The Megyn Kelly Show - Left Turns on Democracy, and Rise of Anti-Semitism in Culture, with Charles C.W. Cooke and Shadi Hamid ｜ Ep. 442

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00:00:02.860 Someone is trying to frame us.

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

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

00:00:41.900 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:43.640 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.320 Hope everyone had a great, great Thanksgiving.

00:00:48.060 We traveled with the family out to Amsterdam.

00:00:50.880 We went to Holland and it was so fun.

00:00:53.700 And I've got to tell you,

00:00:54.320 Doug, my husband, is Dutch on his dad's side.

00:00:58.520 And there were a bunch of people who looked like Doug.

00:01:00.000 I finally figured out why Doug looks the way he does.

00:01:03.200 Tall, angular features, big, wide-set eyes.

00:01:07.620 There's a bunch of Dougs running around Holland. 1.00

00:01:09.660 So ladies, if you're interested, you know, check it out. 0.87

00:01:12.100 I'm just saying.

00:01:13.040 There's a lot of them over there.

00:01:15.060 Anyway, we had a great time.

00:01:16.660 Had tons of fun with the kids and learned a lot.

00:01:19.760 Actually talked to some farmers about the Dutch farming situation over there.

00:01:22.820 You know, the government's cracking down on these farmers,

00:01:24.780 telling them they all have to close it up because of emissions.

00:01:27.980 And they've set guidelines that these farmers can never meet.

00:01:30.400 It's really an example of government overreach in an area of the world that's known for being more hands-off.

00:01:36.260 Right?

00:01:36.420 That's why they have the red light district.

00:01:37.980 They're very proud.

00:01:38.660 It's Amsterdam.

00:01:39.320 You can do what you want.

00:01:40.120 Except for farm.

00:01:41.440 That you cannot do because of climate change.

00:01:44.660 Anyway, the people were delightful.

00:01:46.420 It was an absolutely beautiful city, all on these beautiful canals.

00:01:49.740 It's underwater.

00:01:50.560 Michael Schellenberg has pointed to this city as an example of how it's not ideal to go underwater.

00:01:56.280 But if with climate change and global warming, we have the oceans rise and certain cities wind up in that unfortunate position,

00:02:03.900 there are ways to make it work.

00:02:05.660 And those Dutch physicists and experts on how they did it there were called in to help New Orleans after Katrina and so on.

00:02:14.440 They know how to do it.

00:02:15.100 They're an example to us all.

00:02:16.600 Anyway, highly recommend it.

00:02:17.820 Went to the Anne Frank Museum.

00:02:19.140 Went to the Van Gogh Museum.

00:02:20.360 A bunch of other places.

00:02:21.700 Watch.

00:02:22.040 We made some cheese.

00:02:23.140 We did.

00:02:23.380 Whatever.

00:02:23.940 We had a great time.

00:02:24.620 And I recommend you check it out.

00:02:25.940 Okay.

00:02:26.480 Back now today.

00:02:27.320 And there's a ton of news to cover.

00:02:28.620 Wow.

00:02:29.020 A lot went on.

00:02:30.520 We're going to talk about former President Donald Trump's decision to host Kanye, now known as Ye West.

00:02:36.000 And Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

00:02:39.700 Milo Yiannopoulos was also reportedly there.

00:02:42.340 But Nick Fuentes, we've covered him on this show before.

00:02:45.380 We've covered him on Twitter as well.

00:02:48.640 He is a Holocaust denier, though he says it with a laugh.

00:02:52.540 He has been targeting Ben Shapiro for years, and I've covered that on my Twitter, and we're going to get into all of it.

00:03:00.260 How did this guy wind up at Mar-a-Lago?

00:03:01.980 It's absolutely disgusting that Nick Fuentes was at Mar-a-Lago, period, period.

00:03:07.900 He shouldn't have been within 10 feet of the former President of the United States.

00:03:12.020 It's deeply, deeply wrong.

00:03:13.760 How did it happen?

00:03:15.620 We'll talk about it.

00:03:16.540 Plus, the latest from Dr. Fauci, he's still going.

00:03:19.640 He was forced to testify in our deposition, and Mr. I am science, I am king of the world, and I run a $6 billion agency, suddenly lost his memory.

00:03:26.880 Oh, Mr. Honesty and I am truth.

00:03:29.440 He can't remember anything now that there's dollars and cents on the line.

00:03:32.260 Also, we'll get to YNBC allowed two of its top reporters to lie about key details in the Colorado nightclub shooting as they claimed the moral high ground as the only honest media arbiters in covering anything involving the LGBTQ community.

00:03:48.420 Okay, later we're going to get to Shadi Hamid, who's going to come on.

00:03:51.900 You may remember he had a fantastic debate.

00:03:53.920 People still stop me on the street to talk about this with Alan Dershowitz on Israel and Gaza last year.

00:03:58.880 He returns in our second hour.

00:04:00.940 But joining me first, Charles C.W. Cook, senior writer for National Review and host of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast.

00:04:07.660 Charles, great to have you here.

00:04:08.560 How are you?

00:04:09.940 I'm doing well.

00:04:10.940 Thank you for having me back.

00:04:12.600 The pleasure is all mine.

00:04:14.780 Okay, so let's just start with the Trump dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

00:04:19.560 I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that Nick Fuentes dined at Mar-a-Lago with the president.

00:04:24.900 I thought for sure this is not true.

00:04:26.200 I could believe that Kanye dined there.

00:04:28.980 Trump is all about he only sees you through one prism, and it is how do you feel about him?

00:04:34.800 That's it.

00:04:36.060 And so I wouldn't expect Trump to care about Kanye's anti-Semitic comments, despite the fact that Trump has a Jewish daughter and a Jewish son-in-law.

00:04:45.580 You know, Kanye, as Trump later said in a statement, has been good to Trump, so Trump is good to Kanye, and he had him at Mar-a-Lago.

00:04:53.440 But the fact that Trump's handlers or whomever, or if there are no handlers, then Trump himself has allowed a system to be in place where Nick Fuentes could get within 10 feet, as I said, of the former president of the United States, is downright alarming.

00:05:07.540 We've done a deep dive on this guy in preparation for today.

00:05:11.020 We've done a lot of reporting on him in the past. 0.79

00:05:13.180 There is no question this is a raging, raging anti-Semite and white nationalist, though he denies the latter.

00:05:21.380 And Trump is now basically saying, well, I didn't know him.

00:05:23.900 So how are people supposed to process this before we get into the details on this guy?

00:05:28.620 Well, he's a revolting individual, and I regret that I know who he is, or you know who he is, or anyone knows who he is, because his contributions to the United States and the world in general are next to nil.

00:05:42.400 He should not have been near a former president.

00:05:47.360 He shouldn't be anywhere near anyone who wants to represent the whole country, which is the role that the president is obliged to play.

00:05:58.360 But I would ask even those people who have defended Trump here, and I don't think their defenses are convincing, people who have said it's not his fault, he didn't know, this guy snuck past,

00:06:10.580 or it doesn't matter why you continue to put all your trust and faith in Donald Trump when he just seems to cause endless distractions.

00:06:25.800 What did this do for America?

00:06:29.420 What did this do for conservatism?

00:06:32.180 What did this do for the Republican Party?

00:06:35.260 Once again, we are talking about Donald Trump, not because he made a Supreme Court pick or said something everyone has been thinking or pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and thereby engendered all sorts of criticism from the press.

00:06:52.940 We're talking about him because he did something at worst terrible and at best careless.

00:07:00.880 And I just hope that people have tired of this at long last.

00:07:05.260 I don't know if they've tired of it, but I think people should understand that it's a very big deal.

00:07:09.760 It is a big deal.

00:07:10.560 I realize Trump is not sitting in the White House right now, but he's already declared his candidacy.

00:07:15.000 He's an ex-president and he's beloved by huge sections of the country.

00:07:20.100 And there it does no one any good to pretend that Nick Fuentes is anyone other than the man we know him to be, who is a 24 year old aspiring David Duke.

00:07:30.000 I mean, this guy's anti-Semitic and pro-white comments to the exclusion of all their groups go way back.

00:07:40.080 And the thing about Shapiro is what first brought him into my orbit because I'm friends with Ben and it was downright alarming.

00:07:46.820 A couple of years ago, he put out a video of himself, this Fuentes guy playing the game Grand Theft Auto and someone in a yarmulke went by in the in the game and he ran him over.

00:07:59.900 And then I think there was a second video where he attacked that figure again.

00:08:04.420 And Fuentes celebrated it, saying, oh, look, I just killed Ben Shapiro and was gleeful about it.

00:08:10.540 And then he tried to get in Ben Shapiro's face, wanting to know why Ben didn't want to debate him.

00:08:14.840 Well, Ben's weird like that when you threaten his life and pretend to murder him.

00:08:19.540 He doesn't really want to stand across from you on a stage, especially when no one knows who the hell you are at this point and everybody knows who Ben Shapiro is.

00:08:26.320 So this is the history of this guy.

00:08:29.840 And then you hear him going out on his own show and talking about the way he sees the Holocaust and the six million Jews who were killed in it.

00:08:39.660 By the way, as I mentioned at the top of the show, just came back from the Anne Frank Museum, deeply stirring, disturbing, moving.

00:08:48.080 And a firsthand reminder of what what Jews in Europe had to go through as a result of that time frame and how so many people stood by and watched it happen.

00:08:58.060 Nick Fuentes is still denying it, though he does it with a giggle.

00:09:01.560 Here's a sample of this guy who dined with Trump last week, Sot7.

00:09:05.020 Matt says, if I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies and Cookie Monster has 15 ovens, working 24 hours a day, every day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make six million batches of cookies?

00:09:21.860 I don't know.

00:09:22.640 That's a good question.

00:09:24.100 Hmm.

00:09:24.680 I don't know.

00:09:25.080 It certainly wouldn't be five years, right?

00:09:26.920 The math doesn't seem to add up there.

00:09:29.560 The math doesn't quite seem to add up there.

00:09:31.680 I don't think you'd result in six million, maybe two hundred to three hundred thousand cookies.

00:09:37.620 My God, Charles. 1.00

00:09:40.540 I mean, he's an idiot. 1.00

00:09:42.220 The absolute least that anyone in any position of influence or authority can do is not hang out with that guy. 1.00

00:09:51.900 And you focus quite rightly on his racism and his anti-Semitism. 0.63

00:09:57.800 He also says utterly appalling things about women. 0.68

00:10:00.480 He said in the past that the Taliban has it right and that women are essentially chattel. 0.99

00:10:08.260 We have in this country a profoundly robust First Amendment, and we should.

00:10:14.960 We, unlike most countries, are not going to arrest Nick Fuentes for saying what he just did.

00:10:21.860 And I support that.

00:10:22.980 As grotesque as I find everything he says and does, I support that. 0.69

00:10:26.980 It's not illegal to be a racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic person.

00:10:31.480 It's just illegal.

00:10:32.480 And it shouldn't be.

00:10:33.180 Employment decisions and so on.

00:10:34.540 But when you have the system that America has, when you allow pretty much all speech, you have a heightened responsibility to oppose the people who speak like that.

00:10:49.500 You have a heightened responsibility to refuse to associate with them and to call them out.

00:10:54.820 And that doesn't just apply to former presidents or CEOs or radio hosts.

00:11:00.420 That applies to everybody.

00:11:03.040 We in America are supposed to do with our society what other countries try to do with their laws.

00:11:10.040 And Donald Trump has spectacularly failed here.

00:11:14.260 He has rendered himself, in my view, ineligible to be the president of the United States again just with this act. 0.88

00:11:22.900 This guy is revolting.

00:11:25.320 He's a repudiation of the pluralist country in which we live and in which we aspire to live.

00:11:34.200 And, you know, if nothing else should convince people that Trump is now really living out a little soap opera on the margins that is divorced from the movement he claims to represent, it should be this.

00:11:47.200 A little bit more on this guy, Fuentes.

00:11:50.420 He's been labeled not forget the Anti-Defamation League, forget the Southern Poverty Law Center.

00:11:55.800 Those are those have become these far left groups.

00:11:58.200 But the Justice Department, which I realize has got its own controversies, but randomly throwing out labels until the the the recent controversy with the parents, hasn't typically traditionally been one of them.

00:12:12.420 They have labeled this guy a white supremacist.

00:12:14.620 The New York Post has called him a Holocaust denier.

00:12:17.180 He's cheered on the January 6th riot. 0.79

00:12:19.200 He he he opposes liberal values like feminism and LGBTQ rights because he views them as the quote, the bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed. 0.94

00:12:31.460 OK, he adamantly claims not to be a white supremacist, calling the term an anti-white slur.

00:12:37.980 Instead, positions himself as a Christian conservative, though there's nothing Christian or conservative about those views we just discussed.

00:12:45.780 He tries to pepper it all in a just joking manner, as you heard in the cookie shot, which is somewhat stomach turning to.

00:12:53.060 There was a question, a taping of his show in which an audience member asked him about how to respond to the guy's wife getting out of line, quote, getting out of line. 0.98

00:13:02.420 And Fuentes, this 24 year old moron who knows absolutely nothing about anything, responds by saying, quote, why don't you give her a vicious and forceful backhanded slap with your knuckles right across her face disrespectfully and make it hurt? 0.99

00:13:15.240 Just kidding, of course. 1.00

00:13:16.200 Just a joke.

00:13:17.100 I would never lay a hand on a woman unless she had it coming to your point about the misogyny. 1.00

00:13:21.500 He referred to Daily Wire columnist and podcast host Matt Walsh as a Shabbos gov race traitor because he works for Jewish people like Ben Shapiro. 0.52

00:13:31.520 And on and on it goes.

00:13:33.720 So here's the thing.

00:13:37.060 I.

00:13:38.580 I believe Trump when Trump comes out and says, I didn't know who that was.

00:13:42.540 I believe him because most people have no idea who Nick Fuentes is.

00:13:45.780 I'm in media.

00:13:46.500 You're in media.

00:13:47.340 I've covered him because he went after my friend and it made a it was dust up on Twitter.

00:13:53.020 Most people have no idea who that is.

00:13:54.400 And Trump's been kind of busy the past six years.

00:13:57.580 So I believe he didn't know him.

00:13:59.480 But he knew what Kanye West has said recently.

00:14:03.940 He had absolutely no screening process in place to make sure whoever Kanye was bringing was not deeply problematic.

00:14:10.480 Milo Yiannopoulos is a little controversial, too, for the same reasons.

00:14:13.940 Similar.

00:14:14.260 And it is alarming to me the prospect that Trump might have somehow been intentionally fanning a certain flame with a certain part of his base because it helps him, helps him get in the news, helps him generate controversy, etc.

00:14:30.180 Well, look, even if it's true that Trump didn't know who that was, it doesn't let him off the hook for a couple of reasons.

00:14:38.520 First, because he is not a random guy.

00:14:42.260 If you host a party, you say, let's meet at a restaurant and a friend of a friend brings Nick Fuentes along.

00:14:47.540 Maybe that's okay.

00:14:50.260 You say, I didn't know who it was.

00:14:52.160 I'd never have invited him.

00:14:53.960 He doesn't represent my views or my values in any way.

00:14:57.160 It's a little bit different when you're the former president of the United States.

00:15:01.620 You do have an obligation to screen your guests a lot more carefully than Trump did.

00:15:08.320 And I, for what it's worth, I think that should have included Kanye West as well, given his recent behavior.

00:15:14.400 That's right.

00:15:14.660 It also matters because the justification that he didn't know who he was notwithstanding, this isn't a problem that seems to befall other people.

00:15:24.980 It's not as if we wake up every morning and we read, oh, no, another white supremacist got into Greg Abbott's mansion and had dinner with him.

00:15:34.240 Oh, no, Governor DeSantis was caught once again with a known anti-Semite.

00:15:39.100 You know, Donald Trump is declared for president.

00:15:40.900 He is therefore eligible for a great deal of public scrutiny and comparison with his peers.

00:15:47.040 And his peers aren't doing this.

00:15:49.240 This is a problem that even if accidental only seems to happen to Trump.

00:15:53.920 And that is a problem, given his declared interest in becoming president again.

00:15:59.320 What's going on with the rise in in anti-Semitic comments and figures lately?

00:16:06.440 I mean, to me, Charles, it's like it's getting disturbing because the embrace of Kanye West, despite the numerous anti-Semitic comments he's made now.

00:16:16.200 I mean, he can't stop making anti-Semitic comments.

00:16:18.380 He has shown us who he is. 0.99

00:16:19.900 Kanye West is an anti-Semite. 0.95

00:16:21.620 He is. 0.98

00:16:22.500 Or he's just playing one on TV because every interview he gives, he says something that is anti-Semitic.

00:16:28.240 And Kyrie Irving, we had a long debate about him.

00:16:31.560 Jason Whitlock came on the show not long ago and said, look, you know, what did he do?

00:16:35.780 He's not the same as Kanye.

00:16:36.800 He tweeted out a link to a movie that has some anti-Semitic comments in it.

00:16:41.340 That's not the same.

00:16:42.360 And I gave him that point.

00:16:43.540 It's not the same as Kanye.

00:16:45.300 However, we've had some time now.

00:16:47.800 We've gone back. 0.99

00:16:48.500 My team, I had somebody, one of my producers watched the whole damn movie. 0.99

00:16:51.800 God bless Lauren. 1.00

00:16:53.360 She watched the whole thing.

00:16:54.620 She gave me a line by line on it.

00:16:56.460 And there is no question that this film is anti-Semitic to its core.

00:17:01.280 Kyrie Irving's defense of, well, under pressure and under threat of being kicked off his team or being suspended, he came out and said, well, I don't agree with the anti-Semitic parts.

00:17:09.260 Well, guess what?

00:17:09.780 It's entirely anti-Semitic.

00:17:11.740 The whole film is anti-Semitic. 0.99

00:17:13.640 It's about how blacks are the real Jews and all these Europeans pretending to be the real Jews are fakers and they've subjugated the black race. 0.99

00:17:25.160 And I'll just give you a couple more just so you understand, because I don't want to make you have to go back and watch it. 0.93

00:17:29.220 But it's absolutely disturbing.

00:17:33.120 And hold on.

00:17:33.780 I'm trying to find my my little memo where I outline or my my team outlined it.

00:17:37.480 But in any event, it goes on and on about the Jewish race and about how there was no Holocaust, that that's just one of the six million dead Jews is one of the many Jewish lies. 0.79

00:17:49.200 Kyrie Irving tweeted out a move, a link to this movie.

00:17:52.300 And then under pressure says, well, I don't agree with the anti-Semitic parts.

00:17:54.840 Oh, which was about the six million dead Jews about the Adolf Hitler quotes, which may or may not have been real, but are very anti-Jew.

00:18:02.020 Like, so you've got Kyrie, you've got Kanye, you've got Kanye tweeting out pictures of Kyrie Irving and you've got tens of thousands of people liking it.

00:18:12.860 Now you've got Fuentes and Milo and Kanye going to meet with the former president.

00:18:17.380 I don't know what's going on, but it's unsettling.

00:18:20.400 Yeah, that Hitler quote that I endorsed wasn't actually real.

00:18:26.040 There's not much of a defensive.

00:18:28.840 Look, I think we ought to put this into some context and then also look at where what's happening doesn't fit that context.

00:18:37.660 Conspiracy theories are as old as time.

00:18:40.860 Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are as old as time.

00:18:45.140 Unfortunately, it is one of the world's oldest prejudices, if not the oldest.

00:18:50.400 And America has always been a hotbed of conspiracy theories on the left and on the right.

00:18:58.300 As time progresses, the nature of the theories and the people who buy them changes.

00:19:04.700 But really, if you go back to the founding, you'll find a tendency toward conspiracy theories for precisely the reason that I mentioned earlier.

00:19:14.400 And that is that we do have this big, rambunctious country with free-flowing information and not a great deal of superintendents from the government or from the elites.

00:19:26.320 But I do agree with you that it is alarming that at the moment, this one does seem to be on the rise.

00:19:33.260 I'm not an expert in this area, but the one reason that I always arrive at is that people can now find these ideas quite easily on the Internet in a way that they would not have been able to 20 or 30 years ago.

00:19:50.580 And often they're packaged, which they weren't 20 or 30 years ago, in a really slick way.

00:19:57.940 You just described a movie.

00:20:00.640 I haven't watched it.

00:20:02.260 But that movie is probably pretty well produced because it doesn't take a great deal now to put out a product that looks legit.

00:20:09.440 All you really need is a 4K camera and a copy of Final Cut Pro and you can present your ideas in a manner that seems high quality.

00:20:24.900 Whereas if you look back at the sort of fringe conspiracy theories, especially fringe anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the 70s, 80s and 90s, they would come on badly photocopied paper or they would be typewritten or there would be one guy at a meeting who wasn't especially eloquent shouting about it.

00:20:48.200 And it's a feature of the modern world that we can now process information that is indistinguishable from what would previously have been sort of elite contrived information very quickly and very easily.

00:21:06.460 And I just don't find it especially surprising.

00:21:08.820 I find it extremely alarming and sad, but I don't find it especially surprising that one of the main veins of conspiracy theorizing that has come back to the fore, given that change, is anti-Semitism because it has been there for thousands of years.

00:21:25.680 I found my cheat sheet from Lauren on the film and just a couple of highlights, lowlights, what have you.

00:21:33.960 So Kyrie, in defending himself for tweeting it out, came out and said, I respect all walks of life.

00:21:42.240 The movie may have had some unfortunate falsehoods in it, some things that were questionable in there, untrue, some things.

00:21:49.940 But then went on to say, I cannot be anti-Semitic if I know where I come from.

00:21:55.280 OK, you look at the actual movie, you know what it says?

00:21:58.380 Because it has a quote, again, falsely, they say, according to the ADL, this is falsely attributed to Adolf Hitler.

00:22:06.900 I guess they know all of the Hitler quotes. 0.63

00:22:08.700 Who the hell knows?

00:22:09.820 But the point is, it appears in the movie as a real Hitler quote.

00:22:12.860 And this is what it says.

00:22:14.300 Because the white Jews know that the Negroes are the real children of Israel. 1.00

00:22:18.740 And to keep America's secret, the Jews will blackmail America. 1.00

00:22:23.160 They will extort America. 0.99

00:22:24.920 Their plan for world domination won't work if the Negroes know who they are. 1.00

00:22:31.920 OK, again, back to back to Kyrie. 0.96

00:22:34.620 I cannot be anti-Semitic if I know where I come from.

00:22:38.560 He's clearly been influenced by this movie and its lies.

00:22:42.840 And they've got a quote on the screen early on in the movie saying that the Jews have established five major falsehoods which work to conceal their nature and protect their status and power. 0.90

00:22:54.680 Like the Jews are Israelites. 1.00

00:22:57.180 Jesus Christ was a Jew. 1.00

00:22:58.680 Six million Jews were killed in a Holocaust during World War II.

00:23:01.900 Boom.

00:23:02.240 Just listed as one of the many lies that we've heard from Jewish people. 1.00

00:23:04.640 That all races are equal.

00:23:07.360 A lie told by Jewish people that the Jews are just another religious group.

00:23:11.320 And talking about how the Jewish slave ships brought our Western African Negro Bantus ancestors to slave ports owned by the Jewish Newport World Center of Slave Commerce off the east coast of North America. 0.88

00:23:24.620 The Jews falsified the history of the Holocaust in order to conceal their nature and protect their status and power. 0.99

00:23:29.340 I mean, I could keep going. 0.99

00:23:30.780 I mean, it's disgusting.

00:23:33.280 The debate about Kyrie is over.

00:23:35.440 As far as I'm concerned, the debate about Kanye is over.

00:23:38.240 The debate about Nick Fuentes has been over for some time.

00:23:41.440 In my view, these people should be shunned.

00:23:43.760 They should not be given a public forum.

00:23:46.200 If Kyrie Irving wants to believe this stuff in his head and play basketball really well, that's his business.

00:23:51.660 But given the platform that he has, if he's going to tweet this out, he ought to be held accountable for promoting these kinds of views.

00:23:58.200 I don't see any problem with doing that.

00:23:59.800 And Kanye, same.

00:24:01.160 By the way, the reports are that Kanye is running for president.

00:24:04.220 And the thing that really pissed off Trump in that meeting was he asked Trump to be his number two.

00:24:09.160 He wants Trump to be the vice president.

00:24:11.820 Which Trump isn't interested in, Charles.

00:24:14.340 I'm going to assume you don't want that as the GOP ticket.

00:24:17.580 I think that is a fair assumption on your part, that I don't want that as the GOP ticket in either configuration.

00:24:25.060 Kanye Trump or Trump, Kanye is out.

00:24:27.660 Doesn't matter.

00:24:28.280 There are there are many Republicans now sort of sniffing around the possible the possibility of running.

00:24:38.640 We had Rick Grinnell on the show not long ago.

00:24:40.960 He's a Trump, you know, loyalist.

00:24:43.300 And he was saying, we see you, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, you know, others.

00:24:49.760 I'm sure you could list, you know, Mike Pence, whomever.

00:24:51.600 We see you denying to us that you're running, but we know you're raising funds and you're getting ready to do it.

00:24:57.200 And he was basically saying, don't do it because you'll get crushed and it's going to hurt.

00:25:01.680 And you have a column up that doesn't say it exactly that way.

00:25:06.040 But you do say, don't run.

00:25:09.300 Don't do it.

00:25:10.080 To me, it seems addressed to pretty much most of the GOP other than Ron DeSantis.

00:25:15.220 You tell me.

00:25:16.360 But you're making a very good point and one that I've been making, too, which is anything close to a fractured GOP field outside of Trump and Trump wins.

00:25:23.460 Yeah, it's not limited to DeSantis.

00:25:29.560 I certainly wouldn't do that.

00:25:31.720 As I've said on my podcast, we don't know yet if DeSantis can make the jump.

00:25:36.380 I suspect he can and he has shown a great skill in leading Florida.

00:25:40.720 But it's always different being talked about as a presidential contender and being a presidential contender.

00:25:47.620 It's unclear whether or not DeSantis will be able to move to the national level with the same aplomb he moved to the governorship.

00:25:56.100 It's unclear what his views are on certain federal questions, foreign policy, immigration, trade, and so on.

00:26:03.580 And it would be premature to anoint him as the non-Trump nominee.

00:26:09.860 What I was doing, though, was saying, if you are peripheral, if your ceiling as a candidate is likely to be 2% or 3%, please don't run.

00:26:22.260 Because it is more likely that your doing so will allow Trump to sneak back in.

00:26:28.120 There's a paradox here in that there are quite a lot of people out there, some of them very decent,

00:26:33.560 who are desperate to prevent Trump from becoming the nominee, which is a cause that I share,

00:26:40.240 but who, if they were to run for president and fracture the non-Trump vote as it was fractured in 2016,

00:26:47.020 might end up making it much more likely that Trump would be the nominee.

00:26:52.720 If Trump had between 35% and 45% of the primary electorate, for example,

00:26:59.980 and the field was 17 to 20 people strong, you could see how that could split in a way that put him back in the race.

00:27:10.500 So my argument was, look, if you are the popular Republican governor of a blue state,

00:27:18.280 who has no constituency outside of that state, don't run.

00:27:22.800 If you are somebody who was a hero on the right 10, 15 years ago, but has done nothing of consequence since, don't run.

00:27:32.880 And if you're a really good person whose friends have convinced him or her that all it takes is to be a really good person, don't run.

00:27:42.200 Now, some people read this and they pretended that what I was saying is a good person can't win the nomination.

00:27:47.260 That's not what I'm saying at all.

00:27:48.480 What I was saying is that it's not enough.

00:27:51.520 Being morally upstanding is not enough if you don't have a likely base of support in the Republican Party.

00:27:59.340 Of course, I want the person who eventually emerges as a nominee to be morally upstanding.

00:28:04.480 But it's not enough just to say, well, I'm a good person.

00:28:07.880 Donald Trump is not a good person.

00:28:09.300 So I'm sure people will rally around me.

00:28:11.560 In fact, what is more likely to happen is that you and the 10 to 15 other people who decide to run without having a path let Trump back in.

00:28:20.300 And that's what I want to avoid.

00:28:22.800 I do think, and I'll reiterate, that we do have to have a proper nominating process, though.

00:28:27.440 And that means that those within the party who have a constituency, have proven themselves to be electable, who've governed well or legislated well, who speak for a particular wing or philosophy should absolutely get in and juke it out.

00:28:46.720 But it would be a huge institutional mistake at the moment for the Republican Party to throw another 20 people at the stage in the hope that this time it will turn out differently, because I really don't think it will.

00:28:59.160 Your comment, of course, we want a good person to get nominated and win.

00:29:03.800 It reminds me of, you know, we're talking about Trump and we're talking about Kyrie and Kanye and Fuentes.

00:29:09.980 You know, who could forget the Barack Obama days and in whose living room he, quote, launched his presidential campaign?

00:29:17.540 Bill Ayers, a domestic terrorist who bombed America repeatedly and lives were lost 100 percent. 0.73

00:29:22.720 And a cop was killed and a judge's home was attacked in the middle of the night.

00:29:25.960 And I interviewed the then little boy who was in that house at the time.

00:29:29.000 That's Barack Obama's buddy. 0.99

00:29:30.540 Not to mention Jeremiah Wright, goddamn America and so on. 0.98

00:29:34.020 Not to mention the influence that Louis Farrakhan reportedly had on him and so on. 0.98

00:29:37.880 You know, so it's like, what is a good person?

00:29:40.940 What is good character?

00:29:42.100 What is the test?

00:29:43.360 Is there anybody who we have who, you know, who's not going to it's not going to emerge that they have connections with these nefarious characters or that they've allowed?

00:29:53.300 You know, I don't know.

00:29:54.400 DeSantis, we don't know yet.

00:29:56.120 He hasn't been thoroughly vetted.

00:29:57.460 Glenn Youngkin, I'd be shocked to hear it.

00:29:59.320 But who knows?

00:29:59.880 He was in corporate America for long enough.

00:30:01.360 You can see him having sold a little bit of his soul.

00:30:03.400 I say it baselessly at the moment.

00:30:04.740 But I'm just like, what is a good person?

00:30:06.840 What are our standards now?

00:30:09.160 Well, I would say that conservatives quite rightly criticize Barack Obama for all of those associations.

00:30:15.840 And I think that that criticism should be maintained.

00:30:20.540 We don't want people who hang out with terrible anti-American figures or with people who reject American pluralism or with people who have fringe conspiracy theorizing views.

00:30:32.720 Now, I do understand that after a certain point, if one side gets away with it, the other is going to throw up its hands and say, I don't care.

00:30:42.200 And as I've said before on your show, I comprehend perfectly why when the question was Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, why a lot of people pulled the lever for Donald Trump.

00:30:58.020 I also understand for what it's worth, why people in 2020 pulled the lever for Joe Biden, even if in every other respect, they're more conservative leaning.

00:31:08.040 The difference here is that we are now in a position in which we don't have to do that.

00:31:13.560 We don't have to say this is a binary choice or, well, when it comes down to it, I didn't really have any other option.

00:31:21.800 We have a nominating process in front of us at which the questions that you just posed can be answered.

00:31:28.460 And at some point as a country, we do have to break this cycle of accepting people who are compromised simply because the other side is worse.

00:31:40.140 There is no good argument in my estimation for going back to the Trump well right now.

00:31:45.660 And what we just saw Trump do with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes is yet another reason why when it comes to evaluating all of the options that are on offer, we ought to weigh that in our calculation.

00:32:00.380 I'll say this in Trump's defense.

00:32:03.280 At least he only had the one meeting.

00:32:05.220 You know, he didn't sit in Jeremiah Church's Jeremiah Wright's church for years.

00:32:09.600 He wasn't tight with Nick Fuentes the way Barack Obama was with Bill Ayers.

00:32:15.080 All of that was so disturbing.

00:32:16.880 And they still hold Barack Obama up like he is the next coming.

00:32:21.700 I mean, they lionize this man on the left in a way that is totally disconnected from the facts and about the way that Barack Obama, according to the way he governed, feels about America.

00:32:31.360 You know, first thing he did was go on an apology tour.

00:32:33.420 His wife is still out there bashing the United States at every turn. 1.00

00:32:36.500 Now we're too racist to have accepted her hair the way she wanted to wear it. 1.00

00:32:40.200 She's been she was first lady for eight years. 0.96

00:32:42.620 If she ran for president, she would win.

00:32:45.460 She knows it.

00:32:46.320 And still, given the microphone, what does she do? 0.95

00:32:48.380 She bashes America. 1.00

00:32:49.580 Too racist to accept my natural hair.

00:32:51.340 Nope, not ready.

00:32:52.340 It's just they get a total pass.

00:32:54.220 And this is what this is why people get pissed off when Trump gets, you know, raked over the coals for having dinner with people who are controversies.

00:33:01.540 It's like the same people criticizing him on the left in these papers made excuses for everything I just listed.

00:33:07.760 You know, there there's a small sliver of people who have criticized both and who can sort of hold on to that ideological consistency.

00:33:16.660 All right.

00:33:17.200 Stand by Charles, because I want to get to speaking of the media, what they've done in the wake of this Colorado shooting.

00:33:22.320 It's it came out that the shooter says that he's non-binary.

00:33:28.360 And while the media has no idea what to do with this, because it was supposed to be somebody who hates the LGBT community, who listens to Tucker Carlson every night.

00:33:35.880 And it turns out we don't appear to have that as the shooter.

00:33:39.060 Um, suddenly they're no longer interested.

00:33:41.800 Charles C.W. Cook stays with us over the break.

00:33:44.300 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:33:47.100 Someone is trying to frame us.

00:33:49.360 Until our names are cleared.

00:33:51.900 We're fugitives from interval.

00:33:53.680 Like Bonnie and Clyde with better snacks.

00:33:57.140 Espionage.

00:33:57.780 You still as good a shot as you used to be.

00:34:00.860 Better.

00:34:01.600 Is there love language?

00:34:02.940 We like to walk that fine line between techno thriller and romantic comedy.

00:34:07.900 We make up our own rules.

00:34:10.180 NCIS Tony and Ziva now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:34:17.060 Charles, last week there was a shooting in Colorado at an LGBTQ nightclub at which five people were killed.

00:34:24.580 The left and the media spent the week telling us that this was a hate crime that was driven by people like Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire,

00:34:32.640 which is an outright slander of Matt Walsh, who has been standing up against mutilation of minors before they reached the age of majority by overzealous parents who want them to have sex change operations when they're too young to even drive or vote or drink or have a cigarette.

00:34:47.740 So they tried to blame it on the right wing, Tucker, Matt, usual suspects, and it was actually pretty outrageous what they were doing.

00:34:56.400 And Chris Ruffo, also in the New York Times, smeared as having led to this.

00:35:01.280 And then it comes out late Tuesday.

00:35:04.820 The defense lawyers for this person who is a man, it's a biological man, say that this person, and we don't name mass shooters on this program, is actually non-binary.

00:35:13.300 And then they say that this person prefers using the pronouns they and them.

00:35:18.660 Okay, they and them.

00:35:20.220 So now, so I'll just give you a sample of how the media, who like, all you need to do is say like a whiff of, like Demi Lovato, I'm non-binary, I'm they, them.

00:35:32.720 Immediately, they, them, she, he, whatever, non-binary, they're totally respectful because you're Demi Lovato, you're a star.

00:35:39.500 But when you shoot people, and they really were counting on you on being a right wing, white supremacist kind of person, they're really not so sure whether your non-binary thing is real.

00:35:51.840 Look at Alison Camerata and her guests on CNN.

00:35:56.060 In a footnote to a motion asserting legal privileges, the public defenders say, quote,

00:36:01.440 is non-binary.

00:36:03.920 I don't know what to say about that.

00:36:16.040 I mean, that's not anything that we had heard from his background.

00:36:18.800 You know, people have been looking into his background.

00:36:20.900 And I don't know if anybody here, are you guys lawyers?

00:36:23.280 I don't know what to say about that.

00:36:24.980 I mean, that's what he's now saying.

00:36:26.720 It sounds like they're trying to prepare a defense against a hate crimes charge.

00:36:30.260 That's the least of his problems, legally speaking, but it looks like they're trying to build some kind of sympathy or at least confusion on the question of whether or not this was purely motivated by hate.

00:36:39.380 I mean, that is what it sounds like.

00:36:42.120 Oh, really?

00:36:42.940 Oh, they have misgendered this person as well.

00:36:45.820 You're not allowed to say his or he once the person has declared themselves as non-binary.

00:36:50.880 It's fascinating the situational ethics that come up.

00:36:55.080 It's astonishing.

00:36:55.900 That is astonishing, given that we have been told that all it takes for it to be objectively, cosmically true is for somebody to declare it.

00:37:07.580 And now we learn that perhaps that's not the case.

00:37:11.640 I find this whole tendency depressing.

00:37:16.340 I've been complaining about this for a decade.

00:37:18.960 I think the correct person to blame in acts of political violence is the person who committed the act of political violence.

00:37:31.040 This is, as I've said too many times, probably on this podcast, a big and free country.

00:37:39.040 If you want to, you will always be able to find some connection between something somebody somewhere has said and something somebody somewhere has done.

00:37:51.520 But in almost all cases, you should not.

00:37:56.500 You should not for a couple of reasons.

00:37:58.800 First, because people who are mentally ill, as the shooters often are, not always, but often are, are going to glom on to something as a means by which to justify or explain their actions.

00:38:12.300 Now, sometimes it's very obviously beyond the pale.

00:38:14.720 The shooter at the Navy Yard, for example, thought that the government was sending him messages through the wall from a microwave.

00:38:22.360 But sometimes it's quotidian political content of left or right.

00:38:26.620 They pick it up.

00:38:27.320 It doesn't mean that it actually influenced them in any meaningful way.

00:38:30.840 It just means that they found it.

00:38:33.040 And in their insanity, they absorbed it.

00:38:36.720 The second reason is that ultimately, the purpose of pointing fingers is to shut people up.

00:38:45.780 Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times wrote the most astonishing column last week, in which she said at the outset, we don't know what the motive was.

00:38:55.300 The police have not established a motive.

00:38:57.760 And then having got that out of the way, she wrote a couple of paragraphs in which she blamed people by name.

00:39:04.440 She mentioned Ben Shapiro.

00:39:05.920 She mentioned Matt Walsh.

00:39:08.040 She mentioned Chris Rufo.

00:39:09.900 Despite there being no motive, these people explicitly were to blame.

00:39:14.180 Now, the reason that she did that, it's not because she has any evidence that one led to the other. 0.80

00:39:19.260 Not because she can draw a line between the two.

00:39:21.960 Not that it would even be fair to draw a line between the two.

00:39:26.660 But because she wants those people to be quiet.

00:39:29.460 She wants to add in a little friction. 1.00

00:39:31.160 So the next time they think of saying what they believe politically, in, it must be said, an area that has absolutely nothing to do with shooting up an LGBT club, they hesitate for a moment.

00:39:44.120 And that her side of the political aisle, ideologically or politically, or on a partisan basis, gains some advantage.

00:39:52.540 And this is not only revolting in and of itself in a free country, but it's so transparent because it's never done the other way around.

00:39:59.340 The most obvious connection that we have seen in the last five years was between the anti-Trump, anti-Republican rhetoric that cropped up in early 2017 and the shooting at the congressional baseball field,

00:40:15.160 where actual Republican lawmakers were targeted and targeted because they were writing, debating and voting on a bill that had been demonized.

00:40:26.900 And I wrote at the time that the shooter there still should be held responsible exclusively for what he had done,

00:40:35.460 because the alternative is telling people who disagree with the Republican Party in Congress about matters of great import that they need to be quiet.

00:40:46.620 And this is just not an acceptable way to run a free country.

00:40:49.640 We cannot have a system where people are expected to stay silent in case somewhere out there on the fringes, under a rock, there is a madman or a zealot. 0.87

00:41:01.580 If you stand up and say, look, I think this person should be killed.

00:41:05.680 Sure, you could be criticized for that. 0.73

00:41:08.280 If you are, what's the word?

00:41:10.860 If you are emphatic in your politics, you obviously should not be held liable.

00:41:17.640 Right back to the beginning of this country, we have had emphatic politics.

00:41:22.400 We used to burn people in effigy, for goodness sake, for their foreign policy views in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

00:41:31.740 So I think this is just an absolutely revolting habit.

00:41:35.000 I think that it is the worst sort of advantage taking.

00:41:42.320 And I wish to goodness that it would stop.

00:41:45.720 But if it's not going to stop, which it probably isn't, it just has to be ignored.

00:41:49.180 The one thing that many, many people who are just reasonable have criticized that they're now railing on is these drag queen shows for toddlers, you know, for preschool, for young school age children, because this LGBTQ facility was going to have some sort of drag queen show the next day. 0.70

00:42:13.220 And it is true that the names you mentioned, I many people at National Review and others have been critical of drag queen story hour for kids in the single digits who don't need any example of sexualized anything in front of them and certainly not of cross-dressing transgenderism.

00:42:33.120 And a lot of these shows are sexual in their presentation.

00:42:36.160 So, yeah, a lot of parents have said, you know what, if you're when I lived in Chicago, there was this great transvestite bar that you could go to.

00:42:45.840 And I'm telling you, you'd leave there very confused, male or female.

00:42:48.380 The these are biological men who did a show dressed as women and they were totally gorgeous.

00:42:53.760 That's fine.

00:42:54.660 I don't why.

00:42:55.920 Why take issue with people who are doing adult entertainment?

00:42:58.140 That's kind of fun.

00:42:58.860 It's kind of saucy.

00:42:59.700 It's racy.

00:43:00.360 We're talking about kids.

00:43:01.300 That's what the Daily Wire guys are talking about.

00:43:02.960 Chris Ruffo.

00:43:03.620 That's what they're talking about.

00:43:04.840 And yet you get people like NBC News senior reporter Ben Collins blaming the right wing for the Colorado shooting because you're not allowed to object to that because you're in danger.

00:43:15.180 What you're saying, if you object to that stuff, is trans lives don't matter.

00:43:19.980 Listen to this guy painting himself in false glory for his own approach to his reporting.

00:43:26.440 And at his wit's end that people critical of these things won't just shut up.

00:43:30.600 Here he is.

00:43:32.140 I do want to say, though, am I doing something wrong here?

00:43:38.440 Here are some headlines that I wrote the last six months.

00:43:42.680 Fueled by Internet's far-right machine, anti-LGBTQ threats shut down trans rights and drag events.

00:43:48.040 And I'm just wondering, what could I have done different?

00:43:52.000 Seriously, as reporters, what can we do different?

00:43:54.680 I am trying to thread this needle here.

00:43:56.980 I'm trying to say that this is happening.

00:43:59.460 This targeted stuff has real-life impacts.

00:44:02.240 But I think we have to have a come-to-Jesus moment here as reporters.

00:44:08.320 Are we more afraid of being on Breitbart for saying that trans people deserve to be alive?

00:44:12.580 Or are we more afraid of the dead people?

00:44:16.540 Because I'm more afraid of the dead people.

00:44:18.140 You're doing your job.

00:44:19.120 You're uncovering the truth.

00:44:20.460 These bodies are not in the ground yet.

00:44:22.140 Yeah.

00:44:22.280 And they're being used as political props right now.

00:44:26.340 Well, that last line was true. 0.79

00:44:28.620 Except he's got the perpetrator wrong.

00:44:32.120 I mean, look, if Ben Collins wants to improve himself, he should quit his job and go and live in a monastery. 1.00

00:44:37.400 The guy's a clown. 0.94

00:44:39.280 I would just ask what the mechanism is supposed to be here to prevent this. 0.98

00:44:46.820 As I've said, I don't see a line between A and B.

00:44:50.140 But let's assume that there is one.

00:44:53.100 And let's take a much more clear-cut example.

00:44:55.200 Because, as you pointed out, when people say that children should not be exposed to sexualized drag queen shows, they are not saying that drag queens in adult clubs should be shut down.

00:45:08.220 But let's take a much more clear-cut example.

00:45:10.380 Let's say abortion. 0.97

00:45:12.140 So I think abortion is killing.

00:45:15.080 Now, if somebody hears me say that, as they will, given that this show is going out to America, and then they shoot up an abortion clinic,

00:45:23.040 what am I supposed to do to prevent that?

00:45:26.460 The only conclusion I can come to is that I'm not supposed to say it.

00:45:32.620 Which is crazy.

00:45:34.740 And it's very self-evidently crazy to progressives when the tides are turned.

00:45:41.240 When somebody walked into the Family Research Council and opened fire, it would, of course, have been preposterous to say,

00:45:47.620 well, as a result, progressive groups are no longer allowed to talk about the importance of gay marriage.

00:45:54.280 When the congressional baseball shooter showed up at that field, it would have been preposterous to say,

00:45:59.140 well, there is no longer any justification for the Democratic Party to oppose the Republican repeal and replace plan for Obamacare. 0.94

00:46:09.580 I think it's just as ridiculous here.

00:46:11.860 I said this a few weeks ago with the Nancy Pelosi story. 0.85

00:46:14.460 There was a piece in the Washington Post written by Ashley Parker and others that said,

00:46:19.760 well, it was inevitable that Nancy Pelosi's husband would be attacked by a crazy nudist with a hammer because in 2010, the Tea Party vilified Nancy Pelosi.

00:46:28.700 Okay, let's assume that's true.

00:46:30.080 It's not. 0.95

00:46:30.900 It's absolutely ridiculous. 0.50

00:46:32.580 But let's assume that that is true. 0.82

00:46:34.840 Then what?

00:46:35.580 Then you're not allowed to run emphatic ads against the Speaker of the House, the most powerful position in our constitutional order. 0.97

00:46:45.480 This is extremely silly.

00:46:48.220 Ultimately, if you tell people who have strong, legitimate political views that say they're pro-life or they don't want sexualized content being fed to minors that they need to shut up or they will be blamed on television for violent acts, 0.76

00:47:04.160 I can promise you they're not going to shut up because the alternative is essentially just to give up on life, give up on politics, give up on free speech, give up on democracy.

00:47:13.640 And it's not going to happen.

00:47:15.180 So just, as I said earlier, it's going to get ignored and it should be.

00:47:20.580 Glenn Greenwald had a barn burner of a piece saying on Twitter,

00:47:25.580 what NBC permitted Ben Collins to do this week in exploiting the corpses in Colorado Springs with lie after lie, one baseless claim after the next is repugnant.

00:47:33.300 It sickens me. 0.96

00:47:34.720 He doesn't see LGBTs as humans, just weapons and mascots to exploit for his own aggrandizement. 0.95

00:47:41.820 It goes on to say that every poll shows media corporations and journalists are hated.

00:47:46.680 This is why Ben Collins won't be punished for trampling on these corpses with lies and baseless claims to get on TV.

00:47:51.980 And along with his colleague who did something similar, accused political enemies of murder.

00:47:56.660 That's their job and the public knows it.

00:48:00.200 So good.

00:48:01.280 So well said.

00:48:02.460 Much more to say to Charles.

00:48:04.700 What a pleasure.

00:48:05.260 Great to see you.

00:48:06.020 Thanks for coming on.

00:48:06.860 Thanks for having me.

00:48:08.620 And remember, folks, that you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

00:48:18.540 That's YouTube dot com slash Megyn Kelly. 0.85

00:48:21.680 If you prefer to get your news via audio podcast, you can follow and download.

00:48:25.060 Got to hit the download button.

00:48:26.260 Do that for me, would you?

00:48:27.600 On Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts for free.

00:48:32.420 Good deal.

00:48:32.880 Democracy has been a focal point in political talking points recently, like from Democrats claiming democracy may die as a result of the midterms this year.

00:48:45.880 Ta-da! 1.00

00:48:46.480 It's still alive because the Democrats did not lose both houses.

00:48:49.040 Well, our next guest is Shadi Hamid, and he knows a thing or two about democracy and rationality.

00:48:57.060 He's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the new book, The Problem of Democracy, America, the Middle East and the Rise and Fall of an Idea.

00:49:06.680 Welcome back to this show, Shadi.

00:49:08.420 Good to have you here.

00:49:09.440 Hi, Megan.

00:49:09.900 Thanks for having me.

00:49:10.600 It's my pleasure, and I just want to remind the audience that you are the person who was on the opposite side before we had video of Alan Dershowitz in what remains, I think, the favorite debate ever had on the Megyn Kelly show.

00:49:23.160 I have people stop me to this day, random, both sides of the aisle, saying that was the single greatest debate we've heard on the Middle East, on any program anywhere, and it's thanks to you and Alan.

00:49:34.320 Well, that's great to hear, to be the best debate that you've had.

00:49:39.680 Yeah, I really enjoyed it, so thanks for having me on again.

00:49:42.820 And wait, I should tell people, what episode was it, Steve Krakauer?

00:49:45.720 We have a clip of it.

00:49:48.140 It's episode 104.

00:49:50.000 You know what, we have a clip cut just for old time's sake.

00:49:51.920 Let's take a walk down that lane before we get down to business.

00:49:54.880 People can listen to why people loved it so much.

00:49:57.040 When we want to understand the current crisis, as you mentioned, Megan, the key turning point is the very heavy-handed police raid that we saw in Al-Aqsa Mosque.

00:50:09.640 As you mentioned, rubber bullets, stun grenades, so on, more than 300.

00:50:13.220 That was the excuse to juror.

00:50:15.360 That was the excuse to juror.

00:50:16.800 That was not the provocation.

00:50:18.160 This would have happened if there had been peace in Jerusalem. 0.80

00:50:21.200 Hamas does it every few years. 0.96

00:50:22.900 They just wait for an excuse.

00:50:24.020 And they're smart, and they're pushed by Iran to do it. 0.92

00:50:27.700 So they're going to keep doing it.

00:50:29.220 There's always going to be a next week.

00:50:30.020 Let him finish.

00:50:30.700 Go ahead, Shadi.

00:50:32.300 Okay, but fair enough, Alan.

00:50:34.500 But I think I would, at the very least, we should be able to condemn what Israel did. 1.00

00:50:39.440 I condemn it.

00:50:41.400 Extremely aggressive acts that we know are going to be extremely provocative.

00:50:48.520 Good stuff.

00:50:49.560 All such good stuff.

00:50:51.080 You know, it was interesting to me, because I read you suggested in your book that America's

00:50:58.600 kind of lost interest in the Middle East.

00:51:00.440 Why do you think that?

00:51:02.900 Yeah, it certainly has.

00:51:04.380 And I think, you know, part of it is the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

00:51:08.600 But I think maybe even a bigger part is at the start of the Arab Spring, you see this optimism,

00:51:15.040 euphoria.

00:51:15.400 I think Americans were looking to the Middle East for the first time and saying, oh, we

00:51:20.260 can relate to them.

00:51:21.400 They're fighting for freedom and democracy.

00:51:24.400 They're out on the streets.

00:51:26.080 And you might recall that, you know, 24-7, if you turn on the TV in 2011, people were talking

00:51:33.100 about this really optimistic moment in the Middle East.

00:51:36.660 But then it went dark.

00:51:38.800 It went downhill.

00:51:40.380 And now when we think about the Arab Spring, we think about a depressing thing that didn't 0.85

00:51:45.680 work out.

00:51:46.820 And there isn't a single surviving democracy from the Arab Spring.

00:51:51.760 We've seen the return of dictatorship throughout the Middle East.

00:51:55.340 So I think for a lot of Americans, they feel exhausted and they don't quite understand

00:52:00.480 what went wrong and why.

00:52:02.960 And I think that at a basic level, the Middle East is complicated.

00:52:06.580 It's hard to understand.

00:52:07.720 There's a lot going on.

00:52:09.680 And sometimes it's easier to look away.

00:52:11.900 I think the second thing, though, is that we have our own problems here at home with

00:52:16.460 the question of democracy.

00:52:18.260 So I think Americans generally, they're just looking inward.

00:52:22.000 And it's hard to focus so much of our attention to other societies and other cultures when we

00:52:27.920 feel like we're under threat right here in America.

00:52:31.360 You know, I think about the Arab Spring and I think about a lot of things about what happened

00:52:35.000 in Egypt, where it was like, yeah, oh, wait, no, wait, what are we getting?

00:52:38.440 Wait, what's happening?

00:52:39.520 Wait, we may not like the outcome of the democratic process.

00:52:42.000 Hold on.

00:52:43.080 I also think about Lara Logan.

00:52:45.060 What happened to her?

00:52:46.080 You know, that for me as a journalist, just watching my fellow journalists get so attacked,

00:52:49.620 trying to cover this movement in an earnest, honest way.

00:52:53.420 And then to be subjected to that awful violence.

00:52:55.500 It was just such a reminder that, you know, not everybody shares our exact values and not

00:53:01.420 not that those thugs spoke for all people in the Middle East, but just it was an example

00:53:05.640 of how women fare in the Middle East in many places.

00:53:08.780 And I have been thinking about it lately in connection with Iran and this weekend in connection

00:53:14.920 with China, you know, two places that have abysmal human rights records, but both of which

00:53:21.380 are crying for freedom right now, some collection of the citizenry crying out for democracy.

00:53:28.900 Literally in China over the weekend, that was the word that they used.

00:53:31.900 I wrote it down.

00:53:32.760 We want freedom.

00:53:34.120 Don't want dictatorship.

00:53:35.620 Want democracy.

00:53:37.240 Calling for Xi Jinping to step down, step down Communist Party because of the crazy COVID

00:53:42.240 zero policies there, which are once again going into authoritarian lockdown and effect.

00:53:48.120 And it just to me, it's it's it's inspirational to see these Chinese people come out and speak

00:53:54.520 out against a government that would absolutely hurt them, would absolutely hurt them.

00:53:59.520 And it is threatening them right now for doing that.

00:54:01.300 Same thing in Iran, where the people are being threatened and being told, you better watch 0.98

00:54:05.160 it.

00:54:05.580 You people who are speaking out in the wake of this young girl being being well, I mean,

00:54:10.320 her supporters say she was beaten to death.

00:54:12.300 And the Iranian authorities say that this young woman had a heart attack after she was

00:54:18.600 punished severely for not wearing her hijab the proper way.

00:54:21.260 In any event, same thing happening in both countries and same wrestle wrestling match with

00:54:25.840 like, but the human rights record.

00:54:27.520 Oh, but look at these real life human beings who want who want change.

00:54:30.620 What what's our role?

00:54:31.600 Well, I think it's a reminder to all of us as Americans that we have our flaws as a democracy,

00:54:39.940 we have our imperfections, but I think too often we take it for granted.

00:54:45.320 And I think it's useful to see what the alternative actually looks like, because that clarifies the

00:54:51.080 mind that for all of our flaws, America is better.

00:54:56.220 We are, you know, I'll just say it outright, morally and politically superior to any dictatorship

00:55:02.900 anywhere in the world.

00:55:04.520 And it it troubles me a bit.

00:55:06.500 Some folks on my side of the spectrum, you know, I still consider myself to be left of

00:55:12.120 center, although I'm a little bit heterodox.

00:55:14.320 But anyway, I think there was a lot of, I think, envy towards the Chinese model at the

00:55:21.040 start of the pandemic, where people were saying, look how good the Chinese are.

00:55:25.000 They're getting things done.

00:55:26.760 They're building these instant hospitals in four or five days.

00:55:30.200 If only we could be like them and having a strong, efficient leadership that takes COVID

00:55:36.420 seriously.

00:55:38.400 And but I think that if you look at the medium to longer term, dictatorships are fundamentally

00:55:44.160 weak because they can't alternate their leaders.

00:55:48.740 So when the leader is doing something good, people are happy.

00:55:52.540 It's great.

00:55:53.000 It's working well.

00:55:53.880 But then when the leader starts making irrational decisions or starts going in an absurd direction

00:56:00.320 like zero COVID, there's no way for citizens to undo the damage because there is no way

00:56:07.000 to vote.

00:56:07.640 There is no way to meaningfully choose your leaders.

00:56:11.380 And I just wish that we as Americans could really take that on on board.

00:56:17.360 It's good to be self-critical.

00:56:18.780 We've done, you know, we've done terrible things in our history, as we all know, but we've also

00:56:23.040 done pretty bad things abroad.

00:56:24.780 And, you know, I'm very critical of how the U.S. has dealt with the Middle East, that we

00:56:29.640 support authoritarian regimes in the region, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the list goes on.

00:56:35.300 But we can be self-critical without falling into self-doubt where we're always kind of self-flagellating

00:56:43.520 and saying, well, we're not in any position to talk about freedom and democracy abroad because

00:56:49.420 we don't have our own house in order or because Donald Trump was the president.

00:56:53.580 Then we have no moral authority.

00:56:56.740 We can't be moral leaders and talking about these issues.

00:57:00.160 And that's absurd.

00:57:01.300 We should be able to do two things at once, acknowledge our faults, but also say that our

00:57:06.980 model is better.

00:57:08.120 Why?

00:57:08.500 Because we are a democracy.

00:57:10.420 And I hope that now when we see these images in China and Iran, that people are really taking

00:57:15.620 this on board and maybe having a little bit of a different view.

00:57:19.580 I know that you you're a firm believer, not only in democracy, but in democratic outcomes

00:57:27.620 and in entrusting the entrusting them and putting your trust in them.

00:57:33.460 And I could relate very much to what you wrote about.

00:57:38.240 Looking at the nation, really, it was your dad after the 2016 election of Donald Trump and

00:57:45.920 saying I had I was on the air very late with Fox News that night.

00:57:49.420 Got home at maybe three in the morning and I was supposed to appear on live with Kelly

00:57:53.820 Ripa.

00:57:54.740 I don't even remember who her co-host was at the time.

00:57:56.520 I think it was Strahan, but he wasn't there that day.

00:58:00.000 And so it was moments after to me, moments after we had just announced that Donald Trump

00:58:04.260 was president.

00:58:05.140 And I went on that show and she was very, very upset prior to air that he had won.

00:58:10.600 You know, her husband is Latino and he had said very controversial things and she was

00:58:16.000 feeling under threat and her children and so on.

00:58:17.980 So we talked a bit backstage about it.

00:58:21.080 And then I went out onto the stage and said exactly to the public what I had said to her,

00:58:25.280 which is there's a whole faction of Americans who feels heard now for the first time in years

00:58:31.160 after having been ignored, really ignored.

00:58:34.640 And that's a good thing.

00:58:35.780 That's a good thing for America. 0.60

00:58:37.260 That's that bodes well for the outcome of America long term, no matter how you feel about

00:58:41.860 it short term and your dad, who's Muslim American and also Trump had said some controversial

00:58:48.200 things about Muslims.

00:58:49.100 And there were a lot of minority groups who were feeling like, oh, what does this mean

00:58:53.260 for me?

00:58:53.820 Women, too. 0.99

00:58:54.700 Right.

00:58:55.360 What does this mean for me?

00:58:56.960 He had that same long range perspective that net net, this is going to be a good thing

00:59:01.900 and democracies work.

00:59:04.380 Take us take us back to that moment.

00:59:07.160 Yeah, sure.

00:59:07.980 So as you said, my dad shared some wisdom with me the morning after Trump won.

00:59:13.200 So that night, like a lot of people in D.C., I was at an election party.

00:59:17.700 And what started out celebratory turned very dark and, you know, people started crying.

00:59:25.280 I got back home pretty late and I talked to my brother on the phone.

00:59:30.060 And basically, our biggest concern was our parents.

00:59:34.360 It wasn't so much about me and my brother.

00:59:36.140 It was about what might happen to mom and dad.

00:59:38.440 My mom wears the headscarf.

00:59:40.580 My parents are visibly immigrants.

00:59:43.520 They, you know, so and as you said, Trump did say some crazy things.

00:59:48.880 It's easy to forget just how focused Trump was on Muslims.

00:59:52.740 He had a sort of preoccupation with us and he had even, you know, entertained some really

00:59:59.160 frightening things that, thank God, didn't actually come to pass and was just kind of

01:00:03.120 campaign rhetoric.

01:00:03.960 But, you know, making reference to registering Muslims in a database, refusing to condemn the 0.98

01:00:10.220 internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

01:00:13.960 And then you start to wonder, like, what might actually happen to us as American Muslims?

01:00:19.220 So so I cried that night talking to my brother, thinking about, you know, my parents and our

01:00:25.600 future in the country.

01:00:26.920 And then I talked to my dad the following morning and he was just so chill about it because

01:00:31.720 he had seen the alternative.

01:00:33.520 He had faith in America, in part because he's an immigrant.

01:00:38.480 And I think in this sense, immigrants and the children of immigrants sometimes can see

01:00:43.380 something about America that people who have been here for generations might lose sight

01:00:49.440 of, which is our democracy has worked and it probably will continue to work.

01:00:56.380 It'll come under tension.

01:00:58.220 There'll be there'll be points where we doubt ourselves, but our democracy is resilient.

01:01:03.040 And I actually experienced the the four years of Trump with a kind of sigh of relief.

01:01:09.160 I mean, I thought Trump was pretty bad, but the worst case scenarios didn't come to pass

01:01:14.780 and we got through it.

01:01:16.780 And then Americans decided to make another choice and they voted for Joe Biden.

01:01:21.120 And that's the way I mean, that's exactly how it's supposed to work.

01:01:24.320 There's alternation of power.

01:01:26.260 You see someone for four years, then you assess the performance and then you can go a different

01:01:31.920 direction.

01:01:33.480 So that's why I think that I when I talk to, you know, fellow liberals, you know, I always

01:01:39.100 say, well, look, Donald Trump won fair and square in 2016.

01:01:42.860 We don't have to like it, but we have to respect the outcome instead of trying to delegitimize

01:01:49.040 it through Russiagate and through all the other things that were going on in those first

01:01:53.800 couple of years where at some basic level, we as liberals were not able to come to terms

01:01:59.440 with the reality of Donald Trump.

01:02:01.200 And we let him get in our minds and we became obsessed with Donald Trump.

01:02:05.340 I think still many people are right.

01:02:07.500 And I think for me, I draw a lot from my experiences in the Middle East, because as you alluded to

01:02:14.220 earlier, at the start of the Arab Spring in a country like Egypt, there was that euphoria.

01:02:20.360 But then in free and fair elections, a right wing religious movement, an Islamist movement,

01:02:28.080 the Muslim Brotherhood won consecutive elections.

01:02:31.300 And then I saw my relatives in Egypt.

01:02:34.160 I mean, I'm born, raised in Pennsylvania, but my family comes from Egypt.

01:02:38.020 I saw how my secular elite relatives in Egypt, they said basically, well, we like democracy

01:02:45.440 in theory.

01:02:46.300 But if democracy produces a right wing religious party, then actually maybe we don't like democracy

01:02:53.880 anymore.

01:02:54.360 And this is the danger of judging democracy solely on its outcomes, that you only like

01:03:00.200 democracy or accept it if your own party wins or if it leads to outcomes of progress and

01:03:07.420 liberalism or gender equality, whatever it might be.

01:03:10.040 These are all valuable things for for, you know, many Americans.

01:03:14.880 But democracy won't always lead in that direction.

01:03:18.860 And that's the whole point of democracy.

01:03:20.460 You don't know what's going to happen before people vote.

01:03:23.180 People can choose to go in other directions depending on their preferences.

01:03:28.620 So when I come back to the U.S. in 2014, after being in the Middle East during the Arab

01:03:33.600 Spring, I try to bring those lessons with me because I think there's something really

01:03:37.760 important there that we have to come to terms with election results that we don't like.

01:03:43.520 That is the test of democracy.

01:03:45.540 And Trump and Trump really forced us to contend with that.

01:03:50.800 And and how we'll get to that.

01:03:53.180 One second.

01:03:53.600 But I want one point I wanted to make is this is why I think it's so important to have the

01:03:58.940 executive branch be small in power as the founders intended.

01:04:02.260 They never wanted a strong executive.

01:04:04.500 They had they had fled that they didn't want another king.

01:04:08.660 And the legislative branch seeds fights over student debt, loan, quote, forgiveness and covid emergencies,

01:04:18.080 quote, unquote, never ending at its own peril.

01:04:20.700 It is meant to be a very strong, robust branch of government.

01:04:24.140 And it's also one in which we have so much more say over which we have so much more say.

01:04:29.420 Right.

01:04:29.900 Because we elect those House of Representative congressmen and women every two years. 1.00

01:04:34.860 They answer directly to us.

01:04:36.960 They come from our town.

01:04:38.200 They're supposed to represent our values.

01:04:40.240 The Senate longer, but still powerful, important positions.

01:04:44.400 And we should not be electing a king.

01:04:47.320 And when there is executive overreach, which there certainly was during the Obama administration,

01:04:52.280 and I would say to a lesser extent, but still present during the Trump administration, we

01:04:56.620 must revolt.

01:04:57.740 We must stand up and say, no, you're small.

01:05:01.740 You are the least important figure in this government, not the most important.

01:05:05.380 And we're letting that go under president after president.

01:05:09.280 It's getting dangerous.

01:05:13.300 Yeah, I totally agree.

01:05:15.780 And this is part of when the state is so strong that it it it makes every election feel like the most important election of your lifetime.

01:05:25.480 And that's something that we heard in the lead up to our own midterms a few weeks ago.

01:05:30.440 Everyone was freaking out, or at least a lot of people were freaking out, especially on Twitter, saying democracy would die.

01:05:37.560 And there was only one choice at the ballot box and all of this.

01:05:41.440 And part of the reason people feel that level of intensity is because whoever does win control of the Senate or in 2024 control of the presidency

01:05:53.040 really does have a lot of power to change things and to try to transform the broader culture of the nation.

01:06:03.120 So we have to find ways to lower the stakes.

01:06:06.400 Elections shouldn't feel so existential.

01:06:10.480 And then the question is, how do we find a way to maybe not so much weaken the state, but let's just be careful.

01:06:17.720 Not everything should be about the federal government, because that is going to mean that we're perpetually afraid of election outcomes.

01:06:26.880 We're always going to freak out if the other party wins.

01:06:30.660 Most things should not depend on the federal government.

01:06:32.980 The vision was that the entire federal government would be small.

01:06:36.620 The executive branch within it would be the smallest and the least powerful.

01:06:39.540 But that for the most part, the powers would be reserved to the states and we have these 50 or the time 13, whatever labs, laboratories where we could each find a way to live within our own whatever value judgments, cultures, approach to legislation, the police state and so on.

01:06:55.960 And that's what we've been doing.

01:06:57.480 Right. That's why New York is so different from Texas.

01:07:00.240 But somehow we've gotten we've ceded authority to this, you know, no particular man I'm thinking of, but just this sort of out of control executive monster who's king like and his approach to everything.

01:07:12.780 And we're allowing it.

01:07:14.200 We're allowing it to the point where we get this scared.

01:07:17.280 We ran this by not long before the election.

01:07:19.060 This is Michael Beschloss, presidential historian on MSNBC, who lost his mind, lost his mind in advance of the midterms.

01:07:25.480 Chris, six nights from now, we could all be discussing violence all over this country.

01:07:33.220 We could be six days away from losing our rule of law and losing a situation where we have elections that we all can rely on.

01:07:41.400 In 50 years from now, if historians are allowed to write in this country and if there are still free publishing houses and a free press, which I'm not certain of.

01:07:51.020 But if that is true, a historian will say, what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.

01:08:04.780 We're on the edge of a brutal authoritarian system and it could be a week away.

01:08:10.660 Shadi.

01:08:11.260 Wow.

01:08:11.680 Come on.

01:08:15.000 OK, I'm speechless.

01:08:16.320 I actually hadn't seen that clip before, so I'm glad that you shared it.

01:08:19.540 I mean, I've seen I saw some crazy talk in the lead up.

01:08:23.160 I did not see that. 0.99

01:08:24.500 That is that's ridiculous. 0.99

01:08:26.080 It's bonkers. 0.99

01:08:27.900 These historians, whether historians will be allowed to write in the future, whether our children will be arrested or even killed.

01:08:36.120 But I think that even though that might be an extreme example, that general vibe was actually quite mainstream.

01:08:42.720 And that's why, you know, I tell folks, if anyone tells you that this is the most important election of your lifetime, you should immediately be skeptical of that person.

01:08:52.960 That person has lost their sense of proportion and reality.

01:08:57.320 And this is, I think, part of what Trump does to people.

01:09:01.460 He just like burrows himself into your mind and you can no longer analyze things objectively.

01:09:08.360 But I think people also like the thrill of having an enemy.

01:09:11.540 So Michael Betchloss there.

01:09:12.940 He probably felt like he was a revolutionary.

01:09:15.420 He's actually facing the possible end of the American Republic.

01:09:20.520 That can be an exciting feeling that you're actually standing up and you're the one along with your, you know, with your compatriots.

01:09:29.300 You're going to save America.

01:09:31.160 That is an exciting thing.

01:09:33.600 And people want enemies.

01:09:36.060 That's how they increasingly define themselves.

01:09:38.540 They find an opponent.

01:09:39.960 They delegitimize that opponent.

01:09:41.920 They talk about how the world is about to end and democracy can't democracy shouldn't actually be that way because in a two party system, Republicans will eventually win either on the presidential level or retaking the Senate in the future.

01:10:01.460 So when people say, well, oh, if only we could have a permanent Democratic majority, that's also a red flag.

01:10:08.440 No one should want a permanent majority from the Democratic Party or the Republican Party because that would mean one party rule.

01:10:18.120 And democracy at its core is about alternation of power.

01:10:23.180 You have different choices every four years.

01:10:26.900 So it's just really troubling to see that kind of rhetoric.

01:10:29.800 And I hope that now that we've seen that democracy didn't end with the midterms.

01:10:35.740 And I don't know if you felt this way, but it felt kind of anticlimactic.

01:10:39.200 People were raising all these worst case scenarios.

01:10:43.620 And then the midterms went along.

01:10:46.340 There were no major, major issues in terms of voter intimidation.

01:10:52.280 And people voted for the status quo.

01:10:53.620 Sorry, they didn't.

01:10:56.380 And people, yes, agreed with you on the voting processes, but also people voted for the status quo.

01:11:01.180 There was actually no major change.

01:11:03.240 Yes, Republicans won control of the House, but just barely.

01:11:05.540 The American electorate was like, we're just going to hold.

01:11:08.640 We're pretty much going to hold.

01:11:10.240 We don't want to blink check anymore for President Biden, but we're not ready for some big sweeping change the other way.

01:11:14.820 And I do think that part of that vote was based on election denialism, which is one of your things.

01:11:21.420 You didn't like it when the Democrats did it to Trump.

01:11:23.620 You didn't like it when Trump did it to Biden.

01:11:25.940 And there's certainly, we saw from the exit polls, was a pushback by the American people saying, we're over that.

01:11:32.400 Again, I want to get to that in one second.

01:11:33.680 But before we do, let's hit this point.

01:11:37.500 You have made the point when you say, like, when somebody says it's the most important election of our lifetime, stop listening to that person.

01:11:42.900 Like that, that's rhetoric that isn't true and you don't need.

01:11:46.500 And you make two other similar points, which I thought were interesting.

01:11:49.760 Number one, don't be like Shaddy.

01:11:52.200 Don't cry over an election.

01:11:54.660 That's you saying that.

01:11:56.840 You should not be crying over an election.

01:11:59.040 And that politics should not be your life.

01:12:02.420 That that's not a healthy thing.

01:12:03.740 Can you expand on those points?

01:12:06.220 Yeah, yeah.

01:12:06.900 Now, look, so I do feel a little bit sheepish that I cried that night when Trump won.

01:12:12.480 No, no, I mean, look, no, and it's not because I think that men should cry as much as they want.

01:12:17.940 But my issue was I shouldn't have cried over an election because that's not what you shouldn't define your life around a particular election result.

01:12:29.020 You should be nervous about elections, concerned.

01:12:32.020 You should do whatever you can to help produce a better outcome by voting and organizing.

01:12:36.620 But at the end of the day, if your fellow Americans go in a different direction, you don't have to like it, but you have to respect it.

01:12:44.600 So I think that, you know, as I said, like when I talked to my dad the following morning, he was just chill.

01:12:49.120 He's also generally a kind of chill person.

01:12:51.120 That's just his general demeanor.

01:12:52.680 But I think that's a good way of living your life when it comes to politics, that life is elsewhere.

01:12:59.660 The things that you should cry about are, you know, family, friends, love, the things that really matter, the things that orient your life.

01:13:10.520 And those shouldn't be midterm elections, especially a midterm.

01:13:14.660 Like, you know what?

01:13:15.660 So when you're in defense, you didn't cry over the midterm.

01:13:18.380 So you're good.

01:13:19.140 True.

01:13:19.580 That is true.

01:13:20.940 Exactly.

01:13:21.560 That's a bridge too far.

01:13:22.560 And yeah, yeah.

01:13:24.000 So I think that it is it goes back to this.

01:13:28.420 People are looking for meaning in their lives.

01:13:30.900 They want to feel like they're part of a tribe, that they belong to something bigger than themselves.

01:13:35.620 And increasingly, politics gives them a way to feel that.

01:13:41.380 And I think part of that has to do with the decline of traditional religion in America.

01:13:45.920 It's a bit of a different topic, but it is worth noting that as our country has become more secular and for the first time in a record in American history, church attendance has gone below 50%.

01:13:57.860 So a growing number of Americans don't have any way to anchor themselves, to orient themselves around something bigger.

01:14:06.200 And also, you know, people are waiting to build families, to have kids, and sometimes they're not even doing that.

01:14:12.680 So there is a real vacuum.

01:14:15.400 And what are people filling that vacuum with?

01:14:17.640 Increasingly, with these new political ideologies, whether it's anti-Trump resistance or hyper-wokeism, the list goes on.

01:14:27.640 But also on the right, you know, whether white nationalism and these kind of nativist approaches that are very, in my view, contrary to the American idea, which is not about being part of a particular ethnicity.

01:14:41.520 It's about believing in the American idea, and that should be open to everyone.

01:14:45.700 But the fact that we see right and left going in these somewhat crazy directions, it shows that people feel that something is wrong, and they don't know how to express it, and they don't have the normal channels of religion, family, and community to absorb those feelings.

01:15:05.500 And I think that's a real problem.

01:15:07.440 Obviously, there's no solution to that unless we have a religious awakening, but that's where we're at.

01:15:12.400 I mean, I hope we do.

01:15:13.460 I think you're right.

01:15:14.560 This vacuum that's been created has been filled with a bunch of false idols, and it's no accident that depression and anxiety and suicidality are at all-time highs.

01:15:24.640 People are feeling that void, the absence of relationships, friendships, things that matter, church values.

01:15:32.840 What is church?

01:15:33.480 What do you get out of church every week?

01:15:35.200 Yes, a connection to God, a chance to be closer to, for me, Jesus, but whoever it is that you're there to talk to and what you believe in, but also values.

01:15:45.320 Your church, your mosque, your temple, they tend to reinforce a set of values that you then hope will imprint on your children.

01:15:51.780 You hope will back up what you've already been teaching your children.

01:15:54.800 You don't do any of that.

01:15:55.940 What do you have?

01:15:56.340 Your kids sit on the device every day of worship instead of being with his or her family, taking the walk there or the drive there, doing the donuts or the brunch afterward or whatever it is, the Shabbat dinner.

01:16:07.840 It could be anything, but these rituals take time and they require thought, consideration, to some extent love.

01:16:17.340 And you remove all that at your own peril and at the peril of the larger community not to get started on the bowling leagues and the Boy Scouts and the, you know, whatever clubs, elk club, all those things, which are in the rear view now, too.

01:16:33.480 So this is why one of the reasons why I love your writing, Shadi.

01:16:37.200 I love reading you on Twitter and I love the book because you're a deep thinker and you raise these issues and give us reason to just sort of pause, like your comment that you need to think about your people across the aisle with whom you disagree as your opponents, not your enemies.

01:16:51.780 I want to pick up on that and we'll get to this election denialism and how important this is with a very viral exchange that you had on MSNBC right after this quick break.

01:17:01.320 Don't go away.

01:17:03.480 So, Shadi, on the subject of your adversaries on the political front are your opponents, but it's not particularly instructive or helpful to think of them as your enemy, as your enemies.

01:17:19.620 And you had an interesting exchange.

01:17:21.360 This is not the viral one.

01:17:22.380 I'll get to that one in a second.

01:17:23.380 But you had an interesting exchange with Jen Psaki about this very issue.

01:17:27.220 And the left has very much been I mean, the Dark Brandon speech where the president of the United States basically said everyone's an ultra MAGA person on the right and demonize people who are pro-life and just the sweeping rhetoric, which then bit by bit he kind of tried to dial back.

01:17:43.560 But it was too late.

01:17:44.300 And, you know, Hillary Clinton, the deplorables and all that stuff. 0.97

01:17:48.000 You had an interesting exchange with Jen Psaki about this.

01:17:51.480 It's SOT 14.

01:17:53.540 So there's what, 74 million Trump supporters, voters.

01:17:57.820 We can't just wish them away.

01:17:59.720 They're not going to disappear.

01:18:00.940 So then we have to find a way to live with them, even if we think they're bad people, even if we think they're a threat to everything we hold dear, because what what's the other option that's in front of us?

01:18:14.240 I would love to hear how the Morning Joe panel responded to that.

01:18:17.720 Well, what do you mean?

01:18:18.800 What what are the other options?

01:18:20.560 Like, hmm, let's give it some thought.

01:18:24.320 Yeah, well, you know, what's interesting about that clip is that I was attacked on both sides.

01:18:29.800 So, you know, some folks on the right thought that I was saying that all 74 million Trump voters are bad people.

01:18:37.780 What I was trying to say is that even if we think they're bad people, you know, I'm on MSNBC, so I'm speaking primarily to a left leaning audience.

01:18:46.200 And I want to drive home, I think, a very fundamental point is that people are allowed to be bad.

01:18:53.900 They're allowed to have ideas that you think are abhorrent.

01:18:57.740 That doesn't that doesn't take them outside the fold of being American.

01:19:02.880 They're still our fellow American citizens.

01:19:05.980 You know, a lot of people think I have bad opinions.

01:19:09.440 So, you know, I'm pro choice. 0.98

01:19:11.720 So, you know, some people think that I might support, you know, killing, killing babies or whatever it might be. 0.99

01:19:18.820 But still, that's fine. 0.65

01:19:19.940 People can believe their deeply held convictions without saying that you are like you're outside of the American circle, so to speak.

01:19:31.040 And if if someone is an American citizen, they have a right to vote, they have a right to express their preferences.

01:19:38.000 And and this is something I really, you know, I really try to emphasize in my work and in the book in particular, which is in a democracy, you shouldn't see your opponents as enemies.

01:19:49.500 I mean, as you said, once we start to see them as enemies, then we start going along a dangerous path, because if you see them as enemies, then you want to defeat them.

01:20:02.400 You don't think in terms of coexistence, you think that we need to accumulate power to defeat the other side, whether it's through dominating the media or having only one basic approach in universities of making sure that a Trump supporting person isn't hired for a faculty position.

01:20:24.080 You start to see things in that way or that you shouldn't date Republicans or have them in your friend group.

01:20:30.000 And I don't I don't I don't want to see that happening because that's not going to work.

01:20:34.680 That's not a sustainable solution. We are a divided society.

01:20:38.460 There will there will be Republicans and Democrats.

01:20:42.980 And that's the world that we live in.

01:20:45.760 And we disagree on foundational issues.

01:20:47.920 And that's OK. I don't want consensus or unity.

01:20:51.280 And this is actually one thing I get a little bit worried about, too, which is when people say that democracy should produce unity or consensus.

01:21:00.000 It should only produce those things if there is a consensus.

01:21:03.120 But clearly, we as Americans don't agree on on some pretty basic things.

01:21:09.180 And that's OK. We have to learn to live with deep difference.

01:21:12.980 OK, let me ask you. So it sounds good in theory, but let's put it into practice, picking up on a story that we reported in our first hour when it comes to the Colorado shooting.

01:21:24.740 Mass shooting last week in which five people were dead and some 19 others injured at an LGBTQ nightclub.

01:21:32.700 I discussed with Charles C.W. Cook how some on the left totally irresponsibly blamed people like Matt Walsh, who did the film.

01:21:40.120 What is a woman over at The Daily Wire to the point where they they've now had to retract their reports. 1.00

01:21:44.740 They were so egregiously wrong.

01:21:45.980 I'll give you one from the Daily Kos that published a false report last week.

01:21:50.560 The writer Lauren Sue published a piece with the headline Matt Walsh only upset, quote, more people weren't killed at Club Q.

01:21:59.500 Twitter takes highlight GOP hypocrisy.

01:22:04.020 So that's Matt.

01:22:06.060 Matt Walsh did not say anything of the kind in her little quote.

01:22:09.220 She was quoting a critic of Matt Walsh's who was also grossly misrepresenting him.

01:22:15.900 The critic said he's not upset that someone shot up a gay bar.

01:22:19.520 He's upset more people weren't killed. 0.94

01:22:21.440 He has a bloodlust for the murder of LGBTQ people. 1.00

01:22:24.640 He's doubling down on it once more of it. 1.00

01:22:26.480 That's absolutely disgusting.

01:22:27.860 It was a quote by a civil rights attorney, Alejandra Caraballo.

01:22:30.920 It's made up.

01:22:31.820 It's a lie and it's defamatory.

01:22:33.500 And if I were Matt Walsh, I would sue that person immediately, immediately, and she would be terrified because I'd win and I wouldn't let up.

01:22:42.180 There'd be no settlement.

01:22:43.220 She would she would go down submissive so that I understand why Matt Walsh was very angry.

01:22:48.980 And the Daily Kos was they wound up having to retract that report because it was so wrong.

01:22:54.040 So while Walsh tweets out the following.

01:22:59.680 Leftists are using a mass shooting. 0.98

01:23:01.960 This is all he actually said are using a mass shooting to try and blackmail us into accepting the castration and sexualization of children. 0.96

01:23:10.400 His big thing is with children messing with the children and gender. 0.99

01:23:14.120 These people are just beyond evil.

01:23:16.520 I have never felt more motivated to oppose everything they stand for with every fiber of my being. 1.00

01:23:22.140 Despicable scumbags. 0.98

01:23:23.520 Now, this is not in the in the shoddy school of political discourse I see, but I also feel for Matt Walsh and understand fully his anger and need to retreat to his corner of, you know, of the fight. 0.99

01:23:39.720 Right. So it's like when you're looking across the aisle and that's who's staring you down, telling the world that you want dead people in the LGBTQ community, just making up life. 1.00

01:23:50.140 Right. So how do you because like you're you're at the 500 feet level or 30,000 foot and he's down like street fighting saying sounds good in theory, but that's not the way it actually works.

01:23:58.660 Yeah, look, it's understandable, certainly, that he would be very exercised about this.

01:24:06.400 And this is, you know, this demonization is something where people are basically tying you to a killing.

01:24:12.040 It's hard to get a lot worse than that. Right.

01:24:14.280 And you can think that Matt Walsh has terrible ideas without saying that he's somehow vaguely responsible for the broader environment in which a killing happens.

01:24:24.980 And so, you know, I totally I totally get that. I guess I would say to folks like Matt Walsh is, you know, you have specific critics.

01:24:34.180 They are a small minority who say these egregious things about you. Don't generalize that to everyone who's woke.

01:24:41.520 I'm very critical of the woke myself, but woke people have a right to express their wokeness.

01:24:46.660 And if they win elections on a local level and they want to promote these these ideas, then the only solution is to beat them at the ballot box.

01:24:56.640 We can't just say that this whole group is despicable because once you think they're despicable, then I worry then it's not too far of a step to say that you won't accept an election result.

01:25:08.920 If a woke person wins an election, let's say he hasn't done that.

01:25:14.140 He's being personally attacked. And it wasn't just by these lunatics at the Daily Coast or this so-called civil rights attorney.

01:25:19.800 I'd like to see her what she's actually done. But The New York Times went after him by name.

01:25:24.240 And so did many others on the left try to blame.

01:25:27.200 Meanwhile, there's absolutely zero zero zero zero proof that this shooter ever read a single word produced by Matt Walsh or a movie that he made zero.

01:25:36.700 What we know about that shooter is that they are allegedly non-binary.

01:25:40.840 We know that this person had a father who is very anti-gay.

01:25:44.740 The quotes are awful from this person's father.

01:25:48.500 But that's all we know.

01:25:51.380 Like there's no. So if I were being attacked by those folks as having blood on my hands for my political commentary about an issue that's very, very fair game.

01:26:00.060 What how do we treat children? Other countries have already said these procedures should be banned under age 18.

01:26:04.940 It's not like we're, you know, he's advocating for something way outside the mainstream.

01:26:09.120 We're already outside the mainstream as America.

01:26:11.360 Like I get his anger and I don't I don't I could never look at Matt Walsh and say, you've got to take the high road.

01:26:16.360 Don't demonize your you've been demonized.

01:26:18.660 But you need to not demonize and extrapolate these attacks, which came from many corners on all of the woke.

01:26:26.360 Right. Because like I just I feel his pain.

01:26:29.080 Well, I mean, very valid point.

01:26:33.760 I guess I just wouldn't want people to extrapolate and think that this is representative of the Democratic Party.

01:26:40.960 Well, that's true.

01:26:41.960 I just worry about generalizations.

01:26:44.060 But of course, people can we do generalizations all the time.

01:26:47.700 And certainly so sometimes people criticize me for extending too much generosity to my opponents.

01:26:57.320 So if I'm talking about, you know, MAGA Republicans, I say, well, you know, we got to talk to them, listen to what they have to say, understand their grievances.

01:27:04.580 And then they and then my critics say, well, Shadi, they would never extend that generosity to you.

01:27:10.220 They would never give you the benefit of the doubt.

01:27:13.380 So why are you taking this high road or why don't you fight fire with fire?

01:27:19.920 I mean, at some point we have to break the chain.

01:27:22.240 And I'm not asking Matt Walsh to do that.

01:27:24.580 But on the national level, if we're talking about groups and organizations and voters on a collective level, I think each and every one of us has to do whatever we can to lower the stakes.

01:27:38.180 And, you know, I could just as easily, I think, you know, I do tend to focus some of my ire on the left of center because that's generally the audience that I'm primarily speaking to.

01:27:48.560 But, you know, when I talk to folks on the right, I think it is worth reminding people that a majority of Trump voters still believe that the election in 2020 was stolen in some way from Donald Trump.

01:28:05.020 So there is a majority of Republicans, not not just Trump.

01:28:08.320 It's not even just the MAGA core.

01:28:10.320 It's Republicans.

01:28:11.720 Yes, exactly.

01:28:13.040 So clearly, you know, as much as we want to criticize the left for being bad and woke and all of that, if you're some you know, if if someone's on the right, they should focus on their own side, because in the end, we have more influence over our own families, communities and friends.

01:28:31.140 Those are the people more likely to listen to us.

01:28:34.620 So at some level, self-criticism is the way forward, self-awareness, where we say, is our own side willing to accept Democratic outcomes if the other party wins?

01:28:48.460 So if Biden or Kamala, well, that's almost impossible to imagine happening.

01:28:52.920 But whoever wins in 2024, if a Democrat wins, Republicans also have to get better when it comes to saying if Biden or someone like him wins or some woke lefty, if they win fair and square, then that is something we have to live with.

01:29:08.920 We have to respect it. It's legitimate, just as I say to folks on the left, if Trump wins, God forbid, in 2024 fair and square, then we have no choice but to accept that result.

01:29:21.100 So I think each side has I get that.

01:29:23.540 But I think but I think you also point out in the book, you got to it's a chance to regroup.

01:29:28.440 You have to be patient.

01:29:30.040 That's the beauty of democracy is you get another bite at the apple.

01:29:32.560 You know, it's not a it's not not elected president for life or congressman or senator for life.

01:29:36.620 So it's your chance to reorganize, double down and work to get that person out.

01:29:41.420 And he's more at the street fighting level, like making sure that these people don't don't get elected.

01:29:47.340 I've never heard a street fighter.

01:29:49.360 Yeah, no, no, no. And there are there's a place for everybody, depending on what your skill set is.

01:29:53.640 I I talk about this with my friends at church, you know, like here I'm on this show and I'm dropping F bombs and I'm I am occasionally attacking, you know, usually I don't do whole groups, but I'm not a fan of the woke people.

01:30:04.280 Like and then I'm in church, you know, and I wonder if there's an inconsistency there.

01:30:09.660 I have I've thought about it, but I actually have settled on the fact that there isn't like there's a role for what I do, even within my own religion.

01:30:17.200 But let's talk about election denialism, because I do think this is interesting.

01:30:20.580 There's no question the Republicans have been doing it.

01:30:22.360 They were sent a message in this last midterm election.

01:30:24.680 Will they listen? Remains to be seen.

01:30:27.160 Do you think it's interesting?

01:30:28.200 The whole party's not rallying behind the Carrie Carrie Lake thing.

01:30:31.540 Most of like moved on. That's her fight. 0.99

01:30:34.500 They'll let it play out. But you don't hear about that on Fox News all day.

01:30:39.080 But you got into a dispute, a debate, I should say, with Mehdi Hassan back on MSNBC about whether he would accept the election results if Trump or someone like him wins in 2024.

01:30:53.180 It's like about a minute 30.

01:30:54.980 So it's a good clip. We cut it long for a reason.

01:30:57.600 Listen to this.

01:30:58.140 What are you actually suggesting we do if Trump wins fair and square?

01:31:04.480 Let's forget about any like foul play or anything like that.

01:31:06.940 If he wins in 2024, what are you going to do?

01:31:10.520 Are you going to respect that result?

01:31:14.600 I mean, I don't accept the premise of your question.

01:31:16.720 If he wins in 2024, let's forget the foul play.

01:31:19.280 How can I forget the foul play when right now the Republican Party is trying to change state legislature rules, voting rules?

01:31:27.620 Shadi, right now they are taking steps to make sure that the 2024 election is not a free and fair election.

01:31:33.060 You keep just pushing that away.

01:31:35.060 You're not willing to accept that outcome then.

01:31:38.220 That's concerning to me.

01:31:39.240 I'm willing to accept an outcome of a free and fair election.

01:31:44.500 Shadi, as of right now, do you believe the 2024 election will be a free and fair election if black people are denied the right to vote, if there is racist gerrymandering continues, if election workers are threatened with death?

01:31:54.860 Black people have been, the vote has been taken away from them?

01:31:58.520 It's the first you've heard the black voters are being disenfranchised in America.

01:32:03.240 This is exaggerated rhetoric that is, that it's raising the existential stakes.

01:32:08.480 And what I would like each of us to do is to try to lower the temperature.

01:32:13.460 You're not willing to do that.

01:32:14.540 Okay, when you raise the specter of a fascist threat, it justifies taking extraordinary measures to suppress that threat.

01:32:22.880 And that's why sometimes people like the idea of suppressing democracy in order to save it.

01:32:27.460 We think that so much is at stake that we have to do anything it takes to prevent Trump or someone like him from winning in 2024.

01:32:36.100 That can lead to overreach.

01:32:37.960 I worry your rhetoric can lead us to do things we shouldn't do in a democratic context.

01:32:44.500 So good.

01:32:46.560 Well done, sir.

01:32:48.280 Thank you.

01:32:50.180 Did you get blowback on that on that exchange?

01:32:53.860 Oh, yes, certainly.

01:32:54.800 I mean, some people liked it a lot.

01:32:57.760 And it was like an interesting sort of Rorschach test in that respect, that depending on what side you're on, you might think, oh, my God, Shadi doesn't acknowledge that black people are apparently being taken away, the right to vote is being removed from them.

01:33:15.180 But then obviously, more reasonable folks understand that it's not right to say that black folks don't have the right to vote.

01:33:24.360 And that that exaggeration doesn't help anyone.

01:33:26.760 But yeah, I got attacked a lot after that.

01:33:28.660 And just listening to that exchange again, that was it's intense.

01:33:33.140 It's intense.

01:33:33.820 But look, I mean, Maddie and I, we've been friendly in the past.

01:33:37.760 It got a little bit tense this time.

01:33:40.380 I get where he's coming from.

01:33:42.720 I don't want to doubt that he feels very strongly about these things.

01:33:46.580 And he's in this state of alarm.

01:33:48.400 A lot of people are.

01:33:50.480 But that doesn't mean it's right.

01:33:52.100 And that doesn't mean that it's the right way to approach politics.

01:33:57.040 And what can I say?

01:33:59.480 I mean, that's why I was so surprised when he would say something like, oh, well, black people are being denied the right to vote because then then the election results aren't going to.

01:34:12.180 Then you're already deciding ahead of time that 2024 is not going to be a free election.

01:34:17.360 You're saying that already the results are are going to be tampered with because it's an unfair playing field, so on and so forth.

01:34:26.120 So it only leads to one conclusion, which is not accepting the worst case scenario for him and for me, too, which is Trump winning in 2024.

01:34:36.400 He sounded just like Stacey Abrams.

01:34:38.480 And of course, you know, black turnout in Georgia was at record levels despite all these threats that we heard, despite her lawsuit claiming that black voters had been entirely disenfranchised by the laws down there.

01:34:49.620 He sounded like Stacey Abrams and who was the original election denier, she and Hillary Clinton.

01:34:53.640 But then there's no question Trump took it next level.

01:34:56.580 He took it next level as he does everything and amazingly wound up convincing the majority of the Republican Party that he did not, in fact, lose the last election.

01:35:09.480 I don't know what it's going to take to make people move on from that.

01:35:13.500 Even if you like Trump, that issue is a killer.

01:35:16.040 That is a dead issue.

01:35:17.340 It's a bad issue for Republicans.

01:35:18.840 We'll see whether they listen as we approach now the presidential politics season.

01:35:25.620 Shadi, well done.

01:35:26.820 Really appreciate talking to you.

01:35:28.460 Love every exchange we have.

01:35:29.760 And the book is well worth the read.

01:35:31.660 It's called The Problem of Democracy, and it's available right now.

01:35:34.900 Hope to see you again soon.

01:35:36.120 Thanks for having me, Megan.

01:35:36.820 I would love to hear from you guys on your thoughts on today's show.

01:35:41.020 Email me, Megan at M-E-G-Y-N-K-E-L-L-Y dot com.

01:35:45.340 This week, we're going to have the Ruthless guys back. 0.74

01:35:47.140 Plus, our friend Dan Wooden will be here to talk Harry and Megan and more.

01:35:50.280 Download, follow us on YouTube, and we'll see you tomorrow.

01:35:54.600 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

01:35:56.480 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:36:06.820 We'll see you tomorrow.

The Megyn Kelly Show - November 28, 2022

Left Turns on Democracy, and Rise of Anti-Semitism in Culture, with Charles C.W. Cooke and Shadi Hamid ｜ Ep. 442

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