The Megyn Kelly Show - Free Speech Under Attack and Crime Wave in American Cities, with Greg Lukianoff and Ray Kelly ｜ Ep. 243

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00:00:30.560 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:32.520 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:41.960 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:43.740 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.520 America in disarray

00:00:47.640 as criminal justice reforms lead to violence

00:00:50.800 and our constitutional protections take a hit.

00:00:54.180 A little later in the show,

00:00:55.180 we're going to be joined by former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly

00:00:58.480 about the spike in violence

00:01:00.340 and these soft-on-crime DAs,

00:01:02.500 which are becoming a real problem.

00:01:04.480 Recall efforts in cities already underway.

00:01:06.960 The guy here in New York City,

00:01:08.060 just two weeks in office.

00:01:09.500 We don't have a recall provision,

00:01:11.520 but the citizens are now asking themselves

00:01:13.240 what their other options are

00:01:14.420 as some dozen DAs underneath him,

00:01:16.840 ADAs, leave the office. 1.00

00:01:18.960 There have been something like 70 leaving,

00:01:21.320 I think it's the San Francisco office,

00:01:23.200 50 leaving an office in L.A.,

00:01:25.660 and I could go on and I will in just a bit.

00:01:28.580 But first, free speech is also under siege,

00:01:32.140 and it has been for quite some time,

00:01:34.060 but it's reaching peak concern.

00:01:37.140 Students shout down professors

00:01:38.340 or anyone else who dares to disagree with them.

00:01:41.140 Administrators threaten to take action

00:01:42.700 against professors and students

00:01:44.420 for sometimes unspecified misconduct.

00:01:47.460 They just know it when they see it.

00:01:49.060 They know you're wrong when they see it.

00:01:50.640 One of the latest examples involves a Michigan professor.

00:01:54.560 He's a professor at a school in Michigan

00:01:56.520 whose attempted humor

00:01:58.080 apparently did not sit well with the powers that be.

00:02:00.880 Well, it sat well with me.

00:02:02.580 The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education,

00:02:05.100 you need to know about this group if you don't.

00:02:06.840 FIRE is how we all refer to them,

00:02:08.660 is defending this guy,

00:02:10.040 as they do with so many free speech cases

00:02:11.740 on college campuses for any and all issues.

00:02:14.700 Greg Lukianoff is its president and CEO,

00:02:17.460 and he joins me now.

00:02:18.340 Greg, what a pleasure.

00:02:19.100 I haven't spoken to you since you came

00:02:20.520 on the Kelly file years ago,

00:02:21.740 but thank God for you.

00:02:23.160 Thank God, because you're fighting the good fight.

00:02:26.060 It's great to chat with you again.

00:02:27.220 I really love last time we talked.

00:02:28.920 Yeah, the same.

00:02:30.120 And, you know, everybody knows in general

00:02:32.320 that there's a problem with free speech

00:02:33.520 on college campuses these days,

00:02:34.840 which is now morphed out into our society.

00:02:38.540 But I don't know that they know

00:02:40.020 just how bad it's gotten,

00:02:41.420 how oppressive, how stifling.

00:02:44.260 It's gone from bad to worse.

00:02:45.700 And you are really, as far as I know,

00:02:48.240 the main organization trying to keep an eye on this

00:02:51.080 and not just keep an eye on it,

00:02:52.740 but step in and help those who are under attack

00:02:55.900 for speaking their mind fight back

00:02:57.760 as they get fired, as they get censored,

00:02:59.720 as they potentially get kicked off

00:03:01.120 of university campuses.

00:03:03.060 So let's just start with the broad base.

00:03:04.780 How bad is it now compared to,

00:03:07.260 let's say, where it was 10 years ago?

00:03:09.040 Well, I'd say it reaches the point.

00:03:10.380 It's reached the point where people who say

00:03:11.960 there's nothing to see there

00:03:12.940 and there's no threat to free speech

00:03:14.140 or academic freedom on campus.

00:03:15.900 You probably don't need to listen to them anymore

00:03:17.920 because it's just so overwhelming.

00:03:19.600 I mean, people have been warning about this

00:03:21.400 since the late 1980s.

00:03:24.160 Speech codes actually increased since the 1980s.

00:03:27.200 It took like 150 lawsuits to get them to decrease.

00:03:30.900 And when it comes to threats to professors

00:03:32.800 that we've seen over the past couple of years,

00:03:35.160 we've seen 508 attempts to get professors punished

00:03:38.320 for their research or pedagogy or speech.

00:03:41.120 The very thing that tenure is supposed to protect,

00:03:44.380 we've seen 508 examples of that just since 2015.

00:03:48.100 And that includes, by the way, like 20 just at Stanford,

00:03:52.840 my law school alma mater as well.

00:03:55.600 I think Harvard has like a dozen.

00:03:57.940 And the worst year I've ever seen,

00:03:59.960 and I've been doing this since 2001,

00:04:01.760 the worst year I've ever seen for free speech on campus

00:04:04.320 and academic freedom was last year.

00:04:06.640 And second worst was this year.

00:04:09.160 We saw there was something like 120 attempts

00:04:12.800 to get professors fired in 2020.

00:04:15.020 They're mostly successful.

00:04:16.380 And this includes, by the way,

00:04:17.400 nearly 30 examples of tenured professors,

00:04:20.780 something that was unthinkable for that even to happen once.

00:04:24.120 We've seen about 30, close to 30 of them.

00:04:27.200 You did a survey.

00:04:28.600 Your group fire did a survey that tells the story.

00:04:30.820 It showed that 69% that I should mention,

00:04:34.660 this was apparently the largest survey of student attitudes about free speech on 160 campuses.

00:04:39.300 Over 37,000 students surveyed.

00:04:42.400 And you found that 69% of the students agreed

00:04:45.680 that if a professor says something the students find offensive,

00:04:49.340 he or she should be reported to the university.

00:04:52.980 They should be reported.

00:04:53.880 And 60% agreed the same for if a student says something that other students find offensive.

00:04:58.840 They ought to be reported.

00:05:01.140 What?

00:05:01.340 Yeah, no.

00:05:03.020 And that's something that I remember when we first started seeing that stat come up

00:05:06.200 when we did smaller surveys even 10 years ago.

00:05:09.180 And for the older people, you know, in my organization, like me, for example,

00:05:12.560 when we first saw students say, you know, like,

00:05:16.140 I don't speak up in class because I'm afraid I'll get reported.

00:05:19.380 And I remember having younger employees.

00:05:21.400 And it was like something like 9% of them were saying that they don't speak up in class

00:05:24.940 because they're afraid of actually getting reported to the university.

00:05:27.600 And we're like, that's unheard of.

00:05:29.280 Like, we never thought about stuff like that when we were in school.

00:05:33.640 That's nuts.

00:05:35.180 And this is so it's gotten even worse since then.

00:05:38.000 And students get in trouble.

00:05:39.540 People, students were already getting in trouble for pretty tame speech back in,

00:05:43.200 back in when I started back in 2001.

00:05:45.320 But it has gotten so much worse.

00:05:47.220 We even have a case at UC, University of Chicago, Illinois,

00:05:51.720 where a professor was actually taught in an anti-discrimination case.

00:05:56.480 He was talking about a scenario that involved the use of racial epithets.

00:06:00.220 And if you're doing anti-discrimination law, a lot of the cases involve racial epithets.

00:06:04.060 But in order to be nice to his students and not to offend anybody,

00:06:06.900 he actually used euphemisms.

00:06:10.060 He just put B blank and N blank and then explained that referring to epithets for students.

00:06:15.080 They threw the book at this guy as as if he had really broken a rule,

00:06:19.740 even though he was trying to be as inoffensive as possible to his students.

00:06:23.620 How are you supposed to communicate what the offensive word was without doing like N blank?

00:06:28.420 I mean, you know, what what are you supposed to say?

00:06:31.300 And up until very recently, like we made this very sensible decision for in academia

00:06:37.440 that if you're referring to a word saying it is not the same thing as, for example,

00:06:42.560 calling someone that's just common sense.

00:06:44.760 But even that we've seen dozens of cases where a professor there was a professor even at the

00:06:48.700 new school who was explaining that it took a lot of temerity because there was a book called

00:06:53.100 Not Your Negro. 1.00

00:06:54.700 But there was a book there was a movie called Not Your Negro about the life of James Baldwin.

00:07:00.300 And the professor pointed out accurately that that's not what James Baldwin said.

00:07:04.320 And it takes a lot of temerity to correct someone as great as James Baldwin.

00:07:09.040 And that got her.

00:07:10.220 They threw the book at her as well. 0.72

00:07:11.440 We defended her successfully in that case.

00:07:13.800 You know, we Larry Elder was on the show not long ago talking about his great movie,

00:07:17.860 Uncle Tom, and he talked about his dad who grew up in Jim Crow South and had been called

00:07:24.220 the N word.

00:07:24.860 N word and and Larry said the N word in saying what had been, you know, thrown at his dad.

00:07:31.580 And we actually had this debate internally on my show.

00:07:34.280 I'm like, can we air that?

00:07:36.140 You know, it's a black man talking about how his black father was called that word.

00:07:40.240 Yeah.

00:07:40.680 And in the end, I said, I it is not my place to share to censor Larry Elder's story about

00:07:48.000 the racism his own dad was subjected to.

00:07:50.920 We didn't have any trouble as a result, but I'm not on a college campus.

00:07:55.420 If Larry himself, a black man, had stood up and said that in front of a class as a professor,

00:08:00.900 he he would have gotten in trouble.

00:08:02.280 Race doesn't save you.

00:08:03.460 Gender doesn't save you. 1.00

00:08:04.780 There are certain words and it's not just the N word.

00:08:07.060 That's the most extreme example.

00:08:08.620 There's a lot of other things.

00:08:09.560 Yeah.

00:08:11.640 And one of the things that's also so stunning about this, I wrote like a very long piece

00:08:15.200 for Reason magazine.

00:08:16.100 It was a good almost six thousand word piece explaining how bad things have gotten in historical

00:08:22.020 context.

00:08:23.320 And one thing that's really astounding about a place like Stanford that could have 20

00:08:26.820 attempts to get professors shut up or Harvard, where there was more than a dozen.

00:08:31.340 And that's just professors here.

00:08:32.740 Students try to get each other in trouble all the time.

00:08:35.200 There was only something like three percent of the entire faculty at Harvard self-identify

00:08:40.020 as any kind of conservative.

00:08:41.760 So it's like there's already incredibly low viewpoint diversity among professors.

00:08:45.460 It's even lower among administrators.

00:08:47.700 Yet, nonetheless, you are still on a regular basis trying to get professors in trouble,

00:08:52.300 students in trouble.

00:08:53.580 It really has gotten much worse than I ever feared it would get, much faster than I ever

00:08:58.080 feared it would get.

00:08:58.600 My gosh, right, because I remember reading the FIRE survey and it said four out of five

00:09:03.300 students, 83 percent self-censor their own viewpoints.

00:09:06.580 They're like, no way.

00:09:07.480 I know what not to say.

00:09:09.140 One in five censor themselves often.

00:09:12.260 And I thought, God, that's awful.

00:09:13.620 And then when I read the next paragraph about how, well, they're the ones reporting each other

00:09:18.080 and reporting on their professors.

00:09:19.680 I'm like, well, they created this bed.

00:09:22.000 Now they have to lie in it.

00:09:23.100 You know, it's like you should at least be taking a stand for the ability to express your

00:09:27.560 own opinion, even though some might find it offensive if you want us to care about these

00:09:34.280 oppressive college environments.

00:09:35.760 But they're not.

00:09:36.380 They're kind of on board with the censorship.

00:09:38.300 Well, to be fair, that's what they're being taught.

00:09:40.920 One of the things that I do is I always give this this list of five things that everybody

00:09:44.940 should run to their alma mater, ask their president to do the following things.

00:09:48.580 And one of the most basic ones on that five list is, of course, stand up for professors,

00:09:52.360 get rid of your speech codes, pull your students.

00:09:54.300 But one of them is just explain freedom of speech in the orientation.

00:09:58.980 They explain things like the bias-related incident program, which is one of the main tools for

00:10:03.020 students reporting on each other and reporting on professors.

00:10:06.340 A lot of times they'll explain the speech code, but they don't explain this kind of sophisticated

00:10:10.780 democratic idea of freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech, even when it's offensive.

00:10:15.820 And so I have some sympathy for these students because they're doing what they have been told

00:10:20.480 and they can't know things that they've never been taught.

00:10:23.620 And in K through 12, and in higher education, there's a much greater sense that you have

00:10:28.680 something much more like a right not to be offended than explaining the deep wisdom of

00:10:33.520 freedom of speech.

00:10:35.560 You're not wrong.

00:10:36.760 I want to stay on college campuses, but I'll give you a story as an aside.

00:10:39.480 I told this once before about my daughter, who's now 10, and we've since pulled our kids

00:10:44.380 from these New York City private schools, which are just around the bend on all these issues.

00:10:48.220 Um, so we found better places to raise them and place them in terms of education.

00:10:53.760 But anyway, last year she was in fourth grade in the city and they were discussing the Derek

00:10:58.400 Chauvin verdict, you know, the, the police officer who had killed George Floyd.

00:11:02.420 And these are fourth grade girls.

00:11:04.080 It was an all girls school.

00:11:04.920 They handed out a Newzilla article to the girl saying, read the article about what happened

00:11:08.760 in the case.

00:11:09.320 And then let's discuss.

00:11:11.340 And so my daughter's information came from the article and so did all the other girls

00:11:15.120 information.

00:11:16.340 And apparently it was a pretty balanced piece because I guess they were saying this.

00:11:20.540 The teacher stood up and said, there's a massive problem in America with police killing unarmed

00:11:24.860 black men.

00:11:25.580 Now, that's not true.

00:11:26.480 That's an overstatement of the problem.

00:11:27.780 It is a problem.

00:11:28.620 And when it, whenever a cop kills an unarmed black man, that's not good, black or white,

00:11:33.260 but to state it's a massive problem is not true.

00:11:35.720 In any event, she stated it and one of the other little girls said, well, wasn't George

00:11:40.840 Floyd resisting arrest?

00:11:43.200 And the teacher said they always blame the victim.

00:11:46.220 OK, as if that's not an OK factor raise.

00:11:48.820 Right.

00:11:49.200 So then my daughter said, wasn't George Floyd on a lot of drugs at the time he died?

00:11:56.220 And that, of course, was a factor that the defense argued a lot, you know, that the drugs

00:12:01.440 actually were the were the cause of the death and so on.

00:12:03.340 So great.

00:12:04.060 Let's debate it.

00:12:04.680 Right.

00:12:04.820 Let's get into it.

00:12:06.200 The teacher said to the girls, this conversation is making me uncomfortable and I'm shutting 0.55

00:12:11.960 it down right now.

00:12:13.800 So that's what's happening.

00:12:14.960 That's just one story in our little school.

00:12:16.420 But in the K through 12 education system before they even get to the college now, Greg, you

00:12:21.600 know, they're they're not teaching critical thinking.

00:12:24.420 They're not teaching the full fledged debate of ideas, the excitement of hearing disagreement

00:12:29.220 with your own points of view and learning and defending and exploring their teaching.

00:12:34.340 I'm uncomfortable with your opinion.

00:12:37.580 So you have to be quiet and the conversation's over.

00:12:40.340 And that's why I'm worried that this is not going to be a problem that's going to go away

00:12:45.360 fast.

00:12:45.760 That essentially what we're teaching kids in K through 12 with regards to freedom of speech

00:12:50.200 and sort of democratic norms is and what we started teaching them even 20 years ago is

00:12:55.260 what we're seeing now.

00:12:56.300 And I'm not seeing a big move to reform.

00:12:59.660 I'm not seeing I see a push sometimes from Republicans to reform what's going on in K 0.98

00:13:05.200 through 12.

00:13:05.580 And sometimes those are unconstitutional, too.

00:13:07.660 So it's been it's been a tough, tough discussion.

00:13:10.260 But I do think that our expectations, you know, like creating an expectation that if you bring

00:13:15.840 up a political topic that there isn't going to be healthy back and forth and debate around

00:13:20.660 it, that's fundamentally undemocratic.

00:13:22.720 And you look at what's going on in higher education.

00:13:27.120 There is so much of what I call intermediated relationships that essentially rather than have

00:13:32.000 that argument with someone in your class, if you're a Republican or a Democrat, you go and

00:13:36.040 report them to the bias related incident program because you've been trained since you were young

00:13:40.260 to always go to, quote unquote, an adult when you have these kind of problems.

00:13:43.940 And when you get to corporations, people go to H.R., for example.

00:13:47.680 Now, the problem with that is that's not teaching people the habits of living in a

00:13:51.420 democratic society.

00:13:52.440 That's making them go to power all the time. 0.97

00:13:54.660 And that's just fundamentally it should be antithetical to the way we teach.

00:13:58.380 Yet we're training young people in this way of always having intermediated discussions.

00:14:03.520 Oh, you write about this a lot.

00:14:06.940 And I have been subjected to this line.

00:14:08.820 I I've spoken at many universities, Stanford, Yale.

00:14:13.360 I could go on.

00:14:14.620 But the students do now believe and I've seen this just myself.

00:14:18.740 I say to them every time words are not violence.

00:14:22.700 They're not violence.

00:14:24.940 And you've written basically the right there.

00:14:27.220 They're a tool to avoid violence.

00:14:28.540 That's sort of why we have the First Amendment. 0.99

00:14:30.400 And I'd love to get you to expand on that, because we hear that all the time from young

00:14:34.540 people.

00:14:35.000 Oh, yeah.

00:14:35.680 Speech is violence.

00:14:37.360 The thing that I think is amazing is I've seen students come up with this and I've watched

00:14:41.100 professors make this argument as if it's a sophisticated, cutting edge argument.

00:14:45.380 But we now understand that words can be hurtful and that could be traumatic.

00:14:49.460 And therefore, words are the same things as violence.

00:14:51.620 And it's just like so you live in a world where you seriously think that John Stuart Mill was

00:14:55.780 incapable of thinking of the fact that words can sometimes hurt.

00:14:58.580 Like, what do you think Sticks and Stones was about?

00:15:03.460 Sticks and Stones would make no sense if words never hurt.

00:15:06.280 It's something you teach children to make them hurt less.

00:15:09.760 And so the way I open up all of my talks now is I talk about the bad rap that free speech

00:15:14.920 has gotten and about how people will argue that speech is violence and that speech is

00:15:20.620 only the bully, the bigot and the robber bearer and care about freedom of speech are my

00:15:25.640 three B's. And I go in and have to explain that in a democratic society, 50% plus gets to decide

00:15:35.660 who gets to talk. And before they were democratic societies, the rich and powerful

00:15:42.340 who are always protected because they're rich and powerful.

00:15:45.840 So this argument that only the rich and powerful and only the bigots and the bullies are protected

00:15:50.180 by freedom of speech is nonsense. You only need freedom of speech and a First Amendment to protect

00:15:55.860 things that aren't popular with the majority because the majority has majority majority rule.

00:16:00.580 And this is this is this is civics 101. The fact that students are like, wow, I never really thought

00:16:05.760 that way is mind blowing me. And the idea that they're making the argument that speech is violence.

00:16:11.720 I'm like, yes, that is an ancient idea. It's an ancient, very bad idea baked in baked into the

00:16:19.340 whole idea of freedom of speech is that we now settle our disputes through argumentation.

00:16:23.160 And given it's about like how we rule our society, of course, it's going to be ugly. It's literally

00:16:28.060 replacing the way we have dealt with conflict in the past, which was usually through violence

00:16:33.680 and coercion. So, of course, it's intense. It's replacement for violence. But freedom of speech

00:16:38.260 is one of the best inventions in human history for innovation, for peace, which is very badly

00:16:45.660 underappreciated and, of course, absolutely essential to having a democracy in the first place.

00:16:50.920 This I should have mentioned this up top, but you are also co-author of Cuddling of the American

00:16:55.420 Mind with Jonathan Haidt, which is one of the most famous books in the past 10, 15 years. I mean,

00:17:00.280 it's just everybody talks about it now because it was prescient. It was spot on. And there's actually

00:17:06.340 now an update to it, which you can get. They've published it online. But if you haven't read it,

00:17:11.000 read it and read the update, the afterward. But this is from the book. I've been reading so much

00:17:17.640 of your stuff that, forgive me if this isn't from the actual book or the afterward, but I think it's

00:17:22.000 from the actual principal work. You write, the idea that we should campaign against hurtful speech

00:17:27.140 among adults arises from a failure to understand that free speech is our chosen method of resolving

00:17:32.180 disagreements, using words rather than weapons. Open debate is our enlightened means of determining

00:17:39.480 nothing less than how we order our society, what is true and what is false, what wars we should fight,

00:17:45.980 what policies we should pass. And you go on and you write this. I love this part being this is so

00:17:52.080 this is profound. Being a citizen in a democratic republic is supposed to be challenging. It's

00:17:59.920 supposed to ask something of its citizens. It requires a certain minimal toughness and commitment

00:18:06.680 to self-governing to become informed about difficult issues and to argue, organize and vote accordingly.

00:18:15.340 Oh, my God. Yes, I'm putting that out and putting it over my desk. And you'll make a great argument,

00:18:20.780 which is the only other model is authoritarianism. So explain that.

00:18:26.700 Well, that essentially like this, this idea that, you know, speech is speech of violence is

00:18:31.540 essentially forgetting the fact that this is a tool for exolving conflict. And this is something

00:18:39.420 that Jonathan Rauch wrote, wrote a lot about that. The normal model for human society is what he calls

00:18:45.140 the fundamentalist model. And he doesn't mean religious fundamentalists. He means there's someone in

00:18:48.840 charge who gets to decide what is true and what is not. The enlightenment to a degree, and this is one

00:18:53.800 of the reasons why I think it gets a little bit of a bad rap, was the discovery of ignorance, of

00:18:58.080 actually going, wait a second, all this stuff that we thought was absolutely true, and all the shamans and

00:19:02.900 chiefs had told us was true, when you start to test it, it actually, it's completely false. And it's one of the

00:19:09.100 things that I do think is funny, is that sometimes we free speech defenders can get sort of like

00:19:13.760 labeled as paternalistic or arrogant. And while that might be, it might be true individually,

00:19:19.340 ultimately, the freedom of speech is about a very humble idea that we are all wrong all the time,

00:19:26.100 our individual biases are going to get us, in some cases, nowhere, in some cases, worse than nowhere.

00:19:32.380 There's a humility to being in favor of freedom of speech, which is that you always take seriously the

00:19:37.940 possibility, you might be wrong. And there's an arrogance to anyone who thinks that they are, that they can

00:19:44.660 be the perfect censor. Because when you're saying, like, I can actually eliminate discussion on this

00:19:50.540 topic, if I don't like it, you are putting yourself in the position of the final arbiter of truth, which is a

00:19:55.920 position that no person should ever take on entirely themselves.

00:19:59.680 That's exactly right. And if you want that, what you really are asking for is authoritarianism over you,

00:20:06.540 because you won't be the ultimate arbiter, somebody will be more powerful than you are.

00:20:10.440 And and why should they get to decide what capital T truth is, you might like it, for example, to get

00:20:16.220 political in the Joe Biden era, and not so much during the Trump era. Like, that's generally why we

00:20:20.680 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

00:20:26.260 environments and in a country in which it was kind of fun to say subversive things and to hear other

00:20:34.040 people's controversial views and debate them openly and have controversial figures come on campus and

00:20:40.540 sit and listen and then tear them apart. Great, let's do that. But just to have that intellectual

00:20:45.940 stimulation and figure out how you feel about it.

00:20:49.920 Yeah, I used what I used to say, and it sounds very old fashioned now. But being offended is what

00:20:54.900 happens when you have your deepest beliefs challenged. And if you make it through four years or five years,

00:20:59.400 in this case, of college, without that happening, you should demand your money back.

00:21:04.420 I like that. I hadn't heard that. But I like I mean, there's so much to go over with you. My

00:21:08.220 God, I could spend all day doing this. There's so many fun cases. Well, sorry, they're fun to talk

00:21:12.660 about, but they're not fun for the people involved. And I do want to get to that case out of Detroit

00:21:17.320 at Ferris University, because that poor professor is getting it. And the audience needs to know what's

00:21:21.840 being done to this guy. Greg, by the way, was the guy he was on the Yale campus. Remember when the

00:21:27.200 students were shouting down the professor over the Halloween costumes? He was there. He's the one

00:21:32.920 who took that video that we've all seen. I'm going to get into that. I'm going to get into really what

00:21:37.440 the causes are and how overprotective parenting is in part to blame for this problem. Don't miss

00:21:43.080 any of today's discussion. So excited to be bringing you, Greg. Don't go away.

00:21:47.020 Free speech and religion at the center of Supreme Court arguments yesterday as the justices considered

00:21:59.720 whether Boston, the city of Boston, violated the First Amendment when it refused a request

00:22:05.540 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

00:22:45.920 and this goes back to cases going back decades that it's considered to be viewpoint discrimination,

00:22:51.540 which is the highest sin you can commit in First Amendment land if you allow every other viewpoint,

00:22:59.520 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

00:23:13.200 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

00:25:41.540 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 1.00

00:26:02.740 dick cocksucker of an administrator is going to tell me how to teach my classes because I'm a 0.99

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 1.00

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 0.61

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 0.98

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 0.98

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 0.93

00:40:53.660 how we actually talk.

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 1.00

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

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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.

00:43:08.580 Explain.

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 1.00

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.

00:47:37.380 Don't go away.

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 0.99

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 0.54

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.

00:51:40.480 Mm-hmm. The Ferguson effect.

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 0.97

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 1.00

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 0.99

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, 1.00

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 0.56

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 0.88

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.

01:07:59.360 Go f*** yourself. 1.00

01:08:00.760 What'd you do? You pushed the woman on the tracks?

01:08:02.920 Yeah, because I'm God. Yes, I did.

01:08:04.660 Why?

01:08:05.260 Because I'm God. I can do it.

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 0.90

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 1.00

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

01:20:43.820 a store?

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

01:21:12.920 that memo.

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

01:21:21.960 law. We'll find out.

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, 1.00

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 0.97

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

01:27:45.300 concerned.

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.

01:30:03.060 Thank you, Megan. Great to be with you.

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.

01:30:24.740 Thanks for listening to the cabin.

01:30:32.380 I'll see you next time.

The Megyn Kelly Show - January 19, 2022

Free Speech Under Attack and Crime Wave in American Cities, with Greg Lukianoff and Ray Kelly ｜ Ep. 243

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