Brown, you know, very well known.

00:39:11.140 I just, can they possibly get back to that after revealing to the country,

00:39:15.280 anyone who's in the center or right of center that they hate them? It's not like I'm a little

00:39:22.580 biased towards the left, which I think everyone presumed it's, we can't stand you or your way of

00:39:29.500 life. Well, I think it can, because most people don't watch cable news. Right. I mean, even

00:39:36.480 successful cable news shows are watched by a tiny fraction of the American population. And if CNN can

00:39:44.480 return to where it was, you know, around the time of the OJ Simpson chase, um, yeah, I think you can,

00:39:52.780 rebuild an audience. Maybe they're not the same people who watch it now. And maybe they're not

00:39:56.800 the people who've been, uh, made aware that CNN hates them, but it's an absolutely enormous country.

00:40:02.460 You only need two, three, four million people. If you go back to the nineties, I wrote about this in

00:40:07.440 a piece I wrote about CNN a few years ago. This was a cliche in movies, turn on CNN, right? Whenever

00:40:13.920 something happened in a movie, you know, the equivalent of a nine 11, of course that was in real life,

00:40:19.060 um, was turn on CNN. That's what people said. That's why I mentioned the, the OJ chase, turn on

00:40:24.160 CNN. Um, now you would never say that, but, but we still have a need in the United States everywhere,

00:40:32.200 um, for television news. It is still the first thing that we do when something monumental happens.

00:40:40.320 Um, uh, and, and, uh, as a streaming proposition that could have worked too. Um, it's just that

00:40:48.640 they tried to transpose all of their problems, all of the inputs that have led them to collapse

00:40:55.100 over to streaming, uh, and assume that what people who stream things have different tastes.

00:41:00.460 Of course they don't. Right. And here's the thing. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with

00:41:05.800 Geraldo Rivera many moons ago, we were covering the Virginia tech mass shooting. I was very young

00:41:12.400 in my career. I was still working in the DC bureau. So it was, I can't remember the year of the

00:41:16.660 Virginia tech. I want to say 2005. Um, and CNN was crushing us in the field. They were getting all the

00:41:22.840 best bookings and we were struggling to find, you know, the best guests down there. And I remember

00:41:27.240 sitting on a grassy knoll with Geraldo saying, my God, getting our asses kicked. And, uh, he looked

00:41:33.100 at me and, you know, he's of course been everywhere and been with all the networks and he kind of

00:41:37.320 laughed at me. And I was like, what? And he said, they don't watch because of the guests they watch

00:41:43.780 because of the hosts. And I remember being somewhat amused by his hubris. Of course he was a big anchor

00:41:49.920 at the time and me sort of laughing at it, but he wasn't wrong. Charles, like Bill O'Reilly,

00:41:55.600 he never got the huge guests. He never did like, you know, on a big breaking news story.

00:42:01.620 If you were in any way on the left half of the spectrum, you wouldn't go on the O'Reilly factor.

00:42:06.900 He was by far the number one show in cable news for virtually all of his 20 years. Why? Because of

00:42:11.740 him, people wanted to hear what he thought about the news. They found him a compelling, uh, character

00:42:17.880 and host and, you know, thought leader. That's not the case for anyone on CNN. And so for CNN to,

00:42:24.540 to mistake that it's anchors had anywhere near that kind of connection with their audience

00:42:30.540 to the point where they'd want to see them do more, like offer advice on parenting, right? From

00:42:37.400 Anderson Cooper, who's been a parent for about two minutes, right? Or like a Don Lemon talk show.

00:42:43.360 They, they don't have that kind of connection with their audience and they never have.

00:42:48.440 I think that is a perfect point. Uh, and, and on Bill O'Reilly, it also demonstrated that, um,

00:42:55.960 political perfection or, or fealty to, uh, a given ideology was not the key either because,

00:43:04.460 you know, Bill O'Reilly was conservative, but Bill O'Reilly dissented on many key issues,

00:43:08.940 immigration, for example, um, from his audience. And they still, they still tuned in every night.

00:43:13.940 Um, as they say, I, I think CNN needs to, to clean house. You know, when you say that people

00:43:18.660 get upset and they say, well, you know, that's, that's terrible. You know, we don't want anyone

00:43:22.260 to lose their job. Yeah, I, I agree. I don't mean it in a vicious way. Um, but if CNN wants to,

00:43:28.700 uh, present itself as something new, it can't do so with all of the same, uh, on air, uh, talking.

00:43:35.760 Well, and go on. Yeah. I was going to say now there's talk about moving Chris Wallace, who's

00:43:40.440 freshly out of a job after them paying him something I've heard 10 and I've heard $9 million a year

00:43:45.360 to leave Fox and go over to CNN plus. And now there's serious talk from what I'm hearing of

00:43:50.360 moving him into the nine o'clock spot, formerly occupied by Chris Cuomo, which I am here to tell

00:43:55.460 you will be a disaster that will fail instantaneously. That will never work. I've hosted a

00:44:00.640 nine o'clock show in cable news for many years. He can't do it. It's not going to work.

00:44:05.800 And let's not forget Chris, Chris, uh, Wallace's own statements that the reason the alleged reason

00:44:11.220 he was leaving Fox was yes, he thought they had lost their minds. Okay. We've all heard that.

00:44:15.560 But he also said, I was sick of doing politics. I wanted to do more conversational. So what he's

00:44:22.480 going to be like Larry King. Well, that show was failing at the end. I mean, there's a reason they

00:44:27.520 moved to a more political model. Cable is all red meat now. Like they're out of options, but Chris

00:44:34.360 Wallace moving to the 9 PM is not the solution. You know, if you ever talk to veterans of the

00:44:42.200 second world war, they'll tell you everything was different afterwards. And I think that the,

00:44:49.160 the combination of the Trump presidency and then COVID, um, has had a similar effect. And there are a

00:44:56.980 lot of people and many of them work for CNN, but across media, um, uh, who cannot sort of reinvent

00:45:05.260 themselves after, uh, that five, six year stretch. Um, and, uh, you know, I, I, this isn't a particular

00:45:14.260 criticism of Chris Wallace, but Chris Wallace has now been through the last six years. He's been

00:45:20.900 through the Trump years. He's been at Fox. He left Fox and he explained why he went to CNN plus it

00:45:27.700 failed. You, you can't wipe that slate clean. Um, and if I were in charge of CNN, which I never will

00:45:35.540 be because of the way I talk about them, not least, um, I would say just, just cut it all,

00:45:41.820 but basically clean house and, and start again because it's the, the, you know, the walls changed

00:45:47.800 us all. Yeah, I think that's right. You know, I remember thinking that, you know, the Trump

00:45:54.420 derangement syndrome really was real for some of those anchors. You could see it. You could see them

00:45:59.020 really losing all semblance of objectivity. And I wondered maybe the American public will give them

00:46:04.760 a pass when the Trump years are over. Like they were all genuinely temporarily insane,

00:46:09.640 but they don't seem to want to pass. They don't seem to want to come back to objectivity and,

00:46:15.500 you know, being fair to both sides of an argument. They, they seem to very happy where they are.

00:46:20.700 So you're right. If they want to grow their audience with anything more than the hard left,

00:46:24.000 they're, they either have to start getting rid of people or, yeah, no, they have to start getting

00:46:28.220 rid of people or, or at least at a very minimum peppering in a bunch of people with different

00:46:32.500 viewpoints. Right. Because right now it's all one way. Right. And I mean, even,

00:46:37.720 even the hard left, one of CNN's problems is that we already have MSNBC. Yeah. And you're never going

00:46:45.340 to out MSNBC, MSNBC. And again, they're more honest. The MSNBC to its credit, they, I think their

00:46:52.620 motto is, this is who we are. Like we, okay, we get it. CNN still wants to tell us that they're the

00:46:57.080 must trust a name of news, which as you point out, one might as soon call Chris Cuomo a wit.

00:47:02.300 All right. Stand by. We're going to do Patrice colors next, uh, right after this quick break

00:47:06.000 more with the one and only Charles CW cook. And remember folks, you can find the Megan and Kelly

00:47:10.920 show audio podcast on Apple, Spotify, Pandora stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts

00:47:16.080 for free. So if you miss us live on Sirius XM, just download the audio podcast. You can listen to us

00:47:21.500 on the go any time of day. And you will also find our full archives there with more than 300 shows.

00:47:32.540 Breaking news hitting right now back with us to discuss it. Charles CW cook of national review,

00:47:37.520 Charles Reuters reporting Twitter is set to accept Elon Musk's $43 billion offer. It's happening.

00:47:46.400 Unbelievable. And Elon tweeted, and I quote just now,

00:47:50.420 I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means.

00:47:56.960 I can't help but feel this. This feels like a huge win for reason, rationality,

00:48:03.060 and the ability to engage with viewpoints one might find potentially offensive.

00:48:07.860 Absolutely. And what he just said there is classical liberalism distilled. That is what free speech

00:48:15.200 means. And of course, he used the word critics, which doesn't mean that Twitter needs to allow

00:48:21.460 people to publish your address or threaten to send you a bomb. But if that's where he's going,

00:48:28.340 that's great, because that's going to lead to a much better and more open conversation. And

00:48:33.240 it will take some of the frustration, I think, out of our online politics. People quite rightly feel

00:48:41.140 that they're treated differently based on their political views. And if Elon Musk wants to put an

00:48:47.720 end to that, good luck to him. It's crazy. I'm just thinking about this past year, you know,

00:48:51.940 it's suppression of the New York Post story. One of the tweets that they suppressed and said was

00:48:57.380 disinformation was Dave Rubin saying that this is after, this is well into Delta. Him saying the

00:49:04.720 vaccines don't prevent the spread. Like now that's not even controversial. He was shut down for saying

00:49:10.620 that back then. And of course, the thing that seemed to have gotten Elon Musk upset in the first

00:49:15.320 instance prior to his offer was their silencing of the Babylon Bee, right, for for tweeting out that

00:49:23.680 this woman of the year, who's a trans woman, was in fact their man of the year, Rachel Levine.

00:49:30.840 And, and that, and they, so they shut down the Babylon Bee and he's a fan of the Babylon Bee. And

00:49:35.500 really, honestly, that, that tweet could have just saved our national conversation. Like that could

00:49:41.420 have been a game, a life-changing tweet for conservatives in America.

00:49:47.780 I actually think it's worth meditating a bit on what you, you just said about the Dave Rubin tweet,

00:49:53.540 because it reminds me that the free speech position is actually the humble position and the,

00:49:59.680 the pro-censorship or, or viewpoint moderation position is the arrogant position. And that,

00:50:06.960 you know, in order to want a culture in which people speak freely and exchange ideas, you have

00:50:12.060 to admit that you don't know everything, that people who are unpopular might have good ideas.

00:50:18.520 And that what we consider at any given point to be true or likely will change. And, and obviously,

00:50:25.840 that has happened throughout COVID, uh, you know, at various points, things that were regarded as

00:50:34.300 verboten or wrong have turned out to be true. And of course, not everything has been a lot of a lot

00:50:40.000 of conspiracy theorizing and nonsense as there always is. Um, but the, the, you know, the, the problem

00:50:47.620 with, with having higher powers, whether that be government, which should be treated differently

00:50:52.680 because it has force, um, or, or private actors deciding at every given point that they have the

00:50:59.180 answers and that they will, um, enforce those answers ruthlessly is that they assume an omniscience

00:51:07.160 simply can't exist. And, and what Musk said there about leaving his own critics alone, um, betrays a

00:51:14.320 self-confidence and a humility that is necessary in a big diverse country, such as ours, where people

00:51:22.000 do profoundly disagree on things. You can't know the answers. And if you can't know the answers, then,

00:51:27.740 um, whether by law, which is government position or by choice, which is the private position,

00:51:32.900 you should want a freewheeling debate in which people, um, who are generally regarded to be wrong

00:51:39.520 or crazy or eccentric are pretty much left alone. You know, Barack Obama was just railing about

00:51:47.940 disinformation. This is going to be the big post-presidency push now for him. Disinformation

00:51:53.500 in particular on social media and put aside the irony that he's the architect of the lie of the year.

00:52:00.820 Uh, if you like your plan, you can keep, I mean, that's, that's by politifact, right? That's not

00:52:04.440 Megan Kelly. That's not any right leaning media. Um, if you like your plan, if you like your doctor,

00:52:09.200 you can keep them. That was a lie. He knew it was a lie when he told it. So he's one to be lecturing

00:52:13.800 us about disinformation. Put that to the side. He talks about how disinformation is getting people

00:52:18.280 killed. Well, the stats just came out from the FBI. All right. A newly released FBI uniform crime

00:52:25.320 report. This is just for 2020. They haven't done 2021 yet. And the killings across racial,

00:52:31.880 across racial demographics have swelled by 30% between 2019 and 2020, the largest surge black

00:52:39.700 Americans, the number of black Americans murdered jumped 32% in 2020, 9,941 blacks were murdered

00:52:48.880 compared to 7,484 the year before. Okay. The, the, the pushback on the narrative about police that was

00:53:01.200 spun in the wake of George Floyd was just, and it was factual and no one doing the pushback was saying

00:53:08.880 all cops are good. They were saying your attempt to make all cops bad because of a guy like Derek

00:53:15.260 Chauvin is dishonest and it's dangerous. And we know it's dangerous because we've seen the so-called

00:53:21.640 Ferguson effect in city after city. When you rain down hell upon a police force because of the actions of

00:53:27.160 one or a few, when you sick the federal government on a police force and the powers are just relatively

00:53:34.540 huge and minuscule, the feds over the cops, the police back off policing. That's just a fact they

00:53:41.300 do. And when you take away cops, right, the ones who are there are not doing what they used to do

00:53:47.940 because they're worried. They know no one's going to have their back. And there's fewer cops there to

00:53:51.700 begin with because of defund the police. And then when you do finally get an arrest, the people are

00:53:56.280 thrown right back out on the street because of no bail and soft on crime prosecutors. There are

00:54:00.280 real life effects. And people were making those points in the wake of the hysteria surrounding

00:54:06.860 George Floyd. And they were shamed and they were called racists and bigots and oftentimes shut down.

00:54:13.000 So I don't want to hear about disinformation costing lives from Barack Obama or anybody else,

00:54:18.980 because most of the lives that were cost were of brown and black people. When is he going to come

00:54:23.800 out and admit that? Well, I think you hit on the key point here, which is that misinformation or

00:54:28.660 disinformation or whatever you want to put before information really is immediately filtered through

00:54:35.880 politics. And so when figures such as Barack Obama say, we need to do something about misinformation,

00:54:42.500 they mean misinformation that I dislike or that hurts my side or that is spread by the people that

00:54:51.480 I disagree with. It immediately becomes partisan. It immediately becomes ideological.

00:55:03.400 It is a feature and will always be a feature of any free society. This isn't an endorsement of people

00:55:10.740 who lie. This isn't an endorsement of people who are hysterical. And goodness knows with me,

00:55:15.580 it's not an endorsement of the mob. But it is an understanding that power and the spread of

00:55:24.220 information are intrinsically linked. And no one is motivated to stem the flow of bad ideas or falsehoods

00:55:37.180 that help them, Barack Obama included. So what we've seen in the last few months and years,

00:55:45.320 especially as Trump rose up in politics and then became president, is this very selective fear

00:55:52.200 about life, this very selective fear about the use of the internet to spread falsehoods. And Barack Obama

00:56:02.720 is still doing it. So yeah, as you say, when the question is whether or not the average cop helps or

00:56:12.160 hurts the crime rate, it's fine. If as a nation, we adopt a whole bunch of ideas that are silly,

00:56:21.700 if Major League Baseball does it, if Delta does it, if state legislatures do it, if the president does it.

00:56:28.880 But when it comes to COVID, and misinformation has killed people in COVID, well, then that's a very

00:56:35.040 serious problem that we need to address probably with laws, if not with corporate takeovers. And I just

00:56:41.860 think this underscores the first point I made, which is that you just cannot have a situation in

00:56:48.820 which the people making these decisions have perfect knowledge or are free from political bias. And that's

00:56:53.960 why you should want, despite its destructive qualities, which of course it has, a free and open forum

00:57:00.840 that's your starting point. I mean, to me, it's, you know, you'd have to question, I'd like to deep,

00:57:06.700 to dig deeper, because the people who are dying, because they didn't take the vaccine, which I

00:57:11.020 assume is what he's referring to on COVID misinformation, right? Or because they, whatever,

00:57:15.840 relied on ivermectin. They tended to be conservatives, and they tended to be older conservatives,

00:57:21.380 the people who are dying, because all the BLM disinformation or misinformation, are black and brown

00:57:26.380 people for the most part. He's supposed to care about that group. The liberals are the ones who

00:57:31.560 are supposed to, they tell us they're the champions of those group, those groups, and that the

00:57:35.440 Republicans are the evil people who want to see them die, right? Who don't care about them at all.

00:57:40.240 We'll deal with the statistics, deal with the actual facts, because they don't support what you're

00:57:44.700 saying. Speaking of BLM, Patrice Cullors has learned the hard way that when you run a charitable

00:57:51.860 organization, you are supposed to use the money for charitable things. And insult to injury,

00:58:00.140 then you have to disclose what you did with the money. You can't just be like, trust me, we got

00:58:05.080 this. There's something called Form 990 that makes you, it's a standard financial disclosure form that

00:58:11.260 you have to file to tell people, here's where the money went. And a couple weeks ago, she was speaking

00:58:17.660 about this publicly. And let's just say she doesn't like it. Here is soundbite two. Listen to this.

00:58:27.440 This doesn't seem safe for us. This 990 structure, this nonprofit system structure, this is like

00:58:32.840 deeply unsafe. Like this is being literally weaponized against us, against the people we

00:58:39.440 work with. I can't tell you how many people are like, am I next? Like, are they going to do this to me?

00:58:44.840 She said she finds it like triggering, Charles.

00:58:50.960 I mean, are they going to do this to me? Well, if by this, you mean require you to fill in the

00:59:00.200 federal forms when you run a nonprofit and then disclose them if necessary to those who ask? Yeah.

00:59:09.220 Yeah. I mean, this is how nonprofits work. You get to not pay taxes in return for filling in a bunch

00:59:18.040 of forms explaining where the money went. I struggle to see how this is unsafe. I can certainly see how

00:59:27.000 it's triggering given how Black Lives Matter has spent the money, especially on her. But as I wrote

00:59:33.120 at National Review, you wait till she finds Form 1040, which the rest of us have to fill out every

00:59:38.700 year, which asks us where we got our money and how much of it we made. And then, and here's the

00:59:46.100 really triggering bit, requires us to pay a percentage of the total to the federal government

00:59:53.760 or face consequences inflicted by men with guns. I mean, it's just an extraordinary entitlement,

01:00:03.480 the idea that by getting to circumvent normal taxes, she's in some way being victimized.

01:00:12.320 I'm not against nonprofits at all. On the contrary, I think they're a key part of our civil society. I'm

01:00:19.420 not wild about Black Lives Matter, but equally, I don't want to see viewpoint discrimination. And if

01:00:24.300 Black Lives Matter runs a federally permissible structure, that's fine. But come on. The deal

01:00:33.580 here is that the taxpaying public gets to see what you're doing to avoid the taxes. This isn't

01:00:39.320 weaponization. This is accounting.

01:00:42.260 Everything. I mean, the knee-jerk resort to I'm a victim. Again, the New York Magazine article outing

01:00:49.220 their $6.3 million house in California and another $6 million house in Toronto between,

01:00:56.000 you know, she bought one, the spouse bought another, and it's all, oh, it's all on the up

01:01:00.280 and up. Although the New York Magazine reporter got a hold of the text where they were like,

01:01:04.080 how are we going to spin this? How are we going to get them off of it? Maybe we can say it's a

01:01:06.740 safe space. Oh, wait, that's not going to work because we're all over YouTube right in front of

01:01:09.840 it. Artists enclave. That's what we're going to go with. Artists enclave. And now she's like,

01:01:14.540 it's very triggering. The whole thing is triggering. I'll bet it is. I'll bet. Charles,

01:01:22.480 always a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I loved it.

01:01:26.540 Okay. Coming up next, we're going to be joined by journalist and author Yasha Monk. He's been

01:01:31.360 doing some great writing and reporting on cancel culture, on COVID, and now on democracies. Don't go

01:01:38.680 way. The battle for the future of democracy is raging right now as Ukraine fights off Russia

01:01:47.960 and France and Slovenia elect pro-European union leaders and stave off challenges from the far

01:01:54.020 right. Here at home, America is also facing a reckoning of its own with President Biden's own

01:02:00.140 poll numbers underwater in a crucial midterm election year. My next guest just wrote a new book called

01:02:07.180 The Great Experiment, Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. Yasha Monk is the

01:02:14.500 founder of Persuasion Magazine and a Johns Hopkins University professor who has done some fascinating

01:02:20.080 writing on cancel culture and COVID too. Yasha, thank you so much for being here.

01:02:25.380 Thank you so much for having me on.

01:02:26.680 So you're interesting to me because you are of the left. I would say you're a committed Democrat,

01:02:31.720 liberal, but you've pushed back against cancel culture and the crackdown on free speech and

01:02:37.380 opinions that people find offensive. So let's kick it off with what's happening today with Elon Musk

01:02:43.240 and Twitter. Carol Markowitz, who I love, she writes for the New York Post. She summed it up so well,

01:02:49.180 I think, on Twitter. If you will indulge me, this is what she just sent out.

01:02:54.040 In any other time, we would all recognize that Elon Musk is a liberal and it would be the left

01:02:58.860 celebrating this purchase. But the fringe has taken control of language and that's why we are

01:03:03.120 where we are. She writes, a guy from Silicon Valley who popularized electronic cars wants to buy a

01:03:08.840 social media platform to protect free speech. But liberals, mostly in media, are super against this

01:03:15.120 because they think of this as a right wing cause. And she says, that's me today trying to explain the

01:03:20.220 situation to me of 22 years ago back in 2000. Pretty good, right? Like, what's the problem again?

01:03:27.120 Why is there a meltdown? Well, I mean, certainly free speech has traditionally been a broadly

01:03:33.600 philosophically liberal value held by the liberal left and the liberal right. But particularly

01:03:38.280 strongly in many moments of American history on the left, when you think of the free speech movement

01:03:42.240 at Berkeley in the 1960s. And I watched with horror in the last years as my friends on the left have

01:03:52.420 somehow decided that free speech is a conservative value, that it's something that they should

01:03:57.340 criticize, that it's something that they shouldn't own. I think that everybody who believes in the

01:04:03.060 constitution, everybody who believes in the basic principles of our political system should be

01:04:07.000 agreed about this. So yeah, there's a funny kind of evolution in the last little bit where for the last

01:04:13.580 years, I've always heard people say, if you're worried about arbitrary decisions for what to censor and not to

01:04:19.420 censor on Twitter, then you're really misunderstanding the First Amendment, because Twitter is a private

01:04:24.040 company, and they can do whatever they want. And the response to that is that that is legally true. But that

01:04:30.800 there is a very real concern when one of the most important public fora for where people debate politics, has

01:04:38.500 these capricious forms of censorship, some unaccountable people in Silicon Valley, making random decisions for what is

01:04:44.940 censored and what is not censored. Now, I think that's a general problem with Twitter, it'll remain if Elon Musk

01:04:50.580 buys it. But certainly, if he lives up to his promise of censoring fewer things, and being much more

01:04:57.640 consistent in how the platform is run, that would be a positive thing.

01:05:02.400 I guess I remember this happened a couple years ago, Facebook started to debate, it was when Donald Trump was

01:05:07.420 running for reelection, if memory serves. Should we start policing the ads, the political ads?

01:05:14.280 Should we be fact checking the political ads? And I remember thinking, this is the most absurd thing

01:05:18.060 I've ever heard. Who doesn't know that political ads are full of spin? You could be uncharitable and

01:05:25.160 say lies. They're politicians. They're trying to convince us to elect them. We know how the game

01:05:29.640 works. We don't need Mark Zuckerberg over on Facebook or Elon Musk or anybody else at Twitter

01:05:34.780 trying to help us decipher any of this. That's typically what the other side is for, to say,

01:05:40.200 he's a liar. This is not true. Let me prove it to you. Now, it's like this utopian world. We talked

01:05:48.540 about this with our last guest, Charles C.W. Cook, in which, you know, Barack Obama is going to decide

01:05:53.220 what's disinformation and what's not. Or maybe it's Elon Musk, or maybe it's still Mark Zuckerberg. It's

01:05:59.280 not going to work. It's not the way our country was designed to try to censor this speech, but allow

01:06:05.520 this other speech. But then that one, that goes too far. Pull it back. It's the marketplace of

01:06:10.260 ideas. You get on your soapbox and you yell your ideas louder than that guy yells his ideas and then

01:06:15.220 let people decide. We've gotten so far away from that. Well, look, the reason why attacks on free

01:06:22.260 speech are often appealing to people is that they start with a sensible thought, which is that lots

01:06:27.140 of horrible things are said in the public sphere. Lots of wrong things are said. Lots of things that

01:06:31.560 might mislead people to take actions that seriously harm themselves. And it wouldn't be

01:06:35.540 wonderful if we could just stop all of that. But of course, the problem is that I have my opinion

01:06:41.600 of what's bad thought and what's misleading and what's going to make people act in bad ways.

01:06:46.880 And so if I was the censor, perhaps I'd be fine with that. But of course, I'm never going to be the

01:06:51.260 censor. And I'm never going to be willing to trust whatever committee of people is formed,

01:06:56.740 whether it is some random faceless people in Silicon Valley, as is essentially the case now,

01:07:01.560 or whether it is some publicly elected committee. I will never trust those people to decide for me

01:07:09.720 what is in fact worthwhile speech and what is worthless speech. And then when you do have these

01:07:16.980 restrictions on free speech, it has really bad impacts on the political system that we should

01:07:21.500 be worried about much more than we are at the moment. First of all, it makes everybody paranoid.

01:07:27.400 It makes everybody think that their side is being censored more than the other. I think you can

01:07:32.780 see that on Twitter. Now, I think there is some bias probably, but even if it weren't, right? Even if

01:07:37.680 it's just they're trying to ban the 10 worst actors on the left and the 10 worst actors on the right,

01:07:44.160 they're always going to make some mistakes. That's inevitable. And so if I'm on the left,

01:07:47.600 and I see the people that are banning on the left, and they're saying, well, these 10 people,

01:07:50.440 fine, perhaps I can see that it's reasonable to ban them. But what about those two people where

01:07:54.740 they made a mistake? That's really outrageous. How dare they censor these people who are just

01:07:58.500 good faith actors? I feel like they're really out to get me. Now, if on the right, they're doing the

01:08:03.060 same thing, they ban 12 people, of which 10 are bad actors and two are actually reasonable,

01:08:07.820 I probably am less aware of that. I don't know those accounts. I don't follow them. And so I think,

01:08:12.720 oh, well, I'm sure that that's fine. So even if they actually were applying censorship in an even

01:08:17.700 way, both sides would end up with the impression that they're the persecuted ones, they're the

01:08:23.060 ones that are being treated unfairly. And so that actually is going to drive more pressure in our

01:08:29.880 politics, more paranoia, more mutual hatred. And it undermines the core premise of our democracy,

01:08:36.400 because the core premise is, you might hate the other side, you might think the stakes of the

01:08:41.800 election are really high. But you also know, you know what, if they win, I might be really upset,

01:08:48.600 but they get to govern for four years, and I get to make my case. And if I convince my fellow citizens,

01:08:53.620 when I get to govern, my guys get to govern four years from now, if you start to worry that if I

01:08:59.200 lose the next elections, I might stop being able to make my case, I might stop being able to say what

01:09:03.940 I want to in public, then the incentive to not accept the outcome of the election, to say,

01:09:10.220 I'm going to fight in any way I can, including extra legal ways, in order to stay in power becomes

01:09:16.560 much, much high. You know, I think about it, like, if you look at social media, for sure,

01:09:22.820 the left controls it. I mean, there's no question that, you know, liberals are controlling those

01:09:26.740 organizations from Twitter to Facebook and Insta, same ownership and Google and so on. But you know,

01:09:33.120 the right has a pretty big presence on Facebook in particular. And the right has found a way in the

01:09:38.300 digital world to have their voices heard. You know, I mean, there are all sorts of places now

01:09:44.040 where you can, whatever. I mean, the podcast, this is one forum. There's lots of ways. And like,

01:09:49.240 I'm thinking about my pals at The Daily Wire. That website's become extremely popular. For years,

01:09:55.140 Drudge was more right-wing. I don't know how you describe him these days. He's like anti-Trump. I'm

01:09:59.540 not sure exactly where he falls. But my point is, there's a way of getting your voice out there,

01:10:03.360 right? So the conservatives, as much as they do feel censored, there is still a way of getting

01:10:07.900 your voice out there. I'm surprised to hear you even suggest that the left feels censored. Because

01:10:13.820 you know, from where I sit, they're not, they're not, they're the ones doing the censoring. They're

01:10:17.800 not the censored. Sure. But this is the problem with this discourse, right? So I see lots of people

01:10:24.220 share lists of what posts do particularly well on Facebook. And then they say, what do you mean

01:10:30.360 Facebook is left-leaning? Actually, this is a right-wing cabal. Look, it's all of those Daily

01:10:33.600 Wire stories that are at the top 10 every day. This must mean that there's a right-wing bias.

01:10:38.380 So once you have these unaccountable mechanisms... Well, I'm talking about ownership. Just to be

01:10:43.040 clear, I'm making a distinction between the ownership and their mission and the people who

01:10:46.760 actually use Facebook. No, no, sure. Yeah. No, no, I wasn't disagreeing with you. I was saying

01:10:50.860 that I'm seeing people on the left who are sharing lists of what does particularly well on Facebook. I

01:10:56.740 think Facebook publishes a list of the 10 top performing posts every day, or at least there's

01:11:01.440 some way of getting to that. And so I see a lot of people on the left sharing those lists

01:11:05.860 and saying, you know what? Actually, there must be some kind of secret conspiracy where

01:11:09.700 Facebook is promoting those posts because, you know, how can those right-wing posts be doing

01:11:14.360 the best? It must be because there's some bias against the left and we are somehow being censored.

01:11:19.020 So the problem is that when you have these platforms with, you know, algorithms which nobody

01:11:24.740 quite understands and some real censorship going on, everybody always feels like the victim,

01:11:29.540 whether or not it's realistic. And so what we need is for those platforms to very clearly show

01:11:37.780 that they are not favoring one form of content over another and that they're not censoring based on the

01:11:45.380 content of political speech. Well, we know that they are. They can't show that because, I mean,

01:11:49.100 we know, right? Like, the jig is up. Like, Twitter's caught. Like, there's no way for them to deny that

01:11:55.920 because look at the big stories that they've suppressed. You know, why was Hunter Biden suppressed?

01:11:59.540 Why wasn't there an apology? Sure. But that's why I think that Twitter and Facebook and other social

01:12:04.720 media platforms should essentially hold themselves to the First Amendment. Now, they are private

01:12:09.200 companies. They're not legally obliged to follow the standards of the First Amendment. But I think,

01:12:14.560 and clearly, they do need to remove certain kinds of content like child pornography or direct threats

01:12:19.800 of violence and so on. There are certain things we all agree should not be on those platforms. So

01:12:24.180 there's need for some moderation. But I think that moderation should basically be as content neutral

01:12:29.520 as possible and as minimal as possible. And the way to do that is basically for these companies to say,

01:12:35.120 we are going to try and hold ourselves to a First Amendment standard. That's going to involve some

01:12:39.980 difficult calls. We have some kind of accountable committee that ultimately is responsible

01:12:44.380 for adjudicating the most important cases. And that, I think, would take a lot of the heat out of

01:12:49.980 this discussion and give Americans confidence that the most important public forum we have for

01:12:54.520 debating politics aren't biased in favor of their political opponent.

01:12:59.680 Yeah. Take yourself out of the alleged fact-checking business. It's pointless. No one trusts you to do it.

01:13:07.460 Leave it to the other side to flood the field with information they say is corrective.

01:13:11.520 It's no one trusts big tech to do it. It's just gone on for too long with, you know, too much

01:13:17.260 discrimination. And that ship has sailed. They don't have any credibility to be doing fact-checking

01:13:21.900 on anyone. I mean, here's a crazy example for you. Recently, we hosted RFK Jr., you know,

01:13:27.460 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And he's been totally deplatformed. He's one of the so-called disinformation

01:13:32.560 dozen that the White House called attention to on COVID. So we prepare. I mean, you should have seen

01:13:37.680 by preparing for that interview and my team. And we're straight, you know, we're straight news

01:13:42.840 journalists. I do commentary as well. But when I'm presenting the facts, I'm doing it as a journalist

01:13:47.560 trying to bring you to actual truth. And if this guy was a disinformation purveyor, I would absolutely

01:13:53.960 be calling him out on it. And where he did stray a field of what I knew to be the facts, I called him

01:13:58.740 out and he would have a response and so on. But he is not a disinformation dozen. When I spoke to him,

01:14:05.200 I checked out all of his claims. They all have bases. In fact, it's his conclusions they don't

01:14:10.860 like. It's his recommendation as a result of what he sees as the facts that they don't like. Well,

01:14:14.860 that's that doesn't mean he's in the business of pushing disinformation. I was expecting to find,

01:14:18.860 you know, him saying crazy stuff about, I don't know, snakes and vermin and the insects and how,

01:14:24.860 you know, like it wasn't true. He said stuff about like what Bill Gates is doing in Africa. I thought,

01:14:29.280 oh, my God, this can't be true. No, there's no way Bill Gates did this stuff. Well, you know what?

01:14:32.260 Lo and behold, all these independent sources backing up that this is what Bill Gates didn't

01:14:36.640 after. So too often these labels are put on people who don't say the right things, right?

01:14:42.340 Because he's challenging vaccines that left doesn't like that. And then we walk away not

01:14:47.140 knowing what is true or just having the viewpoint censored so we can't make up our mind at all.

01:14:52.500 So, look, I haven't followed the debate about what he said in particular and so on. So I don't want

01:14:56.820 to comment on him in particular. But certainly one of the classic arguments for free speech

01:15:01.460 is that there is often very wide consensus that certain kinds of views are correct. And, you know,

01:15:10.020 20 years later, 50 years later, 100 years later, it becomes absolutely clear that people were deeply

01:15:15.020 mistaken about some important issue. And so one of the promises of free speech is that those lonely

01:15:20.900 voices that disagree with a social consensus at least can try to get a hearing, at least can try

01:15:26.880 to actually express their opinions to a wide audience in the major fora of discussion that

01:15:33.720 exists at that time. Now, by the way, most people who do that are going to be saying things that are

01:15:39.560 wrong, right? By and large, when 99% of people think something, they have a reason to think that.

01:15:45.460 But it's socially really, really important that in those cases, when 99% of us are wrong,

01:15:53.180 the people who figured that out, who are actually trying to point to our error, have a way of gaining

01:15:59.040 a hearing, because otherwise, we're going to be missing out on really important insights and really

01:16:04.360 important correct things that we're getting wrong. And certainly where I agree with you is that

01:16:10.480 on some of the clearest examples where misinformation has been labeled and then removed,

01:16:21.900 we have a pretty bad track record. So one of the most important ones is the so-called lab leak theory.

01:16:27.900 For the first year or year and a half of the pandemic, anybody who suggested that COVID-19

01:16:35.440 may have its origin in gain-of-function research and then security breaches, which mean that virus

01:16:44.400 spread from a lab, was deplatformed from YouTube and Facebook. Now, it's not clear to me whether or

01:16:52.200 not the lab leak theory is right. There's an ongoing scientific debate about this. There's real

01:16:57.080 disagreements between different branches of the United States government. Some security services seem

01:17:01.360 to have concluded that the lab leak theory appears to be correct. Others have concluded that it

01:17:05.700 doesn't appear to be correct. I don't know what the truth of the matter is, but it clearly is an

01:17:10.020 open question and a very important one. And the fact that this is one of the first topics on which

01:17:15.680 this misinformation paradigm was used in order to try to disappear certain ideas from the public

01:17:22.560 sphere, I think is a very vivid example of why this is such a dangerous approach.

01:17:27.880 The hubris, right? The hubris of some tech exec sitting in Silicon Valley to say, I know,

01:17:33.960 I know this is disinformation about the COVID lab leak. You don't know anything. As you point out,

01:17:39.420 the intelligence services are disagreeing about it. You don't know anything. You have to have some

01:17:44.520 humility when running those companies for what you don't know, right? To allow the debate to play out

01:17:51.080 in the public. It's one of the unique, great things about America. And I know you have now become an

01:17:55.920 American citizen, though you were raised in Germany. And I love your story about how

01:17:59.020 you choked up when you were taking the oath and then you left and went to a rally against Donald

01:18:04.160 Trump. But that's uniquely America. I think that's awesome, right? I'm not a rallier, but I totally

01:18:11.920 agree with it. And I think it's uniquely American that you get to do it. So you've lived it, right?

01:18:16.540 You've been out there marching in the streets for the things that you believe in. So that's why it's

01:18:20.080 so concerning to see the effective marching in the streets, the social media streets being shut down,

01:18:25.360 all these roadblocks put in front of people's ability to say how they feel. And it's such a

01:18:29.180 great, you know, democratic forum, right? Because you don't have to leave your house. Like the

01:18:32.140 wheelchair bomb person sitting at home can have his voice heard in the form of, you know, a virtual

01:18:38.260 march if they if only they would allow it. And they're just getting a little too big and a little

01:18:43.520 too scary. So I think the Elon Musk thing is a good development. And I hope I hope it goes through

01:18:48.020 could still be screwed up. But it looks like looks pretty good if he's tweeting about it. All right,

01:18:52.240 let me ask you this. How to save democracies. It's a big topic. And I think it's interesting

01:18:58.760 because today we see France, you know, staving off the Marie Le Pen win, which isn't unexpected,

01:19:05.400 but she made quite a run of it at the end there. You know, she got like 40 percent of the vote.

01:19:09.080 Macron got 60 percent, I think, last at last I looked. And we're seeing this more and more,

01:19:14.840 right? Like the rise of right wing populism. And obviously, we saw it in our own country,

01:19:19.900 to some extent, with Donald Trump. You see Marie Le Pen doing better than she did a few years ago.

01:19:25.220 You got Hungary, Slovenia staved off a similar challenge. But it's one of the things you address

01:19:30.200 in your book. And I wonder, first, why you think it's happening more and more, right? Why more and

01:19:34.760 more people are gravitating toward that kind of a leader? And secondly, what you do think,

01:19:41.100 why you think it's pernicious and it needs to be staved off to save democracy?

01:19:43.800 Yeah. So I think that a lot of people just don't trust the government anymore and they don't trust

01:19:50.080 politicians anymore. Now, it's not that Americans or people in other democracies ever loved,

01:19:54.220 you know, the people in their capital. You know, you go back 30 or 40 years in the United States

01:19:59.600 and most Americans probably thought, I don't really like Washington, D.C. and I don't really

01:20:03.760 trust those senators and congressmen and what they're up to all day long. But they also had the sense

01:20:08.680 that things were working, that they experienced real improvements in the standard of living,

01:20:15.000 that they're doing much better than the parents did, that the kids are probably going to do better

01:20:18.340 than them, that, you know, America's standing on the world stage was very strong. And they had an

01:20:25.860 optimism about the future. And that's why they tended to say, you know, let's let those politicians do

01:20:29.940 their thing. In the end, something seems to be working. I think nowadays, a lot of people

01:20:35.800 understandably feel that that's no longer the case, that they've worked hard over lives,

01:20:40.460 but they're not necessarily doing better than their parents, but their kids might do worse than

01:20:43.900 them, that America's standing on the world stage is much weaker than it was. And I also think in

01:20:50.560 particular, that they feel a deep pessimism about the subject that really is at the core of my new

01:20:56.800 book, The Great Experiment, which is the state of ethnically and religiously diverse democracies,

01:21:04.020 like the United States, the state of integration, the way in which we're dealing with race relations

01:21:10.100 and with immigration. And I think here, there's a really interesting parallel of pessimism on

01:21:17.380 different sides of the political spectrum. Now, you have people on the far right who basically say

01:21:21.920 that the demographic changes that we're experiencing are the problem because the kinds of people who are

01:21:30.260 coming in are supposedly culturally or perhaps even genetically inferior, that what's great about

01:21:38.460 America was the culture and perhaps the ethnicity of its majority group and all of that is supposedly

01:21:43.860 being undermined. And so you have this real sense of doom that these changes will somehow ruin the

01:21:52.080 country. Now, in the mainstream and on the left, people rightly disagree with that attribution of

01:21:58.800 blame. They rightly disagree that there's anything less than about people who are coming here from

01:22:05.500 Mexico or from Vietnam or from Kenya. But in an odd way, they echo that pessimism because they're

01:22:13.400 saying, you know what, you know, 100 years ago, Irish and Italian immigrants could succeed because

01:22:19.740 they were white. Whereas today, those immigrants from non-white countries, they experience so much

01:22:25.160 discrimination, so much racism, so much injustice, but they can never succeed. And so, yes, you know,

01:22:31.760 they are experiencing all of those roadblocks and not making any socioeconomic progress. We're not

01:22:38.180 integrating. It's just that it's a quote, quote, quote, our quote. And I think that that's actually wrong.

01:22:43.860 In this book, I look at what the real state of our diverse societies is like. And I have to say that I was

01:22:50.800 astounded by how positive the developments are. A lot of people who arrive in the country

01:22:59.880 take a long time to integrate fully, especially when they come from poorer countries, when they have

01:23:05.380 less educational opportunities. They may take a long time to learn the language. Some people never

01:23:10.480 learn the language until the end of their lives. But we also see very clearly that the children and

01:23:15.580 their grandchildren are succeeding very, very well. But in fact, the socioeconomic mobility we see

01:23:21.260 in immigrants today is exactly the same at the same speed as that of Italian and Irish immigrants

01:23:28.500 100 years ago. Now, that shows that the far right is wrong to say that these immigrants are somehow

01:23:34.500 inferior. There's something wrong with them. But it also shows that a lot of the mainstream and the left

01:23:38.720 is wrong to say that for all of the injustices that exist, our country is so unjust, so racist,

01:23:46.560 that these immigrants are somehow being stopped from succeeding. In fact, the reality looks much

01:23:51.980 better than it does. But when this pessimism wins, as it did in France, as it does sometimes in the

01:23:57.400 United States, that's what makes it much easier for these far right populists to win. Because if you're

01:24:02.980 basically being told, whatever happens, the future is going to be bleak, then it's easier to

01:24:08.140 blame outsiders for that than to blame your group for that.

01:24:12.060 So let me ask you about that, because admittedly, I haven't studied this as closely as you have. But

01:24:16.620 when I think about the rights objection to immigration, illegal immigration in this country

01:24:23.200 is mostly what they object to. It's not that they're an inferior people. I mean, of course,

01:24:28.980 you're going to have some racists who say that and believe that. It's that they flood the border,

01:24:35.680 we don't have the facilities to take care of them, they come across and there's no provision

01:24:39.880 for these folks. And some wind up taking jobs that they don't have a right to. And then there's also

01:24:46.500 an objection on another level to will they assimilate, right? Because all the immigrants

01:24:51.280 who came over during the 20th century, they would eventually assimilate, assimilate, and they had a

01:24:56.260 shared love of country. There was a patriotism, you know, this is an immigrant yourself, that would

01:25:00.760 bind us together, even though we had our little tribes, you know, right, like I'm Irish,

01:25:03.760 Italian, that they were two separate tribes, but then they merged a lot. That's why you get people

01:25:07.340 like me. But anyway, I had our little tribes. But one thing that brought us all together was love of

01:25:12.260 country and that now that's being eroded. And without love of country, you can't have separate

01:25:17.080 tribes. You can't have people who don't assimilate and just come here just like big blobs, you know,

01:25:21.440 like the big Hispanic community, the big Irish community, the big whatever community. But they don't

01:25:25.580 they have nothing in common. So like, that's what I've heard from the right about America. I mean,

01:25:30.660 there's always people like Pat Buchanan who are out there like the white people are diminishing

01:25:34.180 in number. We always had somebody like that. But I don't think he speaks for really even what we'd

01:25:40.600 call the far right today. I don't know. You tell me.

01:25:44.360 Well, I think there is a strong strain of that, actually. So look, absolutely. It's legitimate

01:25:49.640 to say we want to have control of our own borders. We want to make sure that we determine who comes

01:25:54.520 into the country and that we have some amount of agency in that. And that's a perfectly legitimate

01:26:00.540 argument. I do think, though, that there's two things which are a little bit more concerning

01:26:07.280 than that to me. And the first of those is a claim that there is something in theory about

01:26:12.120 the people who are coming in. You know, in Michael Anton's very influential Flight 93 election

01:26:17.520 essay in 2016, which was making the case for why sort of movement conservatives should vote for

01:26:23.160 Donald Trump, he talked about, I quote, the ceaseless importation of third world foreigners.

01:26:28.440 And he assumed, and this is the second point, that they would have no liking of the Republican

01:26:34.720 Party, but more broadly, no liking of the American Republic, that they just didn't have democratic

01:26:40.160 values. So this is this idea that immigrants don't tend to integrate, that perhaps they don't

01:26:45.340 tend to learn the language, and certainly they don't care about democratic values.

01:26:50.040 No, I think that that actually just happens to be very wrong. Let's take language acquisition as

01:26:56.120 one important case. On the right, you have concerns that immigrants aren't learning the language.

01:27:01.760 On the left, you actually have some people who say immigrants shouldn't have to learn the language.

01:27:05.320 It's perfectly fine if you have immigrants and the children, the grandchildren just continuing to

01:27:10.100 speak Spanish or Chinese or whatever other language. We don't have to have a unified language in

01:27:15.120 the United States. Both of those positions simply miss the empirical reality. Because what happens,

01:27:21.820 and it's incredible how strong this empirical regularity is across time and across different

01:27:27.420 immigrant communities, is that the first generation that arrives often doesn't learn the language

01:27:32.580 perfectly. If you come to the country at 30 or at 40, and perhaps you didn't have a chance to have a

01:27:38.660 lot of education in the country you come from, you might find it hard to learn the language fully.

01:27:43.580 And even if you live in the country for 50 years, you might never come to speak it perfectly.

01:27:49.340 Now, the children of that generation overwhelmingly speak both languages, but prefer to speak English.

01:27:56.960 So when they're among their siblings, among their cousins, among friends who have a similar

01:28:01.960 background of migration, they predominantly speak English. And by the third generation, by the generation

01:28:08.220 of the grandchildren of the original immigrants, only about 1% of people still speak any of the original

01:28:16.520 language. So actually, by that point, English has won a very definitive victory. So that's just sort of

01:28:23.420 one point at which I think some of the fears just aren't true when you look at reality. And that's the same about

01:28:32.740 other things. So it actually turns out that immigrants are more patriotic on some key measures than average

01:28:38.740 Americans, perhaps especially when Americans who tend to be more on the left and who tend to be much more

01:28:43.860 self-critical about the country. They say they love America more than the average person. They identify

01:28:52.020 very deeply with the constitution. And so I think some of those fears about immigrants not integrating

01:28:57.940 simply and reflected in reality. That's fascinating. Um, what do you make of the, uh, well, let me,

01:29:06.880 before I move on to that, so that we talked about the rise of populism and the concerns about immigration

01:29:11.740 and so on, like the changing demographics of the country, obviously also a dynamic in France, that's a

01:29:17.140 whole long, that's a different, longer conversation because they really are facing an issue with a large

01:29:24.720 number of, I mean, I don't know if they're all radical Muslims, but a large number of Islamists

01:29:30.240 moving into France and changing the culture. We've talked about this with Ayaan Hirsi Ali,

01:29:33.940 who's done great writing and research. She's at the Hoover Institution on it. And I understand,

01:29:38.520 you know, given what's been documented there, a concern about now that's, I mean, like Muslim is not

01:29:43.920 the same as radical Muslim. Muslim's not the same thing as Islamist. A lot of Islamists coming into Paris

01:29:49.160 and trying to change the culture there to where the women get like attacked if they walk without an

01:29:54.260 escort to where they get looked down on, if they have a tank top on and skin exposed, that's worth

01:29:59.200 fighting over. I mean, that's, that's a difference in, in culture. That's not tolerable. That's going

01:30:04.480 back into the dark ages. If, if people want to change your culture that way, and it's worth fighting

01:30:08.940 over though in France, Macron's been against that. So yeah, whatever. Um, Le Pen has made an issue out of

01:30:14.480 but what, what else would you say for people who haven't read the book and the great experiment

01:30:18.340 are sort of the things that you, that you feel we're losing that we need to shore up if we're

01:30:25.400 going to save our democracy? Well, sort of on the topic of how to build ethnically and religiously

01:30:31.180 diverse democracies, what I would say is that a lot of people are quite naive about how difficult it

01:30:36.200 is to do that. But interestingly, uh, that kind of naive optimism then easily turns to pessimism.

01:30:42.060 So what I see among a lot of my friends and colleagues is to say, look, diversity should

01:30:46.420 be really easy. How hard is it not to be a bigot? How hard is it not to discriminate against

01:30:51.060 your neighbor just because they're somehow different from you? Um, uh, but then when we

01:30:55.320 look at the current state of America and see that there are some real injustices, they become

01:31:00.300 very, very pessimistic. Now my starting point in the book, uh, is a little bit, I hope less

01:31:05.780 naive. I show the ways in which human beings across time and across cultures have a very

01:31:11.600 deep instinct to form groups, to discriminate in favor of the in-group and against members,

01:31:17.420 uh, uh, against people who are outside of that group. I show that, uh, throughout history,

01:31:23.460 some of the worst conflicts have been, uh, across the lines of ethnic, racial, uh, religious,

01:31:30.920 national divisions. Some of the worst civil wars and genocides and forms of ethnic cleansing

01:31:37.260 have been motivated by that. I think that precisely that account of why we are, uh, going

01:31:43.120 through what I call the great experiment, uh, for, for, for why that is so difficult, um,

01:31:48.920 then also allows us to be much more optimistic about the progress we've made over the last

01:31:53.640 decade. Because in fact, America today, um, is much better at building this ethnically,

01:31:58.800 religiously diverse democracy than most societies in the history of the world, than most countries

01:32:03.640 around the world today. And a lot better than we were 50 or 25 years ago. I mean, you go back 30

01:32:09.820 years in American history and a majority of Americans thought that it was morally wrong,

01:32:15.700 uh, to have interracial marriage, morally wrong for people from different ethnic groups to marry each

01:32:21.440 other. Um, today that is down in the single digits. Um, so actually the transformation of America

01:32:27.880 in the last decades, uh, has been really inspiring. And in that sense, um, uh, I, I believe as a new

01:32:34.540 mint American citizen, uh, that there's deep injustices in American history that we have to

01:32:38.640 face up to, but also that the founding principles of our country is what has allowed us to make great

01:32:44.480 progress towards living up, uh, uh, to our ideals. Um, and that we can build on those founding

01:32:50.540 principles in order to live up to our ideals more fully in the decades to come.

01:32:53.980 Hmm. That's, um, I love hearing that. I agree with it fully. I wish more people would hear it

01:32:59.680 on the left who are so determined to tell us that our country is awful and that you're right. Some

01:33:04.680 pessimism on the right too, about the future and where we can take it. Um, I think it's similar to

01:33:10.760 the discussion we've had earlier. It's based on staying factual, you know, it's just trying to pull

01:33:15.560 your ideology out of it and actually look at the numbers and actually look at how people are doing.

01:33:20.060 Um, you know, Jason Riley wrote a great book about, you know, what the black experience

01:33:23.840 really was like under Trump and how it is right now in America, Glenn Lowry. He's been saying a

01:33:28.580 lot of the same things that you're saying. He's more conservative than you are, but we need more

01:33:32.480 sane voices of reason that just speak the facts, not colored, you know, harshly by partisanship.

01:33:38.520 Yasha, thank you so much. Good luck with the book. It's called the great experiment by Yasha

01:33:42.760 Monk. Uh, and it is out right now. Thanks all the best to you. Thank you so much.

01:33:47.680 Tomorrow. One of my absolute favorites. When Douglas Murray talks, I stop what I am doing

01:33:53.200 and I listen and he's back with us. He is absolutely brilliant. As my friend Donna put

01:33:58.140 it, he's such a brilliant prophetic man. She said, what a crazy combo of insight, clarity,

01:34:02.140 and eloquence. You will love him. Do not forget to tune in, subscribe to the show so you don't miss

01:34:07.860 it. And we'll see you then. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - April 25, 2022

Elon Musk Buys Twitter, and Free Speech Under Attack, with Charles C.W. Cooke and Yascha Mounk ｜ Ep. 307

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