The Megyn Kelly Show - Matt Taibbi on Fighting Cancel Culture, Biden Media Coverage, and COVID Hypocrisy

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00:00:30.700 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:32.540 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:42.380 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:43.980 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.520 Hope you've listened to our Monday offering with Rob O'Neill

00:00:48.940 because it literally was one of my favorite shows ever.

00:00:51.160 You're gonna love it.

00:00:51.700 If you were too busy with your family,

00:00:53.100 don't forget to go hit that one because it's awesome.

00:00:55.480 And so is today's.

00:00:56.360 We have Matt Taibbi,

00:00:58.420 who is just so funny and so talented.

00:01:00.700 He's a journalist.

00:01:01.500 He's a host of the podcast called Useful Idiots.

00:01:05.400 He's a longtime investigative reporter for Rolling Stone,

00:01:08.020 and he's not afraid of anyone or anything.

00:01:11.060 And super smart.

00:01:12.420 And we're gonna get into all the latest news with him,

00:01:14.900 including Fauci's many reversals.

00:01:17.960 I mean, just the latest this week.

00:01:19.160 You could go on, of course, with Fauci.

00:01:20.540 Naomi Osaka, this incredibly successful tennis player,

00:01:24.860 one of the most talented and most successful in the world,

00:01:27.880 not just among female athletes,

00:01:29.720 but among male or female in terms of the money she brings in and so on.

00:01:33.600 Playing the victim now because the press apparently said she didn't play well on clay.

00:01:38.100 Now she can't deal with the media anymore.

00:01:40.060 And the first grade advertisement or video being played here in New York City

00:01:46.180 and probably soon to a school near you talking about little children's private parts

00:01:49.760 and great detail and biological description and whether our country is losing its mind.

00:01:56.080 Okay, so we're gonna get to all that with Matt in one second.

00:01:58.620 But first this.

00:02:04.900 Matt Taibbi, great to have you back.

00:02:06.700 How are you?

00:02:07.720 I'm great.

00:02:08.360 Thank you.

00:02:08.760 Thank you for having me on.

00:02:10.140 I have so much to talk to you about.

00:02:11.440 At first, I was like, it's kind of a slow news weekend.

00:02:12.960 And then I'm like, oh my gosh, like my cup runneth over.

00:02:15.400 There's so much that I want to go over with you.

00:02:17.080 Let's get right into it.

00:02:18.340 All right.

00:02:19.160 Let's talk COVID and Wuhan lab.

00:02:21.440 It's the dogs are chasing their tails now, Matt.

00:02:25.200 Starting with chief misinformer, Dr. Fauci,

00:02:29.700 who, you know, goes right up to the top as Fauci appears to reverse himself

00:02:34.140 on whether this thing could indeed have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China,

00:02:40.120 which is a theory that we were told, no, no, no.

00:02:43.440 Only the crackpots are saying that for the entire year until now,

00:02:47.080 when like magic, poof, out of the hat, people are starting to take it seriously.

00:02:51.520 Despite the fact that serious journalists have been trying to sound the alarm on this,

00:02:54.740 like Josh Rogan at the Washington Post for a while.

00:02:57.020 So here's Fauci, a soundbite before and after.

00:03:00.920 This is him saying, no, no, never.

00:03:03.540 It's not in a lab versus now.

00:03:05.840 Take a listen.

00:03:06.620 If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now,

00:03:13.800 it's very, very strongly leaning towards this could not have been artificially

00:03:19.400 or deliberately manipulated.

00:03:21.380 So I wanted to ask, are you still confident that it developed naturally?

00:03:26.200 No, actually, that's the point that I said.

00:03:28.860 No, I'm not convinced about that.

00:03:31.820 I think that we should continue to investigate what went on in China.

00:03:36.480 All right.

00:03:36.980 So it's May 2020 versus May 2021.

00:03:40.620 No, he's not still convinced.

00:03:41.980 No, now he wants an investigation.

00:03:44.660 And before I get you to react,

00:03:46.320 let's just listen to the media elites embarrassing themselves on this,

00:03:49.600 trying to pretend that there's been some watershed moment that now,

00:03:54.240 as you'll hear in the last little bit,

00:03:55.820 these are all sort of mainstream reporters and commentators on here,

00:03:58.540 now is leading them, as John Carl says of ABC,

00:04:03.820 quote, serious people are now saying it, Matt.

00:04:07.320 Serious people are now saying it.

00:04:08.380 That's why we need to pay attention.

00:04:09.540 Listen.

00:04:09.920 There's this question about the Wuhan lab.

00:04:12.720 We know that it's been debunked.

00:04:14.100 Those same agencies now have been tapped

00:04:16.500 with investigating one of Trump world's most favorite conspiracy theories.

00:04:20.560 This week, Donald Trump is still pushing the debunked bunkum,

00:04:23.960 despite his own intelligence community's findings that that is simply not true.

00:04:27.280 And there is simply no reason to believe that that is the case.

00:04:30.620 There is no empirical evidence to verify that.

00:04:32.980 We don't need to invoke conspiracy theories.

00:04:35.980 This is just another example of the president

00:04:38.440 trying to change the narrative from his own failings.

00:04:40.860 The problem for President Trump is that he's running for re-election,

00:04:44.360 is looking for ways to deflect blame for the performance of the administration.

00:04:49.320 And yes, I think a lot of people have egg on their face.

00:04:51.900 This was an idea that was first put forward by Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, Donald Trump.

00:04:58.340 And look, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them.

00:05:03.440 But now serious people are saying it needs a serious inquiry.

00:05:06.900 A lot of people on the political left and a lot of people in the media made this mistake.

00:05:11.340 They said, wow, if Tom Cotton is saying something, it can't be true.

00:05:14.560 Or they assumed that.

00:05:15.980 And that's not right.

00:05:16.980 Tom Cotton does deal in misinformation about things like election fraud.

00:05:20.600 He said some things that are just wrong.

00:05:22.440 But that doesn't mean that everything he says is wrong.

00:05:25.140 Oh, it's a great, great button soundbites there,

00:05:28.900 the befores and afters for Fauci and the media.

00:05:31.760 Serious people are now saying it, Matt.

00:05:33.540 And not everything Tom Cotton says is wrong.

00:05:36.900 That was David Leonhardt of the New York Times at the end there.

00:05:40.140 I just think it's stomach turning and it's so revealing.

00:05:42.720 What do you think?

00:05:43.840 Well, first of all, I think it was hilarious that Fauci's about face came at a festival of fact checking.

00:05:51.560 He was a guest at the Poynter Institute's festival of fact checking, among other things,

00:05:58.180 because the media sort of elevated him as kind of the soul of rectitude during the COVID crisis as an unassailable arbiter of truth.

00:06:11.420 And then he comes out at that event and says, oh, by the way, that thing we've been insisting on for a year,

00:06:19.540 we're we're going to rethink that.

00:06:22.140 And, you know, it's in the same way that I think the 2008 financial crisis,

00:06:27.340 which I covered for, you know, almost 10 years, was catastrophic for the public's faith in Wall Street.

00:06:35.360 You know, this episode could really could really deal a very serious blow to both the media and to science in general

00:06:43.160 because of the way they were scolded in the last year.

00:06:46.480 If it turns out, you know, that there's more validity to this hypothesis.

00:06:52.900 I mean, could the media be dealt any greater a blow than it's already suffered over the four years of the Trump presidency?

00:06:59.360 I guess, you know, help the National Institute of Health.

00:07:02.360 Yes. I mean, I feel like we've already watched the CDC and the WHO and the NIH go down, down, down in public opinion.

00:07:08.800 And Fauci, you know, our fearless leader, has now been exposed as either a fool or corrupt or just interminably wrong.

00:07:16.220 And people need only just to take off the rose colored glasses to see it.

00:07:19.580 I mean, he's wrong about a lot.

00:07:21.260 And the dishonesty in covering it, you know, just because Trump said it or Pompeo said it or Tom Cotton said it

00:07:27.340 is staring us right in the face.

00:07:30.360 The media couldn't handle it when it came from the Trump administration.

00:07:33.660 And now, magically, they're ready to talk about it without really owning what they've done, how they've misled us.

00:07:40.740 I mean, it's important how this virus started.

00:07:42.880 Over 500,000 Americans are dead.

00:07:44.680 How did it start?

00:07:45.880 We need an honest press to keep pushing.

00:07:49.360 There was a Washington Post correction.

00:07:52.840 Here was their headline in February 2020.

00:07:54.980 2020, Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.

00:08:02.000 That was that it came out of a Wuhan lab.

00:08:04.140 May 2021, Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.

00:08:12.620 And the correction at the bottom of the article right now reads,

00:08:15.940 earlier versions of this story in its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Senator Tom Cotton

00:08:20.160 regarding the origins of the coronavirus.

00:08:21.600 The term debunked and the Post's use of conspiracy theory have been removed because then, as now,

00:08:29.740 there was no determination about the origins of the virus.

00:08:32.920 So why'd you print that?

00:08:34.900 And switching to fringe that's been disputed doesn't actually get it done either.

00:08:38.920 No, it doesn't.

00:08:41.200 And again, they continue to not get that the most offensive part of this whole thing is not just that they're wrong and backtracking.

00:08:50.020 But it's the sanctimony with which they deliver the sort of initial diagnosis of, oh, well, this is debunked.

00:08:58.880 This is a conspiracy theory.

00:09:01.720 You're an idiot if you think this.

00:09:03.400 And then to turn around and say, oh, by the way, yeah, now we're going to rethink this and you still should listen to us.

00:09:10.660 They don't see the problem with that and what that does for the reputation.

00:09:15.820 It's, again, it's catastrophic with this one.

00:09:18.760 There have been a lot of bad ones, but this one is particularly bad.

00:09:21.980 The CNN Crystal is a headline in February 2020.

00:09:26.520 Tom Cotton is playing a dangerous game with his coronavirus speculation.

00:09:31.140 You're playing the dangerous game, sir.

00:09:33.080 Why don't you ask more questions?

00:09:34.940 Follow up on what he's saying, because as it turns out, it looks very much like it's true.

00:09:40.900 You know, and now you've got, of course, just for good measure, New York Times reporter Apura Mondavilli,

00:09:47.220 who covers COVID for the paper, in a tweet dated May 26th,

00:09:51.640 Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.

00:09:58.140 But alas, that day is not today.

00:10:00.460 Then she got criticized and deleted that tweet.

00:10:02.700 And her fix-it tweet reads as follows.

00:10:05.760 A theory can have racist roots and still gather reasonable supporters along the way.

00:10:11.100 Doesn't make the roots any less racist.

00:10:13.580 Yeah, I can't even parse how you end up having those thoughts in public.

00:10:21.260 Again, the really humorous thing about all this is that a lot of these reporters,

00:10:27.140 in scolding everybody about their lack of devotion to science and fact,

00:10:34.320 were basically confessing that they don't really understand science,

00:10:37.520 which is not a series of inflexible dictates, but it's a process by which the whole world

00:10:45.200 converses about their findings and evolves over time.

00:10:49.960 So this idea that you can start at the beginning of a pandemic and just pronounce,

00:10:55.080 this is it, this is the solution, these other solutions are not true,

00:10:59.420 is a total misunderstanding of how scientists would approach something like this.

00:11:03.560 They would leave all their options open until everything had been excluded.

00:11:09.100 And that's been the complaint of a lot of scientists throughout this entire thing.

00:11:12.600 But the journalists want to believe that you can just tell people X is true, Y is false,

00:11:18.920 that's the end of it, listen to us.

00:11:21.140 And that just reveals their ignorance, not ours.

00:11:24.200 Right.

00:11:24.400 And why were they so unwilling to entertain it?

00:11:27.440 Why was there such a knee-jerk, nope, not in a lab, nope, wet market?

00:11:33.260 Say, we believe what the Chinese tell us.

00:11:35.740 Well, I think this is a progression of a phenomenon that's gone on for the entire,

00:11:42.500 since Trump was elected in 2016,

00:11:45.280 which is that basically anything that Trump says automatically must be wrong.

00:11:51.200 I mean, you talked about Tom Cotton, you know, anything Tom Cotton says must be wrong.

00:11:55.280 So this is an extension of the same thing.

00:11:58.160 And the problem with that is, yes, Donald Trump is wrong about a lot of things,

00:12:02.920 but you can't work backwards from that to do reporting.

00:12:06.700 Like, you know, occasionally, even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then.

00:12:11.220 You have to allow for the possibility that things can be true, irrespective of politics.

00:12:16.720 And it's just not the way you do the job.

00:12:19.420 But that is the way they reported this.

00:12:21.880 They reported the same way about hydroxychloroquine, about ivramectin,

00:12:26.940 about every other thing that they interpreted as a culture war issue when it was a science issue,

00:12:32.760 which was a mistake.

00:12:34.580 Isn't it a blind squirrel?

00:12:37.620 Yes, that's right.

00:12:39.280 I'm sorry.

00:12:39.860 Yeah, it could be.

00:12:40.900 That's probably.

00:12:42.400 Yeah.

00:12:43.780 That's right.

00:12:44.720 That's right.

00:12:45.540 There's a knee-jerk reaction to anything Trump says, of course, back then,

00:12:48.920 and probably still now, the other side, the left, the established left and the woke,

00:12:55.720 certainly, and the press are more worried about identity and whether we're in line with

00:12:59.880 where we're supposed to be on woke issues.

00:13:02.200 And, you know, saying it came from the Wuhan lab was somehow, you know, going to put us up

00:13:07.220 against the Chinese in a way that was confrontational and is, I guess, as well, racist,

00:13:12.080 according to the New York Times.

00:13:13.360 So you can't.

00:13:14.440 How about just what's true?

00:13:16.220 What's true, right?

00:13:17.360 Back to my point of we actually need to know that.

00:13:20.040 This one matters.

00:13:20.960 Some of the stuff you can shrug your shoulders and say, whatever.

00:13:23.740 This one we need to know because millions of people are dead.

00:13:27.520 So if this was a mismanaged virus, an intentionally manipulated virus, or God forbid, even a virus

00:13:34.940 manipulated to potentially be a weapon, which isn't seriously out there, but is a possibility,

00:13:40.040 we need to know.

00:13:41.260 So there should be more curiosity.

00:13:44.080 Right.

00:13:44.340 Yeah, exactly.

00:13:46.200 Basically, the way you should do this story is you have to start with the fact that they

00:13:50.880 don't know, right?

00:13:51.800 So they have not yet identified.

00:13:54.860 As virologists usually do in a relatively timely fashion, like where the outbreak started,

00:14:00.360 they haven't found the intermediary host.

00:14:03.580 So all options are still on the table.

00:14:05.800 What are the options?

00:14:06.760 Well, you can list them.

00:14:07.600 There's only a few of them.

00:14:08.620 It's there's zoonotic origin.

00:14:11.360 There's a lab accident.

00:14:13.220 There's a an intentional leak.

00:14:16.500 There isn't it or there's a leak of some kind of weaponized project.

00:14:20.840 The last two are very unlikely, but you have to leave those those other options open.

00:14:26.240 And the notion that this is a it's a racist theory, first of all, it's incorrect because

00:14:32.180 many of the proponents of the lab leak hypothesis are looking at a scenario that involves Chinese

00:14:42.100 American cooperation that involves research that was partially funded by the United States

00:14:47.120 Department of Defense and involves other American institutions and American scientists.

00:14:52.640 So it's not putting it all on the Chinese necessarily if this is turns out to be what

00:14:58.760 happens.

00:14:59.220 But also, again, as you said, that's irrelevant.

00:15:02.400 Like you first you have to figure out what happened and then worry about what the consequences

00:15:07.600 are in terms of the impact of the story.

00:15:10.360 You can't just say, well, this is going to arouse anti-Chinese sentiment and avoid it.

00:15:16.480 If it's true, you have to go there.

00:15:19.080 That's right.

00:15:19.380 Too bad if it arouses anti-Chinese sentiment in some people who want to who want to blame

00:15:25.440 those doing it.

00:15:26.620 Right.

00:15:26.840 I mean, that doesn't cover all Chinese people, but those who actually did it, if this was

00:15:30.960 in any way intentional or grossly negligent, yes, they ought to be held accountable.

00:15:34.380 And that's I mean, this is what again, Josh Rogan, who came on the show not long ago, prior

00:15:38.840 actually to this all blowing up to his credit, he wrote this book saying, I've been taking a

00:15:44.020 hard look at this and I'm telling you, the odds are this came out of a Wuhan lab and it

00:15:48.080 was in a cave in a bunch of bats who weren't bothering anybody.

00:15:52.560 And they went and they got those bats and they took them to the lab and they researched

00:15:56.420 them and they did gain a function research.

00:15:58.520 And then we had the virus.

00:15:59.900 And if they want us to believe that one of those bats wound up in a Wuhan market, wet

00:16:03.220 market, they have yet to show us how that happened, how they traveled all that distance.

00:16:07.720 You know, who was the who is patient zero who brought it from A to B anyway?

00:16:11.940 So he makes a very compelling case and he tweeted out as follows.

00:16:14.580 Most of the mainstream reporters didn't ignore this lab leak theory.

00:16:18.460 They actively crapped all over it for over a year while pretending to be objective out

00:16:22.920 of a toxic mix of confirmation bias, source bias.

00:16:26.420 Their scientist sources lied to them.

00:16:29.160 Groupthink, Trump derangement syndrome and general incompetence.

00:16:32.080 And he went on to say, also, the lab leak theory did not change.

00:16:36.140 It didn't suddenly become credible.

00:16:37.720 It didn't jump from crazy to reasonable.

00:16:40.280 The theory has always been the same.

00:16:41.440 The people who got it wrong changed their minds.

00:16:44.680 They're writing about themselves now with zero self-awareness.

00:16:49.360 He's exactly right.

00:16:50.480 There's no honest showing of the cards.

00:16:54.420 I got this wrong.

00:16:55.800 Tom Cotton was on to something.

00:16:57.920 Mike Pompeo was on to something.

00:17:00.120 The State Department investigation into whether this was out of a lab should have been allowed

00:17:04.240 to proceed to its logical conclusion.

00:17:06.420 And those who are investigating this for the WHO are not honest brokers because they get

00:17:12.460 paid by the Chinese in large part.

00:17:14.600 They're not saying that.

00:17:15.780 They're just pretending that it's an evolving theory that's now got new evidence that's

00:17:20.300 making them take a second look.

00:17:21.680 Yeah, and that incidentally also misreports another story because I think even separately,

00:17:28.840 the development that all these establishment figures who were saying something else last

00:17:33.720 year have suddenly changed their minds, that's a journalistic story in itself that has to

00:17:39.520 be understood and investigated.

00:17:41.980 Why the change of heart?

00:17:43.520 Like, I don't have a good explanation for that yet.

00:17:45.720 Um, and the reason for that is, is what you're talking about is because they're pretending,

00:17:51.300 um, that just suddenly the, the, the theory became credible.

00:17:56.680 Well, that's serious.

00:17:57.780 People are now saying it, Matt, serious people.

00:18:00.780 Right there.

00:18:02.280 They're, they're suddenly re-examining it or something that doesn't make any sense to

00:18:06.280 me.

00:18:06.420 Something must've happened to, to force all of these people to come out in public and start

00:18:11.760 saying this.

00:18:12.420 Now, what is that?

00:18:13.160 Like it, it feels to me a little bit like a bunch of people trying to get out ahead of

00:18:17.780 a story, which is something you see frequently with, um, you know, sort of a damage control

00:18:22.440 type of situation where they know something's going to come out.

00:18:25.100 So they all start planting the seed of a change in direction, or it could be something else

00:18:30.560 who knows, but, but we haven't had any reporting on that score to really explain what that is

00:18:35.440 either.

00:18:35.660 And that's, that's another failing.

00:18:37.660 They want to look smart.

00:18:39.000 We're smart.

00:18:40.360 Um, you mentioned the Fauci thing.

00:18:43.160 So that here's another reversal, uh, by him.

00:18:46.340 He was claiming that the national Institute of health never funded gain of function research.

00:18:52.100 That's where they take the, the virus and try to up the ante of the virus, try to make it

00:18:56.520 more dangerous, ostensibly to protect us against that.

00:19:00.440 If it, if it were to happen, he says, we never funded gain of function research at that

00:19:05.000 Wuhan lab.

00:19:05.780 Um, now he is admitting under pressure that in fact, the NIH gave the Wuhan lab 600,000,

00:19:14.920 uh, bucks.

00:19:16.000 And indeed it could have been used for gain of function.

00:19:18.760 Listen.

00:19:19.620 Gain of function research, as you know, is juicing up naturally occurring animal viruses

00:19:24.660 to infect humans.

00:19:25.740 To arrive at the truth, the US government should admit that the Wuhan Virology Institute was

00:19:32.100 experimenting to enhance the coronavirus's ability to infect humans.

00:19:36.080 Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?

00:19:41.920 Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entire, entirely and completely incorrect that

00:19:50.580 the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute

00:19:59.980 of Virology.

00:20:00.140 Do they fund Dr. Barrett?

00:20:02.060 How do you know they didn't lie to you and use the money for gain of function research anyway?

00:20:07.820 There's no way of guaranteeing that.

00:20:10.480 I know the scientists that we've dealt with have been trustworthy.

00:20:14.760 Have you ever had a grantee lie to you?

00:20:17.720 I cannot guarantee that a grantee has not lied to us because you never know.

00:20:24.300 So yet another reversal by Fauci.

00:20:26.240 He doesn't know.

00:20:27.380 He has no idea whether they took our $600,000 and used it to up the dangerousness of this

00:20:32.820 virus.

00:20:33.160 And he doesn't seem particularly inclined to do a deep dive on it.

00:20:37.200 No, he doesn't.

00:20:38.220 And again, that makes me wonder a little bit about this sudden change of heart with all

00:20:44.120 these officials.

00:20:45.000 Like, why have they suddenly changed their minds?

00:20:48.000 Is it because news is going to come out that actually there was American money that led to

00:20:54.040 some of these behaviors and irresponsible research?

00:20:59.060 And they know that that that's that's a consideration.

00:21:02.780 I mean, there was a there's a little group that I did a story on called the US Right to

00:21:07.180 Know that filed a series of FOIA requests about, you know, sort of research scientists who

00:21:16.780 were funded by the Department of Defense and their relationship to the Wuhan Institute and

00:21:22.360 what they were doing there.

00:21:23.560 And it's it's been steadily coming out that they that, you know, there was all sorts of

00:21:27.840 cooperation between the United States and the Wuhan Institute about this kind of research.

00:21:34.180 So it's a legitimate story.

00:21:36.420 And it's not just coming from Mike Pompeo and and people like that.

00:21:41.040 It's it's coming from all sorts of places.

00:21:43.040 And we have to pay attention to it.

00:21:46.180 Now, meantime, in other covid news, you've got there was a great article in The Washington

00:21:50.260 Post put out there by four very smart doctors, one of whom had been on our program last week

00:21:55.720 and Lucy McBride saying the masks need to come off the children.

00:22:00.080 And these women actually do advise the CDC.

00:22:02.500 So that's good news saying the masks need to come off the children.

00:22:06.080 They need to come off the children at the mat at the at the schools, at the camps, inside

00:22:10.300 to not just outside.

00:22:11.880 Let's get real.

00:22:13.040 I mean, within 24 hours, the American Academy of Pediatrics, which honestly, I think it's

00:22:18.940 it's it's run by far left people.

00:22:22.160 Everything that they have put out from the beginning on this has been near hysterical.

00:22:27.560 Children, they say, ages two and up who are not fully vaccinated.

00:22:32.060 Meanwhile, you can't vaccinate your kid under the age of 12, not that I would.

00:22:37.480 But so you have no option to.

00:22:39.280 They say any child who's not fully vaccinated should continue to wear face masks when they're

00:22:45.080 playing with friends, when they go with you to the grocery store, when they attend school,

00:22:49.700 when they attend camp in any situation in which they are around groups of people, some of who

00:22:55.260 may not be fully vaccinated in response.

00:22:57.340 Which all I could think was F you there.

00:23:01.520 They're so out of touch, Matt.

00:23:03.040 You know, it's like what parent is going to keep their kid?

00:23:05.960 They're little masked.

00:23:08.260 Let's say they don't come up with a vaccine for the parents who actually want to vaccinate

00:23:11.680 their kids at this young age.

00:23:13.380 What if what if they don't manage to get enough tested from from two to age 12?

00:23:19.120 Well, so then what your two year olds got to wear a mask for the next 10 years or until

00:23:23.440 somebody somewhere finally pronounces the pandemic over.

00:23:26.960 Yeah.

00:23:27.460 And what's the data on kids that young actually getting the disease?

00:23:30.720 I mean, like, you know, they're not really operating from a place that of certainty here.

00:23:36.440 I mean, I think one of the frustrating things about the way COVID has been reported is that

00:23:42.620 it's turned into, again, a culture war issue, like the whole issue of masks from the very

00:23:48.740 beginning, because people like Donald Trump, you know, scoffed at mask use at various times.

00:23:55.720 It became sort of a virtue signaling issue for a lot of people on the other side.

00:24:02.160 And so even after the CDC said, you know, a vaccinated person can go outside without

00:24:07.420 a mask, you had scenes with high profile politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, you know,

00:24:14.140 wearing masks for Zoom calls, you know, in rooms full of people who are vaccinated.

00:24:18.020 Like, why are they doing that?

00:24:19.180 Why are they going against CDC guidelines?

00:24:22.640 It's it's not scientific.

00:24:24.580 It's political.

00:24:26.240 And it's it's cut off discussion.

00:24:29.320 And, you know, that should be a normal, natural thing with people like, you know, it makes

00:24:35.180 sense that we should wear masks in some situations and maybe not in others.

00:24:39.000 But for some people, it's all or nothing.

00:24:41.000 Like we should wear them all the time.

00:24:42.680 And anybody who says otherwise is crazy.

00:24:45.720 And it's just ridiculous.

00:24:47.820 The whole thing is, is, again, it's not grounded in science.

00:24:50.620 It's grounded in in this political culture war.

00:24:53.560 And you have them justifying this ongoing call for big government to mandate masks, not

00:25:01.780 just for our kids, but for us, too.

00:25:03.240 But I'm very focused on the kids who need us to help them based on the new variant, a

00:25:09.900 new variant could come.

00:25:11.060 You know, we don't we don't we don't know.

00:25:12.420 And indeed, The New York Times has a piece out trying to create more fear.

00:25:16.440 And I quote, this is the tweet accompanying the article.

00:25:19.020 There is troubling new evidence that coronavirus variant first identified in India could be

00:25:25.120 far more transmissible than the one first identified in Britain for much of the world.

00:25:29.140 Quote, this new variant could be catastrophic.

00:25:33.000 OK, wait, wait to put the news out there in a nice measured way.

00:25:36.520 This is what they've been doing from the beginning.

00:25:38.340 They said the Britain variant was going to be catastrophic.

00:25:41.760 Well, you know what?

00:25:42.440 It turns out that the vaccines are handling the Britain variant just fine.

00:25:45.820 That they have this knee jerk instinct to run deep to the fear.

00:25:52.360 Yeah.

00:25:52.580 And that again, that's been a feature of the covid coverage from the very start, which is

00:25:58.100 let's exact not not not even just exaggerate, but let's just play up every negative, terrifying

00:26:04.740 angle as much as we can.

00:26:07.160 And then any angle that suggests that we might be getting out from under the worst of it.

00:26:13.940 Um, let's downplay that.

00:26:15.760 Let's not write stories about how the vaccines work.

00:26:18.760 Um, you know, let's let's not highlight any of the good news.

00:26:21.900 And and again, I hate to keep going back to this, but it's it's just because to me, I

00:26:27.580 think it just has everything to do with the fact that the looking on the bright side of

00:26:32.180 it was associated with Trumpism.

00:26:33.900 And and the opposite was associated with those who believe in science and all those other

00:26:40.900 things.

00:26:41.520 And so the the catastrophizing became a sort of standardized feature of the mainstream journalism

00:26:49.220 on this on this subject.

00:26:50.920 Now, look, it's been a catastrophe.

00:26:53.040 There's no question about it.

00:26:54.160 It's it's a it's a massive world event that will be remembered forever.

00:26:58.540 Um, but that doesn't mean you have to tell people that they're going to be bodies stacked

00:27:03.300 in the street or that three point five percent of all people are going to die or whatever

00:27:07.820 the numbers were at the beginning.

00:27:09.560 Um, you don't have to exaggerate a story that that's that big.

00:27:13.440 So but they're doing it anyway.

00:27:17.080 Coming up next, we are going to get into Naomi Osaka, this incredibly accomplished, talented

00:27:22.620 tennis player ruling the female tennis world who is so tough.

00:27:26.600 She's beaten the likes of Serena Williams and on and on it goes, but is not tough enough

00:27:30.420 to take a couple of tough questions from the tennis press corps.

00:27:34.600 They're not exactly known for their nastiness, but she's now playing the mental health card

00:27:38.520 saying her depression, her social anxiety, she can't handle it and she can go out there

00:27:43.360 and she can win four grand slams, but she can't sit in front of the media because they

00:27:46.460 keep asking the same questions over and over, she says.

00:27:48.540 So what's going on with the wussification of these American women from Meghan Markle to Naomi

00:27:54.020 Osaka, who then use mental health as a shield, even though they'll use the reporters from

00:27:59.780 whom they're shielding themselves as a weapon to get out their message when it comes to Black

00:28:03.700 Lives Matter, you know, women's empowerment, according to Markle and how racist the royal

00:28:08.400 family is.

00:28:09.120 Even New Jersey, where I know you live and where I spend the summers, I was so ticked off because

00:28:22.000 the governor there, he was proud of the fact that his was one of the only two states, it was New

00:28:27.520 Jersey and Hawaii, that were holding firm on their order to wear masks in indoor spaces, period.

00:28:34.520 You know, this is as recently as May 30th, a few days ago. And then starting to just this past

00:28:40.260 Friday, he reversed himself and said, OK, you can you can go into restaurant stores and other

00:28:44.160 indoor spaces in New Jersey without your face coverings. Why? Because finally, the business

00:28:47.800 industry stood up and said, yo, Governor Murphy, this is insane. The default existence is not us

00:28:54.440 with masks. It's us without masks. We have to admit the truth. It's been good news in the United

00:29:00.120 States. We are at or right next to herd immunity in virtually all, if not most, or at least most of

00:29:06.740 the states, including New Jersey. And it was only that pressure that led him to reverse himself.

00:29:12.520 Yeah. And again, you know, I'm married to a doctor. I have friends who work in emergency medicine. And

00:29:19.940 I understand the idea of continuing to wear a mask even after you've been vaccinated for a little

00:29:26.640 while. Right. Like there's there's some logic to that. But it's it's the it's the anger and the

00:29:33.320 sanctimony that that comes with these pronouncements about masks. That is the part that I don't get.

00:29:39.780 I can understand being excessively cautious. I can. But it's it's this implication that if you think

00:29:46.280 another way, there's something wrong with you or that you're an inferior person. Like that's the part

00:29:52.840 I don't get. And which seems unnecessary to me, like what? I understand being excessively cautious

00:29:58.580 if you have a comorbidity, if you have a risk. But the rest of society is done being overly cautious

00:30:04.040 for you. We did it. We did it for a year and we're done doing it. There are all sorts of things that can

00:30:08.900 hurt you out there. My car, me drinking a bottle of booze, me breathing flu particles on you. It's not

00:30:16.500 the law. The government doesn't get to say to me, don't drive, don't drink ever and stay inside when

00:30:21.980 you have the flu. I can still live my life. And that's we've gotten to that point now with COVID.

00:30:26.320 It's not my job to protect you when the numbers are this low. You get a vaccine. That's how you

00:30:31.640 protect yourself. You take care of you. I'll take care of me. Yeah. And there's and this goes along

00:30:37.340 with this whole sort of trend towards safety ism that's kind of infected everything like, you know,

00:30:43.200 our tolerance for risk of any kind is plummeting and has been for a while now. And this this

00:30:51.960 has been kind of the ultimate expression of that phenomenon. This idea that we know we can't have

00:30:57.440 any there isn't such a thing as an acceptable level of risk. Right. So that's that's what

00:31:03.660 they've been operating from. So this this brings me to the story I've been dying to discuss all

00:31:08.320 weekend. And that's I want to talk about Naomi Osaka. She's an incredible tennis player. She's the first

00:31:15.180 Asian woman to become number one in the world. She's got four Grand Slam singles titles.

00:31:19.560 She's the highest paid female athlete in the world. She made fifty five point two million

00:31:24.460 dollars in the past 12 months. She's behind only Federer, LeBron James and Tiger Woods in terms of

00:31:31.100 her. She makes it all in advertising, really not not as much in just the winning of the tennis

00:31:36.540 matches. So this woman's on fire professionally. And you're a great person to ask about this because

00:31:43.800 you yourself are a recovering professional baseball and basketball player. I remember that from our last

00:31:49.180 interview. So you know what it's like to be in the professional sports arena. I grant you perhaps

00:31:53.720 not necessarily the same exact level as Naomi. But you tell me if whether she is a petulant princess

00:31:59.960 or a mental health warrior, because the story is that she's come out. She has said she started by

00:32:05.740 saying I'm I'm at Roland Garros. I'm at the French Open and I am not going to participate in the press

00:32:11.080 conferences after the matches because I will not subject myself to people who doubt me. It's not good for my

00:32:18.160 mental health. It gets in my head and I'm not going to do it. And if these organizations think

00:32:23.120 they can just keep saying do press and you're or you're going to be fined and continue to ignore

00:32:27.580 the mental health of the athletes, then I just got a laugh. And she got a pile on from a lot of

00:32:34.620 athletes. And the four Grand Slam organizations said, oh, no, you will do the press or the fines will

00:32:39.900 continue. You're not special. Everyone has to do it. It's part of the whole process is part of

00:32:45.460 generating public interest in this. It's part of what pays the winnings that you receive. Right.

00:32:50.220 They get the advertisers. They get money that comes in thanks to the press, putting the word

00:32:53.140 out and so on. And now it's turning, of course, to she's a mental health warrior. Thank God for

00:33:00.040 Naomi's bravery and speaking about her safety, you know, her crippling anxiety and dealing.

00:33:07.400 Meanwhile, can we just start with this? The tennis press corps is not exactly known for being,

00:33:14.340 let's say, the British tabloid press. Right. Like I got to give Meghan Markle this one. At least

00:33:19.580 she could actually show really mean, nasty press that she'd been subjected to. Not that I was on

00:33:24.600 her side. But this woman said like, hey, she doesn't play well on clay. Get over it.

00:33:30.820 Yeah. The tennis press is not exactly like the German Panzer Corps or whatever it is.

00:33:35.920 You know, look, I suffered from depression when I was when I was a kid. But I and I do kind of

00:33:45.800 understand, you know, her attitude that, yes, it's very, very difficult for somebody who has

00:33:51.240 anxiety about being in public to talk to the press. Like, I get that. But she's a professional

00:33:57.840 athlete who's made fifty five million dollars. And the money comes from the media like that.

00:34:01.880 And there's no there's no way to to break up that relationship. If you want the money,

00:34:07.220 you got to talk to the press. You have to communicate with them somehow. And yes,

00:34:12.340 the press is there for the people. The press is really the people.

00:34:15.820 Right. Exactly. And if you if you're not talking to the news media, what you're basically saying is,

00:34:21.620 I want I want the money that comes from the fans, but I don't want to have to communicate with the

00:34:25.640 fans or give anything back to them except for my play. And that's that's been a stance that a lot of

00:34:31.780 athletes have taken over the years. I mean, we had Marshawn Lynch do it in the NFL. There are plenty

00:34:39.100 of of athletes who, you know, have been dismissive and uncommunicative with the media. I've been in

00:34:45.360 locker rooms where athletes have just told me to tell me to go, go, you know, take a hike. But but

00:34:52.940 look, they have rules about this because this is this is how the money model works in professional

00:34:57.780 sports. And, you know, there are there are going to be outliers who are going to have who are going

00:35:03.820 to struggle with the media. But but once you start celebrating people for making this decision,

00:35:09.260 you know, that that's the part I don't get is this whole like, oh, thank you, you know, for being so

00:35:16.900 brave in, you know, refusing to talk to the news media. And this is coming from the news media like

00:35:22.020 that's the part I don't get. It's that's right. The Guardian had a piece out that was that was

00:35:26.280 licking her boots. And in the mornings, I try to listen. I like National Review, the editors

00:35:31.380 in terms of podcasting. I like I like you guys listening at Useful Idiots. I like USA NPR. I

00:35:38.220 mean, I listen to them. I hate their music and I really don't like their hosts. But I feel like I

00:35:41.520 need I need to listen to what the left is saying. I heard a USA Today columnist being featured on NPR

00:35:46.240 who was saying and I quote, wait, hold on, let me let me get it. They asked her, what did you think

00:35:50.880 about her name is Christine Brennan? What did you think about it? She said, well, she's telling us

00:35:54.160 about her long bounce of depression, about her, her social anxiety and how she uses her headphones

00:36:00.940 to dull them, dull it. And what we are seeing is a young person who made great statements about Black

00:36:07.000 Lives Matter and honoring the victims of police brutality and just painting her as this heroine

00:36:13.260 because she went out there with BLM masks and so on and Ahmaud Arbery masks when she is clearly

00:36:17.860 using the press to make a statement, a political statement that that you need reporters to write

00:36:24.080 about what you're putting on that mask, who now didn't come out and say, I have depression.

00:36:30.100 I have massive social anxiety. She came out and said, I don't want the haters to get into

00:36:36.360 my head. That was her first statement. She's like, I don't I've felt people have no regard

00:36:41.500 for athletes' mental health. And this rings true when I see press conferences. We're sat there

00:36:46.360 and we're asked questions that we've been asked multiple times before or we're asked questions

00:36:50.540 that bring doubt into our minds. And I'm just not going to subject myself to people that doubt me.

00:36:55.360 Are she kidding me? I mean, what she's saying is you can ask me questions so long as I come out as

00:37:00.280 a badass. But if you ask me anything about my shitty play on clay, I'm out.

00:37:04.080 No, yeah, it's it's ridiculous. I remember, you know, a baseball player once he was complaining

00:37:13.780 about, you know, he had had a bad game and he was he lashed out at the press basically saying,

00:37:20.300 what do you want me to say? I missed a hanging slider, you know, like, you know, that that happens

00:37:25.000 in sports. But you have to be part of the reason we admire athletes is because they're tough and toughness

00:37:30.760 is what separates is what separates people who are just sort of very talented from the great

00:37:36.140 champions, right from the the Federer's and the Nadal's and, you know, those sorts of people.

00:37:42.700 It's it's the determination and the ability to fight through adversity. This is part of the thing

00:37:48.460 that we're teaching young people when we teach them to admire these champions is that you have to

00:37:55.260 persevere, you have to get through those tough times. When you're down two sets and a couple of games,

00:38:00.540 maybe a break or two, like you you got to fight through, you got to keep playing. And and that's

00:38:06.200 what we that's why they get the big money. That's why we we we admire them. And suddenly now, you know,

00:38:12.480 the message is a little bit different. It's, you know, we want to we want to lionize people for

00:38:19.160 for something else entirely, which seems to run counter to to the the prior ethos of the sport,

00:38:26.700 which really seems to be misleading. I mean, if she had come out and said, I suffer from depression

00:38:32.220 and I have high anxiety and this has been a nightmare for me from the beginning, which is

00:38:36.480 where she wound up after so much criticism. That's that's now her line. But her opening statement was

00:38:41.680 not about that. It was we're subjected to these questions that we have to answer over and over

00:38:46.180 again. She wasn't talking about what she's now saying. And then the the person who really put the

00:38:51.800 lie to her now reliance on the greater mental health and depression and anxiety message is her

00:38:57.600 own sister. Her sister, Marie, came out and said, so many people are picky on this term, mental health,

00:39:04.480 thinking you need to have depression or some sort of disorder to be able to use the term mental health.

00:39:09.240 But she she said, look, she's just trying to block everything out because people's remarks get into

00:39:15.060 her head. And I quote, tennis players don't get paid to do press conferences. They only get paid when

00:39:19.980 they win matches. And then when people were like, OK, Marie, speaking the truth, she wants to win.

00:39:25.660 She doesn't want any negativity in her head. We understand it. But hey, it's part of the game.

00:39:29.480 Everybody has to do it. Marie quickly deleted that, walked it back, said I screwed up. It'd be like

00:39:35.220 we get it. She doesn't want to hear negativity. You think Federer does? You think Nadal does?

00:39:41.240 I mean, Rafa Nadal came out and said without the press, without the people who travel, who are writing

00:39:45.400 the news and the achievements we're having around the world, we wouldn't be the athletes we are today.

00:39:49.200 We're not going to have the recognition that we have around the world and we will not be that

00:39:53.420 popular. Right. Exactly right. That's just the way it works. And so you can't have the glowing

00:39:58.460 magazine covers and fifty five million dollar endorsement deals without dealing with the people.

00:40:04.440 Right. Yeah. You could have you could have sports the way they were once once upon a time when they

00:40:10.980 weren't heavily attended. There was no television. The media didn't travel everywhere. And athletes made

00:40:15.560 twelve thousand dollars a year and had to sell insurance in the offseason.

00:40:19.320 It's like playing in the WNBA. Right. I mean, if that's what you want, then then then you can go

00:40:26.080 that way. But if you want you want to make fifty five million dollars, you can't do it without the

00:40:31.180 media. It's just it doesn't work that way. So, yeah, it's a frustrating story.

00:40:36.900 Boo hoo. Boo effing hoo. That's how I felt like. Come on.

00:40:40.820 Just just get tougher. I mean, I understand. Finally, now she pulled herself from the tournament,

00:40:45.540 which is what you should do. If you can't handle it, don't play. Don't play. It's part of it. It's

00:40:49.100 part of the game. We all understand that there is a reason a lot of people don't don't want that job.

00:40:53.900 Can't make it to that point. Right. And just the same reason with Meghan Markle. There's a reason

00:40:57.460 those other women didn't want to marry Prince Harry. They knew it was coming their way in terms of the

00:41:01.100 scrutiny of themselves and their lives. You willingly jump into it. Don't expect us to feel sorry for you

00:41:06.240 when the press does what the press is going to do. And and at least in Markle's case,

00:41:10.800 the press was mean. This woman hasn't had some avalanche of bad press. And I really think she

00:41:15.560 needs to toughen up. OK, that's my two my two cents on it. It was really irritating me. So sorry.

00:41:24.460 Let's talk about the latest in cancel culture, because I saw you did a really interesting piece

00:41:29.120 on Antonio Garza Martinez. And I don't think that this is getting enough coverage. Tell us who he is

00:41:34.560 and what happened to him. Yeah. Antonio Garcia Martinez, he's an author. Well, first of all,

00:41:42.080 he's had many careers. He worked at Goldman Sachs once upon a time. Then he went to Facebook and he

00:41:48.380 was a fairly high ranking executive there. He essentially ran Facebook ads for a little while.

00:41:53.920 Then he dropped out and wrote a book called Chaos Monkeys, which is a it's a terrific book. He's just one

00:42:02.280 of these rare people who drops out of a profession, turns out to be a born writer. It's very much like

00:42:07.920 like Liar's Poker. If you've ever read that book about Wall Street, it's a Michael Lewis book. It was

00:42:14.880 a very funny, revealing, damaging look at what what the tech business is like. And after a while, you know,

00:42:25.620 he did the writer thing for a while and he wanted to go back into working in tech. So he got a job

00:42:29.880 at Apple. And some people in the inside Apple went through the passages in his book. And there's a

00:42:40.460 there's a section in the book where is a brief section where he's talking about his personal life.

00:42:46.420 And he's talking about how he fell in love with this one woman who he's describing as a strong woman.

00:42:55.900 And to contrast her with all the other women he dated, he says something along the lines of all

00:43:02.140 the women in the Bay Area are soft and full of shit. And that line ends up basically getting him

00:43:11.200 fired. They they they there is a cabal within the company that leads to a letter writing campaign.

00:43:19.480 And Garcia Martinez gets fired. And and the company basically caves and additionally pours

00:43:28.260 gasoline on the fire by by issuing a public statement saying we're not the kind of place where

00:43:32.860 misogynistic behavior is tolerated, which to me is defamatory because it's a it's it implies that he

00:43:38.920 did something in the office. But, you know, the whole thing was absurd. It's a book. If you want

00:43:46.880 people to write books that are good, you have to expect them to make observations that are that are

00:43:52.980 not guarded. And it wasn't, I don't think, a misogynistic observation. It was it was actually he

00:43:59.200 was praising somebody. But, but it was the whole thing was absurd. And, you know, just sort of another

00:44:06.260 example of how there's been this kind of movement towards like a sort of slack eyes union culture,

00:44:16.940 where in place of traditional unions, there are these slack chats who decide who gets to work at

00:44:22.680 places and who doesn't. And that's there's been a lot of that media and now some of it in tech too.

00:44:27.720 Mm hmm. You you had a great piece on this, just talking about how it's these these hypocrites at

00:44:35.300 Apple fired this guy after he had barely been hired. And by the way, there'd been no controversy

00:44:40.120 really about this book. He'd been on stage with Kara Swisher at her recode conference. The book had

00:44:45.340 been favorably reviewed repeatedly. Nobody was saying, oh, my God, this raging misogynist, which his

00:44:50.880 writings do not support, to your point. If he so what? So he has a diss for the women in Silicon Valley

00:44:55.940 finding them not to be the strongest personalities in the world. He's entitled to feel that way. And

00:45:00.340 by the way, he wasn't saying all tech women. He was just saying women in the area. But now we have

00:45:04.480 to pretend that he's a sexist pig because some some people within Apple wrote a letter saying,

00:45:11.180 and I quote, given Mr. Garcia Martinez's history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks,

00:45:16.500 we're concerned that his presence at Apple will contribute to cue the words, an unsafe working

00:45:22.520 environment for our colleagues who are at risk of public harassment and private bullying.

00:45:28.520 How? Like, what do you how? He's the one getting harassed and bullied right here right now.

00:45:33.560 And you raised a great point about Apple's hypocrisy when it comes to let's let's say, for example,

00:45:41.060 Dr. Dre. Right. Yeah. Who is a, you know, has a senior position within the company or and has ever

00:45:51.000 since Apple acquired beats by Dre and owns a massive amount of Apple stock and and yet is also the

00:45:59.660 author of songs like bitches ain't shit and and and some others that we could get into. But and I like

00:46:05.800 Dr. Dre. Let me I don't want to point a finger at him. I think his music is is cool. There's some other

00:46:11.980 stuff going on there. But but the hypocrisy is ridiculous. Right. Like they're they're certainly

00:46:16.880 not going to get rid of Dr. Dre and there and there hasn't been any workplace movement to oust him,

00:46:24.620 but they will go after somebody who is low profile enough that they can they can get away with

00:46:32.140 flexing a little bit of muscle. And that's what happened in this case. So well, and you pointed

00:46:37.080 out in your piece that The Verge, this publication, The Verge, says Silicon Valley has consistently had a

00:46:42.180 white male workforce. And you go on to say it's classic Matt Taibbi, apparently not bothered by

00:46:47.940 Antonio's not whiteness. Right. Yeah. He's he's Cuban. You know, it's it's you know, he's he's, I guess,

00:46:56.300 you know, Latinx or whatever people would want to call it. Don't say that. I know. I know. I hate going

00:47:02.020 there. But but but yeah, no, it's ridiculous. He's he's not a he's not a white male. And it's the whole

00:47:09.020 thing is absurd. In fact, there was a there was a huge debate about that, whether, you know, he was

00:47:14.180 whether whether or not they could call him white on Twitter, even though he was Cuban.

00:47:20.560 He's white adjacent. Right. Yeah, exactly. And you make money, you're white adjacent. And that and

00:47:26.080 and I didn't know all this stuff about Dr. Dre, I confess your your article got me sort of going

00:47:33.020 down the rabbit hole on him. This is you saying author he's author of such classic says, as you pointed

00:47:37.760 out, bitches ain't shit, lyrical gangbang. The subject of such articles as here's what's missing

00:47:43.160 from straight out of Compton, me and the other women, Dr. Dre beat up. So I actually went and

00:47:47.660 pulled that article that you referenced. Here's what's missing from the movie straight out of

00:47:51.260 Compton. And it's written by this woman, Dee Barnes. And Dee Barnes was the host of a well-known

00:47:55.760 Fox show about hip hop culture, hip hop called Pump It Up. And she says in this piece that you

00:48:01.980 reference, it's out there. She's on the record with this. Dr. Dre attempted to throw me down the

00:48:05.900 stairs, slam my head against the wall, kick me, stomped on me. And Dr. Dre admitted, quote,

00:48:11.460 it ain't no it ain't no big thing. I just threw her through a door. He pleaded no contest to assault.

00:48:17.560 Multiple women have come forward to say he beat the hell out of me. And they're cited in this piece

00:48:23.120 is his girlfriend, Michelle, who came out and said, I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and was

00:48:30.220 told to sit down and shut up. He punched his label mate, Terry B twice at a Grammy's party in 1990.

00:48:36.600 Black eyes and scars he gave to his collaborator, Michelle, on and on it goes. And then and then

00:48:41.920 this article points out that when he was in the group of NWA, they were doing songs like a bitch

00:48:48.360 is a bitch. Find them, eff them and flee. One less bitch. And and I quote, perhaps most offensively,

00:48:54.640 she swallowed it. On that track, one of his bandmates brags about violating a 14 year old

00:49:00.660 girl, 14 year old girl. Oh, shit. It's the preacher's daughter. And she's only 14 and a hoe.

00:49:06.420 But the bitch blank D like a specialized pro. I mean, no problem with Dr. Dre. Welcome to Apple.

00:49:14.060 He he's been I didn't know he'd been given an executive role there. He can come aboard. But this

00:49:19.020 guy says, yeah, Silicon Valley has a type of woman that I don't find all that impressive. He's got to go.

00:49:25.220 Right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's ridiculous. The it just I mean, again, it just shows you

00:49:31.480 that there's not a moral thing behind this. This is this is just about flexing a little bit of muscle.

00:49:38.880 And, you know, if they really if they really had a problem, they would have raised it with with

00:49:44.740 with Dr. Dre. But they didn't. They went after, you know, somebody they felt was

00:49:48.940 top level. Let's put it that way. Right. And that that's that's been a consistent feature of the

00:49:55.460 of a lot of these episodes, which is that, you know, especially in the media, you'll find in newsrooms,

00:50:04.200 it's it's almost always somebody who's not that doesn't have a lot of protection among the higher

00:50:13.120 ranking executives in the company. It's usually somebody who's a little bit of an outsider or

00:50:19.260 free thinker. And and and those are the people who are vulnerable in the in these campaigns.

00:50:24.620 Laura Logan and I were just talking about that exact thing. You know, she felt that that happened

00:50:29.120 to her at CBS. I could say the same in my history. Meanwhile, all these people at Apple who are so

00:50:33.760 horrified at, you know, the the hiring of this one guy based on a passage in his book, their their

00:50:40.460 salaries are being paid by the company using Uyghur labor. Right. Oh, yeah. I mean, if you if you want

00:50:47.740 to go down that road, like if you're really going to get morally upset about some guys, you know,

00:50:53.580 jokey memoir about the tech business, but you're not worried about how exactly you're you're making

00:51:01.000 iPads and iPhones at that at that low, low cost using essentially conscripted labor and in a number

00:51:08.920 of different countries with horrific working conditions that's been denounced by human rights

00:51:15.320 organizations for decades like that doesn't bother you. It doesn't bother you that the company

00:51:19.900 doesn't pay taxes, you know, the way it should like it's just all very selective. This is one of

00:51:27.960 the things that's bothering me these days about James Murdoch, who keeps he never misses an opportunity

00:51:32.060 to rip on his brother Lachlan. He lost the battle to Lachlan. He wound up the heir apparent and James

00:51:36.840 isn't. And now he loves to come out and criticize Fox News and his family's platforms. It's like so you make

00:51:44.160 these statements after you fly on your private jet from your penthouse to your yacht that all of those

00:51:49.320 properties paid for. Please spare me, you know, your sanctimony when you're living off of the rewards

00:51:56.080 from all of those media products. Right. Yeah, exactly. Like if you if you want to make a statement

00:52:02.480 about you want to get somebody from from Apple fired for writing a book, maybe you shouldn't be taking

00:52:08.960 the profits that they got from all these other practices. And I guess the same thing you could

00:52:14.160 say about about James Murdoch, too. That's right. Go work someplace else is a lovely solution. A lot

00:52:19.380 of companies out there in the world right now. They really need they need people to work as they're

00:52:22.560 sitting at home collecting their unemployment checks under the auspices of COVID relief.

00:52:27.560 Up next, we're going to get into Matt's thoughts on a debate our friend Candace Owens had with Nicole

00:52:32.640 Arbor, who's going to come on the show as well. She's a comedian, very funny, right leaning. So you'd think

00:52:37.940 these two had, you know, a lot in common and would like each other, but it kind of went south over

00:52:41.260 debate on cancel culture. Candace tried to get Chrissy Teigen canceled successfully. And I think

00:52:46.620 Target and some other places because she'd been bullying young girls on the download 10 years ago

00:52:52.760 and seemed to have a repeated pattern of behavior when it came to really going after young women,

00:52:59.880 which is contrary to her public image. Right. Although she loves to have people canceled.

00:53:03.300 And, uh, Nicole's feeling was the right shouldn't be engaging in that. Right. So they had a spirited

00:53:09.580 debate. Uh, I, it raised some questions for me too. We're going to get into that right after this,

00:53:14.040 but first I want to bring you a feature we have here on the MK show called real talk, where we just

00:53:19.220 get into something that's on my mind or what have you, um, from recent days. And I wanted to talk to

00:53:23.440 you about Memorial day this weekend, um, that we just all shared and my experience, because for me,

00:53:29.800 it was a lesson of how it's good to get out of your native surroundings every so often. And there's

00:53:34.540 a reason that we go to Montana a few times a year, right? There's a reason why we've been spending our

00:53:40.260 Memorial days past few years down in Texas. You got to get out of your liberal bubbles. More of the

00:53:45.500 press should do this in particular and see how the rest of the country lives. And we have some friends

00:53:50.540 down there outside of Dallas, uh, on a big ranch out about an hour outside of Dallas. And we went to visit

00:53:56.160 them again this year. And it, it's just a transformational experience. It's so good for

00:54:02.300 us, for me, for, for my family, for my kids. You know, we, we got off the plane and we, we got to

00:54:07.820 the ranch and my daughter had her mask on because she, she just, you know, it's habit now living in

00:54:13.460 New York. And she was thinking, walking into this house, I should be masked. And our host who was just

00:54:18.440 a doll said, um, Oh honey, you're in Texas. Now we don't wear those. You don't need that. Uh, so we

00:54:23.760 hardly took it off and it was the beginning of a wonderful mask free weekend indoor and out,

00:54:29.340 you know, you know, you're not in New York city anymore when you're driving from the plane

00:54:32.040 to the ranch and you see a big, big sign six months after the months after Trump leaves office

00:54:38.000 that reads Trump country. Right. You, you don't see that in New York city. Um, you see him in like

00:54:44.040 handcuffs, uh, in, in the pictures here, you got, you know, you, you drive past the horses and the

00:54:49.160 cattle and you see ranchers with the cowboy hats and the boots on the, on the horses doing their

00:54:53.800 things. And even just the way we lived while there, right? Like we went on canoe rides and

00:54:58.540 saw a tarantula and we ran into a water moccasin, which was scary, but cool since we didn't get hurt,

00:55:05.320 but it's good for my kids to be around that, right? Get your hands dirty. Understand what is,

00:55:09.960 what does that feel like? Right. It's not just all about the rats in the subways in New York city.

00:55:13.800 There's real wildlife out there that you might have to contend with. We went to a crab bake where they

00:55:18.020 had to crack open the crab legs and eat them. And, uh, you know, I don't like seafood,

00:55:22.340 so they never get that from me. We spent actual Memorial day and the night before looking at

00:55:26.280 fireworks and waving flags and having our moment of silence and talking about America and how much

00:55:32.840 we love it and what the sacrifice of our troops meant and means, you know, what, what the flag means

00:55:39.940 to us and what the media is doing to us. We, we rode bikes in the woods and through the fields and

00:55:46.960 the dirt and got dirty the way you need to, and kids need to, we played some pickle, uh, and drank

00:55:53.580 ranch water. Do you know ranch water? This is my new favorite drink. We kept calling it swamp water,

00:55:58.160 which is not the right name at all. It's ranch water. It's a drink that has some sort of Blanco

00:56:02.260 tequila. It could be Casamigos or whatever, lime juice, and this thing called Topo Chico, which is a

00:56:07.940 Mexican sparkling mineral water. It's all the rage down there. That is a hundred percent going to be my

00:56:13.240 summer drink, but we came home just feeling more connected to our country, to each other,

00:56:19.280 to our troops, our veterans, those who died and served. And, um, it's just a great perspective

00:56:25.260 setter to get out of this place called Manhattan that has values that are starting more and more

00:56:31.340 to look totally unfamiliar to me, you know? And sometimes I wonder whether it's my age and I'm

00:56:36.420 starting to lose my mind. Then you get out there in other parts of the country and you realize

00:56:39.040 it's not, it's not, it's this town. And I'm sure a lot of our listeners are living in towns just

00:56:44.180 like it and wondering the same. It's not us. It's them. Some people are losing their minds,

00:56:50.220 but it's not us, you know, loving your country, loving your country, men, believing in the flag

00:56:55.480 and the sacrifices that have been made for the privilege of living here and the rights that we

00:56:59.100 share. That's what it's about. That's one of the reasons for existing, uh, and spending some time

00:57:06.940 in good old places like Texas helps bring that home. So my thanks to our hosts, to all the

00:57:12.280 beautiful, wonderful friends that we met while down there. A lot of our listeners, I met a lot

00:57:16.780 of fans of the show, which was fun. You know, I invited them to give me feedback and I encourage

00:57:21.560 all of you to do something similar. Your next chance to get out of Dodge. If you live in a town like

00:57:26.100 Portland or LA or San Fran, uh, or even Austin, Texas, get out of there for a little bit and figure it

00:57:33.240 out like I did. Hope you enjoyed your long weekend and, uh, took some time on Memorial Day to,

00:57:39.840 to think about what really matters. All right. Back to our guest, Matt Taibbi right after this.

00:57:51.140 I want to ask you about an interesting debate that happened recently on, you know, Candace Owens has

00:57:55.960 got this once a week show now and, uh, online is over at the daily wire. And she had on Nicole

00:58:01.240 Arbor, who is a comedian. She's, she's a Republican. She's a, she's a Trump voter. So you'd think these

00:58:06.140 two gals would kind of get along. Um, not so, so they, they got into a debate. You don't need to

00:58:12.060 know the specifics, but I'll just get you up to speed in case you hadn't seen it. Um, about Chrissy

00:58:16.860 Teigen, who is, she's never seen a right leading person. She doesn't want to cancel. Chrissy Teigen

00:58:22.780 wants every, she wants you to shut up. She wants me to shut up. She wants everybody other than her

00:58:26.360 and John Legend, her husband to shut up. And, uh, it's annoying, right? It's like,

00:58:31.500 why am I listening to you? What are you like? You're some model that I don't like, I'm sorry,

00:58:35.320 but have you really earned the right to be this judgmental of everybody? Um, you know,

00:58:40.500 talk to mother Teresa, go talk to her in your prayers and come back and then maybe I'll listen

00:58:44.220 to you. But Chrissy Teigen loves to cancel people. And Candace, um, called her out because it turns out

00:58:51.660 Chrissy Teigen is not a very nice person behind the scenes and was really going after this one

00:58:58.920 woman named Courtney Stoddard, who, when she was 15, married a guy in his fifties, clearly

00:59:04.820 inappropriate, a grooming situation. And instead of expressing empathy or concern about this young

00:59:09.380 woman who now is non-binary and uses the they pronoun, she slipped into the woman, the young

00:59:14.680 girl's DMs and told her to go kill herself and said she should take a dirt nap. And there were

00:59:20.840 repeated harassing texts or DMs from Chrissy Teigen, this star to this young 15 year old who

00:59:27.400 was clearly going through a thing. And apparently it wasn't just Courtney Stoddard. She did it to

00:59:31.140 quite a few young, young people. It was 10 years ago. And Courtney Stoddard saved all the Stodden,

00:59:36.880 I guess. Courtney has now come out to say, this is a bully. Chrissy Teigen shouldn't have a deal with

00:59:42.280 Target or Walmart or any reputable store because she harasses young girls who are struggling

00:59:48.820 and is totally unsympathetic about it. Okay. That leads to Candace sort of trying to rally her

00:59:53.980 followers to get Chrissy Teigen's deals canceled at these stores. And Nicole Arbor goes on Candace's

01:00:00.260 show to say, I disagree with what you did. I think if you're against cancel culture,

01:00:04.440 then you're against cancel culture. And Candace was trying to argue, no, this is about accountability

01:00:09.220 for somebody who harassed young women. That's different than cancel culture. Here's a little

01:00:14.720 bit of their exchange. Listen. It is when you put cancel Chrissy and make your audience go after

01:00:19.480 her with vitriol saying the same disgusting things that you stand against. Your audience is now doing

01:00:24.120 it. I would be embarrassed if my audience is now sliding in the DMs of teenagers threatening to kill

01:00:28.360 them. They're sliding at her. She has said that she's having mental health issues. Have they threatened to kill her?

01:00:32.420 I don't know. Probably. So now she's having mental health issues after her. So now my audience is to blame

01:00:36.060 because they're saying that her product shouldn't be. You have directed your audience to be as nasty as Chrissy.

01:00:40.180 That is not true. That is so untrue. I directed my audience specifically to Target and asked them

01:00:46.880 to tell them to drop her product. I never told them to go on Chrissy's wall, not one. No, I agree

01:00:51.620 with what he said. Chrissy Teigen should be held accountable for poor actions. But canceling her

01:00:55.780 is the accountability. No, no, no. We do not participate in cancel culture. What do you consider cancel culture

01:00:59.920 is? I'm saying to Target and Basie drop her products so that she can be held accountable for

01:01:04.780 what she's done. Her products got dropped. I didn't ask for her to be erased from the internet. I think that's stupid.

01:01:09.520 I'm going to politely decline to be on the rest of the show.

01:01:12.320 Yeah. And that followed a discussion about some legal matter she had that she wasn't at liberty

01:01:17.400 to discuss. So I think that was sort of a one off. But it did raise an interesting debate and one I've

01:01:22.300 been struggling with myself, which is you hear that story about Chrissy Teigen and she's been so hateful

01:01:28.000 that you kind of want to say F Chrissy Teigen. I have no empathy for her whatsoever. But is that just

01:01:34.940 joining in on this cancel culture that I know you don't like and I don't like?

01:01:37.960 Yeah. I mean, the response that I've gotten anytime I've written about any of these episodes

01:01:44.820 where somebody's been bounced out of a job because of something they tweeted or wrote a long time ago

01:01:50.880 or something like that is, this isn't cancel culture. It's not intimidation. It's just

01:01:55.240 accountability. So I don't like that excuse that much. I mean, I get the idea that what's good for

01:02:04.460 the goose should be good for the gander, right? If somebody is doing this to other people and

01:02:10.260 they have their own past that they should be reckoning with, that hypocrisy should probably

01:02:15.380 be exposed. But I'm just generally not in favor of getting people fired or campaigning to get people

01:02:23.280 fired because of something they may have written or said a long time ago. Like even if it was bad,

01:02:29.440 everybody in their life has something that they're probably not proud of. And this is an exercise

01:02:39.000 that you could repeat with basically anybody on the planet if you look hard enough. And that's what I

01:02:44.740 worry is that this is all turning into is just this enormous tit for tat kind of exercise that will

01:02:50.720 just result in a lot of, a lot of, uh, you know, aggravation and destruction.

01:02:56.420 But do we make an exception for those who are cancel culture warriors?

01:03:01.780 No, but I mean, I guess, I guess my sympathy would more go in the direction of let's just stop doing

01:03:07.820 this, you know? Um, but we tried that and they won't. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I don't know. It's,

01:03:14.580 you're right. It's, it's a tough issue. Um, I, I just can't imagine myself ever being, uh, moved to

01:03:22.520 use any of the time I have on earth to try to organize a campaign to get anybody fired from a

01:03:28.820 job. Like, I just don't understand that mentality. Right. Like that's, that's part of what I don't

01:03:33.120 get is, you know, worry about your own situation and, and try to make your own contribution the best

01:03:39.800 you can. I get that. And I think probably the Matt Taibbi article or the Megan Kelly commentary

01:03:43.880 would have been something along the lines of she's a hypocrite. Nobody should be listening

01:03:47.740 to Chrissy Teigen on any of her cancel this one or this one's bad or that other one's bad because

01:03:52.700 look at her history as opposed to targeting the stores to cancel her deal. But I also see the

01:03:58.980 point that Candace was making, which is, um, live by the sword, die by the sword. And since,

01:04:05.100 since these cancel culture warriors won't listen to reason, it's been going on now for years.

01:04:10.500 They continue to collect scalps. This is the only way of making them listen. They've got to have skin

01:04:17.220 in the game. You know, I really think that the way we start the stop these weak corporations like

01:04:23.400 Apple, um, from just summarily ruining somebody's career is we should be saying, go for it. You want

01:04:31.000 to get rid of, um, you know, Antonio Garcia, Marty Martinez. That's fine. But we've got our own cabal

01:04:36.180 over here or the Matt Taibbi's of the world or the Glenn Greenwald's or me who are going to look into

01:04:40.240 everything you cancelator canceler, you know, in chief have done. We're going to scrub your record

01:04:46.480 and we're going to make sure that you've held yourself to those same high standards that you now

01:04:49.920 seek to impose on somebody else. And that I really think is the only thing that's going to make them

01:04:53.880 stop. Right. Because just shaming them into how cruel and unnecessary this is, isn't working.

01:04:59.720 Yeah. You're probably right. I, I just, uh, and yeah, and that's, that's, that's probably true.

01:05:06.560 And, and, uh, and we've already had a couple of incidents where, where some of these people who

01:05:11.140 have been the most aggressive in hunting down other people have, have themselves been exposed.

01:05:17.100 Um, you know, it's, it's almost like the, those stories from Soviet times where the, uh,

01:05:22.600 interrogator ends up in the same cell in the gulag with the person that they, um, that they

01:05:29.280 interrogated. Right. Like we've, we've had a couple of cancellation episodes where that's

01:05:32.720 happened. Um, never have clean hands. Right. Yeah, exactly. Uh, but I, I, I just, this process of,

01:05:40.820 of, um, you know, hunting through people's backgrounds for, for sins. It's just, it's,

01:05:46.160 it's a little bit too NKVD for me. Like I, um, I, I get it and, and, um, I, I probably wouldn't

01:05:54.000 stand in its way, but, uh, but it's, it's all ugly to me. What's NKVD North Korea?

01:05:59.700 Oh, that's the KGB. It's the old name for the KGB. Oh, I didn't know that. Um, okay. So this,

01:06:07.400 this woman hasn't yet been canceled, but she's in the news here in New York. There's this crazy

01:06:13.720 far left school called Dalton. It's a great school. It's got a very good academic reputation,

01:06:17.840 but this is the school where over a hundred teachers signed a letter a year ago, demanding

01:06:23.480 all sorts of crazy stuff. I mean, it's just like, it was so far across the line that even

01:06:28.060 the Dalton parents said, this has to stop. We can't have race in every single class in gym,

01:06:34.480 in art, in health, in math. We can't have, they, they wanted, um, all 50% of the parents donations

01:06:41.500 to go to inner city kids in, in New York. Um, and it's like, well, who do you think is going

01:06:46.820 to fund all their scholarships to Dalton? It's that money that does it. Like, it's just,

01:06:50.460 I could go on, but the latest set of Dalton is they have this person who is, I gather she,

01:06:56.720 she's somehow in charge of, um, health and wellness there. Her name is Justine Ang Fonte.

01:07:02.020 And she was in the news a month ago for going to do a lecture over at another school. Um, and

01:07:08.620 called Columbia prep. And at Columbia, she decided to teach the high schoolers about porn by showing a

01:07:14.960 bunch of porn and getting really specific on porn. And if they got these teenagers, they're like,

01:07:19.180 whoa, this is inappropriate. Yeah. She got really specific and it made the news.

01:07:23.760 Well, the follow on story is apparently this woman, um, Justine has been doing her little

01:07:30.820 education at Dalton on first graders. And we have a clip of the video she thought was appropriate

01:07:38.460 for the six and seven year olds. Listen. Hey, how come my penis gets big sometimes and points up in

01:07:45.140 the air? That's called an erection. Sometimes I touch my penis because it feels good. Sometimes

01:07:51.300 when I'm in my bath or when mom puts me to bed, I like to touch my vulva too. You have a clitoris

01:07:57.440 there, Kayla, that probably feels good to touch the same way Keith's penis feels good when he touches it.

01:08:03.120 But have you ever noticed that older kids and grownups don't touch their private parts in

01:08:07.840 public? Hmm. They don't. That's right, Keith. It's okay to touch yourself and see how different

01:08:14.260 body parts feel, but it's best to only do it in private. Boy, I'm like, I'm glad I didn't get

01:08:20.780 high for this interview. Oh my goodness. That, uh, I'm bringing you a natural high, Taibbi.

01:08:27.640 Yeah. That, that was, uh, that's intense. Wow. Can you imagine? I mean, then they have a big lesson

01:08:37.400 about consent. And one of the parents apparently, according to the New York post said, uh, the message

01:08:42.940 was parents, parents are supposed to say to their own children before they hug them. May I hug you?

01:08:49.160 And one parent came out and said, I'm paying $50,000 a year to these assholes to tell my kid

01:08:53.120 not to let her grandfather hug her when he sees her. And then she's going to slip away to the

01:08:58.560 bathtub to touch her vulva. Like, Oh my God. I'm concerned about where our country's going.

01:09:08.620 Yeah. I mean, I guess what that's $54,000 a year you're paying so that your six year old can learn

01:09:13.660 the word vulva. I mean, I, I, I don't know, maybe, maybe math first. I don't know. It feels,

01:09:21.700 feels a little bit, uh, like they could have gotten around to some other things before they went there,

01:09:26.960 but, uh, that is crazy. This is what we're dealing with in New York city. And why one of the reasons

01:09:32.340 why I pulled my kids, but it is not just Dalton saying inappropriate things to little children.

01:09:38.300 It is the president of the United States who made news the other day. It was happened on Friday. He

01:09:44.600 was, um, I think he was in an air force base in Virginia and making a speech. There was a girl

01:09:52.000 who appeared to be in elementary school. Uh, she had joined her parents and two older brothers

01:09:57.900 on the, on the podium when her mother introduced the president and, and Joe Biden said as follows,

01:10:04.640 listen, I'm especially honored to share the stage with Brittany and Jordan and Nathan and

01:10:10.880 Margaret Catherine. I, uh, I love those barrettes in her hair, man. I'll tell you what,

01:10:18.580 I'm looking at her. She looks like she's 19 years old.

01:10:23.880 Oh my God. Oh, that guy is the gift who keeps on giving. He's, he's amazing.

01:10:32.460 Why did you say that?

01:10:34.640 I mean, he's obviously passed the point where they're of coachability or otherwise,

01:10:41.500 you know, he would have stopped doing that stuff a while ago, but he's,

01:10:45.260 he reminds me of that character in hotshots that Lloyd Benson played, you know, that, uh,

01:10:51.380 uh, Lloyd Bridges played the Admiral Benson character. He's just, uh, completely nutty. And,

01:10:57.660 um, you know, that's who he is. Yeah.

01:11:00.740 And is he all there, right? Is he all there there, there, this, this clip made a lot of

01:11:04.900 headlines over the weekend and I loved it too. I confess where he got his ice cream and he came out

01:11:09.300 and as soon as he said, is the flavor, all the people in the crowd, which apparently included the

01:11:13.660 press started oohing and eyeing. Um, it was, um, Oh God, who was it? Molly Hemingway who came out and

01:11:20.780 said, uh, this is the way you speak to your three-year-old when you're trying to teach them

01:11:24.120 that they, that they won candy land. Um, but you can hear, so two things on play the clip,

01:11:28.860 listen to the reaction of the crowd and listen to the way he speaks. He, he, he speaks like a

01:11:32.820 three-year-old. Listen to this clip. Mr. President, what did you order? Chalka, chalka chip.

01:11:37.440 Oh, yeah.

01:11:38.760 Mr. President, what is your message to Republicans who are prepared to block the January 6th commission?

01:11:45.040 Can we hear that again? I need, I need to hear that one more time. Can you re, can you re-rack

01:11:50.100 that, Natasha? Let's hear that one more time.

01:11:51.920 Mr. President, what did you order? Chalka, chalka chip.

01:11:57.340 Mr. President, what is your message to Republicans who are prepared to block the January 6th commission?

01:12:01.980 Oh my God. Ooh, you're a big boy, aren't you? Can you believe me?

01:12:07.680 You put your pants on all by yourself. You know, it's, uh, it's amazing, you know?

01:12:13.160 Right?

01:12:13.680 Well, the, you know, the sycophants that they've been bringing to the, their, the coverage of Biden

01:12:19.200 is, it's like so embarrassing at this point. Um, they, they don't even try to disguise it anymore.

01:12:24.960 So, uh, they really aren't that enamored with him.

01:12:28.760 Yeah. I mean, like, you know, it's, it's such a polar opposite of what happened with Trump. Like,

01:12:34.420 you know, Trump, Trump would, would do the tiniest little thing and it would generate headlines for,

01:12:39.260 you know, four or five days as, you know, the second coming of Beelzebub or something like that.

01:12:45.020 Oh, they would have found a way to say his chalka, chalka chip was racist and that he was covering up

01:12:49.080 something he had done inside the ice cream shop. I mean, like, right. Or Putin chose the flavor

01:12:53.700 or something like that. Right. There'd be in-depth pieces on how that had always been Putin's favorite

01:12:58.900 from the time he was a child in St. Petersburg.

01:13:00.680 Exactly. Yeah, no, it's, it's ridiculous. And the, the, you know, which is, it's, it's,

01:13:08.080 it's funny most of the time, but it does actually matter because what ends up happening is they end

01:13:14.120 up just not going and doing any reporting at all on, you know, things like major changes of mind that

01:13:20.900 the president or whoever's actually running the country, you know, um, has about things, you know,

01:13:26.440 they, they said for months that they were planning on doing this massive, um, sort of rescue open

01:13:33.760 ended, uh, rescue program that would be transformational. And then, you know, they sort

01:13:38.840 of abruptly came out a couple of weeks ago and said, no, we're actually, um, you know, we're,

01:13:44.280 we're planning to on cutting back on all these programs and, um, we're not going to forgive student

01:13:49.300 debt. We're not going to do all these, all this stuff. And there was just nothing in the press

01:13:53.340 about it. We're not, uh, we're not, uh, we're not, uh, there's not going to be a public healthcare

01:13:57.800 option. We're not going to, we're not going to raise the real estate tax. We're not going to do

01:14:01.840 any of these things. No one seems to care because to your point, he's transformational, Matt, he's

01:14:07.500 transformational. That's their narrative. Even chocolate, chocolate chip is transformational

01:14:12.560 and they have, they, they've committed to it and they can, that that's the, the lens through which I

01:14:17.920 think they're genuinely seeing this guy. We have a fun butted soundbite of the press using that term

01:14:23.320 listen. First of all, Biden is a transformative president. Joe Biden as a transformational

01:14:28.480 president. It looks like he does want to be a transformational president. Portraying himself

01:14:33.400 as a potentially transformational figure. I mean, he may be turning into a, really a transformational

01:14:39.880 president. She called him a transformative president. Are we witnessing a transformational

01:14:44.800 moment? Channeling Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A transformational president. Clearly being

01:14:50.660 progressive. Using the word transformation. Transformational is what Joe Biden is setting

01:14:56.080 out to do. It could be transformational. This is a transformational agenda. You know,

01:15:01.000 Bernie Sanders is supposed to be the transformational guy. Yeah.

01:15:05.700 Oh, Hardy har har. I, I forgive me. I credit where credit's due. That's from your YouTube channel.

01:15:11.280 Yeah. But you nailed it. Yeah. It's, it's so funny because I mean, my favorite one in that,

01:15:18.060 in that whole clip is, is Joe Scarborough who's saying, you know, he could be transformational as

01:15:22.700 though it just occurred to him. And, and it wasn't that the Biden administration has been

01:15:29.260 telling reporters for a year that this is the word we want you to use. And we, we want, we want you to

01:15:36.260 compare him to Roosevelt. That's a, that's our new theme. You know, for people who don't know how

01:15:40.380 campaign, I mean, you, you, you obviously have done this Megan, like when you go out in the campaign

01:15:45.220 trail and you, and you meet with the aides after the events, they said, or they'll go over the themes

01:15:51.340 that they're trying to push, you know, with you, they'll say, you know, our guys, um, our,

01:15:56.820 our candidate is trying to do X, Y, and Z. And we think that this is reminiscent of Roosevelt.

01:16:01.680 And we think that this is transformational, blah, blah, blah. So they're feeding you the lines and

01:16:08.000 it's bad enough that they're repeating them, but it gets really embarrassing when they pretend it's

01:16:12.660 their own idea, right? Like, like they, they thought of it like that, that shows you how,

01:16:17.740 how paper trained the press is when, when that reminds me of, it reminds me of that, that scene

01:16:24.080 in devil wears Prada where Andy, the assistant to Miranda, who's really the Anna Wintour type mean

01:16:30.700 character who runs the magazine, the assistant Andy played by Anne Hathaway comes in and that

01:16:36.040 Meryl Streep's character is like, I don't know. They're both so similar. They're looking at these

01:16:41.280 two blues that are, the difference is imperceptible to the average lay person.

01:16:45.340 You know, I'm still learning about this stuff and, uh,

01:16:49.580 this stuff. Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you.

01:16:59.260 You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance,

01:17:06.060 because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put

01:17:10.780 on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise.

01:17:16.720 It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that

01:17:22.300 in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint-Laurent,

01:17:27.940 wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets. I think we need a jacket here.

01:17:32.220 Hmm. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers.

01:17:37.540 And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down

01:17:42.660 into some tragic casual corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin. However,

01:17:49.060 that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of comical how you

01:17:55.680 think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact,

01:17:59.440 you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.

01:18:04.360 The manipulation starts deep and, and works its way out to, to, to the point where somebody like

01:18:09.660 Joe Scarborough is pawning it off. Like it's his idea. Meanwhile, he's just parroting talking points.

01:18:14.880 Joe Scarborough, the only man in media to have loved both Trump and Biden.

01:18:19.380 And now in excusing his Trump sycophants, he just says, well, I have no influence over anybody who votes

01:18:24.560 on the, on the right. Okay. That's one excuse for what, for what you did. Um, but yeah, so,

01:18:31.040 so talk about that. What, why does it matter? Because little by little, the transformational

01:18:35.380 message is falling apart.

01:18:37.340 Well, it matters because you should, first of all, when, when these aides talk, you should do a little

01:18:43.200 digging. Like, is it true? You know, like does the candidate actually have a record of doing what

01:18:49.080 they're saying, what, what, what they say they're going to do. And in Biden's case, they began the

01:18:55.460 campaign, uh, whispering to reporters. And I would, I, I covered them a little at the beginning.

01:19:01.560 Basically their message behind the scenes was we're, we're not the big ideas campaign. We're the

01:19:07.320 stability campaign. Um, and so don't use that kind of language with us, uh, when you're talking about

01:19:14.380 us, because we, we want to get credit for being the unthreatening, the safe date in the field.

01:19:20.400 Right. And they went and they did that. And I mean, if you look, if you go back and look at the

01:19:24.060 coverage of Biden in the early part of the primary, they used all of that language. And then when it,

01:19:30.200 when Bernie Sanders was beaten and suddenly it was advantageous, according to the polls to start

01:19:36.200 describing yourself as transformational, because that's what democratic voters apparently wanted.

01:19:41.700 They started selling that. And, and that's when reporters started pushing that word. And again,

01:19:48.480 like, it's not our job to do PR, like politicians have money to buy commercials. If they, if they want

01:19:53.920 to sell people on the idea that they're transformational, they're, they're free to buy ads

01:19:58.300 and, and, and tell you that, like, it's not, it's not our job to do it for free. You know,

01:20:04.260 that's the problem that I have. And it's this, it's this instinct to try to get closer to people in

01:20:10.600 power by doing them a favor, um, you know, a PR favor, which is, which is dangerous because in a

01:20:17.440 pinch, what will happen is the reporters won't go against the politician and they won't write

01:20:22.040 something negative. And that's, that's where it's dangerous. Hmm. That's absolutely where they are.

01:20:27.900 Although you say that the Biden's message was I'm the safe date. Tell it to a little girl in the

01:20:32.960 elementary school at the air force base. I'm not sure she's looking at him that way.

01:20:40.760 So, so often they can't get out of their own way. You know, it's like, why, how has he not learned to,

01:20:47.060 to not comment on girls or get near girls? And why did that family for that matter,

01:20:51.580 put her anywhere near him on a podium? Yeah. How do you get to be all the way to the White House?

01:20:56.740 If you're the kind of person who says you look like you could be 19, you know, uh, you know,

01:21:02.580 on, on TV, like it, it is, it is amazing that, that, uh, that he made it that far. It's, it's

01:21:09.880 even, and look at Kamala Harris. I mean, what do you think about her? Because she's obviously the

01:21:14.780 presumptive nominee. I mean, this party that is so, so devoted to diversity and identity,

01:21:20.220 there ain't no way they're getting rid of Kamala Harris as the, as the nominee. Um,

01:21:24.840 she's terrible candidate too. She's just a terrible politician. I mean, I don't know what

01:21:29.160 she's like as a person, but she is a terrible politician and going into the Memorial day

01:21:34.980 weekend, which is the one holiday, even unlike veterans day or July 4th, where we are meant

01:21:40.800 to remember those who died for our country and her message, her, her message for the people to

01:21:47.100 consider going in to that weekend was, and I quote, enjoy the long weekend. And then she gets so much

01:21:54.840 right. A picture of herself. And there's so much blowback that then she kept trying to undo it.

01:21:59.120 Like, Oh, remember the fallen troops. You know, it was like too late, too late. We know what you

01:22:03.780 stand for. Rob Lowe had a better message that I saw split screen online of what he said versus what

01:22:08.800 she said. He worked in a fake white house when he started in the West wing and he seemed to get the

01:22:13.240 message better from Aaron Sorkin than she got from her boss. Cause she was way off message.

01:22:18.580 Yeah. And it's funny at the beginning of the primary cycle in, I guess it was 2019,

01:22:25.600 all of the sort of think tanks and democratic strategists were telling all the reporters like,

01:22:33.100 Oh, the candidate you have to watch is Kamala Harris. Like that, that's, who's going to end up

01:22:37.480 winning this thing. That's who we want to win this thing. And, you know, she got very favorable

01:22:43.860 treatment in the press. There were loads of these sort of hagiographic portraits of her on covers

01:22:50.160 of magazines. And she was a complete dud, you know, as a candidate, the voters just overwhelmingly

01:22:55.740 rejected her over and over and over again. She had that one bounce after the debate where she went

01:23:02.780 after Biden and on the busing issue. And she had those t-shirts pre-printed the, that little girl

01:23:10.340 as me t-shirts, which you could buy for 27 bucks as soon as the debate was over. But she was never

01:23:17.440 viable as a, as a candidate in that primary. And yet, you know, I, I think the democratic party

01:23:23.760 establishment really does believe, um, you know, that if, if she had to run in the next term that,

01:23:30.720 that she would win. And I, you know, maybe so, I don't know, but there hasn't been any evidence of

01:23:36.320 that. Okay. The conclusion to our episode is right after this. Don't go away.

01:23:44.020 The other thing I wanted to ask you about was this whole, they want, you know, the Democrats

01:23:48.480 pushed to have a commission study what happened, uh, on January 6th. And in particular, the attempt

01:23:55.020 to compare it to 9-11 saying the reason we need a commission to have, to study what happened

01:24:01.060 in this capital siege is because it's a 9-11 style event. And I, I think you'd sense,

01:24:09.600 sense something out about this. And I saw the most powerful piece in the journal,

01:24:13.200 Deborah Burlingame, who I've been interviewing since after it happened, since after 9-11,

01:24:17.520 I first started at Fox and she is, she's been such a fearless warrior for her brother,

01:24:21.940 Charles Burlingame, who was the pilot of American Airlines flight 77. Uh, as she described it,

01:24:27.020 murdered in his cockpit at age 51 in a six and a half minute struggle for control of the airplane.

01:24:32.880 And she came out with a piece on May 27th saying, look, these democratic lawmakers want to establish

01:24:37.540 this commission, this 9-11 style commission to investigate the siege. And she quotes George Will,

01:24:44.400 commentator George Will, who's really, she's filled with such anger. Uh, and he says, and I quote,

01:24:50.300 I would like to see January 6th burned into the American mind as firmly as 9-11 because it was

01:24:57.040 that scale of a shock to the system. And she says, I'll just give you a couple of thoughts from

01:25:04.520 Deborah. She goes by Deb, she calls it profoundly disheartening. She says, these two events are

01:25:10.680 fundamentally different in nature, scope, and consequence. Mentioning them in the same breath,

01:25:15.880 not only diminishes the horror of what happened on 9-11, it tells a false story to the generation

01:25:21.000 of Americans who are too young to remember that day nearly 20 years ago. She says, um, members of

01:25:26.700 Congress may have had a frightening day on January 6th. We keep hearing about AOC and her therapy.

01:25:30.740 She's needed as a result, but on 9-11, Deb goes on, some 200 people in the world trade center towers

01:25:37.580 chose to jump from 80 to 100 floors above the ground rather than being consumed by fire. A woman waiting

01:25:44.220 at a lobby elevator bank was burned over 82% of her body when jet fuel from the first plane sent a

01:25:49.340 ball of fire down the elevator shaft and into the lobby. I know this woman, her name's Lauren Manning.

01:25:53.760 I interviewed her. She spent three months in a hospital burn unit and was permanently disfigured.

01:25:59.520 Countless harrowing stories like this of death, destruction, heartbreaking loss, more than 3,000

01:26:04.160 children lost parents, eight young children were killed on the planes. Recovery personnel found 19,000

01:26:10.780 human remains scattered all over lower Manhattan from river to river, including on rooftops and

01:26:15.420 window ledges. She says some families received so many notifications of remains, they couldn't

01:26:19.660 take it anymore and ask for them to stop. More than 1,100 families received nothing. Their loved

01:26:25.060 ones went to work that morning and disappeared. Finishing up here, she says the attack brought down

01:26:30.780 our nationwide aviation system. It shut down the New York Stock Exchange for days. It destroyed or rendered

01:26:35.720 uninhabitable 16 acres of lower Manhattan, including the underground subway and commuter train lines and

01:26:41.540 destroyed a section of the Pentagon. Rebuilding at ground zero is still incomplete and the U.S. troops are still

01:26:46.480 in Afghanistan. On January 6th, Congress resumed its session that evening. It's deeply offensive and sad, she

01:26:53.860 says, that the brutal and harrowing memories of the worst terrorist attack in American history are being deployed

01:26:57.960 by political partisans. They're using 9-11, not as an example of what the American people endured and overcame

01:27:03.980 together, but explicitly to divide, to stoke hatred, and to further a political agenda aimed at

01:27:10.900 stigmatizing the other party and marginalizing ordinary Americans. What do you make of it?

01:27:17.840 I actually think it goes even further than that. Like, I think this effort to compare January 6th to 9-11,

01:27:25.420 you know, has a lot to do with the desire on the part of some politicians to sort of remake the domestic

01:27:36.360 security apparatus in the same way that we remade the international security apparatus after 9-11. I mean,

01:27:44.020 you know, this whole concept, we had news stories just a couple of weeks ago that the Biden administration

01:27:51.660 was considering sort of a policy of having the Department of Homeland Security cooperate with

01:28:01.720 private investigators to look into the, you know, the communications of certain people,

01:28:10.540 certain political groups, because it would be illegal for the government to do it themselves,

01:28:14.140 you know, without probable cause.

01:28:17.160 That's scary.

01:28:18.740 Yeah, that's what I worry about is that they're looking for a domestic war on terror. They want the

01:28:26.080 capability to go through those kinds of investigations to use tools like FISA to go after people within the

01:28:36.740 United States. And, you know, there's already an extensive record of those programs being abused.

01:28:41.760 And what happens when they allegedly have a domestic justification, a legal window to start using

01:28:52.580 those powers on the population like that? That's the big fear for me is that the end game is that.

01:28:58.260 So you see the attempt to establish this commission as tied. It's sort of the camel's nose under the

01:29:04.360 tent. Like we've got to crack down on these people. We have to do it's all hands on deck. The same sacrifice

01:29:08.880 of civil liberties we saw after 9-11, an actual terrorist attack on our country need to be made

01:29:15.880 now. Those same sacrifices in our civil liberties need to be made now to protect against white supremacists

01:29:23.740 and so on. All the bad guys that the left claims are responsible for what happened on January 6th.

01:29:29.900 Yeah, I mean, we've already seen some pretty remarkable behaviors where, you know, they're stopping

01:29:36.620 people at airports, they're searching their computers, their phones. You know, if we have even

01:29:44.220 like a theoretical tie to, you know, to anybody who was traveling to Washington that day, that's what I

01:29:54.020 worry about is basically they're going to have a commission that's going to come to some kind of

01:29:57.060 conclusion about how there's a gap in the domestic security apparatus that has to be closed by means of

01:30:04.860 programs X, Y, and Z, right? And that's what they'll come up with recommendations. And probably

01:30:10.640 it will just be legalizing things they're already doing. But that's what I worry about.

01:30:15.820 Yeah. Her closing line in that piece was that the world-changing attack of September 11th, 2001

01:30:21.980 shouldn't be used either as a precedent or moral authority to create a commission whose sole purpose

01:30:28.460 is to turn a straightforward law enforcement failure into destructive political theater.

01:30:34.240 And your point is, it's far more nefarious than just destructive political theater. It's an excuse

01:30:38.500 to gain even more control over our lives, to increase what's becoming the new surveillance state.

01:30:45.180 This is what Glenn Greenwald's been jumping up and down about his old place that he founded,

01:30:49.180 The Intercept, which seems to have done a complete 180 on the protection of privacy and civil liberties.

01:30:56.580 They sound more like Fox News right after 9-11.

01:31:02.160 Yeah. And they're doing a new series of stories that's basically going through a hacked archive

01:31:10.660 of files that they got from Gab. And I wrote about this, Glenn has commented about this, that this is

01:31:18.940 kind of contrary to the original mission of The Intercept, which was they were the tenders of the

01:31:25.300 Edward Snowden Archive. And they were dedicated to kind of exposing the excesses of the federal

01:31:33.320 surveillance state and conversely to protecting the privacy rights of individuals, because that was

01:31:39.080 the whole idea of the Snowden revelations was, look, they're spying on us, right? Illegally,

01:31:45.720 they've, they've, they've assumed authority that they don't really have to listen into and catalog our

01:31:51.400 communications. And now here, here, basically, The Intercept is doing the same kind of work that

01:31:57.700 law enforcement would like to do, which is go through the private communications of private citizens

01:32:03.220 and look for evidence of sort of political unorthodoxy. Now, there are circumstances under

01:32:09.700 which that kind of reporting could be legitimate. But, you know, the irony of The Intercept doing it,

01:32:17.020 I think, to me, is pretty strong.

01:32:19.840 They have lost their way. All right, I want to end with this, because I heard you mentioned on one of

01:32:24.520 your podcasts recently that you're, you have a new approach to the news. And I thought,

01:32:29.200 this is interesting, and I can kind of relate. You said, I only, I only really read what I'm

01:32:34.580 interested in. You know, I'm not doing the wide swath approach to journalism in the mornings. How

01:32:40.340 does that work? And how's it going?

01:32:44.740 Yeah, not really all that well. I mean, you backslide into reading everything again, but

01:32:49.620 they get you.

01:32:51.060 Yeah, but I think the problem for me and for a lot of other people, you know, even just people not in

01:32:57.160 the media business is just, there's just too much stuff out there. And if you, if you follow it,

01:33:02.080 you will go crazy. Like it, it, it, it's designed to make you upset. Yes, constantly. And I think

01:33:09.720 there's only a limited amount of, you know, of mental attention that any one person has that they

01:33:14.560 can use, you know, for, for my purposes, if I focus on more than one or two topics at a time,

01:33:20.060 I get overwhelmed, you know, but, but beyond that, it's, it's just so aggravating to read the stuff

01:33:25.960 that's in the news now that I don't, I think it's not good for your mental health. Like, I think

01:33:30.800 probably we have to ration that somehow in the future.

01:33:35.580 And it is like the, you know, the economics theory of garbage in, garbage out. You have to be so

01:33:40.180 careful who you choose to let in.

01:33:42.760 Right. Yeah. Yeah. What you should think about what's going into your brain in the same way you

01:33:47.980 think about what's going in, you know, what you eat, right? Like you don't just eat everything you

01:33:52.540 see, like you have to have some lettuce sometimes. And, you know, like, I think that's, it's the same

01:33:57.260 thing with news. You just, you just can't keep eating like rage and, and division like all day

01:34:02.440 long. It's just not good for you. If news were a, were a meal, what would it be? Like red meat,

01:34:08.020 like hardcore alcohol, some sort of increased, you know, in proof alcohol, like, you know,

01:34:14.900 the stuff you used to drink when you were in college when you couldn't afford anything.

01:34:17.860 Right. Bacardi 151, right. Or yeah, something like that. Yeah.

01:34:23.880 I can't remember the name. I, I had some encounters. I don't remember them. There's a reason for that.

01:34:29.780 I think we all did. Yep.

01:34:32.520 Matt Taibbi, such a great time catching up. I always love getting your take on the news.

01:34:36.380 Thank you for being here.

01:34:37.620 Thanks so much, Megan. Take care.

01:34:39.060 Thank you for being here.

01:35:09.060 out of the park and made me proud to be an American. Wonder what you thought of that,

01:35:13.280 of Matt, uh, of everything. So get on there and let me know and subscribe now, because if you do,

01:35:17.880 we'll give you a tap on the shoulder on Friday to remind you to listen to Dennis Prager,

01:35:22.920 the soothing bomb of Dennis Prager. Love this man. He's up next. Don't miss it. See you then.

01:35:30.480 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:35:36.080 The Megan Kelly show is a devil may care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

The Megyn Kelly Show - June 02, 2021

Matt Taibbi on Fighting Cancel Culture, Biden Media Coverage, and COVID Hypocrisy ｜ Ep. 110

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