The Megyn Kelly Show - Megyn Kelly's Special Message on Open and Honest Conversations, Exclusively For Podcast Listeners

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

00:00:05.160 Until our names are cleared.

00:00:07.700 We're fugitives from interval.

00:00:09.480 Like Bonnie and Clyde with better snacks.

00:00:12.840 Espionage?

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00:00:30.600 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

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

00:00:41.960 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:43.740 I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:45.360 And this is a special podcast-only episode for you today.

00:00:50.460 As you may know, the show goes out live on SiriusXM

00:00:53.640 between noon and 2 p.m. Eastern every day, Monday through Friday.

00:00:56.460 And we release it on YouTube, among other online platforms.

00:01:00.580 But it started as a podcast.

00:01:02.520 And it occurred to us that we should nurture the podcast audience

00:01:06.080 and the folks who have been there with us via audio from the beginning

00:01:10.320 in a special way.

00:01:11.920 So we are releasing this episode today only on podcast.

00:01:15.660 It is only for the podcast audience, and we hope you like it.

00:01:19.840 We feel very grateful to all of you for helping make the show a thing

00:01:22.700 and giving us a reason to get up professionally each day

00:01:26.300 and continue our mission.

00:01:27.680 And also, I just wanted to talk about the good news.

00:01:31.960 And the news this week was very, very good.

00:01:35.540 It was very good.

00:01:37.260 Very encouraging for those of us on the side of reason,

00:01:41.180 meaning free speech and due process, love of country,

00:01:47.000 and a general rejection of the pernicious ideas of wokeism

00:01:51.000 that are trying to divide us based on race or gender, gender identity, etc.

00:01:56.000 Elon bought Twitter or is going to CNN plus failed.

00:02:01.240 Jon Stewart's ratings are in the tank.

00:02:03.620 Embarrassingly bad.

00:02:05.420 Disney lost billions in value after openly pushing radical trans ideology

00:02:10.160 and getting political in Florida.

00:02:12.380 Um, so what does it tell me?

00:02:15.600 It tells me reason will prevail.

00:02:17.760 Reason is winning, right?

00:02:20.400 It's winning.

00:02:20.980 You can feel it.

00:02:22.860 We here at the show are grateful.

00:02:25.180 I feel excited about this.

00:02:27.460 I'm excited to be part of it.

00:02:29.260 So is my team.

00:02:30.680 We launched this program in September of 2020,

00:02:34.020 which, man, I look back now, it's like everything was happening.

00:02:36.680 My gosh, we were in such a state.

00:02:38.680 In fact, I was sitting on my couch in between, you know,

00:02:41.360 NBC and this, not that motivated to do.

00:02:44.660 I was like, I need to do something.

00:02:46.000 I don't want to go back into the mainstream media at all.

00:02:48.320 What am I going to do?

00:02:49.800 And the madness of the summer of 2020 is what got me off the couch.

00:02:53.160 I'm like, I got to get back out there.

00:02:54.740 I got to, I got to own my own thing

00:02:56.100 because I got to be able to talk about all these dicey issues

00:02:58.160 in a way that is totally frank.

00:03:00.580 And then we did it.

00:03:01.660 We launched in September of 2020.

00:03:03.380 And our mission statement is right in the tagline.

00:03:05.760 Open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:03:09.300 No third rails.

00:03:10.340 We'll discuss anything. 0.99

00:03:12.900 No spinning, no lying, no bullshit virtue signaling.

00:03:17.380 Let's give a platform to honest Americans with an opinion

00:03:22.760 that is worth listening to,

00:03:25.500 who the mainstream media ignores or attacks or censors

00:03:30.060 as unworthy of consideration.

00:03:33.980 When we launched, it was an absolutely insane time.

00:03:38.060 We had like five people.

00:03:39.460 We were not yet on camera.

00:03:42.220 We took a little screenshot of the five of us looking at one another,

00:03:45.340 just on our Zoom computers thinking,

00:03:48.360 this is going to be an exciting news time.

00:03:50.180 And boy, were we right.

00:03:51.960 I mean, it was truly,

00:03:53.020 it was a sustained government assault on debate and discussion.

00:03:57.440 I mean, it's still ongoing,

00:03:58.980 but we've made progress.

00:04:00.200 It was on COVID on trans issues,

00:04:03.340 on radical issues of all, you know, social denominations, racial issues, obviously.

00:04:09.680 I knew, I knew that I needed to start reporting and commenting on all of it or I was going to go crazy.

00:04:15.840 Isn't that how we felt back then?

00:04:17.180 We were going to go crazy unless somebody started to say what was true.

00:04:20.200 More and more people have done it since, and it feels great.

00:04:23.980 But in the beginning, it was so gratifying to hear somebody say what we knew was true, right?

00:04:28.340 In the year and a half plus that we've been on the air, we've tried to lead on what I call the third rail subjects.

00:04:34.400 I love to touch the third rail.

00:04:37.220 I don't know.

00:04:37.980 It's a character flaw or trait.

00:04:39.860 It can be both.

00:04:41.780 And I was thinking back through some of the examples.

00:04:44.320 Let's go back to December of 2020.

00:04:45.960 Okay.

00:04:46.120 That was still back in the height of the COVID muzzling stage. 0.90

00:04:51.680 And a group of doctors put out what would become known as the Great Barrington Declaration.

00:04:57.300 These three doctors from like all the best institutions, Stanford and Harvard and Yale.

00:05:01.700 And it was completely shut down.

00:05:05.460 No one would talk about it.

00:05:06.380 I mean, these are legit doctors, very well respected.

00:05:08.820 Nobody would talk about it.

00:05:09.880 Now we know why.

00:05:11.540 Now we know that Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH were actively working behind the scenes to stifle it, to muzzle them, to censor them and dismiss them as a bunch of loons.

00:05:23.600 But we, I'm proud to say, in December of 2020, put them on the air.

00:05:28.980 And it was spectacular.

00:05:31.700 What were they saying that was so controversial?

00:05:34.020 They objected to the lockdowns.

00:05:35.680 They said the lockdowns were doing more harm than good, that they were going to wind up costing more lives than they saved.

00:05:40.840 They said we need to focus on what they called, quote, focus protection.

00:05:44.880 Focus on the most vulnerable.

00:05:46.580 Those are the ones who need our attention.

00:05:48.160 Who, at that point, we were saying, when we get the vaccine, need the vaccine first.

00:05:51.760 Those are the ones who we need to socially distance from and so on.

00:05:54.200 It was great stuff.

00:05:56.320 And it was crazy that they couldn't get any corporate media attention.

00:05:59.680 And I loved to put them on.

00:06:02.460 And Dr. Bhattacharya recently told us that we were literally one of the first in the mainstream, because we're not sort of far right or far left, to even ask them if they would come on.

00:06:13.160 But the mainstream media, most of them, they're eager to help suppress them.

00:06:17.700 In early spring of 2021, so just a few months later, we put on Josh Rogan of The Washington Post.

00:06:24.020 You guys know him by now, right?

00:06:25.840 He wrote the book on COVID and how it got started.

00:06:28.940 Well, Josh Rogan, even though he's with WAPO, was completely ignored by most of the mainstream.

00:06:35.440 They didn't want to hear him talking about the COVID, that COVID might have come from a lab.

00:06:40.540 They didn't want to hear that Dr. Fauci might have been responsible for the very gain of function type of research that may have led to the pandemic, that he was funding the very type of research that may have wound up causing this whole thing.

00:06:59.420 You weren't allowed to even speak those words.

00:07:02.420 But Josh Rogan came on and did it.

00:07:05.060 And we, again, were one of the first to give him a platform.

00:07:08.080 So that's what I love about the show.

00:07:10.540 That's what I've been enjoying most, the middle finger to the mainstream, and it's absurd judgments about who's worthy of listening to and who's not.

00:07:21.520 Months into the insanity following George Floyd, and really the nation lost its mind.

00:07:25.660 They lost its mind after George Floyd.

00:07:27.380 Months into it, we had on people like Sam Harris, Glenn Lowry, amazing.

00:07:31.760 If you haven't listened to that, if you haven't listened to that episode with Glenn Lowry, where he talks about why we love America and why America is the greatest country in the world,

00:07:39.200 including for people of color, you're missing out.

00:07:42.140 Go back and listen to that.

00:07:43.140 People like Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal, who I absolutely adore.

00:07:46.820 Other thought leaders who pushed back hard on this fake narrative about cops and the dangerous racism being pushed on our kids and our institutions as a result of a bad cop named Derek Chauvin.

00:07:58.700 We booked Shelby and Eli Steele, whose documentary, What Killed Michael Brown?

00:08:05.520 Remember that case of Ferguson, Missouri, was banned on Amazon.

00:08:10.300 They banned it.

00:08:11.540 Two black men having their say about what they think happened in this community that became the epicenter for these racial debates for so long.

00:08:18.880 Their their take on it was banned by Amazon for a discussion that we had on this show.

00:08:26.520 It still brings me to tears.

00:08:27.780 It was amazing because, of course, we wanted to hear what they had to say about Michael Brown.

00:08:31.040 But then we got into everything, how Eli has made it in Hollywood, despite the fact that he is deaf and how most of the shows, even the ones who wanted to hear more about their documentary had canceled him.

00:08:44.900 Eli is Shelby's son.

00:08:46.220 Because he's deaf and they weren't sure if he would make a good guest.

00:08:52.100 And I confess to him that we we were concerned on our show, too.

00:08:56.900 But we said, if he's willing to do it, so are we.

00:08:59.400 And that's when he told me that he'd been canceled by all these other shows and how exhausting it had been for him to do it.

00:09:06.040 But he was so proud of himself that he had made it through.

00:09:08.680 Oh, my God, dying.

00:09:10.780 Those are the exchanges I run home and tell Doug about.

00:09:13.940 To be honest, I just run downstairs and tell him about we're in the same house.

00:09:18.640 But there have been some special, special moments.

00:09:22.260 We booked people like a teenager from Missouri. 0.86

00:09:25.660 This young girl, her life was ruined over false allegations of bigotry by her school, which was so focused on kowtowing to anyone crying racism.

00:09:35.300 They they forgot about the need for due process, for fairness, the importance of decency and actually getting to the bottom of facts.

00:09:43.580 Her sin was she had to support the police flag on her laptop and where they went with that. 0.98

00:09:50.320 And this one accuser who falsely pointed the finger at her was insane. 0.68

00:09:54.140 After that, it was insane. 0.74

00:09:55.640 They didn't care.

00:09:56.160 She was a teenager.

00:09:57.300 They didn't care.

00:09:59.420 We interviewed a mom, a new mom and business owner whose frustration with the lockdowns, her distrust of corporate media.

00:10:07.460 People like Lemon and Quom over at CNN forced her into other pockets of media that wound up taking her down a rabbit hole online and ultimately culminated in her being at the Capitol on January 6th. 0.88

00:10:20.860 We didn't judge her.

00:10:22.440 We listened to her.

00:10:24.620 We learned about her and how she got to that place.

00:10:28.120 I don't know.

00:10:31.980 The interviews that I most look forward to probably were the parents and the teachers and the students speaking out about the craziness in the schools, right?

00:10:41.580 The racial agendas, the trans agendas being forced on them, including my own, my own schools in New York City, which we loved but had to leave because of their crazy, crazy ideologies. 1.00

00:10:52.900 It takes guts for teachers to come on and speak out.

00:10:55.600 They know this is a career ending decision.

00:10:58.120 It shouldn't be, but it is.

00:11:00.100 Or somebody like Jodi Shaw. 0.98

00:11:02.060 Remember her from Smith?

00:11:04.000 She was an administrative assistant.

00:11:05.920 She had no power at Smith, but she spoke out first on Facebook saying, I refuse to let you racialize my experience here.

00:11:14.080 Me, my colleagues, my experience here.

00:11:16.160 And then Smith unleashed hell on this poor woman. 1.00

00:11:19.280 And she wouldn't shut up.

00:11:20.960 She was great.

00:11:21.680 She came on. 0.93

00:11:22.260 She did her first big interview with us.

00:11:24.220 And it was magic.

00:11:28.120 The debates we've had on the show have been so important.

00:11:31.180 I've learned so much.

00:11:33.020 You know, it's like we don't do enough of that in the media these days.

00:11:35.440 You get one side.

00:11:36.340 You go, if you're conservative, you go to conservative media.

00:11:38.280 If you're a lib, you go to liberal media.

00:11:40.540 That's it.

00:11:41.020 You don't learn.

00:11:41.860 You just get your worldview reinforced.

00:11:44.200 That's not helpful.

00:11:45.780 I like to learn.

00:11:47.020 I want to.

00:11:47.420 I don't know.

00:11:48.320 I don't know a lot about a lot.

00:11:50.820 Right.

00:11:51.240 It's like I'm not an expert in critical race theory or in climate change just because I've been covering this stuff.

00:11:58.100 That doesn't make me an independent expert.

00:12:00.000 Uh, so we did debates on, on some of this stuff and I think it was really good stuff.

00:12:05.380 We did.

00:12:06.100 We did one on guns.

00:12:07.260 We did one on whether the bans in schools on critical race theory are a good idea on climate change.

00:12:12.940 We did a great one on Israel and Palestine that was on fire. 0.87

00:12:16.860 People loved it.

00:12:17.480 Uh, we did primers, like just short little episodes to help people understand Cuba, Hong Kong, UFOs.

00:12:26.360 That was a good one.

00:12:28.280 Um, we did a debate with girls in Connecticut, high school girls who didn't want to run against biological boys.

00:12:34.320 And then we brought on a trans female athlete, trans woman athlete who pushed back with a different way of looking at it. 0.99

00:12:43.600 Great.

00:12:44.180 You get both sides of you.

00:12:45.180 You can, you can make up your mind as to which one you think is the more sound judgment.

00:12:52.280 We did wellness weeks, talked about sleeping and drinking and time management and all sorts of good things like working out, which I was inspired to finally try to start.

00:13:03.480 My God, it's been hell.

00:13:05.780 Um, the crime week we did over Christmas was one of our most popular weeks yet.

00:13:09.720 People love a break every once in a while from hardcore politics, right?

00:13:12.680 Take some deep dives into some really interesting cases.

00:13:16.380 It's a rich diet.

00:13:18.600 You're not getting red meat every day.

00:13:20.620 You're not getting, you know, chocolate cake every day.

00:13:23.940 You're not getting only martinis or only coffee, you know, your, your, or green juice.

00:13:29.000 You're getting a mixture of all of it.

00:13:30.920 Like you should have in your real diet, right?

00:13:33.120 Something balanced, something that serves the whole you that helps you work out your issues and then creates more of them.

00:13:41.680 Um, I'm trying to service myself and you together.

00:13:45.040 I'm trying to grow right alongside you and try to learn right alongside you.

00:13:48.900 I'm not the evening news anchor with my glasses at the end of my nose, judging you.

00:13:54.920 None of us is here at this show.

00:13:58.160 And I think, and I know you can feel that most recently we did the RFK junior interview, which was great.

00:14:05.200 I absolutely love that.

00:14:06.400 It was so proud of my team. 0.99

00:14:07.800 It turns out he's actually not some crazy ass quack whose viewpoints are so dangerous. 0.97

00:14:13.420 They have to be silenced, but he's actually a really thoughtful environmental lawyer. 0.92

00:14:17.560 Who has spent a lifetime trying to protect us from a government that too often really has taken crazy risks and endangered us when it comes to dirty waters or dirty air or sketchy vaccines.

00:14:33.460 There have been some questions.

00:14:35.200 Some of the questions he's raised about vaccines are legitimate and deserved answering.

00:14:39.280 And actually some of the issues he's raised have been addressed and then reversed even by the CDC.

00:14:46.060 So this guy is not.

00:14:47.880 He's not part of the disinformation doesn't that's White House spin.

00:14:51.520 And if you listen to that interview, the two parter, you'll see what I'm talking about.

00:14:56.240 And then you'll learn tons about the Kennedy family history, which is also equally fascinating.

00:15:01.260 By the way, we managed to do all of this, all of it without getting censored on any platform.

00:15:07.660 There's a way of doing it.

00:15:09.240 Okay.

00:15:10.300 Some censorship is real.

00:15:11.760 There's no question.

00:15:12.480 And it's viewpoint based.

00:15:13.400 But there's also discussions that offer no nuance and never offer the other side.

00:15:18.120 And in general, those tend to get censored.

00:15:21.360 We're not that show.

00:15:22.640 We're going to make sure you have the full picture before you click off.

00:15:26.960 Look, we pride ourselves in debating respectfully, whether it's with the New York Times reporters, many of whom we've had on, or Democratic presidential candidates, same, or with diehard MAGA fans.

00:15:38.020 Many of whom were in the Trump administration who come on and we have fun with them, too.

00:15:42.260 Try to bring you all points of view on the show because we know that you can get angry one-sided talking points anywhere.

00:15:48.280 It's more interesting to hear a back and forth, right?

00:15:50.800 A variety of voices.

00:15:52.020 And you make up your own mind.

00:15:53.440 But it's true.

00:15:54.060 Sometimes we ruffled a few feathers.

00:15:55.700 There may have been a couple of guests who might not want to come back.

00:15:59.080 Mark Cuban, Scott Gottlieb wasn't too thrilled.

00:16:03.360 But you know what?

00:16:05.120 I don't really care.

00:16:06.160 Or I'm more interested in having a good discussion with you, like in having a truthful discussion that's unafraid, than I am in licking the boots of my guests so that they'll come back on.

00:16:16.560 As we gear up for the presidential elections, we're going to have to think about this.

00:16:19.960 It's not like being in the primetime at Fox where, like, they have to come on.

00:16:23.780 I'm an independent.

00:16:24.800 They don't have to come on.

00:16:26.560 So do I interview these folks and try to, you know, have to think about maintaining access in doing the coverage day to day?

00:16:34.180 Or do I just skip those interviews so that I can just, you know, let it fly, right?

00:16:40.860 We'll see.

00:16:41.520 We'll work that one out together.

00:16:44.200 Look, we have no tolerance for spin on the show.

00:16:46.900 Doesn't mean none ever gets through, but we have a strong bias against spin.

00:16:52.180 And so you come on, you try to lie about BLM or masks, which was the problem with those two guys, and you're going to get it.

00:17:00.720 It's going to get tense.

00:17:02.160 Some people can take it.

00:17:02.920 Some people can't.

00:17:03.760 But I'm committed to honesty, you know, to the belief that there really are facts that are knowable.

00:17:08.880 And honestly, that commitment to being honest and to not trying to mislead my audience is why we had to pull one pre-taped episode recently.

00:17:20.380 A person came on.

00:17:21.880 They asked for it to be pre-taped, allegedly because of their schedule.

00:17:26.480 And we don't normally do that, but we said fine.

00:17:29.020 And we had a very nice exchange.

00:17:30.400 It was a good interview.

00:17:30.960 This person presented themselves as a warrior for taking bold risks and reaching out across the aisle, even when it feels politically risky to do so.

00:17:42.100 You know, you've got to take the slings and arrows because it's worth it.

00:17:45.960 This person happens to be a Democrat.

00:17:47.520 And no sooner had the interview ended than this person had their PR guy contact us after the show to remove a big chunk of the interview, which they were afraid would create political blowback for them.

00:18:02.520 And try to tell us how they wanted the clips handled on social media, how they wanted them styled.

00:18:08.460 Okay.

00:18:09.660 Well, no, we said we're not doing that.

00:18:12.320 We're not going to start hacking away at the interview and taking out the parts you're afraid of after looking into the camera with a microphone on and saying them, understanding this was for an interview to air.

00:18:25.740 We're not going to remove the parts you feel might create blowback for you while you sit there and tell our audience this is a time they must take those very risks.

00:18:36.720 We're not doing that.

00:18:38.900 So we told the guest the interview stands.

00:18:41.000 It can either air or not air, which out of courtesy for the guest, we left up to the guest, but we're not slicing and dicing it in a way that would present a dishonest picture to our viewers and listeners.

00:18:55.180 And this guest, the one who'd been so brave on cam moments earlier, coward, afraid and said, please don't air it.

00:19:05.460 We were well within our rights to air it in its original condition with all the parts he didn't like.

00:19:12.620 We were well within our rights to do that.

00:19:14.540 And some of the team felt that we should.

00:19:16.660 Out of respect for my guest, I chose not to do it.

00:19:18.740 But in no world was I going to air a dishonest portrait of someone painting themselves as a take risks champion who couldn't even make it 10 minutes past the taping before running to us through his PR hack and begging us to slice and dice the controversial parts.

00:19:34.160 Wasn't going to happen.

00:19:36.020 The point is, we're never going to try to mislead you on this show.

00:19:41.880 We'll never willingly mislead you either directly or through a guest.

00:19:46.580 We'll never side with spin over you.

00:19:48.740 And I remain confident that the tagline, open, honest and provocative conversations are the way forward for us, for Twitter, for the digital world, for our institutions, for our schools, our universities, our corporations, for the country.

00:20:14.620 And I do feel confident that we're winning, that this battle is starting to turn our way, that the temporary insanity is starting to subside.

00:20:29.360 And the reason for that is all of you listening to points of view other than your own, is all of the guests I just mentioned willing to put their neck on the line and come out here and take a risk, understanding there could be blowback, but understanding there was a higher principle at risk, right?

00:20:49.380 Those are the people who have started to turn the conversation.

00:20:53.080 So I am grateful again to this audience.

00:21:00.580 I feel really honored and lucky that I'm in the position I am where I get to have these exchanges for you and that I'm not limited to three-minute segments like I was on cable or to doing cooking segments like I was on broadcast, right?

00:21:13.620 I think, as I've seen a lot of you guys remark in the comments, I've found the right venue for me.

00:21:20.220 You know, I feel like I've, I don't know, I'm home.

00:21:24.840 That's how it feels.

00:21:26.420 I hope you feel the same.

00:21:27.720 I'm excited to see this mission spreading and succeeding.

00:21:32.600 And thank you all for being a part of it.

00:21:50.220 We like to walk that fine line between techno thriller and romantic comedy.

00:22:03.220 We make up our own rules.

00:22:05.000 NCIS Tony and Ziva, now streaming on Paramount+.

00:22:08.500 And thank you all for being a part of it.

The Megyn Kelly Show - April 28, 2022

Megyn Kelly's Special Message on Open and Honest Conversations, Exclusively For Podcast Listeners

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