The Megyn Kelly Show - Need for Pelosi Attack Transparency, Media Hypocrisy, and Left Abandons Free Speech, with Sen. Tom Cotton

00:00:00.560 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.560 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Halloween.

00:00:16.800 There's a ton of news to get to today. We've got a great guest with us for the full show who can comment on all of it.

00:00:22.820 Got a lot more information this morning about a story we first brought you live during Friday's show

00:00:26.980 regarding Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul, being attacked with a hammer by someone in their home early Friday morning, 2 a.m. Friday morning.

00:00:36.060 We are learning more about who the intruder was, but many questions remain about the circumstances of this crime,

00:00:42.480 which police have been fairly tight-lipped about and actually contradictory as well.

00:00:47.800 And the media, I mean, of course, they're so disgusting. They're disgusting.

00:00:52.200 Rushing to make this about right-wing political violence and not just that, not just right-wing political violence.

00:00:58.420 This is about January 6th, don't you know?

00:01:00.900 This is about January 6th, like everything needs to be for the Democrats today.

00:01:04.920 Not homelessness, not crime, not mental illness.

00:01:08.700 January 6th, back to that.

00:01:10.400 They will use it for all it's worth and then some.

00:01:12.960 Plus, Elon Musk has officially taken over Twitter and already started to make some changes.

00:01:16.500 And the midterms, of course, now just eight days away.

00:01:20.080 What is the state of the key races across the country?

00:01:23.340 My guest today has been involved in a lot of them, trying to help folks get elected in various states, Republicans.

00:01:28.900 He's Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.

00:01:31.220 He is the author of a new book out tomorrow called Only the Strong,

00:01:35.600 reversing the left's plot to sabotage American power.

00:01:40.060 Tom, welcome back to the show, Senator.

00:01:46.600 Great to have you here.

00:01:47.940 Thank you, Megan.

00:01:48.540 It's great to be back on the show with you.

00:01:50.660 This is so crazy, this thing out in San Francisco.

00:01:53.200 It broke while we were on the air, hit the San Francisco papers, and we talked about it.

00:01:58.880 This lunatic breaks into her house.

00:02:01.700 He's attacking the husband with a hammer.

00:02:03.240 It seems to me the San Francisco police put out information saying a third party was in the home

00:02:08.900 who answered the door, that Paul Pelosi called the cops himself from a bathroom.

00:02:15.620 All sorts of speculation broke loose about whether this man was there consensually.

00:02:20.280 San Francisco police then put out a tweet saying, no, only two people were in the home,

00:02:24.980 Paul Pelosi and the attacker.

00:02:27.040 Conspiracy theories had already taken off.

00:02:29.060 You know, did they know each other?

00:02:29.860 San Francisco PD saying they did not know each other.

00:02:32.400 And now here we are on Monday morning where we know this guy was some lunatic.

00:02:36.500 He was a lunatic.

00:02:37.600 I don't know if there was a greater relationship than that, but I know this guy was a lunatic.

00:02:41.040 42 years old, connected with some famous nudist out there who herself is a child molester

00:02:46.560 who tried to kidnap a 14-year-old.

00:02:48.680 I mean, like, on and on it goes.

00:02:50.880 And yet the press has gone deep, dark, down the rabbit hole of trying to say,

00:02:57.600 this is all this is all about January 6th because the lunatic's latest iteration of craziness

00:03:03.960 was focused on some QAnon theories and, you know, things along those lines, notwithstanding

00:03:09.360 his BLM flag and his LGBTQ flag out in front of it.

00:03:12.900 I mean, honestly, Senator, like, can you help us make sense of what's going on here?

00:03:16.340 Well, Megan, I write a little bit, and only the strong, about how the media has become

00:03:21.600 essentially the press adjunct of the Democratic Party and the progressive left in America.

00:03:26.700 You see that first and most notably during the Vietnam War when the media campaigned so

00:03:31.840 aggressively against the war effort.

00:03:33.800 That continues today.

00:03:36.300 You know, I know Elon Musk ruffled a lot of feathers, you might say, on the Twitter platform

00:03:41.380 by sharing a speculative article that doesn't fit with the mainstream media's story.

00:03:47.220 I think what you would, we'd all benefit from under these circumstances, just more transparency.

00:03:52.540 They should release the 9-11 tape.

00:03:54.640 They can release security camera footage, which I'm sure the Pelosi house had.

00:03:58.960 They can release body camera footage.

00:04:01.740 But the media is not inquiring about that.

00:04:03.640 In the same way, for instance, that they almost never inquired about what was happening on the

00:04:08.080 January 6th committee interviews.

00:04:09.880 You know, we never have had transcripts of those interviews, only selective nuggets.

00:04:13.920 You saw something similar during both impeachment inquiries of Donald Trump.

00:04:18.300 The media's famous inquisitive nature somehow kind of disappears when they're dealing with

00:04:24.720 a story that may not reflect the Democratic Party's preferred storyline.

00:04:28.840 So I think the San Francisco Police Department would be well served.

00:04:31.620 It would help everyone just put out all that information.

00:04:33.960 In the meantime, I wish Paul Pelosi all the best in recovering from this terrible crime,

00:04:37.800 a crime that we see too much of all across America today because of soft on crime policies

00:04:43.020 and failures to put mentally ill people into institutions where they can get the care they

00:04:47.180 need.

00:04:48.440 I feel like at a minimum, the SFPD has egg on its face because even under the most generous

00:04:52.940 story to Paul Pelosi and to the San Francisco police, they were in the house when this guy

00:04:59.460 attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

00:05:01.080 I'm not sure how that happened.

00:05:02.300 How do you have police officers on site and an 82 year old gets attacked with a hammer

00:05:06.500 in front of you when you have a gun as a police officer?

00:05:09.520 It's one of the many questions here.

00:05:11.220 As you point out, there are security cameras all over that house.

00:05:14.020 You can see them from the outside where they turned on.

00:05:15.980 If not, why not?

00:05:18.000 She's the speaker of the house.

00:05:20.200 Far less known public figures than Nancy Pelosi have taken extra security measures in and around

00:05:26.040 San Francisco, given how high the crime rate is there.

00:05:28.480 It would be insane for them not to have their cameras on.

00:05:32.060 And you point out the body cam, the body cam.

00:05:34.060 Right.

00:05:34.260 So if if he walked in there and he heard something on tape or if there was a third person, which

00:05:39.360 now they're saying there wasn't again contradicts what they initially said.

00:05:43.000 Let's see it.

00:05:43.720 Let's see it all.

00:05:44.380 I don't know what went on.

00:05:45.520 I know enough to smell a rat.

00:05:47.580 There's there's something going on here that they're not telling us.

00:05:50.120 I just don't know what it is.

00:05:51.920 What's disgusting me is the media reaction.

00:05:55.520 And I'll give you this.

00:05:56.560 OK, so yesterday, that was October 30th, CNN comes out with an article entitled Why Some

00:06:02.560 Democrats Are Trying a Previously Unsuccessful Strategy in a Last Minute Campaign Push.

00:06:06.800 And it talks about how they're focused on a rush of targeted ads and direct door to door

00:06:12.280 outreach focused on what inflation.

00:06:15.320 That's something they haven't tried before to try to address that crime.

00:06:18.560 That would be new.

00:06:19.800 That could help them talk about crime, convince voters like our governor in New York's trying

00:06:23.520 to do last minute.

00:06:24.800 That she really cares about all these subway attacks and so on.

00:06:27.620 No door to door outreach focused on January 6th and the threat to democracy,

00:06:34.640 hoping that it can anger and scare enough of their own base and peel off still undecided

00:06:41.680 voters to counter the momentum they sense moving toward the GOP.

00:06:45.140 It's right there from CNN that this is the strategy to hope with a rush of a last minute push to scare

00:06:52.720 and anger enough of their own that January 6th is still a threat to democracy.

00:06:57.380 And the Paul Pelosi attack for them plays right into that.

00:07:02.740 I don't know if we have Mika Brzezinski yet, but let me tell you, we're cutting a soundbite.

00:07:06.080 I'll just read you the highlights of her this morning on MSNBC.

00:07:10.500 The central political headline of this story, says Brzezinski, is that years of Republican

00:07:16.500 propaganda and Trump fueled fascism led 42 year old David DePape to break into Nancy Pelosi's

00:07:23.320 home, seemingly with the intent to harm her.

00:07:27.240 The chyron reads this is courtesy of Newsbusters.

00:07:29.420 How far right demonization of Pelosi led to attack.

00:07:33.200 Then Mika Brzezinski goes on, Senator.

00:07:35.580 What connection?

00:07:36.640 What connection?

00:07:37.500 He was just deranged, right?

00:07:39.040 In an isolated way.

00:07:41.440 And and and I'm trying to read my own writing and the voters should look over here, look over

00:07:47.120 here at crime.

00:07:48.260 Crime is up far away from the parallels to January 6th.

00:07:55.700 You know, Megan, we're hearing more and more as the election approach about the Democrats

00:07:59.400 claims of being worried about threats to democracy.

00:08:04.160 I think the Democrats are actually worried about threats from democracy, because in eight

00:08:08.380 days, the American people are going to repudiate the Democrats and the radical agenda because

00:08:12.540 they can't afford food.

00:08:13.920 They can't fill up their gas tanks at the gas pump.

00:08:18.380 They're worried about paying for their kids' braces or sports leagues or music concerts.

00:08:23.700 They see five million illegals streaming across our border, bringing with them fentanyl, which

00:08:27.260 is a terrible drug epidemic.

00:08:28.320 So I think the Democrats are worried about threats from democracy and they're going to

00:08:31.780 get repudiated by the voters next week.

00:08:34.520 So in effect, they're trying to say that Republicans should simply cease all campaigning.

00:08:39.140 I mean, from everything we know about Paul Pelosi's attacker, he appears to be a deranged

00:08:43.920 lunatic.

00:08:44.900 I don't think that he broke into their house because John Boehner, 12 years ago, pointed

00:08:48.500 out that Nancy Pelosi helped pass Obamacare or that Kevin McCarthy points out that Nancy Pelosi

00:08:54.160 has passed $5 trillion, which led to this record high inflation.

00:08:58.620 Well, not just that, but you look at the hypocrisy between the messaging now in the wake of Paul

00:09:04.240 Pelosi being attacked and the guy who showed up outside of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's

00:09:10.020 house.

00:09:10.820 And I know you're just as a reminder to our viewers, you're an accomplished lawyer, Harvard

00:09:15.280 Law School clerk for one of the U.S.

00:09:17.680 Circuit Courts of Appeal, was in private practice, all of it.

00:09:20.600 So you've got a legal background in addition to your time in public service.

00:09:24.000 So this guy shows up outside of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's house.

00:09:28.060 And today the story is zip ties.

00:09:29.820 This guy has zip ties who attached Paul Pelosi.

00:09:32.240 They didn't seem to care that Brett Kavanaugh's attacker, would-be attacker, had zip ties too,

00:09:37.680 that he was ready to kill Brett Kavanaugh.

00:09:39.240 In fact, what we heard from Nancy Pelosi herself after that was the justices are protected.

00:09:46.320 They're protected and no one's in danger.

00:09:48.420 The New York Times thought that that story, the attempted attack on Brett Kavanaugh's life,

00:09:53.200 warranted not front page mentioned, not page two, page 20.

00:09:58.200 They put that on page 20.

00:10:00.160 This time, Paul Pelosi front page below the fold.

00:10:04.300 In order to, by the way, the Brett Kavanaugh threat make the front of the USA Today newspaper,

00:10:08.160 the Chicago Tribune, MSNBC primetime ignored it.

00:10:11.640 It didn't make any one of the Sunday shows except for the Fox News Sunday show.

00:10:15.600 I mean, wall to wall for all those outlets.

00:10:17.600 This one much bigger, trying to tie it to Republicans writ large eight days in advance of a midterm.

00:10:22.040 It's no accident.

00:10:24.200 Yeah.

00:10:24.700 And Megan, I want to be clear up front.

00:10:26.360 I mean, my position on Paul Pelosi's attackers, my position on the would-be assassin of Brett

00:10:31.720 Kavanaugh, we should throw the book at them.

00:10:33.780 But the contrast is stark, as you say.

00:10:36.300 And there are differences in the circumstances as well.

00:10:38.680 Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House.

00:10:40.620 Of course, people are going to campaign against the left-wing ideological agenda that she's

00:10:45.840 promoted in the House of Representatives for all these years, just like she campaigns against

00:10:50.040 Donald Trump or back in the day she campaigned against George Bush.

00:10:53.120 It's a different situation where you're dealing with the Supreme Court justice.

00:10:56.520 It's not normal to single them out for kind of aggressive political campaign style rhetoric

00:11:02.180 and say Chuck Schumer did on the steps of the Supreme Court when he called out Brett Kavanaugh

00:11:07.360 by name and said that he wouldn't know what hit him if he went forward decisions that Chuck

00:11:12.460 Schumer didn't like.

00:11:13.740 Second, there were foreshadowing of this kind of attack on Brett Kavanaugh's home.

00:11:19.580 You had left-wing agitators for weeks protesting outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court

00:11:25.140 justices in direct violation of federal law.

00:11:29.280 Yet Merrick Garland and his politicized Department of Justice refused to enforce this law, refused

00:11:34.600 to arrest these agitators for obvious criminal violations of federal law, thereby sending the

00:11:40.540 message that the United States government was not going to take steps to reinforce security

00:11:45.300 for these justices.

00:11:46.620 So the situation with Brett Kavanaugh is actually more unusual.

00:11:50.080 It's more dangerous.

00:11:50.860 Yet, as you point out, the media largely ignored it compared to the attack on Paul Pelosi.

00:11:56.640 Both heinous.

00:11:57.620 Both criminals should have the book thrown at them.

00:11:59.320 But the media views them very differently because of their partisan leanings.

00:12:03.420 And you think about like the attacks by the papers on Brett Kavanaugh and the other conservative

00:12:08.740 justices by the mainstream papers, by the mainstream press.

00:12:12.440 And yet today you've got two days ago, dated Washington Post, attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband

00:12:17.500 follows years of GOP demonizing her.

00:12:20.420 All right.

00:12:20.800 I'm sorry.

00:12:21.520 As if the Washington Post hasn't demonized President Trump, hasn't demonized Brett Kavanaugh,

00:12:26.460 Sam Alito, all the, you know, give me a break.

00:12:28.700 Right.

00:12:29.200 And in their piece, they have a quote from Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat from California, saying,

00:12:34.840 sadly, this attack was inevitable.

00:12:36.840 Political violence is on the rise.

00:12:39.360 And instead of GOP leaders condemning it, they condone it with silence and even worse, glorification.

00:12:44.780 Meanwhile, I remembered this guy.

00:12:47.500 I remembered this guy when Kavanaugh was up for confirmation and the left was coming for

00:12:51.780 his jugular through Christine Blasey Ford at him and all the rest of it.

00:12:55.660 And Senator Collins of Maine hadn't yet said how she was going to vote.

00:12:59.940 And she's a more moderate Republican.

00:13:01.680 She was under enormous pressure to vote against him.

00:13:04.320 And she made it public that she was being threatened.

00:13:07.480 Her life was being threatened.

00:13:09.080 Voicemails, emails and so on before the Kavanaugh vote.

00:13:13.160 And Swalwell came out and tweeted as follows.

00:13:15.620 Boo hoo hoo.

00:13:17.180 You're a senator who police will protect.

00:13:20.000 Who's going to protect his sexual assault victims and so on?

00:13:22.900 The backlash to him was significant and he had to apologize and delete his tweet.

00:13:26.900 But that's where his mind was.

00:13:28.620 Boo hoo and your stupid little threats.

00:13:31.140 You weak need Republican.

00:13:33.700 Now, this attack was inevitable.

00:13:36.320 Political violence is on the rise and these GOP leaders refused to condemn it.

00:13:40.280 Give me a break.

00:13:41.220 Yeah, absolutely.

00:13:43.820 You can see how opportunistic these Democrats and their media friends are.

00:13:47.340 They're desperate to kind of change the story, leaving this election that's about inflation

00:13:51.280 and crime and our southern border.

00:13:53.700 I mean, it's always been the case, Megan, that campaigns draw upon rhetoric of warfare.

00:13:59.260 It's just a fact.

00:13:59.980 It's a metaphor.

00:14:00.680 It means nothing more than that.

00:14:01.740 You've got the air war on television.

00:14:03.260 You've got the ground war trying to get out the vote.

00:14:05.680 You've got battleground states.

00:14:07.400 You've got targeted races.

00:14:08.600 Even the term campaign comes from military campaigns.

00:14:13.400 That's just normal political rhetoric.

00:14:16.020 Yet the Democrats are trying to essentially say Republicans should not be allowed to campaign

00:14:21.620 for the final 10 days of this election because a lunatic broke into Nancy Pelosi's house and

00:14:27.280 committed a heinous crime.

00:14:28.620 He should be held accountable for his crime, just as all those agitators and the would-be

00:14:32.660 assassin outside of Justice Kavanaugh's homes were held accountable for their crimes.

00:14:35.800 And in contrast to what the Democrats would do for most crimes, all criminals who are

00:14:40.060 pushing people in front of subways or assaulting random civilians on the street, committing

00:14:44.880 heinous acts of violence all across America, should have the book thrown at them as well.

00:14:49.620 That's the reason why the Democrats are going to lose.

00:14:51.360 And that's why they want to change the topic to these so-called threats to democracy when

00:14:55.160 what they're really worried about is threats from democracy.

00:14:57.120 Here's a little sampling, again, courtesy of Newsbusters, of the reporting on this matter

00:15:03.540 this morning.

00:15:04.620 I think it's, let me make sure, it's MSNBC, ABC, and CBS News.

00:15:08.160 Listen.

00:15:09.440 That years of Republican propaganda and Trump-fueled fascism led 42-year-old David DePap to break

00:15:18.000 into Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco home, seemingly with the intent to harm her.

00:15:22.900 Though specific motive has been identified, the circumstances are eerily similar to the

00:15:27.300 January 6th attack, some bringing zip ties into the Capitol, attempting to find officials

00:15:32.360 and take them hostage.

00:15:34.140 Oh, Nancy!

00:15:37.080 Nancy!

00:15:38.320 Pelosi, one of the targets that day and Friday.

00:15:41.320 This is an incredibly toxic moment that has been building for years and only getting worse.

00:15:46.860 Threats against members of Congress have more than doubled since 2017.

00:15:50.280 Fundraising requires lots of conflict.

00:15:52.980 You don't get a fundraising email that says, oh, the other side has a point.

00:15:55.820 You get a fundraising email that says the other side is at the door, ready to ruin your

00:15:59.080 life and all that you believe.

00:16:00.480 Right.

00:16:00.640 That has amped up the temperature.

00:16:02.340 Stoking the flames, if you will.

00:16:03.460 Stoking the flames.

00:16:04.220 There's always been political violence.

00:16:05.960 But now what happens is you have a system that structurally incentivizes more and more heated

00:16:11.880 rhetoric.

00:16:12.200 While there have been victims in both parties, targeted Democrats and Republicans, conservatives

00:16:16.960 and liberals, the structure of the Republican Party, more recently with the advent of Donald

00:16:21.160 Trump, has put a person at the top of the party who has consistently advocated violence

00:16:25.620 and who has created a market within his own party where it's fun to joke about violence.

00:16:31.500 John Dickerson there in the last soundbite.

00:16:33.860 And then, Senator, just to add on, so you're not confused about exactly how this is linked

00:16:38.720 to January 6th.

00:16:39.680 Here's Corrine Jean-Pierre, the White House spokesperson on MSNBC this weekend.

00:16:43.500 The thing that is probably the most haunting about when we hear the reports of this assailant,

00:16:51.320 of the attacker that we were speaking of, is that he was yelling out the things that

00:16:57.260 we heard during January 6th, which is, where is Nancy?

00:17:01.020 And, you know, again, we need to end this type of rhetoric.

00:17:05.340 It needs to stop.

00:17:06.880 And it is incredibly, incredibly dangerous.

00:17:10.940 Got it.

00:17:11.600 Back to the CNN report.

00:17:13.780 We will scare them and we will anger them by putting January 6th in their face as often

00:17:18.640 as possible.

00:17:19.580 The cynicism of trying to exploit this attack into a January 6th redo is obvious and disgusting.

00:17:30.200 Yeah, again, it's because the Democrats don't have any other issue on which they campaign.

00:17:34.920 I mean, the January 6th Capitol riots had many terrible crimes.

00:17:38.380 I think most Americans, though, remember most about January 6th, 2021, that gas was $2.40

00:17:43.840 a gallon or that they could afford groceries at the end of the week or they could pay their

00:17:47.540 rent and their utilities at the end of the month.

00:17:49.940 And that's what they want to have again.

00:17:51.820 The Democratic Party, their adjuncts in the media are simply trying to focus on other stories

00:17:58.180 in the final days before this election because they have no compelling argument to make about

00:18:03.120 their stewardship of the economy or their protection of our border or their building up of our

00:18:07.580 military, which on all those things, they've weakened us.

00:18:11.200 And as I say, I don't think it's strong.

00:18:12.320 They've weakened us intentionally to pursue their own ideological agenda.

00:18:16.140 Now they're about to pay the economic or the electoral consequences of pursuing that

00:18:20.740 agenda.

00:18:21.220 And they want to change the story.

00:18:22.260 So even Gavin Newsom came out and tried to blame this on politics and the GOP.

00:18:29.160 Gavin Newsom, who, you know, he was San Francisco mayor, now is California governor.

00:18:34.180 His state is nothing less than a hot mess when it comes to their economy, when it comes to the

00:18:39.200 homeless problem, the drug problem in San Francisco in particular.

00:18:44.380 OK, this guy, he completely ignores all the facts that have come out about this guy in trying

00:18:50.660 to blame basically you and your party, the GOP, for this.

00:18:54.840 Here's a little bit from Michael Schellenberger, who's an honest journalist.

00:18:58.680 He's I trust him implicitly.

00:19:01.060 He's been he wrote the book Apocalypse Never on the environment.

00:19:03.760 He started out on the left.

00:19:04.920 He's he came to his views very honestly.

00:19:07.200 And he wrote the book San Francisco recently about the homeless crisis, homeless crisis out

00:19:13.080 there, as well as the drug crisis linked, of course.

00:19:16.000 And he went out there and actually got knocking on doors and doing some old shoe leather reporting

00:19:21.820 on this guy who attacked Pelosi.

00:19:23.900 And here's what he posts on his sub stack.

00:19:26.160 Pelosi attack suspect was a psychotic homeless addict estranged from his pedophile lover and

00:19:31.360 their children.

00:19:32.600 He goes through a few of the examples in the past few years.

00:19:35.860 He has shared videos of Disney films altered to make it look like the characters were swearing.

00:19:42.140 He has claimed Jesus is the Antichrist.

00:19:44.140 By the way, another report that this guy, this attacker, thought he was Jesus for at

00:19:47.980 least a year, that he lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home with the BLM

00:19:54.920 sign in the window, as I mentioned, that they lived essentially in a homeless encampment

00:19:59.240 in the midst of an open drug scene.

00:20:01.840 There was a yellow school bus out front, which neighbors said he occasionally slept in.

00:20:06.000 They described him as a homeless addict.

00:20:07.820 The neighbors did with the politics that was until recently left wing, but of secondary

00:20:11.880 importance to his psychotic and paranoid behavior.

00:20:15.380 One neighbor said he had been living in a storage shed.

00:20:17.660 He talks to angels.

00:20:19.680 It goes on.

00:20:20.700 Hold on.

00:20:21.880 Tons of drug use, mental instability, screaming, calling the police about hearing conversations

00:20:25.820 that were never had, wailing at night, that there was frequent nudity before his nudist

00:20:32.460 girlfriend got locked, locked up.

00:20:34.220 There were sex dolls drying on the back porch that they assume she bought for her sons, two

00:20:38.800 of whom she shared with him.

00:20:40.140 And she told the neighbor that this guy had abused her children and that she didn't basically

00:20:46.300 didn't do anything about it.

00:20:47.080 She claims to have called the police and claims they did nothing.

00:20:49.560 But she claimed that he had raped or molested her own children.

00:20:53.220 And she, I guess, decided to stay with this person.

00:20:56.900 This guy was a sick, sick dude.

00:21:00.340 And it's obvious from any of the reports, because there are lots of reports about just how sick

00:21:04.360 he was.

00:21:05.260 And this is how you get the media when confronted with that information.

00:21:08.800 OK, you get that.

00:21:10.200 You got to wrestle with facts.

00:21:11.660 Here's how that happened on NBC, courtesy of reporter Ben Collins the other day.

00:21:16.500 Listen.

00:21:18.880 The question is, did the mental issues arise because of what he read online or were they

00:21:24.820 there before that?

00:21:25.660 And really, does it matter at this point if it's politically motivated?

00:21:28.680 But Katie, like at this point, it simply does not matter.

00:21:31.820 The problem is people keep egging these people on.

00:21:34.480 There are people on the television across the street from us that egg these people on

00:21:38.640 talking about cabals and stuff and people secretly running the world.

00:21:41.620 And it's kind of like women either.

00:21:43.880 So that's happening right now.

00:21:47.340 And then on top of it, you have political figures.

00:21:49.080 You have the previous president of the United States, you know, posting about QAnon on his

00:21:52.560 social media platforms.

00:21:53.820 It doesn't really matter at the end of the day, because right now there are people,

00:21:58.680 people advocating for these conspiracy theories out there.

00:22:02.980 So, of course, people who can't, you know, who don't know this is a game to these politicians

00:22:08.480 are going to take it out on real people.

00:22:11.620 You see, it's still the GOP messaging, which they make a reference to across the street.

00:22:16.080 They mean Fox, MSNBC and Fox are right across the street from each other down in Washington,

00:22:21.260 D.C.

00:22:21.520 Yeah, it really is incredible, the hypocrisy and opportunism here, Megan.

00:22:27.220 I tell a story not only strong about the San Francisco Democrats, which is what our great

00:22:31.300 UN ambassador Gene Kirkpatrick referred to the Democrats in 1984 as they'd held their

00:22:35.980 political convention in San Francisco that year.

00:22:38.860 They sound like a parody of left-wing ideologues.

00:22:42.520 Unfortunately, there's a new class of San Francisco Democrats, people like Gavin Newsom and Kamala

00:22:47.420 Harris and Chesa Boudin, the Soros-backed soft-on-crime prosecutor, who was so bad the people of San

00:22:52.900 Francisco removed him from office just a few months ago.

00:22:55.740 But look at what they've done to a great American city.

00:22:58.640 If you've been to San Francisco lately, you know that it's just rife with homelessness,

00:23:04.100 with drugs, with crime.

00:23:07.040 No one deserves what happened to Paul Pelosi.

00:23:10.020 No one deserves to be the victim of crime.

00:23:12.120 Everybody in San Francisco should be able to live safely.

00:23:15.500 They should be able to walk the streets and take their kids to parks without worried about

00:23:18.660 being accosted by drug addicts and homeless people and criminals.

00:23:23.900 Yet because of the Democrats' soft-on-crime policies, it's happening not only in San Francisco,

00:23:29.200 but in many great American cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

00:23:34.060 If even a fraction of that record that you read to us is true about Paul Pelosi's assailant,

00:23:40.180 he's obviously a deranged lunatic who should have been locked away in prison or in a mental

00:23:45.500 health institution where he could get the care he needed.

00:23:47.840 Yet Democrats let people like him back on the streets every single day all across America.

00:23:54.360 It's crazy.

00:23:55.460 On Meet the Press, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, this is courtesy of National Review,

00:23:59.420 rude how Pelosi's been villainized for years and big surprise has gone viral and it went violent.

00:24:04.760 We need to make sure we're not electing more election deniers who are following Donald Trump

00:24:09.280 down this road.

00:24:10.220 We have to do something about this amplification of this election denying hate speech that we

00:24:14.020 see on the internet.

00:24:14.820 I mean, I presume she's talking about Stacey Abrams and that this is obviously an endorsement

00:24:19.240 of Brian Kemp.

00:24:21.200 The Democrats feel so strongly about election denial that they've only denied every Republican

00:24:27.820 president who won the election in the 21st century had actually won.

00:24:32.240 Remember, in 2001 and 2005 with George Bush and then 2017 with Donald Trump, you've had

00:24:37.900 members of Congress rising up during the electoral count certifications to object that these

00:24:42.840 presidents had been legitimately elected.

00:24:46.180 So the Democrats can spare me their talk of election denial.

00:24:49.300 Can we spend a minute on Elon Musk?

00:24:52.660 I mentioned him in passing.

00:24:54.560 He's now officially bought Twitter.

00:24:56.400 He's taken over.

00:24:57.180 He's fired a bunch of the executives, which seems like a good thing.

00:24:59.860 In particular, one of the lawyers who is she seems like she loved to censor anything right

00:25:04.480 wing.

00:25:05.620 But he's fired the CEO.

00:25:07.080 He's fired a bunch of people.

00:25:08.680 And one of his things that he did over the weekend that got some attention was he retweeted

00:25:12.960 a, quote, conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attacker.

00:25:16.840 But from some publication, I don't even know this publication, Santa Monica Observer or something

00:25:21.280 like that.

00:25:21.540 But in any event, they were speculating.

00:25:23.180 There is, I'm just going to say, speculation online that Paul Pelosi knew this guy, that

00:25:26.880 maybe they were involved in some sort of a gay relationship.

00:25:29.300 Zero actual evidence for that.

00:25:30.880 OK, that is a conspiracy theory at this point.

00:25:33.040 But in any event, or that he may have been a prostitute and so on.

00:25:36.620 So Elon Musk tweeted out that theory like, well, there may be more to this story.

00:25:40.820 He's since deleted the tweet.

00:25:43.120 Of course, cue the, oh, my God, this lunatic he took over Twitter.

00:25:48.980 He's going to allow everything.

00:25:50.480 The next thing you know, the new Hitler's going to rise on Twitter because we have this lunatic

00:25:54.720 conspiracy theorist who's going to allow literally anything to be said.

00:25:59.760 Elon has said that's not true.

00:26:01.280 He won't he won't be allowing anything.

00:26:03.020 He doesn't want it to be that kind of a place.

00:26:04.540 But what do you make of all those developments and Elon Musk, the new head of Twitter?

00:26:10.460 Well, I wish Elon well in his efforts to try to turn Twitter into a fair, neutral public

00:26:15.840 square where genuine debate can happen.

00:26:18.080 I think America is stronger when we all respect the free speech rights of every American to

00:26:22.360 include and perhaps especially our political opponents.

00:26:24.580 Unfortunately, the left has not done that for years.

00:26:26.680 I mean, they call for people to be censored or lose their jobs when they say that there

00:26:32.300 might have been questions about the last election, the way it was conducted in certain states,

00:26:35.720 or that even if the climate is warming, we have the ability to control those effects with

00:26:40.300 fossil fuel production and the prosperity it creates, or that maybe the COVID vaccine is

00:26:45.260 not necessarily necessary for young, healthy teenage boys.

00:26:49.220 Again, these are all things about which reasonable people can disagree and debate.

00:26:52.380 Yet if the left had its way, you would be censored from platforms like Twitter and you would lose

00:26:56.800 your job.

00:26:57.700 So I wish Elon very well in trying to turn Twitter into a genuine, neutral, and viewpoint-balanced

00:27:03.340 platform where all Americans, if they wish, can engage and debate.

00:27:07.920 In contrast, say just two years ago, Megan, two years ago, leading up to the 2020 election

00:27:13.060 on Twitter, you could not repeat what I'd said, that the coronavirus most likely came from a lab

00:27:20.400 in Wuhan, not from some dumb food market in Wuhan, that there was most likely a leak where they were

00:27:26.060 studying bat-borne coronaviruses in those Wuhan labs.

00:27:30.380 That was considered dangerous misinformation.

00:27:33.060 Likewise, you couldn't share a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's notorious laptop,

00:27:37.360 which apparently documented with video and photo evidence every crime he's ever committed.

00:27:41.760 Again, dangerous misinformation.

00:27:44.380 But now we know both of those stories were true.

00:27:48.080 And that just goes to show you again how the left has abandoned its commitment to free speech

00:27:54.000 in America.

00:27:55.240 They'd rather censor viewpoints with which they disagree and certainly viewpoints that cause

00:27:59.900 them any political harm.

00:28:01.560 Yeah.

00:28:01.800 We had RFK Jr.

00:28:03.080 on the show last week, and he was talking about how I think it was his Instagram got shut

00:28:06.400 down after he tweeted out a study done on monkeys on the first vaccine, the first version that

00:28:13.640 attacked the original strain of COVID we all were facing.

00:28:17.060 And he said, you know, not to be the bearer of bad news, but this study of this vaccine on

00:28:22.320 monkeys showed it does not prevent transmission.

00:28:25.200 And for that, he got censored on social media.

00:28:29.980 And I think it was in particular Instagram at the time.

00:28:32.120 So and that, of course, we now know is true.

00:28:34.140 We heard that one of the heads of Pfizer admit exactly that to the European Parliament,

00:28:38.520 that they hadn't even tested that.

00:28:40.180 It was never one of the promises.

00:28:41.740 And of course, the numbers show that it didn't turn out to be true.

00:28:44.480 I'll give you one final example of this guy, David DiPepi, before we go to break.

00:28:49.240 The this is from, again, Rich Lowry over at National Review, who I think he's quoting

00:28:55.380 WAPO.

00:28:56.280 This guy believes that he was being targeted by invisible forces.

00:29:01.000 If he writes in its review of what DiPepi wrote in his blog the week before the attack,

00:29:05.200 Washington Post found he thought that, quote, an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance

00:29:10.440 and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird.

00:29:13.660 Quote, he wrote that he was looking to purchase a fairy house on Etsy, but was frustrated that

00:29:18.080 the doors were painted and so could not be used by a fairy.

00:29:21.320 They have lots of fairy houses, he wrote, this guy DiPepi, but none of them are made

00:29:25.820 for fairies.

00:29:27.740 Before his posts were low, readers would see an image of someone wearing a giant inflatable

00:29:31.640 unicorn costume.

00:29:33.140 Yet we have NBC telling us none of that matters.

00:29:36.760 All that matters is that Republicans in their rhetoric need to know that lunatics like this

00:29:40.900 are out there and they may be incentivizing them.

00:29:44.220 Contrast that to the guy who showed up outside of Brett Kavanaugh's house.

00:29:48.080 Who clearly was having mental issues himself and the whole thing was dismissed because

00:29:53.920 of the fact that he was having mental issues.

00:29:57.780 It was not the left's unhinged attacks on the Supreme Court.

00:30:01.380 Brett Kavanaugh placed him in danger and the left needs to be more responsible because lunatics

00:30:05.900 like this guy who showed up with his weapons and his zip ties outside of Brett Kavanaugh's

00:30:10.240 house.

00:30:11.220 We need to understand that they're out there.

00:30:13.040 Not at all.

00:30:14.460 It wasn't beside the point.

00:30:16.220 It was the entire point.

00:30:17.920 The mental illness.

00:30:18.780 Now it's all about the GOP.

00:30:21.020 Why?

00:30:21.600 Because we are a week plus away from the midterm elections in which the Democrats know their

00:30:27.020 political fortunes are dwindling by the second.

00:30:29.980 And as CNN reported, they see one way out of it, and that is to scare and anger based on

00:30:35.300 January 6th.

00:30:36.520 More with Senator Tom Cotton after this on his book.

00:30:39.500 And it is a barn burner, only the strong.

00:30:42.420 Don't go away.

00:30:48.680 Senator, I'll give you one more kind of fun reaction to Elon Musk buying Twitter.

00:30:54.040 The biggest loser in all of this is the guy who owns Parler.

00:30:58.900 He's married to Candace Owens.

00:31:00.780 And that's a bummer because if you're developing Parler, you really don't want Elon Musk taking

00:31:04.360 over Twitter because it's going to be more fair and balanced.

00:31:06.180 In any event, Taylor Lorenz, a now Washington Post reporter, tweets out,

00:31:10.600 it's like the gates of hell opened on this site tonight.

00:31:15.660 Well, I mean, it goes to show you these hysterical reaction, not just from Democratic politicians,

00:31:21.560 but from supposedly neutral, disinterested, objective, so-called journalists.

00:31:27.960 They're against that Elon Musk is now going to allow conservatives to express themselves

00:31:33.040 on that platform, just how much they relied on the censorship and the content moderation

00:31:38.460 and the policing of anything that was deemed inappropriate conduct.

00:31:42.640 Again, as I detail in Only the Strong, social media tried to suppress my very simple common

00:31:49.700 sense observation in 2020 that the story that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in some stupid

00:31:55.460 food market just didn't hang together based on the facts that we all knew, not any kind

00:31:59.240 of secret classified information, that rather it almost certainly came from research projects

00:32:03.920 into bat-borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan laboratories.

00:32:07.340 But again, you couldn't say that.

00:32:08.340 It was a conspiracy theory.

00:32:09.440 It was dangerous.

00:32:10.700 Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi all said that I and the former president and

00:32:14.740 others were spreading misinformation and xenophobia and racism, when now most fair-minded

00:32:20.360 observers accept the fact that this virus almost certainly came from those labs in Wuhan.

00:32:24.480 I'll give a little show plug while we're on topic is on this Thursday.

00:32:28.940 We're having one of the doctors who was in communication with and we believe under pressure

00:32:33.380 from Fauci who switched from this looks like a lab leak to suddenly this is a natural source

00:32:41.500 market situation.

00:32:42.420 He's coming on the show.

00:32:43.640 We're going to have a debate.

00:32:44.840 He's going to represent that side.

00:32:46.300 We've got another doctor who's going to take the opposite view.

00:32:48.820 And I've never seen one of these guys speak out publicly.

00:32:51.400 I'm actually really psyched he's coming on the show.

00:32:53.120 We'll give him a fair shot.

00:32:53.980 And I hear what he has to say.

00:32:55.740 But yeah, can I just take you back to that?

00:32:58.040 Because like you're a U.S.

00:32:59.280 Senator, it's not like you're Joe Schmo sitting in your, you know, a basement apartment tweeting

00:33:04.200 out about it looks like a lab leak.

00:33:05.940 I've got my suspicions.

00:33:07.100 And now we all know some of the reasons why you would have had those suspicions.

00:33:10.920 You know, we were funding gain of function research on bats at the Wuhan lab.

00:33:15.060 And so so you may have been in a position to know some of this stuff, whereas your sensors

00:33:19.300 weren't.

00:33:20.420 So what happened to you?

00:33:21.780 Like when you did say early on, I think this this may have come from the Wuhan lab.

00:33:27.640 What happened to you?

00:33:29.380 Yeah, I can take you back, Megan, to January of 2020.

00:33:33.520 I just first began to get some inkling that something was up in this central Chinese city

00:33:38.960 that most Americans never heard heard of Wuhan.

00:33:41.800 Again, I didn't have special classified information.

00:33:43.960 I'm not a scientist.

00:33:44.560 I'm not a doctor, but I know enough not to trust communists, especially when their actions

00:33:49.520 and their words don't match up.

00:33:50.780 So I saw Chinese communists saying that everything's under control.

00:33:54.180 It's just an ordinary kind of seasonal outbreak of some respiratory virus.

00:33:57.940 Don't worry.

00:33:58.760 Nothing to see here.

00:34:00.020 At the same time, they were literally sealing people in high rise apartment buildings by welding

00:34:04.960 the doors closed.

00:34:06.060 They were building field hospitals in a matter of days.

00:34:09.080 They were locking down populations larger than the entire West Coast of America.

00:34:12.760 So that's when I really began to dig into what was happening in Wuhan, what they claimed

00:34:17.060 to happen at that food market.

00:34:18.400 And I realized by the end of January, early February of 2020, that the facts just didn't

00:34:23.680 add up.

00:34:24.420 And that because the Wuhan labs dealt with bat-borne coronaviruses, because Chinese laboratories

00:34:30.140 are notoriously unsafe, it's almost certain that the virus came from those labs.

00:34:35.980 And immediately, the mainstream media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, all condemned

00:34:41.960 me, said I was peddling false conspiracy theories, that this is somehow xenophobic and going to

00:34:47.760 foment attacks on Asian Americans.

00:34:50.220 They were all carrying water for Chinese communists.

00:34:53.860 They were all running interference.

00:34:55.360 They were basically saying that I and anyone else who subscribe to these common sense views

00:34:59.540 should just shut up and salute and not do anything to rock the boat or certainly not

00:35:04.260 to offend the Chinese communists.

00:35:05.680 And I explain in Only the Strong, that's actually what the American left has done for a long time,

00:35:10.320 whether it's communist in China now or communist in Russia during the Cold War.

00:35:15.040 Can you put it in perspective for our audience?

00:35:17.360 We talk about China sometimes on the show, but we're not neck deep in it.

00:35:20.740 And now it looks like Xi Jinping is, you know, president for life.

00:35:24.020 He runs the Communist Party.

00:35:25.960 He runs the military.

00:35:27.180 He's the political head.

00:35:28.800 And he seems to have gotten rid of the one guy who was like slightly more democratically

00:35:34.740 minded in his new administration, if that's even the right term.

00:35:37.960 So what do you make of what's happening in China right now?

00:35:40.760 I mean, I I worry about all the them buying up all the land they've taken over Hollywood.

00:35:46.220 They've taken over huge segments of our economy.

00:35:50.120 You know, none of our basketball players will say anything about them like they really are

00:35:54.620 getting their hand over our mouths like a muzzle and we're going along with it.

00:35:59.320 So can you can you just give us a few minutes on China and what they're doing and why we need

00:36:04.240 to be concerned?

00:36:05.360 Well, Communist China is probably the gravest threat we've ever faced, more grave even than

00:36:09.500 Soviet Russia was, in part because China already is so entangled in our economy and in our own

00:36:15.500 way of life at home in a way that Soviet Russia never was.

00:36:19.500 If you go back into the ancient midst of history, China kind of always was and has been, unlike

00:36:25.860 nations that we know their origins.

00:36:27.920 China has always been a large and great civilization.

00:36:30.880 You know, it conceived of itself as the middle kingdom and to put that in concrete layman's

00:36:37.720 terms, that means that it was the middle of the earth and every other nation, every other

00:36:42.500 people kind of revolved around it, that it was the master of all things under the sun.

00:36:47.680 Then when you graft a godless globalist ideology like communism onto that nationalistic worldview,

00:36:53.680 you get a nation that was obviously going to be a threat to America.

00:36:57.280 One of the worst mistakes in our history was starting the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially

00:37:03.220 under Bill Clinton's presidency, as I lay up in only the strong, that we enabled China's

00:37:07.800 rise by essentially outsourcing our prosperity, our jobs, our factories to China, allowing them

00:37:13.720 to grow so rapidly, which, of course, they then turn in to a stronger military, into a totalitarian

00:37:19.920 police state.

00:37:20.800 There was a period of time when Chinese leaders followed Deng Xiaoping's maxim, which is hide

00:37:26.680 your strength and bide your time.

00:37:28.920 That period is over.

00:37:30.080 Under Xi Jinping, China is now flaunting its strength and probably views itself as not having

00:37:35.980 much time.

00:37:36.840 We're in a very dangerous moment now with Xi Jinping just having secured an unprecedented

00:37:41.680 third five-year term in total control in a way that no Chinese leader has had control

00:37:47.820 since Mao Zedong and faced off against Joe Biden, who I believe he views as weak and hapless

00:37:55.620 and that this may be a window of opportunity in which he can press China's claims around the

00:38:00.760 world, most notably in Taiwan, probably the most dangerous flashpoint in all the world for

00:38:06.440 a clash between the United States and another major nation.

00:38:11.060 So it's all very dangerous.

00:38:12.720 It's very dangerous here at home as well because of the threats to our prosperity and because

00:38:16.460 of the threats to our freedom.

00:38:17.940 As you laid out, as I explained in Only the Strong, there's something that I call the China

00:38:21.420 lobby in America that tries to suppress all these facts.

00:38:25.320 Many people think that it's just maybe multinational corporations that have had factories move to

00:38:30.720 China.

00:38:31.060 It's much worse than that.

00:38:32.300 You cited, say, LeBron James.

00:38:34.060 He wants to make sure the NBA has access to the Chinese market.

00:38:37.980 He wants to make sure that his movies has access to the Chinese market, as does every

00:38:41.060 other major Hollywood studio.

00:38:43.400 Silicon Valley wants back into China.

00:38:45.860 For those companies that aren't there, companies like Apple want to maintain their operations

00:38:50.880 there.

00:38:51.460 Even in places that you wouldn't expect it necessarily, like university colleges, sometimes

00:38:55.440 even private boarding schools, they act as de facto lobbyists for the Chinese communists

00:39:01.600 because they depend so much on full freight tuition paying Chinese nationals.

00:39:06.400 I can tell you, I hear it all the time in Congress, people coming in to de facto lobby

00:39:11.660 for Chinese communists because of the economic entanglement of our two countries.

00:39:16.000 That's yet another reason, in addition to our health and our safety and our prosperity,

00:39:19.780 that we try to decouple our economy from China to the greatest extent possible, especially

00:39:24.800 in strategically critical sectors of our economy.

00:39:27.940 Hmm, but it's it's the fact that it's not yet a priority that we're actively working

00:39:33.000 on is really concerning.

00:39:34.480 And I don't know if we get that if we get a Republican president next time around who

00:39:37.980 understands the threat.

00:39:39.600 But to me, it seems like priority number one, priority number one above above Russia, above

00:39:44.780 above anything.

00:39:45.940 And you write about only the strong.

00:39:47.720 We're looking at that threat rising at the same time.

00:39:51.440 We're looking at what in particular the left has done to our military.

00:39:55.260 And this is an ideological commitment, what they've done to our military.

00:39:57.980 And you were in the military.

00:39:59.360 Your story is actually your back story is amazing.

00:40:01.660 And you write about it in the book, too.

00:40:02.920 But you you're this rising star brought up on a cattle farm in Arkansas.

00:40:07.840 Your parents are Democrats, but you found your own politics.

00:40:10.360 You decide that you're going to get yourself into Harvard.

00:40:12.580 One of only two kids from Arkansas, as I understand, to get into that class.

00:40:15.840 You get in, you wind up going to Harvard Law School as well.

00:40:18.900 And then 9-11 comes and you volunteer.

00:40:22.720 You sign up, you go, you fight in Afghanistan, you fight in Iraq, too.

00:40:27.700 You get a bronze couple of bronze stars.

00:40:29.320 I have at least one and all sorts of other medals.

00:40:32.520 I mean, it's really incredible.

00:40:33.720 I have to say it's very incredible to leave that very cushy white shoe path you were on

00:40:39.380 to volunteer to go fight.

00:40:41.800 And you did.

00:40:42.700 So you've got some thoughts in the military.

00:40:44.120 You've never been shy about expressing them.

00:40:47.000 So how does that parallel track against the threat of China describe that for us?

00:40:52.720 Well, thank you, Megan, for the very kind words.

00:40:55.320 Just one bronze star and one tour in Iraq and one tour in Afghanistan, one tour at Arlington

00:40:59.680 National Cemetery between those two.

00:41:01.640 Now, I wouldn't be remiss if my parents would be upset if I didn't point out that while they

00:41:04.360 were Democrats, they were always conservative Democrats like so many are Kansans.

00:41:08.480 I think it's not fair to say that they and most other people have seen the light and joined

00:41:12.540 me in the Republican Party.

00:41:14.600 But that's pretty typical for a lot of places in America.

00:41:17.420 Like Ronald Reagan, like Jean Kirkpatrick, they didn't leave the Democratic Party.

00:41:20.940 The Democratic Party left them in part because the Democratic Party is at best ambivalent about

00:41:26.400 America.

00:41:27.100 And they are openly hostile to American power.

00:41:30.160 And what's the hardest edge of American power?

00:41:33.960 It's our military.

00:41:34.880 That's not the only source of American power, a strong and prosperous economy and our sovereignty,

00:41:40.480 other parts of power as well.

00:41:43.180 The last thing we want to use our military, but it has to be the foundation.

00:41:46.600 Democrats recognize that.

00:41:48.080 And because they are hostile to American power and ambivalent about America, they consistently,

00:41:52.800 when they take office like birds traveling south of the winter, cut our defense budget

00:41:56.520 to dangerous levels, as we saw by the end of the Clinton administration, by the end of

00:42:00.620 the Obama administration.

00:42:02.120 They also have doubts and skepticism about the military and its culture.

00:42:06.920 You know, sometimes the Democrats are called the mommy party because of their focus on softer

00:42:11.920 or nurturing or caring issues.

00:42:14.320 There's few figures in American culture that are less identified with mommy than our drill

00:42:19.060 sergeants.

00:42:20.040 And therefore, they're more worried about drill sergeants using the right pronouns than they

00:42:24.260 are giving our warriors the training they need.

00:42:26.700 They're more worried about training social justice warriors than training warriors who

00:42:31.620 are ready to kill for our nation.

00:42:33.500 So they engage in all kinds of social engineering and voice politically correct training sessions

00:42:39.880 on our troops, something like Mao's Cultural Revolution.

00:42:43.500 I can assure you this is a distraction at best from our military when they should be focused

00:42:48.700 on the kind of tactical training that gets them ready to fight and win wars.

00:42:52.800 More likely, it's actually costing us a lot of troops.

00:42:56.660 I hear from hundreds and hundreds of troops from across the services who want to leave our

00:43:00.980 military because they don't like the turn it's taken under Joe Biden.

00:43:04.300 We can turn all that around, but it's going to take a big victory next week and then a new

00:43:08.840 Republican president and secretary of defense to get our military both the funding it needs

00:43:13.580 and the single-minded focus on fighting and winning our nation's wars.

00:43:17.160 You have a fascinating story in Only the Strong.

00:43:20.420 It's in chapter four.

00:43:21.720 And you write about a story about Donald Trump that I had never heard before.

00:43:25.120 And it reminded me of all, you know, he took it during the campaign because, you know,

00:43:29.480 he always said things that were controversial.

00:43:30.880 And one of the things he said was, I know more than the generals.

00:43:33.860 I can do a better job than the generals, right?

00:43:35.860 And people were like, you never started in the military.

00:43:38.120 What are you saying?

00:43:38.940 But the truth is, that's Trump and his rhetoric.

00:43:40.940 And when it comes to Trump, you always have to make the distinction between what he says

00:43:44.880 and actually how he governed.

00:43:47.020 And I would submit he fares much better if you just look at the latter without connecting

00:43:50.600 it to the former.

00:43:51.240 But in any event, you tell this great story about how for all of that rhetoric, he actually

00:43:57.300 was quite deferential to military expertise at the top and couldn't believe how President

00:44:03.280 Obama tried to micromanage the generals and the troops when it came to, for example, taking

00:44:09.780 out terrorists.

00:44:11.440 Yeah, I had witnessed this when I first got in the Senate in 2015.

00:44:15.140 I was on the Intelligence and Armed Services Committee.

00:44:17.120 So I saw the way President Obama tied the hands of our military when we were going after

00:44:22.460 terrorists in places like Iraq or Syria or Yemen or Somalia.

00:44:27.400 Our military out on the front lines was engaged in great painstaking efforts to track these

00:44:31.860 terrorists, identify chances to take them off the battlefield.

00:44:35.380 Yet they had to get prior approval all the way up in some cases to the White House.

00:44:39.780 What we called back when I was in the Army, the 5,000-mile screwdriver, being micromanaged

00:44:44.960 from Washington, D.C. on simple targeting decisions.

00:44:48.100 So in the early days of President Trump's tenure, he called me about a nominee that he was

00:44:53.560 considering.

00:44:54.180 He'd heard I had some doubts about it.

00:44:56.000 And I shared those.

00:44:57.080 And then we just had some small talk and asked him what else was going on.

00:45:00.820 And he told the story about being woken up in the middle of the night to approve a strike

00:45:05.940 against a known terrorist.

00:45:08.940 And he was kind of flummoxed that this was happening.

00:45:11.480 Why were they calling him in the middle of the night?

00:45:12.820 He didn't know who this person was.

00:45:14.460 And he said, well, you wanted us at least temporarily to maintain your predecessor's

00:45:19.020 policies in place.

00:45:19.920 And he required that kind of approval for this kind of target on the battlefield.

00:45:23.860 And as I say, and only is strong, Trump immediately approved the strike.

00:45:28.280 But he also said correctly, next time, you don't have to call me.

00:45:31.700 There should be some major or captain or colonel overseas who's been following this guy for

00:45:36.820 weeks or months who should be able to authorize this kind of strike.

00:45:39.720 It would be as if when I was leading patrols in Baghdad, if I had to call back to my company

00:45:44.100 commander or my battalion commander every time I wanted to engage a bad guy who was shooting

00:45:49.020 at my platoon.

00:45:49.820 But it just reflects the democratic mindset about the military, deeply mistrustful of it

00:45:56.120 as the fundamental source of American power, always looking to impose excessive, needless

00:46:02.160 political controls over even operational decisions on the other side of the globe.

00:46:07.740 It makes America less safe.

00:46:09.960 And unfortunately, it's happened again.

00:46:12.540 Joe Biden, Barack Obama's understudy, has once again begun to hamstring our military on exactly

00:46:18.140 those kinds of strikes overseas.

00:46:20.320 Well, and you take the reader through it, you know, you go through what Carter did.

00:46:24.000 You talk about Bill Clinton and about how under Bill Clinton, the defense budget fell every

00:46:27.960 year as a share of the economy, reaching levels not seen since before World War Two.

00:46:31.600 The book is backed up with facts and evidence on each of these points.

00:46:35.120 It's not just soaring rhetoric that's anti-leftist.

00:46:37.880 It's got real data from which the reader can make a conclusion.

00:46:41.720 Senator Tom Cotton stays with us for the entire show today.

00:46:44.300 It's a pleasure to have you here, sir.

00:46:45.580 Stand by.

00:46:46.140 And remember, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel

00:46:50.620 111 every weekday at noon east.

00:46:53.620 The full video show and clips are available at YouTube dot com slash Megyn Kelly.

00:46:57.420 If you prefer an audio podcast, the form in which we originally launched, follow and download

00:47:01.620 and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast for free.

00:47:05.960 And never forget, my husband, Doug Brunt, just launched a new podcast.

00:47:08.600 It's called Dedicated with Doug Brunt.

00:47:10.720 And he interviews really well-known, great authors about their books and their writing

00:47:14.200 process.

00:47:14.920 Got a lot of great feedback on it.

00:47:16.280 And you can leave him a comment because he's so sweet.

00:47:18.340 I saw him reading the comments.

00:47:19.720 He's writing down suggestions on guests.

00:47:22.760 So would love for you guys to check it out and let us know what you think.

00:47:29.940 We've talked a bit about the media and their role in the left's plot, as you put it in

00:47:35.180 the title, subtitle of your book.

00:47:36.520 You know more than your fair share about that and and in particular about The New York Times.

00:47:42.360 You've had a couple of interactions with them that are pretty interesting when you were

00:47:46.180 young and fighting abroad.

00:47:48.140 Not that you're not young now.

00:47:50.200 You took issue with them revealing some details that endangered our troops.

00:47:53.860 And you spoke out in a way that I think was it put you on the national map and would

00:47:57.640 lead to you ultimately getting elected as a House representative for your term as a senator.

00:48:01.200 And so you go back to The New York Times in June of 2020, weeks after George Floyd.

00:48:08.580 And you spoke out, wrote out about the lawlessness going city to city in America.

00:48:14.640 And it was very brave of you because this was a time at which there was only one right thing

00:48:20.060 to say.

00:48:20.700 And that was what happened to George Floyd was wrong.

00:48:23.920 The lawlessness is a just reaction to what was done.

00:48:28.520 And if you don't see it that way, you're a bigot.

00:48:31.200 You're a racist.

00:48:32.240 So for you to write this piece took took guts to remind the audience.

00:48:36.100 Here's just a sampling of what you wrote.

00:48:39.120 The New York Times opinion, the op ed board titled it as follows.

00:48:45.180 Tom Cotton, colon, colon, send in the troops.

00:48:48.560 That's not that doesn't represent what you actually said.

00:48:51.780 You were talking about bands of looters roving the streets about the businesses getting smashed

00:48:58.200 and emptied by these folks and being allowed in by feckless politicians who wouldn't do

00:49:03.620 anything.

00:49:04.360 Rioters running over officers with cars on at least three occasions and so on.

00:49:08.120 An orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic and so on.

00:49:13.080 Then you wrote, one thing above all else will restore order to our streets, an overwhelming

00:49:17.240 show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.

00:49:21.320 But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup while delusional politicians in

00:49:26.960 other cities refuse to do what's necessary to uphold the rule of law.

00:49:30.440 You go on.

00:49:30.980 The pace of looting and disorder may fluctuate from night to night, but it is past time to

00:49:35.880 support local law enforcement with federal authority.

00:49:39.660 That's that was your position.

00:49:40.720 Support the locals like the National Guard, et cetera.

00:49:43.300 That's something that we can do at the federal level.

00:49:45.480 It was not send in the troops, martial law.

00:49:47.840 The army is going to take over your city.

00:49:50.400 That's how the left reacted to it.

00:49:52.480 All hell broke loose after this thing got published.

00:49:55.800 The guy who who was basically ahead of the New York Times editorial page, James Bennett,

00:50:01.500 was forced out.

00:50:02.980 They forced the guy to hand in his resignation.

00:50:05.860 He he's the editorial page editor.

00:50:08.460 He was forced to resign.

00:50:10.280 Dozens of times journalists voiced their opposition to them publishing the piece, tweeting out the

00:50:14.280 headline, the caption in a form of the phrase and said as follows, quote, running.

00:50:18.100 This puts black at New York Times staff in danger.

00:50:22.860 Just your opinion.

00:50:24.300 Put them in danger.

00:50:25.760 James Bennett forced to resign, said I hadn't even read the essay before I published it.

00:50:31.240 And then top editors at the Times apologized to the Times staff in a long, tense internal

00:50:37.240 meeting, acknowledging that they had invited you to write this piece because the Times, although

00:50:43.940 always left leaning, used to at least try to include differing opinions.

00:50:50.100 So what what was your reaction to that at the time?

00:50:53.380 And then I'll get to what James Bennett is saying now.

00:50:56.140 Yeah, there were some amusing ironies in that episode, Megan.

00:50:59.420 As you say, I didn't even propose to write that op ed for New York Times.

00:51:02.760 I proposed a slightly different op ed.

00:51:04.620 I'd express these sentiments on Twitter, as we were discussing in the last hour, and some

00:51:09.600 anonymous low level Twitter functionary threatened to permanently delete my account if we didn't

00:51:14.700 apologize.

00:51:15.420 Now, fortunately, as a United States senator with a team of gifted communications professionals,

00:51:19.500 we were able to push back on it.

00:51:20.640 But imagine what normal Americans do when they just have to stand up for themselves to some

00:51:25.260 social media giant.

00:51:26.860 I proposed to write about that and what Twitter had done trying to censor my views.

00:51:31.400 The New York Times asked me to write about the content of the argument that I'd posted

00:51:34.900 on Twitter, which was very simple, that although law enforcement is primarily a local and state

00:51:40.720 function, if you had local police forces that were unable to get control of the rioters and

00:51:47.740 the looters and the arsonists, or in some cases, unfortunately, they were not allowed to

00:51:52.680 get control of them by Democratic mayors and Democratic governors, then the president had

00:51:56.440 an obligation, and he had the power under what's known as the Insurrection Act to use federal

00:52:01.320 forces to restore order to America's streets.

00:52:04.500 The Insurrection Act is one of the oldest and most venerable laws on our books.

00:52:08.080 It goes back to the founding era.

00:52:10.600 It's not commonly used, but it's been used multiple times in American history, most recently

00:52:15.840 in the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.

00:52:18.140 It was used in my home state whenever Orville Faubus, our racist Democratic governor, refused

00:52:24.500 to integrate Little Rock Central, and Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to ensure

00:52:29.260 that those black kids could go to school and get an education, despite Orville Faubus and

00:52:33.640 the Democratic Party's refusal to allow schools to integrate.

00:52:37.780 But as you say, the headline is the most incendiary piece of the whole story, and I didn't write

00:52:42.660 the headline.

00:52:43.160 As you know, as a lot of your viewers may know, authors don't write their own headlines.

00:52:47.140 That headline was chosen by the New York Times, and I think that contributed to a lot of the

00:52:51.680 meltdown at the New York Times newsroom, because you had people who didn't even read the article

00:52:56.020 itself.

00:52:56.540 They just responded to the headline.

00:52:59.160 My reaction to it-

00:52:59.940 Oh, wait, but wait, let me ask you something on that.

00:53:00.900 Let me ask you something on that.

00:53:02.080 I posit to you that they would have reacted exactly the same way had they fully understood

00:53:07.760 what you were saying.

00:53:09.760 Well, they might have.

00:53:10.640 They might have.

00:53:11.540 Because, again, they were so swept away with this radical ideology at the moment, this rioting in the

00:53:19.460 street, tearing down statues of our heroes, condemning America and our police forces as

00:53:25.400 systemically racist, saying that we're an awful country, that we're founded not in freedom,

00:53:30.100 but in bondage.

00:53:31.020 We're founded not in 1776, but in 1619.

00:53:33.840 I mean, it was really a mob mentality, and you saw the mobs playing out in the streets.

00:53:40.800 Now, again, I found the whole thing slightly bemusing to watch all of these social justice

00:53:46.920 warriors at the New York Times meltdown.

00:53:48.860 But most disappointing was that the leadership at the New York Times didn't have the nerve to

00:53:52.780 stand up to its own 20-something workforce.

00:53:56.320 Jim Bennett, the op-ed editor you mentioned that lost his job, is not really a villain here.

00:54:00.200 He's expressed regret that he agreed to the editor's note on my piece, which you can still

00:54:05.100 read today.

00:54:06.080 He was forced to do that by the Salzburgers, the owners of the New York Times, who are the

00:54:11.060 real villains, along with the woke workforce at the New York Times.

00:54:14.920 Now, one funny story about that editor's note, and I like to tell this story on the campaign

00:54:20.240 trail and always gets lots of laughter, is that they said, without citing any factual problems,

00:54:25.200 because there are no factual problems in that op-ed, they said that I didn't meet the New

00:54:29.020 York Times standards.

00:54:30.080 And I agree with New York Times for once.

00:54:31.660 I did not meet their typically very low standards.

00:54:34.220 I far exceeded their standards in my quality of argumentation.

00:54:38.540 That's right.

00:54:39.660 They made him attach an editor's note, drawing into question their decision to publish it.

00:54:47.840 They said, OK, this is just an example of what they posted.

00:54:51.640 It's long, but I'll give you some highlights.

00:54:53.920 We have concluded that this essay fell short of our standards.

00:54:56.500 It should not have been published.

00:54:57.540 The basic arguments advanced by Senator Cotton, however objectionable people may find them,

00:55:02.180 represent a newsworthy part of the current debate.

00:55:04.360 But given the life and death importance of the topic, the senator's influential position

00:55:08.200 and the gravity of the steps he advocates, the essay should have undergone the highest

00:55:11.980 level of scrutiny.

00:55:13.680 Instead, the editing process was rushed and flawed and senior editors were not sufficiently

00:55:17.540 involved and so on and so forth.

00:55:19.480 And they go, I mean, they pull out like these, there's a bunch of BS objections that they try

00:55:23.780 to come up with.

00:55:24.700 Well, what's interesting now is that I'll get to Jim Bennett and his thoughts on this.

00:55:30.500 I think it's very interesting now.

00:55:31.660 He's come out and hit The Washington Post.

00:55:33.380 I'm sorry, The New York Times for doing all of this.

00:55:36.100 But Eric Wemple at The Washington Post has come out with a really thoughtful admission and

00:55:44.020 piece on all of this.

00:55:45.000 This is just on, I guess it was Thursday, 1027, whatever that was, and says James Bennett

00:55:51.260 was right because he's talking about James Bennett ripping on The Times for how it handled

00:55:55.280 this now.

00:55:56.680 He says it's long past time to ask why more people who claim to uphold journalism and

00:56:02.000 free expression, including the Eric Wemple blog.

00:56:05.880 This is Eric Wemple writing, did not speak out then in Bennett's defense.

00:56:09.660 It's because we were afraid to.

00:56:13.280 And he goes on to say, citing somebody who I guess used to work in your office, that they

00:56:19.580 believed that the guy basically had, the guy, when they reviewed the piece to try to find

00:56:24.820 something wrong, they had a gun to their head to try to find something, anything.

00:56:29.280 And even Eric Wemple writes, the review did not deliver the factual bloodbath alleged by

00:56:33.880 critics.

00:56:34.780 At best, it flagged a misquotation that should have been rendered as a paraphrase.

00:56:39.660 Heaven, heavens to Betsy.

00:56:41.680 And he goes on to say, this is what The New York Times did.

00:56:45.140 They published an opinion by a U.S. senator and possible presidential candidate advocating

00:56:49.680 for a lawful act by the president.

00:56:52.840 And Eric Wemple writes, our criticism of the Twitter outburst comes 875 days too late.

00:56:59.040 Although the hollowness of the internal uproar against Bennett was immediately apparent, we

00:57:03.820 responded with an even-handed critique of The Times' flip-flop, not an unapologetic defense

00:57:09.340 of journalism, which is what the situation required.

00:57:13.220 Now, all this time later, James Bennett too, comes out, Senator, and says, the publisher,

00:57:18.980 Salzberger, blew it.

00:57:20.560 He blew the chance to make clear that The New York Times does not exist just to tell progressives

00:57:25.280 how progressives should view reality.

00:57:27.380 This was a huge mistake and a missed opportunity for him to show real strength.

00:57:31.600 He still could have fired me, but he didn't need to handle it this way.

00:57:34.660 He says, I regret that editor's note.

00:57:36.600 My mistake there was trying to mollify people.

00:57:39.020 And goes on to say, The Times wants to have it both ways.

00:57:42.900 They want the applause and the welcome of the left.

00:57:46.240 And now there's the problem that on top of that, they signed up so many new subscribers,

00:57:49.380 he means, during the Trump era.

00:57:51.120 And the expectation of those subscribers is that The Times will be Mother Jones on steroids.

00:57:57.620 So interesting to have these, you know, they're left-wingers.

00:58:01.600 Eric Wemple's more left-leaning, certainly Jim Bennett is.

00:58:05.720 Come to Jesus on this issue.

00:58:07.860 You know, the one guy got canceled.

00:58:10.200 The other guy feels bad about not being honest about it.

00:58:13.220 All this time later, they're starting to see the light.

00:58:17.740 Yeah.

00:58:19.120 You know, as I said, I mean, I don't really fault Jim Bennett.

00:58:22.220 I wish he had not agreed to run that editor's note, or at least not agreed to be associated with it.

00:58:26.640 But he regrets that as well.

00:58:28.020 The real villains here are the owners of The New York Times, Sulzberger's, and their workforce,

00:58:32.400 who don't want to hear anything contrary to their own doctrinaire progressive worldview.

00:58:38.120 My views in that op-ed are not just that the president should take a lawful act if necessary to restore order.

00:58:42.960 They were also supported by a wide majority of Americans at the time.

00:58:47.260 I just point out a couple of things.

00:58:48.880 I mean, The New York Times is like the high cathedral of liberalism in America.

00:58:52.940 Every lefty kid who ever wanted to be a journalist dreams one day of growing up to work at The New York Times.

00:58:59.500 The Sulzberger's could have easily told all of those whiny little social justice warriors,

00:59:04.980 you'll get back to work and there'll be no more discussion about this or you'll be fired tomorrow.

00:59:09.920 And if they did say that, there'd be 10 more people, maybe 50 more people,

00:59:13.480 equally qualified, lined up for any person's job who is willing to quit over that op-ed.

00:59:18.300 Second, about this Washington Post story, which does a pretty good job of laying out what had happened behind the scenes.

00:59:25.020 It talks about how we went through a rigorous fact-checking process with The New York Times,

00:59:28.720 just like I did with my two previous op-eds in The New York Times that talked about,

00:59:32.500 you know, the advantages of buying Greenland to the United States

00:59:35.240 or why we killed Qasem Soleimani, Iran's terrorist mastermind.

00:59:39.260 Same exact process.

00:59:40.640 It really was a kind of witch hunt trying to find something wrong with the op-ed,

00:59:45.140 which they obviously didn't do.

00:59:46.200 But finally, two years later, after you have these writers on the left coming out and saying,

00:59:51.160 we were scared, we should have said this at the time, you know, we didn't agree with this,

00:59:55.340 it just raises the deeper question, what are they suppressing today?

00:59:59.160 What news are they not publishing?

01:00:01.040 What viewpoints are they not allowing onto their pages?

01:00:04.200 Because they have the same kind of partisan filter on their news and their opinion pages

01:00:09.580 that they don't want to do anything that will upset the progressive left in America.

01:00:13.620 I think it's well worth asking, what are they censoring and suppressing today

01:00:17.820 if they're admitting they were doing it two years ago?

01:00:20.440 That's such a great question.

01:00:21.660 Like, perhaps on some dangers associated with the COVID vaccines.

01:00:26.260 Like, perhaps the downside of mutilating minors with these aggressive,

01:00:32.460 quote, gender-affirming surgeries,

01:00:34.520 which actually are leading to a lot of damage that these kids wind up severely regretting

01:00:39.000 and suing over, right?

01:00:40.180 Like, like the race essentialism that we're baking into every elementary school

01:00:44.680 and middle and high school program now teaching children that skin color matters

01:00:48.740 and it might be everything that you're at certain disadvantages

01:00:51.800 depending on your melanin or advantage.

01:00:53.660 And so, like, I don't think we've found our spine on any of those.

01:00:57.960 No, the left certainly hasn't.

01:01:02.100 In fact, as we discussed in the first hour,

01:01:03.860 they would rather suppress all those viewpoints.

01:01:06.160 I mean, I think it's the official position of all these journalists

01:01:09.040 and Democratic politicians who are screeching about Elon owning Twitter

01:01:13.120 that you should be able to lose your job

01:01:16.640 or you should be censored on social media

01:01:18.300 if, for instance, you don't think healthy teenage girls

01:01:20.860 should have double mastectomies,

01:01:22.400 if you think the COVID vaccine may not be necessary

01:01:26.440 and could even be potentially harmful for your teenage boy,

01:01:30.400 if you think the effects of climate change

01:01:32.380 can be controlled by more fossil fuel production,

01:01:34.540 more prosperity for America and the entire world.

01:01:37.640 These are just a few of the things that the left,

01:01:39.120 once you've kicked off social media,

01:01:40.740 wants you to lose your job,

01:01:42.040 wants you to lose your bank accounts over,

01:01:43.600 as opposed to engaging on their own terms

01:01:45.900 and trying to win the debate in the arena of ideas.

01:01:49.720 Have you ever talked to Jim Bennett?

01:01:53.100 I did, actually.

01:01:54.240 Jim Bennett came to see me a few months ago.

01:01:57.360 At first, it was a private conversation,

01:01:58.980 but since he has said publicly exactly what he said to me privately,

01:02:03.040 now I don't feel that it's constraining on me.

01:02:06.700 I can say that he expressed to me the same regret

01:02:08.480 that he's expressed in the articles as of late.

01:02:11.220 And again, I don't view Jim Bennett as a villain here.

01:02:14.700 I agree with him that he shouldn't have agreed

01:02:17.080 to run that editor's note under his own name.

01:02:19.360 But the real villain, his boss, the Sulzburgers,

01:02:21.720 who fired him and all those employees

01:02:23.820 who rose up demanding his head.

01:02:26.500 This is not a right-wing guy.

01:02:28.560 You know, this is, he's written some things

01:02:31.140 that have gotten him sued for the times

01:02:32.620 by people like Sarah Palin and so on.

01:02:34.420 His opinions have not in any way been right-leaning,

01:02:37.320 but he was apparently in favor of publishing your piece

01:02:40.840 because he did have this old school commitment

01:02:43.040 to offering divergent points of view

01:02:46.100 because the belief that used to be in our country

01:02:48.500 that that would help people process an issue

01:02:50.780 and decide which side they're on and so on.

01:02:52.940 Do you think his politics have changed at all,

01:02:55.380 like in talking to him?

01:02:57.300 I don't know.

01:02:58.160 I mean, he now has a column in The Economist magazine,

01:03:01.020 so we'll be able to judge for ourselves his politics on it.

01:03:04.220 But I will say Jim Bennett is far from a right-winger.

01:03:07.580 I mean, his brother, Michael Bennett,

01:03:08.700 is a United States senator,

01:03:09.820 well, soon to be an ex-senator when he loses next week.

01:03:12.780 But, you know, he's written for the Atlantic Monthly.

01:03:15.240 He was the editor of it for a long time.

01:03:16.960 He is a true Times man

01:03:19.000 in the old tradition of the New York Times.

01:03:20.720 I mean, he was a war correspondent overseas.

01:03:22.680 He's actually reported in danger.

01:03:24.520 I have a lot of respect for him as a professional,

01:03:26.700 even if I disagree with some of his political

01:03:29.080 and philosophical views.

01:03:31.000 But it just goes to show how radical

01:03:32.900 today's Democratic Party has become.

01:03:35.580 As a right about knowing that strong,

01:03:37.000 they are the true inheritors

01:03:38.180 of the blame-America-first democratic heritage

01:03:40.920 that started out in the Vietnam War.

01:03:43.080 They always seem to blame America first.

01:03:45.360 They always excuse our adversaries.

01:03:47.700 They always condemn our allies.

01:03:49.640 They think that America is always a source

01:03:53.160 for the world's ills,

01:03:54.540 as opposed to the greatest source of good,

01:03:57.020 not only for our own people,

01:03:58.440 but for all of mankind.

01:04:01.000 All right, let's talk a little politics

01:04:02.600 since you raised that.

01:04:03.860 And I know you've been out there

01:04:04.760 helping in certain races,

01:04:05.940 trying to get the GOP chances shorn up,

01:04:09.320 in particular the Senate,

01:04:11.080 your chamber, but the House as well, I'm sure.

01:04:14.080 So how do you like where you are right now,

01:04:16.660 eight days out?

01:04:17.540 And I know the momentum is with the Republicans.

01:04:19.460 The Dems are going to try to stop it

01:04:20.860 with January 6th, Paul Pelosi.

01:04:22.940 Do you think that has any chance of succeeding?

01:04:26.240 No, we're going to win these midterms.

01:04:27.640 We're going to take back the House.

01:04:28.500 We're going to take back the Senate.

01:04:29.400 I wouldn't want to hazard an exact prediction.

01:04:31.720 I'll leave that to pundits in the media.

01:04:33.760 But we're going to win majorities

01:04:35.080 in both the House and the Senate.

01:04:36.400 And I don't think they're going to be

01:04:37.280 small majorities either

01:04:38.340 because the American people are fed up

01:04:40.660 with the consequences of Joe Biden

01:04:42.460 and the Democrats' radical ideological agenda.

01:04:44.960 They can't afford food at the grocery store.

01:04:46.640 They can't afford to fill up their tanks

01:04:48.040 at the gas pump.

01:04:49.180 They worry about their kids walking to school

01:04:51.020 or going trick-or-treating

01:04:52.140 or playing a part

01:04:53.060 in the threats of crime

01:04:54.620 and homelessness and drugs.

01:04:56.460 They see our wide-open southern border.

01:04:58.740 They want to put some checks and balances

01:05:00.200 in place in Washington.

01:05:01.820 They don't want unified Democratic control anymore.

01:05:05.020 They want Republicans to help restore

01:05:06.840 some sanity and order to this country.

01:05:10.300 So I'm very optimistic

01:05:11.980 about this upcoming election in eight days.

01:05:14.840 You know, just in the last couple of weeks,

01:05:16.020 I've been in Ohio and Pennsylvania

01:05:17.860 and North Carolina.

01:05:19.860 Later this week,

01:05:20.500 I'm looking forward to a West Coast swing

01:05:22.040 where Blake Masters is going to win in Arizona.

01:05:24.820 Adam Laxalt is going to win in Nevada.

01:05:26.600 Tiffany Smiley is going to win in Washington State

01:05:28.640 against 30-year failed career politician,

01:05:31.220 Patty Murray.

01:05:32.240 And the Democrats know this as well.

01:05:33.760 You can see what the polls say.

01:05:35.140 Some polls are more accurate.

01:05:36.520 Some polls are less accurate.

01:05:37.760 But the bottom line is

01:05:38.660 the Democrats are now trying to protect

01:05:40.880 career incumbents like Patty Murray

01:05:43.440 or House members

01:05:45.040 who represent districts

01:05:46.680 that Joe Biden won by 10 or 12 points.

01:05:49.500 They wouldn't be doing that

01:05:50.640 if they thought that they were

01:05:51.500 on the verge of a victory.

01:05:52.720 They know they're on the verge of failure.

01:05:54.060 They talk about things like

01:05:55.640 threats to democracy

01:05:56.620 or January 6th or abortion

01:05:58.640 because they can't say anything else.

01:06:00.200 I mean, what is Michael Bennett

01:06:01.520 in Colorado going to say?

01:06:02.780 He was a great champion

01:06:04.180 of sending out

01:06:05.460 no-strings-attached welfare checks

01:06:07.700 without any relationship

01:06:09.000 to work at all last spring,

01:06:10.980 which helped contribute

01:06:11.900 to the inflation we have.

01:06:13.460 They have no answers

01:06:14.460 for the runaway inflation.

01:06:16.460 They are, in many cases,

01:06:17.420 the cause of it.

01:06:18.240 Not only do they not have answers

01:06:19.280 for the crime rate

01:06:19.940 we have in America,

01:06:20.640 they are the cause of it

01:06:22.740 through their reckless,

01:06:23.980 soft-on-crime policies.

01:06:25.220 And, of course,

01:06:25.680 Joe Biden is the reason

01:06:26.640 our southern border

01:06:27.340 is wide open and so dangerous.

01:06:29.300 Well, we're getting there

01:06:29.940 on an explanation on economy.

01:06:32.100 We're getting as close

01:06:33.100 as we've gotten, I think.

01:06:34.520 This is Karine Jean-Pierre

01:06:35.780 speaking about why the numbers

01:06:37.640 on the economy

01:06:38.240 are as bad as they are

01:06:39.840 on MSNBC.

01:06:41.220 This is SOT2.

01:06:43.860 Poll after poll shows

01:06:45.440 that voters trust,

01:06:47.900 they say they trust Republicans

01:06:49.800 more than Democrats

01:06:50.740 when it comes to the economy.

01:06:52.380 What's the administration's response

01:06:53.800 to that persistent view

01:06:55.860 among the elected?

01:06:56.760 So, first, we have always said

01:06:59.340 we understand

01:07:00.120 what the American public

01:07:01.340 is dealing with.

01:07:02.240 We understand that

01:07:03.020 there are high costs

01:07:04.040 and we understand

01:07:04.900 that they're feeling

01:07:05.680 very squeezed right now.

01:07:07.440 The president always says this,

01:07:08.920 and you hear him say this

01:07:09.820 all the time,

01:07:10.380 that he wants to make sure

01:07:11.720 that we give Americans

01:07:12.640 a little bit more

01:07:13.380 breathing room,

01:07:14.180 which is what his dad

01:07:14.980 used to say

01:07:15.480 when he grew up in Scranton

01:07:17.140 and dealing with these

01:07:18.120 kitchen table issues.

01:07:20.300 So, when the president

01:07:22.000 walked into this administration,

01:07:24.140 the economy was in ruins.

01:07:25.780 It was in absolute ruins.

01:07:28.820 There it is.

01:07:29.920 It was Trump's fault.

01:07:31.980 Yeah, I think most Americans

01:07:33.280 remember in January 2021,

01:07:35.900 they were able

01:07:36.300 to fill up their tank.

01:07:37.120 Gas was only $2.40.

01:07:38.900 Eggs were only a couple bucks.

01:07:40.380 A dozen.

01:07:40.820 They weren't seven bucks a dozen.

01:07:42.400 That they could afford

01:07:43.000 their kids braces

01:07:43.740 or put their kids

01:07:44.540 into a little league

01:07:45.320 or into music lessons.

01:07:46.900 That's not the case now.

01:07:47.860 In fact, recently,

01:07:48.580 my five-year-old son

01:07:49.780 asked me and Anna

01:07:51.400 if we could buy something.

01:07:52.400 And we said,

01:07:52.720 well, I don't know.

01:07:53.220 It's kind of expensive.

01:07:54.260 And he said,

01:07:54.780 is that because Joe Biden

01:07:55.640 has made everything cost so much?

01:07:56.980 So, I guess he's been listening

01:07:58.140 to mom and dad at home

01:07:59.720 when we talk about

01:08:00.580 what we face as a family,

01:08:01.780 what so many Americans face,

01:08:02.920 and what dad has been talking about

01:08:04.440 at the office.

01:08:06.740 We have inflation

01:08:07.900 because the Democrats

01:08:08.760 spent trillions of dollars

01:08:09.940 that we don't have

01:08:11.140 and frankly,

01:08:11.620 that we didn't need

01:08:12.420 as the economy was recovering

01:08:14.340 in early 2021

01:08:15.740 from all those

01:08:16.640 Democratic lockdowns

01:08:18.200 and from the Chinese

01:08:19.520 communists

01:08:20.480 that almost certainly

01:08:22.100 were responsible

01:08:22.820 for this virus

01:08:23.560 coming out of one of their labs.

01:08:25.600 You know,

01:08:25.780 Joe Biden always likes

01:08:26.700 to blame the pandemic

01:08:27.520 for inflation.

01:08:29.000 Well, we had a pandemic

01:08:29.580 for a year

01:08:30.080 and we didn't have inflation.

01:08:31.360 As of late,

01:08:31.920 he started talking

01:08:32.400 about Putin's price hike.

01:08:33.880 Well, we had inflation

01:08:34.700 well before Vladimir Putin

01:08:35.960 launched his war in Ukraine.

01:08:37.620 If the Democrats

01:08:38.380 want to know

01:08:38.940 where the blame lies

01:08:39.940 for inflation,

01:08:40.640 all they have to do

01:08:41.180 is look in the mirror

01:08:41.880 in the morning

01:08:42.440 because they're the one

01:08:43.420 that spent trillions

01:08:45.060 of dollars

01:08:45.700 that we don't have.

01:08:46.740 At the same time,

01:08:47.920 they took steps

01:08:48.560 to constrain supply

01:08:49.980 like on energy production.

01:08:51.760 As I explained

01:08:52.520 in Only the Strong,

01:08:53.440 it's one of the essential sources

01:08:54.940 of American power.

01:08:56.020 It literally is the power.

01:08:57.000 You know,

01:08:57.120 when your lights go out,

01:08:58.220 you say the power is out.

01:08:59.780 Yet the Democrats

01:09:00.380 have done everything

01:09:01.160 they can to make

01:09:02.680 your gas

01:09:03.540 and your electricity

01:09:04.400 and your utility bills

01:09:06.060 cost more

01:09:07.180 because they have

01:09:07.840 an ideological axe

01:09:09.680 to grind

01:09:10.140 against fossil fuel production.

01:09:12.060 The Democrats

01:09:12.620 are to blame

01:09:13.180 for this inflation

01:09:13.820 and the American people

01:09:15.040 are going to get responsibility

01:09:16.180 for this inflation

01:09:17.320 next week.

01:09:18.840 And then we pretend

01:09:19.360 that we have to go

01:09:19.840 to the Saudis

01:09:20.440 for a solution

01:09:21.060 when we don't have

01:09:21.720 to go to the Saudis.

01:09:22.480 We have the solution.

01:09:23.420 We just won't unleash it.

01:09:26.160 On some of the races

01:09:27.480 that you were just mentioning,

01:09:28.860 there was an

01:09:29.460 they thought it was off mic,

01:09:31.480 but it was an on mic moment

01:09:32.520 between Chuck Schumer

01:09:34.300 and Joe Biden

01:09:35.240 on the forecast

01:09:36.440 for these midterms.

01:09:37.780 And Schumer

01:09:38.240 said something

01:09:39.220 to the effect of

01:09:39.880 we're going downhill

01:09:40.700 in Georgia.

01:09:41.780 He didn't like

01:09:42.380 how things were going

01:09:43.100 in Georgia

01:09:43.560 between Herschel Walker

01:09:44.560 and Raphael Warnock,

01:09:46.040 the Democrat,

01:09:46.800 but said in Pennsylvania,

01:09:48.040 it doesn't look like

01:09:49.560 we were hurt

01:09:50.120 too badly

01:09:50.860 by that debate

01:09:52.280 between Fetterman

01:09:53.060 and Oz.

01:09:54.020 And a lot of people

01:09:54.600 have been saying

01:09:55.320 like Fetterman,

01:09:56.280 he's going to win,

01:09:57.920 notwithstanding

01:09:58.500 that disastrous

01:09:59.140 debate performance

01:09:59.920 because Oz

01:10:01.520 is just too slick

01:10:02.960 or he's not conservative

01:10:03.980 enough and people

01:10:04.800 just, you know,

01:10:05.200 as a TV guy,

01:10:06.240 I don't know,

01:10:06.440 like the Carrie Lake

01:10:07.260 thing is one thing

01:10:08.160 that's helping her,

01:10:09.100 her TV presence

01:10:09.820 and experience

01:10:10.920 in Arizona.

01:10:11.980 I don't know

01:10:12.660 that Dr. Oz's TV

01:10:13.720 past is helping him

01:10:14.820 so much,

01:10:15.160 so there's kind of

01:10:15.720 like a wall

01:10:16.280 he's been up against.

01:10:17.560 First of all,

01:10:17.980 do you agree

01:10:18.480 that they're going down

01:10:19.400 Democrats in Georgia

01:10:21.020 and that the Pennsylvania

01:10:22.720 debate did not hurt

01:10:24.040 the Democrats too much?

01:10:26.900 So yeah,

01:10:27.680 Herschel Walker

01:10:28.140 is going to win

01:10:28.540 in Georgia.

01:10:29.120 Raphael Warnock

01:10:29.740 has been a rubber stamp

01:10:30.600 for Joe Biden's

01:10:31.340 voted with him

01:10:31.840 almost 100%

01:10:32.740 of the time.

01:10:33.820 The people of Georgia

01:10:34.400 gave Raphael Warnock

01:10:35.340 a trial run,

01:10:36.340 if you will,

01:10:36.920 an abbreviated

01:10:37.520 two-year term

01:10:38.480 in the Senate

01:10:40.520 in 2020.

01:10:42.260 I think they're

01:10:42.860 very disappointed

01:10:43.460 with the results

01:10:44.060 they see.

01:10:45.000 They want to return

01:10:45.700 a conservative Republican

01:10:47.160 to represent

01:10:47.920 their conservative values.

01:10:50.580 In Pennsylvania,

01:10:51.520 John Fetterman

01:10:51.960 is going to lose

01:10:52.460 that race

01:10:53.020 and it has really

01:10:53.880 nothing to do

01:10:54.540 with his medical condition.

01:10:56.460 Look,

01:10:56.660 I deeply regret

01:10:57.960 that he suffered

01:10:58.700 that stroke.

01:10:59.580 I wouldn't wish

01:11:00.300 that upon anyone.

01:11:01.120 I wish him all the best

01:11:01.920 for his recovery,

01:11:02.680 but frankly,

01:11:03.140 it's the least

01:11:03.620 of my concerns.

01:11:04.940 I'm much more worried

01:11:05.900 about public safety

01:11:07.300 if John Fetterman

01:11:08.220 is in the United States Senate.

01:11:09.820 This is a man

01:11:10.340 who said that we could

01:11:11.000 release a third

01:11:11.720 of all prisoners

01:11:12.520 from prison

01:11:13.580 and it would be fine.

01:11:15.220 This is a man

01:11:15.500 who voted repeatedly

01:11:16.460 to let murderers

01:11:17.760 out of prison.

01:11:19.280 Someone who said

01:11:20.180 he wants to decriminalize

01:11:21.440 all drugs

01:11:22.200 at a time

01:11:22.580 when Pennsylvanians

01:11:23.580 are facing

01:11:24.160 a drug epidemic

01:11:25.620 of unprecedented proportion.

01:11:27.280 Or when I was

01:11:28.420 with Mehmet Oz

01:11:29.500 in western Pennsylvania

01:11:30.440 at a natural gas pad,

01:11:32.760 hydraulic fracturing

01:11:33.840 has allowed Pennsylvania

01:11:35.540 and other parts

01:11:36.240 of the country

01:11:36.800 to become

01:11:37.660 not just America's

01:11:39.200 energy supplier,

01:11:40.060 but much of the world's

01:11:40.980 energy supplier.

01:11:42.500 John Fetterman,

01:11:43.400 for ideological reasons,

01:11:44.920 would ban

01:11:45.600 that incredible technology

01:11:47.060 that allows us

01:11:47.840 to unlock the resources

01:11:49.000 that God put

01:11:49.740 under our soil.

01:11:50.960 These are the issues

01:11:52.220 that are going to cost

01:11:52.960 John Fetterman the rights.

01:11:54.380 That was the infamous

01:11:55.140 answer from the other night.

01:11:56.160 No, I'm for fracking

01:11:57.880 and I'm for fracking

01:11:59.280 and I'm for fracking

01:12:01.100 and totally ignoring

01:12:01.960 the fact that just

01:12:02.600 a couple years ago

01:12:03.220 he was on the record

01:12:04.020 saying he was against it.

01:12:05.600 So, I mean,

01:12:06.300 you tell me what

01:12:06.820 the Pennsylvania voters

01:12:07.620 are going to do with that.

01:12:08.560 My own experience,

01:12:09.420 my husband's from Pennsylvania,

01:12:10.520 his mom's still in Pennsylvania,

01:12:11.480 is that they take

01:12:13.080 their responsibility

01:12:13.640 as a swing state

01:12:14.480 pretty seriously.

01:12:16.000 And a lot of

01:12:16.620 Pennsylvania voters

01:12:17.460 are actually up to speed,

01:12:18.740 especially on issues

01:12:19.580 like fracking

01:12:20.060 because it really

01:12:20.560 does affect them.

01:12:21.620 I feel like they will care

01:12:22.660 about what his position

01:12:23.500 is on it.

01:12:24.680 Yeah, I think they will

01:12:26.040 and they won't take his word

01:12:27.220 in this election eve conversion.

01:12:29.460 You know,

01:12:29.640 his new supposed support

01:12:31.460 for fracking

01:12:31.980 reminds me of

01:12:32.640 an old political story

01:12:34.100 about a young man

01:12:35.180 who died early

01:12:35.860 and went up to heaven

01:12:36.560 and St. Peter said,

01:12:38.000 well, we weren't ready

01:12:38.500 for you yet,

01:12:38.960 so we're going to

01:12:39.240 give you a choice.

01:12:40.240 So he got in the elevator

01:12:40.940 and they went down to hell

01:12:41.900 and everyone was partying

01:12:42.960 and having a great time

01:12:44.080 and dancing

01:12:44.580 and the devil was very inviting.

01:12:46.460 And they went up to heaven

01:12:47.200 and all the angels

01:12:48.500 were on the clouds

01:12:49.280 playing harpsichords

01:12:50.240 and it was nice,

01:12:51.160 but, you know,

01:12:51.460 it was kind of quiet

01:12:52.180 and then St. Peter said,

01:12:53.460 well, where do you want to go?

01:12:54.440 And the fellow said,

01:12:55.800 you know,

01:12:56.020 I know what I'm supposed

01:12:56.800 to say to St. Pete,

01:12:57.620 but I think hell

01:12:58.620 is more my speed.

01:12:59.900 And St. Peter said,

01:13:00.780 are you sure?

01:13:01.200 And he said,

01:13:01.520 yeah, I'm sure.

01:13:02.700 So he sends him

01:13:03.160 back down the elevator,

01:13:04.000 the door's open,

01:13:04.820 the devil's waiting for him,

01:13:06.120 he sees the cries

01:13:07.280 of anguish

01:13:08.340 and despair

01:13:08.880 of all the lost souls,

01:13:10.740 the infernal heat

01:13:11.940 and he says,

01:13:12.800 whoa, what happened here?

01:13:13.720 Two hours ago

01:13:14.180 you were having a party

01:13:15.100 and the devil said,

01:13:16.160 yeah, two hours ago

01:13:16.960 I was in campaign mode, bud.

01:13:18.880 And I think John Fetterman

01:13:20.060 and a lot of these Democrats

01:13:20.940 are in campaign mode

01:13:22.200 right now,

01:13:23.100 but we can see

01:13:24.060 what they've said

01:13:24.640 in the past

01:13:25.340 about crime,

01:13:26.940 about drugs,

01:13:28.160 about our southern border,

01:13:29.840 about their big spending ways

01:13:31.480 and Keystone Staters

01:13:32.920 have a lot of common sense

01:13:34.320 and they're not going to be fooled

01:13:35.280 by these Democratic politicians

01:13:37.260 in campaign mode.

01:13:41.580 So Senator,

01:13:42.380 you spent some time

01:13:43.160 on President Biden

01:13:44.380 in the book

01:13:45.200 and talk about

01:13:46.620 how his bad judgment

01:13:47.740 is getting dangerous

01:13:49.300 in your view.

01:13:50.800 So many things

01:13:51.480 that the White House minions

01:13:53.040 run out to reverse him on.

01:13:55.100 You make the case

01:13:56.600 are actually really dangerous

01:13:58.160 and are compromising

01:13:59.140 American security.

01:14:00.600 The Taiwan relationship

01:14:02.120 with America,

01:14:03.260 what he has said

01:14:04.380 about the Chinese,

01:14:06.180 what happened in Afghanistan,

01:14:07.560 but you're really pointing out

01:14:09.460 that he's gone

01:14:10.820 from somebody

01:14:11.320 who had controversial

01:14:12.580 to be charitable

01:14:13.460 foreign policy views

01:14:14.660 to someone

01:14:15.600 who is now

01:14:16.180 in a serious position

01:14:17.180 of undermining

01:14:18.020 our safety

01:14:18.700 with these erratic,

01:14:20.740 random,

01:14:21.620 seemingly,

01:14:22.600 statements.

01:14:23.700 Yeah,

01:14:23.900 Joe Biden's

01:14:24.740 kind of extemporaneous

01:14:25.780 outbursts

01:14:26.480 are extremely ill-advised

01:14:28.060 and dangerous.

01:14:28.920 I have said time and again

01:14:30.040 that he should only

01:14:31.360 stick to scripts.

01:14:32.160 He should not do

01:14:32.740 extemporaneous speaking.

01:14:34.960 He really shouldn't even

01:14:35.620 take question and answer anymore.

01:14:36.980 If he'd be willing

01:14:37.520 to do that,

01:14:37.920 I probably wouldn't

01:14:38.580 criticize him

01:14:39.300 for not doing

01:14:40.020 question and answers

01:14:40.640 because it's so dangerous.

01:14:41.500 Look what he's done

01:14:42.060 with Taiwan

01:14:42.540 as you suggested.

01:14:43.840 We've all had

01:14:44.620 a very nuanced,

01:14:46.020 subtle relationship

01:14:46.720 with Taiwan

01:14:47.540 since 1979

01:14:49.380 when we shipped

01:14:50.080 our diplomatic relationship

01:14:51.340 from Taiwan

01:14:53.180 to mainland China.

01:14:55.180 Part of that

01:14:55.980 is that we have

01:14:56.740 never said explicitly

01:14:57.900 that we would come

01:14:59.120 to Taiwan's aid

01:15:00.700 if the Chinese communists

01:15:03.520 on the mainland

01:15:04.120 try to invade

01:15:05.060 and annex it.

01:15:06.160 Now,

01:15:06.400 I think that policy

01:15:07.340 was right at a time,

01:15:08.840 perhaps,

01:15:09.260 but it's no longer right.

01:15:10.100 We should be explicit

01:15:10.880 about it.

01:15:11.360 But,

01:15:12.060 Joe Biden now

01:15:12.940 four times

01:15:13.980 in 13 months

01:15:15.180 has said just that

01:15:16.720 only to have

01:15:17.980 anonymous White House aides

01:15:19.260 immediately contradict him.

01:15:21.360 And sometimes

01:15:21.800 he himself

01:15:22.620 walks his own words back

01:15:24.220 within a matter

01:15:24.780 of hours or days.

01:15:26.320 This is incredibly dangerous

01:15:27.500 and it undermines

01:15:28.700 our national security.

01:15:30.200 You get all the provocation

01:15:31.420 of the Chinese communists

01:15:32.540 but none of the deterrence

01:15:33.620 of simply saying it

01:15:34.780 and backing it up

01:15:35.720 with strength

01:15:36.720 and resolve.

01:15:38.240 Or take what's happened

01:15:39.620 since the war

01:15:40.400 with Ukraine began.

01:15:42.360 You know,

01:15:42.760 he said in a speech

01:15:43.640 in Warsaw

01:15:44.120 at the end of the speech

01:15:45.140 that Vladimir Putin

01:15:46.000 can't remain in power.

01:15:47.640 Look,

01:15:48.140 I think that we need

01:15:49.420 to stand up

01:15:50.060 and support

01:15:51.000 the Ukrainians.

01:15:52.360 I've supported

01:15:53.040 giving them weapons.

01:15:54.480 This war should have

01:15:55.200 never happened

01:15:55.700 in the first place.

01:15:56.440 It happened

01:15:56.720 because Joe Biden

01:15:57.420 enticed or tempted

01:15:58.820 Vladimir Putin

01:15:59.560 to go for the jugular

01:16:00.600 in Ukraine

01:16:01.180 and she always says.

01:16:02.340 But Joe Biden

01:16:02.800 was in effect

01:16:03.220 calling for regime change

01:16:04.520 in Russia.

01:16:05.020 a very dangerous proposition.

01:16:07.040 Something that Ronald Reagan,

01:16:08.480 who was always tough

01:16:10.100 on communism,

01:16:11.320 never said about Brezhnev

01:16:13.420 or Andropov

01:16:14.460 or Gorbachev.

01:16:16.500 Joe Biden's

01:16:17.660 intemperate,

01:16:18.620 extemporaneous outbursts

01:16:20.300 are just a grave threat

01:16:22.160 to our national security

01:16:23.620 because they undermine

01:16:25.320 America's credibility,

01:16:26.900 which has a deterrent effect

01:16:28.320 that is vital

01:16:29.200 to preventing war.

01:16:30.360 And that's really

01:16:31.300 one of the main points

01:16:32.780 of American

01:16:33.360 national security policy

01:16:34.760 is to prevent war

01:16:36.100 rather than have to win wars

01:16:38.040 once they start.

01:16:39.680 Do you think he's in control

01:16:40.720 of his faculties?

01:16:41.620 Do you have faith

01:16:42.280 in his mental wellness?

01:16:43.880 He's obviously declined

01:16:45.180 a lot over the years, Megan.

01:16:46.940 You can just go back

01:16:47.840 to video of him

01:16:48.600 as a senator,

01:16:49.180 even video of him

01:16:50.060 as a senator in 2016.

01:16:52.300 Now, if I write

01:16:52.860 not only the strong,

01:16:53.500 there's no doubt

01:16:53.940 that he is still

01:16:54.780 fundamentally in charge

01:16:56.180 of the biggest decisions,

01:16:57.380 most notably

01:16:57.920 the Afghan fiasco

01:16:59.680 because no one

01:17:00.660 could have screwed that up

01:17:01.620 as badly as Joe Biden did.

01:17:03.520 And he did it

01:17:04.160 because he had a chip

01:17:04.740 on his shoulder

01:17:05.220 that Barack Obama

01:17:05.980 didn't listen to him

01:17:06.800 in 2009

01:17:07.580 about withdrawing

01:17:08.380 from Afghanistan.

01:17:09.860 Is Joe Biden

01:17:10.340 in control

01:17:10.920 of their day-to-day

01:17:12.340 minute details,

01:17:13.620 whether it's foreign policy

01:17:14.660 or his legislative agenda?

01:17:15.960 No, he's not.

01:17:16.580 Oftentimes,

01:17:17.160 presidents are not

01:17:18.120 directing things

01:17:20.020 on a minute level of detail,

01:17:21.660 especially when dealing

01:17:22.240 with Congress.

01:17:23.240 But on the big questions,

01:17:24.300 no, I do believe

01:17:25.200 that Joe Biden

01:17:25.900 is running the show

01:17:26.940 because few people

01:17:28.220 could screw things up

01:17:29.100 as badly as he has.

01:17:30.780 Do you have any interest

01:17:31.840 in taking him on

01:17:32.660 in the next presidential election?

01:17:34.920 We'll see what happens

01:17:35.940 after this midterm.

01:17:37.500 I think there are going

01:17:38.260 to be many people

01:17:39.380 running for our nomination.

01:17:40.540 There may be many people

01:17:41.300 running for the Democratic nomination

01:17:42.900 because many Democrats,

01:17:44.660 not just Democratic politicians

01:17:46.340 in Washington,

01:17:47.120 but rank-and-file Democrats,

01:17:48.220 if you look at the polls,

01:17:49.320 don't have confidence

01:17:50.160 in Joe Biden

01:17:50.840 serving the next two years,

01:17:52.480 much less being

01:17:53.240 their standard-bearer

01:17:54.140 in 2024.

01:17:55.400 But before we get

01:17:56.280 to the 2024 election,

01:17:57.640 we really need to run

01:17:58.580 through the tape

01:17:59.040 in this election

01:17:59.580 and make sure

01:18:00.300 that we're electing Republicans

01:18:01.660 in sufficiently large majorities

01:18:03.620 in Congress

01:18:04.200 that we can put the brakes

01:18:05.640 on Joe Biden

01:18:06.520 and the Democratic Party's

01:18:07.740 ideological agenda.

01:18:09.780 You know,

01:18:10.280 that reminds me of something.

01:18:11.320 We were talking about

01:18:11.880 the COVID inflation,

01:18:14.140 right?

01:18:14.260 The inflation that we suffered

01:18:15.260 as a result of these

01:18:16.100 relief programs

01:18:17.060 that by that point

01:18:17.860 we didn't need,

01:18:18.720 but that were pushed through

01:18:20.320 thanks to Joe Biden.

01:18:21.940 And one of the crazy things

01:18:23.540 is whether you believe

01:18:24.260 it started in a lab

01:18:25.040 or whether you believe

01:18:25.540 it started in a market,

01:18:26.260 you got to at least

01:18:27.220 entertain the possibility

01:18:28.620 that it could have come

01:18:29.380 from the lab

01:18:29.920 and that it came from

01:18:31.220 gain-of-function research.

01:18:32.760 Something we're still funding.

01:18:35.120 We just gave more money,

01:18:36.680 Fauci did,

01:18:37.520 to this Peter Daszak

01:18:38.560 and his group

01:18:39.100 EcoHealth Alliance,

01:18:40.440 which were the ones

01:18:41.120 when we say that

01:18:42.260 we funded gain-of-function,

01:18:43.300 we're talking about

01:18:43.760 Peter Daszak

01:18:44.220 and EcoHealth Alliance

01:18:45.100 working with the Bat Lady

01:18:46.460 in the Wuhan lab.

01:18:47.680 And we just did it again.

01:18:48.860 We just did it again.

01:18:50.840 Can that get undone

01:18:52.760 by a Republican Senate,

01:18:54.440 a Republican House,

01:18:55.380 or a Republican president?

01:18:56.980 Or are we just stuck

01:18:57.940 with that now

01:18:58.580 because Fauci blessed it

01:18:59.800 on his way out?

01:19:01.420 And, you know,

01:19:01.880 unless we get

01:19:02.320 a non-Fauci in there,

01:19:03.740 somebody who disagrees

01:19:04.700 with Fauci on this stuff,

01:19:06.100 we got to live with it.

01:19:07.420 These are exactly

01:19:08.320 the kind of things

01:19:09.040 that a new Republican Congress

01:19:10.160 could put a stop to.

01:19:11.800 You know, Congress's central power

01:19:13.620 is our spending power.

01:19:15.520 We're tasked

01:19:16.240 in our Constitution

01:19:17.020 to spend taxpayer dollars,

01:19:19.100 not the president,

01:19:20.440 not the administration

01:19:21.540 underneath the president,

01:19:23.020 but your elected

01:19:24.040 representatives in Congress.

01:19:25.860 And I saw in the final

01:19:27.060 two years

01:19:27.560 of the Obama administration,

01:19:28.720 you know,

01:19:28.840 I was new to the Senate,

01:19:29.840 that that can be effective.

01:19:30.660 For instance,

01:19:31.020 in one of those spending bills,

01:19:32.140 we were able to lift

01:19:33.140 the 40-year ban

01:19:34.020 on the export

01:19:34.860 of American oil,

01:19:36.000 which, of course,

01:19:37.040 made American oil

01:19:38.140 more valuable,

01:19:39.020 produced more oil

01:19:39.780 here in America.

01:19:41.140 We can use our power.

01:19:43.600 How would you get at this?

01:19:44.840 How would you get at this money

01:19:45.560 that's already been allotted

01:19:46.360 for one year?

01:19:47.100 It's a three-year grant,

01:19:47.840 but only one's been allotted.

01:19:49.980 Well, if a grant

01:19:50.960 has already gone out,

01:19:52.400 no,

01:19:52.900 you can't peel that back.

01:19:54.800 But going forward,

01:19:55.660 we can stop

01:19:56.500 all of this nonsense,

01:19:57.740 whether it's grants

01:19:58.800 to Chinese labs

01:19:59.940 researching dangerous

01:20:00.880 coronaviruses

01:20:01.780 or to other countries

01:20:03.140 to promote

01:20:04.060 transgender ideology,

01:20:05.720 which our Department

01:20:06.300 of State does as well.

01:20:07.820 Because that's

01:20:08.600 spending tax dollars,

01:20:09.700 the core function

01:20:10.340 of the Congress

01:20:11.180 and our constitutional system,

01:20:12.800 we can put a stop

01:20:13.620 to a lot of this nonsense.

01:20:15.000 And then, of course,

01:20:15.520 we can end it completely

01:20:17.220 with a new Republican president

01:20:18.760 and a new Republican administration

01:20:20.100 two years from now.

01:20:22.040 Okay.

01:20:22.540 I want to ask you a question

01:20:23.520 because on the GOP side,

01:20:25.680 I had a discussion recently

01:20:27.040 with Dave Rubin.

01:20:27.940 I was on his show

01:20:28.980 and he was asking me

01:20:30.520 about who's likely

01:20:32.000 to be the GOP nominee.

01:20:33.120 And he was asking me

01:20:33.720 in particular

01:20:34.100 about Trump versus Ron DeSantis.

01:20:35.960 And I gave him my analysis

01:20:37.440 of how that was likely to go,

01:20:39.160 I mean,

01:20:39.400 for what it's worth.

01:20:40.420 And it went totally viral

01:20:42.120 unexpectedly to me.

01:20:43.240 Well, I just thought

01:20:43.960 I was like speaking sense

01:20:44.980 because I spend my days

01:20:46.240 talking to people,

01:20:47.620 you know,

01:20:47.780 the callers call in

01:20:48.700 and the viewers write in

01:20:49.560 and blah, blah, blah.

01:20:50.060 So I have a finger

01:20:50.980 on the pulse

01:20:51.460 of how GOP voters are feeling.

01:20:53.900 And it went so viral

01:20:55.700 that former President Trump

01:20:57.060 actually sent it out himself

01:20:59.180 on Truth Social

01:21:00.460 with a message saying,

01:21:01.360 I agree.

01:21:02.300 So what a difference

01:21:03.100 a few years make

01:21:03.840 between Mr. Trump

01:21:05.300 and Mr. Trudy.

01:21:06.260 But in any event,

01:21:07.360 I'm going to play it for you

01:21:08.380 and I'd love to get

01:21:09.660 your reaction

01:21:10.160 on my analysis.

01:21:11.600 Here it is.

01:21:13.240 If they got on a stage,

01:21:15.060 you don't think

01:21:15.660 that DeSantis is crafty enough

01:21:17.360 or stands enough?

01:21:18.620 Really?

01:21:19.140 No, I don't even think

01:21:20.580 that a little.

01:21:21.520 I think Trump sucks up

01:21:23.120 all the energy

01:21:23.580 in every room,

01:21:24.460 no matter what.

01:21:25.360 And even someone

01:21:26.000 as skilled as a politician

01:21:27.480 and smart policy-wise

01:21:28.820 as DeSantis

01:21:29.640 can't overcome that.

01:21:31.160 He can't.

01:21:31.600 You really think

01:21:32.180 that hardcore MAGA

01:21:32.760 is going to abandon

01:21:33.680 Trump or DeSantis?

01:21:34.600 They're not.

01:21:35.440 They like DeSantis,

01:21:36.820 but they don't think

01:21:37.160 it's his turn.

01:21:37.760 They think Trump

01:21:38.160 was screwed out

01:21:38.540 of his last election,

01:21:39.920 that he was screwed

01:21:40.280 out of his first term

01:21:41.000 by all the craziness

01:21:42.140 and the rush of gate

01:21:42.640 and so on.

01:21:43.400 And they think

01:21:43.900 he is entitled.

01:21:45.340 He deserves

01:21:45.900 another shot at it.

01:21:46.900 Like the hardcore

01:21:47.760 Trump faithful

01:21:48.500 is unshakable.

01:21:50.220 They like DeSantis,

01:21:51.180 but they would never

01:21:52.080 cross Trump for him.

01:21:53.120 And they think

01:21:53.520 that DeSantis owes

01:21:54.140 his political career

01:21:54.780 to Trump.

01:21:55.620 Like if forced to choose,

01:21:56.980 they will choose Trump.

01:21:58.480 So DeSantis

01:21:59.760 can't take him down.

01:22:00.620 It's like the line

01:22:01.400 in war games,

01:22:02.040 the only winning move

01:22:02.940 is not to play.

01:22:04.140 DeSantis has got to

01:22:04.980 either be crowned

01:22:06.200 by Trump

01:22:06.800 or he shouldn't run.

01:22:08.980 He won't win over Trump.

01:22:09.960 I'll stand by that.

01:22:10.580 You can play it against me

01:22:11.200 if I'm wrong,

01:22:11.600 but I won't be.

01:22:13.640 That was sped up

01:22:14.660 and put out there

01:22:15.220 by at Greeks for Trump.

01:22:17.580 Where am I going wrong?

01:22:20.080 Well, Megan,

01:22:20.840 I don't want to play pundit

01:22:21.800 about the presidential race.

01:22:23.140 I'll leave that to you.

01:22:24.580 You're a very capable analyst.

01:22:26.080 Many others

01:22:26.700 in the media

01:22:27.880 are as well.

01:22:29.140 I'll say this.

01:22:29.900 In any presidential race,

01:22:31.340 you have many

01:22:32.040 well-credentialed,

01:22:33.060 accomplished politicians.

01:22:34.780 Donald Trump

01:22:35.100 obviously has

01:22:35.640 a strong legacy

01:22:36.620 and a lot of accomplishments

01:22:38.720 on which to run

01:22:39.620 during his four years

01:22:40.540 as president.

01:22:40.980 I've known Ron

01:22:41.840 since we were elected

01:22:42.520 to the House of Representatives

01:22:43.600 10 years ago.

01:22:44.980 Ron obviously has built

01:22:45.980 a strong record

01:22:46.660 in Florida as well.

01:22:47.440 I think he and Marco Rubio

01:22:48.720 are going to win

01:22:49.140 smashing re-elections

01:22:50.180 in the Sunshine State.

01:22:51.420 I'm sure there may be

01:22:52.060 other aspirants as well.

01:22:53.080 I probably serve

01:22:53.780 with a lot of them

01:22:54.460 in the Senate.

01:22:55.400 You've got new governors

01:22:56.280 like Glenn Youngkin

01:22:57.200 who won in a Democratic

01:22:58.160 state last year

01:22:59.200 who's had off to a great start

01:23:01.120 in the legislature as well.

01:23:02.420 That's the reason

01:23:03.440 you end up running

01:23:04.000 these campaigns.

01:23:04.780 I think in most campaigns

01:23:05.760 you end up being surprised

01:23:06.920 that someone emerges

01:23:08.020 as a very formidable candidate

01:23:09.860 that maybe wasn't considered

01:23:11.020 a frontrunner

01:23:11.680 at the beginning.

01:23:12.280 I mean, Donald Trump

01:23:12.840 in 2016 would be

01:23:14.020 a great example of that.

01:23:15.440 Or consider my former governor,

01:23:16.760 Mike Huckabee,

01:23:17.700 in 2008.

01:23:19.060 You know, when he first

01:23:19.680 stepped foot in Iowa

01:23:20.900 he said to me

01:23:21.760 that no one knew

01:23:22.640 who he was there.

01:23:23.280 He had to say

01:23:23.660 that he was from Hope, Arkansas

01:23:24.680 like Bill Clinton.

01:23:25.500 He just wanted them all

01:23:26.640 to give Hope a second chance.

01:23:28.780 And the Democratic Party

01:23:29.860 the same thing.

01:23:30.500 I mean, who would have

01:23:30.880 expected Bernie Sanders

01:23:31.900 to almost dethrone

01:23:32.980 Hillary Clinton in 2016?

01:23:34.300 So I'm sure

01:23:35.800 the campaign next year

01:23:37.480 on our side

01:23:38.440 probably on both sides

01:23:39.480 will be vigorously contested.

01:23:41.640 And we'll see

01:23:42.760 who decides to run

01:23:43.960 after these very vital

01:23:44.880 midterm elections

01:23:45.580 next week.

01:23:46.540 I think a lot of people

01:23:47.580 will decide to run

01:23:48.400 but there's an 800-pound gorilla

01:23:50.320 that's not going to let

01:23:51.200 anybody get any oxygen

01:23:52.360 until he's decided

01:23:53.380 what he wants to.

01:23:54.000 That's my whatever

01:23:55.580 it's worth punditry.

01:23:57.300 Let's talk about Washington.

01:23:58.940 Can we?

01:23:59.300 So you've been there since

01:24:00.360 this is your second term, right?

01:24:01.860 When were you elected?

01:24:03.420 Yeah, I was elected

01:24:04.000 to the House in 2012

01:24:05.240 two years there

01:24:06.060 and then this is my second term

01:24:07.100 in the Senate

01:24:07.440 so I'm eight years

01:24:08.040 into my term in the Senate.

01:24:09.780 What's it like?

01:24:10.420 Is it awful?

01:24:11.020 Seems awful.

01:24:11.900 God, I just feel like

01:24:12.740 spending my time every day

01:24:13.720 with people, politicians

01:24:14.720 they lie all the time

01:24:15.620 there's like dishonest

01:24:16.380 brokers everywhere.

01:24:17.640 I had this great conversation

01:24:18.700 with Tulsi Gabbard about it

01:24:19.760 of course she had left already

01:24:20.520 so you're in a more awkward

01:24:21.280 position on this question

01:24:22.200 but what's it like for you?

01:24:25.280 No, it's not awful.

01:24:26.600 I mean, I feel greatly honored

01:24:27.940 and privileged

01:24:28.640 that the people of Arkansas

01:24:29.960 elected me three times now

01:24:31.300 to represent them

01:24:32.060 in the Congress.

01:24:33.040 Are there days

01:24:33.400 when I'm frustrated

01:24:34.060 at the lack of progress

01:24:34.920 that I'm amazed

01:24:35.720 at some of the insane things

01:24:37.620 the Democratic Party says

01:24:38.920 or proposed to do?

01:24:39.740 Yes, of course.

01:24:41.040 But being able to work

01:24:41.820 on behalf of Arkansans

01:24:42.880 especially interact

01:24:43.800 with Arkansans

01:24:44.600 when they go visit me

01:24:45.800 in Washington

01:24:46.340 or when I'm home

01:24:47.420 during recesses

01:24:48.680 or on weekends

01:24:49.340 to be able to talk to them.

01:24:50.040 It's one of the great

01:24:50.640 inspiring parts of the job

01:24:52.080 being able to meet

01:24:52.600 so many people

01:24:53.160 from so many different

01:24:54.180 walks of life

01:24:55.280 and to hear their concerns

01:24:56.360 and their aspirations

01:24:57.200 and be able to work

01:24:57.880 hard for them.

01:24:58.520 I feel greatly privileged

01:25:00.640 and honored

01:25:01.120 that I have this chance

01:25:01.940 to serve our country again

01:25:03.600 as I served in uniform.

01:25:06.120 What do you make of

01:25:07.040 the lunacy

01:25:08.720 that gets bounced around

01:25:09.840 so frequently nowadays

01:25:11.100 especially in the Senate?

01:25:13.180 Like talk of

01:25:14.040 getting rid of the filibuster

01:25:15.640 which really

01:25:16.240 I mean you put it

01:25:17.260 in perspective

01:25:17.580 that that would end

01:25:18.660 the Senate as we know it.

01:25:19.860 That would reduce

01:25:20.620 the Senate to

01:25:21.420 little more than

01:25:22.560 the people over in the House

01:25:23.540 and the Senate's supposed

01:25:24.160 to be a more august

01:25:25.480 austere body

01:25:26.980 where you know

01:25:28.280 the piping hot saucer

01:25:30.040 goes to cool

01:25:30.780 it would reduce it

01:25:32.760 to nothing much more

01:25:34.380 than the House

01:25:34.860 where there'll be

01:25:36.480 no minority rights

01:25:37.380 and that's what

01:25:38.460 Fetterman and Oz

01:25:39.360 were debating

01:25:39.820 the other night.

01:25:40.560 You know there was

01:25:41.000 an accusation that

01:25:41.740 Fetterman wanted to

01:25:42.500 stack the Supreme Court

01:25:43.400 and he kind of said

01:25:45.300 well no

01:25:45.840 but he is in favor

01:25:47.860 of getting rid

01:25:48.260 of the filibuster

01:25:48.920 which is what

01:25:49.680 they would need to do

01:25:50.500 in order to stack

01:25:51.560 or pack whatever

01:25:52.180 the Supreme Court

01:25:52.840 with you know

01:25:53.340 God knows how many

01:25:54.340 justices.

01:25:55.480 That would really

01:25:56.260 fundamentally change

01:25:57.140 America as we know it

01:25:58.100 and that's your body

01:25:58.900 so it's crazy to me

01:26:00.820 that we're even

01:26:01.660 seriously having

01:26:02.520 debates over this.

01:26:04.260 Yeah so the filibuster

01:26:05.380 is not part of our

01:26:06.040 Constitution

01:26:06.520 but it's directly

01:26:07.660 downstream from

01:26:08.520 the Senate's design.

01:26:10.080 The reason the Senate

01:26:10.820 is smaller

01:26:11.660 while we have

01:26:12.480 six-year terms

01:26:13.520 while those terms

01:26:14.840 are staggered

01:26:15.580 in the three different

01:26:16.160 classes elected

01:26:16.980 every two years

01:26:18.020 while there's only

01:26:18.740 two senators

01:26:19.360 from each state

01:26:20.280 no matter its size

01:26:21.280 is because our

01:26:22.000 founding fathers

01:26:22.620 wanted it to be

01:26:23.480 the sober second

01:26:24.460 thought from transient

01:26:26.120 and shifting winds

01:26:27.080 of opinion

01:26:27.580 from the House

01:26:28.120 of Representatives

01:26:28.740 or public opinion.

01:26:30.120 Our constitutional

01:26:30.580 system is set up

01:26:31.500 that if the American

01:26:32.160 people want something

01:26:33.180 strongly enough

01:26:34.340 and longly enough

01:26:35.560 they're going to get it.

01:26:36.460 It may take an election

01:26:37.260 cycle or two

01:26:38.360 to deliver the message

01:26:39.380 but they'll get it

01:26:40.080 but at the same time

01:26:41.120 we want to have

01:26:41.800 stability in our laws

01:26:43.440 and in our practices.

01:26:45.020 That's what the Senate

01:26:45.660 was designed for

01:26:46.400 that's what the filibuster

01:26:47.360 from the beginning

01:26:48.040 has provided as well.

01:26:49.660 The Democrats

01:26:50.140 want to eliminate that

01:26:51.240 and it's not just

01:26:51.780 John Fetterman

01:26:52.360 it's every Democrat

01:26:53.120 running for Senate

01:26:53.840 this year

01:26:54.380 because they want

01:26:56.240 to pursue their

01:26:56.960 ideological agenda.

01:26:58.380 I talk a little bit

01:26:59.140 about this

01:26:59.740 in Only the Strong

01:27:00.760 that they put power

01:27:02.300 above all else

01:27:03.640 and by eliminating

01:27:04.640 the filibuster

01:27:05.300 Megan

01:27:05.620 they're not doing

01:27:06.240 that to try

01:27:06.800 to raise taxes

01:27:07.920 or pass the Green New Deal

01:27:09.280 or make you pay

01:27:10.460 with your tax dollars

01:27:11.660 for other people's

01:27:12.460 abortions

01:27:13.080 not to cut the military.

01:27:14.280 They would do

01:27:14.640 all those things

01:27:15.180 don't get me wrong

01:27:15.940 but the main reason

01:27:17.460 they want to eliminate

01:27:18.460 the filibuster

01:27:19.340 and pass everything

01:27:20.580 by a simple majority vote

01:27:21.940 is to change

01:27:22.960 the structure

01:27:23.560 of political power

01:27:24.520 in America.

01:27:25.640 They want to make

01:27:26.080 Washington D.C.

01:27:27.180 a state

01:27:27.720 so they'll get

01:27:28.460 two more Democratic

01:27:29.220 senators in perpetuity.

01:27:31.040 They want to pack

01:27:31.780 the court system

01:27:32.520 maybe even the Supreme Court

01:27:34.000 so courts will simply

01:27:35.200 rubber stamp

01:27:36.340 their unconstitutional laws

01:27:38.360 and executive actions.

01:27:40.300 They want to federalize

01:27:41.340 our elections.

01:27:42.180 They want to take

01:27:42.620 all these steps

01:27:43.440 to ensure

01:27:44.200 that you would never have

01:27:45.520 once again

01:27:46.440 what you had

01:27:46.960 in years like 1994

01:27:48.240 or 2010

01:27:49.540 or 2014

01:27:50.660 or 2016

01:27:51.660 a revolt

01:27:53.120 by hardworking Americans

01:27:55.440 against this progressive

01:27:57.260 left-wing ideology.

01:27:59.080 That's why it's so important

01:28:00.180 that we repudiate

01:28:01.780 these left-wing radicals

01:28:03.700 next week at the election.

01:28:05.600 Do you want to see

01:28:06.220 how quickly

01:28:06.780 the filibuster

01:28:07.720 elimination talk

01:28:08.900 goes away

01:28:09.660 if you guys win

01:28:11.020 back control

01:28:11.820 of the Senate

01:28:12.440 and they're

01:28:13.440 in the minority again?

01:28:14.380 It'll be so fun

01:28:15.240 to watch the reversal

01:28:16.360 as we go to those

01:28:17.580 same senators

01:28:18.260 and ask them

01:28:18.940 whether we should

01:28:19.440 get rid of the filibuster

01:28:20.260 now if they wind up

01:28:21.740 in the minority.

01:28:22.420 I mean,

01:28:22.560 it's all just so cynical.

01:28:25.000 All right,

01:28:25.200 who's your best friend

01:28:25.860 in the Senate?

01:28:26.320 Who do you hang out with?

01:28:29.100 Well,

01:28:29.480 I'll say that

01:28:29.780 friendship in the House

01:28:30.920 and friendship in the Senate

01:28:31.780 is a little bit different.

01:28:34.200 You know,

01:28:34.340 in the House

01:28:34.700 you have a lot of people

01:28:35.540 like me

01:28:36.360 when I started there

01:28:37.020 in their 30s

01:28:37.620 or their 40s

01:28:38.340 with kids in the House.

01:28:39.460 In the Senate,

01:28:40.320 I'll say that

01:28:40.940 I don't have

01:28:41.840 any age-appropriate peers.

01:28:43.320 Most of them

01:28:44.720 are grandpas

01:28:45.820 or great-grandpas

01:28:46.760 not parents

01:28:47.680 of young kids.

01:28:48.640 You're not hanging out

01:28:49.220 with Dianne Feinstein?

01:28:50.480 Yeah,

01:28:50.820 I don't socialize

01:28:51.620 a lot in my off hours

01:28:53.080 when I'm with my wife

01:28:55.120 and with my kids.

01:28:56.460 But I do have

01:28:57.120 a lot of good friends

01:28:58.560 across the eras

01:29:00.540 of the Senate.

01:29:01.600 I always have great fun

01:29:02.580 on the campaign trail

01:29:03.480 with Chuck Grassley

01:29:04.760 who I think now

01:29:05.600 is 87 or 88.

01:29:08.440 Wow.

01:29:08.500 I've got some friends

01:29:09.700 who are from

01:29:10.720 say my generation.

01:29:12.560 Cory Gardner is one

01:29:13.320 unfortunately.

01:29:14.180 He's gone from Senate now.

01:29:15.520 Tim Scott

01:29:15.980 is one of the kindest,

01:29:17.780 most decent,

01:29:18.500 hardest working senators

01:29:19.400 you could ever

01:29:20.320 hope to serve with

01:29:21.400 or just people

01:29:22.180 you could hope to know.

01:29:23.660 So we have a lot

01:29:24.260 of great senators

01:29:25.100 with whom I'm good friends

01:29:26.660 and I look forward

01:29:27.760 to a big incoming class

01:29:29.720 not just in some

01:29:30.480 of these battleground states

01:29:31.660 people like J.D. Vance

01:29:33.580 in Ohio

01:29:34.040 or Blake Masters

01:29:35.060 in Arizona,

01:29:35.800 Tiffany Smiley

01:29:36.380 in Washington,

01:29:36.960 Adam Laxalt

01:29:38.580 in Nevada

01:29:39.260 but some of the races

01:29:39.840 are a little bit

01:29:40.240 undercover

01:29:40.620 but you're going to have

01:29:41.500 other great new senators

01:29:42.500 like Katie Britt

01:29:43.240 coming in from Alabama.

01:29:45.280 We're going to have

01:29:45.660 a great new class

01:29:46.460 of vibrant senators

01:29:47.300 and I look forward

01:29:48.220 to working with all of them

01:29:49.160 as I look forward

01:29:49.820 or as I have been working

01:29:50.960 for eight years

01:29:51.580 with my colleagues

01:29:52.200 in the Senate.

01:29:53.300 All right,

01:29:53.460 even though you don't

01:29:53.880 want to play pundit

01:29:54.820 you did it on a couple

01:29:55.660 of like Senate races

01:29:57.160 and so I'm going to ask you

01:29:58.400 to do it on the governor's

01:29:59.940 race in New York.

01:30:01.240 I'm in Connecticut now

01:30:02.040 but I'm following

01:30:02.620 that race closely.

01:30:03.800 I'm into it.

01:30:04.460 I spent most of my 51 years

01:30:05.780 as a New Yorker

01:30:06.720 not New York City

01:30:07.860 but some of those years

01:30:08.920 20 years in New York City.

01:30:10.540 So do you actually think

01:30:11.840 that there's a possibility

01:30:12.660 that Kathy Hochul

01:30:13.980 the Democrat

01:30:14.440 could go down?

01:30:15.060 She was

01:30:15.340 it was something like

01:30:16.440 17% percentage points

01:30:18.800 over Lee Zeldin

01:30:20.340 the Republican

01:30:20.960 and now

01:30:22.360 some polls have it

01:30:23.140 as close as three.

01:30:24.840 I can't even believe it.

01:30:25.960 I can't even believe

01:30:26.380 I'm saying this to you

01:30:27.180 but do you actually think

01:30:27.900 the red wave

01:30:28.680 could be so big

01:30:29.500 it's going to sweep

01:30:30.540 somebody like a Lee Zeldin

01:30:31.500 into office

01:30:32.040 in the governor's race?

01:30:33.080 No, I don't think

01:30:35.300 there's a possibility

01:30:36.060 that Lee Zeldin

01:30:36.820 is going to win.

01:30:37.740 I think it's an almost certainty

01:30:38.900 that Lee Zeldin

01:30:39.580 is going to win.

01:30:40.500 New Yorkers are going

01:30:41.240 to repudiate

01:30:43.100 Kathy Hochul

01:30:44.000 an accidental governor

01:30:45.080 and her

01:30:45.920 the Democratic Party's

01:30:47.280 failed ideological agenda.

01:30:49.700 Look, you can't go

01:30:50.640 on a subway

01:30:51.320 in New York City

01:30:52.120 without worried

01:30:52.880 about being assaulted

01:30:54.260 or pushed

01:30:54.860 in front of a train

01:30:55.900 and then criminals

01:30:57.220 are turned around

01:30:57.900 and released

01:30:58.400 the very next day

01:30:59.340 because Democrats

01:31:00.040 wanted to eliminate

01:31:00.900 the bail system.

01:31:03.280 In New York

01:31:04.500 voters

01:31:05.240 like they're all

01:31:05.780 all across America

01:31:07.120 are going

01:31:08.040 to repudiate

01:31:09.260 the Democrats

01:31:10.320 ideological agenda

01:31:11.820 which has caused

01:31:12.720 crime to spike

01:31:13.780 drug deaths

01:31:14.900 to spike

01:31:15.520 inflation to surge

01:31:17.220 Lee Zeldin

01:31:18.420 who I know well

01:31:19.080 from my days in the House

01:31:20.100 is going to be

01:31:20.960 a great governor

01:31:21.820 of the state of New York

01:31:22.960 and he's going to restore

01:31:23.980 law and order

01:31:24.820 to its streets.

01:31:26.700 You know,

01:31:26.880 that's another guy

01:31:27.620 Republican

01:31:28.220 who got attacked

01:31:29.380 in the course

01:31:30.360 of campaigning

01:31:31.160 for this role

01:31:32.680 that we're talking

01:31:33.220 about right now

01:31:34.100 it was like a half day

01:31:35.820 story for the people

01:31:37.340 in the press

01:31:38.160 you know,

01:31:38.440 in the right wing

01:31:39.520 or the I should say

01:31:40.320 the left wing press

01:31:41.060 which is all the press

01:31:42.400 other than the small

01:31:43.700 the small conservative niche

01:31:45.100 his attack was like

01:31:46.340 barely covered

01:31:47.060 and then it was gone.

01:31:48.400 Mary Catherine Hamm

01:31:48.980 was on the show recently

01:31:49.760 complaining about

01:31:50.560 the same thing happening

01:31:51.460 after the congressional

01:31:52.480 baseball shooting

01:31:53.220 of the Republicans

01:31:53.900 Steve Scalise

01:31:54.560 and others

01:31:54.980 a couple of years ago

01:31:56.140 Ron DeSantis

01:31:56.680 also chimed in on that

01:31:57.680 those politically motivated

01:31:59.580 shootings by unwell people

01:32:01.200 got a mention

01:32:02.560 and then they moved right on

01:32:03.720 and they're going to try

01:32:04.260 to build this Paul Pelosi

01:32:05.400 thing into a narrative

01:32:06.800 for at least eight days

01:32:08.260 and possibly beyond.

01:32:09.900 I mean,

01:32:10.040 it's so obvious

01:32:10.800 what they're doing

01:32:11.580 and it's one of the reasons

01:32:13.160 why what it's like

01:32:14.440 60% of the people

01:32:15.680 absolutely loathe the press

01:32:17.280 and something like 9%

01:32:18.500 actually trust it.

01:32:20.140 And it's why

01:32:20.740 and the voters can see

01:32:21.620 through it

01:32:22.020 and they'd much rather

01:32:22.780 have a governor

01:32:23.420 who's going to stand up

01:32:24.680 to criminals

01:32:25.520 and protect

01:32:26.240 innocent civilians.

01:32:27.820 That's what

01:32:28.340 Lee Zeldin will do

01:32:29.100 in New York.

01:32:29.920 I mean, look,

01:32:30.300 the Democratic Governors

01:32:31.220 Association

01:32:31.680 just started spending money

01:32:32.820 to prop up Kathy Hockel.

01:32:34.340 They wouldn't be doing that

01:32:35.360 if they didn't know

01:32:35.860 that she was in grave trouble.

01:32:37.900 Wow.

01:32:38.040 What's your other favorite

01:32:38.780 sleeper race?

01:32:41.000 Tiffany Smiley

01:32:41.640 in Washington State.

01:32:42.620 Tiffany has a great story.

01:32:43.740 Her husband, Scotty,

01:32:44.600 was blown up in Iraq

01:32:45.580 and blinded permanently

01:32:46.560 the year before I was there.

01:32:47.700 She cared for him,

01:32:48.500 nursed him back to health,

01:32:49.780 stood up to the Army bureaucracy

01:32:51.060 that wanted to medically retire him.

01:32:52.920 They've been great advocates

01:32:53.760 for veterans ever since.

01:32:55.440 Patty Murray is a failed

01:32:56.240 30-year politician

01:32:57.140 who's been a rubber stamp

01:32:58.040 for Joe Biden.

01:32:59.000 I think Tiffany Smiley

01:32:59.800 is going to shock

01:33:00.640 most of Washington, D.C.

01:33:01.860 when she upsets

01:33:02.700 Patty Murray next Tuesday.

01:33:04.380 I'm going to have to have

01:33:05.080 a discussion with my

01:33:05.800 nine-year-old about this

01:33:06.580 because we were talking

01:33:07.060 about how Malcolm Gladwell's

01:33:08.580 book posits that

01:33:09.340 if you name your kid winner,

01:33:10.740 he's going to wind up

01:33:11.200 being a loser.

01:33:12.280 And then Thatcher,

01:33:13.000 my son, was like,

01:33:13.600 should I name my son

01:33:14.520 loser then?

01:33:15.540 And so I'm going to talk

01:33:16.940 to him about the possibility

01:33:18.420 of a smiley, smiley.

01:33:20.520 And is she actually going

01:33:21.360 to be exactly the opposite?

01:33:22.440 I guess all we really care

01:33:23.200 about is how will she vote?

01:33:24.720 Senator Cotton,

01:33:25.360 what a pleasure.

01:33:26.080 Good luck with the book.

01:33:26.960 So happy that you came on

01:33:27.900 to talk about it

01:33:28.580 and all the best to you.

01:33:30.680 Thank you, Megan.

01:33:31.240 Thanks for having me on.

01:33:32.460 Anytime.

01:33:34.040 So wishing all of you

01:33:35.200 a very happy

01:33:35.940 and safe Halloween tonight.

01:33:38.160 I'm excited.

01:33:38.760 I still have young kids,

01:33:39.680 so it's super fun

01:33:40.640 watching them go out.

01:33:41.980 I think my Yates

01:33:43.460 is going to be a football player.

01:33:44.700 Yardley's going to be an Eminem.

01:33:46.560 And Thatcher's going

01:33:48.140 to be Pennywise,

01:33:49.140 which is freaking terrifying

01:33:50.280 if you don't know

01:33:50.820 what they're from.

01:33:51.220 It's terrifying.

01:33:52.180 I don't want to look

01:33:52.980 at that all night.

01:33:54.280 Thunder's going to go

01:33:55.000 as lightning and Strut,

01:33:56.300 of course,

01:33:56.600 will go as an angel.

01:33:58.920 He's going to be

01:33:59.540 in deep disguise.

01:34:02.200 And I'll have a full report

01:34:03.480 for you tomorrow

01:34:04.200 where we'll also dive

01:34:06.100 into the Paul Pelosi

01:34:07.380 story a bit more.

01:34:08.580 Plus, we've got

01:34:09.160 a great guest

01:34:10.180 on Harry and Meghan.

01:34:11.600 Wait until you hear

01:34:12.120 what they've been up to.

01:34:13.080 Meantime, download the show

01:34:14.260 and subscribe at

01:34:14.880 youtube.com slash

01:34:16.060 Meghan Kelly.

01:34:16.640 And thank you so much

01:34:17.780 for listening.

01:34:21.100 Thanks for listening

01:34:21.920 to The Meghan Kelly Show.

01:34:23.220 No BS, no agenda

01:34:24.660 and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - October 31, 2022

Need for Pelosi Attack Transparency, Media Hypocrisy, and Left Abandons Free Speech, with Sen. Tom Cotton ｜ Ep. 423

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