The Megyn Kelly Show - Jon Stewart's Gender Hypocrisy, and an Arizona Deep Dive, with Andrew Sullivan and Jeremy Duda

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00:00:30.660 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:32.560 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:42.080 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:43.780 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.

00:00:46.860 Later today we're going to take a deep dive into another key state for you

00:00:50.300 in advance of the midterms like we did on Pennsylvania last week.

00:00:54.460 And today we will take a look at two hugely important races in Arizona.

00:00:59.460 Mark Kelly, Blake Masters, Carrie Lake, some very interesting candidates.

00:01:05.020 But what are the storylines to watch as we are less than one month away now from Election Day?

00:01:10.800 That's another state in which we might potentially see a split in how the GOP does

00:01:17.880 at the gubernatorial level versus how they do in the Senate race.

00:01:21.800 We'll go on a deep dive there in just a bit.

00:01:25.180 But we begin today with The Megyn Kelly Show favorite, Andrew Sullivan.

00:01:29.240 Over the weekend, the Vanderbilt Transgender Health Clinic officially, quote, paused.

00:01:35.820 It's, quote, gender-affirming surgeries.

00:01:38.580 That's how you have to refer to it now.

00:01:39.980 They're trying to remove all controversy from even the name.

00:01:42.520 This is just an affirmation of what this child already is and somehow knew from the time they

00:01:48.740 were in their cradle that they had been mislabeled by some errant doctor when it came to their

00:01:54.280 biological sex.

00:01:55.160 So this is just a gender-affirming surgery.

00:01:58.040 It ain't but a thing, even if it's a minor sitting here asking for a sex change.

00:02:03.080 OK, this Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt, this used to be one of the most respected universities

00:02:07.420 and facilities in the country.

00:02:10.400 And God bless The Daily Wire and Matt Walsh who exposed what they were doing.

00:02:15.760 They had a, as I understand it from Matt Walsh, they had a leak provided to them by one of the

00:02:22.380 medical providers who was sitting there as this lunatic doctor running the program, or at least

00:02:28.620 health care coordinator running the program, was talking about how you've got to do it.

00:02:32.280 And if you've got a problem with doing this on minors, you may not belong at Vanderbilt.

00:02:36.140 And we're going to do all these procedures because they raise a lot of money.

00:02:39.860 They're expensive.

00:02:41.300 We'll get into that in one second.

00:02:43.080 This is Jon Stewart's Apple Show is back, insert barf emoji, with a new episode asking,

00:02:48.820 like Walsh did recently, what is a woman?

00:02:51.600 And then the press dutifully applauding Stewart's, quote, humiliation of a, quote, anti-trans

00:02:56.580 official, someone who wasn't on board with Stewart's version of trans rights.

00:03:01.360 Andrew is the founding editor of the Weekly Dish newsletter on Substack and host of the

00:03:06.460 podcast, The Dish Cast, with Andrew Sullivan.

00:03:14.800 Andrew, welcome back to the show.

00:03:16.160 Great to have you.

00:03:17.300 Thanks for having me, Megan.

00:03:18.380 Always good to see you.

00:03:19.900 So much to get to.

00:03:21.120 I'm so grateful that Matt Walsh and The Daily Wire exposed Vanderbilt.

00:03:25.560 Truly, this is one of those colleges that you, you know, most most people would pray their

00:03:31.260 child would get into this facility very well respected.

00:03:35.200 And he had the goods of them on camera pushing these surgeries for minors and threatening doctors

00:03:44.480 who are uncomfortable with doing them, saying you might not belong here if you've got a problem

00:03:48.660 with this.

00:03:48.940 And now they've had to, quote, pause all of this while they take a closer look at what

00:03:54.500 their program is doing.

00:03:57.240 The report today from Morning Wire, which is The Daily Wire's morning podcast, sort of

00:04:02.240 the answer to NPR's morning podcast, is they believe it will likely start back up because

00:04:07.520 they say they're reviewing these WPATH recommendations in the course of reevaluating their work.

00:04:12.620 And I know you've done some reporting on this group.

00:04:14.400 It's basically the transgender group and what they recommend.

00:04:17.580 And if that's going to be the standard, they're going to open right back up for business again

00:04:21.560 soon.

00:04:22.800 Well, I think the thing that's interesting to me is that it didn't really take much exposure

00:04:27.540 because these medical centers are quite open.

00:04:32.020 There's no hidden agenda here.

00:04:34.360 They put out videos on their websites advertising for these procedures.

00:04:39.560 There is nothing surreptitious about it, actually.

00:04:42.420 All that Matt Walsh and others have done is simply give them a broader audience.

00:04:50.040 And so what you have is really a consensus that's developed within this rather sequestered

00:04:56.400 medical culture, which has led to the normalization of the idea that children, even prepubescent

00:05:06.440 children, canons should be put on a drug that's called glupron or puberty blockers, and then

00:05:12.680 go on to cross sex hormones and also have mastectomies, breast removal in their early teens,

00:05:22.220 or even, of course, in fact, at some point, castration.

00:05:27.080 Now, for me, the question is, how did it get to the point where this was regarded as completely

00:05:35.220 banal?

00:05:36.520 You know, why, of course, this is just care for children.

00:05:40.780 And I think it's partly because the medical world was not public or very open about the

00:05:47.680 policies it was pursuing.

00:05:49.540 People were not quite aware that this was going on to the extent that it has been.

00:05:54.820 And so people are naturally a little shocked.

00:05:58.000 But the truth is, this therapy, which was developed in the late 90s in the Netherlands, which is

00:06:05.680 the idea that you block children's puberty when they feel discomfort around puberty, and

00:06:12.340 then you wait a little bit, and then you give them cross sex hormones to become the other

00:06:16.420 sex, was really an experimental regimen.

00:06:21.660 So there are no long-term clinical trials of puberty blockers on children, none that have

00:06:29.760 been shown to look at the long-term effects of these drugs on people.

00:06:35.380 There are very few good studies that even show that there's even slight improvement in kids'

00:06:42.320 mental health who are trans if they go through these procedures.

00:06:46.060 So I think what's happening is we're finally, finally actually having a public debate about

00:06:52.560 this.

00:06:53.360 Like, is this the right thing to do for children, for a certain type of children?

00:06:58.340 Is it not?

00:06:59.700 And when you look at the data, and there have been serious reviews of this data now, of

00:07:05.200 this particular new protocol, both in Britain, in Sweden, in the Netherlands, and other parts

00:07:11.360 of Europe, they are fast coming to the conclusion this might have been a bit over the top, that

00:07:17.000 they may have been rushing children into decisions that they weren't actually in a position meaningfully

00:07:23.300 to take, that in fact there is not good evidence behind this procedure that sometimes helping kids

00:07:31.380 who do have what's called genzodysphoria grapple with it psychologically first, maybe even socially,

00:07:39.440 before you take these irreversible steps to change a kid's life forever.

00:07:46.060 I mean, if you are blocked, if your puberty is blocked, you will have long-term impact on

00:07:52.000 your brain development and your bone development.

00:07:54.460 If you are put on cross-sex hormones early, you will have to be on those cross-sex hormones

00:08:00.760 for the rest of your life, decades and decades of treatment.

00:08:05.880 And the question really is, as more and more of this has become public, is do we really think

00:08:11.700 that children, children, even before they have gone through puberty, are genuinely capable

00:08:19.140 of making these kinds of drastic decisions? And have we made mistakes? Have we given these protocols

00:08:28.440 to the wrong kids? And it seems to me that pausing is the least we can do and examine much more closely

00:08:39.220 what these procedures are doing, whether there's really good evidence that they're working.

00:08:44.120 Instead, what you've had is this shutdown of any speech, this view that anyone criticizing this,

00:08:52.220 people like me, who've long been an advocate for trans rights, who is concerned about children.

00:08:57.620 It's a different question.

00:08:59.060 That's right.

00:09:00.340 I mean, what adults want to do, I have absolutely no objection to. People want to change their sex

00:09:07.100 or their sex appearance, and they want to become a member of the opposite sex. I am fully in favor,

00:09:13.540 tolerant of that. But when it comes to children, we have to have a higher standard.

00:09:20.520 Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Well said. I saw you recently tweeted out numbers on this,

00:09:28.120 that there had been 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria

00:09:35.740 diagnosis from 2019 to 2021. I think that was domestically and pointing out not not many,

00:09:43.540 not a huge number, but more than any activist group has admitted 56 genital surgeries among patients

00:09:51.020 13 to 17 over the past few years. And that's horrifying. That's on minors, on minors. As Abigail

00:09:58.880 Schreier's book calls it, irreversible damage can happen just with hormones, nevermind surgeries.

00:10:05.860 And you're talking about, I mean, if they perform a genital surgery going female to male,

00:10:12.060 you basically lose your arm as a woman, as a girl, excuse me, they cut, they hack your forearm up

00:10:18.540 to the point where all that's left is a couple of tendons and bone to create a penis. And even if

00:10:24.820 you're short of that, you just do cross gender hormones as a girl going to boy, Abigail pointed

00:10:31.320 out on our show year, two years ago, you can basically grow, forgive me, this is graphic,

00:10:38.460 but you can basically grow a small penis as a woman out of the clitoris, one that no one would find

00:10:45.320 visually appealing, that will not work the way a normal penis works. That would probably be horrific

00:10:51.360 to most people. And it's like something out of a horror film. None of this is understood by these

00:10:57.820 girls being told, yeah, yeah, you're a boy, you're a boy. And by the way, gender dysphoria

00:11:02.060 traditionally only affected males, people who were identified as male and thought, no, I think I'm

00:11:07.980 actually a woman, not the other way around. So all of this is alarming. And I think I saw you tweeting

00:11:16.060 out about, um, a person online named Casey Miller, who's been documenting, um, their regrets about

00:11:25.020 transitioning. This is, uh, somebody who was born female who thought that she wanted to transition to

00:11:30.520 male and, um, has made the following. I'm just going to read Casey's tweets saying, if the current

00:11:37.280 system is misdiagnosing people at all, nevertheless, at its current rate, it's broken. Generally speaking,

00:11:43.580 when else has a model of care been allowed to misdiagnose people as frequently as quote,

00:11:49.180 gender affirming care does? She goes on. I don't hold it against the medical professionals

00:11:54.100 personally. I believe they were acting in good faith, but they missed quite a few red flags.

00:11:58.900 She's talking about in her case, that would have indicated that more was at play than just simple

00:12:04.020 gender dysphoria. We followed medical advice. It didn't fix much of anything. I continue to struggle.

00:12:09.940 I continue to be suicidal. I'll be it for different reasons. And that was my reality. That is my

00:12:16.040 reality. Here's Casey Miller online in a video showing what five years of cross gender hormones

00:12:24.020 from female to male has done to Casey. When I talk about being too far gone, I don't really know what

00:12:33.080 else to call it. Um, this is what I mean. This is how deep my voice is. Um, it's gotten deeper over

00:12:39.500 time and it's settled. Um, this is what I mean by hair loss. Um, and it just keeps getting worse.

00:12:45.560 It keeps thinning. It keeps receding backwards. Um, you know, and I'm not exactly sure that's coming

00:12:51.500 back. Um, those are the main things when I talk about being androgenized, um, to a point of no

00:12:57.380 return. Um, I really don't see those being fixable. I don't really see me personally being able to come

00:13:03.300 back from what's happened so far. So this is what happens when you give a woman testosterone

00:13:07.400 for five years. This is what happens essentially. So, you know, that's it. Stay safe.

00:13:15.160 Poor Casey, the system failed this person.

00:13:18.860 I I've met and talked to many kids, kids, young adults, uh, grappling with some of this. And the

00:13:26.100 truth is that when you think of drugs, you tend to think of something that comes into your body and

00:13:31.020 leaves it does some purpose or other, but switching core hormones is not like a drug. It is

00:13:38.520 reprogramming your entire body to regenerate itself in a different mode. And obviously that will have

00:13:46.320 profound effects that are not reversible. Like your deep voice as a woman, if you want to go back to

00:13:54.000 being a woman, we'll never, you will never get a higher voice again. I would say one of the things

00:14:00.460 that most concerns me, and this has been admitted in some of the workshops that we also have videos

00:14:07.840 of, again, this is not secret actually, um, is that if you take a little boy before puberty

00:14:14.040 and you invert his little baby penis inside out so that it becomes the glands becomes the clitoris,

00:14:23.900 uh, you can ensure that he never grows up to have a real adult penis. You will also, however, remove the

00:14:35.220 possibility of him or her, depending on what you want to call her ever having an orgasm ever now that it

00:14:44.340 strikes me that a child told, you know, you won't be able to have an orgasm after this. And the child

00:14:50.200 says, well, what's an orgasm? At that point, you say, we can't, this kid cannot conceivably consent

00:14:59.240 when they have no idea what's going to happen to them. To me, removing from a human, any human,

00:15:08.340 the ability to have an orgasm is such an invasion of someone's sexual being, someone's personal being.

00:15:16.400 It's, it's, it's not something you would do lightly. And of course, the argument given is that,

00:15:23.700 and this shows you how weak the positive arguments are, because essentially they eventually come down

00:15:29.580 to, well, we accept all these problems. We accept all these difficulties. We're not going to deny

00:15:35.460 these things, but if we don't do it, the kid will kill himself or herself.

00:15:40.280 So that's, that's what Casey said, Andrew, just to interject quickly, Casey Miller said,

00:15:45.660 we acted out of desperation. And she, I think Casey means Casey's mother trusted highly trained

00:15:51.580 professionals at a reputable children's hospital, children's hospital, that this was the right thing

00:15:56.340 to do. She was told that if I didn't transition, there was an almost 50% chance I would commit suicide.

00:16:02.280 Sorry, go ahead.

00:16:04.600 Yeah, well, that's a low, that's a low estimate given what most parents are told. They're told,

00:16:10.820 do you want to have a live girl or a dead boy? And that's the kind of choice that parents are being

00:16:18.040 presented with. And can you imagine what a family goes through when they are told that?

00:16:25.240 Um, I, I, I think, I mean, one of the things that I do think is important is that we don't lose sight of

00:16:33.260 the human beings involved here. We don't get too caught up in rhetoric without recognizing there are

00:16:40.500 children with gender dysphoria, acute gender dysphoria that who need help and who need treatment.

00:16:47.200 And I believe need thorough mental health examinations, not in an accusatory way,

00:16:52.500 not in a hostile way, but in a way to fully understand why this kid might be believing that

00:16:59.700 he or she is the opposite sex, which can be adduced to many different factors, apart from being

00:17:06.700 actually transgender. For example, the correlation of autistic kids, and kids who believe they're in the

00:17:13.640 opposite sex is very high. The kid, the background of children who have gender dysphoria, who have

00:17:21.340 serious issues with their parents or are in a household with extreme tension or drama, they too

00:17:29.240 are highly correlated with this. In other words, the kids can get fixated in ways that are not healthy,

00:17:36.820 are not true, but their children, and especially when they are on the, uh, uh, the, the neurodiverse

00:17:44.260 spectrum. In other words, they have very high levels of intelligence. They can become very,

00:17:48.940 very adamant about things that are not true, but they require through their mental health to insist

00:17:55.060 are true. And that requires really sensitive and important, uh, mental health treatment and

00:18:02.840 examination. And if at the end of that, it is understood this kid is transgender, genuinely

00:18:08.720 transgender, has nothing to do with other things. Then I think you can talk about treatments. Um,

00:18:14.520 so I'm, I'm, I'm going to be called wishy-washy, but I don't want to, I don't want the government to

00:18:18.860 come and ban all this stuff because I do think there are possibly a few cases in which it could

00:18:25.760 be justified. And I'm trying to take into account the feelings of those children and parents involved

00:18:32.200 in this. It isn't just inventing. I know what you're saying. I know what you're saying. It's,

00:18:35.980 it's tricky because I too have known and have met adults who they've told me, you know,

00:18:44.540 that they knew from the time they were two, these are people born boys and who said, I think I I'm

00:18:49.800 actually a woman and said, you know, I knew it my entire life. What's happening right now is very

00:18:56.260 different from that case. And they're just almost bastardizing those cases. You know, it's like those

00:19:04.480 cases are getting lumped in with these other people who may have autism, who may be socially

00:19:10.240 awkward, who may be looking to fit in. Um, and there is a difference between those two groups.

00:19:16.120 There is. And there's a very specific group that we have seen that has emerged in the last 10 to 15

00:19:21.960 years that we'd never saw before, which is young adolescent girls suddenly deciding that they are

00:19:31.240 boys or men. Now in early adolescence, this has been called by Abigail, uh, rapid onset gender

00:19:38.180 dysphoria. Um, but it certainly seems to be a phenomenon here. For example, you've seen

00:19:43.920 stratospheric rises in the number of people who are being referred to gender clinics in the UK and

00:19:50.180 throughout Europe, uh, and American, you could argue, well, this is simply because we're becoming

00:19:55.720 more tolerant of trans people. And therefore it's possible to, uh, this is just simply like when,

00:20:02.060 when, when, when people were left-handed for the first time and suddenly it became less of a taboo

00:20:06.380 to be left-handed. We suddenly saw there were many more left-handed people in society and that possibly

00:20:11.220 is part of it. But what that doesn't explain and can't explain is why the rise in young girls

00:20:17.540 is so much higher than among young boys. In other words, there seems to be this early adolescent,

00:20:24.540 uh, rush among many teenage girls. Many of whom are in the same social circles and dynamics to

00:20:31.720 suddenly transition to be men. And that is brand new. Haven't seen that before. And if that doesn't

00:20:39.340 set up a red flag to be careful, uh, because social contagion is not unknown among teenage girls

00:20:45.580 in a whole variety of ways. Uh, and, and when, when they come and tell you, you know, me and my five

00:20:51.760 girlfriends who are all becoming men next week, mom, um, you have every right to say what, hold on,

00:20:58.760 stop. Um, the trouble is that in my view, having looked at this, the medical authorities have become

00:21:05.180 politicized.

00:21:06.680 Quit waiting. So before you make this point, can I, can I ask you about this? Because when we were

00:21:10.820 talking about the general genital mutilation, I mean, that's, that is what it is. Um, either by

00:21:16.740 hormone or by surgery it, and you were talking about the orgasm issue. It reminded me of genital

00:21:23.100 mutilation that is done in the radical Islamic population to young girls in the name of religion.

00:21:30.060 Andrew, this feels akin to that in some ways where we are allowing parents to mutilate the genitals of

00:21:38.080 their children. In these cases, the children are saying, okay, I want it, which is not always the

00:21:43.620 case, um, in the radical Islamic, uh, groups just ask I on her CLE, but it's also a sort of form of

00:21:50.740 religion. This like radical trans ideology of my child has said it, therefore it is true. And I'm a

00:22:00.240 bigot if I don't take it to its extreme or even worse, the parents who start at ground zero, refusing to

00:22:06.960 accept a label of boy or girl from a doctor in the nursery, instead actually calling their child a

00:22:13.560 baby and saying they'll figure out their gender as they age. Um, like it is a form of abuse. And then

00:22:21.780 your child's like, yeah, I got labeled the wrong thing. And you're going to let them cut off their

00:22:25.980 penis at age 10. And you're going to have a doctor affirming it. And then a surgery center at age 13

00:22:33.400 saying, we'll do it. I just see the two as non-parallel lines. Go ahead.

00:22:40.000 Well, you have two separate things going on here. One, you do have the absolute verified existence of

00:22:47.640 transgender people in every culture and time. We know this is the case that a very small minority

00:22:53.220 of people genuinely do feel inside their very being that somehow they've been misaligned physically.

00:22:59.920 That's real. It's always been there. It deserves treatment. Then there is an ideology

00:23:04.760 that says, in fact, that the sex binary, the fact that there are only men and only women as the

00:23:11.040 choices available to humans is itself a aspect of white supremacist thought, right? That the goal

00:23:19.460 of liberation is to be liberated from the prison, as it were, of these binary choices. That in fact,

00:23:30.580 what we need to do in society is rid every institution and every word even from any understanding

00:23:39.560 that there are just two sexes. So that we liberate everyone from having to conform to sex stereotypes.

00:23:48.760 And this is the political goal. And the trans people are a device, in my opinion.

00:23:55.880 It may be, again, I don't want to get to the point, the idea that people are badly intentioned. Many of them are well-intentioned.

00:24:05.880 They've just drunk the Kool-Aid and think, in fact, for example, that there is a third sex somehow,

00:24:13.840 the humans. There is not. There are two sexes, but there are variations within them. There are.

00:24:21.260 There are a small number of people who are intersex. It just happens in nature. The people have slightly

00:24:26.460 different genitalia appearance and certain combinations of different kind of chromosomes,

00:24:33.820 which are slightly different from everybody else. This is a, you know, less than half of one percent

00:24:40.580 of humanity has this. It doesn't disprove that the rule is male and female. In fact, all they have are

00:24:49.980 a mixture of male and female. There isn't some third entity in here.

00:24:54.380 Mm-hmm. That's right.

00:24:56.060 And so what they're doing is using the genuine feelings and needs of this clinical minority

00:25:04.860 to facilitate the imposition of a much more thoroughgoing ideology in which sex itself,

00:25:11.980 biological sex is abolished, in which what your body is, has no relationship to the sex you are,

00:25:21.740 that everything is interchangeable, and that there are 54 plus different genders. Now,

00:25:29.020 this is a function of critical gender theory, critical queer theory. It is separate from the genuine

00:25:36.460 medical needs and psychological needs of actual transgender children.

00:25:40.460 Right. That's what's so offensive about it. That's what's so offensive about it,

00:25:45.820 that this community has taken a legitimate problem that a very small percentage of the population suffers

00:25:51.980 from and expanded it into this woke ideology and trying to bend the rest of society to their knees

00:25:57.980 if they don't support it. And rational people understand this isn't real. You're bastardizing

00:26:04.220 something to the, to the detriment of everyone. Okay. So enter Jon Stewart. I'm sorry to bring

00:26:10.780 him back up. I know you had a negative experience on his show, which we talked about the last time,

00:26:14.940 but this is making the rounds today. And I've had many negative experiences with Jon Stewart,

00:26:19.580 for the record. So he decides to come in. By the way, he has a long history of bigoted

00:26:24.940 comments, remarks, jokes, misogynistic comments, remarks, jokes. He is in no position to be lecturing

00:26:33.020 any of us on issues like gender or race or misogyny, no position. But he comes out and

00:26:42.380 here's the, here's a bit of the open from his latest episode on his Apple show that no one other than my

00:26:49.100 producers apparently is watching. Here's a bit. It wasn't always like this people as recently as

00:26:56.220 let's say the 1990s, early 2000s, people were making shitty reductive jokes about the subject.

00:27:02.380 What can I say? The joke rhymed. Shitty and reductive jokes are kind of my brand. But as we know from

00:27:16.700 history, any moment of progressive visibility will be met with a vicious backlash. There are two

00:27:23.900 genders. There are two genders and everyone knows it. Ain't but two genders.

00:27:32.700 That last guy sounded like it's an emergency and we're running out of genders. Everyone,

00:27:38.460 there ain't but two genders. I don't want to have to start rationing genders.

00:27:44.540 Then he went on to suggest that Arnold Schwarzenegger saying girly girl and people talking about,

00:27:52.940 you know, man's man, girly girl. What was it, Steve? Whatever it was. A girly, girly man,

00:27:58.300 girly man, that all of these set the stage for an admission by the rest of the world that gender is

00:28:04.140 a spectrum. You see, that's what they were really acknowledging. And that any pushback now

00:28:10.380 is artificial, like that you you've already admitted it. You've given up the game by taking those,

00:28:15.980 those positions and then goes on to cross-examine the Arkansas Attorney General

00:28:22.940 on on why states don't listen to the experts on what these children need. Here's how that went.

00:28:34.140 All of those physicians, all of those experts for every single one of them, there's an expert that

00:28:39.180 says we don't need to allow children to be able to take those medications, that there are many

00:28:46.940 instances where- But you know, that's not true. You know, it's not for everyone. There's one there's,

00:28:52.860 these are the established- Well, I don't know that that's not true. I don't know that-

00:28:56.860 Then why would you, why would you pass a law then if you don't, if you don't know that that's true?

00:29:00.940 Wouldn't you- Well, I know that there are doctors and that we had plenty of people

00:29:04.220 come and testify before our legislature who said that, you know, we have 98% of the young people who

00:29:11.740 have gender dysphoria, that they are able to move past that. And once they have the help that they

00:29:19.820 need, no longer suffer from gender dysphoria. 98% without that medical treatment.

00:29:25.420 That's an incredibly made up figure.

00:29:28.220 That's so, I'm sorry, but that, that's such douchebaggery. He doesn't know-

00:29:35.100 Well, here's the thing, Megan, just on that very last point,

00:29:39.980 that figure is out of her head. That's not-

00:29:43.340 It's over 70%. Well, you don't know that that's over her.

00:29:46.780 But it's about 80%.

00:29:48.780 But she said she had, but she's saying she had experts come and testify before Congress,

00:29:52.620 before the Arkansas State Legislature on it. I haven't gone back and listened to that,

00:29:56.460 that hearing. I don't know that that's not true. I wasn't somebody who voted on it,

00:30:00.780 so I don't need to know. But it's very possible somebody came in and said,

00:30:03.820 we did a study at this, at the following clinic and found that 98%

00:30:07.020 will come out of it if left alone. Abigail Schreier, who we've talked about her book said,

00:30:11.260 indicate nearly 70% of kids who experienced childhood gender dysphoria

00:30:14.620 and are not affirmed or socially transitioned, eventually outgrow it.

00:30:17.340 Well, you and I have talked before about how a lot of these kids just wind up being gay.

00:30:20.460 They're not trans. So the number is high. It's very high. It's probably upwards of 70,

00:30:25.980 perhaps upwards of 88. But him saying you just made up the number of 98, we don't know that.

00:30:31.340 Did he listen to the hearing? I guarantee you, he didn't.

00:30:34.460 Well, the trouble is the statistics on this are very hard to get, as you can imagine. It's very

00:30:39.740 hard to find these kids early and have large studies, which have any kind of blind controls

00:30:46.300 on them. It's very difficult. But we do know this, that lots of kids have some sort of conflict with

00:30:53.580 their sex. I mean, and mostly they're gay. Let me give you, let me tell you about myself,

00:30:59.820 because it's my health. As I was approaching puberty and I could see that something,

00:31:05.980 these things were going to happen to my body. And I tended not to be into team sports. I did not

00:31:14.940 reflect the stereotypical rough, rough housing boy. I was more withdrawn. I was quieter. I was

00:31:22.940 interested in, in books. So I'm like, well, can I function as a male? Will I function as a male?

00:31:29.660 And at some point, it was like, I don't know. I'm slightly panicked. I don't know. A lot of kids

00:31:34.700 before they go through puberty get these panics. But I went through it, partly because no one was,

00:31:40.300 no one gave a shit anyway, back in those days, excuse my language. But, and as I went through it,

00:31:45.420 it resolved everything. Because as a human, that's what happens. When puberty happens,

00:31:51.820 you are transformed. You begin to understand what your sex is, why it makes you different

00:31:58.220 than the other sex. You come to love it. You come to embrace it. It doesn't have to become an

00:32:04.700 obsession, but it becomes very important to me, for example, and for many gay boys to be reminded that

00:32:13.180 you are a boy. Just because you don't behave typically, according to the way most boys behave,

00:32:21.260 it doesn't mean you're a girl. It doesn't. In fact, you can have two sexes and a variety,

00:32:29.740 vast variety of ways to express being male or female. Much more interesting diversity of how

00:32:36.780 you do that than simply this other thing that Jon Stewart brought up, which is that there is a

00:32:41.420 spectrum that goes from G.I. Joe to Barbie. And you have to fit somewhere in the middle of that.

00:32:47.820 What on earth is that? What's strange is that progressive ideology is presenting us with the

00:32:55.180 most hoary old stereotypes, telling gay children if they don't live up to certain stereotypes,

00:33:01.100 they could be the other sex. And the people who are going through this mistakenly are overwhelmingly gay

00:33:08.300 children. And that is why I am particularly frustrated that the perspective of gay people

00:33:17.100 has been subsumed within the LGBTQIA plus movement. Yes. Which seeks to essentially remove us.

00:33:26.140 Yes. Yeah. So my I think I've told you this before, but one of my good gay friends is like,

00:33:29.500 why do we have to share letters with them? It doesn't it's not working out like we shouldn't.

00:33:33.340 We're not in the same group with the same interests. But I will tell you, you know,

00:33:36.540 Stewart's whole bit was about taking aim at Matt Walsh to on what is a woman mocking Tucker for

00:33:41.420 saying there are only two sexes and is evidence that they these are hypocrites who don't know what

00:33:45.260 they're talking about is clips where, for example, you've got women from Fox saying I was a tomboy

00:33:51.180 growing up. That's somehow an acknowledgement that there are more than two biological sexes,

00:33:56.140 that there's more than two genders. No, it's not. As you said, and I've short formed it the following

00:34:00.700 way. We're big tent. We women, we have a big tent. Guys, you have a big tent. You can be gender

00:34:05.980 nonconforming and still be a man. You can be gender nonconforming and still be a woman.

00:34:10.060 It's not hypocritical to have said I'm a tomboy and then say there are only two sexes. And Jon

00:34:15.980 Stewart is in no position to be lecturing anyone on this. I mean, you look honestly, look, go back

00:34:21.980 and look at his history, because I was at Fox News when he was doing all of this. And I remember of all

00:34:26.620 places Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera wrote an article about him after he attacked yours truly while I

00:34:32.860 was on my maternity leave with my baby. And their their headline Al Jazeera was the Daily Show has a

00:34:39.980 woman problem. Women were constantly. Constantly belittled on his show for being women, this piece

00:34:47.500 points out. Valerie Plame, the CIA spy who was outed, he called her a fuckable blonde. Laura Bush joked

00:34:54.700 about her being covered in horse semen. Condi Rice suggested she may may have earned her secret

00:34:59.740 service nickname ping pong ball, you know, the old fashioned way. They were accusing him of lazy,

00:35:05.580 sexist jives and asking the following. Why does the show not hold itself to the feminist yardstick

00:35:10.540 by which it measures the rest of the world? This, as he accuses you of being a bigot on his show,

00:35:16.300 and Bill Donahue of the Catholic League pointed out this is a guy who defended a comedian who picked

00:35:21.580 on black black couple in the audience in 2008, that a black writer for Jon Stewart came out and accused

00:35:27.580 him of using racist voice impressions, which he did in imitating Herman Cain, which Herman Cain came

00:35:33.100 out and said was an Amos and Andy impression, not an impression of Herman Cain. Then the black writer

00:35:39.580 raised it again with Stewart. Stewart again screamed at him, apparently reportedly to F off. The guy had an emotional

00:35:45.420 breakdown after Stewart's treatment of him. This is all documented in the Bill Donahue piece and also

00:35:50.380 in the Al Jazeera piece, not to mention the stuff he says about the Catholic Church. So he can take a seat

00:35:55.660 on lecturing anybody about what a woman is or isn't and bigotry because he's the expert. He should keep it

00:36:03.660 quiet. Take a seat. That's it. OK, well, I am you. I'm not going to add to any of that. I don't

00:36:11.020 subtract from it. I will say this, though, Megan, is that notice that the way in which the words sex

00:36:17.980 and gender are used. Now, this gender was introduced as an idea to say it's separate from sex. You have

00:36:26.620 your biological sex, which is are you male or female, then your gender, which is what kind of male or what

00:36:31.820 kind of female are you? Right. But notice that they now fuse the two, use them interchangeably.

00:36:38.060 So that to say there are two genders, I think is just not true. There are two sexes and many

00:36:44.540 different genders, as it were. But and the other point I would make is that without sex, there's no

00:36:51.020 gender. If you don't have a core male identity, how can you play off it? How can you be a different

00:37:00.220 kind of man unless you have the raw material of being a man? Go back to the 1970s, not a woke era,

00:37:07.020 not an era in which transgenderism was. And go look at David Bowie. Go look at Freddie Mercury.

00:37:14.460 Go look at all the glam rock guys. That was androgyny. That was experimentation. That was a

00:37:21.580 way in which you could use the fact that you were a man and God knows David Bowie was absolutely a man,

00:37:27.020 but could play with it because he was a man.

00:37:30.620 Again, you can have a whole variety of different gender expression within a world of two sexes.

00:37:39.420 And and there are only two sexes. We are a reproductive strategy as a species, Megan.

00:37:46.940 It's male and female. I'm sorry, but it's true. We're not aliens from outer space. We're like every other

00:37:53.100 species on this planet. And our reproductive strategy is binary, binary, binary. Now, you can

00:38:00.700 have a few variations on that thing. But does the few exceptions prove or disprove the rule? I think

00:38:09.420 they prove the rule. It doesn't mean that you can't accommodate the tiny minority of people who

00:38:15.500 need to be accommodated, but you don't have to invalidate the entire experience of the vast

00:38:21.820 majority of human beings for all of human history. It's absurd.

00:38:25.900 And you certainly don't have to start mutilating children because they affirm your own worldview,

00:38:32.940 your own far. I don't even know if it is left, but just woke worldview that is off the reservation.

00:38:40.540 But there's a lot more to get to and why I have hope, why I have hope after seeing

00:38:45.340 Kim Kardashian at the L.A. Rams game this weekend. I'll play you the sot.

00:38:56.620 So just to pick it up where we left it off, I will say this, having watched the Stewart bit,

00:39:02.060 he's lost it. He's not only irrelevant. I mean, no one's talking about him. We decided to do it just

00:39:07.740 because we were having you on and I have a history with him, too. It's fucking annoying. But anyway,

00:39:13.340 he's lost it. And even the even the audience knew it. He could get no more than just a smattering of

00:39:17.980 applause. They weren't with him. He's out of step there. He will not run for president,

00:39:24.220 as Politico suggested. At one point, he has no more of a constituency now. And I think he knows it.

00:39:31.740 Just no one cares. Well, I don't know what to make of it, really, to be honest with you, Megan,

00:39:39.260 except he's not interested, it seems to me, in the truth. I mean, it's a really interesting story,

00:39:46.700 what's happening with transgender medicine right now. There is serious debate within transgender

00:39:52.380 medical authorities about the best way to go forward. There have been reverse decisions in Europe.

00:39:59.180 This is an open question. You could have had an expiration. You could have had, for example,

00:40:05.020 when she said 98 percent, he should have said, well, it's 80 percent. Well, what does that mean

00:40:08.780 about gay kids? You could have had someone on that panel who had a slightly different point of view,

00:40:15.740 someone reasonable. He didn't want that. They don't want debate. They don't want to raise the

00:40:21.900 strongest points against them. They want to propagandize, and they don't just want to

00:40:28.140 propagandize. They want to propagandize from the highest horse you can imagine, condemning others

00:40:35.260 who might disagree with them for completely good, honest reasons, as somehow bigots, as somehow people

00:40:43.180 who hate, this is the word they say all the time, hate trans people. I am allegedly a trans hater,

00:40:49.580 even though I've spent my entire life defending the rights of trans people. And I will defend them as

00:40:55.100 adults until the day I die and will respect their dignity. But I'm concerned that children are a

00:41:02.300 different matter and that we have to be very, very, very, very careful. Now, that's not bigotry.

00:41:08.860 I agree with your analysis. Yeah, I agree with you on it. You're right. Like, it is an interesting

00:41:12.700 debate. I mean, it's horrifying. But any honest broker would pause and say, yeah, we should talk about

00:41:19.020 it. And let's say Stewart was right that it's not 98%, that the AG was wrong. It's at least 70.

00:41:27.900 It's hovering in the high 60s to the low 70s, worst case scenario for the side that doesn't want to see

00:41:34.700 this be doled out like candy to children, these procedures. Why wouldn't he deal with that?

00:41:41.100 That deserves some reckoning. He's not interested in the actual issue. He's interested in dunking on

00:41:47.420 a Republican for yucks from his liberal audience. That's what he's about. He's about proving that all

00:41:54.780 these people are morons or bigots. That was the goal. And in fact, what you see, Chase Stranger,

00:42:01.660 one of the people who was on his shows, the ACLU trans person, he congratulated Stewart on having

00:42:10.140 learned, gone through a learning process before he did this show. In other words, that he directed

00:42:16.620 the ideology and content of the show. And what Jon Stewart asked himself is, what is the most left-wing

00:42:23.180 position on this? And how can I make it seem as if it's the only legitimate one, and that any other

00:42:28.460 position is bigoted and moronic? That's the game. And the truth is, it's boring. It's not interesting.

00:42:35.820 It doesn't add to anything. All it does is heap self-righteousness upon self-righteousness,

00:42:41.580 and is not in any way either comedy or journalism.

00:42:46.620 Just to go back to the actual point with the Arkansas AG. So she says, for all the physicians

00:42:52.940 that he was citing, who think the children need to transition or they're going to self-harm,

00:42:57.420 etc. She says, for every single one of them, there's an expert that says, we don't need to

00:43:01.100 allow children to take these medications. There are instances where he cuts her off.

00:43:05.020 No, you don't know that's true. You know it's not for everyone. There's another one. And she says,

00:43:11.180 no, I don't know that. And he does this gotcha like, well, why would you pass a bill if you don't

00:43:16.140 know? She's saying no. He's claiming, you know what you're saying is false. And her response is,

00:43:22.140 no, I do not know that. I know nothing of the kind. And his gotcha is, well, if you don't know,

00:43:27.420 why would you pass a bill? The logic is faulty. He's lost a step. His mind isn't doing as well

00:43:33.500 as it used to because the old Jon Stewart would never have caught himself in such a stupid failed

00:43:38.860 trap. But even if he were right that there is not a physician to respond to every single one who's

00:43:46.540 saying transition or they'll kill themselves transition or they'll self harm. There's a

00:43:51.020 reason for that. The entire medical community has decided to self censor. They've decided to tell

00:43:57.820 doctors who have young people coming into their offices. The standard of care is to affirm you

00:44:03.500 could get in trouble if you choose to do anything like what you were saying, Andrew, which is an honest

00:44:09.580 exploration with the child of what's actually going on in his or her life. So once again, he misses the

00:44:15.340 point entirely. And as you point out, it's for a reason because he was agenda driven.

00:44:21.180 Yep. Everything you say, Megan, I think I think you're correct. And look,

00:44:26.540 the truth is the medical authorities are divided to some extent. That's why their recent guidelines

00:44:32.940 removed any lower age limit and asked for much more caution. In other words, they asked for more

00:44:39.420 caution because they realize something's going wrong here. They, they, they, um, uh, and, and,

00:44:47.660 and, and they want to, uh, I, I, I, I'm sorry. I, I, I, I, wait, let me ask you a question about

00:44:53.980 that because that group, we talked about W path, right. I'm trying to find the actual, what that

00:44:58.060 stands for. It's like, uh, world, something of trans, professional association for transgender

00:45:03.900 health is the, uh, is the thing. Now you will notice that they got rid of the age. They want

00:45:09.180 the age limit gone, but they want more caution. I thought they just wanted to have more caution.

00:45:14.300 They want the lower age limit removed because, and they even say this explicitly,

00:45:19.500 if they put a real age limit in there and a doctor did it below that, then they will be vulnerable to

00:45:24.620 lawsuits. In other words, they are hedging their guidance to protect doctors from lawsuits,

00:45:31.100 which are going to come in large numbers in future years. That's what they're doing. This,

00:45:36.060 by the way, in the same guidelines, chapter nine talks about why eunuch identity is a,

00:45:45.500 just as valid as transgender identity. This is horrifying. And that people who are eunuch

00:45:51.900 identified, I'm using their words, should have a right to be castrate themselves. And we need to

00:45:58.220 actually, um, facilitate this. So I'm, when people say medical authorities, they're talking

00:46:05.980 about medical authorities in this particular niche. And within that niche, there are lots of people who

00:46:11.820 are quite seriously bonkers. And, and, and if you think that being a gender, being a eunuch identified

00:46:20.220 person is bizarre, Jon Stewart should understand that's the medical authority that you're relying on.

00:46:26.300 Oh my, that's the medical, these are these, these, and the point is, look, I've been a long time with

00:46:32.460 medical authorities. I'm HIV positive. The one thing I know is you ask questions. You do not take things

00:46:38.860 on authority. This is, this is the gold standard for journalism. Do not take something simply because

00:46:47.580 it's backed by an authority. He's not a journalist. He's not a journalist. He's a comedian who tries

00:46:55.180 to act as a social commentator, arbiter of truth, but he's actually not tethered to the truth. And

00:47:01.500 whenever he's caught, he falls back on his, I'm a comedian trope, which doesn't excuse his lack of

00:47:08.300 diligence or adherence to the truth. All right. Stand by Andrew. Yeah, go ahead. I'll give you.

00:47:13.340 I'm getting older. John Stewart's getting old. I don't really care. John Stewart is desperate

00:47:19.740 to be loved by people coming out of Harvard and Ivy league schools today. He wants to win their

00:47:26.300 applause. So he's sacrificing whatever he can to be as woke as he can to appeal to that particular

00:47:31.420 demographic because he's scared he's becoming irrelevant, which is sad.

00:47:34.780 It's not going to work because his show, nobody's watching his show and there are younger,

00:47:38.380 more exciting people for them to watch now. Um, so we'll see how, I think season two is probably

00:47:43.420 going to go the way season when one went after he attacked you and showed his true colors. Um,

00:47:48.060 we have to get to, to the moment Kim Kardashian attended the LA Rams game. There's a good reason

00:47:54.220 why I want to talk about it. Andrew, you may not know you have thoughts on this, but you do.

00:47:59.500 So I'm going to pause, come back to Andrew Sullivan in two minutes. Don't go away.

00:48:04.220 Uh, and remember folks, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on serious XM triumph channel one 11

00:48:09.660 every weekday at noon East. So if you want to listen to us live, it's always fun to do.

00:48:14.060 You can catch the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com

00:48:17.960 slash Megan Kelly, or you can download the audio podcast on anywhere you get your podcast for free.

00:48:23.820 Uh, and I'm curious about your thoughts on all this. You can email me at Megan at Megan,

00:48:29.340 kelly.com now. Okay. Email me Megan, M E G Y N at Megan, kelly.com. Now, do you think Jon Stewart is

00:48:38.620 still a relevant social commentator? If, as I feel you do not, why did we just spend all that time

00:48:46.060 on him? Because he attacked Andrew in the most vicious and nasty way just a few months ago. And he

00:48:51.820 has a long history of doing the same to me. And I just felt the need to remind the audience of who

00:48:56.860 this is, who this moral arbiter of us all actually is. Um, and there's a reason now it's watching.

00:49:03.900 Okay. Megan, kelly.com with your thoughts, send me an email and I may read them on the air. We're

00:49:08.300 going to start doing that now at the end of the show. Uh, we'll be right back with much,

00:49:11.940 much more on Kim K and others. So Andrew, I read you, uh, writing recently that narcissism

00:49:22.940 is everywhere. And this is in the wake of the queen's death. And you were, you know,

00:49:27.900 you were juxtaposing with the queen to this new subset of England and America and the world that is

00:49:35.060 just completely narcissistic and self-obsessed. And that is what leads me to Kim Kardashian.

00:49:41.660 And I don't think that Kim Kardashian is at heart, a bad person. I hate what she's come to stand for,

00:49:48.040 what she represents, what kind of an influence she has over our society. And in particular,

00:49:53.560 our little girls of which I have one. And I've had it with her narcissism and her endless vanity.

00:50:02.300 And I pointed this out before last week, it also came out that she's a rules don't apply to me kind

00:50:07.360 of person because she got pursued for unpaid taxes. Okay. Like so many of these rich people,

00:50:12.260 she just decided the rules would not apply to her. She didn't pay her taxes on a certain

00:50:15.560 portion of income she had. And she was forced by the feds to pay over seven figures, uh, to make the

00:50:22.060 bill correct. Um, the rest of us don't get away with that, right? Neither should she. So she decides

00:50:28.300 to go all decked out as she always does to a, an NFL football game. She lives in California. She goes

00:50:35.740 to an LA Rams, uh, Dallas Cowboys game out there and the giant jumbo cam found her. What a shock

00:50:43.960 and they booed her. They booed. Listen,

00:50:51.020 yeah. So I believe the reason they booed Kim Kardashian is because the country's getting sick

00:51:11.040 of narcissistic, vain, self-promotional rules do not apply to me type of people like her,

00:51:20.020 like Megan Markle. And I do think one of the reasons it's in the ether is because the death

00:51:26.000 of the queen and the reminder of what used to be, what once was, what we used to once revere

00:51:32.540 versus this false God of money and materialism and selfie culture and weird decisions on extreme

00:51:43.100 plastic surgery that one refuses to acknowledge infecting it into the bloodstream of our little

00:51:48.280 ones and so on your thoughts. Oh, I don't even want to, um, really add anything to that, except

00:51:56.480 have you seen the latest photographs of Madonna? Oh my God, what's going on with her? I don't know.

00:52:04.260 I mean, I have to say, you know, I love Madonna back in the day. Um, and she's an amazing artist.

00:52:10.760 She's done extraordinary things, but, but I guess what happens is that you become addicted to youth and

00:52:18.520 fame. And there are methods in which you can kind of look younger in which so many people now,

00:52:26.240 they're, they're, they're developing faces that really aren't faces at all. They're masks and

00:52:32.780 they become permanently fixed on their face. Uh, the sort of, you know, the Nancy Pelosi permanently

00:52:39.420 startled look where you are, your eyes are constantly, uh, furiously open and your skin is

00:52:49.640 incredibly taut. And, uh, and it comes a point at which, you know, I think of Jared and Ivanka, who

00:52:55.860 when you, at a distance now, you, the two faces are becoming exactly indistinguishable because

00:53:00.780 they're both strange human features in a white, bland, wrinkle-free, shape-free suit. Um, and

00:53:09.820 yeah. And then you look at the queen and you look at someone who was, had this incredible amount of

00:53:16.500 exposure placed upon her very young. She wasn't even intending to be queen. This happened to her,

00:53:21.920 um, because of the abdication of her uncle. Uh, and yet she, in 70 years, never said something that

00:53:32.920 drew attention to herself, never engaged in some crass attempt to, uh, please people who kept

00:53:42.120 every single public engagement she was supposed to keep, who lived up to every role she was supposed to

00:53:49.620 live up to, uh, which is incredibly difficult to be that public and have not a single opinion of

00:53:58.020 yours be known. Imagine that 70 years of doing that, the discipline, the service, the, the, the,

00:54:07.360 the humility actually to realize I'm just here because I happen to have the right genetics and I'm just

00:54:13.140 plonked here on a huge big throne, but I'm going to do my job and I'm going to do it well. And I'll

00:54:20.940 tell you when she died and you saw those scenes is because so many people deep down, yeah, they'll

00:54:26.740 buy the tabloids and they'll love the celebrity stuff and they will gobble it all up because it's

00:54:31.360 like candy, but they will respect and revere someone who chose a different path. And as long as

00:54:40.140 that exists, and I, I, I think William and Charles are hoping to do the same thing, uh, then we have

00:54:47.240 a public realm that is not entirely despicable. Yes. Yes. But also it tells me, you wrote that

00:54:55.340 that kind of self-restraint was that the queen's level of self-restraint was staggeringly rare.

00:55:01.720 Yes, exactly right. And you, and you wrote, you need only look at those around her from her husband

00:55:06.440 to her children to see just how hard it is to, to lead a life that doesn't wind up in the tabloids

00:55:13.520 or the headlines for the wrong reasons. Let alone Megan Markle who got there for 10 minutes

00:55:18.620 and immediately tried to turn it into some celebrity Hollywood stardom, uh, utterly, utterly

00:55:27.180 misunderstanding the institution and rightly ejected from it. Um, it would be lovely, wouldn't it? If more

00:55:34.680 of our public figures accepted, they get old and uglier, that's okay. It's good. We're all going

00:55:41.020 to get there. We need, we need role models of aging as opposed to these role models of panicking.

00:55:46.460 Yeah. That's good.

00:55:47.480 The other thing that strikes me is also that these people are not happy. If you're constantly changing

00:55:54.420 your face, something inside is not at rest. Um, and so I feel pity to some, I feel pity for Madonna.

00:56:07.220 I mean, in some ways, cause she seems trapped.

00:56:09.760 Let me show the video so the audience knows what we're talking about. You can watch it on YouTube.

00:56:14.400 If you're listening right now on Sirius XM, I'm going to show it now. This is Madonna in this

00:56:18.560 bizarre video. And I don't think there's sound it's her with a cat looking bizarre. She looks,

00:56:24.920 people think she looks like Marilyn Manson in this video. She's the, the captions read something to

00:56:29.840 the effect of if I'm, if I'm gay, if I miss I'm gay. And she has this big pair of hot pink panties

00:56:35.780 that she tries to hit into a trash can and she misses by a mile. So people are wondering if she's

00:56:41.440 coming out. Here's the video at the panties, she's, she's put on some weight. So she looks very

00:56:51.700 different. We've never seen Madonna, anything other than ripped and athletic bright pink wig.

00:56:58.240 And the, her eyebrows are gone. She does look a little like Marilyn Manson, you know, to, to your

00:57:02.980 point, Andrew, you can make yourself look a little younger, you know, like I've talked openly, I get

00:57:08.540 Botox and I like the Botox. I still get a, I get a little, so I can still do this with my eyebrows,

00:57:15.060 you know, but like, if I didn't get it, I'd have a lot more lines in my forehead than I do.

00:57:18.680 I think where people go wrong is trying to look young. You can look a little younger,

00:57:24.500 you know, you could shave off, I think between five and seven years with like taking good care

00:57:29.100 of your skin, staying out of the sun, getting the Botox, but you cannot take off 27 years or you

00:57:33.940 start to look like a freak. Well, what I'm concerned about is people who get a face at age 30 and it's

00:57:40.880 the same face when they're 80. Um, you know, there was a, there was a great line by George Orwell that

00:57:47.500 said by the age of 40, everyone has the face they deserve. And, and because life has, has brought its

00:57:55.040 painful path on your face and that's what it means to be human. And we're, we're in a flight from

00:58:02.460 mortality. We're in a flight from pain. We're in a flight for all the discomfort that actually makes

00:58:07.680 you strong. Um, and again, for me, the main thing is pity. A fame is fame is the most overrated

00:58:16.600 thing in our civilization. It is so massively overrated. It brings generally misery and isolation.

00:58:26.420 And, and, and look, I have a mini, mini, mini insight into this. Cause I'm, I'm, I used to

00:58:32.780 be on TV a lot. I took myself off because I don't want to be in a place where suddenly everyone sees

00:58:40.780 you and which you can't walk into, into a room and just be part of the background and observe things.

00:58:46.420 Once you become too famous or too well-known you, every place you go into is altered. So you never see

00:58:53.180 reality. So you get constantly shut off the reality. You get constantly shut off from the

00:58:58.760 human interactions you need. You get shut off from criticism and you get shut off from the past and

00:59:04.580 you, you can develop as, as, as Madonna has, or as many other people have, um, into masks that are

00:59:12.880 hiding misery really. Um, anyway, I hope she's okay. And she's done some wonderful stuff and it's okay to

00:59:21.460 retire and just go away and live your life. It's fine. Or, or just, you know, start to look like

00:59:28.700 an older version of yourself, of the self that was so hugely popular and beloved and keep singing and

00:59:36.800 just do the old, do the Tina Turner, you know, do the Tina Turner aging version there. There's a lane

00:59:42.900 for that. When I was in my twenties, I had two big musical, uh, passions. One was Madonna and the other

00:59:49.640 were the Pet Shop Boys. Um, now Pet Shop Boys just did a concert in the Hollywood Bowl just last,

00:59:56.560 just last night. Um, they are doing concert after concert. They're putting out new albums all the

01:00:03.120 time. They look as if they're in their sixties because they are in their sixties, but they are

01:00:08.540 having a blast and they're actually creating things and they're putting out new material.

01:00:13.780 That's actually as good as anything they've ever done. That's, they are my role ones.

01:00:18.940 Can I ask you something as a guy from, as a guy from the UK originally,

01:00:22.300 one thing I noticed when I go on GB news, which I love is you're allowed to be a woman who is aging

01:00:29.020 on television in the UK. It's okay. You're not kicked out here in America, different standard.

01:00:35.060 I mean, I'm sorry, but there just is. And I don't know exactly why that is. Why are the British so

01:00:42.680 normal? And I hate to use this weird term, but like forgiving of a, of an aging woman versus here

01:00:50.060 in America where there's so much pressure put on, I mean, people like Madonna that she feels the need

01:00:55.180 to make herself into Marilyn Manson and continue being this weird exhibitionist now well into her

01:01:00.180 sixties where she should be like nailed life. Look at me now. Here come my, my lines. Boom.

01:01:07.900 Yeah. I, I, I, I'm agreeing with you as well on this, Megan. I, I, I don't know. I find the examples

01:01:16.840 of women who have not done this. If you look at someone like Christine Lagarde, or if you look at

01:01:22.240 someone like Margaret Thatcher, or if you look at people who, who grew older and didn't do this

01:01:27.840 Angela Merkel, there's a certain poise and gravitas for an older woman in power that I find very

01:01:35.720 compelling. Um, maybe it's because the British have always had a women leaders, whether it be the

01:01:41.480 first Elizabeth or Victoria or Elizabeth the second or Thatcher, um, in ways that they've got aged and

01:01:49.620 they've become icons. And so you don't need them to be young. Maybe I, I'm, that's, I'm just, uh,

01:01:56.100 thinking out loud there, but, um, I find with older women with gray hair and real faces, they don't have

01:02:03.820 to be completely as they were, um, to be incredibly compelling figures. And, uh, and, and because also

01:02:11.860 it, it, it exudes confidence and self-confidence and that's very attractive. Whereas this other stuff

01:02:19.560 just seems to put forward insecurity, which is not attractive.

01:02:23.960 If you rise to fame because of your beauty, I can understand being a little unsteady as that

01:02:30.100 natural sort of youthful beauty fades, but it does require a reassessment of one's definition of the

01:02:36.340 term beauty. Do it, you know, does wisdom, does life's experience, does a, a more calm and

01:02:42.220 interesting approach to issues make you more attractive? I think so. And I'll give you one other

01:02:48.460 example. Um, I actually just had to look up her name cause I've, I do, I watched the first season

01:02:52.740 of Ted Lasso, but I haven't seen beyond that. But this, um, British actress named Hannah Waddingham,

01:02:58.240 she is gorgeous. This woman is gorgeous. Uh, Wikipedia tells me she's 48 years old, which is

01:03:03.600 not, that's not that old, but I noticed her because she clearly isn't getting Botox. She's got the lines

01:03:10.380 and she looks amazing. And, you know, I was saying to myself, like, as I get older now, I'm older than

01:03:15.920 she is. As I get older, I want to look like that. I'm like, well, I could stop the Botox

01:03:20.240 right now and probably look like that. But I think I'm going to save that Andrew to save

01:03:23.280 that for like 10 years for 61 instead of 51. That's my own vanity at play. I'm, I'm guilty

01:03:28.780 too. Um, okay. Can we spend a minute? You mentioned Megan Markle. I do want to spend one

01:03:33.060 minute on her. There was a report out, you know, there's a British author, um, named Valentin

01:03:38.700 Roy. I think it is. And he just released a book in the UK called court law, Valentin low

01:03:45.340 called courtiers. And, um, it's about the Royal family and her. And he reports in this book that

01:03:53.320 Megan Markle who landed on the cover of vanity fair for no reason other than she was Harry's

01:03:58.920 girlfriend. And if any fair doesn't put on the cover, you know, somebody who is the sixth

01:04:04.140 lowest ranking person in the show suits, which nobody's watching. That's not how she got it.

01:04:09.260 She got like, she was dating Harry and the caption under her picture is a beautiful picture is she's

01:04:15.920 just wild about Harry. And it's a, you know, it's a take on that show on that song. I'm just wild

01:04:22.100 about Harry. Harry's wild about me, whatever. Okay. Um, she thought it was racist. She complained

01:04:33.280 this, well, this person who's like out of nowhere gets featured on vanity fair. She was angry and she

01:04:40.160 complained according to Valentine Valentine that, uh, it was a racist caption demanded that they change

01:04:46.600 it because apparently Judy Garland in 1939 sang this song while in blackface. Okay. So she suggested

01:04:56.700 this was an attempt to diminish her as somebody who's mixed race. Meanwhile, the song goes back to

01:05:03.040 like 1921, excuse me, and has a long history. Apparently it was written for an African-American

01:05:09.580 show by an African-American songwriter. Anyway, everything, Andrew, everything is either racist

01:05:16.120 or sexist or wrong when it comes to Meghan Markle, despite all of the enormous gifts that have been

01:05:21.880 given to her and adulation that's been given to her. It's just back to my comment about the Kim

01:05:26.780 Kardashian booze. I am cheering the downfall on this woman's approval rating. I'm cheering the authors

01:05:32.960 who are bringing these stories out so that people can see how petty and shallow and small these people

01:05:42.160 are who have taken the national stage. Yeah. I, I increasingly, as I get older too, um,

01:05:50.780 the, the, the theme I sort of grapple with is gratitude. Um, uh, in the West, we have so much

01:05:58.140 incredible advantages, both over the rest of the world and in human history that to be this full of

01:06:09.140 resentment, this constant looking for offense or for harm is a sort of mental disorder. Uh, it's,

01:06:19.240 it's the one, I mean, as a gay person, I could go through life every day looking for a slight

01:06:28.280 when someone assumes I'm straight to feel offended when they make some sort of joke or when they

01:06:34.340 assume that no one gets, I mean, I could go crazy, but you decide not to, you decide so much has been

01:06:41.560 forgiven. I am so blessed in so many ways. I just let this stuff go and, and, and focus on the positive.

01:06:51.040 It's as if the more, for example, it's as if the more equal we become, the more fanatical we become

01:06:57.640 about the small inequalities that remain, that we lose perspective, um, that we unable to take a deep

01:07:05.740 breath and say, look, I just got to be nearly in the Royal family on the cover of Vanity Fair. I have

01:07:12.380 gazillions of dollars. I can just go and live my life. I don't have to be constantly seeking the

01:07:19.400 victim position or seeking to be the center of everyone's attention all the time. Uh, just look

01:07:28.920 around yourself one day and realize what you already have and be glad for it. I don't know if I'm trite,

01:07:35.000 but I do think that a lot of the problems in our world, a lot of the extraordinary anxieties, a lot

01:07:40.300 of the roiling tensions on the web and on Twitter or all the function of our losing perspective that we

01:07:46.240 actually do have it really good. Most of the time, certainly compared with anywhere else in history.

01:07:52.140 And we should be more focused on being grateful for that. They've been constantly extremely angry at all

01:07:57.520 the tiny little things we don't have. It's so true. I love what you said. I wrote it down. The more

01:08:02.900 equal we become, the more fanatical we become about the small inequalities that remain. Well

01:08:09.720 said. It's always a pleasure talking to Andrew Sullivan today with no exception. Thank you for

01:08:15.240 being on. Cheers, Megan. It's lovely to see you. All the best. Uh, yeah. Read the weekly dish,

01:08:21.420 please. Yes, do. You can get all sorts of provocative, fun and well-researched thoughts

01:08:27.960 from the one and only Andrew Sullivan. Okay. Coming up next, a deep dive into the Arizona

01:08:33.200 Senate and gubernatorial races. We did it. We did Pennsylvania on Friday. We'll do Arizona today. And

01:08:38.860 by the time we get to the midterms, we will have covered all of these. We'll put them all together

01:08:42.380 on YouTube so you can just click on them and know the very latest on how it's likely to go and what

01:08:46.540 the big issues are. I'm looking forward to this talk. So it's, um, Columbus day or indigenous

01:08:54.480 people's day or whatever. Um, my kids don't have school today. I don't know about yours. It depends

01:08:59.900 on where your kids go to school. A lot of school kids are in school because, you know, Columbus is

01:09:04.240 too offensive. Depends anyway. Um, so I'm home. My kids are, you know, running around and I just got a

01:09:11.020 text from my nine-year-old that reads, it's going fine, mom. Very fine. Should I be concerned?

01:09:18.800 Because I am what's going fine. What could you be more specific, sweetheart? Um, I'll get back to

01:09:25.660 you on how that goes before we hear back from Thatcher. However, we are shifting gears in the

01:09:29.480 show to bring you a deep dive on the key midterm races in Arizona. Last week, democratic Senator Mark

01:09:35.760 Kelly and Republican candidate Blake masters faced off in a debate. We're going to bring you the

01:09:40.260 highlights and Katie Hobbs, the Democrat and, uh, rising star Carrie Lake, the Republican

01:09:46.100 continue to be neck and neck in one of the most competitive races in the country. Carrie

01:09:50.020 Lake was getting killed in this race, according to most of the polls few months ago, but she has

01:09:55.100 been slow and steady, slow and steady, slow and steady, and really has caught on. Uh, you may

01:09:59.180 recall she was on our show, um, a few months ago before she won the nomination. And this thing's

01:10:04.160 gotten really interesting. Joining me now to take a deep dive into all this is Axios Phoenix

01:10:08.360 reporter, Jeremy Duda. Jeremy, welcome to the show. How are you?

01:10:12.600 I'm good. Thanks for having me.

01:10:14.300 Oh, it's my pleasure. All right. So let's start with the Senate where you've got, uh, Mark Kelly,

01:10:19.360 uh, and Blake masters and Mark Kelly is the brother, identical twin of Scott Kelly, both

01:10:24.300 of whom are former astronauts. It's an interesting, you know, pair. The mother's sure she was very

01:10:29.260 proud. And, uh, Mark Kelly is the, is the twin who's married to Gabby Giffords and, um, has

01:10:36.040 been in politics. So Mark Kelly, uh, is holding the seat right now. It's the seat that was once

01:10:40.660 held by John McCain. He's the incumbent. He's trying to fend off this challenge from a Peter

01:10:45.420 Thiel backed Republican, who is, uh, a big business guy, uh, who decided to try his hand

01:10:51.240 at politics and, um, just set up the race for us before we play a couple of the debate clips

01:10:56.720 on like how it's going so far between the two of them.

01:10:59.740 Um, so far, I mean, all of the polling that we've seen so far has got, uh, Kelly ahead

01:11:05.540 by, you know, anywhere from a point to, you know, six or seven points. Uh, so far it looks

01:11:10.940 like, um, I mean, right now, Mark Kelly's race to lose. Um, obviously anything, anything

01:11:15.380 could change. And as we've seen from the last few election cycles, a lot of this polling

01:11:19.740 does not always turn out to be, uh, you know, as accurate as the pollsters would like.

01:11:23.560 So I think the general perception right now is that, uh, Kelly is, uh, ahead and, you

01:11:28.600 know, masters is, uh, trying to catch up.

01:11:31.740 Why is it that masters, I mean, virtually everything I read about masters is somebody

01:11:36.600 bashing him on the right, on the left. It's just like, why is there this backlash to masters

01:11:43.700 who doesn't seem to even have much of a political record?

01:11:47.460 Um, I mean, on the left, obviously they don't like him cause he's, you know, the Republican

01:11:50.520 nominee against Kelly on the right. I think, um, you know, it was a pretty

01:11:53.340 divisive primary. Um, as we saw, you know, we had, uh, Mitch McConnell in DC spent a long

01:11:58.920 time trying to recruit, uh, governor Doug Ducey into the race. Um, I think there was a lot

01:12:04.060 of perception among, at least among some Republicans that, uh, you know, they didn't have a great

01:12:07.980 field out there. Um, what we've seen since the, uh, primary is, uh, you know, masters

01:12:13.500 trying to kind of, you know, do the classic pivot back, you know, towards the center. But

01:12:18.160 he said a lot, he's had a number of things that he said in the primary that are really

01:12:20.900 coming back to haunt him. And, uh, you know, Kelly and, uh, you know, the Democrats are

01:12:25.080 spending tens of millions of dollars to, uh, really make him pay for that on abortion and

01:12:29.500 on social security, especially.

01:12:31.720 Hmm. Um, okay. So last night, and you never know, cause we'll get to what's happening at

01:12:36.740 the gubernatorial level. Um, is the, the, you mentioned Doug Ducey, he's a sitting governor.

01:12:41.580 He's a Republican. He's got to go because of term limits. So Mitch McConnell was like, Hey,

01:12:45.660 how about running for Senate? You know, you'd be a good candidate. You're well-liked in Arizona.

01:12:48.880 Didn't happen. Well, and now it's, it's masters who who's running on the GOP ticket. Um, so you

01:12:54.880 never know because Carrie leak is doing well, which we'll get to in a minute in like, does

01:12:58.940 she have coattails? You know, are there are enough people going to go to the ballot box

01:13:01.920 and say, you know what? I like her. I'm going Republican up and down the line. Uh, we had

01:13:07.000 a similar, we had that same question on Friday as of, um, on Pennsylvania. And I got an interesting

01:13:12.660 answer from Selena Zito. The audience has to go back and listen to that if you want to hear

01:13:16.120 it. So the Arizona debate takes place. Masters and Kelly get up there and they start going

01:13:22.100 at it over immigration, which is a massive issue in the state of Arizona, both in fact

01:13:27.120 and politically. And here's a little bit of how that went.

01:13:30.100 I've been focused on the border since day one on this job. I'm down there all the time.

01:13:34.820 I was on the phone this week, just, you know, with mayor Nichols of Yuma, Mark Kelly, Sheriff

01:13:39.120 Daniels of Cochise County talking about what more we need for border patrol and immigration.

01:13:44.200 That my friend is called invasion. We're, we're, we're working to raise border patrol

01:13:47.840 pay by 18, 18%. I've got legislation to do that. I've been focused on the border since

01:13:53.480 day one. Okay. You know, we know great effects because we have a wide open Southern border.

01:13:58.140 So if that's the best you can do, I respectfully request you resign and let's get someone in

01:14:01.820 the seat who will actually secure our border. Just a little bit more. Um, this is soundbite

01:14:07.840 13. The debate continued. You know, if the Mexican drug cartels, if these terrorist

01:14:12.740 narcos, if they could vote in this election, every single one of them would vote for Senator

01:14:17.300 Kelly because they get what they want from him, which is a complete wide open border is

01:14:21.480 complete free reign. And again, the fentanyl is killing our children. He's not doing a gosh

01:14:26.640 darn thing to stop it.

01:14:28.600 Love the self edit on the swear. So how, how did that go over? Cause this is a huge issue

01:14:33.600 in Arizona.

01:14:35.080 Sure. Absolutely. We're a border state. We really bear the brunt of a lot of this,

01:14:38.920 of this problem. Um, obvious issue for obviously a good issue for the Republicans. Um, you know,

01:14:44.520 you've seen Senator Kelly try to kind of, uh, you know, lean more towards the center on this,

01:14:51.240 uh, you know, boasting of us, you know, supporting, I think a billion dollars in funding for, you know,

01:14:55.600 barriers, border patrol agents, stuff like that. He's got ads talking about border security.

01:15:00.660 That's one of the areas where he's trying to put a little distance between himself and

01:15:03.740 president Biden on the title 42 issue. But, uh, obviously it's still an issue that, uh,

01:15:09.280 you know, going to resonate, uh, with the voters and going to favor Republicans. And you saw,

01:15:12.660 you know, Blake masters really trying to hit that hard. I think, uh, it was a debate that,

01:15:16.780 uh, lacked a lot of, uh, you know, notable one-liners, but, uh, there were a couple of,

01:15:21.100 you know, two of the only ones we had were on that issue. And you just showed one of them

01:15:24.360 where he talked about if that's the best you can do, you could resign. And there's another

01:15:27.400 question or another comment that Blake masters made right before that, where he said,

01:15:30.760 you know, can you genuinely say that, uh, you've done everything you can to secure the

01:15:35.860 Southern border. And this is after he's been hitting, uh, Mark Kelly on, uh, voting against

01:15:39.720 this Republican amendment, uh, for, to fund 18,000 new border patrol positions. So you can see,

01:15:44.840 so obviously it's an issue where Kelly, uh, you know, knows he has to kind of reach out to the

01:15:48.780 center, reach out across to the, uh, right side of the aisle a little bit. Um, you know,

01:15:52.760 Blake master is certainly hoping that's not going to be enough for most voters.

01:15:56.420 Yeah, he's that's, this is an area in which he is vulnerable because he's a Democrat.

01:16:00.200 The Democrats are vulnerable, even though I'm sure Mark Kelly is to the right of Joe Biden

01:16:05.040 in general on most issues, because he's, you know, he's in Arizona. The Arizona Democrats are

01:16:10.760 different from the national Democrats as a rule because Arizona is per used to be red. It's more

01:16:16.880 purple now, but it's not blue. No, I'm sure. And a lot of the Democrats you've seen over the past,

01:16:22.520 you know, 10, 20 years, we have had success at the statewide level. Our Democrats, you know,

01:16:26.260 folks like, you know, Kelly cinema, Janet Napolitano who have taken a, you know, a little

01:16:30.600 bit more of a centrist or conservative position on the border. Yeah. Okay. So now I would give that

01:16:36.880 point masters, but then you got, of course, points on the other side. And this was Mark Kelly honing

01:16:42.160 in on the issue that's been put, put a lot of Republicans in a vulnerable position. And that is

01:16:46.940 abortion. Uh, and, and maybe none more so than Blake master. I don't, you just hear this raised all

01:16:51.780 the time with him and we'll talk about why, but here's Mark Kelly calling out Blake masters on past

01:16:59.580 comments about abortion. Stop 14. He has said, and this isn't like years ago, he has said very

01:17:06.640 recently that he wants to punish the doctors. He's called abortion demonic, a religious sacrifice.

01:17:15.080 I don't even know what that means folks, but what I'm doing is I am protecting your constitutional

01:17:21.720 rights that you have lost because of rhetoric like this. Okay. So we did look it up. I believe

01:17:29.800 he's referring there, Jeremy, to, um, a comment by masters to Allie Beth Stuckey, friend of ours,

01:17:34.000 uh, in September of 2021, where he said as follows, you see Allie, how the abortion thing has turned into

01:17:40.200 this religious totem for the left in the nineties. They just wanted abortions to be safe, legal, and rare.

01:17:45.400 Now you have activists wearing their shirts with tally marks of how many abortions they've had.

01:17:49.380 And this is the cultural thrust of it. It's a religious sacrifice to these people. It's demonic

01:17:54.200 and we've got to put a stop to it. I will say in his defense, that is a context that changes the way

01:18:02.360 he used the word demonic. He's not saying abortion in general is demonic there. He's saying to be proud

01:18:07.140 of it, to do a tally with how many you've had proudly wear it. That's a different story,

01:18:12.620 but how did he respond live to that? And how do you think it went over?

01:18:19.060 Well, the way he responded, I mean, I think more of the crux of, uh, Senator Kelly's argument,

01:18:23.520 and obviously those are some very inflammatory comments that Blake masters made, especially

01:18:27.040 if they're not, uh, put in that context, but he also spoke earlier during the primary about,

01:18:31.800 you know, possibility of enacting, you know, a federal personhood law that would ban abortions

01:18:36.080 nationally, punishing doctors. And that's what Kelly's really hitting them on in particular,

01:18:40.840 because now what, uh, like master was saying is, you know, the 15 week ban that, uh, we've enacted

01:18:45.940 here in Arizona earlier in the year, which, uh, is kind of a ping pong ball going back and forth

01:18:49.960 in the courts, do it, do it, do it, uh, law that we have the predates, uh, pro v. Wade and even

01:18:54.720 predates statehood that bans most abortions, except to save the life of the mother. You know,

01:18:59.740 Blake masters, they came out and supported that plus of, uh, Lindsay Graham's, uh, proposal in the U.S.

01:19:03.940 Senate for a kind of a nationwide, uh, 15 week, uh, ban, you know, that's what he's supporting now.

01:19:09.460 Kelly, of course, is trying to paint him as a flip-flopper. It looks, you know, he's on video

01:19:14.180 talking about, you know, the possibility of banning abortions nationwide. So it was definitely not a

01:19:19.980 good look. And, uh, you know, definitely speaks volumes of Blake masters is kind of, uh, pinning

01:19:24.500 his hopes on the 15 week ban now and say, no, he doesn't support a nationwide ban at all.

01:19:29.580 Hmm. I mean, honestly, it's the only smart position for Republicans who want to win.

01:19:33.940 In states that are in any way purple, it's like the, I see that, you know, he faced very little

01:19:40.320 alternative other than to do that, but it did require abandoning earlier statements. Um, what

01:19:45.380 about the stolen election stuff? Because a lot of these Trump back candidates kind of had to say

01:19:50.660 they thought it was stolen to get Trump's endorsement. And then once they got the nomination,

01:19:55.760 we're like, who, what, huh? And is he one of those? Cause I did hear him at this debate,

01:20:01.840 um, sounding like he was breaking with Trump. Here's the sound bite. And then you tell me

01:20:05.960 whether this is a reversal. It's not 15. Was that election stolen? Was it rigged in any way,

01:20:13.900 shape or form enough to keep Donald Trump out of the white house? I suspect that if the FBI didn't

01:20:18.880 work with big tech and big media to censor the Hunter Biden, the Hunter Biden crime story. Yeah.

01:20:24.100 I suspect that changed a lot of people's votes. I suspect president Trump would be in the white

01:20:27.980 house today. If big tech and big media and the FBI didn't work together to put the thumb on the scale

01:20:32.940 to get Joe Biden in there, but not vote counting, not election results. Yeah. I haven't seen evidence

01:20:37.400 of that. So that last piece definitely has a divergence from where Trump stands on it,

01:20:42.520 but is it a divergence from where masters used to be? I would say so, you know, during the primary,

01:20:48.140 you saw him putting out videos, saying things flat out, like president Trump won the 2020 election.

01:20:52.820 He was perhaps not quite as strident about it as say, you know, Carrie Lake or some of the other

01:20:57.820 down ballot candidates, Mark Fincham for secretary of state, Abe Hamadev for attorney general.

01:21:02.160 But obviously that was a big litmus test for Trump for his endorsements, you know, in the primaries

01:21:06.620 this year, you know, he was not going to back someone who doesn't say that the election was rigged,

01:21:10.680 that he was cheated out of it. That's, you know, I think that that is definitely masters,

01:21:15.460 I think, kind of seeing the writing on the wall there, not wanting to, you know,

01:21:18.380 tap into himself to what's probably an unpopular position with the electorate in general.

01:21:24.420 Well, Arizona, of course, was one of the big states in 2020 that went for Biden that Trump

01:21:30.540 was so angry about. And that's the man at Fox News for calling it too soon and all that.

01:21:34.740 And now there's been like 25 different investigations by like Team Trump. And then the

01:21:38.680 other, you know, like, see, it really did get stolen. No, it didn't. How do you think

01:21:44.180 Arizonans see that issue? Forget Trump and Masters and Kelly, how do Arizonans see the issue of 2020?

01:21:54.880 I think, I mean, there's obviously that base of hardcore believers in, you know, these election

01:22:01.060 rigging claims. But I think for the most part, you know, most Arizonans, especially the people

01:22:04.780 that these statewide candidates need to win the general election. You know, I don't think they

01:22:08.900 like that at all. I don't think that's something that they buy at all. We've had, you know,

01:22:12.840 this was the, you know, 2020 was the first time in 20 years that Arizona voted for a Democratic

01:22:18.240 presidential candidate, only the second time since 48 when we went for Harry Truman. I think

01:22:25.060 the fact that Masters is backing away from that more now kind of shows exactly where, you know,

01:22:30.020 the kind of the independents, the persuadable voters are. Although interestingly enough,

01:22:34.580 you don't see that among the other statewide candidates. He's really the kind of the outlier

01:22:38.300 there in terms of all the Trump endorsed candidates who won the primary. And it was all in

01:22:42.480 pretty much every race. It was the Trump endorsed candidates who won those Republican primaries.

01:22:46.260 He's kind of the only one who's really made a point of backing away from that a little. I think

01:22:51.500 a lot of us were kind of surprised to hear that last week during the debate.

01:22:54.900 Well, and even before he backed away from it, he was losing all these polls. Like, we don't know if

01:22:59.560 the polls are right or wrong, but he was not doing well in the poll. So it's not like sticking to the

01:23:03.760 Trump was robbed. It was rigged. That wasn't helping him. So now he's trying a different tact of

01:23:09.120 it was unfair. But no, I'm not going to say I saw anything that would have changed the outcome

01:23:13.760 of the election. And I don't know whether that'll change his polls. This debate was last Thursday.

01:23:17.660 But Carrie Lake, who's running for governor as a Republican, is 100 percent team Trump on stolen,

01:23:24.340 stolen, stolen on all fronts, not just unfairness, but actually stolen. And she's doing much better.

01:23:31.720 So why is she doing so much better with these same Republicans who you tell me may be turned off

01:23:37.260 by what Blake Masters had said earlier?

01:23:40.660 Well, a couple of reasons. I mean, Carrie Lake is obviously a very charismatic candidate. She really

01:23:44.940 caught fire in the primary in a way I've never really seen a candidate do. And, you know,

01:23:49.620 the 14 years or so I've been covering elections in Arizona. You know, we've seen since, you know,

01:23:55.400 since Donald Trump first got into the political scene in 2015, we've seen so many Republican

01:23:59.060 candidates try to emulate his style. And I don't know that I've ever really seen anyone kind of

01:24:03.540 nail it the way she has. So she's got that going for her. Plus, you know, Mark Kelly is a very

01:24:08.820 difficult opponent. He's a great resume, you know, somewhat moderate credentials. He's got the,

01:24:16.280 you know, his wife is Gabby Giffords. He's, you know, he has a lot going for him. You know,

01:24:21.160 political consultants will wait their entire career to get a candidate with that kind of resume.

01:24:24.480 Katie Hobbs is just not as strong an opponent for Carrie Lake as Mark Kelly is for Blake Masters.

01:24:32.800 And I think that's definitely a big part of her, part of what's helping out Lake right now,

01:24:37.540 too, because she has some of the, you know, she's not trying to go towards the center in the same

01:24:41.440 way that I think Masters has been since the primary. You know, a little bit in some areas,

01:24:46.060 but not nearly as much. Obviously, like you said, she's still embracing the,

01:24:48.900 you're still in election rhetoric. You don't see the same kind of pivot in there.

01:24:55.440 You're so right, though. I mean, if you spend any time with Mark Kelly or Scott Kelly,

01:24:59.300 they're likable guys. It's hard to dislike them. I just, you know, it's tough. And Mark Kelly's

01:25:06.440 also got a personal story, as you mentioned, with Gabby Giffords as his wife that will tug on your

01:25:10.300 heartstrings and also isn't an extreme leftist. That would be a turnoff to the Arizonans.

01:25:15.560 But Carrie Lake, who hasn't abandoned any of the hardcore MAGA, Trump, stolen election stuff,

01:25:21.000 is also extremely charismatic. That's what I've been saying since I had her on the show. I didn't

01:25:24.980 know anything about her. I saw, OK, she's saying all this election stuff. Let me talk to her.

01:25:29.360 She was amazing. She was great. You know, you listen to her. You're like, oh, this woman's got

01:25:35.040 it. She's got it. The it factor. And as you point out, Katie Hobbs doesn't. Her opponent. So

01:25:41.420 here's just a flavor of that for the audience. Let me start with not not. I want to talk about

01:25:47.600 Hobbs on abortion. OK, because she went on, I think it was Face the Nation during a Sunday

01:25:51.720 appearance. And she appeared to suggest to Major Garrett, who was hosting, that she doesn't

01:25:57.160 she doesn't see the need for any limits. Here it is. 17. So if an Arizona voter were to conclude from

01:26:04.360 your previous answer that you do not favor any specific week limit on abortion, would they be

01:26:11.000 correct? I support leaving the decision between a woman and her doctor and leaving politicians

01:26:18.340 entirely out of it. So that's that's extreme, even within the Democratic, you know, party,

01:26:27.820 I guess, at least at least in a reddish state. That's that's pretty extreme for Arizonans. No,

01:26:32.140 am I wrong? I would imagine so. I would imagine that's not going to be, you know, no limits at

01:26:37.400 any point in pregnancy is probably not a particularly popular position. No, I've spoken with the Hobbs

01:26:42.980 campaign about it and got pretty much the same answer. You know, I think what they'll tell you,

01:26:47.500 what most Democrats will tell you is that, you know, abortions in the third trimester

01:26:50.360 are very rare and generally pretty much for, you know, severe health or, you know, life of the

01:26:57.240 other issues. But without putting that kind of qualifier on on the issue saying there should be

01:27:04.260 no limit, you know, that's, you know, again, there's probably a reason why Carrie Lake is

01:27:08.500 going after Hobbs on that. And it's because that is probably not going to be a particularly popular

01:27:13.260 issue is going to be as damaging as, you know, for her as the more kind of unflinching, you know,

01:27:18.740 anti abortion rights position that Carrie Lake has taken, you know, probably not. I think the way

01:27:23.380 one Republican consultant put it to me, you know, a few weeks ago was that going after the third

01:27:29.200 trimester issue is it's more mitigation for Republicans, you know, something that's going

01:27:33.260 to hurt the Republicans, but probably are the Democrats, sorry, but probably not as much as,

01:27:38.000 you know, the repealing row in general hurt the Republican candidates.

01:27:42.840 What where what is Carrie Lake's position on abortion in Arizona?

01:27:47.600 We've kind of seen that go back and forth a little bit lately. She was on a radio show,

01:27:52.300 I believe last week, and she said, you know, previously, she'd been very, you know,

01:27:56.140 unflinching, unyielding on, you know, supporting Roe v. Wade being overturned, supporting Arizona's

01:28:01.920 pre-statehood law, banning any abortion except those needed to save the life of the mother.

01:28:07.340 I believe she said she would support she would say if she were governor, she would sign a bill

01:28:12.340 similar to the six week heartbeat law that was signed in Texas, I believe last year. But the last

01:28:19.500 week she said, you know, she wants abortion to be kind of took the same position of, you know,

01:28:24.380 I believe she said safe and legal kind of kind of echoing Bill Clinton's famous line about wanting

01:28:29.280 abortion to be legal, safe and rare within that interview, she kind of shifted and later on said,

01:28:33.340 you know, rare and safe. And that's kind of the position her campaign took after afterwards when

01:28:38.380 reporters asked them about that. So still, you know, pretty stridently pro-life. I mean,

01:28:43.460 obviously that's the position she had for a long time. These are her personal beliefs. I think

01:28:48.020 she said she would support whatever, basically whatever the courts decide, whether we have this

01:28:52.420 15 week ban or this pre-statehood ban go into effect. And that'll take a little while to support

01:28:57.740 out, to work out in the courts. She said that if the courts do decide it's the 15 week ban,

01:29:04.180 that's what goes into effect and she won't push for a stricter ban in the legislature. Now,

01:29:09.480 obviously I would imagine that lawmakers were still almost certainly going to have a Republican

01:29:13.680 controlled legislature come January. And if the 15 week ban is what's in effect, I would imagine

01:29:18.400 we'll see a push to enact, you know, a stricter ban, probably something, you know, closer to the,

01:29:23.860 you know, the pre-row ban that's in the courts right now. Now, they really may not push for that,

01:29:28.660 but would she sign that if it lands on her desk? She's kind of all over the place, but I mean,

01:29:32.300 she did vote for Barack Obama. We talked about her political evolution when she came on.

01:29:36.380 So I don't know whether she's always been pro-life or whether that's a new position she's recently

01:29:41.880 come to. I mean, look, it's like for Republicans, they're in a spot because there's zero chance

01:29:47.840 Donald Trump was a pro-life person prior to running for political office or, you know,

01:29:53.980 as life as a, you know, playboy, New York city, real estate tycoon, uh, did not suggest in any way

01:30:00.720 that he was a pro-lifer and he was on Larry King defending partial King abortion or partial King,

01:30:05.760 partial birth abortion at one point. So, but, but they got in him a president who appointed,

01:30:11.920 you know, three of the most conservative justices we've seen in a long time who

01:30:14.980 effectively overturned Roe versus Wade. So who the hell knows, right? Like they, they all,

01:30:19.320 they're placing a bet on how the person's going to vote, not what their personal views are. And,

01:30:25.160 um, they'll have to figure that out, I guess, in Arizona. Is it a pro-life state or is it a,

01:30:29.540 like, how would you describe it?

01:30:30.440 I think it's a fairly, I think on the whole, Arizona's probably majority supportive of, uh,

01:30:37.460 abortion rights at some level, whether it be a 15 week ban, whether it be kind of the 24 week mark,

01:30:42.420 which I think is more closer to what we had prior to Roe v. Wade being overturned. I think it's

01:30:47.740 historically been a pretty conservative state, but also, you know, it's historically very libertarian,

01:30:53.560 kind of, uh, you know, let people leave people to their own devices. And I think, uh,

01:30:57.140 there, I think there is a lot of support for abortion rights out in Arizona for that to be

01:31:02.000 a winning issue for Democrats. And I think, you know, obviously we've seen them hitting,

01:31:05.020 you know, Masters, Blake and others pretty hard on that.

01:31:08.560 How can Arizona be so close geographically to California and be libertarian? And California,

01:31:13.660 I would say is the opposite of libertarian. They love big government.

01:31:18.960 I don't know. Arizona is kind of one of the last states, uh, you know, in the lower 48 to be settled.

01:31:22.920 You know, people came here cause they were just trying to, uh, I think at least back in the day,

01:31:26.440 it's a lot different now, but, uh, historically is the place where people came to cause they kind

01:31:30.140 of wanted to get away from where they were from, you know, you kind of started anew. No one was

01:31:33.960 going to ask a lot of questions. You could just be who you wanted to be. And I think, uh, you know,

01:31:37.400 back in the day of Barry Goldwater, you know, Barry Goldwater, that was very much kind of the

01:31:40.920 ethos of Arizona. I think, you know, it's a little bit different now, but to historically kind of the

01:31:45.000 Arizona that I was born into and grew up in, it was a lot more like that.

01:31:48.400 I like that. Um, so Katie Hobbs had a difficult moment when she was asked about the Latino community.

01:31:55.520 Uh, Blake Masters tweeted out this video just this past Sunday, writing Katie Hobbs is the

01:32:01.300 Kamala Harris of Arizona. And, um, I get, I'm not sure if I need to set this up, but it was at her

01:32:08.760 appearance at the historic chamber of commerce forum in Phoenix. Uh, a town hall moderator asked her to

01:32:14.100 explain how the state's Latino community had impacted her personally. And here's how that went.

01:32:20.820 What have you learned specifically learned from the Latino community?

01:32:29.660 Oh, that's a great question. Um, I don't necessarily, uh, think about it that way in those terms. I

01:32:36.160 think, um, I really value, uh, my relationships across the board with, um, with, with different

01:32:43.640 books and, um, and I learn all the time from, from people, uh, in my life. My sister-in-law, um,

01:32:50.640 she is, uh, Latino and, uh, her family, uh, I love hanging out with them and, um, practicing

01:32:59.860 my Espanol bookies books.

01:33:02.420 So there's not one specific lesson you could share, other than Espanol

01:33:06.200 . Uh.

01:33:08.200 It's one third of the state.

01:33:11.500 Yeah, yes, absolutely.

01:33:13.640 Is it over?

01:33:15.480 Oh my God, Jeremy, Jeremy, that was not a good answer.

01:33:21.140 It is over.

01:33:22.140 It is over.

01:33:23.140 Is it over? Do you think that's it? Like, is that, I mean, it's a big Latino population,

01:33:28.380 as the moderator pointed out that that's not going to help her.

01:33:31.220 Uh, probably not. And you've seen, you know, here in Arizona and I think nationwide, we've seen, uh,

01:33:36.920 Republicans making more inroads with, uh, Hispanic voters. And we've seen that in the past. We've seen a

01:33:41.500 lot of outreach here over the last, you know, I'd say decade or so. And I think it's, you know,

01:33:45.500 starting to bear fruit.

01:33:47.000 So what are the odds that Carrie Lake gets elected as governor and Blake Masters goes down as senator so that Republican voters would split their vote?

01:33:59.560 I mean, right now, that's looking like the likeliest scenario. I mean, we've seen, you know,

01:34:05.280 in, you know, the pulling in the governor's race and, you know, again, with the caveat that for the last few cycles,

01:34:09.860 you know, close races, we've seen polls wrong here and all over the country.

01:34:13.200 Um, it goes back and forth. Some have, you know, Hobbs up by, by a few points and have Lake up by a few points.

01:34:19.300 I mean, this is still a pretty, you know, for, for all the, uh, the purplish tendencies voters out here have shown over the last, uh,

01:34:26.920 three election cycles, this is still a Republican leaning state is still a predominantly Republican state, um,

01:34:32.860 you know, Republican in what should be a Republican year with, you know, Democratic white house, very unpopular one at that.

01:34:37.680 It's, you know, and I think what we saw from Katie Hobbs there is kind of speaks to kind of a, you know,

01:34:42.520 bigger problem for her campaign. She's not a great speaker. I think I've heard from voters who, you know,

01:34:47.940 love her message, but hate the delivery. And that, uh, you know, when you compare that to Carrie Lake,

01:34:53.980 very poised, very polished, you know, she was on TV for 27 years. She was a news anchor for 27 years.

01:35:01.320 So she kind of exudes a lot of confidence and, uh, you know, again, charisma and Lake does, or Hobbs, uh,

01:35:06.840 there's a lot of hers, a lot of, um, that's a style of speaking. If you, if you talk to supporters of

01:35:11.140 hers, I think even they'll tell you the same thing that, uh, that's kind of an Achilles heel for the

01:35:15.860 campaign there. Hmm. And then meantime, back on the Senate race that we started with masters has not

01:35:21.180 led in a single public poll after the primary or before it. I mean, it's just in my own experience

01:35:26.720 sitting in the anchor desk on these big political nights that that's a better indicator than anything

01:35:31.660 that the person's not going to win. I mean, when they, when they've never led pretty good bet

01:35:35.980 that they're not going to win though, anything could happen. And Peter Thiel was just saying,

01:35:39.640 he feels like he secured JD Vance in Ohio, even though the polling is questionable there.

01:35:45.380 And now he was going to move his money to Arizona to help shore up masters who worked for him as his

01:35:50.580 COO for a few years. So Peter Thiel's money is plentiful and there's still some time to go. Um,

01:35:57.140 a quick question before we go, do you think it'll be enough?

01:35:59.360 Um, I don't know. It's hard to say, look, it's not looking good for masters. I'm looking a lot,

01:36:05.480 a lot better for Lake, you know, Peter Thiel can come in with a lot of money. There's still tons

01:36:09.220 of money on the democratic side too. And early voting starts this week.

01:36:13.760 Jeremy, what a pleasure. Thank you for coming on.

01:36:16.520 Thanks for having me.

01:36:18.080 No word back from Thatcher on what on earth he meant. So I'll let you know tomorrow,

01:36:22.820 whether everything really was fine. Reminds me of my, my fake Donald dialogue with my dog,

01:36:27.240 who is a good boy. Then I do his fake voice back to me. Not me. Tomorrow, the fifth column. Don't

01:36:34.500 miss that. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - October 10, 2022

Jon Stewart's Gender Hypocrisy, and an Arizona Deep Dive, with Andrew Sullivan and Jeremy Duda ｜ Ep. 408

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