Glenn Greenwald on Trump and the media, MSNBC, and Edward Snowden ｜ Ep. 1
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 2 minutes
Words per Minute
194.00499
Summary
In this episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, Megynkelian talks about why she created the show, why she s sick and tired of the news, and why she decided to take matters into her own hands.
Transcript
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest and provocative conversations.
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Hey everybody, I'm Megyn Kelly and welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
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So glad you're here with me, so glad you're listening.
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We're doing audio for now, we may add some video at some point.
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You know, the audio is kind of more intimate just to start with.
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And I thought I'd just start by telling you why I'm here, right?
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And the reason really is I am deeply concerned.
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I'm concerned about what's happening to our country, to our media and to us.
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You know, the press of which I've been a part for many years now
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I feel like it has abandoned any semblance of objectivity.
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And just having the luxury of being just a consumer for the past couple of years,
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You know, I feel like the COVID pandemic really brought it home.
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Because like you, I was sitting at my house thinking,
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oh wow, you know, like, I really need to have honest information about this.
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You know, the truth is, I didn't trust Trump to give it to me straight.
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And I didn't trust the media to give it to me straight either.
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And I actually sent out a tweet saying something like that.
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And some of the sort of mainstream elite journalists who I know DMed me saying,
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Because most of the media today expresses fealty to one side or the other,
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And now it's fealty to the toxic religion of wokeness,
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you know, policing people's words and their thoughts.
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in which my only fealty will be to the audience and to the truth.
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You know, I'm sick and tired of the news today.
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And I hope to be a place that you can come for information that you trust, right?
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That you know I'm not in the bag for either side or for anybody.
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And a place in which opinions, even heterodox opinions,
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And that you guys are sophisticated enough and smart enough
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So we are not about the silencing of viewpoints here at this show.
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And we hope you'll stay along with us for the ride.
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This is the part of the show where I have to read an ad or two.
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And it's the reason you get to get the show for free.
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And it's the very first time I've ever done it.
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My executive producer, Steve Krakauer, is with me.
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And so, you know, we'll see how it goes, Steve.
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And now, without further ado, our very first guest here on The Megyn Kelly Show, Glenn
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You may or may not know him, but he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a really interesting
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Like he was more aligned, I would say, with progressives.
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And then through a series of life events, started to realize maybe he wasn't where he
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He's been fearless in his reporting, and he will take on anybody on any charge.
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And I think you're going to find him and his discussion about the media in 2020 really
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Glenn Greenwald, thank you so much for being here.
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You first splashed onto the scene in my world when you broke one of the biggest stories of
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You were working for The Guardian, and you broke the story of the NSA spying scandal,
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the whole Edward Snowden, and are they listening to us?
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And it turned into, well, we're only collecting the metadata of people's phone calls.
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We're not actually listening to the phone calls.
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And so people, you know, maybe don't remember the whole thing.
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But you were the guy who broke that story for which Edward Snowden is basically still on
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And I just want to go back, because I wonder, when you get a scoop as big as that, and he's
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coming to you and sort of saying, this is what I'd like you to do, was it exciting?
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I mean, I had, prior to his coming to me, you know, he anonymously emailed me at the end
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of 2012, I had spent two or three years, or even a little longer, maybe, working as a
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journalist, columnist, blogger, concerned about the NSA, writing a lot about the NSA,
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And it was very difficult work, because it was so opaque.
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There was very little we knew about what was happening within this agency.
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And the little tidbits we were getting were making me very concerned as somebody very
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devoted to privacy rights and limited government, that probably the invasiveness was much greater
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So when he came to me as somebody who said, not only do I have the only top secret documents
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ever to leak from this agency, I have an enormous number of them, you know, hundreds of thousands,
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However, I knew on the one hand, it was going to be this unique journalistic opportunity,
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kind of like the story of a generation, be able to shine light on the most secretive
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agency within the world's most powerful government.
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But I also knew that precisely for that reason, that there had never been a leak like this.
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Probably going back to the Pentagon papers, but because it was from the NSA, this was even
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And because of my position in the media ecosystem, right, I was with The Guardian, but I was kind
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of like a calmness of The Guardian only for about eight months.
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It was a riskier position to be in, to do a story this sensitive and this threatening
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And then Snowden, you know, the first thing he wanted before he was really willing to do
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anything was for me to fly halfway across the world to Hong Kong, where he had gone in
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order to safely work with journalists, which had a lot of intrigue to it, had a lot of tension
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We didn't know what the Chinese government or the local Hong Kong authorities knew about
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And obviously, when you're getting hundreds of thousands of proxy documents from a military
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But also, you know, that's why I went into journalism in the first place is to do those
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He's with Putin now in Russia, but I'm sure would like to come back and is pushing for a
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And Trump actually just said he'll consider it.
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You know, what happened this month was the Ninth Circuit ruled that program to be illegal.
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I mean, Snowden was effectively justified or vindicated in some sense because the program
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was ruled illegal and his conduct was discussed favorably by the court.
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But, you know, I don't know if they're just all neocons or what, but the people who really are
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still upset with him, like my old pal Mark Thiessen of the Washington Post and AEI would
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say, you know, he endangered, he endangered people.
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He's not a whistleblower because he should have taken it to lawmakers.
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You know, he he hurt people who are helping the United States, our allies.
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And this all boiled down to us after 9-11 needing to see where the terrorists and who the
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And, you know, they looked at the metadata only.
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They didn't look at your private phone calls, which doesn't hurt anybody if they just see
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I mean, first of all, I think there's this very interesting split on the right that just
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reveals of people who kind of started off as 9-11 war on terror warriors and remained
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But there's a big part of the Republican Party, obviously led by Trump, right?
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When he ran in 2016, he ran in opposition to the war in Iraq and to like general notions
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Snowden's biggest advocates right now aren't just the ACLU, but Senator Rand Paul and Congressman
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People, Thomas Massey, who are saying that he deserves a pardon, that he's a hero.
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So I think there's this split on the right that recognizes that we allow the government
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I mean, one of the philosophies of right wing politics in the United States has always
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been we need to protect individual liberty from incursions by a powerful central government
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that can invade our lives in too extreme of a way.
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And having them even, let's set aside the debate about whether they're really listening
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to our calls, because there's a lot of evidence that they are.
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But even if they're only listening to, quote, just our metadata, think how much that reveals
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Like you're a woman and you're considering an abortion, you call an abortion clinic.
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You don't really need to know what you say on that call.
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You just need to know that you called that abortion clinic or you call a drug counseling
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hotline or a suicide hotline or an HIV specialist, or you're talking to someone who's not your
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Metadata is incredibly revealing to create a picture about who you are.
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Unless we're doing something that a court says justifies them being suspicious about us.
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That was never supposed to be the role of the government.
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So it's one of those kind of controversies, Megan, where it's very unique in that a lot of the
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support we got came from the right and then came from the left.
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But there was also a lot of the opposition came from the part of the right that you described,
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but then also part of the left that was angry that we were making President Obama look bad.
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It was one of the least partisan controversies that has existed in years.
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Whereas it's a lot of conservatives who care about individual rights and limited government
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Well, I think people can understand that there, in a way, is a sliding scale.
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You know, when you're within a year or two of a massive terrorist attack on domestic soil,
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I think most people are willing to shift the balance a bit on their civil liberties
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to letting the government have more power and do what it needs to do to stop another attack.
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But then, you know, the more time that passes, the less tolerant I think the American people
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will be because it's not necessarily the solution long term.
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And so, you know, I think now is a good time to have the debate about how we feel about this guy
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I think certainly Republicans are willing to have that debate now.
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I think the biggest objection will be what message does it send to others if he gets a pardon?
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I mean, the reality, though, you know, he has been punished, right?
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He was trying to transit through Russia on his way to Latin America.
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And they, you know, the Obama State Department invalidated his passport.
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It's a country with which he has no connection.
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He's been separated from his family for seven years from his own country.
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That's a pretty big price to pay, you know, seven years of exile.
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So even if you think that he should be punished, notwithstanding that he exposed illegal and unconstitutional acts
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on the part of the government, which seems like a weird thing to say about somebody who did,
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but even if you think he should be punished, it kind of has been.
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Because if Trump wants to pardon him, not that...
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I don't know if Trump even thinks about, you know, PR and how it gets covered in this day and age,
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but you'd need some PR cover for why it's just.
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And the time in exile is probably a decent one.
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You know, I look at that now just, you know, from the perspective of 2020,
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I mean, that is truly fearless journalism on your part.
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But to me, it's so funny, Glenn, because I think that's what most of the mainstream journalists think they're doing now.
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They think they're little mini Glenn Greenwalds, and that they're out there exposing the truth,
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speaking truth to power, you know, the Washington Post with democracy dies in darkness,
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which I always laugh at because I'm like, well, I don't remember you, you know, with a democracy dies in darkness
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when Barack Obama had his pen and his phone and was issuing these executive orders every other week.
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So what, I mean, what's your take on this sort of, you know, resistance journalism
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and adherence to a cause at all costs going on today?
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I really find it so repellent for so many reasons.
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You know, first of all, the Obama administration was probably the single most menacing administration
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Just, you know, as one example, they prosecuted more sources and whistleblowers under the Espionage Act,
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this 1917 statue enacted by Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent over the U.S. involvement in World War I,
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And very few people in the media, you know, where was the Washington Post chaining its motto
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There were some journalists saying, look, this is a huge threat to investigative journalism.
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What's happening, this kind of threat to our sources, as you know, your colleague, James Rosen,
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the Obama Justice Department under Eric Holder subpoenaed not just his phone records,
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but his parents in order to find out who his source was for a story.
00:16:14.080
I couldn't leave Brazil for a year and a half, almost a year and a half during that senator reporting
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because the Justice Department was saying, if you leave Brazil, there's a good chance we're going to arrest you.
00:16:23.200
Well, at least subpoena you, but we're probably going to arrest you.
00:16:25.860
So that's number one, is there were all kinds of very grave and real threats to press freedom
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taking place during the Obama administration, and there was no hashtag resistance or media denunciations
00:16:38.560
except in very small sectors of the media, which is why I don't take very seriously what they're saying now.
00:16:44.040
Secondly, if you look at what they claim are the attacks on press freedom, it's usually things like Trump posted some insult,
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some infantile insult about like Chuck Todd and Wolf Blitzer or, you know, said something mean to Jim Acosta.
00:17:06.920
You know, like I did reporting all last year in Brazil, and the government, the president himself,
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threatened repeatedly to imprison me, and they actually tried to indict me.
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Being insulted by Trump on Twitter is not an attack on press freedom.
00:17:25.900
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They forge your signature on a quick claim deed.
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Then you use code radio for 30 free days of protection.
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First of all, there's a profit model to it, right?
00:19:26.200
Like the New York Times was really struggling financially and became a really profitable
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Just as an aside, let me tell you, at the end of Obama's second term, I was at the White
00:19:42.960
And, you know, they invite the journalists for one of those.
00:19:45.080
And I saw Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC and I said, hey, how you doing?
00:19:49.560
And he said, and I quote, I am on a sinking ship known as MSNBC.
00:20:05.040
He, I mean, yeah, I have friends at MSNBC who were on the verge of losing their jobs because
00:20:14.180
Obama was treated as this kind of like quiet savior figure, which isn't very exciting.
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You need to get people revved up and angry in order to get them to watch cable news.
00:20:27.500
And so Trump was the savior by being able to turn him into this kind of like existential threat to the
00:20:34.260
And so there is a real monetary and career incentive to wildly exaggerate the threat that
00:20:43.340
It was it's become a huge profit model for media to pretend that they're kind of on the
00:20:50.220
front lines of, you know, this unprecedented assault on democracy by this fascist dictator.
00:20:57.620
Now they're essentially treating him almost like a like a as a Hitler figure.
00:21:01.840
But I also think, you know, there's that cynical motive, which is we make more money
00:21:06.480
getting people afraid, afraid and revved up with adrenaline.
00:21:10.180
But I think that like one of the things that has happened, which I find really disturbing
00:21:13.720
is that because journalists spend so much of their time on social media now, there's so
00:21:21.820
Nuance gets you canceled on social media or at least ignored.
00:21:24.940
What gets you attention on social media, what gets you applause from your colleagues is
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And I think that when you stay on social media for long enough time, as they do, they start
00:21:36.880
it's kind of like a one of the most potent weapons of groupthink ever invented.
00:21:44.120
So if you keep hearing enough times that Trump is Hitler, even though there's a cynical motive
00:21:49.120
to say it, which is that people will watch your show or donate to your blog or follow
00:21:54.820
I think there's also like almost a sincere it's like a collective mania that takes place
00:22:00.920
that they keep feeding on one another and making themselves increasingly more unhinged.
00:22:07.200
Well, and then there's no there's no accountability.
00:22:10.300
They get they get financially rewarded for going after him nonstop, no matter how small
00:22:17.900
I mean, Russiagate is the best example of that.
00:22:21.000
You know, like look at Rachel Maddow, what she did during Russiagate.
00:22:28.560
She went on every night and like talk about the Steele dossier as though it were real,
00:22:34.820
It was obvious in the beginning it was a fraud, but it became increasingly obvious.
00:22:38.040
And she continued to push it, which is, you know, like essentially a document that says
00:22:42.360
this foreign power has taken over and infiltrated American institutions.
00:22:46.880
Not only that, every single completely unhinged conspiracy theory that can like really generate
00:22:52.540
hysteria among the population about a nuclear power in Moscow, she promoted.
00:22:57.980
I mean, she went on one night practically in tears, claimed that Russia had seized control
00:23:03.440
of the heating system of the United States at a time when it was like negative 40 degrees
00:23:08.660
And she was like, what would you and your family do if the Kremlin shut off the heat when
00:23:15.000
You know, just the kind of it's almost like Alex Jones or QAnon level conspiracies.
00:23:20.740
But because it's serving an agenda that the mainstream press has decided is just exactly
00:23:28.320
Not only is there no accountability, there's just lots of benefits.
00:23:30.740
She's become, you know, her ratings just went through the roof the more she fed her audience
00:23:37.940
I mean, I used to be at nine on Fox and she was at nine on MSNBC and we crushed her all
00:23:45.320
But we did have an adherence to fact on the show, good or bad for Republicans, good or
00:23:54.820
I just see some clips from them is just freewheeling.
00:24:01.520
And and if you're a reporter or a fact witness who has a different story to tell, you get
00:24:08.760
And speaking of Lawrence O'Donnell, he tweeted out not long ago that anyone defending Trump
00:24:15.460
and I think it was either on Russiagate or Ukraine, anyone defending Trump is a liar and
00:24:24.540
I mean, or, you know, you're either a liar and or a racist.
00:24:28.680
I mean, obviously, I have experience personally because I used to be really good friends with
00:24:31.700
Rachel Maddow before she got on MSNBC show when she was on Air America.
00:24:37.640
We used to go on all the time, used to bash the Democrats from the left about how they
00:24:46.780
And same with Chris Hayes, who's been a longtime friend of mine who has a theater cox show on
00:24:55.260
And I used to go on their both of their shows all the time, all the time, you know, to kind
00:25:02.520
of feed the audience whatever they felt like they wanted to have them fed.
00:25:07.640
And then once I became a critic of Russiagate, it just, I basically got banned from the network,
00:25:12.220
especially because I became a critic of their coverage of it.
00:25:15.080
And I find that so interesting because I know, like, I, you know, I didn't, I'd never watched
00:25:19.120
like any cable show constantly, but like, I would see your show and I know that you would
00:25:22.860
love one of the things you like best, probably because of your lawyer background, probably
00:25:26.060
because your personality is you would like to invite people on your show who were, had an
00:25:31.320
opinion different than yours so that you could kick the tires on the underlying rationale.
00:25:35.780
Like, it's so boring to just have people on constantly affirming your own assumptions
00:25:42.640
They completely backballed anyone who was a critic.
00:25:58.620
Like I have producers who tried to book me and they get told, no, he's on the no book list.
00:26:03.040
And that's not even for, that's for your opinion that they covered Russiagate wrong,
00:26:13.240
And like, and you know, the thing is there were other journalists dissenting on Russiagate,
00:26:19.920
you know, with a lot of accomplishments and credentials.
00:26:21.740
Like for example, Matt Taibbi, who is a longtime popular journalist from Rolling Stone, who did
00:26:30.480
He was beloved by liberals on the left, but he lived in Russia for, I think, a decade
00:26:34.920
or so, speaks the language and understood from the start that this was all hysteria about
00:26:40.020
Putin and Moscow and the Kremlin and said so when he got banned.
00:26:43.360
I don't think he's been on MSNBC in about five years either.
00:26:48.440
Not just that there's this prevailing orthodoxy, but that they will never allow anyone to question
00:26:55.260
or challenge them exactly because what Lawrence O'Donnell said, if you at all are perceived
00:26:58.960
as defending Trump, even if you don't like Trump ideologically or personally, but if
00:27:03.020
you say anything that pushes back against whatever anti-Trump narrative has been concocted,
00:27:08.060
you're a liar and a racist and therefore not welcoming good company.
00:27:10.880
Because not only do they have to say your point of view is wrong, i.e.
00:27:14.100
you're a liar, it's you are a bad person, which the left just does all the time.
00:27:18.320
You have to be completely discredited as a human.
00:27:37.400
I think the last time I was invited to CNN was earlier this year when I was indicted by
00:27:41.740
the Bolsonaro government for the reporting I was doing on Brian Stelter's show and I
00:27:47.580
And I'm not banned from there, but they very rarely have.
00:27:55.560
When's the last time you heard somebody on there defending President Trump or questioning
00:28:01.720
CNN has reached out to me to have me on and I've said no every time.
00:28:04.720
But the times they reach out to me, they want me to rip on Trump.
00:28:08.860
I mean, it's like, oh, Trump did something to a woman.
00:28:13.740
I have no desire to to play the role they want me to play.
00:28:16.680
It's like, look, if Trump said something controversially, you can talk about it.
00:28:20.840
But there's a reason they came to somebody like me.
00:28:23.220
And that's when they you know, they think I'm going to do what they need the puppet to
00:28:28.740
They want you to be their little dancing conservative bear who, you know, like amuses
00:28:39.200
So now they fear you because you're you founded The Intercept in 2013, which is amazing.
00:28:46.360
It's so interesting to read all of your reporters, too.
00:28:51.240
I mean, you're you're in you're a place where I I also feel that I am now, you know,
00:28:57.660
I'm outside of the conservative and the and the traditional media, which I like.
00:29:02.060
But you are you've been there for a while and you've been sort of poking and prodding
00:29:05.700
And I thought you had a really interesting point earlier this week.
00:29:08.140
It was a column I read about how this is why they're also turning on Joe Rogan, because
00:29:17.280
You know, he he's not woke, but on most things, he's more progressive, but they can't stand
00:29:24.380
And I think you tell me, but I think it's because he's not of them.
00:29:30.080
And he's extremely powerful and successful now.
00:29:34.400
The resentment really came to the fore when there was a suggestion by one of Rogan's guests
00:29:38.700
that Rogan host a debate, a presidential debate, which is kind of like, as you know,
00:29:44.300
the most prestigious thing in media that you can do in a presidential election year.
00:29:48.900
And Trump was excited by it, probably taunting Biden, knowing he would never do it, saying
00:29:55.920
And the media acted like, you know, they had kind of asked just some like random homeless
00:30:03.600
person to come into their glittery realm and and and vandalize it with their their filth.
00:30:09.800
And, you know, Rogan has a way bigger audience than any of them have.
00:30:14.140
Um, and obviously there's a lot of resentment, there's a lot of professional jealousy, but
00:30:20.140
I really think what it is more than anything is kind of like this prioritization of culture
00:30:27.560
I think like one of the things that a lot of people on the right don't fully understand
00:30:30.680
is that establishment liberals, you know, like kind of the dominoing of the Democratic
00:30:36.300
Party, they don't actually care about politics.
00:30:40.080
They serve the interest of Silicon Valley and Wall Street and K Street.
00:30:48.320
Most of them themselves are extremely rich and wealthy families.
00:30:51.500
Um, they they use some rhetoric that's populist in nature, but populism exists far more on the
00:30:56.920
right than it does on the establishment of the Democratic Party.
00:31:08.420
Um, what they care about is culture, dominating the culture.
00:31:11.560
And the reason they look at Joe Rogan and see an enemy, even though if you go down the
00:31:16.800
list, he's pro-choice, he's pro-gay rights, he believes in social spending, he's anti-war.
00:31:29.600
When, because they don't care about politics, they care about culture.
00:31:31.860
And Rogan is not, he doesn't sound like them, right?
00:31:44.500
So to them, he's like an interloper culturally.
00:31:47.980
And that's what they care about more than politics.
00:31:50.020
And that's why I think the, like the contempt for Rogan among liberals in the media, which
00:31:58.720
So what I did think it was interesting, just one more minute on him, that he signed his
00:32:03.140
deal with Spotify and, and, you know, made a bunch of money off of it, but already there's
00:32:08.520
Like he had on Abigail Schreier who wrote, so easy for me to say, irreversible damage, which
00:32:14.920
takes a hard look at transgender teens and why it seems to be increasing in frequency.
00:32:24.660
And I, I read the book and now there's a protest over there.
00:32:31.760
And Spotify has reportedly had 10 meetings, not reportedly the CEO confessed.
00:32:38.060
And it made me wonder, can Joe Rogan last at Spotify?
00:32:47.300
You know, first of all, I look at it kind of through the prism a lot of the primary success
00:32:54.340
of a social movement in my lifetime that affected my life most, which is the gay rights movement,
00:32:58.380
you know, like of age as a gay teenager in the eighties with the moral majority and the
00:33:03.640
Reagan era, no one thought anything like gay marriage was even remotely possible that
00:33:11.380
And one of the reasons it's happened is because so many people who wanted this profound social
00:33:18.360
Like said, Hey, like you have these ideas about who I am, what my life is like, that aren't
00:33:25.320
I understand that you were raised to think differently.
00:33:27.480
You have religious convictions that lead you to a different place.
00:33:30.460
Let's have a dialogue so that you can actually see the reality of our humanity.
00:33:34.640
It wasn't this like coercive demand that everybody swallowed this truth.
00:33:39.040
I'm not saying there were no elements of the gay rights movement that did that, but by
00:33:41.620
and large, it was successful because it was persuasive.
00:33:46.280
And now like around these, this trans issue, there's like almost this kind of demand that
00:33:51.260
nobody asked any questions about these really profound changes that are being demanded about
00:33:57.020
how we think about gender, how we think about sex, how we think about the choices of children
00:34:05.000
You know, I, I have this media outlet in that's based in New York.
00:34:08.340
So I go a lot to New York and I, a lot of my colleagues are, you know, journalists who
00:34:12.600
send their kids to very liberal private schools in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
00:34:16.100
And a lot of their, their teenage children, their, a lot of their teenage children have
00:34:23.060
So like 15 year old trans boys who have already had their breasts removed at the age of 15
00:34:29.940
or, you know, the other way of trans women who have had genital reassignment, sexual reassignment
00:34:36.340
surgery involved in their genitals that are permanent changes that they're making at the age
00:34:40.360
And if you talk to these journalists, they'll tell you at dinner over a glass of wine that
00:34:45.080
they're very disturbed by the question that we don't really have a lot of science about,
00:34:50.380
about whether kids are too young to be making these decisions about whether people are being
00:34:55.360
misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria who actually have other problems in the culture.
00:34:58.760
It's encouraging them to think that they're trans when they're like, people have those
00:35:02.320
questions, people in the privacy of their home ask the questions that Joe Rogan asked,
00:35:06.180
but those journalists would never, ever write about it or publicly say it because they're
00:35:12.100
too scared to, they're too beholden to liberal orthodoxy and Joe Rogan's not.
00:35:17.540
And that's why they hate him because they can't control him.
00:35:25.080
I'm, I've always been somebody who will go there.
00:35:27.340
You know, my old executive producer at the Kelly file used to say, MK, you like to go to
00:35:34.340
I, I like you believe there's no harm in having tough discussions and, you know, poking sort
00:35:43.060
And I also feel it's our job to be antagonistic towards the subjects and the, and the people
00:35:48.060
we cover and to be skeptical that we get paid to be skeptical and suddenly on certain issues
00:35:52.660
is one of the things that's driving me nuts about covering trans issues or covering black
00:35:56.880
lives matter is you're not allowed to be skeptical.
00:35:59.660
If you are skeptical, there's something wrong with you.
00:36:02.120
You know, you're anti black people or you're anti LGBT, you know, trans people that just
00:36:08.680
And it's alienating to people who would like to be an ally, right.
00:36:13.260
But like to help in ways that are reasonable and that we can get on board with, you know,
00:36:16.900
you don't, you don't want to support racism, but you also don't support somebody going over
00:36:20.480
to somebody's restaurant table in the middle of the evening and saying, you raise your fist
00:36:24.140
right now and say BLM or else that it's baloney.
00:36:30.860
If it doesn't challenge and question orthodoxies, if all it's doing is kind of submitting to
00:36:37.320
them and reciting them and echoing them, um, you know, it's a very kind of authoritarian
00:36:43.040
approach to say, you can't actually question things.
00:36:47.980
And if you question things, um, we're going to declare you off limits.
00:36:53.860
And I go back to, you know, again, like the gay rights movement.
00:36:56.740
I remember, you know, like when I was 25 and 30, people would say, you know, there's something
00:37:03.120
Like how do two men or two women end up married or how do they have sex?
00:37:08.740
And like, you know, you could like, you could easily, if you wanted to just kind of scorn
00:37:12.940
them and say, you're a bigot, you're, you know, hateful and, and, or you could say, God,
00:37:17.940
I'm so happy for the opportunity that you want to have that discussion.
00:37:21.320
Let's like talk about that and engage in that kind of debate.
00:37:25.240
And I think one of the things that has happened is exactly as you suggest, which is that the
00:37:30.100
kind of liberal left tactic to win debates is to bar them from happening.
00:37:37.660
Um, and it's very alienating to people who are prospective allies and, you know, it can
00:37:43.680
work in the short term, but I do think eventually it's going to drive a lot of people away because
00:37:48.440
who wants to be part of a subculture or an ideology that says that you're required and
00:37:54.360
forced upon pain of being condemned as a bad human to accept orthodoxies and pieties that
00:37:59.880
don't actually even understand, let alone get agree with.
00:38:05.460
So we're going to be doing some features on the show for you all, and we're going to call
00:38:10.980
Uh, it's just a moment that happened in my life that I thought might be worth sharing.
00:38:15.300
Uh, for the first time last week, I saw four of my best friends who I hadn't seen in six
00:38:27.620
We were last together on a ski vacation out in Montana in March.
00:38:33.820
And, you know, we didn't even know that there was going to be a quarantine and we're all
00:38:39.340
So we went six months, like most of us without seeing each other.
00:38:42.520
We had zoom calls, you know, we actually played, um, flip cup, you know, flip cup one
00:38:50.840
Um, and this is the first time at least four of our seven woman posse got together.
00:38:56.520
And, uh, I have to tell you, you know, you have to eat outside here in New York, like
00:39:01.720
And, uh, as I walked up the sidewalk and saw them sitting there, cause I was last to arrive.
00:39:08.240
They looked amazing that it was a beautiful night.
00:39:14.700
We had a couple of drinks and it was, it was a feeling of freedom.
00:39:19.940
You know, it was, it was happiness and just friendship, you know, seeing your friends face
00:39:25.240
to face and you don't have to wear the mask at the table.
00:39:27.420
Um, and it turns out one, one is getting engaged.
00:39:32.520
So it was just, I'm, I was launching this podcast.
00:39:35.960
It was just, sometimes it's not like these huge events in your life that matter.
00:39:46.980
So one other thing that I wanted to tell you is that we're going to be answering your questions
00:39:50.840
So if you have anything that you want to ask, uh, fire away, it can be personal.
00:39:56.820
It can be about the show, um, whatever's on your mind.
00:39:59.440
So the email to reach me is questions, plural at devilmaycaremedia.com questions at devilmaycaremedia.com.
00:40:09.240
And, um, we'll get back to you on the show with our favorites and, you know, the ones that
00:40:14.300
stand out to us and, you know, hopefully we can keep it back and forth going.
00:40:17.260
Even if it's comments on the show and you want to follow up, maybe I can run down some
00:40:22.520
Personally, the one, probably the greatest gift, the greatest positive thing to come
00:40:29.260
out of my, you know, very negative ending at NBC was a freedom, you know, a liberation
00:40:35.540
to just, once you've been called awful things by every publication in the country, you know,
00:40:43.780
You know, it's like, so I'm just going to talk honestly about these subjects and what
00:40:48.260
You're going to say something bad about me yet.
00:40:58.280
I think one of the really interesting things is that if you look at the media ecosystem,
00:41:05.540
you know, the kind of like economic structure of it, the outlets where you're forced to recite
00:41:10.600
these orthodoxies upon pain of being fired are doing very poorly.
00:41:14.300
If you look at who's thriving independently, it is people like Joe Rogan.
00:41:19.440
You know, like Andrew Sullivan, for example, got forced out of his column at New York Magazine
00:41:23.840
because a lot of the millennials at New York Magazine thought he was a white supremacist,
00:41:27.580
think that he's a racist, think that he can't, doesn't deserve to be in decent company.
00:41:33.260
And he went on Substack and his audience followed him.
00:41:36.480
And I think he tripled or quadrupled his income.
00:41:40.140
Same thing with Matt Taibbi, who kind of got forced out of Rolling Stone and that was making
00:41:44.380
way more money than he was ever making at Rolling Stone.
00:41:47.600
The podcasts that are doing well are the ones who refuse to be captive to this.
00:41:54.640
So there's a hunger for people to say, I'm kind of free from it.
00:41:59.740
Exactly as you said, what else can they do to you?
00:42:02.860
I kind of wonder just why we're, I wonder the like, why we're on that topic.
00:42:05.900
Like, do you, because the way like that it all kind of played out was, you know,
00:42:15.020
He's Brazilian as we were trying to do this show.
00:42:16.920
And I was saying like, she was kind of like just asking why it is that it always has to
00:42:23.560
Like, is there a way that you could do something like that non-maliciously?
00:42:26.780
Like you, you know, adore a black celebrity, a black athlete, a black actor.
00:42:36.740
I do wonder, like, do you regret kind of apologizing for it?
00:42:41.740
Or do you feel like your apology was justified because for whatever reason, rightly or wrongly,
00:42:49.200
people were hurt by the comments and you feel like an apology is justified if people are hurt?
00:42:58.300
I think I'm not I'm not sorry that I said sorry, because I do think some people, especially
00:43:05.040
people who have just been reading the media interpretation of what I said, which was they
00:43:08.840
presented it as though I was defending minstrel show blackface and wanted it to return to the
00:43:13.340
airwaves immediately, you know, which wasn't anywhere close to the truth.
00:43:17.300
I was just trying to start a discussion because I had noticed when I was a kid.
00:43:21.040
And as it turns out, very recently, prior to my remarks, people were wearing blackface.
00:43:26.660
This this, you know, this whether it was as an homage or otherwise, they were wearing
00:43:31.460
And as it turns out, NBC itself was putting out at least five different shows as recently
00:43:36.200
as a couple of years before my discussion about it with characters in blackface.
00:43:40.360
So I think it was a good discussion to try to start.
00:43:44.000
So I don't if people misunderstood the point I was trying to make, I think it's I've usually
00:43:48.680
been quick to apologize as opposed to just, you know, stand in my my principle and say,
00:43:55.580
However, I also think I made the mistake of believing that most of my critics were coming
00:44:02.800
And what I've seen since then is that wasn't true.
00:44:07.540
They were on the war path from you from the beginning.
00:44:09.520
They saw you as somebody who didn't who shouldn't have been there.
00:44:13.940
But I mean, look at the media, you know, look at even just a couple of weeks ago, Joy
00:44:19.200
Now, she, unlike yours truly, has actually worn blackface and she was defending it by
00:44:25.560
saying, well, it wasn't really blackface because I meant it as an homage.
00:44:30.160
Well, Glenn, that's exactly what I was trying to ask.
00:44:42.440
So I sent out a tweet saying, gee, I, you know, she should be careful because even asking
00:44:47.160
whether intent matters can get you on The New York Times and The Washington Post and
00:44:52.280
it can get you on Nightly News on NBC and World News Tonight on ABC and GMA, which ran
00:44:57.080
I just wonder whether GMA and World News Tonight are going to cover their own host, either
00:45:02.020
Jimmy Kimmel, who were it repeatedly or Joy Behar.
00:45:08.660
I think I think that was a rhetorical question from the start.
00:45:12.580
My only point is that there was no good faith by the media outlets covering it and by the
00:45:17.120
vast majority of critics who just wanted, you know, a scalp.
00:45:20.260
I think people see that, you know, you know, media, the media loves to whine very sanctimoniously
00:45:32.240
They've been taught to look at media outlets as fake news.
00:45:35.640
People have lost trust and faith in authoritative media outlets.
00:45:46.300
It's always they're the unjust victims of a defamation campaign.
00:45:49.860
And I think that, you know, when they do something like this year, I think the most
00:45:53.060
degree just example was they were shaming everybody who stepped out of their house for to go to
00:45:58.820
church, to have a funeral, to do a political rally that had a cause that they didn't agree
00:46:04.420
They were denounced as being selfish, as killing grandma.
00:46:07.060
And then suddenly these Black Lives Matter protests broke out all over the country where
00:46:11.000
tens of thousands of people were packed in extremely dense crowds, one on top of the
00:46:15.200
They were at exactly the moment where the pandemic was at its peak and everybody in the media
00:46:19.740
not only was afraid to condemn it or denounce it or shame it the way they had been doing
00:46:23.420
for other gatherings that they didn't like, but they were praising it, saying that it's
00:46:28.960
And I think people see the fraudulent nature of that.
00:46:32.760
You know, they don't believe, unlike the media, that the virus knows whether you're there to support
00:46:39.280
Trump or, to say, BLM, or for that matter, to mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
00:46:44.240
They know the virus does not discriminate in that manner.
00:46:49.420
Epidemiologically, the virus does not enter your body if it decides that you're supporting
00:46:53.640
a right-wing cause as opposed to a left-wing cause.
00:46:55.860
No, honestly, it was right around the time all those protests and I was in the grocery store
00:46:59.540
and I had headphones on and I had sunglasses on.
00:47:03.760
And so I kind of had the feel that my mask was still on me and it wasn't.
00:47:07.200
I had forgotten it in my pocket and for a second there, I was like, oh my God, I don't have
00:47:12.640
And, you know, I had a couple of looks and I was like, oh, Black Lives Matter.
00:47:23.000
Just there's no, all the limits are abolished instantly.
00:47:27.800
So I got to ask you before I let go, we got to talk about the election.
00:47:30.940
I'm dying to know, because I know you're not, you're not big on voting and I'm just going
00:47:35.300
to guess you're not going to support, I mean, Trump's done some things you like, but like,
00:47:43.700
If you were going to vote, who would you support?
00:47:46.560
I mean, I, I end up not voting just for the standard journalistic reason.
00:47:51.400
It's like one of the few traditional journalism precepts that I end up believing in that if
00:47:55.580
you do vote, you kind of even psychologically attach yourself to a candidate in a way that can
00:48:00.760
affect your independence, I prefer not to, you know, be a supporter of anyone because I want
00:48:07.120
to remain skeptical and adversarial to anyone who wields power.
00:48:11.660
And I also think there's something a little pompous about like announcing my vote, like
00:48:15.460
I'm endorsing somebody or encouraging somebody to vote.
00:48:18.720
I prefer to just give people information that they can use to make their own decisions about
00:48:24.120
But what I absolutely do reject is the prevailing liberal discourse that looks at Trump as some
00:48:29.120
sort of grave threat to the Republic as some kind of, you know, I think Trump is much
00:48:33.780
more of a continuation of the American political tradition than he is a departure or aberration
00:48:38.000
from it, except, you know, in these kind of like rhetorical and stylistic ways where
00:48:45.440
So I don't accept this, you know, sort of melodramatic proclamation that this is the
00:48:51.080
gravest and most important election in the history of the United States or democracy is
00:48:55.480
Um, you know, I think that each candidate is better in some ways and in worse than others.
00:49:01.780
Do you, the thing about Biden that everybody talks about is whether he's all there.
00:49:07.220
You know, I mean, I, I feel like as a matter of factual reporting, you cannot deny that he,
00:49:20.620
Um, there was a, there was, there was an exchange, like, it was just a couple of weeks ago that
00:49:29.360
Because if you could take care, if you were a quartermaster, you can sure and help take care
00:49:35.280
of running a, you know, department store, uh, thing, you know, where, and the second floor
00:49:41.600
of the ladies department or whatever, you know what I mean?
00:49:43.340
What, what, I mean, it's honestly sad, you know, and this is so interesting, Megan, because
00:49:52.680
as you probably recall, the primary, um, in the democratic party came down to Biden and
00:49:59.320
And so those of us in the media who started when Biden was one of the two only last standing
00:50:05.680
choices were raising this issue of cognitive decline.
00:50:08.900
And a lot of the people who were kind of the guardians of the democratic party were saying
00:50:12.160
this is such a low life, you know, um, below the belt tactic to raise this.
00:50:17.920
And then I went back and I looked and what I saw was that through all of 2018 and 2019,
00:50:22.580
the people who were most disseminating this narrative about Biden were the democratic
00:50:29.160
They were petrified that he was way in the lead, that he was by far the biggest, uh, most
00:50:35.160
And they didn't believe that he had the capacity to endure the grueling rigors of an election.
00:50:40.220
And you can find on Morning Joe and on every MSNBC show and CNN show democratic, you know,
00:50:46.460
operatives, strategists, consultants saying, I don't think Biden has the mental capacity
00:50:54.060
It was Cory Booker and Julian Castro in the debate who like essentially mocked him for
00:50:57.600
forgetting, forgetting what he had said just like moments earlier.
00:51:01.040
They're the ones who raised those issues because they were petrified that Biden was going to
00:51:05.100
become a nominee and be so obviously incapable.
00:51:08.500
What saved him is the COVID pandemic, like that he gets to just stay in his basement and
00:51:12.980
everyone kind of understands that's the best thing that ever happened to him.
00:51:18.700
Like we all recognize it in our elderly relatives and people that it's sad to see.
00:51:24.340
It's one thing if it's your elderly relative, like all my mom has to do is like send out
00:51:29.820
But Joe Biden's going to have access to the nuclear codes and like decisions about whether
00:51:35.920
Like the thing is, what's what's really hilarious is if you watch how MSNBC hosts interview him,
00:51:42.780
because like that's the only place that they'll basically go at this point.
00:51:46.680
She talked to him in the most like patronizing voice.
00:51:49.320
You know that like soft, sweet voice that you use for like elderly grandparents who are
00:52:01.640
Like everyone knows it, but we're all supposed to just like pretend it's not happening.
00:52:05.520
Well, to your point earlier, she's openly declared that she's not going to vote for
00:52:09.920
So talk about I don't know whether this is a straight news journalist or, you know, she's
00:52:15.460
But, you know, I don't think a journalist should be declaring who they're voting for if
00:52:20.180
And, you know, she's sort of shown her cards in a way that was pretty surprising to me when
00:52:24.960
But let me ask you this, because speaking of the media and Biden, you guys are the ones
00:52:30.380
your reporter, Ryan Grimm, is the one who broke the Tara Reade story as Joe Biden's accuser
00:52:36.160
that he was sort of following her Twitter and he repeated some of the things she said
00:52:41.360
And then she went on, was it Katie Herzog's show?
00:52:51.560
So I feel like the media has done its level best to run cover for him on the Tara Reade
00:52:58.220
story, whether you believe Tara Reade or you don't.
00:53:01.000
The way they've treated those allegations versus the way they treated the allegations against
00:53:05.140
Trump and against Brett Kavanaugh is starkly different.
00:53:11.480
Like what happened was Ryan got wind of this and we didn't want to get behind it as a news
00:53:18.200
story saying, here's an accuser because we couldn't tell whether or not it was true.
00:53:23.100
And we didn't want to give our journalistic imprimatur to these allegations without any
00:53:28.040
evidence about whether that's truth that it's journalistically wrong to do, notwithstanding
00:53:35.260
So what Ryan decided to do instead was to report it from the hypocrisy angle that she
00:53:39.700
had gone, Tara Reade did, to Time's Up, that Hollywood-based advocacy group for sexual assault
00:53:51.400
And of course, they didn't want to do it because they want Biden to win.
00:53:53.620
So they concocted this bullshit explanation of excuse about why they weren't going to represent
00:54:00.140
her, which is, oh, we're a 501c3 group and we can't get involved in elections.
00:54:04.600
But all you're not allowed to do if you're a 501c3 group is advocate for a candidate explicitly.
00:54:09.900
It was such an obvious pretext to avoid doing it.
00:54:14.440
So my issue always was, it was never, I never, it was never, I believe Tara, sorry, go ahead.
00:54:21.560
I was going to say the irony of that is that, so in their, in their purported attempt to
00:54:25.280
not take a side, to not, you know, back one candidate or the other, is of course they were
00:54:29.160
just running cover for Biden because it turns out Anita Dunn, who's running PR for him, is
00:54:37.240
Her firm is, you know, senior counsel to or advisor to Time's Up.
00:54:41.460
And which, you know, I'm sure Tara Reade had no idea of when she got rejected.
00:54:45.640
And she, Anita Dunn was also the primary public relations advisor for Harvey Weinstein.
00:54:52.720
So the whole edifice is based on like such a weaponization of this issue for cynical and
00:55:01.320
And that was always my issue was not, I believe Tara Reade, because how can I believe Tara Reade,
00:55:06.760
She has claims that she made about what happened in a hallway in the Senate 20 years ago.
00:55:12.560
I have no rational basis for adjudicating who I believe or who I don't believe.
00:55:17.200
What I found so objectionable was that the standards that have been promulgated under
00:55:21.960
the phrase, believe women, that got applied to why we should all believe Christine Blasey
00:55:26.940
Ford, even though there was just as little corroborating evidence for her allegations, and
00:55:34.300
You have to have consistent standards for how this is treated.
00:55:37.160
Otherwise, what you're going to do is you're going to make everybody cease to take allegations
00:55:41.420
of sexual harassment seriously if you just start weaponizing it in this flagrantly cynical
00:55:50.920
Tara Reade has more evidence on her side than Christine Blasey Ford had.
00:55:56.160
By any standard, Christine Blasey Ford did not have a witness to whom she recounted this
00:56:09.260
She's got a witness, a very credible, professional family woman who's from the Southeast, who I
00:56:15.820
spoke with at length and so have the other journalists looking into this, who remembers
00:56:20.340
And she's got a neighbor, she told two years after that.
00:56:22.580
And she's got a third person, she told shortly after that.
00:56:27.240
Her mother calling into Larry King saying her daughter's been harassed.
00:56:29.680
Now, that could have been anything, so that's not as persuasive.
00:56:34.120
And they're like, you know, that's not that interesting.
00:56:37.400
But could we talk about Brett Kavanaugh's gang rape again?
00:56:42.620
I mean, they, like the media during the Brett Kavanaugh thing, not only promoted Christine
00:56:50.360
They promoted Michael Avenatti's thing with Julie Swetnick.
00:56:54.740
Rachel Maddow, I found the video during the Tara Reade controversy, was so exciting.
00:56:59.680
She was excited to announce that she had gotten Michael Avenatti an exclusive interview for
00:57:04.200
him to talk about Julie Swetnick's gang rape charges and put that on the air.
00:57:09.680
And, you know, I think the other thing I think it gets back to, though, of course, there's
00:57:13.860
like the partisan angle, which is people wanted to believe Christine Blasey Ford because they
00:57:17.780
wanted to stop Brett Kavanaugh from getting appointed to the court and discredit Tara Reade
00:57:24.200
But there's also that same cultural angle that we talked about with Joe Rogan, which is
00:57:28.020
look at Tara Reade and look at Christine Blasey Ford.
00:57:30.280
Christine Blasey Ford is this well-groomed, upper-middle-class woman with a PhD.
00:57:35.880
She's, like, in the, like, exactly the kind of cultural milieu that coastal liberals love
00:57:43.940
Whereas Tara Reade is more similar to, like, the Bill Clinton accusers, like Paula Jones and
00:57:51.020
And those kind of people who, you know, as James Carville famously said, drag a $10 bill
00:57:56.120
through a trailer park and you can pretty much find anything.
00:57:59.000
So I think a lot of it is that cultural bias that comes back again, that what matters most
00:58:06.980
Or are you this kind of, like, icky working-class person who exudes middle-of-the-country vibes?
00:58:12.820
And that determines so much of how you're evaluated as a human being by our media culture.
00:58:18.680
Well, boy, did they miss Judge Tara because she, up until now, was a pretty committed progressive
00:58:23.920
and, you know, clearly has rethought that commitment in the wake of what has been done
00:58:29.380
But it's up to the audience to figure out whether she's being truthful or not.
00:58:32.660
If you want to see, I did a lengthy interview with her, you can go check it out on YouTube.
00:58:39.000
We have a disgusting media that's incredibly broken.
00:58:45.660
I mean, I think, you know, one of the things we tried to do in 2013 when we created The
00:58:51.360
Intercept was to kind of create a media outlet that could be trusted across the political
00:58:55.720
spectrum, that even if we had political ideologies, we would be open about them, but we would do
00:59:02.800
And to me, I think that has to be the, and I'm not saying we fulfilled that as much as I
00:59:07.960
would have liked, I think we still have work to do, but I still think that's the model.
00:59:11.460
And I think there is a really underappreciated craving in the public for journalists who can
00:59:20.280
be trusted that way, who can report on things in a way that will contradict or undermine what
00:59:28.040
their political ideology might be without trying to deceive and manipulate them.
00:59:33.900
And I think the internet enables independent media to thrive.
00:59:38.280
I mean, again, you look at Joe Rogan's platform, like we all ignore it in the media, in the
00:59:42.680
mainstream media, but he's talking to 15 million people and not just 15 million people, but like
00:59:47.360
15 million people who aren't committed partisans, who can go one way or the other, which is a lot
00:59:52.060
more valuable than an audience of 5 million who are squirrely in one camp or the other.
00:59:56.560
Um, so I think that there's a lot of kind of undercurrents that this dissatisfaction with
01:00:01.700
the media is giving rise to, um, this independent ecosystem that can reach a lot of people.
01:00:09.200
And obviously like that dynamic that you're talking about is when I feel myself, which
01:00:13.020
is a lot of times, like when I feel myself getting ejected from, you know, or expelled from
01:00:20.560
decent mainstream precincts, it's so liberating, right?
01:00:24.960
It's so emboldening if you like wake up the next day and you're not like homeless and you
01:00:32.120
Now I can go speak really freely, you know, as you described.
01:00:36.000
Um, and I think that the more people they alienate that way, the more people they turn against
01:00:40.360
them, which is always what these kinds of insular authoritarian cultures do, the more people
01:00:45.600
they're going to kind of create their own adversaries, their own enemies.
01:00:48.420
And I think that is where I find my optimism is this kind of like counter backlash that
01:00:53.660
they're creating just through their own repellent behavior.
01:01:00.580
And our thanks to the fascinating and fearless Glenn Greenwald.
01:01:04.740
In the meantime, we'll talk to you next time on the next Megyn Kelly show, which will be
01:01:08.700
released on Wednesday after the first presidential debate.
01:01:14.520
You can find the Megyn Kelly show on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
01:01:20.080
You can download the podcast, rate it and review it five stars, of course.
01:01:24.460
Uh, and then go and spread the word, send the Apple podcast link to others who might want
01:01:29.460
And even those who you think might hate, listen to it.
01:01:32.100
Uh, or if Apple podcast is not your thing, you can go to Spotify, Google, I heart tune in
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The Megyn Kelly show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.
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