Failures of Elite Media, and Hypocrisy of Left on Mob Behavior, with Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles ｜ Ep. 788
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 35 minutes
Words per Minute
188.35454
Summary
Nellie Bowles, author of the brand new book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, joins me to talk about the anti-Israel protests on college campuses, and why she thinks it s time to move to California.
Transcript
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We like to walk that fine line between techno thriller
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Live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Friday.
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The anti-Israel and in some cases anti-American
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have continued as finals and graduation approaches.
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And just wait until these brats go home for the summer
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The Free Press has been doing some great reporting on all of this
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And it actually really conveys what the book is about.
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and the head of strategy for the Upstart Media Company
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and now I'm spanning it into two days of shows.
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I don't understand what you and Barry are doing in L.A.
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I mean, it's like to cede the most beautiful land in America.
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once you get past all the homeless people in the tents,
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you just think, why doesn't everybody live here?
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And I would say it's better than the lifestyle of Manhattan.
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Like, when we were living in the Upper West Side
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and all the intensity of the New York media world was happening,
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I mean, California, for all of its eccentric politics,
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Politics are not like the center of your life here.
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Or the media world is not the center of the universe here
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We have other conversations, all sorts of stuff.
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as sort of their local entertainers who are here.
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And we bring like a headline or two along with us
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and then move on to, I don't know, Botox anecdotes.
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So I might be able to last for a week out here.
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I wrote it because I had been a reporter at the Times
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who'd been given a lot of autonomy to write features.
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and the world was kind of spinning into this wildness,
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I wanted to write about what was happening in Seattle
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and Portland and what was going on on the streets.
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And I ended up quitting the paper and writing this book.
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It kind of gave me an excuse to cover the revolution.
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Well, because you wanted to write about it in an honest way.
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You didn't want to go cheerlead it necessarily.
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You wanted to just report what you found on the ground.
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I think, and again, there's a small correction that you're starting to see happen.
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But for a long time, it was very explicit within mainstream American publications
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And it started around in 2019, but really 2020, it was said out loud.
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And I think within the Times, within every mainstream American liberal media institution,
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it was quite proudly stated, we are not going to cover the most interesting stories.
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And that was really frustrating as a reporter who was curious about the world.
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I wrote to cover things with curiosity and open mind and a sense of humor.
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Because, you know, the book is replete with these stories of what you found there.
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So they did eventually send you, but how did the...
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A couple of the first chapters and a little bit in the beginning of the reporting, I managed
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It basically became impossible within the world of the paper.
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I mean, most of this was done sort of socially.
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The editors of all these institutions, the leaders of all these institutions don't want
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They want the old values, but the closing was a kind of communal effort of the staffers.
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So you're saying, I don't like, what's the line of command?
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You go to your editor, your assignment editor, and they say, this is what you're doing, Nellie.
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How does somebody who's lateral to you shut down your reporting?
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But I think the big, really interesting one that happened was the creation of these huge
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But I think every single one of these institutions has them.
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Do not create a Slack channel at the free press.
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So I know we have like a tiny one, and I was like, watch that Slack.
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If people want to complain at my show, they have to text me.
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So you had like a 3,000 person Slack channel where someone, like a junior editor on the
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Wirecutter section, could be like just reaming a top politics reporter.
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And that politics reporter would then have to respond.
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And it was like kind of this crazy flattening of the hierarchies.
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Yeah, hierarchies are useful for a lot of reasons.
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Now I'm like, we need, you should have to ask my permission to even post anything in Slack.
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It's like these idiot White House interns who think they're going to set Israel policy.
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No one gives a shit what you think about the Mideast.
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It's like if you're releasing a public letter, you got to, you got to name yourself.
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No, and otherwise it's like, you know what, you know what your thoughts, where they go, they go in your journal.
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Dear diary, I'm so angry about the evil Israel.
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You can't try to hijack the White House and demand policy change.
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Anyway, this is why I'm against Slack channels.
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I don't mind, like, I don't mind if my staff complains about me or policy at the show.
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That's part of, you know, being a corporate person, right?
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But allowing a forum where they can go and do it publicly foments insurrection, you might say.
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Anyway, so the problem, the Times Slack channel is infamous for leading to this kind of problem.
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Complete flattening of hierarchy, complete flattening.
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And then basically the 5% of loudest, craziest voices get to decide editorial policy.
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Because you don't want to be yelled at by a thousand people in a Slack room.
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But I think within these leftist circles, it does matter.
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You know, they're still obsessed with reputation and standing.
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And certainly, I'm sure, at the Times, even more so.
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And prestige and goodness and the appearance of good and writing this book and, like, doing this reporting and going to these places required giving up a little bit of my need for prestige and good standing and being good in the eyes of people who I'd spent most of my life trying to be good in the eyes of.
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The sort of Substack, Free Press, all of the independent media outlets get a full two years to report on that before the mainstream media decides it's safe to touch it.
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So you really get a big head start on a lot of these stories.
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So in a lot of ways, it's very fun as a reporter because there's so many stories that the old institutions are scared to touch.
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Well, let me ask you a question on that because, and I could bring this up when Barry comes too, but so there's a piece of that that is fun because you have a corner on the market.
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It's like, I really like Bill Ackman and I love what he's doing on X now.
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And I love watching his awakening, this, you know, billionaire investor who's realizing how pernicious DEI is.
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But I would be lying if I didn't say there's a piece of me that is also like slightly like, all right, Bill, you're a little late to the party.
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But the way, you know, it's like people write about it like he's finally Bill Ackman is going to bring down.
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A lot of us have been fighting this fight a very long time and we're called a bunch of names for it.
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This reminds me of when, sorry, just a one off.
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So she played me in a movie and it was about sexual harassment.
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And when she went on her media tour to promote the movie, people said to her something about like, well, Megyn Kelly wasn't first.
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You know, she she had been harassed by him years earlier and she didn't come out with it until years later.
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And she had the nerve to say Megyn Kelly was late to the party.
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You never fucking came forward with any allegations.
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I'm sure you were harassed, but you're too pussyfooted to say anything about it.
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But there was no party for Fox News and then the New York Times exposing Harvey Weinstein.
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So I have like some tolerance for people like you who are legitimately on the other side of just liberalism and like sort of with those people and of those beliefs who then were open minded enough to see.
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Wait, this I may not be on the factual side of this particular issue.
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And I have that same tolerance for Bill Ackman.
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And I just don't like the lionization of people like Bill because it's like, no, of course, of course.
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But at the same time, like I think of it in terms of like seeing evidence and responding to evidence.
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Like I was always lockstep in being a sort of good progressive in the good progressive movement.
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And I don't consider it that my politics have radically shifted in any which way, although, of course, the progressive movement doesn't allow any questioning.
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So that they would consider me as having done so.
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If you live in San Francisco and you still believe that drug legalization, which I believe for many years, that drug legalization is a good idea after walking for years along the streets and seeing people dying on the streets as you're walking around.
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And that being the ideal progressive outcome where it's the freedom people have to just do drugs, die on the streets, be given cash every month to just sort of continue to live there.
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Like, if you look at that and say, this is working and my ideas here were right and I shouldn't change my mind on this, you're fooling yourself.
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And emotionally, I want to say drugs should be legal because I'm like the government should get out of as much of people's lives as possible.
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And if people want to do drugs, whatever, but the lived experience, the reality you see on the streets, you're like, you know what, this isn't working.
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You write about how you, you know, you walk around San Francisco these days and you realize that this is what it's like to be in a failed city, a dying city.
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Is it because of that, because of the open air drug use?
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Yeah, I think, I think it's a bunch of factors.
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One is the open air drug use and San Francisco is a good example of there's a reformation happening there legitimately right now.
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You've got the crime because of the policies around petty crime, basically not being prosecuted.
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Um, you have the destruction of the public school system through basically, um, the belief system that any standardized testing is white supremacy and any, um, let's say accelerated math.
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This is the really, the thing that really lit the city on fire, that offering accelerated math class, um, is racist, racist.
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And so you, that kind of got, got it, although now is starting to be reformed.
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Um, and then you have the housing policy, which is sort of the progressive movement is actually also very anti building housing because it's always about like butterflies in backyards and chicken coops and things like this.
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And building an apartment complex doesn't sound very like green and lovely, even though it of course is green and lovely.
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So you don't have a middle class in San Francisco anymore.
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So it's kind of a vortex of all the wackiest ideas.
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But I think you can look at San Francisco as maybe five years ahead of the rest of the country in terms of, no, but I mean this in a good way, actually, because now you're seeing the reformation and the waking up of people who are saying, this isn't working.
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And so I write about that, about the recalls that you saw in the city for the first time in decades, where the citizens stood up and said, this is enough, this is insane.
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And so I think you could see that in other liberal spaces.
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In San Francisco, there's a fair share of Asians in American, you know, Asian descent.
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And they tend to be very hardworking, you know, stereotypically, they would be a very hardworking group and who believe in merit.
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So I wonder, will it happen in other cities that are more full of like the Upper West Side, where I live for 17 years, which is not a bunch of Asians.
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It's a bunch of woke leftist women in Lululemon.
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Well, well, you're right that San Francisco, the revolution, the moderate reforms that happened there very much were driven by the Asian community getting very galvanized and getting pretty pissed off.
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Because some of the school board members were basically calling them like white supremacists, whatever.
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Um, I think, I mean, for the Lululemon ladies who you live among, I would say the person who best describes that is a Rob Henderson with the idea of luxury beliefs, which is this concept of people advocating for politics that have nothing to that that don't impact their lives, but that sound really nice to them.
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So like, let's say you live in a doorman building, the police, you live in a doorman building, but you want to abolish the police.
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But for the rest of us who don't have a doorman, it's more of an issue.
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And it's, and it's a perfect example of what you were saying before, which is like, oh, you know, I care.
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So I don't want to see them arrested for drug use.
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I just want to see them die in the street so I can step over them.
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I want to bypass their corpse on the way to my multimillion dollar townhome.
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And in, in the Upper West Side, it's the same thing where we have to defund.
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And the police are evil and they'll go to home to their door man building on the Upper
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And they'll be completely ignorant of what's happening in the Bronx, where the black population
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And they're, they're showing up to meetings saying, don't defund our police, but give us
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But if the money's not there because they listen to these rich ladies in the Lulu's
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who are having liquid lunches, but they feel really good about themselves, folks.
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I imagine you just wandering around the Upper West Side glaring at the Lulu ladies.
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Nellie, I would be walking down the streets there and people would be like, we signed this
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I don't want to, I, I walked around Fox with my first child, um, you know, Fox news onesie
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The, um, the abolish the police is a good luxury belief example.
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The, all the sort of public school faux reforms that actually like make the school worse
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when the people who are pushing for them tend to send their kids to private school.
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Like these, these, these are the classic hypocrisies of the moment.
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But one of the other things you have in the book is a little journey to Chaz, which remember
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when the left thought that would be a great idea.
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Now we're seeing it every college campus in America.
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No one's been shot so far, but if this is allowed to continue.
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No, they're just doing hunger strikes and complaining a lot about missing lunch.
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Did you see, like, there's been a couple of soundbites of these students saying they're
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You know, we have people regularly checking our vitals.
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We have people, you know, constantly worried about us.
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We have people, uh, donating stuff all the time, like, uh, rain boots, you know, all the
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He doesn't actually care about, you know, doing good or being altruistic.
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I mean, they also look bad, but this, the absurdity of this.
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So in Chaz, that was an autonomous zone that was created in Seattle by, autonomous zone,
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It, a group of anti-fascists called Antifa, written about by Andy Ngo very beautifully,
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And, and, um, they declared it an autonomous zone and wouldn't let police in, ambulances
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And I think there's a lot that was interesting about what happened in that moment and in,
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in that time when they had that, the city of Seattle embraced it.
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The mayor said it was like a beautiful, it was like summer of love.
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But I think that the thing that lasted from that moment and that we're seeing now is Antifa
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believes that violence and the threat of violence is a very acceptable part of a political conversation
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And there was a lot of work at the time to pretend like Antifa wasn't part of the BLM movement
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and just pretend like this, these two groups were totally separate, but, but they were, they
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were working together for a while and, and you saw it very clearly in, in the autonomous
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zones in Chaz because there were guys with guns wandering around, guarding those new borders.
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And I think now with what we're seeing on college campuses and with the comfort around,
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let's say chanting for Intifada or chanting for violence, you're seeing that kind of anti-fascist
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notion of like, let's bring the threat and the frisson of a little violence back into
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the American conversation in a way that I don't think we've seen for a while.
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And so that's become quite widespread and quite acceptable.
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We've got a bit on the latest, uh, with this young, the Columbia chapter of the Lawyers
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Guild and their latest ridiculous accusations against the NYPD.
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And by the way, we have an exclusive statement from the NYPD responding and it's on fire.
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We'll, we'll get to it in a minute, but you are seeing the parallels there too.
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It's described as an anti-war movement, but it's very much a pro-war movement, which
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you can be pro-war, but just say what you are and you should, and the mainstream press
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ought to describe you as what you actually are.
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And also I don't really want to send plan B pills or dental dams to your aunt, to your war
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I like, I should know what I'm getting, like first, soon you're going to need Chipotle and
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But wait, I want to talk a little bit about more about the book, because you also talk
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in there about Barry and I've talked to both of you about this separately, but this is sort
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of a piece of your, your awakening on where you were working, what your own values were
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and whether these people who were so accepting of so many and so, you know, so many things and
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They couldn't have cared less that you were a lesbian.
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That's why they had to move on to the weird trans stuff and abandon the gays.
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But anyway, it was the fact that she is not a hard lefty.
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She's more heterodox in her approach to issues.
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She was a Biden voter who never voted Bernie or never wanted Bernie.
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It was really, you know, she's within the New York Times community.
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So basically in tandem with reporting on some of this stuff that was happening, I also fell
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in love with someone who was on the wrong side of the movement.
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And I, for a while, was a little naive about it.
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I didn't think it would be an issue because I was sort of like, I still believe in these
00:24:40.900
But no, because the political movement is a social movement.
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And by falling in love with someone outside of it, I had violated kind of the social contract
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And I just, I mean, I couldn't, I couldn't change that reality.
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But I think it just was a wake-up call for me to realize that, that pleasing this movement
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and pleasing this really increasingly tight, increasingly strict group was not going to
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And it was a impossible ask of myself and a miserable ask of myself to, to squelch curiosity
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as a reporter and then to, to, to not love someone who was just a fraction of the way
00:26:10.100
I'm just wondering if you have, because I, of course I've been through controversies in
00:26:14.460
And for me, when the people fall away, you don't realize it immediately.
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In my case, it was like several months went by or a year or two.
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And I'm like, Oh, whatever happened to that person?
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The main thing when I really, there was no, like, I was never canceled.
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I'm not, I don't have like a sob story to tell.
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And then we started, Bear had started an amazing, at the time, very little newsletter.
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And so like, things didn't feel, I don't feel like I'm like here with my violin, but there
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was the one moment when there was a real sort of fracture was when everyone on staff at
00:27:03.740
the Times was supposed to tweet about this one young editor who had somehow contributed
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to the Tom Cotton op-ed that ended up getting all, you know, the opinion editor fired and
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And we were all supposed to tweet that this op-ed puts our black colleagues in danger.
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And basically we were all supposed to kind of join a call to get this young guy fired.
00:27:24.560
Was this the guy who wrote the piece coming out with how they made him choose the starburst?
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I just didn't believe, I just didn't want to cancel him.
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And I had been part of canceling people before, so I wasn't opposed to the idea, but I just
00:27:49.400
And I, and by not doing that, then I got, people in my life wrote me basically saying,
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by not doing this, you are endorsing violence against black people.
00:28:05.560
And so I write about it in the, and I write about it in one of the last, in I think the
00:28:12.220
And it, yeah, I mean, at a certain point you just.
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No, anything I say, I sound, I make myself sound like too like heroic in this.
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And, but I, at a certain point you have to say like enough is enough.
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And I'm not just going to go along with what my friends are doing, even, even if I really
00:28:46.600
And that year and those two years, and I think what we're seeing right now is a frenzy.
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And you just have to take a breath and step out of it.
00:29:01.320
It's very Salem witch trial-y, you know, where we're just being told over and over again,
00:29:07.040
And the mob is following ready to stone her to death or burn her to death.
00:29:10.740
And then there are a few fallouts who are like, hmm.
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Again, I want the audience to know the name of the book is Morning After the Revolution.
00:29:32.860
I hope you're right that the revolution has kind of closed to the point where we are the
00:29:39.460
Well, I would say that the revolution, like the intensity, the loudness, the city's burning
00:29:48.420
Although let's see what these college kids do, but I don't think they're going to be.
00:29:52.080
But it's only because it's now in the institution so fully, it doesn't need to be so loud.
00:29:58.300
So you don't need to scream so loud if to be hired at a university, you have to write
00:30:05.120
And that actually is the only criteria that's considered for the first.
00:30:12.560
These things completely imbued themselves within institutions to an extent where you
00:30:20.880
When you have Raytheon doing Robin DiAngelo-inspired trainings, you don't need to be breaking the
00:30:35.060
And one thing I try to do in the book is to write about the movement from the movement's
00:30:49.500
And so, yeah, I try to wrestle with that and help explain part of the appeal of it.
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I just think it's so fragile, though, because have you really won when what you've really
00:30:58.520
done is force the hostages to their knees with a gun to their head?
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And so making a smart move of like, okay, I'm either going to die or I have to get to
00:31:07.660
my knees right now and say the words, most human beings would comply.
00:31:18.020
Your hostages are doing what you've told them to, but they're not really on your side.
00:31:21.800
Does anyone really think Raytheon cares about DEI or making people issue these statements?
00:31:30.780
But corporate America, I don't know, the random Americans who felt like you did, not necessarily
00:31:36.860
about James Bennett and that piece with Tom Cotton, but about like posting the black square.
00:31:43.640
I think for adults, maybe it's more kind of swayable and they could be swayed in which
00:31:53.740
But I think once an institution is changed, it's very hard to change it again.
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I also think that it is one so fully in our education system that those kids are being
00:32:07.100
raised to be true, true believers in really the most eccentric versions of these ideas
00:32:20.040
What now you, may I call attention to your condition?
00:32:37.600
I mean, I think about it because my kids are older, 14, 13 and 10.
00:32:40.660
But, you know, you and Barry at some point are going to have to direct your children on,
00:32:51.060
It's not four years of, well, yes, fun, but intellectual stimulation and learning how to
00:32:55.660
think, not what to think and having your ideas challenged and learning some of the classics.
00:32:59.620
As you well know, well, no, it's not about that anymore.
00:33:07.940
Well, given that we have some time, I think that by the time this one is 18, well, there
00:33:19.420
I mean, one of the things that has happened with the kind of collapse of the old institutions
00:33:23.980
and with the hollowing out of our old media empires and whatnot is that there's been a
00:33:30.740
blossoming of new stuff and cool new stuff that's obviously we see that the free press
00:33:36.920
with the growth of a little newsletter into a media company.
00:33:41.820
But I think you're going to start seeing it in higher ed.
00:33:45.220
You're going to start seeing it in a lot of places in American life where just new things
00:33:48.740
are going to be built to stand up some of those old values.
00:33:53.620
So I'm hopeful that one of those will be great around then.
00:33:59.440
But I'm really like, I look at it all the time because I think there's no way my, our
00:34:04.580
eldest is such a, she has such a beautiful mind and there's no way I'm going to let one
00:34:11.100
of these institutions start to corrupt it, even though he's been inoculated.
00:34:17.800
Why would I put this beautiful person in their clutches?
00:34:22.200
And so millions of Americans feel as I do, and we are going to find other institutions,
00:34:27.820
you know, whether it's non-college or it's a different institution that I look at the
00:34:31.800
University of Florida run by Ben Sass, which just seems like it's on a great course.
00:34:36.400
But there are a lot of universities that are stepping up.
00:34:39.960
And I think those really might be the future recruiting centers.
00:34:44.680
For the biggest and most successful companies in America.
00:34:54.820
Not to say that Harvard's going to be a name that never means anything, but it, it will be
00:35:05.920
And if I ran a university, if I ran the University of Chicago, I would make clear there are zero
00:35:14.300
You get no extra points for being, and not just race, but for being a woman, for being
00:35:19.860
trans, for being black, for being Hispanic, zero, none.
00:35:24.880
Not in our hiring of professors and not in our admissions for students.
00:35:28.740
And then if I were a young black or lesbian or woman, whatever, somebody in any protected
00:35:38.700
And then I would run around the country saying, I went to the University of Chicago.
00:35:51.360
We're putting people in minority groups in this impossible situation now where if they
00:35:56.780
are completely talented and qualified to get into a Harvard or Yale or Stanford on the merits
00:36:02.180
and would have gotten in, had they not checked any box, they'll always be looked at like,
00:36:09.760
I get, that's, we're completely undermining them.
00:36:12.920
And there's a huge selection of folks in those categories who don't give a shit.
00:36:17.140
They're like, fine, just give me the fancy degree and I'll work it.
00:36:20.220
And then I'll work all these same advantages, racial, demographic, gender, at my next job too.
00:36:26.640
You know, I'll get my straight A's at Harvard because that's what they give.
00:36:29.200
And then I'll parlay of that in the medical school.
00:36:30.760
They've turned into, they've intentionally turned into pass fail institutions.
00:36:35.400
The average GPA is now, but that, that's for, that's for all kids.
00:36:38.520
And then when I kill some people out as a doctor, I'll just claim you're a racist for
00:36:53.960
To see the process of the light bulb coming on.
00:36:56.220
A lot of Americans have been through this exact same journey over the past few years.
00:37:14.300
And joining the two of us, Barry Weiss, founder, CEO, and editor of The Free Press.
00:37:19.500
And the host of Honestly With Barry Weiss, a great podcast.
00:37:40.000
Because I'm the ultimate wife guy and because I know how brilliant she is and how brilliant
00:37:43.500
this book is, I am just going to say that for anyone looking around at the world and wondering
00:37:48.000
how the hell everyone supposedly who is smart and intelligent descended into, into total
00:37:55.220
and utter madness and has capitulated to insanity.
00:38:06.300
Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History by my wife, Nellie Bowles, who's also seven and
00:38:10.300
a half months pregnant as she is doing this book tour and looking gorgeous.
00:38:14.460
And I think the thing that came through and, and is maybe kind of still evolving is like,
00:38:21.300
she was a part of, she was part of it just naturally.
00:38:28.080
So like those were the waters she was swimming in.
00:38:33.300
I think, I think one of the things that's really unique about this book is how vulnerable
00:38:38.300
I don't think you're going to find, there's a lot of excellent reporting out there from
00:38:42.640
a lot of our friends, Megan, on what's going on and how it all came to this.
00:38:47.540
There's not a lot of voices out there who are like, I saw it from the inside.
00:38:52.040
And in some ways, speaking for Nellie, like I was swept along by it.
00:38:59.360
And, and it's, it's very, very vulnerable and true.
00:39:06.620
Well, no, but I think there has to be that, that journey.
00:39:10.380
And then that reckoning about one's journey in order for everyone to work together.
00:39:14.860
Because there, I do think there's resentment on the right.
00:39:17.360
I'm sure you see it too online for some people who are like, you know what?
00:39:21.960
I mean, I've seen in the wake of the Israel Hamas thing, right.
00:39:24.380
Where there are some on the right who are like, where were you?
00:39:29.700
Like you were like, and Nell said, like I was late to the party and compared to, you
00:39:34.600
know, I remember so clearly when our friend Abigail Schreier, um, I said to her at a dinner,
00:39:44.240
Now, if she were here, she would generally, generously say that I did.
00:39:48.420
And I was, you know, loudly, sort of proudly standing up with her, but I told her and have
00:40:01.240
You were still enough on the other side that Abigail's book was.
00:40:04.760
It's just that I knew the social and reputational ramifications that I might suffer.
00:40:09.900
And so it's easy for anyone to sort of look to someone slightly to their left, let's call
00:40:16.100
it that for the sake of this conversation and say, you were late.
00:40:21.600
Like I ran, like, I like, you know, broke down the wall so you could walk or whatever
00:40:26.680
And I, but I do think that that resentment, um, is understandable, but it kind of doesn't
00:40:35.280
And I really think the right response to anyone at any stage, especially those who
00:40:43.800
I mean, Bill Ackman, we were talking about him before.
00:40:48.160
That is a very rare thing for people to say right now in American life.
00:40:54.540
What I was trying to say is I, I pause at, and you're our new leader.
00:41:01.360
The fetishization of the newcomer who still has a little bit of the sheen of the old
00:41:08.900
Because you're like, you haven't been damaged by the movement yet.
00:41:15.060
You know, it's like, where are all your stabbings and your jousting scars?
00:41:20.480
And then I like Ackman, but I do think he got very, very focused on the plagiarism
00:41:26.640
It was like kind of off mission, like care about the wife, but not that much.
00:41:39.300
We've got, we've got an ultimate wife guy right now.
00:41:40.400
When I see him there and going to the barricades for his wife, I'm like, yes.
00:41:57.760
And I'm like, don't you dare because I really feel it's important to fight my own battles
00:42:04.220
And I realize Bill has a much bigger platform than his wife does, but she's also a very powerful
00:42:09.660
And had it been me, I would not have let my husband fight my battle.
00:42:12.020
I would have been out there fucking scalping people and standing up for myself.
00:42:16.400
And I don't like, like, there's just whatever in me that's like a little, like you back
00:42:21.200
her up, but let her lead the way or, or just don't let her, Hey, yo, you lead the way.
00:42:35.220
So, um, on the college campus front, we've had so much craziness and I want to, and you
00:42:39.260
guys have been breaking all sorts of news of the free press.
00:42:41.260
You got the custodian and now there's more than one custodian who was held hostage by the
00:42:47.720
Um, there was two more that, uh, our wonderful reporter, Francesca Block has been breaking
00:42:52.760
First, she got more Mario Torres who was in that viral photo.
00:42:56.220
And it's, it's, it's the perfect encapsulation of this movement because on the one hand you
00:43:01.960
have a 40 year old self-described anarchist that lives in a brownstone in Brooklyn, or at
00:43:10.320
His parents own one worth more than three up against a custodian who has two children.
00:43:17.580
And the average janitor at Columbia or average facilities worker makes $19 an hour, right?
00:43:25.260
And it's kind of a really, really interesting Rorschach test.
00:43:28.420
So we got him on the record on this really, really moving interview.
00:43:32.200
I felt where he talks about being scared to go back on campus because the mob is still
00:43:37.780
there at the gates and now being fearful that Columbia is going to retaliate against him.
00:43:42.240
And today two more spoke on the record to, to Franny, our reporter.
00:43:46.340
And one of them said that he was scared he was going to get killed in the building.
00:43:53.040
Let me run this out by, we have just an excerpt.
00:43:58.740
Initially, I thought it was about five, five or six students.
00:44:07.800
They came from, you know, both sides of the staircases.
00:44:10.660
They came through the elevators and, and they were just rushing.
00:44:14.900
You see people with bags with duct tape and, and, and zip ties.
00:44:18.460
And then, and then they put tables and chairs to block it.
00:44:29.060
Just thinking that you're locked in with a bunch of crazies.
00:44:32.640
You know, we don't expect to go to the work and, and, and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves.
00:44:43.040
That's so, and this is unlike on January 6th, where we saw the left super empathetic for the cops who had to deal with that mob.
00:44:58.800
I mean, just before I came on here, I was looking at, um, there's like a internal Columbia app.
00:45:05.260
It's almost like Slack, but for Columbia students.
00:45:13.860
So it's like an internal Columbia conversation and they shared this story.
00:45:18.000
And you know what the response is on the part of the students I was saying?
00:45:26.640
How's that for worker solidarity and all of the other things that the kids in the encampment pay?
00:45:32.660
I would, I wouldn't like it any better if you were, but I certainly don't like it when he's unarmed
00:45:38.960
And we've seen them request more on the, that of those same supplies.
00:45:44.900
Well, I don't know what they were doing behind closed doors, but I certainly wouldn't want to have to fight them one handed like this guy did.
00:45:49.740
And it's, it's just, again, I just think it's such a powerful litmus test of, you know, the 40 year old anarchist who seems to be, you know, LARPing as some kind of like campus jihadi versus a guy who's trying to provide for his family.
00:46:06.800
And as he just said in that video, like he doesn't expect to go to work at an Ivy League school and get swarmed by organized protesters who are barricading themselves in buildings, who broke glass to get in there and are shouting, you know, shouting in praise of the Intifada.
00:46:29.940
If I were that guy, I would sue Columbia University to within an inch of its feet.
00:46:33.480
So the, the, I think the news broke, I think the New York post broke this story.
00:46:39.220
I've really lost track of time since October 7th, I have to say, but they are, they are organizing a lawsuit, the union of custodial workers at Columbia.
00:46:47.680
So that'll be very interesting to see how it plays out.
00:46:52.680
And like we were talking about earlier, the frijon of violence is part of what this movement wants to bring.
00:46:57.220
So the fact that he was scared, of course, the Columbia chat isn't apologetic about that.
00:47:04.020
That's sort of proof that they're doing a good job.
00:47:06.960
They're not bringing zip ties in for, for peace, duct tape, rope and zip ties.
00:47:11.940
Maybe they just broke some of those tables, Nellie.
00:47:13.620
And they want to, you know, put them back together.
00:47:15.540
It's, they're saying they want violent armed revolution.
00:47:22.680
Like we actually read them say, we need more violence.
00:47:27.980
And also whatever the cause du jour is becomes the only priority.
00:47:31.640
So like whatever was the old cause of labor rights or whatever is washed away.
00:47:36.960
Now it's just this pro-war movement, whatever you want to call it, pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas.
00:47:45.320
So you see this in the way that like Zadie Smith is now, she wrote a somewhat complex, really interesting essay about the movement.
00:47:55.600
And she's had been sort of celebrated on the left as an amazing writer, black woman, like kind of held up as an aspirational figure.
00:48:09.720
And now she's completely thrown to the side and hated because she goes against the most extremes on this one movement.
00:48:18.460
So whatever the cause du jour is becomes the only cause.
00:48:27.020
I think the other thing that's really important to pay attention to is just this kind of breathtaking double standard, right?
00:48:33.460
When we see the people marching in Charlottesville with tiki torches, shouting, Jews will not replace us.
00:48:43.660
Everyone in intelligent society in the chattering class says, take them seriously.
00:48:54.060
That was the mentality that drove the neo-Nazi into Tree of Life, the synagogue where I became bat mitzvah and murder 11 of my Jewish neighbors in Pittsburgh.
00:49:04.040
But by the exact same logic, take what these young revolutionaries, I don't know what else to call them, are saying seriously.
00:49:15.680
You know what's hard about it is there's so much video of them being absolutely pathetic.
00:49:19.840
You know, I mean, truly, like the guy with the midriff exposed the other day and his little, as Joseph Massey called him, Osama non-binary.
00:49:32.520
Well, when they're doing like their interpretive dancing and talking about their gluten-free bread and like how they need their melatonin gummings.
00:49:39.220
But there is a hard, and let's just say, let's call it 80% of the people that are going along with it are there for the vibes.
00:49:47.520
They're there to like sleep in a tent one night and go along with the cause.
00:49:53.280
But for the hardcore group, and I include a lot of professors in this group, that are shouting from the river to the sea, that are shouting globalize the intifada.
00:50:13.920
No, I remember watching Jennifer Griffin reporting from Israel through all of that.
00:50:19.340
She was there with her flak helmet on and the flak jacket, and the reports were more and more dire by the day.
00:50:29.600
But some of the people who repeat that slogan are clueless.
00:50:40.160
That is your compromised state of pregnancy talking.
00:50:52.820
He is the one who's going to get hurt when he—as soon as he gets home to his friends in Palestine and Hamas.
00:50:58.700
Some people—I agree with you, Megan, just to give them the benefit of the doubt.
00:51:01.980
Some people are saying it—are saying it in the same way that they said every other thing.
00:51:11.360
But some of the people saying it know exactly what they mean.
00:51:14.980
And there is no—there is no foreign word in Jews go back to Poland or you're all inbred.
00:51:29.200
You don't need a debate about what that means, right?
00:51:32.620
And somehow there is an unbelievable pass being given to the students saying those things as if they are righteous.
00:51:40.720
When—if you said them about—I'll give you just one example because I—I really, like, this example killed me.
00:51:47.440
Do you remember in 2021, there was a Native American student at Yale named Trent Colbert who invited his fellow students to a Constitution Day bash in his trap house?
00:52:09.020
Within 12 hours, he had, like, been hauled into a disciplinary meeting.
00:52:13.100
I believe the dean of Yale had put out a statement.
00:52:15.780
He was, like, pressured to a—for trap house in an email after 12 hours.
00:52:28.960
—who had all of their sensitivity sessions—
00:52:31.660
—about, like, offensive Halloween costumes and bad tacos?
00:52:37.780
After I first launched the show, we didn't have video.
00:52:41.460
Well, I launched the show in September of 2020, so it was—
00:52:45.620
I remember, like, this is our first real conversation on the air.
00:52:48.900
And you said—we talked about anti-Semitism back then.
00:52:51.360
And you said—and I've quoted you many times on it—
00:52:58.220
And I know you fought very hard and continue to right now, saying the solution is not to
00:53:06.480
We want you to just recognize when we actually are being threatened and not to be excluded
00:53:13.740
It's been very obvious for the past six months.
00:53:18.920
Like, the radical proposition of America and the thing that has allowed for the Jewish
00:53:25.560
community to flourish in this country, unlike we have in any other diaspora in all of history,
00:53:32.180
is because of the things that are found in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
00:53:35.800
And the solution is not for Jews at this moment to argue for a slightly better status in this
00:53:42.780
new caste system, really, ideological caste system, in which victimhood points get you
00:53:51.980
It's to go back to a world in which we follow the law, in which the law and social mores,
00:54:00.140
frankly, are—especially when you think about these campuses, you know, the codes of conduct
00:54:04.580
are enforced equally and not less so for Jews as they are in this moment.
00:54:09.740
And to get back to a world, frankly, in which we judge people based on their individual merit
00:54:16.100
and not based on whether or not they're part of a particular group or not.
00:54:19.940
I'll give you just one example that, like, really brought this home for me.
00:54:22.880
Abigail Schreier wrote about it brilliantly in our pages, which was, you know, one of the
00:54:28.140
leaders of the encampment at Columbia—Hamani James is his name—four months ago took part
00:54:35.320
in a disciplinary hearing at Columbia, in which he said—in which he openly fantasized,
00:54:41.880
you're lucky I'm not going out murdering Zionists, okay?
00:54:45.600
You're lucky I'm not going and murdering Zionists, which is, with rare exception, basically a synonym
00:54:51.020
And the mask is falling more and more every day.
00:54:54.320
Nothing happened to this student until it went viral, right?
00:54:58.820
Because he posted it, because he was proud of it.
00:55:01.360
Like, the school itself didn't do anything about it.
00:55:13.180
So you have a bureaucracy right now at one of the most prestigious schools in the country,
00:55:19.660
supposedly, where a student is saying that to the administration of the university and nothing
00:55:28.880
I do feel like—not the Jewish students who are there, I feel for what they're going
00:55:33.380
through—but I do feel like their parents, I hope, are having a big wake-up call right
00:55:37.860
now, because it was a dumb, dumb thing to send your child to Columbia.
00:55:42.860
If you were anything other than a member of one of these groups who are hard left or weird,
00:56:02.560
But if you are one of these families that's in any way normal and you're sending your kid
00:56:08.120
to Columbia, even within the past four years, you knew what you were getting.
00:56:17.380
Because they want the prestige of a Columbia degree.
00:56:20.000
And I really believe that, like, part of what needs to happen, and we talk about this all
00:56:26.440
the time over dinner, like, part of the, if we're really honest, like, the difficulty
00:56:32.460
of leaving a place like the New York Times, you know, is that you're giving that up, okay?
00:56:38.380
Like, you're giving up the, at least in our circles, the cool thing to say at the dinner
00:56:45.460
You're giving up, like, being with the beautiful people and at the right party.
00:56:53.660
The beautiful people are at, are definitely in, like, Florida at state school.
00:57:07.860
And it's absolutely incumbent, though, upon anyone who wants to, I'll say it, like, save
00:57:23.780
It's a society that's indoctrinated generations into believing those are the right circles to
00:57:31.000
And there's fair fights, also, between the ideas of abandoning ship, like, us leaving
00:57:38.980
Like, us being in California right now and trying to, you know.
00:57:43.620
I'm sorry to tell you that's going to go the same way.
00:57:48.300
Megan, you're talking to a seventh generation Californian.
00:57:55.160
Wait until your kids get told they're secretly boys when they're girls or girls when they're
00:57:58.620
I think a lot of these people genuinely think, well, if we all leave, if we pull, like, a
00:58:02.900
lot of the donors, if we pull out our money and lose our seat at the table, then I won't
00:58:08.380
I personally think that they're too far gone, these institutions.
00:58:13.660
But it's not insane, even if the result is sort of self-harming and sort of putting their
00:58:23.520
kids in positions to be kind of tortured by these institutions, by these professors, by
00:58:33.540
I mean, that was when we were in New York and thinking about do we stay or do we go with
00:58:39.460
Because I actually made several phone calls to several billionaires in New York who I
00:58:45.740
They were either reformed leftists on this issue or these, you know, social issues, or
00:58:56.080
You know, I was like, well, Doug and I, you know, we've donated.
00:58:58.720
It's like, oh my God, these people have donated.
00:59:10.720
And I think that's why, you know, we're spending all of our waking hours trying desperately to
00:59:19.340
Like that's, that's the whole name of the game right now, you know, and I'm on the board
00:59:38.380
But the, the thing itself, I mean, it started off, uh, with a meeting with me, Joe Lonsdale,
00:59:44.880
Neil, Neil Ferguson, Pano Canales from St. John's.
00:59:51.320
And that, and then it was like a July boiling hot.
00:59:54.640
I thought to myself, this is really important now.
00:59:58.320
I'm like, this is of civilizational importance that this succeeds.
01:00:04.300
Like we looked at our daughter and we were like, we're not, like I was saying, where
01:00:12.180
Like we have, we need alternatives who are not crazy and who aren't going to try to indoctrinate
01:00:17.280
Again, it's like so, uh, it's so offensive, right?
01:00:19.460
Because most of us, we don't, we don't need them to indoctrinate them in right wing thinking.
01:00:24.780
When I say that, just stop indoctrinating them.
01:00:28.780
We just want our kid to like know how to read, write, know things about history and
01:00:36.700
Like it's not, we don't, we don't want politics at all actually.
01:00:41.760
I love in our, um, new school, our son is just finishing fourth grade.
01:00:45.360
And this year, first of all, they say the pledge in the morning in the lower school,
01:00:50.580
And second of all, he spent the whole year studying, uh, the formation of the country,
01:00:55.200
the American revolution and, you know, the various players, all the founding fathers,
01:00:59.220
the documents, um, they've done, you know, in, in science, they're doing like the solar
01:01:05.440
They did a whole play on the American revolution, the 50 States, the capitals, right?
01:01:10.340
Like, this is like, we joke a lot about like, just be normal.
01:01:19.860
And that's no, it's like, when I think about like, how, how's the free press succeeding?
01:01:33.300
Like there's such a market for that because everyone else seems to have given up on reality
01:01:37.960
Like if you started a new school that was like, we're just going to teach math and history
01:01:42.020
and like radical, like actual math where the numbers add up to what they've always added
01:01:48.780
Where you can help yourself to your taxes a little bit and like function in the world.
01:02:00.660
Are they calling the two plus two equals five indigenous math?
01:02:06.920
I mean, you would know more because you write about all of these things in TGIF.
01:02:13.600
Math is the thing that upsets this movement more than anything.
01:02:16.040
Math classes, because it, because it's so measurable.
01:02:21.400
And teachers don't like these things because they don't want their work measured and whatever.
01:02:25.640
It's like the Craig T. Nelson line from The Incredibles.
01:02:33.920
But now they really abandoned math is what they've done.
01:02:36.740
I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM.
01:02:40.900
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01:02:45.620
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01:03:41.420
I've got to get to this because it's just too good a story.
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So there's this group at Columbia and it is the Columbia.
01:03:55.220
And they have written the following insane letter that I want to read you because the
01:04:06.120
OK, it's the National Lawyers Guild, but it's the Columbia law chapter of them.
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And these people are, to say, far left would be very generous.
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They are complaining about the cops going into Hamilton Hall and reclaiming the hall that
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belongs to Columbia University and not these nutcases who are there.
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Our team of legal observers tried to enter campus repeatedly.
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We remain stuck outside, facing a wall of riot police, unable to bear witness to the violence
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Hello, that's the situation of Jews on the campus of Columbia, not of your weird lawyer
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We felt a deep dread knowing that without any witness, the police could do whatever they
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This moment eerily echoed the telecommunications blackouts Israel has imposed on Gaza.
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The police unleashed violence upon the unarmed students.
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One was thrown down a staircase and knocked unconscious.
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The letter goes after the trope of the outside agitator calling it beyond tired.
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I'm going to get to the NYPD's response to law professors.
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Tenured Columbia law professors enjoy some of the greatest job security in the world.
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Their response has been overwhelming, deafening silence.
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To those professors, you have forfeited the respect of your students.
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We have repeated to the point of exhaustion that the protection of Jewish students and faculty
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is a dangerous, flimsy pretext for Columbia's violence.
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Any Jew speaking out against genocide, Israel, or the U.S. war machine is not safe.
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To Jewish students, faculty, and trustees blocking divestment and urging the violent crackdowns
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Yet you continue to claim to speak for all Jews.
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It does say, keep our names out of your mouths.
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And so the NYPD decided to respond to this, giving us an exclusive statement.
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It's very long and we're going to post it, but I'll read you the highlights.
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The allegations outlined by this Columbia Law student group are scurrilous, deceitful, and
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The writers are in league with the unruly mob that broke into Hamilton Hall, doing all
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The protesters illegally locked themselves inside, securing the doors with clamps, heavy
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They disabled interior surveillance cameras so that their criminality could not be documented.
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Every police officer on the scene that night had a working body worn camera and everything
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Also recorded, a protester dramatically rolling himself down the wide front steps.
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His flop of a performance was worth, at a minimum, a yellow card from a professional
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soccer referee or at most, a gold statue from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
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At the end of the night, no injuries had been seen or reported.
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What we learned a long time ago is that reversing the roles between offender and victim is a tactic
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often employed by professional demonstrators and their sympathizers.
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The same method exploited by sex offenders and perpetrators of domestic violence.
01:07:57.860
It is an insidious form of psychological manipulation, gaslighting.
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And one plain fact remains, those arrested at Hamilton Hall were not victims.
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And despite their urging, their urgent imploring to the contrary, they never will be.
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And then they say, keep our names out your mouth.
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The letter says that no Jew, I just want to make sure I understand it.
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That unless you were a Jew that denounces Israel, you will not be safe?
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No Jew is safe until Palestine is safe or until Palestine is free?
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You know it's not good when you're starting a sentence, no Jew is safe.
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They're exhausted of saying that the protection of Jewish students and faculty is a dangerous,
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Any Jew speaking out against genocide Israel or the U.S. war machine is not safe because they're
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saying like, all the Jews are on our side is what they're saying.
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If you, if you're a Jew, like Jewish voices for peace, which we all know is not really
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Jewish nor for peace, um, that those people are not safe because, you know, to the Jewish
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students, faculty and trustees blocking divestment and urging the violent crackdowns, you threaten
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So if you don't want to divest, if you're the predicate to violence, if you want to end
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the crackdown, if you want to end the, the campus encampments, then you threaten everyone's
01:09:41.500
That's what they, this is what's so important here is they are saying that by being yourself,
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in other words, the fundamental part of 95, let's even be conservative, 90% of Jews identity,
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which is a connection to forgetting the two state solution, forgetting all the modern
01:10:01.480
politics, Jewish identity is fundamentally tied to the land of Israel.
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Anyone that denies that is a historical revisionist.
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We could have another two hours about all of that.
01:10:15.220
They're basically saying that unless you cut off an absolutely essential part of your religious,
01:10:22.340
ethnic peoplehood identity, you yourself are a threat to humanity and to peace.
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Haven't we heard, haven't we heard that before?
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I mean, the, the historical echo of this is just, it's, it's just so scary to hear that
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in 2024, because it's, again, it's just a predicate to violence.
01:10:46.860
They're justifying their revolutionary violence by saying that in order to stop this thing
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that we have declared a genocide, which is actually a just war that was started by Hamas,
01:10:59.380
the way that we solve that problem and make the world safe is by essentially a modern forcible
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And so the very same bargain that was put to Jews in other times and places, right?
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So it was, hey, you want to remain a Jew and safe in the Soviet Union?
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Now it's, you want to be safe and be a Jew in progressive 21st century America?
01:11:37.680
Again, it's just the terms of it are different.
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The original post from the Columbia Group was first reported, as far as we know, by
01:12:03.800
And summers are usually when things quiet down.
01:12:14.800
Because it doesn't look like Israel's exactly ending thing soon, right?
01:12:24.580
I feel I'm a little worried because I've seen the polls.
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I've realized America is still overwhelmingly pro-Israel.
01:12:29.780
And this isn't, I'm not asking you how the war ends.
01:12:31.580
But I do feel like there's a real risk on the right, too.
01:12:40.120
And I include what's happening on the campuses and the anti-Semitism looking like Ukraine.
01:12:53.920
That vibe already exists strongly in major precincts of the online right, which basically
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goes from a sort of like neutral isolationist position to a out-and-out sort of very old-school
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anti-Semitic position that is now, like, masks have fully come off on a lot of these people.
01:13:16.620
And they're talking openly about, you know, the Jews killing Jesus.
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As if they're finally coming to realize that Jews do not believe Jesus is Christ.
01:13:34.640
Explain a little bit more what you mean about how, like, draw that out for us of, like,
01:13:39.920
Well, I'm worried that, you know, in the horseshoe principle of, like, sort of the hard right
01:13:44.900
is going to come together with a hard left and be like, yeah, we don't care about the
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And to the extent we do care, we don't like them.
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And not support Israel the way at least the right always has.
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You know, the left, I think, large sections of it have.
01:14:02.720
And leave it to itself, possibly not support with, you know, arms and other,
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And here, domestically, not really do anything about these protesters and actually
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start to side more and more with them and start to, like, both sides it.
01:14:22.760
Yeah, I think that that is probably what's going to happen.
01:14:31.040
I think what comes next is more of what we're seeing in Europe, which is kind of
01:14:42.660
I mean, I think we'll see some of these folks become elected officials.
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We'll see the revolution here start to win more.
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And I think the threat of violence is going to continue and grow.
01:15:02.800
Like, I don't feel super optimistic about this topic right now.
01:15:06.040
I wish I could, like, be, like, the counter to you guys on this.
01:15:13.180
And I think now it's kind of latching into a broader movement to hate America, to overthrow
01:15:21.780
You're seeing a lot of that rhetoric become part of it, that Gaza is lighting the fire
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to overthrow the empire, and the empire being American empire.
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And I take that as a serious part of the aspiration here, to do away with our value system, to
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do away with Western liberalism, and the idea that that maybe is tired and old.
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And I think there's a lot of people on the right who also think Western liberalism is tired
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and old and played out, and who are willing to toss it to the side.
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It's like we're seeing the beginning of it right now.
01:16:17.840
I think for most people going about their lives, they might look at what's happening on campus,
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it's crazy campus kids, or they might hear about something that happened where a Jewish
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store gets vandalized, or, oh, that's unfortunate, and they go about their day because they're
01:16:33.440
not Jewish, or the Jews are such a small minority, and, oh, they're fine anyway, they have a lot
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of money, or they're so successful, or they're smart.
01:16:41.400
I guess I would just implore those people, and I think this case needs to be made much more
01:16:46.300
Perhaps the best person doing it right now on the scene, maybe in the world, is Douglas
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We're seeing him for Shabbat dinner on Friday night.
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He's the best at explaining how the fate of this tiny minority, 100% of the time, for
01:17:11.740
all of recorded history, is bound up with the fate of a civilization.
01:17:16.440
And that is why this should matter to everybody, because if the Jews are not, however you want
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to phrase it, if we're going down, it is simply a sign that the society is deeply, deeply diseased
01:17:40.100
Like, the Jews here right now seem like they're the main character.
01:17:46.440
Like, what is at stake here is, do we believe that this country remains exceptional?
01:17:54.680
Would we rather live here than Putin's Russia or Hamas's Gaza?
01:18:01.600
Like, that's what I think needs, that's the framing, I think, that's really necessary and
01:18:09.040
And when I see people on the right, I mean, we have an excellent story today in the Free
01:18:12.920
Press by Peter Savodnik about the American men on the right.
01:18:16.780
It's a handful, but really interesting and emblematic, I think, moving to Russia to pursue
01:18:22.720
In other words, they've so given up on America and they so think that, you know, what's happening
01:18:28.260
in terms of some of the madness we've been talking about is so impossible to sort of restore
01:18:34.980
normalcy that they've headed all the way to live under Putin's regime.
01:18:40.260
And you see the same phenomenon sort of on the left of, as Nelly just said, like the turn
01:18:44.740
against America, I think, is what this is about.
01:18:47.040
The turn toward nihilism, whether on the left that wants to burn it all down or on the right
01:18:53.200
that's glorifying right-wing authoritarianism, where there are none of the liberties that
01:19:00.720
And for those of us whose entire lives, like, look at our life, not possible anywhere else
01:19:06.900
in the world to have the kind of freedoms we have, you know, that's what this is all
01:19:13.320
And I think a lot of the times Nelly and I are looking at each other and are like, we
01:19:16.680
get called conservative, like, are we conservative?
01:19:19.140
It's like, no, we're just trying to, like, conserve liberalism.
01:19:30.120
It's actually more surprising that fundamentalist Islam has aligned with sort of Western progressivism
01:19:37.040
because it's very easy to imagine the American right, the Western right, aligning with fundamentalist
01:19:43.180
The values are quite easy to see as compatible in a lot of ways.
01:19:47.420
You're talking about that weird slice on the right, not normal.
01:19:50.340
I'm not talking about the moderate conservatives.
01:19:54.200
I'm talking about the faction of the online right that we're talking about.
01:20:00.000
So this sort of alliance against Western liberalism is not hard to imagine.
01:20:09.860
I hate to make it so dark, but I mean, this is the reality.
01:20:12.400
On my own show, we focused on Israel when the attack happened for a while, but I've always,
01:20:18.580
since the beginning, been much more interested in what's happening here.
01:20:22.160
And very poorly in many ways, and it's not limited to left or right.
01:20:27.920
I just, it's a, unlike anything I've seen before, I've been covering Israel for a long
01:20:31.480
time as a journalist, I've never seen the right start to turn on Israel the way I'm starting
01:20:38.640
And I'm, I don't know where, I'm asking genuinely because I'm searching on where,
01:20:43.520
How does, how does it look, you know, in 10 years?
01:20:46.880
I've had Jewish friends of mine actually say, yeah, we think we'll eventually be pushed
01:20:55.500
To steal me on the right on this a little bit with this, I think some people are looking
01:20:59.060
at the last couple decades of American wars and thinking that didn't really work.
01:21:09.780
Look at, look at, and so they're thinking, we don't exactly have American success stories
01:21:18.520
I think obviously Israel is a lot different than Afghanistan and Iraq.
01:21:20.940
But the difference in those cases is there's no American soldiers being asked to do anything
01:21:26.680
But I'm, to, to steel man that argument, I don't think it all comes from like just,
01:21:32.400
um, I don't think it's all necessarily like antisemitic or hateful.
01:21:36.800
I think some of it is from people who are just like exhausted with.
01:21:39.920
Well, and I make a distinction between the more isolationist, right?
01:21:45.020
Who they don't want involvement in any foreign conflict.
01:21:48.560
I think that's a real, but they're like, I, we've talked on the show before about like
01:21:57.140
Not only did he have the sit down, you know, with Trump, but people I follow on Twitter
01:22:02.200
and who follow me regularly like retweet him and they'll slide like a video into
01:22:12.040
I have zero interest in hearing anything he has to say other than to respond with scorn.
01:22:18.860
But I rarely try to mention him on the show because he deserves to be ignored.
01:22:27.080
And there's a reason for that, you know, and people I formerly knew like at Fox news,
01:22:32.480
like the one woman in particular, I work with very closely is like now an open griper.
01:22:38.240
Like I, I don't, I just, I don't know where it ends.
01:22:44.000
I will say that I think, I think one of the important principles here is like, it's really
01:22:53.180
easy for people on the left to look at, he's a Nazi, look at Nick Fuentes, a Nazi and say,
01:23:01.640
And it's so easy for someone on the right to look at what's going on on the left and
01:23:04.840
look at Ilhan Omar and say, aha, the problem's on the left.
01:23:07.920
And I think it's really important for those of us who care about the future of the country,
01:23:14.520
not just like our Jewish friend, like the literal future of the country to like police
01:23:21.620
And I, I find that the incentives to do that are just very low.
01:23:25.640
And it's so easy to point to the other side and say, the problem's there.
01:23:29.700
And I have been, I would say heartbroken by the lack of that impulse.
01:23:37.300
Like, you know, I, I have sent personal notes to people saying, you know, the guys that run
01:23:42.880
the Babylon Bee, I saw how much, I've never met them.
01:23:46.280
I saw how much shit they were taking online for standing up against antisemitism from the
01:23:51.960
And I just wrote them a note saying like, thank you.
01:23:56.880
But there, but I can count the people that have been awesome.
01:24:00.340
And that's what really worries me on both the right and the left.
01:24:04.360
And, and most people are just sort of like going along with it.
01:24:08.380
I, if I, if I'm honest, cause I obviously have nothing against the right.
01:24:14.700
My own perception is it's, this is overwhelmingly a leftist problem.
01:24:18.600
And there's a smaller percentage on the far right that's titillated by it, interested
01:24:23.520
with it, starting to kick it around more, starting to make it more like some sort of
01:24:26.880
a, well, aren't we technically against the Jews because of the whole Jesus thing?
01:24:40.240
But let me ask you about Candace because I, she's been on the show.
01:24:43.600
I don't know her personally, but she definitely had some criticisms of Israel, which you would
01:24:51.580
Like, you don't agree with them, but you would defend the criticism of Israel.
01:24:56.740
So I actually went and looked like, what are the specific tweets?
01:24:59.780
And there was that one where she clicked the tweet on like drinking Jewish blood, right?
01:25:04.440
I was like, okay, that's what got her in all the trouble.
01:25:10.900
But then when I looked at it more, she seemed to be defending herself saying that wasn't
01:25:15.540
I was liking the fact that this guy was defending me on a previous argument that didn't get
01:25:21.980
I just think I really, I want the bar to be high before we dismiss somebody as an anti-Semite.
01:25:29.540
I think there is a 100% correlation pretty much between people that seem to be, or minds that
01:25:39.540
seem to be vulnerable to conspiracy-minded thinking and the line between that and open
01:25:48.700
And sometimes that path takes a while to get to, but it always gets there.
01:25:55.280
That is, those two things do tend to go hand in hand.
01:25:59.080
It's because anti-Semitism is the oldest conspiracy in the world.
01:26:02.760
Like the cabal of powerful Jews controlling everything.
01:26:04.900
Sure, and now it's the Jewish state instead of the Jew themselves standing in for that
01:26:13.260
But it's, if you are openly talking about how Bridget, is her name Bridget Macron?
01:26:25.340
I'm like, okay, it'll be, I don't know when it will get there.
01:26:28.720
So those are the indicators to you that someone's going down that line.
01:26:36.580
Don't watch him that much, but notice some things he's been saying recently.
01:26:43.080
And it's like, well, yeah, like, like, look at, look at the, look at the pattern.
01:26:51.960
Like, it's, again, I will never attempt to get into someone else's mind or psychology.
01:27:00.180
I will just say that there is a very clear, there's a very clear pattern at play, which
01:27:05.280
is that when you start to make yourself susceptible and it's easy in a moment where everyone's
01:27:16.000
Like, I have some questions about the fluoride in our water.
01:27:19.320
Alex Jones has been railing about that for a long time.
01:27:24.780
Can I tell you, not for nothing, but when I went down to interview Alex Jones, I've told
01:27:28.600
this story before, but he said all this crazy stuff.
01:27:38.100
I mean, clearly, you know, there were some that were very serious and I pressed him very
01:27:42.140
And, you know, he's later apologized for some of those positions.
01:27:44.180
But when we ran the fact check at NBC and NBC's fact check is no joke.
01:27:48.760
You know, when they really want to do it on something that's not political, where they've
01:27:51.640
got a thumb on the scale, they'll they have a team that's very good that will actually
01:27:55.180
figure out whether somebody's got the basis for what they're saying.
01:28:00.660
It was like there is a goat that has a human face and there is a problem.
01:28:06.360
OK, I was like, oh, my God, I think as and there are aliens in the no, there is a goat
01:28:16.120
The old gatekeepers have lost so much credibility and so much power because of that.
01:28:23.300
And and it's really in this situation, it becomes very sad that they've lost that power
01:28:33.760
That the old gatekeepers now declare as conspiracies aren't conspiracies, right?
01:28:40.040
Like the lab leak theory is not a conspiracy theory.
01:28:43.100
That's a really, really fair thing to talk about.
01:28:47.720
Obviously, we've all talked about this ad nauseum, but it's true and it's really interesting.
01:28:51.980
And by losing the credibility to say this goes beyond the pale.
01:28:59.740
If you've already said everything you don't like is a conspiracy theory, you don't have
01:29:04.680
you don't you don't have any more juice left to then fight something like that.
01:29:08.660
And so I think we're in a really tough situation where the the old gatekeepers, the mainstream
01:29:16.720
There's no sort of confident voice who can set the record straight, set the record straight
01:29:24.220
There's no central trust in American society anymore.
01:29:30.080
It's been lost, willfully lost, proudly, happily lost of this.
01:29:33.340
You know, COVID didn't help, you know, people locked inside in small, isolated pockets of
01:29:37.880
America and just spending hours on the Internet.
01:29:41.600
But I do at its core blame the collapse of the media for most of this.
01:29:51.000
And it's not to say he shared the politics of most people over on my side of the aisle,
01:29:56.200
And there were we could go back or we could go back and pick apart his coverage for sure.
01:30:00.740
But it was important to have a news media that in general was earnest in its effort to chase
01:30:15.540
They've been so burned by that media that hated them.
01:30:22.620
They told them they were deplorable and conspiracy theorists.
01:30:23.840
And now they're understandably rushing into the arms of.
01:30:27.160
They've been right about so much and they don't know where to turn for information there.
01:30:30.500
You know, it's like Reddit or some guy on Twitter or, you know, it is my OBGYN.
01:30:44.680
And all the old terms have lost all their power.
01:30:47.000
Like terms like racist terms, like sexist terms, like transphobic.
01:30:50.840
And so then when a real bigot walks onto the scene, there's like, how do you.
01:31:08.380
It's by the way, it's two in the afternoon here in L.A.
01:31:24.440
Thankfully, I am not in the business of providing solutions.
01:31:27.080
I'm just in the business of shining the light on the problems and having honest discussions
01:31:30.420
about them, which eventually leads us to the right place.
01:31:33.200
Um, I do think we have to rebuild some sort of media center.
01:31:37.740
You know, you guys are doing it at the free press.
01:31:39.720
Independent journalists are doing it in the digital lane, and that's working.
01:31:43.040
I do think we have to be careful about building up, whether it's like me as a host or you guys
01:31:49.500
at the free press, people who have become untethered.
01:31:53.120
And, you know, I'll I have certain people on that list who are, you know, people who I care about,
01:31:58.560
but I don't have to be promotional of the product.
01:32:01.740
Um, and then at night, honestly, I pray, I pray, I pray for all of them.
01:32:07.760
And I pray for the country and I pray for the wisdom to know what to do and how to handle
01:32:12.140
it and how to check my own hubris on whether I'm the wrong one.
01:32:17.020
Not about like Jude being evil, but like, am I being too judgmental?
01:32:22.860
Don't, don't come into it as a know-it-all thinking you, you are better or, you know,
01:32:28.880
Be, have a kindness and a generosity of heart, which is number one, if you want to convince
01:32:32.660
somebody to come over to your side anyway, right?
01:32:34.740
Like whether they're right or I'm right, I'm not going to get them if I'm the right one
01:32:41.300
I am sometimes that I'm not perfect at this and I don't know, Barry and Nellie, I think
01:32:46.280
part of it also goes back to just foundational values of spending more time with your family,
01:32:51.000
having family, having kids, believing in the future of America, believing in each other,
01:32:56.760
Like just turning away from this device for large amounts of the day, just having dinner
01:33:02.580
together, holding each other, watching a stupid movie together, having dumb ass laughs over
01:33:08.220
I think those things are really important and they're integral to fixing everything.
01:33:21.520
I'm sorry, but God is a fair guy and he wouldn't give her that many gifts.
01:33:26.120
But I mean, I'm going to be honest, her sister Susie's better.
01:33:37.640
There's nothing those Weiss parents didn't give you.
01:34:00.860
Having kids, I think, has clarified everything for us.
01:34:06.340
I do think, you know how these far leftists are like, no kids, we're going to save the
01:34:25.760
Like, you're putting a child into a worse world because it's a very pessimistic worldview.
01:34:29.160
And it's irresponsible in terms of the environment.
01:34:33.460
That one kid is, you know, X number of carbon units.
01:34:43.680
If I were a younger woman, I'd be doing what we're doing right now.
01:34:46.180
I wish Doug and I could have had five or six, but three is a good.