On this week s episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, Megyn talks about her Thanksgiving trip to Holland, Kanye West and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes s visit to Mar-A-Lago, and the latest on the Aurora shooting at a Colorado nightclub.
00:03:16.540Plus, the latest from Dr. Fauci, he's still going.
00:03:19.640He 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.
00:03:29.440He can't remember anything now that there's dollars and cents on the line.
00:03:32.260Also, 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.
00:03:48.420Okay, later we're going to get to Shadi Hamid, who's going to come on.
00:03:51.900You may remember he had a fantastic debate.
00:03:53.920People still stop me on the street to talk about this with Alan Dershowitz on Israel and Gaza last year.
00:04:36.060And 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.
00:04:45.580You 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.
00:04:53.440But 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.
00:05:07.540We've done a deep dive on this guy in preparation for today.
00:05:11.020We've done a lot of reporting on him in the past.
00:05:13.180There is no question this is a raging, raging anti-Semite and white nationalist, though he denies the latter.
00:05:21.380And Trump is now basically saying, well, I didn't know him.
00:05:23.900So how are people supposed to process this before we get into the details on this guy?
00:05:28.620Well, 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.
00:05:42.400He should not have been near a former president.
00:05:47.360He shouldn't be anywhere near anyone who wants to represent the whole country, which is the role that the president is obliged to play.
00:05:58.360But 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,
00:06:10.580or 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.
00:06:32.180What did this do for the Republican Party?
00:06:35.260Once 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.
00:06:52.940We're talking about him because he did something at worst terrible and at best careless.
00:07:00.880And I just hope that people have tired of this at long last.
00:07:05.260I don't know if they've tired of it, but I think people should understand that it's a very big deal.
00:07:10.560I realize Trump is not sitting in the White House right now, but he's already declared his candidacy.
00:07:15.000He's an ex-president and he's beloved by huge sections of the country.
00:07:20.100And 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.
00:07:30.000I mean, this guy's anti-Semitic and pro-white comments to the exclusion of all their groups go way back.
00:07:40.080And the thing about Shapiro is what first brought him into my orbit because I'm friends with Ben and it was downright alarming.
00:07:46.820A 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.
00:07:59.900And then I think there was a second video where he attacked that figure again.
00:08:04.420And Fuentes celebrated it, saying, oh, look, I just killed Ben Shapiro and was gleeful about it.
00:08:10.540And then he tried to get in Ben Shapiro's face, wanting to know why Ben didn't want to debate him.
00:08:14.840Well, Ben's weird like that when you threaten his life and pretend to murder him.
00:08:19.540He 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.
00:08:29.840And 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.
00:08:39.660By the way, as I mentioned at the top of the show, just came back from the Anne Frank Museum, deeply stirring, disturbing, moving.
00:08:48.080And 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.
00:08:58.060Nick Fuentes is still denying it, though he does it with a giggle.
00:09:01.560Here's a sample of this guy who dined with Trump last week, Sot7.
00:09:05.020Matt 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?
00:10:34.540But 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.
00:10:49.500You have a heightened responsibility to refuse to associate with them and to call them out.
00:10:54.820And that doesn't just apply to former presidents or CEOs or radio hosts.
00:11:25.320He's a repudiation of the pluralist country in which we live and in which we aspire to live.
00:11:34.200And, 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.
00:11:47.200A little bit more on this guy, Fuentes.
00:11:50.420He's been labeled not forget the Anti-Defamation League, forget the Southern Poverty Law Center.
00:11:55.800Those are those have become these far left groups.
00:11:58.200But 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.
00:12:12.420They have labeled this guy a white supremacist.
00:12:14.620The New York Post has called him a Holocaust denier.
00:12:19.200He 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.
00:12:31.460OK, he adamantly claims not to be a white supremacist, calling the term an anti-white slur.
00:12:37.980Instead, positions himself as a Christian conservative, though there's nothing Christian or conservative about those views we just discussed.
00:12:45.780He tries to pepper it all in a just joking manner, as you heard in the cookie shot, which is somewhat stomach turning to.
00:12:53.060There 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.
00:13:02.420And 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?
00:13:17.100I would never lay a hand on a woman unless she had it coming to your point about the misogyny.
00:13:21.500He 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.
00:14:14.260And 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.
00:14:30.180Well, 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.
00:14:38.520First, because he is not a random guy.
00:14:42.260If you host a party, you say, let's meet at a restaurant and a friend of a friend brings Nick Fuentes along.
00:15:14.660It 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.
00:15:24.980It'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.
00:15:34.240Oh, no, Governor DeSantis was caught once again with a known anti-Semite.
00:15:39.100You know, Donald Trump is declared for president.
00:15:40.900He is therefore eligible for a great deal of public scrutiny and comparison with his peers.
00:15:49.240This is a problem that even if accidental only seems to happen to Trump.
00:15:53.920And that is a problem, given his declared interest in becoming president again.
00:15:59.320What's going on with the rise in in anti-Semitic comments and figures lately?
00:16:06.440I 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.
00:16:16.200I mean, he can't stop making anti-Semitic comments.
00:16:56.460And there is no question that this film is anti-Semitic to its core.
00:17:01.280Kyrie 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.
00:17:13.640It'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.
00:17:25.160And 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.
00:17:33.780I'm trying to find my my little memo where I outline or my my team outlined it.
00:17:37.480But 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.
00:17:49.200Kyrie Irving tweeted out a move, a link to this movie.
00:17:52.300And then under pressure says, well, I don't agree with the anti-Semitic parts.
00:17:54.840Oh, 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.
00:18:02.020Like, 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.
00:18:12.860Now you've got Fuentes and Milo and Kanye going to meet with the former president.
00:18:17.380I don't know what's going on, but it's unsettling.
00:18:20.400Yeah, that Hitler quote that I endorsed wasn't actually real.
00:18:28.840Look, I think we ought to put this into some context and then also look at where what's happening doesn't fit that context.
00:18:37.660Conspiracy theories are as old as time.
00:18:40.860Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are as old as time.
00:18:45.140Unfortunately, it is one of the world's oldest prejudices, if not the oldest.
00:18:50.400And America has always been a hotbed of conspiracy theories on the left and on the right.
00:18:58.300As time progresses, the nature of the theories and the people who buy them changes.
00:19:04.700But really, if you go back to the founding, you'll find a tendency toward conspiracy theories for precisely the reason that I mentioned earlier.
00:19:14.400And 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.
00:19:26.320But I do agree with you that it is alarming that at the moment, this one does seem to be on the rise.
00:19:33.260I'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.
00:19:50.580And often they're packaged, which they weren't 20 or 30 years ago, in a really slick way.
00:20:02.260But that movie is probably pretty well produced because it doesn't take a great deal now to put out a product that looks legit.
00:20:09.440All 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.
00:20:24.900Whereas 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.
00:20:48.200And 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.
00:21:06.460And I just don't find it especially surprising.
00:21:08.820I 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.
00:21:25.680I found my cheat sheet from Lauren on the film and just a couple of highlights, lowlights, what have you.
00:21:33.960So Kyrie, in defending himself for tweeting it out, came out and said, I respect all walks of life.
00:21:42.240The movie may have had some unfortunate falsehoods in it, some things that were questionable in there, untrue, some things.
00:21:49.940But then went on to say, I cannot be anti-Semitic if I know where I come from.
00:21:55.280OK, you look at the actual movie, you know what it says?
00:21:58.380Because it has a quote, again, falsely, they say, according to the ADL, this is falsely attributed to Adolf Hitler.
00:22:06.900I guess they know all of the Hitler quotes.
00:22:34.620I cannot be anti-Semitic if I know where I come from.
00:22:38.560He's clearly been influenced by this movie and its lies.
00:22:42.840And 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.
00:23:07.360A lie told by Jewish people that the Jews are just another religious group.
00:23:11.320And 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.
00:23:24.620The Jews falsified the history of the Holocaust in order to conceal their nature and protect their status and power.
00:25:16.360But 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.
00:28:09.300So I'm sure people will rally around me.
00:28:11.560In 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.
00:28:22.800I do think, and I'll reiterate, that we do have to have a proper nominating process, though.
00:28:27.440And 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.
00:28:46.720But 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.
00:28:59.160Your comment, of course, we want a good person to get nominated and win.
00:29:03.800It reminds me of, you know, we're talking about Trump and we're talking about Kyrie and Kanye and Fuentes.
00:29:09.980You know, who could forget the Barack Obama days and in whose living room he, quote, launched his presidential campaign?
00:29:17.540Bill Ayers, a domestic terrorist who bombed America repeatedly and lives were lost 100 percent.
00:29:22.720And a cop was killed and a judge's home was attacked in the middle of the night.
00:29:25.960And I interviewed the then little boy who was in that house at the time.
00:29:43.360Is 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?
00:30:09.160Well, I would say that conservatives quite rightly criticize Barack Obama for all of those associations.
00:30:15.840And I think that that criticism should be maintained.
00:30:20.540We 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.
00:30:32.720Now, 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.
00:30:42.200And 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.
00:30:58.020I 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.
00:31:08.040The difference here is that we are now in a position in which we don't have to do that.
00:31:13.560We 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.
00:31:21.800We have a nominating process in front of us at which the questions that you just posed can be answered.
00:31:28.460And 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.
00:31:40.140There is no good argument in my estimation for going back to the Trump well right now.
00:31:45.660And 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.
00:32:16.880And they still hold Barack Obama up like he is the next coming.
00:32:21.700I 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.
00:32:31.360You know, first thing he did was go on an apology tour.
00:32:33.420His wife is still out there bashing the United States at every turn.
00:32:36.500Now we're too racist to have accepted her hair the way she wanted to wear it.
00:32:40.200She's been she was first lady for eight years.
00:32:42.620If she ran for president, she would win.
00:32:54.220And 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.
00:33:01.540It's like the same people criticizing him on the left in these papers made excuses for everything I just listed.
00:33:07.760You know, there there's a small sliver of people who have criticized both and who can sort of hold on to that ideological consistency.
00:33:17.200Stand by Charles, because I want to get to speaking of the media, what they've done in the wake of this Colorado shooting.
00:33:22.320It's it came out that the shooter says that he's non-binary.
00:33:28.360And 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.
00:33:35.880And it turns out we don't appear to have that as the shooter.
00:33:39.060Um, suddenly they're no longer interested.
00:33:41.800Charles C.W. Cook stays with us over the break.
00:34:10.180NCIS Tony and Ziva now streaming on Paramount Plus.
00:34:17.060Charles, last week there was a shooting in Colorado at an LGBTQ nightclub at which five people were killed.
00:34:24.580The 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,
00:34:32.640which 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.
00:34:47.740So they tried to blame it on the right wing, Tucker, Matt, usual suspects, and it was actually pretty outrageous what they were doing.
00:34:56.400And Chris Ruffo, also in the New York Times, smeared as having led to this.
00:35:04.820The 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.
00:35:13.300And then they say that this person prefers using the pronouns they and them.
00:35:20.220So 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.
00:35:32.720Immediately, they, them, she, he, whatever, non-binary, they're totally respectful because you're Demi Lovato, you're a star.
00:35:39.500But 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.
00:35:51.840Look at Alison Camerata and her guests on CNN.
00:35:56.060In a footnote to a motion asserting legal privileges, the public defenders say, quote,
00:36:26.720It sounds like they're trying to prepare a defense against a hate crimes charge.
00:36:30.260That'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.
00:36:55.900That 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.
00:37:07.580And now we learn that perhaps that's not the case.
00:37:11.640I find this whole tendency depressing.
00:37:16.340I've been complaining about this for a decade.
00:37:18.960I think the correct person to blame in acts of political violence is the person who committed the act of political violence.
00:37:31.040This is, as I've said too many times, probably on this podcast, a big and free country.
00:37:39.040If you want to, you will always be able to find some connection between something somebody somewhere has said and something somebody somewhere has done.
00:37:51.520But in almost all cases, you should not.
00:37:56.500You should not for a couple of reasons.
00:37:58.800First, 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.
00:38:12.300Now, sometimes it's very obviously beyond the pale.
00:38:14.720The shooter at the Navy Yard, for example, thought that the government was sending him messages through the wall from a microwave.
00:38:22.360But sometimes it's quotidian political content of left or right.
00:38:33.040And in their insanity, they absorbed it.
00:38:36.720The second reason is that ultimately, the purpose of pointing fingers is to shut people up.
00:38:45.780Michelle 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.
00:38:55.300The police have not established a motive.
00:38:57.760And then having got that out of the way, she wrote a couple of paragraphs in which she blamed people by name.
00:39:09.900Despite there being no motive, these people explicitly were to blame.
00:39:14.180Now, the reason that she did that, it's not because she has any evidence that one led to the other.
00:39:19.260Not because she can draw a line between the two.
00:39:21.960Not that it would even be fair to draw a line between the two.
00:39:26.660But because she wants those people to be quiet.
00:39:29.460She wants to add in a little friction.
00:39:31.160So 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.
00:39:44.120And that her side of the political aisle, ideologically or politically, or on a partisan basis, gains some advantage.
00:39:52.540And 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.
00:39:59.340The 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,
00:40:15.160where actual Republican lawmakers were targeted and targeted because they were writing, debating and voting on a bill that had been demonized.
00:40:26.900And I wrote at the time that the shooter there still should be held responsible exclusively for what he had done,
00:40:35.460because the alternative is telling people who disagree with the Republican Party in Congress about matters of great import that they need to be quiet.
00:40:46.620And this is just not an acceptable way to run a free country.
00:40:49.640We 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.
00:41:01.580If you stand up and say, look, I think this person should be killed.
00:41:05.680Sure, you could be criticized for that.
00:41:10.860If you are emphatic in your politics, you obviously should not be held liable.
00:41:17.640Right back to the beginning of this country, we have had emphatic politics.
00:41:22.400We used to burn people in effigy, for goodness sake, for their foreign policy views in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
00:41:31.740So I think this is just an absolutely revolting habit.
00:41:35.000I think that it is the worst sort of advantage taking.
00:41:42.320And I wish to goodness that it would stop.
00:41:45.720But if it's not going to stop, which it probably isn't, it just has to be ignored.
00:41:49.180The 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.
00:42:13.220And 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.
00:42:33.120And a lot of these shows are sexual in their presentation.
00:42:36.160So, 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.
00:42:45.840And I'm telling you, you'd leave there very confused, male or female.
00:42:48.380The these are biological men who did a show dressed as women and they were totally gorgeous.
00:43:04.840And 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.
00:43:15.180What you're saying, if you object to that stuff, is trans lives don't matter.
00:43:19.980Listen to this guy painting himself in false glory for his own approach to his reporting.
00:43:26.440And at his wit's end that people critical of these things won't just shut up.
00:44:53.100And let's take a much more clear-cut example.
00:44:55.200Because, 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.
00:45:08.220But let's take a much more clear-cut example.
00:46:11.860I said this a few weeks ago with the Nancy Pelosi story.
00:46:14.460There was a piece in the Washington Post written by Ashley Parker and others that said,
00:46:19.760well, 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.
00:46:48.220Ultimately, 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,
00:47:04.160I 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.
00:47:15.180So just, as I said earlier, it's going to get ignored and it should be.
00:47:20.580Glenn Greenwald had a barn burner of a piece saying on Twitter,
00:47:25.580what 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.
00:48:08.620And 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.
00:48:18.540That's YouTube dot com slash Megyn Kelly.
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00:48:32.880Democracy 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.
00:48:46.480It's still alive because the Democrats did not lose both houses.
00:48:49.040Well, our next guest is Shadi Hamid, and he knows a thing or two about democracy and rationality.
00:48:57.060He'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.
00:49:10.600It'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.
00:49:23.160I 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.
00:49:34.320Well, that's great to hear, to be the best debate that you've had.
00:49:39.680Yeah, I really enjoyed it, so thanks for having me on again.
00:49:42.820And wait, I should tell people, what episode was it, Steve Krakauer?
00:49:50.000You know what, we have a clip cut just for old time's sake.
00:49:51.920Let's take a walk down that lane before we get down to business.
00:49:54.880People can listen to why people loved it so much.
00:49:57.040When 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.
00:50:09.640As you mentioned, rubber bullets, stun grenades, so on, more than 300.
01:05:15.780And 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.
01:05:25.480And that's something that we heard in the lead up to our own midterms a few weeks ago.
01:05:30.440Everyone was freaking out, or at least a lot of people were freaking out, especially on Twitter, saying democracy would die.
01:05:37.560And there was only one choice at the ballot box and all of this.
01:05:41.440And 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
01:05:53.040really does have a lot of power to change things and to try to transform the broader culture of the nation.
01:06:03.120So we have to find ways to lower the stakes.
01:06:06.400Elections shouldn't feel so existential.
01:06:10.480And then the question is, how do we find a way to maybe not so much weaken the state, but let's just be careful.
01:06:17.720Not everything should be about the federal government, because that is going to mean that we're perpetually afraid of election outcomes.
01:06:26.880We're always going to freak out if the other party wins.
01:06:30.660Most things should not depend on the federal government.
01:06:32.980The vision was that the entire federal government would be small.
01:06:36.620The executive branch within it would be the smallest and the least powerful.
01:06:39.540But 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.
01:06:57.480Right. That's why New York is so different from Texas.
01:07:00.240But 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.
01:07:14.200We're allowing it to the point where we get this scared.
01:07:17.280We ran this by not long before the election.
01:07:19.060This is Michael Beschloss, presidential historian on MSNBC, who lost his mind, lost his mind in advance of the midterms.
01:07:25.480Chris, six nights from now, we could all be discussing violence all over this country.
01:07:33.220We 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.
01:07:41.400In 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.
01:07:51.020But 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.
01:08:04.780We're on the edge of a brutal authoritarian system and it could be a week away.
01:08:27.900These historians, whether historians will be allowed to write in the future, whether our children will be arrested or even killed.
01:08:36.120But I think that even though that might be an extreme example, that general vibe was actually quite mainstream.
01:08:42.720And 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.
01:08:52.960That person has lost their sense of proportion and reality.
01:08:57.320And this is, I think, part of what Trump does to people.
01:09:01.460He just like burrows himself into your mind and you can no longer analyze things objectively.
01:09:08.360But I think people also like the thrill of having an enemy.
01:09:41.920They 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.
01:10:01.460So when people say, well, oh, if only we could have a permanent Democratic majority, that's also a red flag.
01:10:08.440No one should want a permanent majority from the Democratic Party or the Republican Party because that would mean one party rule.
01:10:18.120And democracy at its core is about alternation of power.
01:10:23.180You have different choices every four years.
01:10:26.900So it's just really troubling to see that kind of rhetoric.
01:10:29.800And I hope that now that we've seen that democracy didn't end with the midterms.
01:10:35.740And I don't know if you felt this way, but it felt kind of anticlimactic.
01:10:39.200People were raising all these worst case scenarios.
01:11:10.240We don't want to blink check anymore for President Biden, but we're not ready for some big sweeping change the other way.
01:11:14.820And I do think that part of that vote was based on election denialism, which is one of your things.
01:11:21.420You didn't like it when the Democrats did it to Trump.
01:11:23.620You didn't like it when Trump did it to Biden.
01:11:25.940And there's certainly, we saw from the exit polls, was a pushback by the American people saying, we're over that.
01:11:32.400Again, I want to get to that in one second.
01:11:33.680But before we do, let's hit this point.
01:11:37.500You 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.
01:11:42.900Like that, that's rhetoric that isn't true and you don't need.
01:11:46.500And you make two other similar points, which I thought were interesting.
01:12:06.900Now, look, so I do feel a little bit sheepish that I cried that night when Trump won.
01:12:12.480No, no, I mean, look, no, and it's not because I think that men should cry as much as they want.
01:12:17.940But 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.
01:12:29.020You should be nervous about elections, concerned.
01:12:32.020You should do whatever you can to help produce a better outcome by voting and organizing.
01:12:36.620But 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.
01:12:44.600So I think that, you know, as I said, like when I talked to my dad the following morning, he was just chill.
01:12:49.120He's also generally a kind of chill person.
01:12:52.680But I think that's a good way of living your life when it comes to politics, that life is elsewhere.
01:12:59.660The things that you should cry about are, you know, family, friends, love, the things that really matter, the things that orient your life.
01:13:10.520And those shouldn't be midterm elections, especially a midterm.
01:13:24.000So I think that it is it goes back to this.
01:13:28.420People are looking for meaning in their lives.
01:13:30.900They want to feel like they're part of a tribe, that they belong to something bigger than themselves.
01:13:35.620And increasingly, politics gives them a way to feel that.
01:13:41.380And I think part of that has to do with the decline of traditional religion in America.
01:13:45.920It'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%.
01:13:57.860So a growing number of Americans don't have any way to anchor themselves, to orient themselves around something bigger.
01:14:06.200And also, you know, people are waiting to build families, to have kids, and sometimes they're not even doing that.
01:14:15.400And what are people filling that vacuum with?
01:14:17.640Increasingly, with these new political ideologies, whether it's anti-Trump resistance or hyper-wokeism, the list goes on.
01:14:27.640But 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.
01:14:41.520It's about believing in the American idea, and that should be open to everyone.
01:14:45.700But 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.
01:15:14.560This 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.
01:15:24.640People are feeling that void, the absence of relationships, friendships, things that matter, church values.
01:15:33.480What do you get out of church every week?
01:15:35.200Yes, 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.
01:15:45.320Your church, your mosque, your temple, they tend to reinforce a set of values that you then hope will imprint on your children.
01:15:51.780You hope will back up what you've already been teaching your children.
01:15:56.340Your 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.
01:16:07.840It could be anything, but these rituals take time and they require thought, consideration, to some extent love.
01:16:17.340And 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.
01:16:33.480So this is why one of the reasons why I love your writing, Shadi.
01:16:37.200I 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.
01:16:51.780I 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.
01:17:03.480So, 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.
01:17:23.380But you had an interesting exchange with Jen Psaki about this very issue.
01:17:27.220And 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.
01:18:00.940So 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?
01:18:14.240I would love to hear how the Morning Joe panel responded to that.
01:18:20.560Like, hmm, let's give it some thought.
01:18:24.320Yeah, well, you know, what's interesting about that clip is that I was attacked on both sides.
01:18:29.800So, you know, some folks on the right thought that I was saying that all 74 million Trump voters are bad people.
01:18:37.780What 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.
01:18:46.200And I want to drive home, I think, a very fundamental point is that people are allowed to be bad.
01:18:53.900They're allowed to have ideas that you think are abhorrent.
01:18:57.740That doesn't that doesn't take them outside the fold of being American.
01:19:02.880They're still our fellow American citizens.
01:19:05.980You know, a lot of people think I have bad opinions.
01:19:19.940People can believe their deeply held convictions without saying that you are like you're outside of the American circle, so to speak.
01:19:31.040And if if someone is an American citizen, they have a right to vote, they have a right to express their preferences.
01:19:38.000And 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.
01:19:49.500I 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.
01:20:02.400You 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.
01:20:24.080You start to see things in that way or that you shouldn't date Republicans or have them in your friend group.
01:20:30.000And I don't I don't I don't want to see that happening because that's not going to work.
01:20:34.680That's not a sustainable solution. We are a divided society.
01:20:38.460There will there will be Republicans and Democrats.
01:20:45.760And we disagree on foundational issues.
01:20:47.920And that's OK. I don't want consensus or unity.
01:20:51.280And 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.
01:21:00.000It should only produce those things if there is a consensus.
01:21:03.120But clearly, we as Americans don't agree on on some pretty basic things.
01:21:09.180And that's OK. We have to learn to live with deep difference.
01:21:12.980OK, 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.
01:21:24.740Mass shooting last week in which five people were dead and some 19 others injured at an LGBTQ nightclub.
01:21:32.700I discussed with Charles C.W. Cook how some on the left totally irresponsibly blamed people like Matt Walsh, who did the film.
01:21:40.120What is a woman over at The Daily Wire to the point where they they've now had to retract their reports.
01:22:33.500And 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.
01:23:01.960This is all he actually said are using a mass shooting to try and blackmail us into accepting the castration and sexualization of children.
01:23:10.400His big thing is with children messing with the children and gender.
01:23:23.520Now, 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.
01:23:39.720Right. 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.
01:23:50.140Right. 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.
01:23:58.660Yeah, look, it's understandable, certainly, that he would be very exercised about this.
01:24:06.400And this is, you know, this demonization is something where people are basically tying you to a killing.
01:24:12.040It's hard to get a lot worse than that. Right.
01:24:14.280And 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.
01:24:24.980And 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.
01:24:34.180They are a small minority who say these egregious things about you. Don't generalize that to everyone who's woke.
01:24:41.520I'm very critical of the woke myself, but woke people have a right to express their wokeness.
01:24:46.660And 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.
01:24:56.640We 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.
01:25:08.920If a woke person wins an election, let's say he hasn't done that.
01:25:14.140He's being personally attacked. And it wasn't just by these lunatics at the Daily Coast or this so-called civil rights attorney.
01:25:19.800I'd like to see her what she's actually done. But The New York Times went after him by name.
01:25:24.240And so did many others on the left try to blame.
01:25:27.200Meanwhile, 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.
01:25:36.700What we know about that shooter is that they are allegedly non-binary.
01:25:40.840We know that this person had a father who is very anti-gay.
01:25:44.740The quotes are awful from this person's father.
01:25:51.380Like 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.
01:26:00.060What how do we treat children? Other countries have already said these procedures should be banned under age 18.
01:26:04.940It's not like we're, you know, he's advocating for something way outside the mainstream.
01:26:09.120We're already outside the mainstream as America.
01:26:11.360Like 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.
01:26:16.360Don't demonize your you've been demonized.
01:26:18.660But you need to not demonize and extrapolate these attacks, which came from many corners on all of the woke.
01:26:26.360Right. Because like I just I feel his pain.
01:26:44.060But of course, people can we do generalizations all the time.
01:26:47.700And certainly so sometimes people criticize me for extending too much generosity to my opponents.
01:26:57.320So 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.
01:27:04.580And then they and then my critics say, well, Shadi, they would never extend that generosity to you.
01:27:10.220They would never give you the benefit of the doubt.
01:27:13.380So why are you taking this high road or why don't you fight fire with fire?
01:27:19.920I mean, at some point we have to break the chain.
01:27:22.240And I'm not asking Matt Walsh to do that.
01:27:24.580But 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.
01:27:38.180And, 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.
01:27:48.560But, 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.
01:28:05.020So there is a majority of Republicans, not not just Trump.
01:28:13.040So 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.
01:28:31.140Those are the people more likely to listen to us.
01:28:34.620So 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?
01:28:48.460So if Biden or Kamala, well, that's almost impossible to imagine happening.
01:28:52.920But 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.
01:29:08.920We 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.
01:29:49.360Yeah, no, no, no. And there are there's a place for everybody, depending on what your skill set is.
01:29:53.640I 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.
01:30:04.280Like and then I'm in church, you know, and I wonder if there's an inconsistency there.
01:30:09.660I 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.
01:30:17.200But let's talk about election denialism, because I do think this is interesting.
01:30:20.580There's no question the Republicans have been doing it.
01:30:22.360They were sent a message in this last midterm election.
01:30:28.200The whole party's not rallying behind the Carrie Carrie Lake thing.
01:30:31.540Most of like moved on. That's her fight.
01:30:34.500They'll let it play out. But you don't hear about that on Fox News all day.
01:30:39.080But 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.
01:31:39.240I'm willing to accept an outcome of a free and fair election.
01:31:44.500Shadi, 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?
01:31:54.860Black people have been, the vote has been taken away from them?
01:31:58.520It's the first you've heard the black voters are being disenfranchised in America.
01:32:03.240This is exaggerated rhetoric that is, that it's raising the existential stakes.
01:32:08.480And what I would like each of us to do is to try to lower the temperature.
01:32:57.760And 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.
01:33:15.180But then obviously, more reasonable folks understand that it's not right to say that black folks don't have the right to vote.
01:33:24.360And that that exaggeration doesn't help anyone.
01:33:26.760But yeah, I got attacked a lot after that.
01:33:28.660And just listening to that exchange again, that was it's intense.
01:33:59.480I 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.
01:34:12.180Then you're already deciding ahead of time that 2024 is not going to be a free election.
01:34:17.360You'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.
01:34:26.120So 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.
01:34:38.480And 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.
01:34:49.620He sounded like Stacey Abrams and who was the original election denier, she and Hillary Clinton.
01:34:53.640But then there's no question Trump took it next level.
01:34:56.580He 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.
01:35:09.480I don't know what it's going to take to make people move on from that.
01:35:13.500Even if you like Trump, that issue is a killer.