Kardashian Narcissism, Kanye's Anti-Semitism, and Nuclear "Armageddon," with The Fifth Column Hosts | Ep. 409
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 35 minutes
Words per Minute
188.17865
Summary
Tiffany Cross says that the NFL is racist because Tua Tagovailoa is not black, but according to her, he is. Plus, a Pfizer executive admits that should be the final death blow to mandatory vaccines.
Transcript
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
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Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
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There is a lot of news to get to today and we have the perfect team to help us cover it all.
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Among the topics we're going to tackle, Tulsi Gabbard officially leaves the Democratic Party,
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torching them on the way out, calling them an elitist cabal of warmongers and cowards
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who try to divide us racially. I think the party will get the message. Oh, I'm sure.
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And an MSNBC host makes a stunningly racist claim, arguing that Tua's recent concussion problem,
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you know, on the Miami Dolphins, proves the NFL is racist against black people. The only problem is
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Tua's not black. She's not black. Hello, you dumbass Tiffany Cross.
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She's the most racist person on television. It's amazing.
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Maybe she just doesn't see color. Anyway, he's not black, but according to her, he is. Oh,
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and by the way, his coach isn't white either. Cannot make it up. All this plus a Pfizer executive
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makes an admission that should be the final death blow to any mandatory vaccine requirements. It's
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all on camera. Joining me now to cover it all, our friends from the fifth column podcast,
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Michael Moynihan, a correspondent for Vice News Tonight, Matt Welsh, editor at large for Reason
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Magazine. Love that. Reason. And Camille Foster of Freethink Media.
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Guys, welcome back to the show. Hello, Megan. Oh, my God. I'm sorry. I wasn't planning on starting
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with this more on Tiffany Cross, but it's so good. Wait, I think we have the soundbite. Do we have
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the soundbite team? OK, listen. Yes, it's SOT 11. This is her railing on the mistreatment of Tua,
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with which I agree. I don't think the NFL has treated Tua or a lot of these players right.
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It's just one problem with her analysis. Standby. Do we have it? SOT 11.
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I got to say, Mike, the optics just look bad to see all these black men crashing into each other
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with a bunch of white owners, white coaches and the complete disregard of black bodies and black
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life. I mean, it just represents a larger issue. This was in the context of Tua, but Tua is not
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black. He's Samoan and his coach is mixed race, white. I had a white parent, a black parent. So
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anyway, he's not white. I guess in Tiffany's world, that's white. But in any event, this person sees
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everything, everything through a it's racist prism. What do you guys make of it?
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Yeah. I mean, anyone who's like watched, I presume you guys defer to me because I actually
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watched the game. And look, anyone who knows anything about the NFL is aware of the issues
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around concussions and has seen players kind of sacrifice themselves to stay on the field in
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circumstances that seem kind of less than safe and disconcerting. It's worth having conversations
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about all of that. But this is just another quintessential, perhaps example of how you
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inject race into absolutely everything and you completely discombobulate the conversation about
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what actually matters here. What we should be talking about is whether or not the health and
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safety protocols are at all sufficient to help keep players safe in these circumstances. We should
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be talking about the fact that it's not just head injuries. JJ Watt, who's a defensive end for,
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I think the Cardinals had a similar sort of drama where he had a heart issue and then went out and
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played about a week later. There are plenty of things that we could be talking about with respect
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to the NFL, but Tiffany Cross in so many circumstances seem to only be able to think about
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one thing and one thing only in every single situation, and that is race. And here she kind of
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stumbles into it in a way that makes her look absolutely ridiculous. Since the gentleman that she's
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talking about does not identify as black, he identifies as Samoan. But even if he were black,
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she wouldn't have a point here. There is no reason whatsoever to make this.
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Well, exactly. Camille, she makes it sound like the white man who was not white, the mixed race
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coach, just went out and found a bunch of black bodies and started making them bang into each
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other. It's also known as sports. And by the way, not all football players are black and they're all
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out there because it's a lifelong dream for, I think, every single one of them. They want to be there.
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They're begging to be there and they're getting very well paid for. It doesn't mean the safety
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protocols are perfect, but she makes it sound like literally like a form of slavery. It's back to the
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Colin Kaepernick documentary of how this is just a modern day form of slavery.
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Yeah. It makes zero sense. People, uh, who are excited about, uh, concussions and NFL rules,
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um, uh, would be advised to go watch a, uh, game from the 1970s. Um, uh, back when people were getting
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paralyzed on the field. I mean, it was just a brutal game. Even though I was, I saw on Twitter today,
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someone showed a, uh, a clip of like Tom Brady's rookie year and it's so many decades ago at this
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point, it sport than it is now the type of hits that were allowed on his white body. Does he self
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identify as white as a whitey? Uh, but the kind of, the kind of hits that were allowed. And back then
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there weren't as many, uh, black quarterbacks and what as many black, uh, coaches to the extent that
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blackness is real. I'm sorry. Um, and, uh, and yeah, it's just a different sport and I'm not sure
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what we gain by racializing the progress of rules over time. Do you, do you racialize? Like if you
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ever watch the NHL and there's like a fight, cause that's the best part of NHL, you'd be like, Oh God,
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look at the white bodies going out for each other. Northern European Finnish bodies.
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This is the most offensive thing is that we really have to retire this idea that using the
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word bodies is somehow poetic and smart. Like it's like, it makes them sound like there's some
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sort of lab experiment. They're doing football players. I mean, come on. It's the other thing.
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Can we also say this one thing? I don't, I mean, I I'm with both of these guys on this and the
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protocols of this and you can cut down on it, but at the same time it is football. And that is what
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people have chosen to do as their profession. They are paid very handsomely for it. I don't
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want to see anyone get injured. I don't want to see anyone have any long-term effects like that,
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you know, make them go crazy and become suicidal and all the side effects that we know about.
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But, you know, it's like MMA is the same way. You have a boxing referee who calls the fight because,
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you know, it's bad. You see what happens to boxers over time. You know, Jerry Cooney,
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I'd be a good example. Leon Spinks. I mean, it's part of the sport and, you know, there's only so
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much you can do. And so the focus on that is great, but the somehow the racializing it shows
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you the obsession with this stuff in the fact that people who talk about it all the time must look
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for it and find it all the time to justify their television. Even when it's not there.
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Even when it's not there. I mean, honestly, like even to his name, it sounds Samoan. Like she should
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have done like a modicum of research would have red flagged her that this might not be your target.
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Wait, wait, another target for you someplace, Tiffany, I'm sure. But I agree with you fully
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on the point about bodies, the use of bodies. We're hearing that more and more. Black bodies
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must be centered in the football discussion. Is that English?
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Okay. Also in the news today, Kanye West. And I'm so fascinated to talk to you guys about this
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because I ended Friday's show after Tucker's first interview with him. You know, he broke
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into two parts by saying, I don't understand half of what Kanye says. Like I just sit there
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sort of like the dog with a cocked head. Like, I don't get it. I don't, I'm not sure if I'm too
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dense or I'm just not a creative thinker the way he is. You know, I'm just linear, linear thinker,
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you know, legit logics, um, and reasoning types of person. I'm smarter than I just made myself sound.
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He's a creative genius. I get that. I get that. So I just sort of shrug my shoulders and say,
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I guess I'm acknowledging that. Yeah. I'm too dumb to understand, you know, what he's trying
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to say. And then, I mean, you know, and then we had more comments over the weekend where I was like,
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am I still too dense to get it? Like, so just to, just to get the audience up to speed on what
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the latest controversy is. And I'm sure you've heard it by now, but just in case, um, he's being
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accused of being an anti-Semite or having made anti-Semitic comments, by the way, two headlines
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on my, the first page of my outline for you guys are Kanye West, anti-Semite or in a mental breakdown,
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Joe Biden, nuclear warmonger or in a mental breakdown. Okay. So back to Kanye. On Friday,
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he went on Instagram and got into a dustup with Diddy, the former, the artist formerly known as
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P Diddy, Puff Daddy, whatever. Uh, and he said to Diddy, Diddy to challenge him on his all, uh,
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white lives matter shirt and told West to quote, stop playing these internet games. Then Kanye
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responded, this ain't a game. I'ma use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you
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to call me that no one can threaten or influence me. Then he was kicked off Instagram. All right. So he
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was kicked right off of Instagram for that. Then he goes back on Twitter for the first time in two
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and a half years. Cause he's apparently, I don't know. I don't think he was banned. I think he just
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hadn't been using it. And, uh, he, yeah, he just hasn't been using it. And he tweets out,
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I'm a bit sleepy tonight, but when I wake up, I'm going death con three on, and then it all caps
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Jewish people. The funny thing is I actually can't be saying my hand. I, the funny thing is I actually
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can't be antisemitic because black people are actually Jew. Also, you guys have toyed with me
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and tried to blackball anyone, whoever opposes your agenda. And he was probably locked out of
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Twitter. So no more Insta, no more Twitter, at least for now. Um, you know, I didn't know what
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to expect of his staunchest defenders. Like I wasn't exactly sure how you defend that, you know,
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where people are going to go. I'll read you someone I think is an honest broker. Jason Whitlock
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took a shot at it. Not sure Jason has solved the problem, but this is what he says.
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Kanye West and Dave Chappelle. Is there a pattern? The industry wants both of them canceled.
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So far he's right. Black rappers and comedians are free to denigrate black people and white men
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a million different ways, but there's a line they better not cross and everybody knows it.
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And I actually did think when he wrote that, you know, and women too, right? You can say whatever
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that bitches and hoes and whatever they want to say about women is fine. But like, he's trying to
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make a point when you, when you bring Jewish people into it, it's a different story.
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All right. I'm feeling uncomfortable. Then he added, you can't question black entertainers
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unhealthy relationship with non-religious Jewish power brokers in Hollywood. Is that clear enough
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for you? And again, I'm like, I don't know. What do you guys think? There's nothing better than
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coming at somebody who is accused of making an antisemitic comment with one of your own.
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Yeah. That's actually what that is. Yeah. I mean, that is demented. I mean, both of them are
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demented. I think that, you know, Kanye is obviously, and we've all been talking about this
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quite a bit. And Camille is a big booster of Kanye as a musician. I would say as a thinker,
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uh, cause all of us talked about the general incoherence of the Tucker, uh, interview with
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like moments of lucidity, but they're also just like, Oh, okay. That's just a normal comment that
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he made, uh, on the Jewish thing. I mean, this is Jewish question. Yeah. So no, this is like,
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this is definitely antisemitic. I have to say, um, when you're talking about Jewish power,
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as if some uniform kind of, uh, maybe a protocol of an elder of Zion that actually makes these
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things. I mean, it is a, it is a classically antisemitic trope that Hollywood is controlled
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by Jews. Not that there's disproportionate numbers of Jewish people in Hollywood, that
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it's controlled, which is a different kind of idea in that they are coming after me or
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us through this cutout of pity, P. Diddy, who's who, or whatever it's called. Diddy, sorry.
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Um, and he is like kind of the Jews of the puppet master of it's, it's so bizarre and controlling.
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It's like, well, you can't actually say anything about Jewish power. It's like, well, you can say
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things about individual people who are Jewish. I don't believe that their Jewishness has any,
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uh, bearing on what they're doing. I don't think this is part of some, you know, Jewish
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conspiracy is demented, uh, bonkers and wrong. And I think people who actually, um, go to this
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point, what they're doing is they're saying, I mean, I saw the Candace Owens said something
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similar. They're taking a line, which is understandable in the broadest sense about
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identity politics. We can't talk about this. We can talk about that. I get that instinct,
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but here it's not applicable because why it's not applicable is you're talking about a group
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and assigning a sinister agenda to a group. That is insane. If you said, you know, white people are
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trying to do X or Y, we call that out on the, on the fifth column. And I think that you hear it on
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this show too. Is it, if you say Jews are doing this also bad, um, but probably worse because of
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a very, very dark history of people making those comments about, about Jewish control as a minority,
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like the minority Jews are controlling the majority. It's a really dark, uh, dark, uh, argument to make.
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And it's also, and I know that you, I don't know, I don't know how to say defended, but offered
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another piece to the story of, um, of central park, Karen, uh, Amy Cooper, right? I think that
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was her name, right? Um, you, well, not the central park, Karen part, but yes, Amy Cooper.
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Yeah, no, sorry. That's how people know her. I know it's, I feel bad for the people call her
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that, but that's, that's how people know her. She had that confrontation with the angry bird
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watcher who got all, you know, upset and so on and became very viral. And, um, you told the other
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side was this guy had a long history of harassing dog owners in the park. And he had threatened,
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had indeed threatened, not just Amy's dog, but other people's dogs in the past and blah,
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blah, blah, blah. So the, the problem I had with Amy Cooper and I, and you and I talked
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about this before was, was not that she said, I'm going to call the cops and tell them that
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you're threatening me. Cause he was, it was the fact that she said to him before she called
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the cops, she was going to mention his race. She said, I'm going to tell them that a black
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man is threatening me. That's where she went off the rails. If she had just called 911 and
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said, he's a black man, he's six, two, he's in the Bramble, you know, like that's one
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thing. And I think that's the problem with Kanye's comments too. It's not just like you're
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being controlled by a bunch of Hollywood power brokers and then he names them and they all
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happen to be Jewish. He's like saying, I'm going after the Jews. I mean, like it's different.
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It's like, it's more in the, you know, I'm going to make your thing, your race or your
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Yeah. Look, I'll set the Amy Cooper stuff aside for a moment and just talk about Kanye
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here. And, and I, I think it's important to acknowledge here that when Tucker sat down
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with Kanye, the knock on the interview was, why is anyone talking to Kanye? He's crazy.
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And then Kanye says something that seems kind of crazy. He tweets it anyways. And it is kind
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of incoherent and seems a bit antisemitic and everyone's like, well, we need to condemn that
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immediately. Wait a minute. Are we supposed to be not listening to this guy because he's crazy
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or he's supposed to be condemning everything he says, because we presume that there's kind
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of this precise racially motivated attack. And I should say cards on the table as I'm kind
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of seeing my visages on the screen here. And I know that over my shoulder, um, is Kanye's
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discography. Um, I'm a big fan. It's on the wall. I mean, I even have a bobblehead like
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that. I'm a big, I'm a big fan of Kanye West music. Um, but that said, like most artists
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like aren't going to be brilliant intellectuals that have worldly knowledge about a range of
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important topics. Kanye's lyrics have always included kind of conspiratorial, like nutty
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stuff about like the government administering AIDS for the purposes of killing black people.
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And even in that Tucker interview, when he talked about obesity and how we have kind of
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romanticized it, how there are people who won't be honest about the fact that if you are morbidly
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obese, this could kill you. He says that the reason why this is happening is because there's
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a conspiracy to kill black people, a conspiracy which he is attributing to white people. This
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is, it's the same sort of preposterous language. And I would agree with you, Megan. It is broadly
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reprehensible that we traffic in this sort of stuff, but there is a sincere fair point to
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be made that we actually do give people a pass to use this kind of categorical totalizing
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language and even to engage in that kind of bizarre conspiratorial musing when it comes to white
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supremacy and whiteness broadly. And we don't allow that when it comes to Jewish people. I would say
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that that's probably the appropriate standard for us to regard that kind of race mongering for what
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it is, whether it's Tiffany Cross or it's Kanye West would say that's repugnant. That's something that
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people shouldn't be engaged in. I think some of the selective outrage about these things,
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and I do understand the unique history of talking about kind of Jewish people as puppet
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masters. That is gross and despicable. I think there's also a very high probability
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that Kanye West isn't familiar with that. Again, Jewish black people are Jews. What are you talking
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about exactly? Is that like the guys who are in Times Square?
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Because then how can you take him seriously when he's talking about this? I love the music.
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I appreciate much of the fashion, but his insights on politics, I shelf them right next to like Bruce
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Springsteen's. I do not give a crap what they think about political issues.
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Isn't this the danger with conservatives sometimes? And somebody, a listener to our show who sent us a
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message and was like, as a conservative, what do you pick, Kanye West or Kevin Sorbo?
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I mean, that's okay, right? I mean, you have, you don't-
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Nice guy. I'm sure he's lovely. I never, don't know what he's in.
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But this kind of dearth of like conservative, famous people, and particularly in the world
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of culture, and people get excited. They're like, ah, Kanye. And then he says things that
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about 40% of it is completely incoherent. Like, all right, that's fine. Just forget about that.
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He said something about, you know, romanticizing obesity and Lizzo. And it's like, he also said
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it was demonic. So I don't know if he's on the same.
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Indiana attorney general or some Indiana Republican politician.
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After the absolutely bonkers anti-Semitic statement is like, you know, the media,
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I am someone who doesn't want to necessarily sentence people to be in intensive therapy
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I think there's, I think there's a bad history of that. He was the very controversial, crazy
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psychotherapist who more or less imprisoned Brian Wilson for about seven, eight years there
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in the late seventies and early eighties. But Brian Wilson is a, is, was a seriously drug
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addicted, a schizophrenic whose brain was broken by a bunch of different things.
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Um, and he was sort of taken out of, of, uh, himself, um, for intensive therapy. Uh, someone
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needs to put Kanye back on the no Twitter diet. Um, I mean, it's, there's something that is
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gross about, um, uh, kind of exploiting, uh, mental illness for whatever reason. Um, it makes
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it a little bit, uh, strange because both in the case of Kanye West and Brian Wilson,
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who weren't the same people, but they're both super artistic geniuses. And it's possible
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that some of the wellspring overlaps there, but it's also truthful that it's awkward as
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hell. There was just a new Brian Wilson documentary that came out that he participated in and, and
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was, uh, I think an executive producer on, um, that came out last year. And it's just really
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awful to watch because he's like a child, um, and, and schizophrenic. And he's sort of,
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um, he's exploiting himself in this sense. Um, and I don't like to watch it. And it's like that
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with, with, uh, Kanye, I don't, I, I love his music to the extent that I'm exposed to it.
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And, um, but I don't really want to see him talk ever again, unless it's at, uh, hurricane Katrina,
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uh, fundraiser. I'll just say one thing. There's one thing he said, he told Tucker that it hurts,
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quote, hurts his feelings when people suggest he's in the midst of a mental breakdown when he says
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these controversial things, um, or when they accuse him of being like bipolar and this is
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what's driving his commentary. I mean, he, I think he himself admitted that he has bipolar disorder,
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um, in 2019. So that is a thing for him. Now I don't, I don't know enough about bipolar disorder
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to know. I mean, my under, my lay person understanding is you have manic swings and depressive
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swings. And I don't know that you're, that you say things you don't believe in, in one of those
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phases. You know what I mean? It doesn't, doesn't make you say things you don't actually believe
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in. It just makes, it changes your mood, changes your approach, your conversation, your energy
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level, and you know, your thoughts about life and what matters. Um, but either way, I think you're
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hitting the nail on the head with like, this is how I felt about him on Friday before he said any of
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this stuff. Um, my mind cannot connect with his mind. My mind doesn't work anything like the way his
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mind works. And so I really kind of have given up trying to understand him, you know, like I don't,
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I don't get it. Um, but I do think you can sort of appreciate this creative genius in our society
00:22:22.880
and understand some of his eccentricities are connected to those gifts. It's kind of like,
00:22:28.540
forgive me, but like Michael, Michael Jackson, you know, or even like a Tom Cruise, you know,
00:22:34.460
like the Scientology stuff, these people get so big and they do have massive creative streaks that I
00:22:41.040
certainly don't have. And there's something that changes them as a result of that and the huge
00:22:47.380
success and the huge fame that follows. Yeah. I think that's right.
00:22:53.160
Listeners, uh, just as a very brief, only Camille talk is that our friend, frequent guest, and I know
00:22:58.420
his father has been on this show, Megan, Ben Dreyfuss, um, had a great tweet thread yesterday about
00:23:06.020
mental illness and Kanye and people said, you know, uh, you know, I know people with mental illness
00:23:10.300
and it doesn't make them all of a sudden antisemitic. Ben has is very open about the fact that he's been
00:23:15.660
institutionalized in the past. It has a very, very thoughtful thread about what bipolar and this sort
00:23:21.060
of thing can do to one's, um, you know, brain and make you paranoid and make you say things that you
00:23:26.900
might not otherwise say when you're not in a medical episode, but I recommend people, people check that
00:23:30.920
out because Ben, I actually follow Ben's substack. I just haven't read it from yesterday. I was just
00:23:35.880
recently looking at the one about Jon Stewart, which I thought was highly entertaining where he
00:23:39.540
wrote Jon Stewart will not be president. He's not going to be president. So stop, take a seat.
00:23:46.700
Ben is always great. I'll say this. I don't think Kanye is crazy. Um, he, he has acknowledged that
00:23:53.300
he's bipolar. Um, I, I don't think most of us are, none of us are designed for the sort of attention
00:23:59.000
and adulation and criticism that people in a position like Kanye's endure. And I think it's,
00:24:05.820
it's easy to kind of Chuck Spears and to, to hurl ridicule at him, at Kim Kardashian, et cetera.
00:24:12.940
They earn fortunes in many respects because they have such high profiles and the fortunes have kind
00:24:18.480
of earned them those profiles, but it's worth having some sympathy and some empathy. Um, I remember,
00:24:23.880
you know, when I first saw that Kanye was going to be on a Tucker show, my first thought was that
00:24:29.780
this doesn't really seem like the sort of thing that I would want to do if I were producing a news
00:24:35.860
show to like take him and put them on broadcast television, because a lot of the output on social
00:24:40.980
media just didn't seem like a guy who was in a particularly great place. I mean, he was in the
00:24:45.860
midst of having these really public explosive arguments with people where he's denigrating
00:24:51.180
them. He just broken up with Adidas and gap, um, in the weeks prior to that, like he's
00:24:58.240
and filmed it and posted. Yeah. I don't know if, I don't know if it, I don't know if unstable is like
00:25:03.620
the right phrase, but at a minimum, he is making the kind of decisions and of great consequence in a
00:25:09.860
way that if I were a friend of his and I was close to him, I would be encouraging him to take a step
00:25:15.460
back. Like what you need at the moment probably isn't, you know, a national television audience
00:25:20.500
and, you know, two hours of content that are going to be taken and dribbled out over the course
00:25:25.080
of two days. You need a vacation. Let's get out of here so we can collect our thoughts and then come
00:25:30.980
back to the public and continue your career. Well, the whole thing was delivered in a different way
00:25:37.000
than that. Like he, his messaging on Tucker was, I don't want to be told that anymore. He kind of
00:25:43.180
painted himself as a victim of cancel culture in the way that so many people have been like I
00:25:47.940
self-censored. I wanted to say a lot more about my admiration for Trump and so on. And I didn't feel
00:25:53.520
like I could because of my industry, because they were all against him and because I knew I'd be
00:25:58.160
called crazy, you know, I'd be called crazy. So you have to be careful on the other side too,
00:26:03.140
and dismissing, you know, his opinions that are out there, not necessarily loving Trump or not.
00:26:08.140
I mean, a lot of people feel that that way as a function of his bipolar disorder. But I will take
00:26:14.200
you on on this. I do not feel empathetic toward Kim Kardashian in general. I've been going on a tear
00:26:21.460
over her for the past couple of days, because every time I open my paper, there she is again. And I find
00:26:27.980
it deeply alarming. Like, what are we celebrating? Her enormous fake ass? Her extreme plastic surgery?
00:26:37.540
No, no, no. She's not writing the stories, though. She's not writing the stories. I'll say this.
00:26:43.200
Oh, she is too writing this. Stop it right now. She is orchestrated every single one of the photographs
00:26:49.940
you've ever seen. There isn't one that was organic every single time. The paparazzi has been called by
00:26:55.220
her and lured to the location. And then she shows the bottom and then she photoshops it. And then
00:27:00.520
she denies that she's done any of that shit. And then little girls all over America are like,
00:27:04.800
oh, why is it my bottom five times the size that it is without any surgery whatsoever?
00:27:08.960
I must be inadequate. And then you say, no, sweetheart, you're not. Every mother across
00:27:12.660
America says, no, sweetheart, you're not. But they continue to see these absurd, obscene images of
00:27:18.260
her. And then she's like, oh, you know, I'm sad that my my children's school was mentioned by Kanye.
00:27:25.860
You're the one who puts them on camera at every turn. It wasn't enough that you exploited yourself
00:27:31.120
and you put off your own sex tape. We all know it. And then pretended to be a victim about it. But now
00:27:36.880
you've got your kids at every public event. You put their faces on the camera almost as much as you put
00:27:41.320
your own face on the camera to the point where your kids are trying to hide when you bring them to the
00:27:45.240
fashion shows. They don't want to be public figures. So I don't feel sorry for her.
00:27:52.940
I just kind of get it to make sure that people understand.
00:28:00.340
My daughter, I actually watched the show with my daughter who was like, can you watch it? And she's 11.
00:28:06.960
And incidentally, she's never said, why is my ass not like that?
00:28:13.560
Yeah, she's a very good gymnast and that would be a difficult thing as a gymnast. But she watched
00:28:19.500
it and made fun of them the entire time. So that's when I realized that I was not doing a
00:28:23.940
terrible job as a parent because she watched this and was like, these people are absolutely
00:28:28.000
ridiculous. I did once, by the way, it was assigned something for Newsweek and it's an
00:28:33.080
old issue of Newsweek where I watched the show. I had never seen it before and I made the mistake
00:28:37.040
of telling an editorial meeting that I hadn't. So they made me go watch it and write about it.
00:28:41.680
And I came to a slightly different conclusion. The first thing, by the way, is I got the
00:28:45.640
neurovirus right the day I started watching it. So I spent the entire time watching and
00:28:49.860
vomiting, which is absolutely perfect. And it's absolutely true, by the way. And I watched
00:28:54.560
the other and I was like, you know, I mean, credit for being great business people, not great
00:29:00.940
role models, Megan. I don't think they're great role models. But, you know, I mean, people
00:29:04.420
like it. I don't know what they're selling. I don't understand it. I don't pretend to understand
00:29:07.840
it. But, you know, and, you know, she she was good with Trump and, you know, getting
00:29:11.700
some people out of prison, which which I thought was I got total credit on Alice Marie Johnson.
00:29:15.880
I do. I get that. And I'm not saying she's never done good things. And I and I said that
00:29:20.040
many times. But there's Kim Kardashian, the person. And then there's Kim Kardashian, the
00:29:26.160
brand. And the brand is dangerous. I'm telling you, the Kardashian brand is dangerous. It's
00:29:32.160
done way more harm than good to young girls across this country and continues to grow
00:29:36.380
and become more influential. I mean, I will tell you, I've said this story in the air.
00:29:40.280
My daughter and her little friend were in my bathroom with me one morning. I was getting
00:29:43.880
ready and I was putting on my makeup. And the other little girl said, oh, is that is that
00:29:49.900
by Kim Kardashian, the makeup? And I was like, when I gave her the side eye, like, no, it's
00:29:58.500
not. And my daughter said she goes, who's Kim Kardashian? And I said to her, I
00:30:06.360
I do not mean I do not wish to be the person who introduces this woman into your life.
00:30:11.540
You know, I really think that this group of people and I don't think they have evil
00:30:16.960
hearts. I want to say that again, it's different from, you know, some other bad guys in the
00:30:20.100
news. But that brand has grown to the point where I think newspapers need to be really
00:30:24.140
careful about splashing those photos all over the pages with impunity, because I do think
00:30:29.780
we're setting a terrible example for our young kids.
00:30:32.980
I mean, I don't want to belabor this. I'll say this. I met Kim. I met Kim once and her
00:30:41.080
mom, actually. And I'll say this, like the conversation that we had was about like her
00:30:45.500
work in criminal justice reform. It was about her efforts with programs like the Innocence
00:30:49.660
Project. She's incredibly bright. There's a very real sense in which the sexualization
00:30:55.320
and all that other stuff, those are legitimate things that one could take issue with. But I think
00:31:00.400
it's worth acknowledging that there are other ways that they could be covered. These women,
00:31:05.400
this family, like they're moguls. They've built businesses, like legitimate businesses that don't
00:31:10.160
have anything to do with those other things. Based on nothing. They're brilliant marketers.
00:31:13.720
Trust me, Camille. I know the family. I went out there and interviewed all of them. And I did my
00:31:18.060
homework before I did that, as I do with everything. And they are marketing masters. And I get it.
00:31:23.860
They're in the beauty business. Which is something. But they have built an empire. But they've built
00:31:27.520
an empire based on absolutely nothing. No talent. It started with her sex tape, which her own
00:31:34.460
mother, according to the man in the document, the film with her, put out there with their consent.
00:31:42.620
No, I mean, I've seen Ray J talk about it. Take it easy. I saw him talk about it. I don't watch that.
00:31:51.640
The patriarchy is not working because Ray J did not get famous from that. I still don't know who
00:31:55.380
he is. Well, Ray J was already a little famous. He was more famous with her than her at the time
00:31:59.660
that was made. But I think that's another point. Their marketing, and it's, again, all of the kind
00:32:05.700
of general, all the general criticism about the sex tape, about the over-sexualization, et cetera,
00:32:12.500
all fair. But there are plenty of people who make sex tapes and plenty of people who might be
00:32:15.920
physically attractive who haven't been able to eke out the kind of success that they have.
00:32:20.680
Like, it's kind of an extraordinary only in America story, for better or worse. And what it
00:32:25.580
says about America might not be terribly nice, but I don't think that's their fault. I mean,
00:32:30.740
there's a very kind of long history of this sort of thing, whether it's Marilyn Monroe or Kim Kardashian.
00:32:36.120
He said, blame the players or blame the game, not the players. And I really thought about it. It was
00:32:39.820
just last week. I blame both. I mean, I really did. The game is wrong and the players are wrong. The
00:32:44.960
players do not get excused for being disgusting players. Go ahead, Camille.
00:32:50.020
No, I'll say fair. Fair. I don't want to belabor it.
00:32:54.540
You know, I get the point. And also, you know, I said that positive things about their business
00:32:59.740
acumen. There's negative things to be said about it, too. I mean, Kim Kardashian was just fined over
00:33:04.460
a million and a half dollars. Yeah. Boosting crypto.
00:33:07.960
For being a text sheet. Yeah. And there's been a bunch of things, you know, those like credit card
00:33:15.140
stuff and apps that kind of charge parents. And so they've been involved in some dodgy stuff,
00:33:20.000
too. But the thing to think about with them is, you know, did they usher in an era or was this an
00:33:25.880
era because of technology that was inevitable? Because right now, if you talk to young people,
00:33:29.860
the Kardashians are they know who they are. They don't care about them too much. And there's a whole
00:33:34.780
bunch of new people on TikTok in particular that they're obsessed with. And like I talked to a
00:33:39.340
bunch of like young girls about this stuff for a piece that I did. And they're like, oh, this guy
00:33:43.260
and he's got 25. I'm like, I've never heard of any of these people. These kind of like, like,
00:33:47.080
they're not even micro celebrities because they're macro celebrities. They have unbelievable
00:33:51.140
followers. And it's all. Those are the women who came after that. Yes. No, that's what I'm
00:33:56.700
wondering. Would that have happened anyway because of technology? I don't know. I don't know. But
00:34:01.560
these women have 100 million followers on Instagram, probably more. That was back when
00:34:06.280
I interviewed them in 17 or 18. I mean, I'm sure it's greater than that now. And I'm sure a lot of
00:34:11.440
them are bought and paid for and all that. But still, the number's got to be huge if it's up,
00:34:14.660
you know, at those levels. And they they are at the heart of selfie culture. When you see these
00:34:21.940
girls going out to lunch with each other and instead of just enjoying each other across the table,
00:34:25.600
they're taking their own picture in 50 different ways instead of watching the sports game or the movie or
00:34:30.960
the band. They're making it about themselves and doing their stupid fake poses. I blame the
00:34:36.180
Kardashians not entirely, but hugely. They had a huge role in it. They're all about selfies and the way
00:34:43.460
they look and extreme, inappropriate, false vanity. It drives me insane. They're a force for evil in the
00:34:51.180
country. Who's the antidote? I mentioned the Queen of England the other day. Like, who? Where is the
00:34:56.420
distinguished, smart, fierce, patriotic, you know, businesswoman who we can point to as the anti
00:35:05.600
Kardashian? We don't have that. We don't revere women like that in this country. We take the big
00:35:10.820
ass, big boobed women and we give them a total pass for what they've done to the children.
00:35:15.640
If they managed to get a great woman like Alice Marie Johnson out of jail, by the way, Kim Kardashian
00:35:20.300
did not do that herself. OK, there were a lot of other people. No, not on the road.
00:35:22.860
It was Donald Trump. And she would. She called attention to it, I think. So that was it. That was
00:35:26.160
a blessing. I agree. That was a good thing she did. It was a mitzvah, but it doesn't come close
00:35:31.040
to overshadowing all the other stuff that she's done to hurt other girls, in particular, the young
00:35:36.660
ones. All right. I'm sorry. Belabor, belabor. That's the last word. I don't know why I didn't.
00:35:44.040
Did you know that Megyn Kelly was so angry at the Kardashians? It was like touching that nerve was the
00:35:48.600
best thing that ever happened to me. I knew. I have one question for you, Megyn. I'm going
00:35:54.160
to turn this around and pretend it's my show. I was in a yogurt shop the other day. It was like
00:35:59.780
in August. I saw a woman at the front putting stuff on her yogurt. And I said, that woman looks
00:36:05.020
vaguely familiar. And the person I was with said, that is Bethany Frankel. And I was like,
00:36:10.260
Bethany Frankel. And it's like, oh, she's the real, like the OG real housewife.
00:36:14.940
A lot of what you're describing is very much because I've watched a few of those episodes.
00:36:19.780
It is exploitative as people throwing drinks at each other, like behave horribly and you'll
00:36:24.100
become famous. There are people who matter. All the men are like these trollish, horrible
00:36:28.740
men. And they're all married to like beautiful or once beautiful women who married them clearly
00:36:33.660
for money. It's a lot of bad messages for young people. Do you feel the same way about the
00:36:39.200
fantastically entertaining real housewives? No, I don't. I don't. First of all, I think they have
00:36:45.780
different audiences. I think the Kardashians are for younger women and girls and real housewives.
00:36:52.000
They're fucking my age. I mean, it's there for like people like me who want to put on candy instead
00:36:58.240
of sports on Sundays and just to have a little mindless TV. They haven't built enormous empires
00:37:05.180
based on their fake boobs or fake bottoms, which they then deny are fake.
00:37:11.020
Why are you pointing out the two best things about Kim Kardashian and then denouncing them?
00:37:15.580
It's not good stuff. It's not bad stuff. It's not bad.
00:37:19.280
I don't know. I got to be honest. Even if Kim Kardashian said it's fake, it's all fake,
00:37:24.820
I'd respect her a little bit more, but I'd still say you're dangerous. Like, would you please focus
00:37:29.600
on your criminal justice stuff, which, you know, you could take issue with too, depending on the
00:37:34.720
person. But we focus on your law. Why don't you do something with that law degree, which you clearly
00:37:38.660
just did as a vanity project to try to make yourself sound like you were a little smarter than you
00:37:43.060
actually might be. She failed the bar three times. Don't get me started. All right. She could actually
00:37:47.340
do something. She could actually be a force for good, but she chooses not to. And the whole line
00:37:52.460
behind her, it's just like the Meghan Markle thing. Meghan Markle targeted Prince Harry. She wanted to be a
00:37:57.680
star. She rejected a couple of other British guys who weren't powerful enough. Then she was
00:38:02.620
rejected by a bunch of them. How embarrassing for Prince Harry to have been the one who fell for it.
00:38:07.160
What a dope. I mean, we had Tom Bauer on their show on Friday being like, Prince Harry's dumb.
00:38:12.040
That's why he went for the one that, I don't know, all these other soccer stars rejected and so on.
00:38:16.860
But they were conniving and they saw a means to stardom, to fame, to being self-centered for a living.
00:38:23.700
And the same is true with Kim Kardashian, her sex tape. They're on parallel lines. And what's
00:38:28.760
happened? We've rewarded them. I will give Kardashian this. She's not constantly running
00:38:34.300
around like a victim, like Meghan Markle now is having, you know, gotten the crown. She wants
00:38:39.180
us to feel sorry for her. That's the difference between the two. My God, I need to take a break.
00:38:43.740
Do you have, do you have, do you take an exit like 12, 30 or is that fine?
00:38:49.700
But wait, Meghan Markle, I'll say this. She is the worst person in America and I just want
00:38:54.940
that. And like, she didn't succeed. She's never gotten anyone out of jail.
00:38:59.400
In the Kardashians, whatever you think of them succeeded on their own. She succeeded
00:39:02.140
by marrying the ginger guy that used to wear a Nazi uniform.
00:39:05.060
That like she, he's literally, well, he did. He's literally, he did, he did as a costume.
00:39:10.680
And by the way, she's getting, unlike the Kardashians who really come in for it on this
00:39:16.300
show, it's a pretty rough ride in the media, appropriately so too, because, because yeah,
00:39:22.420
not, not a fan of the Markle, but I'll just give you a chance.
00:39:25.480
And she's going to, after this break as well, because I got something to say on her latest
00:39:28.620
podcast. Stand by. We're with the host of the fifth column right after this. Wow.
00:39:33.460
At some point, we're going to talk Russia. Stand by.
00:39:42.520
So Meghan Markle's podcast released another episode today. And this is really just a series
00:39:48.660
of attempted victimizations, like women who are very successful, who she wants to repaint
00:39:55.140
as a victim from Mariah Carey to Serena Williams to herself, of course, always herself. And today,
00:40:02.060
what she's upset about is how women are sometimes called crazy. And I will acknowledge that it is a
00:40:08.580
typical thing when you're trying to discredit any woman. There's a saying, nuts or sluts.
00:40:13.660
They're either nuts or sluts. Right. And so if you can't say she's a slut, you find a way to say
00:40:18.340
she's a nut. Now, that is definitely a tactic that is used by some people. But that doesn't mean that we
00:40:23.800
need to get rid of the term crazy to describe women, because guess what? We use it to describe men
00:40:29.160
all the time, as I believe we just spent about 25 minutes discussing the Kanye critics and his
00:40:36.180
frustrations. Right. So it does happen on, you know, to men and to women. But you would think
00:40:42.300
if you listen to this podcast, my God, that women we were still in 1870. We listen to the way like
00:40:47.340
how hard we have it as women when as Asian women, as black women, as as crazy women. And here's just
00:40:53.240
a bit of how she sounded today. Raise your hand if you've ever been called crazy or hysterical.
00:41:04.940
Nuts. Insane. Out of your mind. Completely irrational. Okay, you get the point. Now,
00:41:12.260
if we were all in the same room and could see each other, I think it would be pretty easy to see just
00:41:18.100
how many of us have our hands up. By the way, me too. And it's no wonder when you consider just how
00:41:26.160
prevalent these labels are in our culture. Everything is an attempt to sound profound,
00:41:33.780
deep and knowledgeable and wise from all her years of doing absolutely nothing.
00:41:40.060
Trying to explain to us the other greatest offense she's managed to stumble on that she needs to sell.
00:41:45.880
Can I just say, you know what? You know who called me crazy repeatedly? Donald Trump
00:41:50.000
during that whole dust up that we had. You know what I did in response? Absolutely nothing. I let
00:41:54.680
it roll off my back and I was fine. And it wasn't a thing. And I didn't go on to do podcast or a podcast
00:41:58.960
on how I'd been victimized by being called crazy. This woman, my God, she trolls the comment sections
00:42:05.320
of the internet, finds the most offensive one, and then makes it into a podcast. Anyway, you guys too,
00:42:12.260
you've suffered. You've been called crazy. Raise your hand for the audience now.
00:42:14.980
I mean, it's an accurate description. So I mean, there's no, like, if you care about journalistic
00:42:25.720
truth, then we have to call it that. What I love about it, besides her, you know, elementary school
00:42:32.480
librarian voice that she was using there, is that that was written out. Yeah, that was absolutely,
00:42:38.360
that was the worst prevalence. I will bet all my life savings was written for her as she was attempting
00:42:45.720
to sound like she was having a conversation with fellow women sufferers and things. Jesus Christ,
00:42:52.140
everybody suffers. The REM taught us in 1994 that everybody hurts. We are, we are not just in the 1%,
00:43:01.420
we're in the 0.1% in the world of fortune. And she is in the 0.001%. Yeah. But that's the point,
00:43:10.240
right? And to Megan's comment is that everybody is coming on this show as somebody who has been,
00:43:17.240
you know, abused or suffered or, you know, the victim of an ism. And I look at that as one of the
00:43:24.940
great vindications of America. It's a great patriotic point where if you go around the world,
00:43:29.920
people who have been victims of things have nothing, you know, can't, don't have potable
00:43:35.160
drinking water, don't have money or put in jail for having opinions or for being a certain race or a
00:43:41.200
certain ethnicity or a certain religion. Whereas Megan Markle doesn't realize from her billion dollar
00:43:47.280
place in Montecito, she's interviewing the downtrodden other millionaires that are around her. And I
00:43:54.220
don't know if you saw Sharon Osbourne had this hilarious comment that Megan, Megan Markle has
00:43:58.820
one talent. She just wants to be around rich people and you have to be at a certain level of
00:44:03.360
wealth. And that is hilarious when you think of the fact that she's talking incessantly about people
00:44:09.600
who have been wounded by society, but they all seem to have an enormous amount of money,
00:44:13.320
not a bad society to live in. The second thing is I wanted to point out that I watched a video the
00:44:17.520
other day and your, your listeners and viewers can find this, uh, from, um, Emily Ratatouille,
00:44:24.400
Ratatouille, the one that's, uh, extremely attractive and dumb, but who thinks she's really
00:44:30.440
smart. And she had this, uh, like selfie video. It was amazing. And she was like, I heard about,
00:44:38.200
but I haven't watched that Marilyn Monroe movie called Blonde. And I'm really tired. And she hasn't
00:44:42.620
watched it. She's telling you this. I'm really tired of Hollywood, um, um, like doing things to
00:44:48.100
women's pain to make it like monetizable. And she's like, I own my pain. And I'm like, what is this
00:44:53.280
woman even talking about? You were like the hottest woman on earth. Like literally people give you tons
00:44:58.460
of money and you have no talent. You just were born with amazing assets. And she's like doing this
00:45:04.160
thing about how awful it is. And we are in this moment where if you talk like this about pain and
00:45:10.500
being called crazy, it's just utter nonsense. You don't need any data. There's going to be a study
00:45:15.200
to back it up. And everyone's like, that is really brave, Emily. Yeah. And Megan Montesino.
00:45:20.600
That's right. And again, everyone I know is being called crazy.
00:45:24.140
Everyone. Sometimes they are. That's the thing.
00:45:31.300
Well, so this, you, she would take issue. This is going to wind up in her next podcast. This clip
00:45:35.460
right here, because look what she singles out. Deb, this is the last of the three clips.
00:45:39.520
Look what she singles out as examples of how out of control our society is on, on women.
00:45:45.720
I feel like you guys think that we like choose to be crazy. You know, it's an active choice.
00:45:50.780
A girl is allowed to be crazy as long as she is equally hot. Thus, if she's this crazy,
00:45:55.340
she has to be this hot. I don't think that men can control crazy women.
00:45:59.520
Carla, I cannot hide the crazy a minute longer. I'm just this big mountain of cuckoo who's about
00:46:03.240
to erupt and spew molten crazy all over him. And he's going to die like this.
00:46:06.060
She doesn't trust you. That is crazy. Let me tell you why.
00:46:10.040
The use of these labels has been drilled into us from movies and TV, from friends and family,
00:46:16.040
and even from random strangers. And the fact is, no one wants this label.
00:46:21.800
Oh my Lord. How I Met Your Mother, Scrubs, et cetera, are on the evil list because they did this and they
00:46:29.960
had women singing about themselves. They had men singing it to women. Those are all comedies,
00:46:33.980
by the way. So it's like, yeah. It's a joke. Yeah.
00:46:41.540
Well, it's the practice. It's the practice helplessness that bothers me. I have a young
00:46:45.580
daughter. I worry about her inculcating these values. She's not a victim. She shouldn't think
00:46:50.080
about herself that way. And she's not a victim on account of her being a female. It's preposterous.
00:46:55.000
You hear it. You release it and you move on. And I will submit to the jury that if it stays in there
00:47:01.660
and it really gets to you, maybe connecting with some reality, the things that bother you when it
00:47:08.860
comes to like bad insults are the things that resonate with you for some reason. I'm not saying
00:47:13.660
she's crazy, but she does go on to talk about her alleged suicide and how low she was and all
00:47:18.420
that. Not suicide, but suicidal thoughts and how Harry had to rescue. I mean, like she's been on
00:47:23.140
this for a while. Meanwhile, you go back and you look at her lifestyle website before she met Harry
00:47:28.000
and it was like life is grand. OK, pause. Be right back. Much, much more with the guys from the fifth
00:47:32.760
column. Like, are we about to go to nuclear war with Russia? So back to the hard news, and that is
00:47:41.600
we may be going to nuclear war with Russia. Not really. But according to our president's
00:47:48.740
loose language, he's throwing around possibilities like that, like it's a nothing. I mean, haphazardly,
00:47:55.500
this is not one of those things. It's OK to have the White House staff come back two days later and
00:48:00.040
try to clean up. We need really clear and careful messaging from the commander in chief on things
00:48:06.440
like nuclear war. And that memo clearly didn't get to our president, who said the following on Thursday
00:48:14.120
about the possibility. No. OK, I've got it. It's not on camera. Who said on Thursday that we are looking
00:48:22.420
at possible Armageddon that we haven't seen. I want to get the exact quote, but I don't have it in front
00:48:27.500
of me, but that we haven't we haven't been this close to Armageddon since 1962. That's how we put
00:48:32.000
it since 1962. Now, what happened in 1962? It was the Cuban Missile Crisis. All right. So we went back,
00:48:38.440
took a little walk down memory lane and pulled some old news footage because it's always fun to see what
00:48:42.780
was going on in 1962 when John F. Kennedy was president and we had a showdown with the Soviets
00:48:49.220
over them moving missiles into Cuba and pointing them at the United States. And that was the last
00:48:57.040
very real possibility. There was the whole cold war or after that, where we actually thought we
00:49:02.040
might be heading to nuclear war with Russia. Here's a little bit of that old news footage.
00:49:07.720
For some days before the presidential announcement, lights had burned late in key Washington offices,
00:49:13.400
as those most vitally involved in the nation's defense and security made ready to deal with the
00:49:18.980
crisis. Well in advance, the strategic air command had been put on super alert. Global disbursement
00:49:27.760
and redeployment, increased in-flight readiness. Polaris subs, each with 16 nuclear missiles, would give
00:49:35.720
added force to our announcement when it came. During the week preceding the president's speech,
00:49:41.680
the tactical air command had quietly repositioned thousands of men, tons of equipment, large numbers
00:49:48.440
of fighter reconnaissance and troop carrier aircraft, mostly in Florida. I love that old news footage,
00:49:55.340
can't get enough of that stuff. Managed to avoid nuclear war back then because while Kennedy was
00:50:00.440
advised to carry out an airstrike on Cuban soil in order to compromise Soviet missile supplies,
00:50:06.160
followed by an invasion of the Cuban mainland, he chose instead a less aggressive course of action
00:50:11.660
in order to avoid a declaration of war, using a naval quarantine to prevent further missiles from
00:50:17.880
reaching Cuba. And then tense negotiations followed in which he and the Soviets decided to
00:50:25.380
de-escalate Khrushchev. And basically the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and
00:50:32.500
return to the Soviet Union. And we would pull back and say we would never invade Cuba again. This is
00:50:37.860
after Bay of Pigs. So in any event, it was a very scary time for Americans. And Joe Biden comes out,
00:50:43.720
here's the exact quote on Thursday and says, Putin was not joking about potentially using, quote,
00:50:49.220
tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say,
00:50:54.420
significantly underperforming. End quote. He goes on, quote, we have not faced the prospect of
00:50:59.560
Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. We have a direct threat of the use of nuclear
00:51:05.880
weapons if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going. This is, I think, not OK. What do
00:51:15.480
you guys make of it? Not OK. Reckless. And said, I think, at a fundraiser that was, am I wrong about
00:51:22.460
that? Was it James Murdoch's house? No, you're right. A fundraiser for that. But no, I mean, the parallel
00:51:27.960
is stupid and wrong. Very different scenario. I mean, if you look back in 1962, there was things
00:51:35.620
to negotiate, right? I mean, that ended because the Cubans pulled their missiles out. The Russians
00:51:41.340
pulled their missiles out of Cuba and we pulled missiles out of Turkey that were pointing at the
00:51:45.800
Soviet Union. This is not a similar situation as that you have a country that's been invaded in
00:51:50.460
Ukraine and the Russians are mad that they're losing. There's not a lot of negotiation that can
00:51:56.660
happen here, particularly because Zelensky and if you look at all the actually decent opinion
00:52:02.300
polling that's happening in Ukraine, nobody in Ukraine really wants to negotiate this. They
00:52:06.240
want to win, particularly because they are winning now. For the president to say that we, the guys,
00:52:12.860
he's serious. That's not, that's very, very bad leadership and very bad diplomacy because what we
00:52:19.980
probably know about this, and I imagine people in the DOD and there's people who actually study this
00:52:24.300
stuff and people within the military understand that this should be taken very seriously. You know,
00:52:29.060
the Ukrainians are taking it seriously. They are handing out sort of anti-radiation pills to people,
00:52:34.280
people who want them, but there's not a widespread panic. There's not a panic in the United States.
00:52:39.240
There's not a panic in Europe where that obviously those dust clouds would go like, like happened in
00:52:44.400
Chernobyl in the late eighties. Why is there not a lot of panic? Because I don't think people
00:52:49.060
think, and rightfully so, that this is a logical option for food.
00:52:54.300
Americans exist for these types of threats. You don't actually say, oh my God, he's serious.
00:52:59.060
Armageddon, I mean, Armageddon is a word of panic. Do not say that to the American people that we're
00:53:04.280
on the, on the precipice of Armageddon. There is, you know, we can come back from this, but the only
00:53:10.480
way of coming back from it is there's no negotiating with Putin on this, is this is what he wants, is
00:53:15.400
that he wants to break the will not of the Ukrainians because he cannot do that. He's noticed that
00:53:19.640
very, for over the past, you know, now seven or eight months that the Ukrainian spirit,
00:53:24.400
if anything, has been emboldened by the psychopathic actions of the Russian military. He's trying to
00:53:29.780
break the Europeans and the Americans. And of course, you know, President Biden is walking right
00:53:35.900
Hmm. This just doesn't sound very libertarian of you. I would have expected you to say,
00:53:40.080
it's not our war, this is somebody else's conflict, you know, stand out of it.
00:53:43.200
No, no. You know, because the people who are, and libertarians who say this are disgraceful,
00:53:47.820
who say that, you know, the people responsible for this war are anybody but the people in the
00:53:53.280
Kremlin who invaded a sovereign country, brutalized their people, and as we've seen in the last couple
00:53:57.520
of days, are punishing the fact that they actually, you know, have a better military. And yes,
00:54:02.980
we're arming them and the Europeans are arming them, but they're doing quite amazing things with
00:54:07.540
those arms because their homeland has been invaded. There's a kid from Novosibirsk does not want to be
00:54:12.060
killed in Ukraine. The guy in Ukraine will die for his country. It's a very, very different thing.
00:54:17.100
And now you have the terror bombing, like legitimate terrorism, definitionally terrorism,
00:54:21.920
where the brave Russian military hit a playground yesterday, a university building,
00:54:28.640
a bicycle bridge, things like that. The entire point, as Putin said,
00:54:32.000
is revenge for the attack on the bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland.
00:54:36.380
And they're doing it by indiscriminately back against the wall, trying to terrorize the Ukrainian
00:54:41.560
people. Anybody who believes that the Russians have, you know, or has some sort of sympathy for
00:54:48.260
people that are doing this. And if you look at Bucha, if you look at all of these war crimes that we've
00:54:52.680
seen, massive, massive numbers of war crimes that we've seen, you know, I said on the show not too long
00:54:57.660
ago, America had a very, very long conversation about what happened at Abu Ghraib. There's about
00:55:03.880
700 Abu Ghraibs a day in Ukraine. And I think people that were anti-war, anti-interventionist,
00:55:11.180
anti-imperialist, however they want to say it, were very, very interested in all of those war crimes,
00:55:16.040
right? I mean, the collateral murder video that was released by WikiLeaks, which is a, you know,
00:55:21.800
a helicopter gunship mistaking a Reuters journalist for having an RPG and then lighting them up,
00:55:27.100
as I believe that the helicopter pilot said, that really, you know, changed a lot for a lot of
00:55:31.400
people because it was a terrible thing to see. That stuff happens every day in Ukraine. I don't
00:55:34.900
know why one can attack those things back in the day, maybe because it was George W. Bush that was
00:55:39.400
the person believed to be perpetrating these things or was perpetrating these things versus
00:55:43.940
the Russians and were on the other side of it. No, no, the Russians are 100%, the Kremlin is 100%
00:55:51.220
responsible for this and make no mistakes, is that if you allow this stuff to happen, if you allow
00:55:56.740
them to, you know, we don't have, we're not in a position to negotiate other people's sovereignty.
00:56:01.740
So when people come and say, well, we have to come to a conclusion, like Donald Trump said this the
00:56:04.480
other day, we have to come, no, no, no, Ukrainians have to, we can assist them, we can advise them,
00:56:09.500
we can help facilitate these things, but we cannot determine the fate of Ukraine. And for us to think
00:56:16.640
we can, you know, an anti-imperialist bunch of people would say America's always, you know,
00:56:20.700
putting its nose in everybody's business. Well, this is included. Do not tell the Ukrainians what
00:56:24.580
to do with their future. They have done an amazing job of retaking an enormous amount of territory
00:56:29.340
that was taken by the Russians. And I hope they take more and I hope to kick them out. And I hope
00:56:34.060
they kick them out of even Crimea. It's, it's a, it's a, it's, it's disgraceful.
00:56:38.360
You know, but what's scary about it is, I'll give you the floor, Matt, but what's scary about it is,
00:56:42.280
speaking of the Cuban missile crisis, you know, Kennedy got out of that. He got us out of that by
00:56:47.520
realizing when your enemy's in a corner, you've got to give them an off ramp. Otherwise the worst
00:56:52.700
will happen. And they did, they did. So he gave him an off ramp and they took it and we cut a deal
00:56:58.520
that both sides liked. And it led to a nice little period before the cold war. But how do we facilitate
00:57:04.480
an off ramp that would work for Ukraine? That would work for Putin? I mean, is your, do you think we
00:57:09.440
just, we just don't like the Ukrainians? And I understand the position is the off ramp is get out,
00:57:14.380
Russia, get out. But if he's not willing to do that. A quick thing on that is that, you know,
00:57:19.880
I understand that. And that of course was actually pretty, you know, interesting and impressive
00:57:25.520
diplomacy in the Cuban missile crisis. But you had two people that, as you mentioned, were in a cold
00:57:29.680
war, not a hot war. So that made the off ramps were slightly easier. What you, if you want to see a
00:57:34.520
Russian example of this, the Russians in 1945, they had been, you know, the great patriotic war,
00:57:39.920
they had been brutalized incredibly by the Wehrmacht and the German army. And they were
00:57:44.240
coming, sweeping back and they did amazingly horrible things. And they did nothing. There
00:57:49.340
was no off ramps. It was unconditional surrender. We're going to take every territory,
00:57:53.620
Estonia, et cetera. And there was, to them, there was like, this was the only option because they had
00:58:00.840
just fought a brutal war and you saw what happened in Stalingrad and Leningrad, et cetera. There's a
00:58:04.760
version of that right now in Ukraine. And I'm not saying that, you know, if I had my druthers,
00:58:09.340
I would offer an off ramp, et cetera, if I was in that position. But the Ukrainians are pretty
00:58:13.520
united on this front because of what has happened, because of the images they see every day, because
00:58:19.340
of, you know, people waiting in line at a train station being blown up by an enormous missile.
00:58:24.900
And, you know, you see children's shoes and clothes scattered around and people's, you know,
00:58:29.740
you know, broken bodies on the ground being hauled off. I mean, this has had a profound effect.
00:58:35.500
And look, the Zelensky administration, people close to me have said this. It has a profound
00:58:40.160
effect on the off ramp. If there was, as people say, a point of negotiation at the beginning of
00:58:45.840
this conflict, and there was points of negotiation, I don't think they were very serious. There is no
00:58:50.300
points of negotiation now. Why? Well, it's because of what's happened. And what has happened is that
00:58:55.200
the Ukrainians do not want an off ramp that actually cedes any of their territory because they
00:59:00.680
believe the entire conflict is the fault of the Russians and it's morally wrong to take somebody's
00:59:04.740
territory. I get that. I'm not saying I would do the exact same thing. I'm just saying that that is
00:59:08.740
definitely how the Ukrainians look at it. People forget that the Cold War wasn't just like people
00:59:16.720
from a distance issuing stern communiques with one another. That's not how it went. I mean,
00:59:22.580
in addition to being completely inappropriate for an American president to elevate the pathetic
00:59:28.400
attempt at using a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to allied support for Ukraine. In addition to that,
00:59:35.860
it's just factually untrue that we are closer to Armageddon now. I get that it's a queasy-making
00:59:43.040
moment. Nobody likes it. I feel bad and worried about a lot of things right now. However, I'm old
00:59:50.660
enough to remember the Cold War. The Cold War had hot shooting wars with Americans in them against
00:59:56.880
Soviet-backed countries. There's a whole thing called Korea. Check it out. It happened after
01:00:01.020
World War II. It was a hot war. There was a series of hot wars everywhere. There were proxy wars all
01:00:08.480
over Africa, all over South America and Central America, between the two sides. There was obviously
01:00:13.120
Afghanistan. In all these moments of tense nuclear, not exchanges, but negotiations, people were dead
01:00:22.880
worried about a nuclear holocaust and Armageddon all throughout the eighties. My God, did you watch
01:00:29.360
a movie? Did you see a television series? That was constantly part of the culture and it didn't come
01:00:34.360
out of nowhere. It was part of what was happening diplomatically. We didn't know that it was all going
01:00:40.260
to suddenly collapse in 1989 through 1991. We assumed it would go like that forever. So part of this is
01:00:46.840
that I don't want to say that we've gotten soft. We've forgotten what it was like to live back then
01:00:52.240
under that constant kind of threat while people were dying in a lot of places.
01:00:56.460
And one small brief point on this on the nuclear question. The sovereignty of Ukraine was, and this
01:01:01.920
is very often overlooked and for some reason nearly, it's nearly ever pointed out, is that the Budapest
01:01:09.860
protocols in 1994, the exchange was that the Russians, Europe, America would recognize and
01:01:16.820
basically defend Ukraine's sovereignty or allow Ukraine to be a sovereign country if they gave
01:01:21.580
up their nuclear arsenal. At the breakup of the Soviet Union, so much of those were in Ukraine,
01:01:26.500
that Ukraine, I believe at the time, became the third largest nuclear country. And so in exchange for
01:01:31.960
giving up those weapons, which they did, and probably would be quite helpful right now in a nuclear
01:01:36.160
showdown, they were assured by the Russians that Ukraine was an independent country. And that's
01:01:42.320
important to remember because those treaties don't get to go away when you decide that they go away.
01:01:47.820
Right. I mean, those are those have people's signatures on them and they should mean something.
01:01:51.200
They don't mean anything right now. But it was because of the nuclear question that that their
01:01:54.880
sovereignty was actually guaranteed in the first place.
01:01:57.360
Want to want to tell you that, of course, there was the attempted cleanup by the White House.
01:02:01.280
The next day, Kareem Jean-Pierre comes out. The president's comments did not reflect any new
01:02:17.120
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby, his comments were not based on specific new information. We don't have
01:02:23.140
any information, in fact, that Putin has made that kind of a decision, nor have we seen anything that
01:02:28.000
would give us pause to reconsider our own strategic nuclear posture. He just says the president was
01:02:33.660
reflecting the very high stakes that are in play right now. So, again, he was reckless. And what
01:02:38.600
does he do as we're on the brink of Armageddon? He goes to Delaware. But fear not, because you know
01:02:45.000
who's on the case of Ukraine and the situation there? Randy Weingarten. Yes, America's diplomat,
01:02:52.020
the carer in chief of children, has gone to Ukraine. I don't know why. For a photo op to improve her own
01:03:00.480
image, undoubtedly. She's giving out some books to the Ukrainian children. Okay, whatever. This is her
01:03:07.340
trying to improve her own PR. Meanwhile, you know, back here in the United States, the children she's
01:03:13.120
actually supposed to be, you know, looking out for are at record lows on our test scores, on our mass
01:03:19.540
scores, on our reading scores. They just upped like the nation's report card in absolutely dreadful
01:03:25.120
numbers that she actually is responsible for. She's abandoned all those children. As somebody said,
01:03:29.720
the kids in Ukraine can't go to school because of an actual war. The kids in America haven't been
01:03:33.920
able to go to school because of Randy Weingarten. So you feel better. I'm sure I can see it on your
01:03:39.740
faces. You feel better. You see her comment where she was in Lviv, in the kind of beautiful center of
01:03:46.920
Lviv. And she said, first of all, she kept on saying Putin, which is a very weird pronunciation.
01:03:54.060
She was saying Putin and Putin. And she, the best thing about it was she said, you know,
01:03:58.440
I was invited here. Okay, maybe she's invited. And there's been missile attacks overnight. And
01:04:04.920
the schools are closed and the kids are learning remotely, which I thought was an amazing Americanism
01:04:10.300
in like this. The schools are being bombed. And she's like, yeah, they're learning remotely. I was
01:04:15.200
like, what an amazing, but she actually had this other tweet where she said, you know, there's been
01:04:20.980
attacks in Ukraine and I'm, um, I'm heading to the border to check it out. She should literally tweet
01:04:26.020
that. Oh my God. Can you imagine? Check it out. Who are you? These Ukrainian soldiers are probably
01:04:31.040
like, who is this annoying lady? My God. And why is Mark Hamill from Star Wars here?
01:04:41.960
That was the weirdest twist in the Ukraine news. It was like Mark Hamill from Star Wars said that
01:04:50.060
President Zelensky called him personally to ask him to be like a drone, a drone, a drone
01:04:57.280
administrator. Hold on. We actually cut it. Cause I was like, what the hell is happening? It's
01:05:04.920
I'm not used to be being contacted by world leaders. You know, I, I'm, I'm a court jester. I'm,
01:05:12.620
I'm a non-essential worker. I do cartoon voices and TV and movies. So I was,
01:05:20.060
honored to be contacted by him. And basically what they were wanting me to do was become a so-called
01:05:27.700
ambassador, which is a glorified word for representative of their army of drones.
01:05:32.360
I was surprised he spoke to me as long as he did. I thought, my gosh, this is a man that has a lot on
01:05:38.040
his agenda. Uh, but he took the time and, uh, who knows? I mean, uh, maybe he's just a Star Wars fan.
01:05:47.100
Oh my God. He's not used to be contacted by casting agents.
01:05:54.740
I mean, apparently it's worse than we knew in Ukraine for Zelensky to be reaching out
01:05:59.540
to Mark Hamill and Randy Weingarten. Like I, like the Vanity Fair cover. I'm not sure
01:06:05.700
this guy's being advised well. I realize he's a former actor. He's a star, but I don't think this
01:06:12.520
is the way to win the hearts and minds. Am I wrong that? Yes. Because what, what is allowing
01:06:18.300
him to fight besides the fact that all Ukrainians are like conscripted to fight? You can't leave the
01:06:24.680
country for mail at this point, but also they all are really enters is what happens when your country
01:06:29.540
gets invaded by a bigger bully next door. You kind of want to fight back and punch them in the mouth.
01:06:33.900
So they're fighting really hard. That's great. But we've also sent them $67 billion.
01:06:37.780
Yeah, that's better. And we could send them really quickly a whole lot more and probably will be.
01:06:43.500
And that is the most important source of funding by far. I mean, we are dwarfing everybody. Can we
01:06:49.200
still say dwarfing? No. Okay. We are little people. And also he needs that lifeline to be open. It's
01:06:59.460
literally going to be a lifeline because it's going to be pretty hard for a lot of Europe to continue
01:07:04.160
supporting Zelensky. Poland will. The Baltics will. The Czech Republic will. A lot of them will.
01:07:09.960
But there's going to be a recession and there already is a recession, but there's going to be a bad one
01:07:14.300
probably this winter with energy supplies coming in. And there's going to be a lot of people starting to
01:07:19.320
get wobbly. So he needs to keep by any means necessary. People are always mocking him for showing up on award
01:07:24.980
shows and doing this in America. And it is ridiculous. It's inherently ridiculous. And also we are giving him
01:07:32.340
all the guns to fight his war. He needs to get. Then you get the rock. Okay. I'm just saying,
01:07:36.820
like, if you want to get somebody who Americans are going to listen to aim a little higher with
01:07:40.420
respect to Mark. I'm like, maybe just a little higher. Is he says he's doing like voiceovers and
01:07:46.260
cartoons. It's a Kim Kardashian practical with his sort of diplomatic efforts there. But I would say that
01:07:55.340
I just briefly agree broadly with what's been said here. I mean, Kiev is what was getting pounded
01:08:00.380
yesterday. This is what 500 odd miles from the Korean Crimean Peninsula. It's, it's, it's a major
01:08:07.040
deal. I mean, this is not kind of a, to the extent there's a strategy being employed by Putin. It appears
01:08:13.160
that the strategy is just a tax of reprisal on civilian centers, not to try and take out any,
01:08:18.440
this is demoralization by targeting civilians. It's grotesque. And at the same time, the one thing
01:08:24.920
that I've kind of continued to be very concerned about is the degree to which I don't hear a lot
01:08:30.360
of public officials like a Joe Biden, who the one thing that we were promised when Joe Biden was
01:08:35.280
running for office is that the adults were back in charge, that we would see a more kind of steady
01:08:39.320
hand at the wheel. And that the rhetoric coming out of this white house perhaps could be anticipated
01:08:44.060
that we could expect it to be a bit more mature. I would expect to see more public declarations.
01:08:49.200
I can appreciate strong support for the Ukrainians, but at the same time, also just
01:08:54.360
the importance, the urgency of bringing an end to the conflict, of bringing some sort of close to the
01:09:01.660
fighting itself, which obviously the United States nor any other European government is, is able to
01:09:09.180
simply declare unilaterally that this can happen. But certainly once you're arming aside in the
01:09:15.560
conflict and providing them with some advice and guidance in other contexts as well, there is some
01:09:21.940
responsibility to try and help bring this whole thing to some sort of resolution. And that resolution
01:09:31.780
may or may not involve the complete kind of territorial integrity of Ukraine being as it was before the
01:09:38.140
conflict began. And to the extent they can encourage Zelensky to accept some sort of compromise,
01:09:44.480
however distasteful it may be to him, that might be in the interest of the Europeans broadly and of
01:09:52.460
God forbid, God forbid Putin use a strategic nuclear weapon, a tactical nuclear weapon, because
01:09:59.480
now you're going to have NATO countries getting involved. I mean, that is the last thing we want.
01:10:04.960
Something needs to be done before that happens. Let me just pause it there because there's so many
01:10:08.820
other things that I tease that I want to get to. We've spent a good deal of time on Russia.
01:10:12.160
Um, and that is, uh, let's, let's go with this because what you talk about, what does,
01:10:17.800
does Joe Biden walk it back? Does he walk back those comments? Does he walk back? I mean,
01:10:20.880
we always talk about the white house, walking back his comments and on the subject of the president
01:10:25.100
and his messaging, he literally walked back the other day. Every day, it seems there's a sign
01:10:33.100
that sends shivers down the spines of American voters about how well our president is. I mean,
01:10:38.340
from the Armageddon comments and forgetting about the dead Congresswoman the other day to the
01:10:42.340
constant mandering and wandering and losing his train of thought, um, he's mumbling, mumbling now.
01:10:48.440
I mean, it's really genuinely getting alarming and the polls, there was a poll that just came out
01:10:53.040
that shows, um, okay. In August, overall, 59% of Americans said they had concerns about his mental
01:11:00.340
health. Now it's up to 64. All right. It's gone up five points. And guess where all the gains came
01:11:05.200
from? Democrats. Democrats are up. Um, they make up the difference because even they now are seriously
01:11:11.440
concerned about whether our president is all there. This, as video comes out of the president taking
01:11:17.640
questions on, I think it was OPEC and how they're giving us the middle finger after we went over there
01:11:23.460
and did the fist bump. And the answer was pound sand. Um, watch this, watch, watch how he literally
01:11:29.420
backs away from the lectern. No, the trip was not essentially for oil. The trip was about the
01:11:38.640
middle East and about Israel and rationalization of positions, but it is a disappointment. And it says
01:11:57.140
Do you think they'd maybe have smoke bombs and he was supposed to go off and he was just
01:12:07.140
Somehow that's worse than the congresswoman thing.
01:12:26.140
You need an aim always to be close enough to come grab you and say, we got to go, Mr.
01:12:36.140
So many of those clips are him trying to find ways off of podiums, which is kind of troubling.
01:12:44.140
And Megan, to your point, it's like those numbers are increasing maybe because the president
01:12:49.140
is talking about Armageddon and everyone's talking about the potential of nuclear war.
01:12:58.140
And now, hopefully, we'll be taking this seriously because the buck does stop with the president.
01:13:03.140
And you can't say, well, Mr. President, we're not going to listen to you because you're old
01:13:08.140
He can make some pretty bad decisions right now.
01:13:12.140
It's not just, you know, 1994 Bill Clinton or something where the world was a little...
01:13:21.140
At least he has a very coherent vice president.
01:13:25.140
I mean, it was near the beginning of the conflict.
01:13:29.140
When Biden was talking openly about assassinating Putin or at least suggesting he needs to go
01:13:40.140
We should cut that clip of Biden walking back and that should just be like the theme video
01:13:43.140
for the Biden presidency because that's what his staff does after every single one of these
01:14:02.140
While we're on the subject of politics, can we talk about Tulsi?
01:14:09.140
She's no more of a Democrat than Liz Cheney is a Republican.
01:14:17.140
I don't know if we have this on camera, but she says she's done with them, that they're
01:14:24.140
She happens to be coming on the show later this week and coming out with a book as well,
01:14:28.140
but I think she thought this was a good time to announce it.
01:14:30.140
I don't think anybody's surprised, but it's sad to me in a way because we used to have
01:14:35.140
centrist Democrats and that used to be allowed.
01:14:38.140
I think she was chased out of this party, first by the Clintons, then by Nancy Pelosi.
01:14:43.140
She outlined it the first time she came on this show, but she was just too centrist for
01:14:47.140
They considered her a threat and they got the hell rid of her.
01:14:50.140
I mean, even though she kind of like Bernie, which isn't all that centrist, but my point
01:15:03.140
She was a person of some heft and universal health care.
01:15:08.140
I think that Tulsi has always been kind of a party of one.
01:15:13.140
And, you know, I, as someone who wrote a book about political independence, I always appreciate
01:15:23.140
But she has an element of like, I'm being heterodox over here.
01:15:27.140
New book and podcast coming out near you sometime.
01:15:32.140
She's a little bit over the map right now and seems to be trying to land kind of closer
01:15:37.140
to Tucker Carlson's desk and on her emphases and some of her politics.
01:15:45.140
Some of her objections are things that a lot of people are objecting to the Democratic Party
01:15:50.140
She very specifically went about how they're too woke and all of this.
01:15:55.140
And I think you see a lot of kind of the Latino disaffection with the Democratic Party,
01:16:02.140
Part of this is they don't like the cultural messages being sent by the kind of elite top
01:16:08.140
And Tulsi has always had sort of that kind of response.
01:16:11.140
She has a different background than a lot of people and is out there in Hawaii and has
01:16:16.140
But I don't know if it's a harbinger of anything besides Tulsi's own idiosyncratic career.
01:16:23.140
I mean, it's definitely kind of third way politics now when you say, oh, you know, Joe
01:16:30.140
There's a number of these people who are, you know, Brianna Joy Gray used to also work
01:16:36.140
And a lot of these people at the Jacobin magazine, you know, kind of left wing magazine
01:16:44.140
They don't like wokeness and they don't like American foreign policy when it's George
01:16:51.140
So you have this kind of third way of people that were conservatives, that many of which
01:16:58.140
I mean, Saurab, our friend Saurab Amari is a version of that, who was calling for the
01:17:06.140
And now is like the only two people in America that can save the Republic are Bernie Sanders
01:17:12.140
That's a definitely an emerging poll in American politics.
01:17:15.140
I don't know what it is, because like I mean, when you said and I think that you're
01:17:28.140
And she's kind of on this side and that one and this side and that one.
01:17:30.140
And like Matt, I like political independence, even when I disagree with her.
01:17:33.140
And I vehemently disagree with a bunch of stuff.
01:17:38.140
And by the way, that is definitely the doing of Donald Trump, because Donald Trump came in
01:17:42.140
and destroyed the idea of what American conservatism was.
01:17:45.140
And it was kind of backwards casted in a way where American conservatives then decided to
01:17:50.140
create an ideology based on what Donald Trump was talking about.
01:17:53.140
And that was, you know, anti-free trade, you know, anti-immigration, anti-foreign
01:18:00.140
These are a lot of kind of mixed things that wouldn't have been traditional Republican positions.
01:18:08.140
But Donald Trump, you know, Republicans put their replacement for Obamacare on his desk
01:18:17.140
That's a very unique thing that's happening in American politics.
01:18:20.140
And Tulsi is definitely someone who's following one of those paths.
01:18:26.140
So how many seconds until Tiffany Cross says another black person forced out of the Democratic
01:18:37.140
I'm saying she's complaining about anti-white racism.
01:18:44.140
You know, and that's you're not allowed to say that.
01:18:46.140
I know you guys have been talking about that kind of thing and anti-male chauvinism and
01:18:53.140
all the narratives that we've been seeing about women, this women that Meghan Markle,
01:18:57.140
every single woman who ever succeeded in America is, in fact, a victim.
01:19:02.140
Meanwhile, it's like guys aren't graduating from high school.
01:19:06.140
Guys are overwhelmingly the ones who kill themselves.
01:19:11.140
And we just have to continue saying girl power, girl power, girl power.
01:19:15.140
To me, that's another massive problem that we've got in our society that you guys have
01:19:20.140
Well, I think one part of it is just the start.
01:19:25.140
Well, especially when you compare to 20 years ago, the the number of people who are working
01:19:30.140
dudes and women as well when they're starting to go down recently.
01:19:35.140
Like, you know, 20 years ago, something like 55 percent of teenage 16 to 19 year old males
01:19:46.140
It's going down and it goes down in every single cohort up until age 55.
01:19:54.140
And it's also interesting that and this is male and female to people, young people will
01:19:59.140
describe themselves as being feeling like too injured, either actually or psychologically
01:20:09.140
These are like the average 27 year old describes themselves basically as being more disabled
01:20:15.140
than the average 57 year old, which says to me that there's something really weird going
01:20:21.140
If we don't inculcate a work ethic anymore, you know, we're half the people don't have
01:20:33.140
So, yes, a lot of that is part of the male feeder thing.
01:20:37.140
And that's a trend line that's been increasing.
01:20:41.140
Richard Reeves and Nicholas Eversat and other people are looking at this.
01:20:45.140
But the flight of men from work is a bad thing in and of itself.
01:20:51.140
I don't I'm not one who wakes up in the morning and says, you know what?
01:20:56.140
I want them to, you know, get up off their ass and go to work, too.
01:21:00.140
But we also should recognize when a problem is staring us in the face.
01:21:05.140
I think that the impulse has to be to address ourselves to people's needs, people, individuals,
01:21:12.140
whatever the whatever the gender, whatever the race or ideological background, the remedies
01:21:17.140
to the problems that people are facing in their lives and their particular communities,
01:21:20.140
the structural impediments to their success, to building wealth, to being trained and properly
01:21:25.140
equipped for the kind of jobs that are likely to be available in our in our in our communities,
01:21:30.140
I mean, in our economy going forward, those things are generally going to be gender and race agnostic.
01:21:35.140
That has something to do with family structure, for sure.
01:21:37.140
I mean, if you're a single parent household, whether you're a man or a woman, things are going to be slightly more daunting for you.
01:21:42.140
But if we could start to think about people's needs and not their identities in the particular communities that they are said to belong to,
01:21:51.140
I think that would go a long way towards helping to improve outcomes for more and more Americans and and allowing us to actually fix problems.
01:22:01.140
But we haven't been able to get out of our way on that.
01:22:05.140
And I will give you a great example of how right after this quick two minute break, more with the fifth column guys coming up.
01:22:10.140
And by the way, last time we talked about pumpkin spice latte and whether I was for it.
01:22:14.140
I'm going to try my first one right here with the guys.
01:22:18.140
Had a big debate about it last time when they were on.
01:22:20.140
You guys will be with me and I'll tell you how it goes.
01:22:23.140
So we're less than a month away from midterms and the get out the vote effort is in full swing.
01:22:32.140
And Michelle Obama's group, when we all vote, that's her initiative, is working with the BLK dating app.
01:22:42.140
The BLK dating app is designed for black singles looking to date.
01:22:46.140
And they have a new video out that is meant to inspire young black singles, not only to date, but to vote and warn that if you do not vote, you do not get to vuck.
01:23:41.140
If I abstaining from voting, abstain from having sex with those people.
01:23:53.140
You know, my team puts together these great packets for me when you guys come on and when everybody comes on.
01:23:59.140
So you hit Microsoft Word, you download as a Word document, then you hit read aloud.
01:24:03.140
And you got to hear that song read on the read aloud.
01:24:17.140
But my homegirl, my homegirl, though, put the buy and buy in partisan politics.
01:24:31.140
If you want to come before the deadline, come in this jacuzzi, gerrymander in this coochie.
01:24:41.140
So, I mean, I feel like they're uplifting the dialogue.
01:24:49.140
What do we make of this this beautiful attempt to reach out to young black voters?
01:24:54.140
I think if certain people have decided that they're going to abstain from voting and they're
01:24:59.140
perhaps abstaining because they say to themselves, you know, I don't really know enough about this
01:25:04.140
And as I think we've observed, because we had a conversation about this on our members only
01:25:10.140
So there's a certain category of American who probably should vote.
01:25:16.140
And if they're not inspired to go out and vote, like, let's not encourage them.
01:25:25.140
The only way to incentivize you to actually get out and cast a ballot is to promise you sexual
01:25:35.140
I think that the quality will be improved, well served by keeping you at home.
01:25:43.140
He came out with a this is his headline in his piece.
01:25:47.140
Democrats colon gerrymander this coochie, which literally is a line from the song.
01:25:54.140
And he writes it's this song is urging women to hold out on men who are not registered to
01:26:01.140
If a white supremacist had depicted black people like this as sex mad animals, we would
01:26:09.140
And we shouldn't because it's totally degrading.
01:26:12.140
But this was made by black liberals for black people.
01:26:16.140
We're a long, long way from Smokey Robinson and Otis Redding.
01:26:23.140
Like this is how this group thinks this is how I'm going to appeal to young black people
01:26:27.140
by putting these morons on screen and threaten no access to the coochie unless you register.
01:26:34.140
But could you imagine, you know, I imagine myself as a journalist interviewing somebody
01:26:40.140
coming from the polling place and me saying, you know, who did you vote for?
01:26:52.140
No, I'm super funny, but I just I heard they're great.
01:26:59.140
I voted sticker and I'm going to be gone for about six hours.
01:27:04.140
I don't care about the actual optics of the video.
01:27:07.140
It's like, and I will probably disagree with Rod Dreher in the sense that I think some
01:27:14.140
But yeah, I am somebody who does not want to encourage more people to vote.
01:27:25.140
I'm not a person who likes Australia, which forces everybody to vote by by by law.
01:27:30.140
And, you know, there's a lot of people and we talked about this on the podcast the other
01:27:34.140
Not voting is a choice, just the same as pulling the lever for a Republican or Democrat.
01:27:40.140
And I often don't vote not because I'm misinformed or I don't know anything about the candidates
01:27:47.140
And so I have this idea that not voting is always a bad thing.
01:27:52.140
Although if you don't vote, you don't have the chance to comically write in the names
01:27:56.140
You're all like the district court judge things that you should never vote for.
01:28:05.140
Let me let me shift gears to something equally controversial.
01:28:11.140
There is an award winning multimedia journalist who none of us has ever heard of named David
01:28:21.140
He claims that he's written for CBS, Yahoo, Examiner, et cetera.
01:28:26.140
And this is a person who called child protective services on Virginia State Senate candidate
01:28:38.140
Did Tina do something that would make any sane person call child protective service on her?
01:28:43.140
Tina said, quote, I teach my daughter real American history.
01:28:48.140
I refuse to join the radical left campaign to erase history and wished her followers a happy Columbus Day.
01:28:59.140
Can someone please call child care services on Tina Ramirez, who is teaching her child to be a racist?
01:29:07.140
Then he apparently decided to make the call himself and complained about the long wait time to speak to someone at the hotline tweeting.
01:29:17.140
The Virginia State hotline for child abuse has a 10 plus minute hold and is experiencing high call volumes for the 14 callers ahead of me.
01:29:26.140
How many people try to report child abuse and hang up?
01:29:38.140
You are jamming up the lines and you're encouraging other people to do it as well.
01:29:42.140
Some young child might have been in trouble seeking help.
01:29:46.140
And you and your asshole followers are harassing this woman on the Internet.
01:29:50.140
I will say that Columbus Day, probably my least favorite holiday because of the ridiculous kind of culture war antics that tend to dominate the holiday.
01:30:00.140
Whatever kind of particular political historical narrative you choose to embrace, whether you imagine that Christopher Columbus was just this bold, chaste explorer who went to America and found it and we should celebrate him forever and ever.
01:30:14.140
Or that the noble savages were here living peacefully in bliss before anyone got here and have never done anything terrible or wrong.
01:30:20.140
And the reason we should regard them as the first peoples is because God gave them the land and they never had to fight any sort of violent conflict or genocide one another or anything else horrendous.
01:30:29.140
If everyone were equally upset about the fact that some people in the past have done awful things and therefore perhaps shouldn't be celebrated, I would be OK.
01:30:39.140
But instead, you get this kind of selective outrage in one direction or the other that I find like plenty preposterous and nonsensical.
01:30:48.140
And I wish we would just be a little bit more thoughtful.
01:30:50.140
I think there's so many interesting things to talk about.
01:30:52.140
Maybe if not rebranded Columbus Culture War Day, we could rebrand it like Discovery Day.
01:30:59.140
It was the day that just shut up and enjoy the free day off there.
01:31:03.140
If you're going to tax something, does that have to be a freaking holiday?
01:31:07.140
They enjoy having the school day off, having a day off from work, like pick something else to pick on.
01:31:12.140
You know, like what good was done by taking that day back as a work day and a school day?
01:31:18.140
Ramirez, the candidate, tweeted back to this guy, mighty bold and liberal of you to lecture a Hispanic mother with a black daughter on racism.
01:31:27.140
What's next? Are you going to lecture me on women's rights?
01:31:31.140
Having a black child doesn't make you any less racist.
01:31:38.140
Do you think David Duke is like, I'm a black child.
01:31:44.140
I'm going to adopt a black or marry a black woman and I'm David Duke.
01:31:54.140
I remember a long time ago, I had a conversation about this where Camille said something similar
01:31:59.140
when somebody said, like, you know, just because you say, like, oh, I have a black friend.
01:32:02.140
It doesn't make me like it doesn't make you less racist.
01:32:04.140
And Camille's argument is a matter of fact, it does.
01:32:15.140
Abby has gone and gotten me the pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks.
01:32:18.140
Now, I have never had a pumpkin spice latte in my life.
01:32:21.140
However, I confess that my hairstylist brought me an iced coffee with the pumpkin cream on
01:32:29.140
You guys remember we talked about this the last time I'd never had one.
01:32:33.140
Now, and refresh me on your stances when it comes to pumpkin spice anything.
01:32:43.140
The only hate crime that I love seeing prosecute.
01:33:13.140
I'm I get what you're saying with the medicinal flavor there.
01:33:17.140
I got to say the the pumpkin spice iced coffee.
01:33:32.140
And by the way, I don't know what what's in there.
01:33:38.140
So if you want to suck up there, it's like not totally consistent with the intermittent
01:33:42.140
But for a treat every once in a while, I would stand by that latte.
01:33:48.140
The important thing about the pumpkin spice and you mentioned, Megan, the word Karen before
01:33:57.140
It was the pumpkin spice lady in the Ugg boots.
01:34:01.140
It was like it was a very particular type of person who went and got the pumpkin spice
01:34:11.140
Well, I don't even think that if that counts, if it's iced.
01:34:17.140
She doesn't have any of the same characteristics as the original Karen.
01:34:24.140
There's so many delicious caffeinated beverages that you can get at Starbucks or any place
01:34:29.140
that the attention that is given to the pumpkin spice latte completely undeserved.
01:34:38.140
Although I believe that saying chai tea is a little weird because it's.
01:34:43.140
I love Camille's like methodical businesslike approach to this.
01:34:51.140
By the way, there's a peppermint cream that comes out soon, too.