Free Speech Under Attack and Crime Wave in American Cities, with Greg Lukianoff and Ray Kelly ｜ Ep. 243
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 30 minutes
Words per Minute
180.66264
Summary
Free speech is under siege, and it's reaching peak concern on college campuses. Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly joins me to talk about the spike in violent crime and the use of "soft-on-crime" tactics by law enforcement officers.
Transcript
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Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.
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Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
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we're going to be joined by former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly
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or anyone else who dares to disagree with them.
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One of the latest examples involves a Michigan professor.
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apparently did not sit well with the powers that be.
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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education,
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you need to know about this group if you don't.
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Thank God, because you're fighting the good fight.
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the main organization trying to keep an eye on this
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but step in and help those who are under attack
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You probably don't need to listen to them anymore
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Speech codes actually increased since the 1980s.
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It took like 150 lawsuits to get them to decrease.
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we've seen 508 attempts to get professors punished
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The very thing that tenure is supposed to protect,
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we've seen 508 examples of that just since 2015.
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And that includes, by the way, like 20 just at Stanford,
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the worst year I've ever seen for free speech on campus
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something that was unthinkable for that even to happen once.
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Your group fire did a survey that tells the story.
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this was apparently the largest survey of student attitudes about free speech on 160 campuses.
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that if a professor says something the students find offensive,
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he or she should be reported to the university.
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And 60% agreed the same for if a student says something that other students find offensive.
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And that's something that I remember when we first started seeing that stat come up
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And for the older people, you know, in my organization, like me, for example,
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when we first saw students say, you know, like,
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I don't speak up in class because I'm afraid I'll get reported.
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And it was like something like 9% of them were saying that they don't speak up in class
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because they're afraid of actually getting reported to the university.
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Like, we never thought about stuff like that when we were in school.
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And this is so it's gotten even worse since then.
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People, students were already getting in trouble for pretty tame speech back in,
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We even have a case at UC, University of Chicago, Illinois,
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where a professor was actually taught in an anti-discrimination case.
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He was talking about a scenario that involved the use of racial epithets.
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And if you're doing anti-discrimination law, a lot of the cases involve racial epithets.
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But in order to be nice to his students and not to offend anybody,
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He just put B blank and N blank and then explained that referring to epithets for students.
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They threw the book at this guy as as if he had really broken a rule,
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even though he was trying to be as inoffensive as possible to his students.
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How are you supposed to communicate what the offensive word was without doing like N blank?
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I mean, you know, what what are you supposed to say?
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And up until very recently, like we made this very sensible decision for in academia
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that if you're referring to a word saying it is not the same thing as, for example,
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But even that we've seen dozens of cases where a professor there was a professor even at the
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new school who was explaining that it took a lot of temerity because there was a book called
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But there was a book there was a movie called Not Your Negro about the life of James Baldwin.
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And the professor pointed out accurately that that's not what James Baldwin said.
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And it takes a lot of temerity to correct someone as great as James Baldwin.
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You know, we Larry Elder was on the show not long ago talking about his great movie,
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Uncle Tom, and he talked about his dad who grew up in Jim Crow South and had been called
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N word and and Larry said the N word in saying what had been, you know, thrown at his dad.
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And we actually had this debate internally on my show.
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You know, it's a black man talking about how his black father was called that word.
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And in the end, I said, I it is not my place to share to censor Larry Elder's story about
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We didn't have any trouble as a result, but I'm not on a college campus.
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If Larry himself, a black man, had stood up and said that in front of a class as a professor,
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There are certain words and it's not just the N word.
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And one of the things that's also so stunning about this, I wrote like a very long piece
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It was a good almost six thousand word piece explaining how bad things have gotten in historical
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And one thing that's really astounding about a place like Stanford that could have 20
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attempts to get professors shut up or Harvard, where there was more than a dozen.
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Students try to get each other in trouble all the time.
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There was only something like three percent of the entire faculty at Harvard self-identify
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So it's like there's already incredibly low viewpoint diversity among professors.
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Yet, nonetheless, you are still on a regular basis trying to get professors in trouble,
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It really has gotten much worse than I ever feared it would get, much faster than I ever
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My gosh, right, because I remember reading the FIRE survey and it said four out of five
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students, 83 percent self-censor their own viewpoints.
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And then when I read the next paragraph about how, well, they're the ones reporting each other
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You know, it's like you should at least be taking a stand for the ability to express your
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own opinion, even though some might find it offensive if you want us to care about these
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Well, to be fair, that's what they're being taught.
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One of the things that I do is I always give this this list of five things that everybody
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should run to their alma mater, ask their president to do the following things.
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And one of the most basic ones on that five list is, of course, stand up for professors,
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get rid of your speech codes, pull your students.
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But one of them is just explain freedom of speech in the orientation.
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They explain things like the bias-related incident program, which is one of the main tools for
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students reporting on each other and reporting on professors.
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A lot of times they'll explain the speech code, but they don't explain this kind of sophisticated
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democratic idea of freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech, even when it's offensive.
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And so I have some sympathy for these students because they're doing what they have been told
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and they can't know things that they've never been taught.
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And in K through 12, and in higher education, there's a much greater sense that you have
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something much more like a right not to be offended than explaining the deep wisdom of
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I want to stay on college campuses, but I'll give you a story as an aside.
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I told this once before about my daughter, who's now 10, and we've since pulled our kids
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from these New York City private schools, which are just around the bend on all these issues.
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Um, so we found better places to raise them and place them in terms of education.
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But anyway, last year she was in fourth grade in the city and they were discussing the Derek
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Chauvin verdict, you know, the, the police officer who had killed George Floyd.
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They handed out a Newzilla article to the girl saying, read the article about what happened
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And so my daughter's information came from the article and so did all the other girls
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And apparently it was a pretty balanced piece because I guess they were saying this.
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The teacher stood up and said, there's a massive problem in America with police killing unarmed
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And when it, whenever a cop kills an unarmed black man, that's not good, black or white,
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but to state it's a massive problem is not true.
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In any event, she stated it and one of the other little girls said, well, wasn't George
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And the teacher said they always blame the victim.
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So then my daughter said, wasn't George Floyd on a lot of drugs at the time he died?
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And that, of course, was a factor that the defense argued a lot, you know, that the drugs
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actually were the were the cause of the death and so on.
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The teacher said to the girls, this conversation is making me uncomfortable and I'm shutting
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But in the K through 12 education system before they even get to the college now, Greg, you
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know, they're they're not teaching critical thinking.
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They're not teaching the full fledged debate of ideas, the excitement of hearing disagreement
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with your own points of view and learning and defending and exploring their teaching.
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So you have to be quiet and the conversation's over.
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And that's why I'm worried that this is not going to be a problem that's going to go away
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That essentially what we're teaching kids in K through 12 with regards to freedom of speech
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and sort of democratic norms is and what we started teaching them even 20 years ago is
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I'm not seeing I see a push sometimes from Republicans to reform what's going on in K
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So it's been it's been a tough, tough discussion.
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But I do think that our expectations, you know, like creating an expectation that if you bring
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up a political topic that there isn't going to be healthy back and forth and debate around
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And you look at what's going on in higher education.
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There is so much of what I call intermediated relationships that essentially rather than have
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that argument with someone in your class, if you're a Republican or a Democrat, you go and
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report them to the bias related incident program because you've been trained since you were young
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to always go to, quote unquote, an adult when you have these kind of problems.
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And when you get to corporations, people go to H.R., for example.
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Now, the problem with that is that's not teaching people the habits of living in a
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And that's just fundamentally it should be antithetical to the way we teach.
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Yet we're training young people in this way of always having intermediated discussions.
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I I've spoken at many universities, Stanford, Yale.
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But the students do now believe and I've seen this just myself.
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I say to them every time words are not violence.
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That's sort of why we have the First Amendment.
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And I'd love to get you to expand on that, because we hear that all the time from young
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The thing that I think is amazing is I've seen students come up with this and I've watched
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professors make this argument as if it's a sophisticated, cutting edge argument.
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But we now understand that words can be hurtful and that could be traumatic.
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And therefore, words are the same things as violence.
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And it's just like so you live in a world where you seriously think that John Stuart Mill was
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incapable of thinking of the fact that words can sometimes hurt.
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Like, what do you think Sticks and Stones was about?
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Sticks and Stones would make no sense if words never hurt.
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It's something you teach children to make them hurt less.
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And so the way I open up all of my talks now is I talk about the bad rap that free speech
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has gotten and about how people will argue that speech is violence and that speech is
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only the bully, the bigot and the robber bearer and care about freedom of speech are my
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three B's. And I go in and have to explain that in a democratic society, 50% plus gets to decide
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who gets to talk. And before they were democratic societies, the rich and powerful
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who are always protected because they're rich and powerful.
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So this argument that only the rich and powerful and only the bigots and the bullies are protected
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by freedom of speech is nonsense. You only need freedom of speech and a First Amendment to protect
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things that aren't popular with the majority because the majority has majority majority rule.
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And this is this is this is civics 101. The fact that students are like, wow, I never really thought
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that way is mind blowing me. And the idea that they're making the argument that speech is violence.
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I'm like, yes, that is an ancient idea. It's an ancient, very bad idea baked in baked into the
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whole idea of freedom of speech is that we now settle our disputes through argumentation.
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And given it's about like how we rule our society, of course, it's going to be ugly. It's literally
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replacing the way we have dealt with conflict in the past, which was usually through violence
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and coercion. So, of course, it's intense. It's replacement for violence. But freedom of speech
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is one of the best inventions in human history for innovation, for peace, which is very badly
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underappreciated and, of course, absolutely essential to having a democracy in the first place.
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This I should have mentioned this up top, but you are also co-author of Cuddling of the American
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Mind with Jonathan Haidt, which is one of the most famous books in the past 10, 15 years. I mean,
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it's just everybody talks about it now because it was prescient. It was spot on. And there's actually
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now an update to it, which you can get. They've published it online. But if you haven't read it,
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read it and read the update, the afterward. But this is from the book. I've been reading so much
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of your stuff that, forgive me if this isn't from the actual book or the afterward, but I think it's
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from the actual principal work. You write, the idea that we should campaign against hurtful speech
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among adults arises from a failure to understand that free speech is our chosen method of resolving
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disagreements, using words rather than weapons. Open debate is our enlightened means of determining
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nothing less than how we order our society, what is true and what is false, what wars we should fight,
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what policies we should pass. And you go on and you write this. I love this part being this is so
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this is profound. Being a citizen in a democratic republic is supposed to be challenging. It's
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supposed to ask something of its citizens. It requires a certain minimal toughness and commitment
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to self-governing to become informed about difficult issues and to argue, organize and vote accordingly.
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Oh, my God. Yes, I'm putting that out and putting it over my desk. And you'll make a great argument,
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which is the only other model is authoritarianism. So explain that.
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Well, that essentially like this, this idea that, you know, speech is speech of violence is
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essentially forgetting the fact that this is a tool for exolving conflict. And this is something
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that Jonathan Rauch wrote, wrote a lot about that. The normal model for human society is what he calls
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the fundamentalist model. And he doesn't mean religious fundamentalists. He means there's someone in
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charge who gets to decide what is true and what is not. The enlightenment to a degree, and this is one
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of the reasons why I think it gets a little bit of a bad rap, was the discovery of ignorance, of
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actually going, wait a second, all this stuff that we thought was absolutely true, and all the shamans and
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chiefs had told us was true, when you start to test it, it actually, it's completely false. And it's one of the
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things that I do think is funny, is that sometimes we free speech defenders can get sort of like
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labeled as paternalistic or arrogant. And while that might be, it might be true individually,
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ultimately, the freedom of speech is about a very humble idea that we are all wrong all the time,
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our individual biases are going to get us, in some cases, nowhere, in some cases, worse than nowhere.
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There's a humility to being in favor of freedom of speech, which is that you always take seriously the
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possibility, you might be wrong. And there's an arrogance to anyone who thinks that they are, that they can
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be the perfect censor. Because when you're saying, like, I can actually eliminate discussion on this
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topic, if I don't like it, you are putting yourself in the position of the final arbiter of truth, which is a
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position that no person should ever take on entirely themselves.
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That's exactly right. And if you want that, what you really are asking for is authoritarianism over you,
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because you won't be the ultimate arbiter, somebody will be more powerful than you are.
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And and why should they get to decide what capital T truth is, you might like it, for example, to get
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political in the Joe Biden era, and not so much during the Trump era. Like, that's generally why we
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don't want our leaders telling us what's okay to say and what's not okay to say. We used to be in college
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environments and in a country in which it was kind of fun to say subversive things and to hear other
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people's controversial views and debate them openly and have controversial figures come on campus and
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sit and listen and then tear them apart. Great, let's do that. But just to have that intellectual
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stimulation and figure out how you feel about it.
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Yeah, I used what I used to say, and it sounds very old fashioned now. But being offended is what
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happens when you have your deepest beliefs challenged. And if you make it through four years or five years,
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in this case, of college, without that happening, you should demand your money back.
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I like that. I hadn't heard that. But I like I mean, there's so much to go over with you. My
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God, I could spend all day doing this. There's so many fun cases. Well, sorry, they're fun to talk
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about, but they're not fun for the people involved. And I do want to get to that case out of Detroit
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at Ferris University, because that poor professor is getting it. And the audience needs to know what's
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being done to this guy. Greg, by the way, was the guy he was on the Yale campus. Remember when the
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students were shouting down the professor over the Halloween costumes? He was there. He's the one
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who took that video that we've all seen. I'm going to get into that. I'm going to get into really what
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the causes are and how overprotective parenting is in part to blame for this problem. Don't miss
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any of today's discussion. So excited to be bringing you, Greg. Don't go away.
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Free speech and religion at the center of Supreme Court arguments yesterday as the justices considered
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whether Boston, the city of Boston, violated the First Amendment when it refused a request
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to temporarily raise a Christian flag outside of City Hall. Greg Lukianoff of FIRE is back with us.
00:22:14.240
So, Greg, this was a free speech case that went up to the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday in which I
00:22:19.980
didn't listen to the arguments, but according to what I read, they did the impossible. They managed
00:22:24.980
to unite the left wings and right wing of the of the Supreme Court. It sounds like this this could
00:22:31.520
wind up being a nine zero decision, possibly in favor of free speech. In other words, you got to let
00:22:39.560
the Christian flag fly. Yeah. And that would be consistent with previous decisions that essentially
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and this goes back to cases going back decades that it's considered to be viewpoint discrimination,
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which is the highest sin you can commit in First Amendment land if you allow every other viewpoint,
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but you don't allow a religious viewpoint. And this is something that goes back to cases on campus as
00:23:04.140
well. It's not it's not the biggest sin you can commit if you're part of big tech tech, however,
00:23:09.620
they love viewpoint discrimination. And I actually want to get to that with you later, because
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you have the exact same philosophy that I do, which is there's the First Amendment, which protects
00:23:18.560
us from the government interfering with our with our ability to speak freely. But there's also just the
00:23:24.860
concept of free speech. And it matters outside of the government setting. It matters in big tech.
00:23:29.160
It matters in the rest of our lives. And the more we crack down on people's speech, the more into these
00:23:34.320
deep rabbit holes they go. I think it explains a lot of what we're seeing right now. I've been talking
00:23:38.540
about it a lot. And I know I know you believe this. So we'll get to that, too. But let's let's just start
00:23:42.620
with this poor, poor guy at Ferris University. OK, this poor guy. I love him. I want the audience to get to
00:23:50.480
know him. And I ideally would like for them to write in and help him. His name is Barry. Is it Mellor?
00:23:55.240
Mellor. Yeah, Mellor. OK, he's a history professor. He's 74 years old. OK, the guy had tenure and he
00:24:03.840
did the unthinkable. He went he opened up his class. I guess it was this was it when was it fall
00:24:10.860
semester? It was just in the recent past. Yeah. Oh, OK. He opened up his class. OK, no, it just
00:24:18.140
happened. OK, so it just happened. And instead of being a normal, boring professor who stands up there
00:24:22.920
and says, welcome to history, we're going to start this day, I'm going to go forward. Here's
00:24:28.280
what I expect of you. Be honest. Don't copy other people's work and in your own assignment, whatever.
00:24:34.060
He decided to make it interesting. He's dealing with adults. You're in college. You're an adult
00:24:38.420
at this point. They're young adults, but they're adults. And what he did in order to prove the point
00:24:43.460
of don't plagiarize while you're in this class was he took a scene from the show Deadwood and he he would
00:24:52.620
he would show the scene in a minute. But he started by sort of reenacting it in his own words. He changed
00:24:58.140
the words to to have more of a professor to student message. And it was irreverent and it was vulgar and
00:25:05.460
it was hilarious. And then he showed the students the actual clip from Deadwood, which is almost exactly
00:25:11.340
the same, but for a few words. And he said, did I plagiarize from Deadwood? And he said, no, I
00:25:16.120
didn't. If I had just done this little bit in it, like in a paper or for you guys without crediting
00:25:20.900
the original source, that'd be plagiarism. That was that would cause you a problem in this class.
00:25:25.820
But that's not what happened. OK, so this is a fun way of teaching an ethics rule right up off the top
00:25:30.000
of class. I'm going to show you the video. Our audience is there are no strangers to profanity.
00:25:35.820
So they it's not that I use it every day. It's just when I really need to. So here is soundbite
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one with the professor sort of his own. Again, it's got some R rated words in here. Take on this
00:25:48.200
scene out of Deadwood. Listen. I may have fucked up my life flatter than hammered shit, but I stand
00:25:55.740
before you today beholden to no human cocksucker and working a paying fucking union job and no limber
00:26:02.740
dick cocksucker of an administrator is going to tell me how to teach my classes because I'm a
00:26:08.520
fucking tenured professor. So if you want to go complain to your dean, fuck you. Go ahead. I'm
00:26:15.440
retiring at the end of this year and I couldn't give a flying fuck any longer. You people are just
00:26:20.200
vectors of disease to me and I don't want to be anywhere near you. So keep your fucking distance.
00:26:27.120
If you want to talk to me, come to my zoom. I love him. It's funny. He was trying to make them laugh
00:26:37.340
and make a point and tell us what happened to him as a result of all this. Oh, they're going they're
00:26:43.600
going after him. They're going after his tenure. The university is planning to discipline him. We've
00:26:49.220
actually we have a faculty legal defense fund at fire and we're defending him in court if need be.
00:26:56.040
And what's funny, Megan, is that that's one of the cases that like is on the less sympathetic
00:27:01.600
sort of spectrum from what I do all the time. It's amazing how tame speech can get you in trouble.
00:27:07.660
You're not all that surprised sometimes when, you know, people are funny about swears, Megan. Like
00:27:11.680
I'm not. But it's amazing how often if something involves like vulgar language, you'll have even
00:27:17.060
people right or left go like, well, that's that's pushing it too far. And I like to remind them
00:27:21.980
that one of the most important cases regarding campus free speech is a case called Papish,
00:27:29.340
which which is a student with the Supreme Court saying you cannot expel a student for printing a
00:27:34.880
cartoon, mocking the police by showing them raping the Statue of Liberty. Like and if so, if stuff that
00:27:42.360
offensive is protected, obviously this joking tirade that he went on is protected. And to be clear,
00:27:48.660
he sets it up with him in a in a spacesuit, essentially, like he talks about being from
00:27:53.280
Rigel seven. There's no way the university could actually say with a straight face that they didn't
00:27:58.140
understand. He was kidding for the whole thing. Of course. Right. Exactly. And the students
00:28:02.600
apparently, well, at least some of them thought it was hilarious. It's been posted online now. It has
00:28:07.140
at least my last check half a million views. Tons of Ford of former students are writing to him saying,
00:28:14.580
this is absurd. You were the funniest, best professor I ever had. You don't deserve this.
00:28:18.580
You know, God forbid the guy try to make it something that'll catch their attention,
00:28:22.280
something that they'll remember, something that isn't mind numbingly boring and utterly forgettable.
00:28:28.880
This is the thanks he gets. They've placed him on leave. They're coming for his job. And I am 100%
00:28:35.360
team, Barry Mailer. And if you are to find a way to email into this school, this Ferris State,
00:28:43.680
Michigan, northwest of Detroit, and tell them they have it wrong. This is disgusting what they're
00:28:48.240
doing to this guy. Can I ask you about what's happening at Vanderbilt? Because this one seems
00:28:53.580
so amorphous. They have some sort of a discrimination policy, I guess, that allows the, quote,
00:28:58.860
equal opportunity and access office. Already, I'm concerned that that's so broad to, quote,
00:29:06.020
take action against conduct that is inconsistent with the university's values. And apparently they
00:29:12.660
can take action, take action against you if you're the student or your child, if he or she's the
00:29:17.740
student, even if they haven't actually done an investigation and there are no appeals. So the
00:29:26.520
university just gets a report that some kid did something stupid. Based on the allegation,
00:29:31.700
they can discipline the student. And by the way, they say the action could include increased
00:29:36.960
monitoring, supervision, or security at various locations where the conduct occurred. Of course,
00:29:43.140
training and education for the students, they got to re-educate you into their thinking. But
00:29:48.300
monitoring and supervision and security and so on, for what? How is this? What?
00:29:52.620
Yeah. Now, it goes back to the free speech movement. 1964 starts at Berkeley. 1974, suddenly the Supreme
00:30:02.340
Court really recognizes that free speech rights include even highly offensive speech. And then by
00:30:06.680
1984, the actual year, you start having universities passing speech codes to ban offensive speech, whether
00:30:13.660
it's on the basis of race or sex. And these all get shot down. These get shot down by the court of
00:30:20.000
public opinion. This is something that brought actually a lot of liberals and conservatives
00:30:23.020
together in the 80s and 90s. It was defeated in court. And amazingly, as I mentioned before,
00:30:29.560
even though it was consistent, even though every time these were brought in front of courts,
00:30:34.240
they were shot down, universities actually had 79% of them had crazy speech codes. So what happens next
00:30:39.800
is that we help with lawsuits all over the country, always defeating the speech codes. And what they've
00:30:47.440
replaced them with are these things called bias-related incident programs or procedures that are as vague
00:30:54.500
as the one you just read, that basically they try to just barely be constitutional, just barely squeak
00:31:01.440
by, but they nonetheless enforce orthodoxy. They mean that students really should be scared about what
00:31:08.680
they say. And professors should be because they can be reported and, as you saw, punished without even
00:31:14.220
being found guilty of anything other than free speech. So how are these bearing in the courts?
00:31:19.100
Because, you know, one thing we've been noticing on the show as we cover, you know, woke culture and
00:31:23.460
all this stuff is that the courts overall, in my view, have been doing a pretty good job of not
00:31:28.960
becoming woke and just following the law. You know, it's been my one comfort as a recovering lawyer that
00:31:36.380
we still have. Yes, we have more and more woke jurists and so on, and certainly law schools are
00:31:40.860
woke. But so far, the law has pretty much held. So how are these cases faring?
00:31:47.480
So, so far, it's a little bit of a mixed bag, partially because they were constructed in order
00:31:51.960
to in order to be found just fairly constitutional. And that's kind of outrageous. We've also seen
00:31:58.280
after winning every single speech code lawsuit that that had been brought in the past five years,
00:32:04.260
we've seen a couple of cases where where judges are saying that students don't have standing to
00:32:10.580
challenge these speech codes, even in cases where it's very clear, the speech code had been had been
00:32:16.500
applied. We saw this at University of South Carolina, for example, easy case, as far as I was concerned,
00:32:21.520
and they investigated a student for two weeks under the speech code. And then when this got in front of
00:32:27.280
court, believe it or not, they actually tried to argue and they succeeded on this argument that
00:32:31.640
because they decided not to find the students guilty at the very end, this wasn't a speech
00:32:36.160
violation. Now, this is going against decades, decades of law. So for the first time, I actually
00:32:41.500
have some worries. Now, of course, Megan, the good news is when things get to get in front of a court on
00:32:46.620
the substance, free speech always wins. There's no right not to be offended. That's very clearly
00:32:51.360
established. First Amendment law is very strong. But I'm afraid with these sort of technical outs,
00:32:55.960
more courts are going to be not striking down speech codes, not defending student rights,
00:33:00.800
because of a misinterpretation of what of who's allowed to bring a case to court.
00:33:05.500
Oh, my gosh. That's basically the court's way of weaseling out of doing the right thing. Right.
00:33:10.760
Which is defending the speech, even if somebody finds it offensive, even if it is offensive,
00:33:14.540
even if it's disgustingly offensive. Right. I know you've defended people, speakers and speech
00:33:19.660
that you don't agree with and that you find offensive. So have I. I mean, I was on the air at Fox
00:33:23.960
defending those lunatics at the Westboro Baptist Church for their signs at the funerals of a
00:33:28.880
fallen military men and women. Did I like what they were doing? No, but I like the First Amendment
00:33:33.440
that that's how we all used to be. We most of us used to be in that camp. It's a more recent
00:33:38.820
phenomenon that, you know, with these young people that it's like somehow free speech itself is the
00:33:43.000
problem. Yeah, no, that's that's a change that happened very fast. And it's the whole reason why I
00:33:48.700
wrote the book Coddling the American Mind with my friend Jonathan Haidt is because it wasn't a subtle
00:33:53.500
shift on campus. It was 2014. Bam. Suddenly students were showing up. And to be clear,
00:34:00.300
for the previous, you know, 15 years of my career, students had been the best constituencies for free
00:34:05.840
speech. They understood offensive comedy. They understood offensive lyrics. They had each other's
00:34:11.120
backs to a degree. And like lightning struck in 2014, suddenly that all that all changed. And the
00:34:17.360
whole book really is trying to figure out what was so different about these students who started
00:34:22.200
hitting campus around 2014. And so much of what we're seeing today, you know, is closely tied to
00:34:28.060
that major shift. And we do think that social media is actually a leading reason why we had this
00:34:34.420
dramatic shift. But also K through 12 education is a big part of it as well.
00:34:40.440
Hmm. Well, you do have it diagnosed. And I think that's that's fascinating because everyone wants
00:34:46.300
to know, like, how, where did they come from? Why are these kids like this? My feeling is who the hell
00:34:50.780
gave birth to these kids? Are these Gen Xers kids, children? Because Jen, I know you're a Gen Xer. So
00:34:55.460
am I. We're tougher than that. Like we our generation takes everything. We never complained. What's so are we
00:35:00.840
raising? Are we the ones raising these coddled little children?
00:35:04.580
Yeah, it's it's an interesting combination. And one of the things we try to figure out in the book
00:35:08.620
is that if you were born in the late 90s and grew up in the zeros, you were growing up at a time that
00:35:14.140
was way safer by basically every single measure than when we were kids or when our parents were
00:35:20.200
kids, et cetera, et cetera, you know, going back in time. But for whatever reason, a lot of these
00:35:24.600
parents were extra paranoid that essentially the the idea of always keeping your kids in it safe
00:35:31.120
took on a sort of unbounded sense. And this is why we call it in the book safetyism. This is
00:35:37.620
actually something that Pamela Paretzky came up with the name and I think is fantastic.
00:35:41.360
But this idea that free that safety is the ultimate goal, no matter how absurd it gets,
00:35:46.840
there are no tradeoffs as long as you can argue that kids are that even if it's the tiniest increase
00:35:52.000
in safety, everything else goes out the window. And we think that this obsession with safety,
00:35:57.180
particularly as it morphed into something that also means emotional safety, it's very harmful to
00:36:03.240
people's ability to talk across lines of difference or for that matter, say anything provocative at
00:36:08.040
all. That's I mean, I don't understand it because I really think that I like my generation, I think,
00:36:16.780
you know, I just saw this thing online. I don't know if you saw this meme, but it was showed this
00:36:19.380
one guy and he's walking through a doorway. Maybe he's he's probably around our age, like, you know,
00:36:23.900
late 40s, young 50s. And he's walking through a doorway and his shoulder hits the doorway and he just
00:36:29.960
keeps going. It's like it didn't even happen. And it says born in 1970. Right. And then have you
00:36:35.780
seen this? And then then he hits it and he kind of gets like slightly irritated, kind of yells at
00:36:41.300
the doorway as a born in 1980. And then they show 1990 where he like acts hurt like it hurt him 1990.
00:36:48.740
And then it gets to the 2000s and the person's like falling down on the ground is like, oh, my God,
00:36:53.320
my shoulder. Ow, ow, ow. And then takes a selfie.
00:36:55.340
So I just don't like I'm trying to figure out how people like us born in that general era where we
00:37:02.080
were dealing with the Cold War who lived through 9-11 and all that are raising these wussy little
00:37:06.520
children. All I can think is that somehow like something happened in a window there because my
00:37:10.140
kids, I'm 51 and I had my kids late, you know, late 30s, early 40s. Like, who are these parents and
00:37:16.760
why are they so scared? Is it because ours is the first generation where that's really the second
00:37:20.700
generation where we were we were both parents outside of the house? Is that way you got upset with
00:37:24.980
safetyism and like, oh, my God, nothing can happen to junior and there could be no independent
00:37:28.280
conflict resolution. And then they go off into life that way. And this is the result.
00:37:32.600
Yeah, well, we call it problems of progress in the book. And in my earlier book, Freedom from Speech,
00:37:37.360
I called it problems of comfort that essentially the kind of problems that we're currently facing
00:37:42.100
with regards to overprotection are the kind of problems that you'd probably want to have
00:37:46.720
throughout most of human history. That essentially, like if you if you're less concerned about the
00:37:51.360
saber tooth tiger eating you or the commissars or the Nazis coming to arrest you, then it's nice
00:37:56.660
that you get to a stage where you can worry about smaller and smaller things. But that was usually
00:38:01.300
met with some amount of like, but, you know, it's good to be challenged. It's actually even good to
00:38:06.120
be offended. It's good to engage. You know, like all of these kind of aspects of wisdom that we used to
00:38:12.920
teach younger people have been largely sort of dismissed. And so I feel like once again, I don't think it's a
00:38:18.680
student's fault that they're being raised in an environment where they're being told you have a
00:38:22.400
right not to be offended. In some cases, that words are violence, as we mentioned before, that
00:38:27.380
they're permanently harmful to people and that people will never recover. And the reason why this
00:38:31.680
anchors me so much, though, is it's telling students that and this is the major takeaway of
00:38:36.820
coddling the American mind. We are teaching a generation of young people the habits of anxious
00:38:42.680
and depressed people that everything they're always under threat, they're always under harm,
00:38:46.740
and they won't bounce back if they are harmed by words or thoughts. And it's leading to incredibly
00:38:53.120
bad mental health outcomes. And that's on us. Like, why on earth would we be whispering into
00:38:57.860
students' ears? It's like, by the way, if you hear something that really bothers you, it might
00:39:01.720
permanently damage you. And you definitely shouldn't do that to someone else. Then, of course, they're
00:39:06.040
going to be anxious and depressed. Right, right. I've said this before, but at my daughter's old
00:39:11.680
school, I said to the head of school, hey, you know, you do all this diversity training for the
00:39:16.480
girls, for the faculty, for everybody. You know, at some point you might consider spending
00:39:20.420
some time on grit because at some point in life they may meet somebody who hasn't had
00:39:24.800
the training. And they may actually say something offensive to these girls. And she said, will
00:39:28.860
you teach the class? I said, well, first of all, it's more than just one class. But second
00:39:32.760
of all, I will do it, but I'm going to show up in an inappropriate Halloween costume.
00:39:38.460
That's how it goes. I'm going to offend everyone. I'm going to say swears. I'm going to call
00:39:43.020
them names. And you know what they're going to learn? They're fine. They can handle it.
00:39:48.940
They're strong enough. And that's the thing that happens naturally psychologically. If
00:39:54.540
you basically say, like, this is the worst thing that could ever happen to you, it's
00:39:58.080
always going to be in your head a million times worse than when it actually happens.
00:40:01.700
And you're like, OK, that was fine. Like he gave a popular opinion among people who don't
00:40:07.360
go to don't go to elite colleges. And that's one thing that I do get frustrated with as well,
00:40:12.220
Megan, is so much of this is classism. So much of this is upper class, you know, elite educated
00:40:18.800
people. You know, they have a really hard time distinguishing the ideas and political ideas
00:40:25.920
that they're born with or raised in as being the same thing as truth. When I started Stanford
00:40:31.800
law school in 1997, I was constantly pointing out. It's like, listen, my dad's a Russian refugee.
00:40:38.780
My mom's a British immigrant. I was probably the only one in my class who was working when
00:40:43.020
I was 11. And constantly you are saying things that you think are the are the God's honest
00:40:48.340
truth that any working class kid would come in and say, well, you'd be kind of horrified by
00:40:56.020
Right, exactly. Some of these families are actually more worried about getting food on the table
00:40:59.700
for dinner that night than they are about, you know, the girl in the Argyle sweater with her
00:41:03.640
cute little pleated skirt sitting there gazing at her navel and then feeling, oh, what color is my
00:41:07.940
skin? Oh, it's white. Maybe that's important. Oh, look, there's my lady parts. Maybe I should
00:41:11.080
focus on those. Oh, that's that's what I stand for. It's like, oh, my God, you get a real problem.
00:41:16.120
Get a real problem. All right. Stand by, Greg. There's so much more to go over with. And I think what
00:41:20.400
you said about social media is really important. Why Greg revised his original condemnation of
00:41:27.520
screen time in his addendum and is now more focused on social media and why he thinks that's
00:41:33.320
actually the villain we need to keep our kids away from. Don't go away. And remember, folks,
00:41:36.920
you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East and
00:41:43.380
the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly.
00:41:49.040
If you prefer an audio podcast, subscribe, download for free on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher or wherever
00:41:55.080
you get your podcasts. And there you will find our full archives with more than 240 shows. We get so
00:42:00.440
many downloads in the archives every day. Love seeing all of you find our library.
00:42:11.040
A stat from 2019 from our then Surgeon General. One in three, this is before the pandemic,
00:42:18.160
one in three high school students and half of female students report persistent feelings of sadness
00:42:23.620
and hopelessness, an increase of 40 percent since 10 years earlier, saying technology is largely to
00:42:30.200
blame. Research done during the pandemic of 80,000 students worldwide found depressive and anxiety
00:42:35.940
symptoms doubled during the pandemic on a worldwide basis. Back in the United States in early 2021,
00:42:42.620
ER visits for suspected suicide attempts were 51 percent higher for adolescent girls,
00:42:49.060
4 percent higher, a much lower rate, but still higher for boys than the same period back in 2019.
00:42:55.520
We're going in the wrong direction. And technology is not the only thing, but it's a huge factor.
00:43:01.780
And you have zeroed in, in particular, on not the cell phone, not the screen, the social media.
00:43:09.720
Yeah. Initially, when we were trying to figure out what was so different about the kids hitting campus
00:43:14.660
around 2014 and why they were so much more anxious and depressed and all this kind of stuff,
00:43:18.780
the obvious candidate was the cell phone, because that basically it being the iPhone being
00:43:25.300
released, you know, changing the world forever, lined up in terms of time perfectly.
00:43:32.420
And the only data we had when we were working in 2018, we were wondering if maybe it was screen time.
00:43:36.840
But it's since become much clearer that the thing that is the most harmful, particularly young girls,
00:43:42.280
is social media and particularly, you know, websites like Instagram.
00:43:46.380
So we talked in the book about how Instagram is harmful to the mental health of teenage girls,
00:43:52.660
partially because it's this constant social comparison thing, which is which is kind of like
00:43:56.060
taking the existing nasty behavior from adolescents and giving it superpowers,
00:44:01.720
making it a thousand times worse so that you're dealing with the mean girls 24 hours a day
00:44:06.040
for the rest of your life, which even just saying it makes me depressed and sad just thinking about
00:44:10.200
it. And it turns out Facebook, as we fairly recently discovered, had some of this research
00:44:15.740
itself. So I don't have daughters. I have two little boys. But if I had if I had daughters,
00:44:21.760
I would keep them off social media as long as possible.
00:44:25.200
Yep. Same. Now, there's zero chance my kids are going to be allowed on social media. I just don't
00:44:29.360
care. I don't care how many of their friends are on it. That's where I draw the line.
00:44:32.260
Um, you write about things like overprotective parenting, loss of unstructured playtime that
00:44:37.420
allows children to learn how to get along. Um, some of these, all of this feeding into the
00:44:43.020
intolerance that we're seeing left and right in our society today.
00:44:47.020
Yeah. Yeah. That was a genuine surprise. Like when we were writing the book, we didn't think that the
00:44:52.020
lack of free time would play such a big role, but free time and free play. That's when you learn how
00:44:56.340
to interact with each other. That's how you learn how to take a joke. That's how you, that's,
00:44:59.700
that's how you get over yourself to a degree. And then I realized that all of my, the parents,
00:45:03.620
my age, like they, they schedule their kids from six o'clock in the morning until they go to bed at
00:45:07.640
night. And that's bad for you. It's so true. Last but not least, we don't have such a short time.
00:45:13.480
There's so much I wanted to cover. You got to come back. Um, censorship, censorship by big tech and
00:45:18.700
others. It doesn't change people's opinions. You right. Um, but it does make them more likely to
00:45:24.360
talk only to those with whom they already agree. Group polarization. Uh, this is one of these things
00:45:31.600
like in first amendment law, there's this idea that, you know, you have to let people say hateful
00:45:35.640
things because it will drive it underground. Well, it'll get worse. It's actually much worse than
00:45:39.840
that. It will lead them to talk to people they only agree with. And when you, when that starts
00:45:43.820
happening, you start spiraling off into crazy land. And this happens on the right and the left of,
00:45:48.560
as we've seen, it's really good to know what people really think. So you can know the world as it is.
00:45:53.460
And if you don't, they're just going to talk to the people who are either as radical as they are
00:45:57.800
or more, and it's just going to get worse. So expose them to dissenting opinions,
00:46:03.380
expose everyone to opinions that sound different from the way they think. And that might lead them
00:46:10.000
to moderate their own views. Yeah. Well, teach people also, also to listen as far, if I could
00:46:16.020
wave a magic wand, like one of the things I'd love to do is have people from different, you know,
00:46:19.800
polarized communities, not, not automatically go and debate each other, but hear what they're
00:46:25.400
coming from. We've, we've, we've seemed to fundamentally lost curiosity about each other
00:46:29.360
in the culture war. That's so true that this is what, I mean, like this is why after January 6th,
00:46:35.500
when people ask like, how did it happen? How these people actually believe that Mike Pence was going
00:46:38.540
to become president that day. And I tried to say, look, all the censorship and all of the,
00:46:43.580
you know, sanctimonious broadcasting where these people felt judged, made them turn you off and
00:46:50.560
find their own information sites. And that wasn't necessarily a good thing. You know, that really
00:46:56.260
wasn't and remains a serious problem on so many levels. Thank you for being one of the warriors on
00:47:02.120
the side of the angels, Greg. It's a pleasure. I love, I love your organization. Love, I love fair.
00:47:07.380
That's a different one. And I love fire, which is equally important. All right. To be continued
00:47:12.900
coming up, we're going to take a deep dive into the crime wave in America right now. The latest
00:47:18.420
statistics on murders in our major cities are far worse than even I understood. But now I've taken a
00:47:25.820
hard look at it. And Ray Kelly, former NYPD commissioner, will be here with his take on these
00:47:30.980
soft on crime DAs popping up in city after city after city, often thanks to George Soros.
00:47:42.900
We are taking an in-depth look now at how left-wing criminal justice reform policies are getting
00:47:48.420
young women in particular this week killed in America. Over the past two weeks, we saw three
00:47:54.480
high-profile murders of young women killed by men who police say have extensive criminal records.
00:48:00.460
Joining me now is Ray Kelly, former New York City police commissioner and CEO of the global security
00:48:05.220
firm, The Guardian Group. Commissioner, it's great to have you here. I'm so disturbed by all of this.
00:48:13.620
And I just want to sort of give people an overview because for a while there, after George Floyd,
00:48:17.720
we saw defund the police, defund the police. And then the cities started to realize that was a disaster
00:48:23.700
and the money started to get replaced for police departments. But people like yourself, people like
00:48:30.420
Bill Bratton, Commissioner Bratton and others had been saying it's so far beyond this. You've got to
00:48:36.420
go after the soft on crime DAs who have been placed in office by these far left wingers. And a lot of other
00:48:43.840
things are going to have to happen to shore up the safety in these communities. And now we're living that.
00:48:48.520
So we've got this one woman out, a UCLA grad student, 24 years old, working in a furniture store
00:48:56.880
who was gunned down this past weekend. We've got a woman on the New York City subway, 40 years old,
00:49:03.580
shoved to her death as an oncoming subway train came with absolutely no possibility of saving her
00:49:10.180
own life. And in East Harlem, you've got a 19 year old girl killed at a Burger King as she was totally
00:49:16.160
complying with this guy's demands to hand over the cash from the cash register. And he still shot her
00:49:22.720
in the head and she was killed. That's just the latest. Your thoughts on where we're going and how
00:49:26.880
we got here? Well, I'm pretty pessimistic, quite frankly, Megan. The future, at least for New York
00:49:33.180
City, and probably in the short term, because New York will always survive, is bleak. We see Alvin
00:49:43.180
Bragg, a George Soros promoted district attorney who took the radical step of putting out a memo
00:49:52.160
that said, you know, we're just not going to prosecute a lot of crimes, a lot of felony crimes,
00:49:58.080
robbery, for instance, that sort of thing. We're going to make the transit system free. We won't
00:50:03.540
prosecute anybody for fare evasion. We won't prosecute anybody for resisting arrest. And this is
00:50:11.020
emblematic of what these other so-called progressive district attorneys have done and are doing in 25
00:50:18.480
cities throughout America, supported, promoted, funded to a large degree by George Soros and his Open
00:50:27.940
Society Foundation. He's been doing things like this for years, but this is really an insidious plot
00:50:36.580
that he's foisted upon us. And it has resulted in criminals knowing that they're going to walk
00:50:45.880
free. It resulted also, to a large degree, in bail reform, which has not worked well, certainly not
00:50:53.260
in New York City. So another thing that has to be factored in is that in the aftermath of the death of
00:51:01.880
George Floyd, cities, counties, states throughout America overreacted and put all sorts of unreasonable
00:51:13.580
rules and regulations upon the police. Now, there's a lot of discretion in policing. Cops can make a
00:51:21.600
decision to act or not to act. So police are reacting by pulling back, by not engaging in the
00:51:31.580
proactive strategies that have been successful in the, certainly in the 90s and in 2000.
00:51:42.500
The cops. Well, that's right. Exactly. The Ferguson effect, which is 2014. And we've seen the Ferguson
00:51:49.660
effect to a certain degree up until George Floyd death. But then there was a sea change,
00:51:58.040
major sea change. Cops have gotten the message, don't do anything. We don't want you to do anything.
00:52:04.640
And they don't want to do very much because it jeopardizes their job. It jeopardizes their family's
00:52:11.080
well-being. So unless we can remove or alter some of these restrictions, police understandably are going
00:52:20.440
to be hesitant to engage, certainly in the way they were engaging prior to Ferguson.
00:52:28.840
Mm-hmm. You can see it. I mean, you're a cop out there right now. You see somebody like Kim Potter, who made the
00:52:33.800
mistake of pulling her gun instead of her taser. And she's about to face a sentence that could be 15 years for a
00:52:40.000
mistake. Think how you're feeling about willingly intervening in a situation that may result in violence, where the
00:52:46.820
defendants in New York are now being told, don't worry about resisting arrest. We won't charge you
00:52:50.580
with that. Resist all you want. Go for it. If you can get away, good on you. Because according to this
00:52:55.060
DA, we'll no longer be pursuing that crime. And by the way, it's in several cities now that we're seeing
00:53:02.680
this so-called Ferguson effect where the cops pull back because they've been unfairly demonized by the
00:53:07.500
press, by some of our leaders. And so they're thinking, why am I going to risk my life, my relationship
00:53:13.720
with my family for this? Here's some of the stats. Chicago, 797 homicides in 2021. That's 25 more than
00:53:23.340
the previous year. It's almost 300 more than the year before that. Most since 1996 in Chicago. Philly,
00:53:31.540
559 people murdered last year. Most in the city's history. Los Angeles, 392 homicides as of the end of
00:53:40.480
2021. Most of any year since 2007. Houston, 18% rise in murders over the last year. Austin,
00:53:47.520
highest murder total since 1984. Portland, Oregon, highest murder total since 87. Rochester, New York,
00:53:53.700
highest since 1991. I could go on. The murders are spiking in all of our major cities. And you know
00:54:00.200
what's not spiking? Police killings of suspects. And the experts say that is an anomaly. Normally,
00:54:08.560
when the murder rate goes up, the police killing of suspects goes up just because there's more
00:54:13.060
interactions. Things can go south faster. It's not happening. And this expert was saying in one of
00:54:18.260
the pieces I read, Ferguson effect, these cops are like, I'm not, I'm not getting engaged.
00:54:23.600
Yeah. Not getting out of the radio car like they used to. They're delaying their, they're holding back
00:54:32.680
because they are concerned. Concerned that they're going to do something wrong or something perceived
00:54:38.700
to be wrong. And their job is at risk. You know, 12 cities in the U.S. in 2021 had record high
00:54:48.820
murders. And the country had a 30% increase in murder in 2020, which we've never had before.
00:54:58.140
Never close to that. So, you know, I attribute so much to the abuse that cops have taken,
00:55:08.880
these regulations and rules. For instance, in New York City, the city council removed a qualified
00:55:15.540
immunity defense, which is basically a good effort defense. So cops cannot use that in cases in the
00:55:24.060
city. Not federal cases, but cases brought in New York City. Now the city may or may not indemnify it.
00:55:30.420
So that is a clear signal to hold back. You know, in many ways, the advocates with defunding the police
00:55:39.800
have gotten what they wanted because cops are leaving. New York City lost, I think it's about
00:55:46.780
5,500 police officers in a year and a half. About half the retirements and half to just leaving
00:55:53.620
to resigning. We've never seen anything like that before. So this is why I'm pessimistic. I think
00:56:03.780
you're going to have to show a lot more support to police officers and perhaps even remove some of
00:56:11.560
these restrictions before we're going to see a major change. It would be nice if we had a DA in our city,
00:56:17.120
in LA, in San Francisco, in several of these cities that are seeing these crime rates, who actually
00:56:22.680
wanted to prosecute crime. Because while we elected a former cop as our new mayor, Eric Adams, and
00:56:28.240
anybody's got to be better than de Blasio. But I mean, that's a low bar. And so he's he has the tough
00:56:34.820
on crime rhetoric, the new mayor. But he doesn't make he doesn't bring the cases. The DA brings the cases
00:56:41.680
who is elected separately, Alvin Bragg. And they think it's one of those things where it's like everybody
00:56:47.560
in New York. It went 87 percent for Joe Biden. They just do down ticket Democrat. Dem, dem, dem,
00:56:51.580
dem, dem. That's how we got Alvin Bragg, a guy who is much more fitted for the Legal Aid Society,
00:56:59.080
where I think he used to work for a time than he is to run the Manhattan DA's office. They've had at
00:57:05.480
least 12 DA's quit already, including one of the most famous that they had, the woman who prosecuted
00:57:09.860
Harvey Weinstein, the woman who put poor little Etan Patz's killer in jail. She was great.
00:57:15.140
They they don't want to work for this guy because he's no longer going to be prosecuting several
00:57:19.720
felonies. He doesn't believe in bail, of course. So people go right back out on the streets.
00:57:24.660
Several crimes now are being treated as misdemeanors that aren't. He's rewriting the
00:57:28.800
law with his own pen. Right. Who does he think he is? An emperor? I mean, that is some nerd to go
00:57:36.980
against the will of the people, to go against the legislation on the books, laws that are on the
00:57:43.020
books because he thinks it's somehow not fair. You know, in the memo that he put out, he talks about,
00:57:49.600
hey, he's had a gun held to his head, you know, as a kid. And so what? That's not a rationale.
00:57:56.580
You'd think that'd be a reason to be tougher on crime. But no, the memo follows, you know, a ridiculous
00:58:05.420
path saying that, as you just said, virtually is not going to enforce any felonies. And
00:58:12.800
unless it's a murder. The whole tenor of the memo is to reduce crime to misdemeans and
00:58:21.400
absolutely consider incarceration as the last resort. So it's a pretty tough environment to try
00:58:30.380
to try to reduce crime in the city that's had a very tough experience during a pandemic with crime.
00:58:38.980
Exactly. So he also says, we're not going to, I don't want anybody in this office to seek a
00:58:44.380
carceral sentence, in other words, jail time, except with homicides and a handful of other cases,
00:58:52.080
like some domestic violence, felonies, some sex crimes. So just a handful, where are we going to
00:58:56.900
seek jail time? Right? That's crazy. And when bringing a case, you have to keep in mind the impacts
00:59:03.040
of incarceration and so on and so forth. And then he says, you cannot, if you're going to put a
00:59:10.600
convict behind bars, you cannot request that they go behind bars for more than 20 years for any
00:59:17.520
sentence that can't be reviewed or changed by a parole board. Meanwhile, oh, and they say,
00:59:23.600
and we shall not seek a sentence of life without parole. No seeking life sentences without, without
00:59:27.600
parole. Meanwhile, those had only been used by the DAs in the worst of the worst cases. I mean,
00:59:33.200
it's like serial killers, terrorists, cop killers, and people who kill children under the age of 14
00:59:40.560
in connection with sex crimes or torture. They were already reserved for the worst of the worst. And now
00:59:44.440
he's saying, nope, we'll not be seeking any life without parole because he, he has concerns even about
00:59:49.600
those guys. Yeah. To fight crime from Bob Morgenthau and he was the DA for 40 years. And that office was
00:59:59.500
the model for the rest of the country. They used to come from overseas to observe the New York County
01:00:05.720
district attorney's office. Well, that's, uh, that's long gone. Uh, so we're, we're in for a rough ride.
01:00:11.940
I know people are talking about the governor, uh, having the ability to remove a district attorney.
01:00:19.400
That's never going to happen. This governor is, uh, you know, was not elected to the point that
01:00:25.020
wants to run again. She's not going to take on the brag constituency. Uh, so we're going to have
01:00:33.100
to see if he, if he, uh, modifies position at all. But the question is whether the question is
01:00:39.020
whether Eric Adams can lean on him sufficiently. He doesn't have the power to make him make these
01:00:44.360
arrests, but can he lean on him sufficiently? But when you listen to Eric Adams, you know,
01:00:48.920
the past week, it doesn't sound like he has the motivation. I mean, that woman, that 40 year
01:00:54.240
old poor woman who was shoved in front of the oncoming subway, it's disgusting. It's so disturbing
01:00:59.580
that today there were pictures of New Yorkers refusing to go through the turnstiles to wait
01:01:04.320
for the subway. They wouldn't get onto the subway platform. They were waiting behind the turnstiles
01:01:07.880
where you slide your little card because they're worried about some lunatic shoving them on the
01:01:12.740
tracks. Here she is, this poor woman, um, shoved and died. And, uh, what we hear from the mayor is
01:01:20.580
these are quotes. New Yorkers are safe on the subway system. Cases like this aggravate the perception
01:01:28.540
of fear, the perception of fear. This you, my, my husband just read Bill Bratton's book. It just came
01:01:36.820
out with his biography, his autobiography and Bill Bratton, of course helped clean up New York city.
01:01:42.860
And Bill Bratton talks in his book about how he went down to the subways and rode the subways and
01:01:49.940
said to a New Yorkers, the subways are safe. It's just a perception of fear basically is what he had
01:01:55.560
deduced that they were safe, but people felt like they weren't. And at that point in time, that was
01:02:00.440
true. So it worked. He just needed to show them. Right. But it's not true today. He can't just copy
01:02:07.300
what Bill Bratton did and hope for the best. It is not safe down there. That's why this poor 40 year
01:02:12.820
old woman is dead. Yeah. Well, you know, some practical things, uh, can be done. The cops have
01:02:19.380
to be deployed onto the platform. They were focused on fair evasion, but here's a district attorney
01:02:27.580
telling you he's not prosecuting any fair evasion cases. So those cops have to be visible on the
01:02:33.660
platform. So there's not a lot of cops obviously to do every station, but that would be an important
01:02:38.120
message. And they have to look at building barriers, which you see in other subway systems. I think
01:02:44.880
there's actually barriers on the union, the union square subway station in, in Manhattan. Yeah. It's
01:02:51.440
expensive. Absolutely. But something has got to be done to get the ridership confident about being
01:02:59.220
in the subway system because New York will never come back. There's only, there's only 28% of the
01:03:04.080
workers back in the offices in New York city. There's less than 50% ridership riding the subways now
01:03:10.800
than it was, uh, pre pandemic. And it's the key. It's the lifeblood of the city. And if people are not
01:03:19.620
comfortable, people are not using it. The city is going to have a very rough road to hoe. Yep. And it's,
01:03:25.580
you're right. They need more, they need more law enforcement down there. Transit crimes alone have
01:03:29.840
soared 65%, more than 65% in the first two weeks of the year compared to 2021. Um, crimes in general are
01:03:40.320
up more than a third in the first two weeks of this year compared to the same period in 2021. Car thefts
01:03:46.120
have doubled over the first two weeks. Grand larcenies are up 61% robberies are up 25% felony
01:03:52.400
assaults up. I could go on, um, murders to it. That's just our city that, and that's before we
01:04:00.260
had the weird DA memo saying, I'm not going to be prosecuting all these crimes. Right. So like
01:04:04.140
that's New York, uh, in, in San Francisco, in LA, they've got George Soros backed, uh, DAs.
01:04:11.860
The guy in San Francisco was raised by domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers, that Chesa Boudin. He was
01:04:17.080
raised by domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, who was on the FBI's 10 most
01:04:21.540
wanted list. I remember asking Bill Ayers about this. I'm like, Oh, your wife, you know, he, I said
01:04:26.500
she, she was on the, the 10 most wanted list. He was go, he goes, a lot of good people are on that
01:04:30.540
list. I'm sure she's a peach. All right. So this is who's running the crime enforcement in San Francisco.
01:04:37.720
There's a, there's an effort to recall him. They want to recall Beverly Hills, the city council of
01:04:42.600
Beverly Hills that just voted to recall. They want to recall the LA, uh, prosecutor because
01:04:47.940
he's another Soros guy, Gaston. He's not, he's not prosecuting crime there. And the crime rates
01:04:53.380
are soaring. It's what haven't we seen enough to know that this isn't working when you have the
01:04:58.600
London, I'm sorry, the San Francisco mayor, London breed come out and be like, Holy, we got to get on.
01:05:04.120
This is insane. We see the chips falling one by one. It makes me wonder whether even the left is
01:05:09.620
going to see your experiment is failing. It doesn't work. Well, we hope so, but I think we're going to
01:05:15.140
have to go, uh, lower quite frankly, and down in deeper before we get perhaps a Rudy Giuliani type
01:05:23.480
of, uh, figure of being elected in, in some of these cities, because, you know, by and large,
01:05:30.480
people are not paying attention to elections. Alvin Bragg got only 86,000 votes, uh, in New York
01:05:39.180
County. Uh, the borough has 1.6 million people in it. And same thing with the Blasio. He had,
01:05:45.200
you know, a very small voter turnout. So people have other things on their mind. I don't know why,
01:05:51.760
because it certainly, uh, uh, is, is a major issue and should be a major issue. But, uh, you know,
01:05:59.260
George Soros gave Alvin Bragg a million dollars. Now that may not be, you know, a lot of money in
01:06:05.740
today's political world, but it is a lot for district attorney's rights. And it, it, it made
01:06:12.100
a big difference. I saw Alvin Bragg, I didn't vote for him. I live in Manhattan. I saw, uh, a lot of ads
01:06:18.580
for him and, and effective organizing, uh, and going on. So people are going to have to wake up and pay
01:06:27.420
attention to these elections until that happens. I think we're still going to see these types of
01:06:33.400
people in the office because there are organizations that are focused on getting these people, uh,
01:06:40.980
into positions of, uh, of power. Uh, it is just something that, uh, cries out for more attention.
01:06:50.660
And, and I, I think unfortunately the crime situation will have to get worse before people
01:06:55.960
really wake up. All right. Let me ask you a question about two of the cases that I mentioned
01:07:00.980
at the top with the young women, because the, the, the men who have been arrested in those cases seem,
01:07:06.860
and they have long criminal histories and they seem not totally there, not all there. And we've had a
01:07:12.700
massive problem with homelessness, with, uh, criminals, with convicted criminals out on the streets who have
01:07:18.540
mental disorders in Manhattan, um, free to roam, free to commit crime, and now, you know, free to
01:07:24.460
avoid prosecution thanks to this DA. But I just want to show you in the audience, a clip of, of these
01:07:29.080
two guys, two of the guys, again, two of the cases I mentioned were in New York. One was in LA. Um, but
01:07:33.620
here is this, the, the man who is suspected of murdering, uh, this 40 year old woman in the subway,
01:07:39.200
uh, is named Simon Marshall. I'm going to play you the tape. You can't really understand what he's
01:07:43.840
saying. So forgive me. I'll tell you in advance, but I want you to see him. He yells,
01:07:48.660
go F yourself. Only he says the word. The reporter says, why'd you do it? And he yells,
01:07:53.420
yeah, because I'm God. Yes, I did. I'm God. I can do it. So let's watch him first.
01:08:00.760
What'd you do? You pushed the woman on the tracks?
01:08:07.620
Oh my God. I mean, honestly, I mean, how many times have you been down the subway and seen somebody
01:08:10.900
like that yelling crazy stuff and you just get your kids and you huddle against the wall so they can't
01:08:15.600
do it. I mean, this is crazy. Then there's the Burger King murder suspect, um, who again,
01:08:20.560
took the life of this young girl who complied with his insane demands and gave over the cash
01:08:25.200
register money. And he knew about a second cash register and she was trying to get it open for
01:08:29.260
him. She didn't want to disobey anything. The guy said he had a gun and he shot her to death.
01:08:34.060
Anyway, um, his name is Winston Glynn. Again, I'm going to translate for you because you can't,
01:08:39.380
you can't quite hear. Um, he yells out, you know, they charge N words every day. Where's our
01:08:46.760
reparations for 400 years of effing slavery? America's going to burn. Listen.
01:08:52.780
Oh my gosh. So how does it factor in, um, the number of people on the streets of Manhattan that
01:09:11.340
are mentally ill, the number of people who are homeless, who have long rap sheets and so on.
01:09:15.660
You can't walk down the street, New York city for any length of time without seeing somebody
01:09:20.200
who appears to have significant mental problems. Now it goes back to the seventies when the beds,
01:09:26.760
when the hospital beds for people with serious mental problems, uh, were started to be removed
01:09:34.720
and drugs were, were the answer. In other words, people had to take, uh, uh, a certain amount of
01:09:40.660
medication and that would be in place of being in a, in an institution. But we're going to have to
01:09:47.580
rethink that. We need to get people who are obviously a danger to the public and a danger
01:09:55.480
to themselves. We have to get them back into the institutions. And that's not, that's not
01:10:01.260
politically, uh, popular, or at least it hasn't been, but we can't go on like this to just, and
01:10:08.200
they're, they seem to me to be a lot more aggressive. The aggressive panhandling is a
01:10:16.100
tandem out. Some instances do a robbery, you know, demanding, demanding money. And of course
01:10:21.580
you see crimes, crimes that committed like this. Uh, they, they all have a combination of mental,
01:10:28.300
uh, uh, treatment and a criminal record. Uh, it's, it's, it's a major problem that I don't,
01:10:36.480
I don't think the political superstructure is going to respond to this, uh, uh, very well,
01:10:45.260
but we have to get them. We have to get them off the streets. Again, it's critical to New York
01:10:50.480
coming back. And, uh, you go to Midtown and you don't see people on the streets.
01:10:55.980
Not just New York, right? You got LA, this, this guy, there's a, there's a recall effort to get that
01:11:00.080
guy out in LA. Uh, there's a recall effort to get the guy out, as I mentioned in San Fran,
01:11:04.420
uh, in San Francisco, 50 plus attorneys have resigned since Chesa Boudin took office in January
01:11:09.460
2020 in Philadelphia. Similar thing. George Soros backed, uh, DA Krasner is his name took office in
01:11:16.840
2018. Apparently he said about to Ivy league law schools and historically black universities when
01:11:21.880
he took office, inviting top grads to help him on this progressive prosecutor mission. About 70 of
01:11:29.720
these recruits, according to the Philadelphia inquirer have already left, um, in as part of
01:11:34.720
an exodus that has included these young idealists and veteran prosecutors who realized this guy has
01:11:40.380
no interest in prosecuting crime out in LA, this young UCLA grad student who has just killed Brianna
01:11:48.700
Kupfer. Uh, they, they arrested, uh, the guy and he's 31. He, um, they, they believe he's homeless,
01:11:58.580
career criminal, lengthy rap sheet has arrested Charlotte, South Carolina, California. Uh, the
01:12:04.500
cops are saying now he should be considered arms, armed and dangerous. Okay. They didn't arrest him,
01:12:09.120
but they identified him. Uh, and we have the video of this guy on camera as he, as he just calmly
01:12:14.420
purchased a vape, a vape pen from seven 11, 30 minutes after he murdered allegedly Brianna
01:12:20.120
Kupfer. This guy, uh, was free on a thousand dollar bond from a misdemeanor arrest in Los
01:12:25.020
Angeles County. Uh, this is the kid, this is a DA who has said he's going to, he ran for office
01:12:30.980
vowing to stop prosecuting many misdemeanors. All right. And this guy was free after having
01:12:34.800
committed one. Uh, he hadn't fit. He had failed to appear in court repeatedly, had a bunch of bench
01:12:39.980
warrants out for him. Uh, serious crimes do not just that, that one crime, uh, assault with a
01:12:44.980
deadly weapon, carrying concealed weapon, assault on a police officer, trespassing. I could go on.
01:12:49.140
And when they asked this DA Gascon, a Soros Beck guy, uh, for comment on this guy, like, why,
01:12:56.440
why was he out? No comment, no comment. They don't want to weigh in when their policies go south.
01:13:02.000
They want to stay quiet. They want to skulk away. And they want to tell us that they're standing up for
01:13:06.040
things like racial justice and overcrowded prisons and, you know, keeping in mind that the life of
01:13:10.940
the defendant post post-incarceration and so on. Does any of that matter? Should it, should it be a
01:13:16.940
factor? Go ahead. I'm sorry. No, you go. Now what I'm concerned about is, well, the same thing will
01:13:22.660
happen in New York County. I'm sure where competent, qualified attorneys will leave, but I'm concerned
01:13:30.200
that they'll be replaced by individuals of a like mind to these, uh, district attorneys. So in a way,
01:13:39.740
I don't think that these DAs are that upset about people leaving because I think there is a, uh, sort
01:13:49.020
of a stream of like-minded people to take some of these, uh, positions because it's a, it's a ideological
01:13:56.640
fight, uh, for them. That's a very good point. In New York, you can't recall out in San Francisco,
01:14:03.360
two of the DAs who left recently joined the recall effort. They're now actively campaigning to get
01:14:09.500
this guy Chesa Boudin out of there. In New York, we don't have that mechanism. So we're stuck with
01:14:14.220
this guy. I agree. I agree because the governor apparently can remove and extenuating circumstances,
01:14:22.640
but she's not going to touch it. She wants to be elected herself. Yeah, we can get rid of her
01:14:28.240
because she's, she took over for Cuomo. Um, but her time in office is limited too. So she's going
01:14:33.400
to face a challenge and we'll see what New Yorkers decide to do. Ray Kelly's staying with us. Uh,
01:14:37.620
we have much more to discuss, including what happened at that, uh, Texas synagogue. He's got
01:14:42.060
thoughts on how, but don't forget after nine 11, he was a big counter-terrorism guy for our country.
01:14:46.140
So we'll ask him about what happened there. And there is an update in that case.
01:14:52.640
Okay. So we'll get to the terrorism situation in Texas in just one second. One thing I wanted to
01:14:59.080
mention to you is there was an update, um, out of Chicago about, and of course they're,
01:15:04.060
they're facing record murder rates there, which is saying something, um, nearly 100 murder suspects
01:15:10.440
in the Chicago area are at home right now, commissioner. They are enjoying the comfort of
01:15:17.520
their homes. Thanks to these soft on crime judges and the criminal justice reforms there.
01:15:24.080
The, the sheriff of cook County, his name is Tom Dart. He said, 2,600 defendants are under home
01:15:30.380
confinement and electronic monitoring right now. But he said he never wanted judges to use that program
01:15:36.480
for people charged with violent offenses. He's saying 75 to 80% of my people on home monitoring right
01:15:43.560
now are charged with a violent offense. I didn't want that. I have about a hundred people on home
01:15:48.880
monitoring who are charged with murder and including at least one of them is accused of
01:15:55.740
shooting and killing. Remember the shooting and killing of little seven-year-old, uh, Jaslyn Adams
01:16:00.440
at a Westside McDonald's in April of last year that made tons of news. That guy, that guy sitting at
01:16:06.360
home, I'm sure he's going to be respectful of the ankle bracelet, but it's come to that.
01:16:11.320
Yeah. Well, they're using the pandemic as an excuse to do this, but it's happening, uh, for reasons
01:16:19.480
more than just the pandemic. It's a philosophical thing that a lot of people don't want to see
01:16:25.440
anybody incarcerated. It's happened here at Rikers Island. Rikers Island has been pretty much empty.
01:16:32.000
There's still, uh, prisons there, but so much of it has to do with the pandemic. So it's another
01:16:39.520
issue because you can do things with an ankle bracelet too. You know, uh, crimes of, uh, emotion,
01:16:46.480
uh, you know, domestic violence, that, that sort of thing, uh, will not be stopped by, uh, an ankle
01:16:52.560
bracelet, but it's, uh, it's the world in which, in which we live now. This permissiveness has got to,
01:16:59.360
the pendulum has, pendulum has got to swing back, but, uh, it's not going to happen anytime soon. I'm afraid.
01:17:05.600
Well, what about the concerns that the people behind these softer on crime approaches say,
01:17:11.520
they say, look, you know, prison can make a criminal. Like you, somebody who goes to prison
01:17:17.720
over a crime, let's say they get to get a year sentence or something. Um, they, they,
01:17:22.200
they got prosecuted for an armed robbery, but the, the gun didn't really go off. And, you know,
01:17:29.960
he only brandished it for a minute and hadn't been in a lot of trouble before. Okay. You send that
01:17:34.440
kid to jail for a year. You make him a career criminal. He's surrounded by criminals. There's
01:17:40.260
obviously a lot of sexual assault in prisons and so on. And so they say, anytime you can reasonably
01:17:44.780
divert somebody from prison, you should, because that will ultimately keep society more, more
01:17:50.700
protected, more safe. What do you make of it? Yeah. That's what Alfred Bragg said in his memo.
01:17:55.580
It's going to make us safer. Yes. That young man though, cannot commit a crime against you or me for a
01:18:03.100
year. And that is a valuable aspect of, of putting people in a way, but incarcerating them is they're
01:18:13.020
not able to commit a crime. I want to be safe tonight. And I can't concern myself as, as a citizen
01:18:21.160
too much of what may happen a year or two years down the road. I want those people to be separated
01:18:29.480
from society because for a year, fine. That means he's not committing, committing crimes. So you
01:18:34.700
have to factor that, that reality in making these decisions. What about the number of people who
01:18:41.060
commit crimes because of drugs, right? They're high on drugs. They're, you know, they're out of their
01:18:44.520
mind on drugs. Should they be diverted to a drug program as opposed to sent into the prison pipeline?
01:18:50.320
Perhaps. And believe me, every district attorney's office has a diversion program these days. So
01:18:57.200
they're, they're looking at that very closely. And I, I, there's merit in that. I think you have to
01:19:03.420
look at each case individually, but if someone is just a, a user and maybe committed a crime to get
01:19:13.680
money to be, uh, to use drugs, I think an argument can be made for people in that status to be
01:19:22.040
diverted from the criminal justice system. But if they keep committing crime, then they have to pay
01:19:27.520
the consequences in my journey. Yeah. Well, that's the problem is that we're not looking at individuals
01:19:32.200
in New York and these other cities. We're just looking at the offenses and we're saying entire
01:19:37.060
categories of crimes will not be charged, will not be treated as the felonies. They are,
01:19:42.000
will be treated as misdemeanors. We're not looking at the individual circumstances. So like we're
01:19:45.500
missing opportunities to lock up serial criminals, um, who ought to be in jail. I mean, that they were
01:19:52.520
making a distinction, the mayor, uh, I mean, um, DA Alvin Bragg was saying something like, look,
01:19:58.160
the problem with, you know, the armed robbery is you got these cops arresting somebody from going in
01:20:04.920
there. You know, it's like a pork chop. The guy, is that a dangerous instrumentality? He whipped a
01:20:09.160
pork chop, pork chop at somebody and that guy doesn't belong in jail. And I like, okay, but
01:20:15.640
you know, these guys we're talking about today, they didn't use a pork chop. They used a gun and
01:20:20.640
they shot a young woman and they shoved a woman in front of the subway. And you never know if
01:20:25.200
somebody pulls out a knife, a fake gun, a gun that's not loaded. These are the distinctions
01:20:30.220
he's trying to make, whether that's going to lead another person to pull a gun on him,
01:20:33.780
somebody to get shot in the crossfire. You know, why would we be telegraphing anything
01:20:37.900
other than, than strict law enforcement and you're going to jail if you try to rob or burglarize
01:20:45.180
Yeah, it makes no sense. And, uh, in the memo, he talks specifically about section 160 of the
01:20:52.460
penal law, one, two, and three that deal with guns, uh, specifically. And he still says in
01:20:59.240
a memo that it can be reduced to, uh, misdemeanors. So, you know, his, his message, I think his
01:21:06.820
message is confused in his own head. You've got to look at specifically what he said in
01:21:13.880
Yeah. You're saying, he's saying he's going to reduce to misdemeanors, uh, think crimes
01:21:17.520
that the law says have to be treated as felonies. So he may be confused or he's just flouting
01:21:23.300
You know, what, what's a concern too, is the fact that there in the last couple of days, he's
01:21:28.320
turning to a public relations firm to help his image, to get him, you know, to better,
01:21:34.160
uh, perform on television or, or whatever. He's not looking at the substance. He's looking,
01:21:41.140
seeing it as a public relations matter, which I find to be, uh, concerning, uh, as well.
01:21:48.740
Yeah, no, he's, he used to work for Preet Bharara because he was, I think he was at legal
01:21:52.560
aid for a while, but he also worked in the U S attorney's office under Preet Bharara. And now
01:21:55.640
he's leaning on Preet for some sort of messaging. Apparently he's going to give some speech
01:21:59.700
saying the last two weeks have been a challenge, but no one cares. No one cares how it's been a
01:22:04.020
challenge for you. You know, people are dying, get it together, start enforcing the law. That's
01:22:08.160
why they put you in office. Nobody knew about your soft on crime policies. They just hit D.
01:22:13.320
I don't believe New Yorkers want no law enforcement. I don't believe they want to
01:22:16.860
say okay to resisting arrest and jumping the subway turnstile and, you know, armed robbery. I just,
01:22:23.120
I don't believe it. So he better watch it. He's about to give a speech. I don't think he's going
01:22:26.500
to dial it back. Um, I we'll see what New Yorkers do cause they don't tend to be a quiet crowd.
01:22:31.280
Yeah. Um, okay. Let's talk about what happened in Texas. Cause you, in addition to being one of
01:22:35.660
our most respected police officers and commissioners ever, uh, are a true counterterrorism
01:22:41.760
expert. And that's where your career took you after 2002, or you really spent a lot of time on that,
01:22:45.820
um, after nine 11. So what's happened down in Texas this past weekend appears to be an attempted
01:22:52.900
terror attack by a guy, uh, from the UK who, um, took four people hostage at a Jewish synagogue,
01:23:01.180
including the rabbi. And there are real questions about what the heck this guy was doing in our
01:23:07.460
country. He made clear he was there to protest her. She was known as lady Al Qaeda, who was in a nearby
01:23:13.120
jail sentenced to 86 years or 87 years in prison after she shot or tried to shoot, uh, our military
01:23:19.320
and, uh, police officers and had been caught with the ingredients for, um, how to make a dirty bomb
01:23:26.240
and all sorts of things. Anyway, he wanted her gone. She's a raving anti-Semite. And so is he.
01:23:30.720
So he comes over here. He takes these guys hostage. Thankfully he got shot and he was the only one,
01:23:35.120
but it turns out he does have a long criminal history in the UK and he was on their terror watch list
01:23:42.840
um, as recently as 2020, he was in be investigated for, uh, possible terror related, uh, problems.
01:23:50.300
And now we learned that the two teenagers they took into custody over in the UK are his sons. So you
01:23:55.980
tell me whether you think this guy should have been led in the country with a criminal history,
01:24:01.840
uh, terrorism sympathies, and possibly also mental illness. Yeah. Well, what does it take to get on the
01:24:09.620
no-fly list? Uh, it sounds like with the record that he had, he should have been on the no-fly list
01:24:16.120
or at least questioned, uh, before getting on a plane to come to this country. Uh, I did a study
01:24:23.880
of anti-Semitism in Europe for, uh, two years. So I'm pretty familiar with the issue. And in Europe,
01:24:31.300
anti-Semitism is as high as it's ever been since World War II. But clearly anti-Semitism
01:24:38.700
played a role in him taking the hostages. And I, I was disappointed in the FBI trying to
01:24:46.660
characterize it as just as effort to free, uh, see it's a Diki. Uh, anti-Semitism is a big
01:24:56.460
problem. It's a big problem in this country. We have to continue to focus on it. And the
01:25:01.460
FBI should very much be focused on it, uh, as well and not putting out statements that sort of
01:25:08.700
sort of, uh, poo-poo the, the, the threat. They have been overly sensitive to somehow
01:25:16.300
besmirching or, or denigrating the Muslim community in, in this country. And believe me,
01:25:25.220
they are very, very quick to complain about it. But this was obviously, uh, had an anti-Semitic
01:25:33.600
aspect to it. They, they corrected their position, but kind of too late. It showed that that's the,
01:25:40.900
that's the default, uh, position, trying not to involve any ethnic group, God forbid.
01:25:49.240
Mm-hmm. Yeah. You clearly have a radical, uh, Muslim in there who's, who hates Jews. I mean,
01:25:54.740
he made that pretty clear right from the start. And there's a real question about whether we have the
01:25:59.920
appetite to go after such suspects, uh, in this administration. I mean, Andy McCarthy over at
01:26:05.600
National Review wrote as follows. How, and he said, the question naturally arises, how energetic
01:26:10.720
is our counterterrorism vetting of aliens seeking entry into the United States now that Biden has
01:26:17.900
countermanded Trump's heightened vetting? You know, cause Biden's first day, he got rid of those
01:26:23.120
executive orders by Trump seeking heightened vetting of guys like this. And Andy said, quote,
01:26:28.300
when it comes to Western governments and jihadism, willful blindness is never fully cured. The
01:26:35.380
pressing question though, is whether it is back with a vengeance. What do you think?
01:26:40.940
Well, you, you never hear discussions of Islamic terrorism. They haven't heard it in the last, uh,
01:26:48.300
year from a government. All you hear about is the threat of domestic terrorism, uh, you know,
01:26:54.920
white supremacists, that sort of thing. I, I haven't seen cases brought against white, white supremacists.
01:27:02.000
Uh, you know, where are the cases, where are the leaks, where are the arrests of these
01:27:07.600
so-called domestic terrorists? And I certainly hope that, uh, you know, it's not the case that they're
01:27:13.200
taking the, their eye off the, uh, the external terrorist threat or the Islamic threat, because that's
01:27:21.680
real, that's ongoing. It's not going away. It's going to be fairly consistent. And, uh, you know,
01:27:29.440
all we have nationally to do these investigations is the FBI. So I hope that they haven't taken their
01:27:37.480
attention away from international terrorism and domestic terrorism, as far as radical Islam is
01:27:45.700
Well, here's, here's the reality. You have the FBI now saying this guy was not on their radar and
01:27:51.120
people want to know why, why not? What he should have been, right? Like there's no way he should
01:27:55.620
have been given a visa and our partners over in the UK should have alerted us to him and we should
01:28:00.980
have been on it as well. Um, so the FBI says not on our radar. And meanwhile, the FBI is ready to go
01:28:08.120
in case any parent at a school board meeting in America, uh, decides to continue speaking without his or
01:28:14.120
her mask because they've been identified by this group as possible domestic terrorists.
01:28:19.540
Merrick Garland refused to stand down on sicking the FBI potentially on these parents, even after
01:28:25.380
that school board association withdrew its letter and said, nevermind, sorry. Now we know the whole
01:28:30.060
thing was generated by the education secretary Cardona anyway. Um, and so that's what the FBI is
01:28:34.620
doing. They're, they're looking at the school board meetings for people who are not so nice in their
01:28:38.700
rhetoric. They may say things to the school board that the school board members may not like,
01:28:42.320
but they don't have this guy on their radar and they don't recognize anti-Semitism when they see it.
01:28:48.740
Right. Yeah, exactly. And, uh, they, they, uh, have become unfortunately very political in the last
01:28:57.960
few years. They're trying to read those, uh, those tea leaves. And, uh, that was not the way it was.
01:29:05.380
The FBI has been a great institution throughout its history, but lately they look so sensitive to,
01:29:14.200
uh, the politics of a particular, uh, situation. That's not what they should be doing. That's not
01:29:22.400
what we want the, the justice department, justice department to be doing, but it looks certainly in
01:29:27.920
recent past, like, uh, they've shifted to being hypersensitive to, uh, the politics of, uh, the,
01:29:38.860
the, the particular administration that's in power.
01:29:44.060
Well, Ray Kelly, you put in a lot of years of service. I think it's 45 years in the NYPD.
01:29:49.560
You're a police commissioner, served honorably and revamped our police department into a world-class
01:29:54.740
counter-terrorism organization. And for that, the city and yours truly, we remain very grateful.
01:30:01.380
Great to speak with you. Thank you for being here.
01:30:04.680
Want to tell you tomorrow? Tristan Harris, household name,
01:30:07.520
thanks to the alarming documentary, The Social Dilemma on Tech. Don't miss it.
01:30:14.340
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.