The Megyn Kelly Show - Harry and Meghan Get Booed, and a Free Speech Victory, with Ilya Shapiro and Mark Steyn ｜ Ep. 335

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

00:00:11.640 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Friday.

00:00:16.840 We begin today with an exclusive interview, a victory for free speech, and an important defeat for the cancel culture mob.

00:00:24.580 We first told you about the case of constitutional law expert Ilya Shapiro back in February.

00:00:30.800 He had recently been hired by Georgetown Law, but just days before he was scheduled to start his new job, Ilya sent out a tweet questioning President Biden's decision to limit who he would be considering for the soon-to-be-vacant Supreme Court seat based on their race and their sex.

00:00:48.920 The tweet received immediate pushback, and while Shapiro repeatedly apologized, saying he had phrased it inartfully, there was a reference to, quote, a lesser black woman, it wasn't enough for the vultures who demanded that Georgetown revoke his employment contract.

00:01:05.200 Four months of investigation of his tweet followed until Georgetown finally said yesterday that he could start the job he had been hired to do, with some caveats.

00:01:17.560 Today, Ilya officially begins his job as Executive Director of the Center for the Constitution and Senior Lecturer at the Georgetown University Law Center, and this is his first interview about it.

00:01:34.140 Ilya, thank you so much for being here.

00:01:36.440 Great to be with you, Megyn.

00:01:37.820 Congrats on your victory.

00:01:39.100 Thank you.

00:01:41.120 As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, it's a technical victory, not quite a victory for free speech.

00:01:46.500 Don't want to oversell it.

00:01:47.760 The university did not say, yes, I'm protected by their excellent freedom of expression policy.

00:01:53.580 They just said, oh, we forgot to look at the calendar.

00:01:56.800 And it turns out I was not an employee when I tweeted, so all of these policies they've been investigating me under don't apply.

00:02:04.060 Kind of ominous, indicating that if I or some other faculty member in the future were to have an errant tweet, then that might be a whole other story.

00:02:14.300 Yeah.

00:02:14.600 So let's go back for the viewers who haven't been following this as closely as some of us who are, you know, in this atmosphere, this sort of center, center right media atmosphere, because it's caused quite a firestorm for us.

00:02:27.140 I mean, all of us have been outraged by what they've been doing to you.

00:02:29.760 It was a tweet.

00:02:30.580 It wasn't perfectly worded.

00:02:31.680 You've copped to that, but just tell us what you were trying to say.

00:02:36.600 And I can find the tweet in front of me, but I'm sure you have it memorized by this point.

00:02:41.100 Tell us, walk us through how it went.

00:02:43.020 Yeah.

00:02:43.260 So this was back in January, January 26th, to be precise, when news of Justice Breyer's retirement leaked.

00:02:52.600 And I was doing media all day.

00:02:55.160 I put out statements.

00:02:56.260 I was still at Cato at the time where I was vice president and director of their constitutional study shop and commenting on the Supreme Court because that's my area of expertise.

00:03:06.020 You see my my books behind me, Supreme Disorder, Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court.

00:03:12.680 And that evening, I was still upset about President Biden's decision to limit his pool of candidates by race and sex.

00:03:20.420 He said that it would be a black woman, as he promised during the presidential election campaign. 0.89

00:03:26.660 And, you know, not best fault, not following best practices.

00:03:30.920 I was doom scrolling on Twitter that night in my hotel room.

00:03:33.980 I happened to be on a trip in Austin, Texas, and was just getting upset about commentary and thinking about, you know, what have we come to that, you know, with the racial preferences that have invaded all of our lives have now come to even high public office.

00:03:53.740 It's anathema to, I think, how people should be treated.

00:03:56.660 I thought to myself, you know, the best person for this job, if I were a Democratic president, would be the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, Judge Jackson's colleague, Sri Sri Srinivasan, who happens to be an Indian American immigrant.

00:04:09.420 Excellent judge, was on President Obama's shortlist for the spot that eventually went to Merrick Garland.

00:04:14.600 And I said, well, by operation of logic, that means that everyone else is less qualified. 0.55

00:04:19.320 And if, you know, President Biden said it was going to be a black woman, so I said, well, I guess we're going to be based on today's hierarchy of intersectionality, as I cheekily put it, we're going to end up with a, quote, lesser black woman. 0.75

00:04:32.780 And those three words are what got me in trouble.

00:04:34.520 I, of course, meant less qualified black woman, because everybody by operation of logic was going to be less qualified than the person I thought would be the most qualified. 1.00

00:04:43.560 And away we went.

00:04:44.540 I went to bed at that point, and it was only when I woke up the next morning that I saw that a firestorm had erupted on Twitter.

00:04:51.520 I thought, you know, I really did not phrase that well.

00:04:54.680 I had been in a kind of a festy and a feisty mood after a friend's birthday or employment celebration, actually, at a restaurant.

00:05:03.680 And so I thought, I should delete this.

00:05:06.480 I should.

00:05:06.720 This is not this.

00:05:07.580 This firestorm is detracting from the point I want to make that, you know, that 76 percent of Americans agreed with that all candidates should be considered.

00:05:16.020 So I deleted it.

00:05:16.860 And I said, look, I meant no offense, but this was poorly phrased.

00:05:19.860 I'm taking it down.

00:05:21.220 But by that point, it was it was too late.

00:05:23.420 The knives were out and things snowballed and quickly moved from from Twitter to real life.

00:05:29.340 The dean put out a statement attacking me and calling me an appalling racist.

00:05:33.760 And away we went.

00:05:35.600 This same dean right now.

00:05:37.500 Was it trainer?

00:05:38.760 It is.

00:05:39.340 Yes.

00:05:40.120 Oh, wow.

00:05:40.600 So, I mean, this is a guy who's now saying, OK, welcome to Georgetown.

00:05:44.000 So there's some awkwardness there.

00:05:45.160 It was I think National Review of Rich Lowry had a piece saying in any sane world, you're taking down that tweet and explaining what you were trying to say would have been the end of this.

00:05:56.640 It's Twitter.

00:05:57.720 It's Twitter.

00:05:58.460 It's not sworn testimony before the Congress or Supreme Court brief where you think things out very carefully and have it reviewed by five different people. 0.99

00:06:07.700 So it's Twitter is a stupid late night tweet who I mean, who hasn't sent something out on Twitter that they'd like to have back. 0.98

00:06:14.820 But the vultures, as you say, saw an opportunity and they were excited to get you. 0.99

00:06:19.640 Now, just by way of background, can you explain like your own politics and what this constitutional center that you were hired to be the executive director of at Georgetown do?

00:06:30.820 Because these are these are more right leaning organizations.

00:06:33.800 I mean, like I was surprised, too.

00:06:35.760 I didn't actually know about this.

00:06:37.260 But when I see their mission, I'm like, oh, well, this is a little bit more conservative.

00:06:40.840 So I'm sure it already had a big red bullseye over it.

00:06:44.980 Yeah, I was hired to to heighten their profile so people like you would know all about it's actually celebrating its 10th anniversary.

00:06:51.320 Randy Barnett, who's a celebrated law professor, one of, I think, three.

00:06:57.140 I would be the fourth at the entire Georgetown faculty who's not on the left, who's not progressive of some stripe.

00:07:03.780 He's a libertarian.

00:07:04.780 I'm a classical liberal.

00:07:05.820 I guess you could say I was born in the Soviet Union and my parents brought me out when I was little.

00:07:11.940 When I was four, we came to Canada and enjoyed immigrating so much.

00:07:15.680 I had to come to America as well.

00:07:18.220 Like I like to say that, like most immigrants, I do a job that most native born Americans won't. 1.00

00:07:23.300 And that's defending the Constitution.

00:07:25.700 So after a cup of coffee and big law, which was not that much fun, I came to the Cato Institute and wrote briefs for the Supreme Court,

00:07:34.620 edited the Cato Supreme Court review, did my own writing, both academic and popular, gave a lot of speeches.

00:07:40.820 I've been doing media for a long time.

00:07:43.300 And after nearly 15 years at Cato, which is the nation's premier libertarian think tank, I thought, you know, how can I have more impact or have a new challenge?

00:07:52.580 And Randy Barnett, who's become a friend and a mentor, thought that it would be a good fit to have someone of my profile, my skills, my network come to the center and especially be the public face,

00:08:04.380 get more engagement from judges and practitioners and publications and media and all of that to push the importance of the Constitution

00:08:13.960 and originalist analysis, looking at the Constitution by what the original public meaning of its provisions are.

00:08:21.660 A lot of people call that conservative, but it doesn't have to be.

00:08:24.600 There are progressive originalists or living originalists.

00:08:27.600 There's all sorts of different stripes.

00:08:28.980 So it's more academic and nerdy in certain ways, but still very relevant to the discourse and certainly to the Supreme Court,

00:08:37.940 where now a majority for the first time do call themselves some flavor of originalist.

00:08:44.960 It kind of reminds me of the Kevin Williamson situation with the Atlantic, where the Atlantic's like, let's hire Kevin Williamson.

00:08:53.060 That's that he'll be great.

00:08:54.100 People really like him.

00:08:55.140 And then they found out, oh, Kevin Williamson doesn't sound like all the rest of our writers.

00:08:59.320 He says things that to us are awful, but to at least half the country are perfectly reasonable and fine.

00:09:06.200 And then they're like, oh, no, my God, what have we done?

00:09:09.400 Right.

00:09:09.620 I feel like there was a little bit of that going on with Georgetown, like, oh, it doesn't sound like the rest of us.

00:09:15.980 It doesn't look like the rest of us.

00:09:17.540 It says weird things about, you know, race and gender not being the be all end all.

00:09:23.140 And this adherence to identity politics seems to offend this guy.

00:09:26.720 What what on earth?

00:09:28.360 So I'm mocking it because we've seen it so many times.

00:09:31.760 It's just laughable.

00:09:32.700 But you point out in your Wall Street Journal op-ed, which had late last night, this is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone, except perhaps the instigators of the Twitter mob that launched this tempest, particularly the first few days, which were truly terrible for me and my family.

00:09:47.900 Can you talk about that?

00:09:49.620 Yeah, my wife had actually warned me a couple of days, a couple of days before my tweet.

00:09:54.260 We were out celebrating her birthday and she said, you know, you're joining an academic institution now.

00:09:58.420 You have to be careful, particularly about race and sex. 0.67

00:10:01.520 And then I sort of step in it, which doesn't mean that my tweet is a firing offense or disciplining offense.

00:10:06.460 But I opened the door for my political enemies to go after me.

00:10:12.960 And that's and that's a one way street.

00:10:14.500 I mean, lots of law professors and other professors on the left say all sorts of things way more outrageous than than than than what I did, even interpreted in its worst light.

00:10:25.300 And yet Georgetown did did nothing for them.

00:10:27.780 But anyway, my personal experience.

00:10:29.520 Right.

00:10:29.740 So I woke up that morning in that Austin hotel room and saw what was going on and I felt sick to my stomach and especially come around noontime when the dean issued his statement.

00:10:44.280 I thought, OK, I'm going to get fired.

00:10:46.520 I was transitioning jobs from from Cato to Georgetown.

00:10:49.740 How can I provide for my family?

00:10:51.540 I have two little boys who are four and six.

00:10:54.280 This is horrific.

00:10:56.160 I've blown up my life.

00:10:57.320 I've you know, it was honestly, Megan, the probably the second worst day of my life, the worst being when my mom passed when I was in college.

00:11:06.380 I really thought, you know, I I worked hard my whole life.

00:11:10.400 I had done everything right.

00:11:12.700 Went to the right schools, built a platform for myself as a inserted myself into the national conversation about many important issues on the Supreme Court and the Constitution, public affairs, lots of different things.

00:11:25.560 And with one bad tweet, I had just I had just killed that.

00:11:30.640 And what am I going to do?

00:11:32.580 And it was just the most horrific, horrific feeling.

00:11:36.440 And as I worked with my allies and friends over the over that day and the coming home and in the coming days, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, FIRE, which I told them is now my my favorite nonprofit organization.

00:11:51.820 I'm going to be number one fundraiser.

00:11:56.360 Other other folks, just so many people came out of the woodwork, good friends, you know, acquaintances who I hadn't seen or talked to in 10 years.

00:12:03.020 How can I help a lot?

00:12:04.860 You know, this is one thing I learned from this whole experience, just exactly who my friends are and how many I have.

00:12:09.900 I'm truly blessed in that department.

00:12:11.980 I'd rather not have had reason to to learn about all that.

00:12:15.220 But nevertheless, those first few days were I have a metaphor that the first few days were hell.

00:12:22.600 And then once the dean decided that he was going to let me join the Georgetown, be onboarded, but immediately be placed on leave.

00:12:31.260 And then that leave became purgatory.

00:12:32.940 So I had four days of hell and I couldn't sleep.

00:12:35.360 There were physical manifestations in my health, my wife as well.

00:12:38.980 I mean, we try to keep things from our from our kids.

00:12:41.020 They can sense when when something's bothering mommy and daddy.

00:12:44.320 And then it became purgatory and it was kind of a roller coaster of emotions.

00:12:49.060 You know, I made the best of of that situation going, you know, became sort of an inadvertent poster boy for for cancel culture and whatnot.

00:12:57.120 But great personal and professional instability.

00:13:01.280 And today I'm with you the day after that purgatory ended.

00:13:05.440 Uh, I'm not sure we're quite in heaven at this point to push the metaphor even further.

00:13:10.220 Uh, but those first few days you asked me about, I, I really, I mean, it was, um, you know, we talk politically and we try to frame things and I had good crisis PR advice and things like that.

00:13:21.780 Uh, but the, the personal toll was just visceral.

00:13:25.860 Yeah, I, I can relate and I think it's, we skip over that too quickly in these situations, no matter how they end.

00:13:34.920 You know, I've said before one other time in this show, when I had my show canceled at NBC, I had the same feeling, the sleepless nights, like this stunned feeling of what just happened to me.

00:13:46.800 Is my career entirely gone, all, everything I've worked so hard for, you know, nothing matters, only, only this one moment seems to matter.

00:13:55.720 And will it be used to destroy me?

00:13:57.940 Will I emerge from this?

00:13:59.220 And I, I was seeing a therapist who I'd been seeing for years, you know, I hired him.

00:14:04.440 I went, started seeing him in 2011.

00:14:07.100 Um, but anyway, he offered me antidepressants and I refused, Ilya, because the one thing I was certain of was Andy Lack was not going to put me on antidepressants.

00:14:18.720 Like I, for me, that was the hard line.

00:14:20.880 Like I'm, I'm not doing that.

00:14:22.380 I will not give that guy that power.

00:14:25.140 And for me, it's a badge of honor.

00:14:27.220 There's nothing wrong with antidepressants at all.

00:14:29.120 I know a lot of people for whom they've done a lot of good, but it was like in that moment, I couldn't let that happen.

00:14:34.240 You know what I'm saying?

00:14:35.060 It was like, that to me meant something in my little private battle.

00:14:39.200 So I get it.

00:14:40.040 These are, people don't understand the like deep emotional toll these decisions can have.

00:14:47.500 And, you know, it's not so much the Twitter mob, you know, I've, I've, I've had attacks and, and, you know, the kind of snark that the, the, the surreality of all of the online stuff.

00:14:59.180 It was the fact that I might be unemployed, that my reputation would be destroyed forever over a tweet.

00:15:06.500 And how did I let this happen?

00:15:08.420 And how am I hurting my family?

00:15:10.880 Yeah, that was, that was, that was, that was pretty horrible.

00:15:14.640 So then you have, so it's what, it's one thing if it's just like the Dean who's looking to see why a, and you're like, okay, you know, it's like your boss is basically looking to punish you for a little while, you know, just to make himself look like he cares.

00:15:28.360 That's one thing.

00:15:29.260 But you had the Black Law Students Association at Georgetown demanding that your employment be rescinded.

00:15:36.600 We pulled up that statement and it's, forgive me, but they demanded the revocation of your employment contract and that the college condemn your quote racist tweets.

00:15:47.640 At Georgetown Law, Black students are haunted by the shadow of imposter syndrome.

00:15:52.360 Shapiro reinforced this phenomenon by reducing Black women's accomplishments and so on, it goes on. 1.00

00:16:00.080 But that stuff hurts too, because now you've got whole groups of minority coalitions coming together to basically condemn you as racist without any appreciation for the context or the apology or the, you know, everything that you said thereafter.

00:16:14.700 Well, that's why the Dean acted as he did, why he first condemned me and then why he put me on administrative leave and launched the investigation.

00:16:28.460 Because as administrators around the country are, they're afraid of student activist groups, which by no means represent the majority.

00:16:37.960 I mean, the majority of students, especially at a ladder climbing, you know, legal professional school at a place like in Washington, D.C.

00:16:48.020 Like Georgetown, the vast majority just want good jobs and get networked and what have you.

00:16:53.100 But the the very vocal minority who is, you know, are cowing their classmates often, you know, peer pressure to sign letters and make denunciations.

00:17:05.040 It's kind of a Maoist sort of unhealthy campus culture.

00:17:09.380 They pressure administrators as well.

00:17:11.640 And we've seen around the country in different contexts that if administrators from the beginning stand up for due process or free speech or other policies that are well considered and well written, and most schools actually do have on paper good policies, then they put down the unrest fairly quickly.

00:17:33.560 But if they if they if they try to kowtow, it's it doesn't help them, frankly.

00:17:40.620 And I think Dean Traynor is probably facing that right now.

00:17:44.100 Kick the can down the road for years.

00:17:46.480 Sorry, four months.

00:17:47.540 It felt like four years.

00:17:49.100 And now, as I'm, you know, writing my Wall Street Journal op-ed and talking about getting ready to go and host a diversity of thought in my classroom and that everyone's welcome and will be treated equally.

00:18:00.040 Obviously, he's being pilloried by those same woke activist groups.

00:18:05.660 I don't know if you if your producers found the latest Black Law Students Association tweet and statement from late last night.

00:18:13.020 But if anything, it's even more strident than than what you just read.

00:18:17.940 Yeah, they're essentially saying we never we never, you know, we're basing our complaints on him being an actual Georgetown employee.

00:18:24.800 They're not satisfied. They they they want to scalp and, you know, and they have a demand for the dean to define exactly where the line is between conservatism and racism, as if that's the spectrum.

00:18:35.680 At a certain point, they criticize the dean for calling my tweets as attacking females, black females, where there's some there's some nomenclature dispute over female and woman.

00:18:48.380 I might have to consult a biologist to understand what that's all about.

00:18:51.780 Well, there are none, especially on the sitting Supreme Court.

00:18:54.820 And the the justice who was then later nominated doesn't know either.

00:18:59.720 Speaking of black women. 1.00

00:19:02.840 So by the way, I think she's qualified to be on the Supreme Court. 1.00

00:19:06.020 Of course, she is the outset.

00:19:07.400 Make clear that my tweet in no reasonable world can be interpreted as saying as no black women are qualified to be on the Supreme Court,

00:19:16.440 which is how those acting in bad faith willfully misconstrued it to propagate this this attack.

00:19:23.840 No, as compared to Ketanji Brown Jackson, I am a lesser white woman and in a potential seat on the Supreme Court.

00:19:33.200 I don't have anything like her credentials or experience.

00:19:35.760 That's what you were trying to say.

00:19:37.360 It didn't have anything to do with really your an objection on your part to race or to gender.

00:19:43.900 It was that you were getting somebody lesser than the guy I think you should choose.

00:19:47.900 And it's sad that this guy won't even be considered because he doesn't have the right, you know, gender and he doesn't have the quote, right, even though he's a member of a racial minority group and an immigrant.

00:19:57.280 But yes, but not the preferred, not the preferred.

00:20:00.460 So this is where things got really crazy.

00:20:02.720 It was already crazy.

00:20:03.500 So this whole story has already gotten so out of hand.

00:20:06.220 But then I'm sorry to laugh, but you've got to laugh a little.

00:20:10.560 Then they had like sit-ins at Georgetown Law over you.

00:20:15.380 And we played some of this because National Review got their hands on some of the tapes.

00:20:19.060 And it was just you couldn't believe your eyes.

00:20:20.840 We're like, yeah, I think I made Nate Hokeman's career there at National Review, the young young writer who's like on the Shapiro beat the last few months.

00:20:28.220 Well, it was shocking stuff.

00:20:29.880 It was like, wait, what did he do again?

00:20:31.820 You know, like what what exactly did he do?

00:20:34.180 They had meetings with Dean Traynor.

00:20:37.540 He was front and center in all of this.

00:20:39.660 He this is actually from from Nate, from Nate Hokeman's reporting.

00:20:45.800 A chastened looking trainer spent more than an hour answering questions from what appeared to be the Black Law Students Association leadership team in a closed auditorium.

00:20:54.760 The dean, striking an apologetic tone, echoed the language of the activists in the crowd, assuring the assembled students.

00:20:59.900 He was appalled by the painful nature of Shapiro's tweets and promising to listen, learn and ultimately do better.

00:21:10.020 And we have actually clips of that where one of the students demanded reparations for the time they missed in class to attend the sit-in and a free lunch.

00:21:23.780 Here's a bit of that, SOT 1.

00:21:27.100 In terms of coming back to the reparation things, because this is great, but we have to do so much work to catch up for all this stuff that we missed.

00:21:34.580 All I'm saying is, I don't know if it's a couple of dinners or lunches.

00:21:38.500 But that would help us, because we, like, we can't, I can't go home for lunch now because I need to study.

00:21:45.640 I have to, I have to make up for this class that I lost.

00:21:48.060 So it's little things like that.

00:21:49.400 It doesn't have to be something that takes a year to figure out.

00:21:52.480 It's like, we know our Black students or whatever group is hurting, and we're going to give them things today, whether it's snacks, whether it's counseling, whether it's whatever.

00:22:00.380 But a part of that trust is to see an immediate reaction to what we are saying.

00:22:05.360 But food would be great.

00:22:07.920 We have food on the way.

00:22:09.780 All right.

00:22:10.060 Oh, good.

00:22:12.560 Okay.

00:22:13.360 Stand by, because the next soundbite was about the one gal demanding cry rooms. 1.00

00:22:20.600 I'm sorry, but we need tougher people.

00:22:23.640 Like, if you're going to be a lawyer, you've got to have a thick skin.

00:22:27.060 I mean, you would think. 0.99

00:22:27.940 And there's no fucking crying in litigation. 0.99

00:22:29.240 Sorry. 0.98

00:22:29.720 I think you would think in legal, in a legal career, you're going to face more challenging issues than a speaker who offends you or a tweet that you think, you know, correctly or not is racist.

00:22:41.920 Of course.

00:22:42.640 It's like there's wait until you get into a courtroom.

00:22:45.680 You want to you talk about cry rooms. 0.97

00:22:47.540 You're going to have to hold it as you get berated by federal court judges, by opposing counsel, 100 percent by jury jurors who, after the fact, go out and publicly say you sucked.

00:22:58.140 You know, like, you've got to hold it together, people.

00:23:01.280 But tell that to this group, because here they are demanding this dean to give them a place to cry over your tweets.

00:23:08.020 It is really, really hard to walk out of class or a meeting in tears, and you should always have a place on campus where you can go and feel like you're not then also under people's eyes and observation.

00:23:22.900 Maybe you don't want to answer a question of what's going on or what's wrong.

00:23:26.300 And if you're finding that you're not getting the person you want to talk to or not getting the space that you need, reach out to me any time, any time so we will find you space.

00:23:39.360 So that's Dean Traynor, who's totally into the cry rooms, correct?

00:23:42.600 That was the associate dean.

00:23:44.520 I forget what his name is.

00:23:47.600 Mitch.

00:23:48.980 I forget his name now.

00:23:50.740 But, yeah.

00:23:53.640 Look, people's feelings were hurt.

00:23:59.560 Some people were offended.

00:24:02.580 But, I mean, come on.

00:24:06.220 Grow up.

00:24:06.680 You know, I'm happy to meet with any students and discuss what concerns they have.

00:24:12.980 I already said what I had to say about the tweet, and I, you know, I kick myself to this day that, you know, I pride someone.

00:24:19.840 I'm someone who prides himself on communicating well, both orally and in written form, and this was a failure in communication.

00:24:26.420 But you're not a perfect man.

00:24:28.060 No.

00:24:28.240 I mean, no one is.

00:24:29.780 I bet you Dean Traynor's got some things he's said or written that he doesn't want thrown back at him.

00:24:35.660 You know, Megan, one thing I've learned through this ordeal is that we as a society, I think, have lost our understanding of grace and of seeing your political enemies or social enemies, for that matter, not simply as, you know, we now see them not simply as wrong, but as evil.

00:24:57.340 Uh, and everything is unforgivable, uh, and in an academic context, uh, so many things, everything's racist or sexist or offending, um, the latest hierarchy of intersectionality is, uh, as I, as I cheekily put it.

00:25:14.680 So it's, you know, perhaps my eyes weren't sufficiently open as I was transferring to Georgetown from, from Cato, because I think if I had stayed at Cato and made the same sort of commentary, um, not, you know, the same thing wouldn't have happened.

00:25:29.360 There would have still been a bit of a Twitter storm.

00:25:31.060 Uh, but you know, Cato wouldn't have fired me or investigated me.

00:25:35.940 Um, that's right now they were silent, uh, after this all happened.

00:25:40.280 And, and that was telling, that was telling and disappointing after nearly 15 years of service and purportedly being an institution that supports the freedom of speech, you would think they would have plenty of reason to come to my defense issue statements.

00:25:56.780 And they did not.

00:25:57.780 And that's been one of the few, uh, disappointments or negative surprises in terms of people who have acted or not, uh, in my defense.

00:26:06.460 But it's kind of a gift too.

00:26:08.260 It is a gift.

00:26:08.920 I mean, one of the gifts of going through something like this is as you point out, you find out who your friends are and you find out who your friends aren't, you know, and that list is significant as well.

00:26:18.100 It's better to know, you know, I'd rather know this person was only attached to me because whatever they thought I was famous or powerful, or, you know, in your case, powerful and well-known and sought after and respected.

00:26:31.120 And then the second you've got a bruise, they run.

00:26:35.060 Okay, great.

00:26:36.320 I, that's perfect.

00:26:37.220 Cause that's information I didn't have about you before this happened.

00:26:40.480 So better, better to be armed with it.

00:26:42.640 Disappointing, but better to know.

00:26:46.060 Which isn't to say that my, my many friends and former colleagues at Cato didn't reach out, you know, personally.

00:26:51.380 Uh, I must say it's not that, you know, everyone affiliated, uh, with the institution has, uh, pledged some sort of omerta, but there, there is some, um, and it's been noticed in legal circles and libertarian circles, um, there.

00:27:04.580 Well, that's the thing is like, that's the test is it's like when your friends are down, number one, do you kick them?

00:27:09.900 And number two, do you at least stay out of the Twitter, Twitter mob, right?

00:27:15.240 Like that's the, but, but ideally defend them.

00:27:17.360 I mean, that's the ideal is to actually say a word.

00:27:20.020 And I listened to those guys on national review, talk about this at length in the podcast saying, yeah, okay.

00:27:24.680 It wasn't perfectly worded tweet.

00:27:25.940 We all get that, but you got to look at this guy.

00:27:28.620 Like you got to know who this person is.

00:27:30.120 You got to, you got to like examine the man and see like this, you've devoted your life towards constitutional scholarship.

00:27:36.840 Like this is a worthwhile task and you're not some bomb thrower, you know, some flamethrower.

00:27:42.960 No one wanted to acknowledge that or give you the benefit of the doubt in any way.

00:27:47.920 One of the other things on the students, which kind of stood out to me because you mentioned fire, uh, and I love fire.

00:27:53.140 They're a great organization and, um, they stand up for free speech on, on campus.

00:27:57.860 She, she pressed the Dean to send out an email attacking the critics of the black student law association.

00:28:04.780 And she said, quote, something that's important is to remind our classmates that are attacking us, that they are only here because our ancestors were sold for them to be here.

00:28:16.380 And I think that's a very important fact that is not talked about explicitly enough because we are still being attacked.

00:28:21.920 So I would just appreciate in whatever message that's going out to the student body that our classmates are explicitly reminded, do not attack the people who were sold for you to have this opportunity.

00:28:31.780 That needs to be something that these people are reminded of because they continue to attack us as if it is not on our backs that they are even here.

00:28:41.140 This woman is talking like she is a modern day slave. 1.00

00:28:47.640 Like we have slavery right now and she's enslaved at Georgetown law, one of the most elite privileged institutions in the world.

00:28:56.900 And that she is, no one is allowed to criticize her or her colleagues in the black student law association group because there's a history of slavery in the United States.

00:29:07.380 Well, victim status is a form of privilege to turn the tables on the way the discourse works.

00:29:16.540 And I mean, I really wish things didn't work that way and everyone was just treated based on the strength of their arguments, their intellect, you know, what they contribute to the community, what grades they get, what institutions they build, all of those sorts of things.

00:29:37.620 But, you know, we're told from some institutions that considerations of merit are racist in and of themselves or operation of logic or the scientific method.

00:29:46.740 These sorts of things are racist.

00:29:49.040 I mean, if everything is racist, then nothing is.

00:29:50.940 And that's the real problem here.

00:29:52.180 You know, you see those side by side statements.

00:29:54.640 It's what you just read could have been read effectively by a white supremacist organization.

00:30:02.020 It's the horseshoe theory where the the most identitarian on the left from the the racial minority groups match their rhetoric.

00:30:14.760 You know, the 69 project, the 19 project or what have you, with the most strident white supremacist racist organizations in their racial essentialism.

00:30:24.260 And I think it's really a negative trend that has certainly infected academia, but obviously has spilled out into the greater world. 0.80

00:30:32.000 It's like this idea from a Georgetown law school student, somebody who's, you know, one of the leaders of the legal profession in years to come to suggest that she cannot be criticized because she's black and there's a history of racism in the United States that you may not criticize her or anyone in this group is insane.

00:30:55.300 I mean, it's deeply disturbing to me, and I can't wait to see how it goes for her when she gets out into the real world and starts actually practicing law, because there's a whole slew of criticism coming her way. 0.73

00:31:08.040 She will be torn apart. 1.00

00:31:09.460 She will be called an idiot. 1.00

00:31:10.940 She will be told her ideas are terrible, that she doesn't belong at her firm or on this case or writing this brief. 1.00

00:31:17.120 That's how it goes.

00:31:18.540 Litigation or corporate law.

00:31:20.620 It's just it's not beanball or maybe not so much anymore, Megan, because.

00:31:25.300 These sorts of attitudes have certainly crept into the major law firms and general counsel's offices of corporate America.

00:31:32.900 It's the the the the legal industry as a whole, you know, from the ABA setting out credentialing requirements for law schools that now incorporate certain diversity rules and equity rules and what have you through how affirmative action and racial preferences are practiced in in different settings.

00:31:53.540 You know, I'm not so sure necessarily that, you know, that kind of attitude necessarily will result in negative repercussions.

00:32:05.000 Oh, my gosh.

00:32:05.860 I mean, that's that would be the most disturbing thing of all.

00:32:08.260 I mean, what are people going to do?

00:32:09.520 Start seeding arguments in court because of the skin color of opposing counsel?

00:32:14.640 Well, that's madness that that cannot be.

00:32:18.860 But you're right.

00:32:19.460 I mean, I know that the law schools have become wokeified.

00:32:22.420 The students certainly are.

00:32:23.920 And that does lead me to the question of why are you doing this?

00:32:28.300 Now, wait, don't answer that yet.

00:32:30.320 I'm going to give you the break to think it over.

00:32:32.020 I'm going to squeeze in a break.

00:32:32.900 And Ilya Shapiro answers that question when we come back.

00:32:43.360 My whole team was talking in the break like this isn't going to last.

00:32:46.600 How can this last?

00:32:48.380 Yeah, especially with the end of term Supreme Court decisions and even more when the students are back on campus this fall when the Supreme Court takes up the Harvard affirmative action case.

00:32:58.120 And I'll be giving public comment, including probably to you in a way that they won't like.

00:33:05.340 Look, when I when I took this job, when when Randy Barnett and I started talking about how to move the center into its into its second decade, it's now celebrating 10 years now.

00:33:14.280 But we want to elevate its presence as an energy center for originalism, for constitutional interpretation.

00:33:19.720 I thought that this would be an opportunity to for me to kind of have a different sort of impact with students have being based in an academic institution rather than an explicitly ideological think tank.

00:33:35.380 And then for the students and judges, practitioners who I get involved in programming to learn from me and to to expand upon originalism and and and and have hopefully a better constitutional judicial conversation.

00:33:51.460 Whether that is going to be feasible now, you know, the proof will be in the pudding.

00:33:56.760 And Dean Traynor expressed to me, as I wrote in The Wall Street Journal, that he wants me to succeed.

00:34:03.740 And as long as I behave professionally, that he will have my back.

00:34:08.880 What does that mean?

00:34:09.740 I'm not sure.

00:34:10.300 I don't I still don't think that tweets are firing offenses, but we'll see what whether we can make a go of this.

00:34:21.940 University has policies against disrupting events, disrupting classes.

00:34:26.020 You know, if I'm ceaselessly protested in my new role and the law school does not enforce its rules against that sort of thing.

00:34:34.540 Well, that won't be a that won't be something that that's feasible and we'll have to figure out where to go from there.

00:34:42.060 And also, you know, with the various friends that that have come out in my support and allies, I've gotten some interesting offers and things to do and ways to spend my time.

00:34:50.880 So I think I'll end up all right out of all this, which doesn't justify the process.

00:34:56.440 But that is an interesting question.

00:34:59.000 And and I'll I hope to make a go of it.

00:35:02.780 But if it becomes the environment becomes truly hostile, which is ironic because I've been accused by of creating a hostile environment by the the diversity administrators who are investigating me, then I'll have to see what the next step will be.

00:35:19.960 I know, because it's one thing to send out a tweet that wasn't perfectly worded.

00:35:25.820 It's another to be punished, as is very likely going to be the case for your viewpoints, for your genuine, genuinely held viewpoints on, as you point out, for example, the affirmative action case or any other or the growing DEI commitment that we see at all these institutions.

00:35:42.820 Something fire, Greg Lugiana's organization, we had him on the show, has been pushing back again, saying you cannot mandate that you cannot mandate that professors seeking tenure commit to DEI and certain expansive programs.

00:35:57.640 That's mandated speech.

00:35:59.300 And those things are fraught if they have a nice name, but they're fraught once you start to peel away the layers of the onion.

00:36:05.220 And so, like, if you're not on board with that is a lot of conservatives see that that's not really what it what it says it is.

00:36:13.440 You could get punished.

00:36:14.460 As I read Trainor's letter announcing that you were coming back, he says the following.

00:36:21.880 Georgetown Law is committed to preserving and protecting the right of free and open inquiry, deliberation and debate.

00:36:27.040 OK, great.

00:36:27.900 Hope that's true.

00:36:28.420 We have an equally compelling obligation to foster a campus community that is free from bias and in which every member is treated with respect and courtesy.

00:36:39.960 I'm committed to continuing to strive toward both of these indispensable goals.

00:36:44.880 The problem is that respect, courtesy and anti-bias could mean anything.

00:36:51.560 It could mean anything.

00:36:53.780 And it's it's going to be really hard for him to uphold both of those goals at once.

00:36:57.760 I mean, it used to be we could go and slug it out and maybe it wasn't perfectly respectful in the eyes of everybody there.

00:37:03.620 But that's what college is for to duke it out.

00:37:07.980 Yeah.

00:37:08.240 I mean, you you you say that I might be persecuted for my viewpoint or as just happened with Josh Katz, a professor at Princeton who was stripped of his tenure and fired.

00:37:21.700 You know, some pretext will be generated to punish someone for their viewpoint.

00:37:27.240 So the next time, you know, might not be a tweet.

00:37:30.200 It might be something that I've already said to you, taken out of context, some clip that emerges this fall during the Harvard affirmative action case.

00:37:40.740 And that's being pointed to as well.

00:37:43.000 Now, that's the second incident where he, quote unquote, misspoke.

00:37:46.460 And so clearly that's a pattern of of his racism, something like that.

00:37:52.040 You know, that's certainly within the realm of possibility.

00:37:55.860 Is it is it scary being here and talking so openly about it?

00:37:58.720 I mean, to your credit, this is this is brave of you.

00:38:02.820 I don't want to oversell it.

00:38:04.480 I'm not into patting myself on the back.

00:38:07.880 I like talking to the media.

00:38:10.400 I certainly respect what what you've done professionally.

00:38:13.280 I think, you know, I've developed certain skills in conveying ideas and translating the highfalutin academic theories down into as my as my judge who I clerk for, I like to say, got to chew it up for the little goats to eat it because I think it's important.

00:38:29.180 I think it's important for the American people to understand what the Supreme Court is doing, how our law works, how the different branches work, because we have a real crisis in our public discourse.

00:38:40.100 And if I can contribute to alleviating ignorance and fostering more civil discourse, that's what I'm that's what I'm all about.

00:38:47.900 At the end of the day, if someone wants to take disciplinary action against me or, you know, the next cancellation campaign, what this process has taught me is that I think I'm going to be OK.

00:39:00.460 I have enough friends, I have enough of a profile at this point that I think I might be OK.

00:39:06.180 Now, it might not be the planned career transition that I had in mind.

00:39:10.160 But, you know, the real problem with cancel culture, with people who are really brave are those who don't have the sort of platform that don't have Megyn Kelly asking to interview them, that don't have the Wall Street Journal saying, yeah, we'll take whatever comment you have after this decision is made.

00:39:28.400 And that includes professors. It's not, you know, before we even get to the average people that get fired or doxed or boycotted for contributing 20 or 100 bucks to some politically incorrect cause, that's terrible enough.

00:39:44.700 But even other professors or high ranking business people that don't have a platform per se and lots of horrible things happen to them.

00:39:54.920 So, you know, as long as I have the ability and and the the analytical capacity to bring something to the table that folks like you want to hear about, I'm going to keep talking.

00:40:07.800 You know, they're not going to shut me up.

00:40:09.560 You know, next time I slip up and say something poorly, you know, I'll own up to it always.

00:40:14.720 I try to be honest and fair.

00:40:17.860 But but but look, life is too short.

00:40:20.580 And as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident, said, live not by lies, let the lie triumph, but not through me.

00:40:31.580 So you are not going to be able to hold me down.

00:40:35.760 You know, I'll be careful with my with my with my tweets and I have a whole new approach to Twitter these days anyway.

00:40:41.920 But but but even beyond that, I think it's important to talk about what's going on in our public life, honestly and forthright, forthrightly.

00:40:50.280 And if someone wants to lie about that and slander you, you know, that's on them.

00:40:56.020 Oh, I love your attitude about it.

00:40:58.040 You've gotten to a healthy place.

00:40:59.480 Yes. I know they're going to make you do DEI training, implicit bias, cultural competence and non-discrimination training.

00:41:05.820 Yeah. All that stuff clearly susses out or converts the real racists. 0.51

00:41:10.020 I mean, it's like all the studies have proven that actually that actually makes people more racist if it's implicit or it's like, you know, sort of this quiet, simmering bias.

00:41:20.640 These these studies bring it out.

00:41:22.380 That's what the studies have shown.

00:41:23.280 But the universities won't listen and you must make yourself available to meet with student leaders concerned about your ability to treat students fairly.

00:41:30.760 I'm sure that will be a joy for you, Ilya.

00:41:33.960 I actually wonder whether they'll want to meet with me.

00:41:37.240 You know, the university folks I've talked to said it doesn't necessarily have to be a town hall.

00:41:41.000 It just might be, you know, if someone wants to arrange a meeting or whether it's the Black Law Students Association or just anyone.

00:41:46.420 I don't know if they're going to want to come to, like, office hours or a, you know, reparations lunch or something like that.

00:41:54.140 And I predict you're going to get the gal who's like, you remember, how did she put it, that it was my back on which you're even here.

00:42:02.720 Do not attack the people who were sold for you to have this opportunity.

00:42:06.240 So you better prepare a line.

00:42:07.840 To be clear, I don't want to attack the students.

00:42:10.000 You know, I want to educate.

00:42:11.660 I want to, you know, and to be clear, my my classroom, my programs are open to all.

00:42:17.320 And I can promise that everyone will have the freedom of speech and be treated equally and fairly.

00:42:25.820 Yeah, well, we're definitely going to be watching that piece of beer next chapter with great interest and 100 percent rooting for you.

00:42:34.140 But while I have you here, I want to take advantage of your legal mind, if you don't mind.

00:42:38.340 I've seen some of your writings recently on guns.

00:42:41.400 Last night, President Biden made a big speech on guns, seeming to suggest he wants to bring back the assault weapons ban that was in place from 94 to 04, or at least that piece of it that bans high capacity magazines and on and on.

00:42:56.220 Sort of similar rhetoric to what we've heard from him for many years now.

00:42:59.140 And I mean, you tell me what your view of it is, because right now there's a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court on guns that most people expect to go in favor of Second Amendment advocates.

00:43:11.700 They're not tightening gun laws right now.

00:43:13.600 They're not restricting their interpretation of the Second Amendment, or so we believe in oral argument.

00:43:18.140 And so and nor is there the political will for an assault weapons ban.

00:43:21.100 But he says it worked.

00:43:23.100 He said mass shootings have tripled since it expired and, you know, that there's a moral obligation to do something.

00:43:29.260 Your thoughts on it?

00:43:31.160 So it did not work.

00:43:33.520 No studies show that there was less gun violence attributable to the assault weapon ban, whether there's more mass shootings.

00:43:42.420 Yes, we have seen more mass shootings in recent years, although since the ban ended nearly 20 years ago, it's hard to compare, you know, 94 to 04 to to recent years because there's a lot of other things going on.

00:43:56.560 But more broadly, most crime in this country is not mass shootings and it's not committed with so-called assault weapons.

00:44:05.460 And by the way, the way assault weapons seem to be defined as semi-automatic rifles.

00:44:10.060 That's pretty much all rifles that aren't, you know, shotguns.

00:44:14.660 It means you you pull the trigger and each time a bullet comes out.

00:44:17.340 These are not machine guns.

00:44:18.720 These are not automatics.

00:44:20.300 And there's a whole, you know, miss misapplication of words here.

00:44:26.720 But also, you know, more people get killed through people's bare hands and and feet than than rifles.

00:44:36.460 In 2019, I just pulled up a statistic.

00:44:39.240 There were about 14000 people murdered in this country.

00:44:42.440 Nearly half of them were with a handgun.

00:44:45.440 Fifteen hundred of them, about 10 percent with knives, four percent with hands or feet and about three percent with rifles.

00:44:52.220 And that doesn't distinguish between semi-automatic rifles and, say, a single shot, a 22 rifle.

00:44:59.000 So anyway, this is all trying to reach for easy solutions for tough problems or problems that are simply insoluble because they're cultural or they they have complicated roots.

00:45:12.920 And, you know, the most the latest horrific shooting at the at the elementary school seems to be a complete breakdown of not of the background check system.

00:45:24.680 He passed his background check, but of the police standing around, not going in with an active shooter situation, contrary to the training that they just received.

00:45:33.960 So before we pile on new legislation that has little chance of changing things, why not enforce our existing rules or against sales to straw purchasers or felon in possession?

00:45:47.140 By the way, those existing rules and laws will disproportionately affect racial minorities.

00:45:53.380 These are tough issues to deal with, particularly in the debates over, you know, George Floyd and and police misconduct and and what have you.

00:46:04.440 But there are no easy solutions. And certainly certain things that Biden is proposing may be more and better red flag laws so that people who are seemingly crazy or a threat to themselves or other people.

00:46:17.520 They have to be narrowly drawn with plenty of due process protection. So they're not locked out of your rights forever and sort of things.

00:46:23.940 You know, certain things there are there's room to discuss. But the assault, the so-called assault weapon ban, that's that's a cosmetic thing that really, you know, most as I said, the most common handgun used in crime is a handgun.

00:46:40.480 And nobody's talking about that because it can't be done. And that's the best gun for for self-defense as well.

00:46:46.140 And the most deadly school shooting ever was committed with handguns at Virginia Tech. The guy had two of them and unleashed, you know, carnage.

00:46:53.540 And that was a failure of the background check system because he actually had a record of mental illness that was disqualifying that did not get into the record system.

00:47:02.520 So, again, existing rules are there and there's a failure of existing structures.

00:47:06.980 Yeah. Quickly, before I let you go, got to ask you about Supreme Court.

00:47:11.100 And by the way, I'm not a gun nut. I have never owned a gun.

00:47:14.000 You're Canadian. I'm a constitution nut. Call me a constitution nut. But, you know.

00:47:19.480 Supreme Court leaker. What the hell? Only this week, the marshal asked for the cell phone records of the clerks. 0.98

00:47:27.260 I'm starting to lose faith in the marshal, Bilya. How about you?

00:47:30.940 This infuriates me. I'm losing even more faith in Chief Justice John Roberts.

00:47:35.640 If he really wanted to come to the bottom of this, as he expressed his outrage when it happened a month ago, then, you know, you ask for all the phone records and the email records of the clerks, of the justices, of the staff that had access.

00:47:49.020 You know, and not not because it's a criminal investigation and but because this is a very serious threat to the functioning of the Supreme Court.

00:47:58.500 This is an unprecedented circumstance.

00:48:02.280 You know, the leaker needs to be caught. The leaker needs to be punished.

00:48:05.560 Now, I don't know.

00:48:07.500 The leaker may be celebrated with a professorship at Yale Law School or a contributorship on MSNBC or something.

00:48:13.220 But they need to own up if they think what they did was was heroic.

00:48:17.540 Yeah, the leaker may wind up being a colleague of yours at the Georgetown Constitution Center.

00:48:23.020 They may welcome her with open arms.

00:48:25.460 All right. Listen, thank you for your analysis.

00:48:27.100 Thank you for your honesty and come back anytime.

00:48:30.320 Next time we'll talk about more about the news and hopefully not at all about you and your job troubles because there won't be any.

00:48:35.560 That's my hope.

00:48:36.860 Well, next time I might be coming to you asking for a job, Megan.

00:48:39.560 We'll see how things go.

00:48:40.780 It's done. Consider it done.

00:48:42.560 It would be my honor.

00:48:44.000 Ilya, all the best to you.

00:48:45.420 Thank you. Take care.

00:48:46.380 Lots of love.

00:48:47.680 Wow.

00:48:48.340 So that's just like so wrong.

00:48:50.500 It's so wrong what they did to him.

00:48:51.980 Just remember that, you know, there's a real human behind these cancel culture mobs with families and kids.

00:48:57.480 What we're doing to one another is wrong.

00:49:00.940 All right.

00:49:01.400 When we come back, Mark Stein is with us.

00:49:03.380 I'm very excited to have him.

00:49:04.540 We used to work together at Fox News a bit.

00:49:06.920 And I always loved his commentary.

00:49:08.160 He's coming on.

00:49:08.680 We're going to talk about all things royal and beyond.

00:49:12.560 A spectacular celebration happening in the United Kingdom, where they are marking Queen Elizabeth's 70 years on the throne.

00:49:24.860 She was seen beaming with pride yesterday on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, along with Prince Charles, Prince William and all the other senior royals.

00:49:34.400 Last night at dusk, she led an incredibly moving ceremony at Windsor Castle.

00:49:38.400 She pressed a small globe, which set off a river of lights across the lawn.

00:49:43.300 Look how pretty that is.

00:49:44.100 You can check it out on our YouTube channel later.

00:49:47.440 It also signaled the beginning of a chain reaction of lighting ceremonies across the UK and the Commonwealth.

00:49:52.960 However, she did not take part in today's church service at St. Paul's Cathedral, the palace, saying that she had felt some, quote, discomfort during yesterday's festivities.

00:50:03.860 So she needed to rest.

00:50:05.420 She's 95 years old and she's got something planned for this evening.

00:50:08.940 So it is a big few days for the queen.

00:50:10.960 And in addition, she reportedly got to finally meet her great granddaughter, Lilibet.

00:50:17.660 Yes, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle finally found the time to introduce their daughter to the.

00:50:23.360 Is she 95 or 96?

00:50:25.160 My script here says 96 year old monarch.

00:50:27.580 96.

00:50:28.060 OK, it's Prince Harry's and Meghan's first time back together in the UK since 2020, since Megxit.

00:50:35.560 And today, when they emerged from St. Paul's Cathedral, well, I'm take a listen to this.

00:50:41.680 I was new a couple of times.

00:50:42.800 They received a bit of a frosty reception.

00:50:45.100 You can hear some cheers and plenty of booing in the crowd.

00:50:49.220 Listen.

00:50:58.060 I was joking with my team before the show that, you know, that they were each thinking those boos are for the other one.

00:51:22.520 And my team was saying, no, they're thinking of these racists booing us.

00:51:28.320 My guest now grew up in England and has met like many, many members of the royal family.

00:51:34.760 He's got some great fun stories of his own history there.

00:51:37.240 He's also an old pal from the Kelly file.

00:51:39.440 His name is Mark Stein and he's host of the Mark Stein show on GB News in Britain, which is a great, great channel.

00:51:46.340 Mark, great to see you.

00:51:48.080 Hey, great to see you, too, Meghan.

00:51:49.760 Good to be back with you.

00:51:50.780 I'm so happy, first of all, that you're with GB.

00:51:53.220 I love what they're doing over there.

00:51:54.480 I love their mission.

00:51:55.600 I love Dan Wooden and so many of the anchors over there.

00:51:58.920 So congrats on finding a spot with a great place.

00:52:02.900 No, no, it's been great fun.

00:52:05.080 And it's a scrappy little station, but we did quite credible coverage of the Jubilee yesterday.

00:52:12.220 So I'm thrilled with how it's going over there.

00:52:14.180 Yeah, it's going very well now.

00:52:16.480 OK, so let's talk about what this is about.

00:52:18.700 70 years on the throne.

00:52:19.900 That officially makes her the longest reigning monarch ever, right, in Great Britain's history.

00:52:25.860 Yes, she's the longest reigning British monarch.

00:52:30.420 In Canada, they say she's the longest running monarch of the British of the modern era, because back when it was still New France, Louis the whatever it was actually reigned for 72 years. 0.93

00:52:44.620 So she's got a couple of years to go yet to be the longest as as this idiotic way of looking at it in Canada goes.

00:52:52.000 But in the UK, she's she's the longest running. 0.95

00:52:55.980 She took the throne or at 26.

00:52:59.280 Right.

00:52:59.540 She was that's when her father passed.

00:53:01.540 So, I mean, the things that this woman has seen and been through and the fact that she's still we're running tape of her, you know, in black and white coming out when she had just been coronated.

00:53:11.560 And the fact that she's still walking out in that balcony, Mark, and to the beloved British people below really says something about her commitment to this role and to her country.

00:53:23.340 Yeah, she was first on that balcony on V.E. Day in 1945 when the Germans surrendered and she came out with her father and mother onto that balcony.

00:53:37.240 And then she and her sister slipped out of the palace among the crowds of on the streets of London.

00:53:43.980 And that's how she's now been on that balcony for almost 80 years.

00:53:49.420 She's she's been on the Canadian $20 banknote since 1935.

00:53:55.400 That's like 87 years.

00:53:57.280 So, you know, this is not how we think of politicians come and go.

00:54:02.780 But if you have a nonpolitical head of state, the memories go back a lot further.

00:54:08.980 Well, I heard you say something in defense of the monarchy that I thought was intriguing.

00:54:13.000 And it was right along these lines about how politicians here in America, for example, have a little too much power.

00:54:20.620 I think some of us feel uncomfortable with the amount of power they have or they think they have or we've given them.

00:54:26.220 And you see the queen in a way as a check on that.

00:54:30.140 Explain.

00:54:30.280 Yes, I think that I think it's healthy.

00:54:33.700 I think it's actually a design flaw.

00:54:35.500 I don't want to send your previous constitutional scholar, get his head exploding or anything.

00:54:42.780 But I actually think it's a design flaw to have a combined head of state and head of government.

00:54:48.600 It's very necessary to have something that's bigger than politicians or your politicians start getting all queenly.

00:54:55.120 I mean, Nancy Pelosi is far more queenly than the queen is in terms of putting on airs and graces and expecting to be flown around. 1.00

00:55:05.180 You wind up even with an hereditary political class.

00:55:08.300 The only reason anybody gives money to Hunter Biden or to Jim Biden is because they're the son and brother of the connected president.

00:55:16.900 Same same reason anybody gives jobs to Chelsea Clinton. 1.00

00:55:21.180 Nobody wants really to pay $4 million for a speech by Chelsea Clinton on diarrhea in Africa, but it's because of the proximity to power. 0.98

00:55:30.600 So you end up with all these pseudo-monarchical things.

00:55:34.380 And one of the things I love, especially for Republicans, there's a lot of Republicans in Australia and Canada.

00:55:41.080 But the great thing about if you have a monarchy is it arouses a certain chippiness in their subjects.

00:55:48.140 So people are always, you wind up with far less corruption.

00:55:52.660 When William and Kate were in Canada, the Royal Canadian Air Force, which was flying them around, decided to refurbish the accommodations and buy them a couple of comforters.

00:56:03.660 And so the press all complained, why do Canadian taxpayers have to pay for these pampered little princelings to fly around our country? 0.88

00:56:11.940 And the lady from the RCAF who'd bought the comforters said she'd gone to Canadian Tire, which, as its name suggests, is a very basic kind of store.

00:56:21.160 And they'd had a great deal on two comforters for $120.

00:56:25.200 And it was such a great deal that she'd bought a second set for herself.

00:56:29.720 And so I think actually having people running around calling themselves duchesses and prince actually keeps the citizens on their toes, too. 0.98

00:56:39.200 So you'd never be able to get away with your stupid 48-car motorcade like the president has here, because people would just be resentful of it. 0.95

00:56:47.280 I've never considered the monarchy in this way, but I like it. 0.99

00:56:50.260 You're talking me back into it.

00:56:51.740 I'm going to look at George Washington totally differently now.

00:56:53.680 Maybe you weren't as smart as I thought.

00:56:55.260 Just kidding.

00:56:55.840 No, no, in fairness, you know, George Washington, that George Washington, and there was some talk at the time that he would be known as his most excellent highness or whatever.

00:57:09.140 And he chose not to do that.

00:57:11.600 But the fact is, since then, you've wound up with a monarchical presidency and ludicrously, you know, the Queen got stuck in traffic yesterday on the way from Windsor Castle to Buckingham Palace.

00:57:25.280 She was a little late arriving.

00:57:26.840 She got stuck on the motorway, the interstate, as you say.

00:57:32.880 And that would never happen for the president, because the president, when he came to Vermont, the vice president came to Vermont.

00:57:41.780 They closed basically the entire road system of Vermont for the vice president.

00:57:47.820 I mean, there's nothing in the least bit Republican about that.

00:57:52.020 Wow.

00:57:52.980 No, there isn't.

00:57:53.840 It's a good point.

00:57:55.480 And now you've got people, you know, acting like they're entitled to that, although that's a problem we have across industries here in America.

00:58:01.420 Good.

00:58:01.580 Just go back and read Rosie O'Donnell's book where she talked about how thanks to her fame and celebrity, she got to the point where she believed she could just run the red lights because she was so famous.

00:58:12.000 Look how that ended.

00:58:12.860 Okay, so let's talk about the significance of what we're watching, because I don't think most Americans totally understand, like, what's the jubilee, what's the trooping of the colors, and what does it mean that, you know, only the senior royals were on the balcony, notably absent were the Megxit couple.

00:58:30.260 So just put it in perspective for us, what's happening and what we're looking at.

00:58:34.540 Well, we're celebrating basically an extraordinary 70-year reign.

00:58:40.220 If you think about it, in U.S. terms, Harry Truman was in the White House.

00:58:46.060 Joe Stalin was in the Kremlin.

00:58:48.060 Chairman Mao had just taken over in China.

00:58:51.880 There is nothing that survives of 1952 except this woman, and she survived in an industry in which, for the last century, it's been taken as inevitable that crowns don't survive.

00:59:06.460 You know, all her cousins in the German Empire, in the Russian Empire, her more distant ones in the Habsburg Empire, you take the Ottoman Empire, they're all gone.

00:59:18.160 And she's somehow managed to cling on and cling to, you know, an awful lot of valuable real estate all around the world. 0.53

00:59:27.400 And that's, I think that's helpful, too.

00:59:29.660 I think it's, I was, I mean, I don't want to do a lot of name dropping or whatever, but I was at Buckingham Palace.

00:59:35.720 I think I can tell this because I think I'm the only guest still alive.

00:59:39.580 I was at Buckingham Palace for a small private dinner a few years ago.

00:59:43.940 And at the end of it, we're all sort of relaxing and in the easy chairs and kicking off our shoes.

00:59:51.580 And somebody said, started one of those after dinner conversations on who's the most impressive person you ever met.

00:59:58.540 And the Queen's husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, said, oh, I would have to say, after a bit of thought, he said, I would have to say Vincent Massey and Sir Robert Menzies.

01:00:07.360 And Vincent Massey was Canada's governor general in 1952, and Sir Robert Menzies is the longest serving Australian prime minister.

01:00:15.620 And I can guarantee you that nobody else in that room had given those guys a thought in several decades.

01:00:21.100 But they're like the icebergs.

01:00:24.260 It's the seven eighths below the surface.

01:00:27.600 It's what Abraham Lincoln called the mystic chords of memory.

01:00:32.240 And it's a lot easier to bring those to the surface under a monarchical system.

01:00:37.660 How is it that you were invited to go to Buckingham Palace for a dinner and to just hang with the royals?

01:00:44.620 Well, I'll tell you, my assistant in New Hampshire, who was very New Hampshire focused, she was a little bit interested in stuff from Maine, not so much in Vermont, and no interest at all in Massachusetts.

01:01:03.940 But the telephone rang one day and she picked it up and she's going, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.

01:01:09.500 And then she puts her hand over the mouthpiece and goes, some palace on the phone for you.

01:01:15.000 And it was because the Duke of Edinburgh had read a column I'd written on the European Union and wanted to hear more about it.

01:01:26.560 So I agreed to go to dinner.

01:01:29.180 I was the only mister there.

01:01:30.760 Everybody else was an earl or a viscount or whatever.

01:01:35.620 For sure.

01:01:36.120 And I quite liked being the only mister in the room. 0.78

01:01:39.520 Well, can you tell us, because I read this in preparing for the interview, about how you had sort of boned up on how to say hello to the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen's husband, Prince Philip, and it didn't go exactly according to plan.

01:01:55.780 No.

01:01:56.260 I took the precaution because I love genuine republicanism.

01:02:03.700 You know, I fell in love with New Hampshire because everything's decided at town level.

01:02:08.460 So if you don't like the school district policies, you can call the guy up in the evening and yell at him about it, which is, you know, tough.

01:02:17.340 It's not something that cabinet secretaries in Washington have to put up with.

01:02:22.560 So I loved all that.

01:02:23.440 And I'd been in New Hampshire so long that I'd quite forgotten all the sort of fawning and groveling you had to do.

01:02:29.480 And so I'd been boning up on it beforehand.

01:02:31.340 And you have to bow from the neck when you are introduced, because, as George V says, only a waiter bows from the waist.

01:02:40.860 That was his line.

01:02:42.460 And so I land in London and, as usual, everything's a bit flustered.

01:02:46.740 I'm running.

01:02:47.180 I go and I change into my evening dress and I'm all running a bit late.

01:02:52.280 And I get to the palace and I'm ushered in by the footman.

01:02:56.640 And the Duke of Edinburgh is on the other side of the room.

01:03:00.040 And so instead of remembering to walk up to him and bow from the neck and go, Your Royal Highness, I just did the New Hampshire thing where I stuck out my arm and went, Hi!

01:03:09.440 And he was a bit startled, but he went, Hi!

01:03:15.880 And shook my hand, which was very...

01:03:18.040 And I feel I sort of felt bad about that when he died, because the last time I had to bow to the neck was about a year or two back for dinner with the Queen's Viceroy in Ottawa.

01:03:33.520 And so there I was completely on top with all the fawning and groveling, and I did bow from the neck.

01:03:40.420 And she just went, Oh, Mark!

01:03:42.560 And brought me in for a huge hug.

01:03:46.020 So I felt in Buckingham Palace, I feel bad about being so informal.

01:03:52.440 And in Rideau Hall in Ottawa, I feel bad because the Queen's Viceroy declined to accept my formality.

01:04:02.920 So I get it every which way.

01:04:04.820 I can relate to this.

01:04:05.860 It's not exactly royalty, but I love Cardinal Dolan.

01:04:09.700 And he's got a show right on Sirius XM, too.

01:04:12.900 And I went and participated in his Christmas special, which was shot live at Sirius headquarters.

01:04:17.600 And I walked in, and I've known Cardinal Dolan, and I've interviewed him repeatedly.

01:04:21.020 He's been super nice to me my whole life.

01:04:24.100 So I walk in, and he calls me Meg, which I like.

01:04:27.540 Only a few people call me Meg, but I like it.

01:04:29.740 And I walk in, and he says, Meg!

01:04:32.420 And instead of greeting him properly, I said, CD!

01:04:37.520 Nice.

01:04:38.340 And his right-hand man said, Your Eminence.

01:04:41.840 I was like, Oh, my God, I'm going to hell.

01:04:45.200 No.

01:04:47.280 Well, it's the same thing.

01:04:49.160 It's nice to have a place in the world for formality.

01:04:54.520 And I'm a little disturbed by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

01:04:58.560 He'll be the next king but one.

01:05:00.840 And he says, Oh, I'm not really comfortable with all this bowing, so I don't know whether

01:05:06.340 we need to have that.

01:05:07.420 I think people actually, like every schoolgirl loves to, it doesn't matter, it's all, it

01:05:14.060 doesn't matter whether it's in Mauritius, it doesn't matter whether it's in the Solomon

01:05:19.460 Islands, it doesn't matter whether it's in the Turks and Caicos, every schoolgirl loves

01:05:25.280 to curtsy to the queen.

01:05:27.860 And it's important to keep a lot of that stuff.

01:05:30.120 Well, I mean, that reminds me of Meghan Markle complaining in her Oprah interview that no

01:05:35.300 one taught me how to curtsy.

01:05:36.900 They don't teach you those things.

01:05:38.480 She didn't understand, Mark.

01:05:40.100 You know, she didn't, she wasn't able to figure it out.

01:05:42.320 And I'll tell you one thing she's got figured out because watching that ceremony yesterday,

01:05:45.600 she was sure to undo that window when she was in the car so that she could be photographed.

01:05:51.340 I mean, literally days after she flew, she was the only celebrity to fly to Uvalde, Texas

01:05:57.480 to make sure she had a photo op there. 0.65

01:05:59.260 I'm sorry.

01:06:00.280 That to me was an obvious press generation move.

01:06:03.900 And I found it absolutely abhorrent. 0.75

01:06:07.200 Oh, absolutely, absolutely disgusting.

01:06:10.380 She didn't get the job. 0.66

01:06:12.300 You know, my kid, youngest kid said to me when the Duke of Edinburgh died last year, he's

01:06:18.660 been educated pretty much in America all his entire life.

01:06:23.480 And so he was talking with his American chums and he said to me, oh, dad, you just can't

01:06:28.360 talk about the monarchy to Americans because they just don't get it.

01:06:33.060 They think it's like a celebrity who opens supermarkets.

01:06:36.940 And I think that's what Meghan failed to misunderstand.

01:06:41.760 She thought it was like a sort of a group celebrity.

01:06:45.640 It's like the Rat Pack with tiaras or something.

01:06:48.620 And so the fact that it's largely boring and it's about the subjects, and particularly if

01:06:54.540 you're a minor royal duchess like her, it involves being, you know, colonel in chief

01:06:59.700 of some island on the other side of the planet.

01:07:02.260 And you have to fly into and pretend to take it all seriously.

01:07:06.260 Then you have to go to New Zealand and open a hospital.

01:07:09.500 And I think and she genuinely thought, I think, that you'd be just swanning around with A-list

01:07:17.540 celebrities all day long and didn't give any thought to the fact that, no, you're going

01:07:21.920 to be sitting in a room talking to some guy in Bangladesh who started a rural ambulance service

01:07:29.500 for remote parts.

01:07:30.640 And she had no interest in any of that.

01:07:33.420 And she likes George Clooney and Oprah.

01:07:36.840 And she was entirely unsuitable for the role of minor royal duchess.

01:07:42.120 And it's a very sad fact, but that's just the way it is.

01:07:45.140 So now they did come back.

01:07:46.540 They did not get the invitation to go up on the balcony with the queen because they're

01:07:51.700 not, I guess, considered senior royals.

01:07:54.280 They're not working royals anymore.

01:07:55.680 And the reports I've read today say things between Harry and William appeared somewhat

01:08:01.620 frosty at the church.

01:08:03.680 They sat on entirely separate sides.

01:08:07.120 Everything's choreographed.

01:08:08.360 And it seems the choreography has kept them away from one another.

01:08:11.620 When the ceremony ended, we're told that, again, the senior royals went out to lunch.

01:08:17.740 Meghan and Harry went back to Frogmore Cottage and did not join the rest of the family for

01:08:22.260 lunch, though she did find time to introduce the queen to her great-granddaughter, whose

01:08:27.160 name Meghan and Harry chose to use while calling someone in the royal family racist.

01:08:32.100 Who knows who?

01:08:33.260 Nevertheless, here's Lilibet.

01:08:35.820 So what do you make of the relationship there and what we can glean from these facts?

01:08:42.060 Well, when you use that expression, senior royals, you know, they've basically invented this

01:08:48.400 since Harry and Meghan chose to check out, because there's an order of precedence.

01:08:57.680 He is the queen's grandson, the queen's second most senior grandson.

01:09:03.920 So he should have a certain place in the procession behind his older brother and their kids.

01:09:11.600 That's where he should come.

01:09:12.580 And as they were walking out the church, he was way at the back with all the riffraff, 1.00

01:09:17.680 which gave me a spectacular laugh, because essentially they've invented this idea of

01:09:23.860 working royals, senior royals, just as a way of moving him, you know, from flying up front

01:09:32.160 in first class all the way back to sitting in row 274, wedged up with the riffraff right 1.00

01:09:40.920 at the back.

01:09:41.420 And I think they're quite right to do that.

01:09:45.760 You can't, you just can't have, I mean, for a start, it's all totally fraudulent.

01:09:51.100 These two are not in show business.

01:09:54.840 You know, if you are George Clooney, that's one thing.

01:09:59.680 If you're Katy Perry, that's one thing.

01:10:02.700 But if you're just two people who have no talent in that sphere, but you want to hang

01:10:07.560 around with them all the time, you want to live on the beach at Malibu, that's just kind 0.98

01:10:12.200 of sad and pathetic. 0.68

01:10:13.180 You know, the Netflix deal is, Netflix is tanking. 0.99

01:10:18.140 And so they're not, people can't afford just to throw away millions on useless royals just

01:10:25.620 to get their name on things.

01:10:26.900 Whatever it was when they were trying to raise money through GoFundMe or one of those kinds

01:10:33.560 of things to pay off the mortgage on that mansion they live in, which is a multi, multi, multi-million

01:10:40.020 pound mansion.

01:10:41.060 And I think they raised $1,047.73.

01:10:45.240 So the public gets it.

01:10:48.060 They don't want to pay money for them.

01:10:50.220 The only thing they have going for them is their titles.

01:10:55.300 She uses it on book spines, which, you know, generally speaking, you shouldn't do.

01:11:00.200 Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, which isn't even the right style, but she has to use that 0.92

01:11:05.800 to sell the book.

01:11:07.540 It's usually, when the royals are trying to break into show business, it's usually the

01:11:11.560 opposite way.

01:11:12.080 I knew Prince Edward when he was the Queen's youngest son, when he was trying to pass himself

01:11:18.880 off as a filmmaker.

01:11:20.840 And I remember the first time I knew him in his new incarnation.

01:11:25.920 I was at a party and he came up to me and he stuck his arm out as I did.

01:11:32.400 And he goes, hi, Edward Windsor.

01:11:34.880 And the lady I was with turned to me and said, is that his stage name?

01:11:39.520 And it's the opposite with Meghan here.

01:11:42.380 She's basically milking. 1.00

01:11:44.160 She actually is in show business.

01:11:46.700 She's got a stage name and she's improperly using this royal title because it's the only 1.00

01:11:52.740 thing that makes any money for her. 1.00

01:11:54.940 I'm going to go by Meghan, Duchess of Sirius.

01:11:57.960 From now on, that's going to be my new self-appointed 2020.

01:12:05.300 No, right around there.

01:12:07.460 Well, since she came along, I prefer your spelling too.

01:12:13.140 Thank you very much.

01:12:14.560 I appreciate that.

01:12:15.480 She's put me off that spelling of the name.

01:12:18.600 Well, what do you make of the fact that they were openly booed?

01:12:22.940 You can hear, it's hard to hear when we just play it like over the transom here, but I've

01:12:27.280 listened to a few times.

01:12:28.060 They were getting booed, she and Harry, as they walked out of the church.

01:12:32.300 That's just remarkable.

01:12:33.360 I mean, I realized the polls, there was a YouGov poll that shows the popularity of the royals.

01:12:39.260 Of course, the queen remains the most popular by far.

01:12:42.360 She has a net score, a positive score of plus 69.

01:12:45.600 Prince William is second at plus 59.

01:12:48.160 Princess Kate, plus 55.

01:12:50.200 Charles doing better than years ago.

01:12:52.320 He's at plus 19.

01:12:53.260 Even Camilla is at plus nine.

01:12:56.120 Then we get to Harry, minus 26.

01:12:59.920 Meghan Markle, minus 42, which is down a few points from where it was not long ago.

01:13:05.880 And Andrew, of course, is the least popular with a minus 80.

01:13:09.480 We all know why.

01:13:10.260 You don't pal around with Jeffrey Epstein and get any higher than that.

01:13:13.920 But the boos, I thought, were remarkable.

01:13:15.960 What do you make of it?

01:13:17.440 Yeah, I think it's because they see the phoniness of it.

01:13:22.680 You know, they lied to us.

01:13:26.240 When they checked out, they said they were going to commit themselves to working for people all around the Commonwealth.

01:13:34.500 And on the day before they left, they went to Canada House in London, which is the central Canadian building in Trafalgar Square.

01:13:45.520 And oh, Canada, Canada, we love Canadians.

01:13:47.720 They flew then out to Salt Spring Island off the coast of British Columbia.

01:13:52.680 On the west coast of Canada.

01:13:54.420 In fact, they were living down the road from a couple of old rock star pals of mine.

01:14:01.680 Randy Backman from Backman Turner Overdrive in the 70s.

01:14:06.020 And his son, Tal Backman, had a big hit in the 90s with She's So High.

01:14:11.020 And that's because it's in Canadian terms.

01:14:14.180 It's where like Canadian pop celebs like to live.

01:14:18.280 And they stuck Canada for a couple of weeks. 0.79

01:14:20.540 And then Meghan decided it was all boring and provincial and she'd had enough of Canada and preferred Beverly Hills.

01:14:27.380 That's fair enough.

01:14:28.420 But you told a lie to get yourself out of the deal.

01:14:32.840 And people don't, you know, that's what their whole thing was.

01:14:36.120 They always, we want to serve the Commonwealth.

01:14:38.920 No, they didn't.

01:14:39.620 They want to go to cocktail parties in Beverly Hills.

01:14:42.220 At least be honest about it.

01:14:44.160 At least be honest about it.

01:14:45.540 People don't mind George Clooney being George Clooney, but they resent Meghan Markle, the most mediocre actress, who can't really carry off the pretense of wanting to do everything for the little people, who doesn't understand basic things like inserting herself into a gun shooting in Texas is in the most ghastly bad taste.

01:15:06.840 They get that these people are just talentless self-promoters and they're sick of them.

01:15:12.920 Who does she think she's kidding?

01:15:14.060 I'm sorry, but she did not go to Uvalde to out of the goodness of her heart.

01:15:19.020 She went if she had done that, then we wouldn't know about it. 0.94

01:15:22.840 She would have managed to get there.

01:15:24.440 She would have paid private tribute somehow without going to the very spot where all the press were and laying flowers. 0.98

01:15:29.860 And we wouldn't know about it.

01:15:31.260 She made sure that she was photographed and she made sure that she had a bunch of positive headlines generated out of it.

01:15:36.760 And the sycophantic media just goes along with it as though this isn't exploitative.

01:15:42.560 That's what she did.

01:15:43.380 That she exploited the death of those children so she could get herself on camera.

01:15:47.400 That's the same thing Beto O'Rourke did at that press conference that the mayor and the governor were having.

01:15:53.180 And it's wrong.

01:15:54.300 I mean, to me, I really think it's indicative of a deep character flaw that you can even think about yourself and your image in a moment like that.

01:16:04.800 Yes, I don't even understand how you can be crass enough to think like that, whether whether you're talking about Beto or about the Duchess of Sussex, because it just instinctively you should know that this incident is about the grieving parents.

01:16:24.800 It's about the police who stood in the corridor.

01:16:28.940 These are the people who need to be in the picture.

01:16:31.780 You don't need to be in the picture.

01:16:33.380 You might want to help.

01:16:34.800 You might want to give blood.

01:16:36.900 You might want to give money to support those families.

01:16:40.860 You can do all that without getting on a plane.

01:16:44.580 And I'm absolutely astonished at seemliness, which is a word we don't hear terribly often these days.

01:16:53.800 But I'm absolutely astonished at the way people have no idea anymore about what is seemly and what is not.

01:17:02.260 And that alone to me would be a disqualifying act, because if she were to return to being a working royal and there was to be a, you know, some kind of mining disaster in Australia or whatever, you certainly wouldn't want her doing the same thing there that she's just been doing in Texas.

01:17:21.020 It's terrible.

01:17:21.780 Well, I know there's a lot of people speculated after Megxit that this couple, the two of them, would be the downfall of the queen.

01:17:31.240 You know, somehow this would be the end of the royal family.

01:17:35.660 And, you know, that that's clearly not going to be the case.

01:17:40.020 Like the other, the senior royals seem to have withstood Megxit just fine.

01:17:44.500 And as I was thinking about it when you were talking about the queen and how how long she's been on the throne, there's been a lot of tumult.

01:17:51.860 Obviously, the Diana nightmare was probably way bigger than Megxit.

01:17:55.720 But what do you make of that?

01:17:56.880 The speculation that somehow Meghan Markle will be the downfall of the royal family?

01:18:01.180 Well, I think it it fundamentally misunderstands what a royal family you have a royal family because you're a constitutional monarchy, which is a system that Britain invented.

01:18:14.520 It's it's it's taken up elsewhere.

01:18:17.740 And in fact, I think if you look at the Freedom House rankings of the free, freest nations on the planet, seven of them are constitutional monarchies.

01:18:26.880 So it's not a bad system of government to live under.

01:18:31.260 You know, it's I was listening to what Ilya and you were talking about earlier about the Supreme Court nominations and and so forth.

01:18:39.660 And Ilya, although he was briefly Canadian, he couldn't actually make a living in Canada as a constitutional scholar, because under the Canadian theory or the English theory, the queen is the state and the state is the queen.

01:18:55.080 And that's the beginning and end of it.

01:18:56.480 If you look at the Canadian Constitution, I think it's paragraph nine, says executive power, it's headline and it goes, executive power shall be vested in her majesty.

01:19:08.660 And you think, wait a minute.

01:19:11.740 Where's the rest of it?

01:19:12.800 Where's the mention of the prime minister or elections?

01:19:15.940 And there's no mention of any of that in the Canadian, the Australian, whatever constitutions.

01:19:20.840 And it's because the it's a system of government and the fact that they occasionally go to a pop concert or the Duke of Edinburgh is informed at the James Bond premiere that Madonna is singing the title song.

01:19:37.580 And he turns to the Queen and says, I told you we should have bought the earplugs.

01:19:42.800 That kind of thing.

01:19:44.360 That kind of thing is all very well.

01:19:46.920 But at the heart of it, it's a system of government.

01:19:49.540 And so the showbiz fripperies are just for entertainment value.

01:19:55.640 What is that word?

01:19:56.760 Showbiz fripperies?

01:19:58.760 Fripperies.

01:19:59.700 F-R-I-P-P-E-R-I-E-S. 1.00

01:20:05.140 There's a lot of fripperies around. 1.00

01:20:07.540 I like it.

01:20:07.600 I like it a lot.

01:20:09.100 All right.

01:20:09.320 I'm going to be looking that up in this break and we will be right back with more with Mark Stein.

01:20:14.920 Don't go away.

01:20:15.600 Don't go away.

01:20:45.820 It's Soundbite 5.

01:20:46.960 Let's take a listen.

01:20:47.940 We need to ban assault weapons in high capacity magazines.

01:20:51.940 And if we can't ban assault weapons, then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21.

01:20:59.300 Strengthen background checks.

01:21:01.780 Enact safe storage law and red flag laws.

01:21:05.360 Repeal the immunity that protects gun manufacturers from liability.

01:21:08.720 Address the mental health crisis.

01:21:13.280 Deepening the trauma of gun violence and as a consequence of that violence.

01:21:18.980 These are rational, common sense measures.

01:21:24.040 A lot in there.

01:21:25.220 What are your thoughts?

01:21:27.120 He, as you say, there's a lot in there and he hasn't got the political energy to make any of it happen.

01:21:33.660 I'm talking about, you know, Democrats, too.

01:21:37.360 I live in New Hampshire.

01:21:39.000 Across the Connecticut River from me is what they call the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

01:21:43.740 They're all Democrats who vote for Bernie Sanders because Bernie Sanders doesn't mess with their gun rights.

01:21:51.060 In Coos County, in far northern New Hampshire, they vote Democrat because they want bigger government checks to spend at the gun shop.

01:22:01.480 There are not Democrats, rural Democrats like Bernie Sanders, Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire.

01:22:08.700 They are not going to go along with any of this.

01:22:11.600 It's not going, none of it's going to happen.

01:22:13.800 A lot of what he talks about has happened.

01:22:16.260 There's laws on, you know, the big problem with any society is that if you have a small number of laws, they tend to be observed.

01:22:26.320 Then when you pile on law upon law upon law upon law, background checks and all the rest of it, what happens is that they all go unobserved.

01:22:36.060 I mean, this guy sailed through a lot of the laws that are already in place, as with most of these mass shooters.

01:22:45.400 The fact is, politically, judicially, none of this is ever going to happen.

01:22:50.560 Politically speaking, you were talking about it from the court's point of view, but the political reality is this, that since in the last two years, things have got a lot more dangerous on the crime front.

01:23:03.160 I travel with a gun in my glove box, just tootling around, which I never did before, but I've done for the last two years, simply because I've seen enough of these things where people are just out on the streets in broad daylight and they're suddenly attacked.

01:23:18.800 But this is no, culturally speaking, this is not a time when anybody is going to mess with American gun rights.

01:23:26.900 That's not, it's not going to happen.

01:23:28.460 And the truth is about these mass school shooters, the vast majority of them get their guns from their parents' cabinet.

01:23:34.760 The vast majority don't actually apply for a license and actually go out and shoot with that gun.

01:23:39.320 They just take the gun from their parents, you know, whatever, vault security, wherever they keep them.

01:23:44.080 His solution to that is have these mandatory, you know, lock up laws for the guns.

01:23:48.120 OK, I'm sure every parent's going to observe that perfectly and hide the key to where the kid could never find.

01:23:52.880 Like, that is not the answer.

01:23:54.680 And then so he says he calls assault weapons.

01:23:57.200 It's like that's not really a thing.

01:23:58.880 You know, it's like a senior royals.

01:24:00.920 That's the senior royals of gun discussions.

01:24:03.440 Yeah, that's basically a category of gun that doesn't exist except when Democrats are calling for gun control.

01:24:11.760 I mean, what's the old line that it's basically a scary looking weapon that doesn't have a wooden stock?

01:24:18.780 You know, I'm old fashioned because I was in the cadets when I was at school.

01:24:23.200 So we had old Lee Enfield rifles, which was the backbone of the British Empire.

01:24:29.060 And I think now it's Arctic Rangers in Canada and a one police department in India are the only ones who are.

01:24:36.380 And so I'm old fashioned.

01:24:37.800 So I like the wooden stock.

01:24:39.800 But the fact the fact of the matter is that these this is this is just filling up airtime on MSNBC and has no actual reality.

01:24:49.520 And I think also, you know, I don't want to be cruel or hard hearted about this, but that and I think the school the school thing is, well, I mean, my neighbors all say, oh, yeah, I was at school in the 70s and I used to take my gun to school for show and tell.

01:25:08.480 A lot of us boys did.

01:25:10.340 And we all thought it was cool and didn't mean we were going to shoot up the place.

01:25:13.680 But the reasons for why we have an atomized society in which in which loners sit and fester until the point they reach where it seems like gunning down large numbers of people is a is the logical form of self-expression.

01:25:36.940 That's actually far more dangerous.

01:25:39.360 And in a country this large with this many guns, you cannot have you cannot actually devise a regime that will protect one group of people from another person.

01:25:51.420 It's it's way beyond any of that.

01:25:53.800 And so this is also shallow.

01:25:55.520 The level at which it's talked about is completely shallow and preposterous.

01:25:59.620 And I would imagine that a lot of other Western societies, countries that haven't had such great gun cultures, they're going to find that actually they they'd like to be packing heat these days rather than America adopting continental ways. 0.75

01:26:14.620 Well, I'm looking at, you know, his his other suggestions.

01:26:17.880 We should raise the age to purchase these these so-called assault weapons from 18 to 21.

01:26:22.300 Perhaps he's unaware that that's already been struck down.

01:26:25.220 The Ninth Circuit, the very liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has already said, and in at least one case, that's unconstitutional.

01:26:31.460 You're 18. You're an adult.

01:26:33.160 It's a constitutional right.

01:26:34.500 And you can buy a rifle.

01:26:36.280 So good luck, because that's going to pose some legal challenges if he tries to do it.

01:26:39.800 But he goes on to the repeal, the immunity that protects gun manufacturers from liability.

01:26:45.760 He always hits this.

01:26:47.060 They're the only industry that has this protection.

01:26:49.140 That's absurd.

01:26:50.380 If you buy a Glock and the Glock is manufactured poorly and it misfires because of the manufacturing defect, you can 100 percent sue the gun manufacturer.

01:26:59.720 You just can't blame someone's random gun violence on the gun manufacturer.

01:27:06.380 That's that's not something special to the gun lobby.

01:27:09.580 See, that makes perfect sense.

01:27:11.620 But but they're being cynical, Megan.

01:27:14.320 That's that's the point here.

01:27:16.480 Joe Biden and the Democrats.

01:27:18.640 Joe Biden can't get anything through Congress on this.

01:27:22.620 So he's just serving up pap to to placate metropolitan lefties who dislike the Second Amendment.

01:27:31.980 But it has no real world meaning.

01:27:35.160 And this is this is, again, one of the I think one of the problems in the system that you you wind up with a guy like this.

01:27:42.800 None of us know who's actually running the United States government, but it's clearly not him.

01:27:47.620 Because as we just heard, he wasn't even informed of the baby formula shortage until until late April.

01:27:57.520 So that you have. So you have a guy who they just say you should really you should go out.

01:28:02.920 I think this is, again, the defamation of the presidency, because you can say what you like about McKinley or Chester Arthur or whatever.

01:28:11.240 But they didn't live in a in a culture where, oh, something's happened.

01:28:16.500 Go out there and say something to everybody just for the sake of saying something.

01:28:21.440 This is this is absolutely but nothing, nothing Joe Biden says on anything, whether he's threatening regime change against Putin or anything else is taken seriously anymore. 0.92

01:28:33.640 So these are just this is just presidential dinner theater and is rather pathetic in that respect.

01:28:40.560 Well, there's a there's a question about who's calling the shots there and who's pushing these crazy policies that he either has no chance of getting through or that won't do anything to address the problem he's purporting to tackle.

01:28:53.500 And and that leads me to my next question, because I heard I saw and read about National Review's Jim Garrity wrote this up today, and it was from a Charlie Sykes podcast.

01:29:04.580 This is a conservative, never Trumper, Charlie Sykes, but he had a very interesting exchange with a Washington Post columnist, former reporter James Homan about student loan, quote, forgiveness.

01:29:16.500 Right. It's not really forgiveness. It's it's a transfer of wealth from the working class to rich, elite university graduated professionals.

01:29:26.780 And the only requirement is that, according to what he's thinking of, is that you make less than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

01:29:35.400 OK, so you can make one hundred and forty nine thousand dollars a year and qualify for this, quote, forgiveness or three hundred thousand as a married couple.

01:29:41.840 And and and you might get this debt forgiven or paid for by, you know, a trucker who didn't go to college because he decided didn't need to or didn't want to take on debt.

01:29:51.220 Now you're going to have to pay for somebody else's debt. So the question Charlie Sykes was asking this reporter, James Homan, who's done reporting on it, is why is he doing that?

01:30:00.200 This is insane for him to be pushing this right now. And the number he's reportedly getting ready to settle on is ten thousand dollars a person.

01:30:06.760 And for the first time, there was a real answer based on this guy's reporting. Listen to this exchange.

01:30:14.260 I mean, seriously, where does Joe Biden think this groundswell is going to come from, except for this small group of highly entitled college graduates who dominate college graduates who dominate the staffing and the inner workings of the Democratic Party?

01:30:32.220 I've asked. I've repeatedly asked people and I've asked a lot of people in the White House this question.

01:30:39.060 And essentially the answer is this is the fault of Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock.

01:30:43.880 What? Stacey Abrams has been browbeating the White House on this and says that this is the only way she can win, that this is going to be a base turnout election. 0.91

01:30:53.760 This isn't about persuading people in the middle. It's about getting the base to turn out and the base isn't going to turn out if they don't do this.

01:31:00.100 And they have all sorts of stats about how a lot of graduates from HBCUs have all this data.

01:31:07.100 And so there are a lot of people very close to the president who privately understand that this is a complete disaster for them.

01:31:14.000 But the president is being pulled really hard by these woke leftists who believe it's all about the base.

01:31:24.720 And that's just they just don't get it because they haven't spent time in, you know, in the wow counties or in Apple Valley, Minnesota.

01:31:35.440 Extraordinary, right?

01:31:37.540 It's just Stacey Abrams.

01:31:38.780 No, that's just insane to be doing it for Stacey Abrams.

01:31:44.960 So the fact that there is a problem with American education, there's too much of it.

01:31:49.720 People in 1940, the average American had an eighth grade education.

01:31:54.920 That's the America that won the Second World War and emerged as the dominant power on the planet.

01:32:00.440 So when people think of the America's glorious 1950 moment, that that was built by eighth graders.

01:32:07.580 And now we encourage everybody to stay in school to 28th grade to do, you know, transgender and colonialism studies at a cost of a quarter million bucks.

01:32:19.440 It's completely worthless.

01:32:21.300 And if you then and if you decide to do student loan forgiveness, people think, oh, yeah, I was a bit I thought maybe I should just leave the front door and go to work.

01:32:31.860 But maybe if they're offering student loan forgiveness, I should do transgender and colonialism studies, although not just for four years, maybe for six, seven, eight years.

01:32:41.040 That's the way to make an already decrepit system that is far worse than, say, China's even worse. 0.99

01:32:50.220 So it's the biggest structural defect in America today is the education system, as we've seen over the last two years, where, in effect, the system has been prepared to traumatize children rather than actually bring them back into the classroom to teach them.

01:33:08.300 So then to reward what is absolute and I agree with 1940 America, I think K-8 is the most important education you get.

01:33:18.560 If you screw that up, you can stay in school till you're 37, 48.

01:33:22.940 It's not going to make any difference.

01:33:25.120 So I'd like us to get K-8 back to being passingly respectable again.

01:33:29.780 But if you encourage if what this does is encourage absolutely the worst and most unnecessary element of the American education system, as you say, it's transferring its trans it's it's a wealth transfer to from the poor to people considerably richer than them. 0.64

01:33:51.700 And in that sense, it's the perfect Democrat policy.

01:33:54.340 And there's something else in there that's revealing.

01:33:57.260 So Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock, who's senator from Georgia, thanks to that election that happened, both are black Americans concerned about the black vote.

01:34:08.880 That's really what he's saying, that they that students who have graduated from historically black colleges and universities, HBCUs are not ready to turn out for Democrats in the midterm elections or possibly beyond, and that he needs to pay for their votes.

01:34:25.240 That's basically what that reporter was saying.

01:34:27.460 And we've seen him losing support with Latinos, with black voters, and now there's a there's a five alarm fire.

01:34:37.720 And these two lawmakers, well, one aspiring and one existing, are sounding the alarm saying, you better do what politicians do best, which is go buy some votes with some taxpayer dollars to motivate people to go and support the team blue comes November.

01:34:54.800 Yeah, yeah, it's very what we live in a very weird moment because the Democrat Party would not be doing what it's done the last year and a half if it was thinking rationally.

01:35:09.580 You know, basically everything that can go wrong now has go.

01:35:13.640 Oh, you can't afford to gas up your car.

01:35:16.600 You can't find any formula milk for your baby.

01:35:19.860 You know, everything that can be screwed.

01:35:23.540 And at the same time, we've got open borders.

01:35:25.980 So there's six million people coming in between now and September who will be able to help push the gas prices even higher and make the formula milk shortage even worse.

01:35:38.920 And the Democrats have if they were thinking rationally, they wouldn't be doing any of this.

01:35:44.320 And their whole theory that you can build a coalition of the fringes that will, in effect, make their punitive policies not matter.

01:35:56.400 There aren't the numbers for that unless they're planning on, you know, serious big time electoral theft, in which case none of this matters.

01:36:05.600 But the fact is no rational person would govern as they've governed these last 18 months.

01:36:12.280 Hmm. Well, let me ask you quickly about immigration, because I know you were saying something about how in Great Britain, they're encouraging people not to have sex.

01:36:22.300 Meanwhile, like it's a total open border there and here.

01:36:25.960 Maybe we're focusing on the wrong problem.

01:36:29.180 Yeah, I just think this actually is the, you know, it's the biggest story of our time.

01:36:33.680 I mean, anyone who's ever crossed into the United States from Canada, where they check every little thing, you know, and they forbid you from bringing in kinder eggs for your kiddies and all the rest of it.

01:36:46.140 And then you have the contrast with the Rio Grande, where everybody just walked.

01:36:49.940 It's a continuous stream of people just walking in.

01:36:53.040 At some point, it doesn't have to go on that long for it to have really demographically transformative consequences.

01:37:01.280 And these days, when you're looking at, I think, 40 percent of the planet's jobs being eliminated by artificial intelligence, nobody really needs mass immigration anymore.

01:37:13.880 No country really needs it.

01:37:16.000 And in that sense, the cultural issues out, they trump the economic issues and they're far more long term and far more consequential.

01:37:24.420 Yeah. So they'll try to prevent monkeypox by policing what you do in your bed, but they will not control the borders.

01:37:30.140 That's a bridge too far. It's a perfect point, Mark.

01:37:33.360 It was such a pleasure catching up. I hope you come back on.

01:37:36.220 No, I always say you have one of the best shows out there, Megan, and I'm always thrilled when I get to.

01:37:43.540 You know, we've talked some serious stuff when I think about the Charlie Hebdo shootings and things.

01:37:49.840 It's always a pleasure to be with you.

01:37:51.860 Oh, thank you. To be continued.

01:37:53.860 Thanks for joining us today. I really enjoyed that show. I hope you did, too.

01:37:57.220 Two really interesting guests. And we have a lot more great content coming your way next week.

01:38:01.560 Our friends from the Ruthless podcast will be back. We love those guys.

01:38:05.380 Plus, for the first time ever, the hosts of the Red Scare podcast will be with us.

01:38:10.080 Very, very popular. And we're all very excited about that.

01:38:13.020 David Sachs, part of the PayPal mafia, he's coming back on. He was great the last time.

01:38:18.580 And then later in the week, we're going to be doing an entire special focused on President Biden's mental fitness.

01:38:25.220 You don't want to miss that. So go ahead and download the show right now on Apple, Pandora, Spotify and Stitcher.

01:38:29.240 Go to YouTube dot com slash Megan Kelly and have a great weekend.

01:38:32.500 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - June 03, 2022

Harry and Meghan Get Booed, and a Free Speech Victory, with Ilya Shapiro and Mark Steyn ｜ Ep. 335

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