NPR Whistleblower Resigns, Smug Elites, and Sports Pay Disparity Reality, with Andrew Klavan ｜ Ep. 769
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Summary
The fallout continues from the NPR whistleblower s expose about his media company as he announces he is resigning. Meanwhile, the kook who s running NPR continues to hold her perch with not a word said by NPR about her incendiary tweets over the past 15 years. And we'll get to what that tells us about this other media complex and just who is atop the American media complex.
Transcript
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. I'm Megyn Kelly. The fallout continues from the NPR
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whistleblower's expose about his media company as he announced he's resigning. But the new CEO,
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Catherine Mayer, oh, she's not going anywhere. She continues to be a focus of what's being
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uncovered now, including her crazy take on truth. Truth. This woman is unbelievable. Joining me now,
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one of our favorites, Andrew Klavan. He's host of The Daily Wires, The Andrew Klavan Show.
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And you can also find him on Substack at thenewjerusalem.substack.com.
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Andrew, welcome back. Good to see you, Megyn. Thanks for having me.
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Okay, so this poor guy, Uri Berliner, is out. He's like, I'm sorry, you know, I respect NPR and
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all the years I've spent here, but I just, I can't be a part of this anymore. And left. Meanwhile,
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this kook who's running NPR continues to hold her perch with not a word said by NPR about her
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incendiary tweets over the past 15 years. She wasn't the CEO for most of these. She was running
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Wikipedia. And we'll get to what that tells us about this other site and just who is atop the
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American media complex. But it just feels wrong. And it seems like they got rid of the one guy who,
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yes, was admittedly liberal, but at least could understand the damage that doing only liberal
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bents on every aspect of the news would have to this news organization. What do you think of it?
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Well, first of all, it goes beyond liberal bias. It was absolute dishonesty and not never taking
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responsibility for the times you got the story wrong because you were so busy trying to bring down
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Donald Trump. But what really was striking was Yuri Berliner's original talk, which was to Barry Weiss's
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free press, was so specific in his attacks. It was not just a sort of broad, you guys are biased,
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you slant a little here. It was this story, that story, that story. So for instance, the Russian
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collusion story, which was a complete hoax, a complete passage of Hillary Clinton's campaign dirt
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to the FBI, to the press, through the FBI, and then this completely bogus, years-long
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investigation, when it died out with the Mueller report, when it turned out there was no Russian
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collusion, which was always ridiculous, they never said, oh, you know what? For the last two years,
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we've been selling this nonsense. The attempt to destroy Donald Trump was so intense that it justified
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anything. So now he brings out this very specific series of charges. And Catherine Marr responds with
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this typical emotional, you know, I don't even know what to call it. It's this kind of emotional
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reaction. Oh, that's hurtful. That's mean. It's degrading, never addressing the obvious truth,
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the provable truth of the charges. And so then he's suspended on a technicality, which is that he didn't
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ask permission to go to the free press before he did, which was apparently against some in-house
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rule. He's suspended for five days, and she unleashes on him all this time about what a
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terrible guy he is. And finally, of course, of course, he has to resign. He has to walk away from
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that. Meanwhile, with the help of Chris Rufo, who's always doing great work, Catherine Marr is exposed
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as an absolute fruitcake. I mean, she has no journalistic background. Her commitment to wokeism is
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intense. So she completely believes that any kind of attack on her, who's a white person, is somehow
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an attack on black people. It's somehow racist, is somehow implying that, you know, DEI is a bad
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thing, which of course it is. But also she's on a tech talk, on a video, declaring basically that
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there's no such thing as truth, which is a great thing for a journalist to believe, because you're not
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no longer a journalistic operation. You're basically Disney World. So the thing about this
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is NPR has always had this certain power over a huge number of people for the simple reason
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that it covered elite cultural stories in a way no right-wing site did. So someone like me,
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who is a conservative politically, but is very culturally oriented, who loves the arts, who wants
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to hear about the arts, could actually turn on NPR and hear about a jazz musician or a painter or
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something that you weren't going to hear about anywhere else and hear interviews with people
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like that, that basically weren't all that political and basically just discussed the kind
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of cultural things that were going on. So even I would listen to NPR, but after a while, every single
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story that they did was geared toward attacking people like me. And so we started to drop away.
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And another one of Berliner's provable charges was that they no longer had any reporters who were
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anything but Democrats, but any listeners who were anything but Democrats. Their listenership
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had solidified, had congealed around their point of view, as of course it does. And that creates this
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destructive cycle. The same thing has happened to the New York Times. When you're only pitching to
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those people, you have to get more and more radical, more and more intense in your content in order to
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keep them there. The New York Times only has to stray a little bit and NPR too has to stray a little
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bit from the left-wing line for people to suddenly get upset and say, why are you moving away from the
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great truths of wokeism and socialism? And so basically, you know, this station that was supposed
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to be for all of us, publicly funded, gets a lot of public funds, that was speaking to a sizable
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number of elite conservatives, the kind of conservatives who care about the arts, who care about the
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culture, basically just ditched us. It just said, we don't want you. The culture doesn't belong to
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you. Beauty doesn't belong to you. Art doesn't belong to you. Nothing that has to do with the
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truth belongs to you. You're gone. And we left. And this is the same thing that's happened politically
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to the Democrat Party. It's the same thing that's happened to the mainstream media. And now it's
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happening to NPR. And the fact that no one besides Ted Cruz is talking about pulling their funding
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is absolutely embarrassing. It's true. Why? Why are you and I and everyone listening to us right
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now? Why are we paying this woman's salary? I object. I don't want her in my employee at all.
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She's a nutcase. As you point out, fruitcake is a very nice way of saying it. Chris Rufo's latest,
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just a couple of samples from her agenda for the day. This is June 20th, 2012. Put on a dress,
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meet some senior officials, boss it in a man's world, critique the politics of representation,
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scotch. Oh, you go, girl. You go. I mean, I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed for her.
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Okay. Then October 14th, 2016. For the record, I don't usually fly business class,
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just board past it on the way to the back of the bus. As Chris pointed out, oh, you're a regular
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Rosa Parks, Adam. Look at you. Not getting a business class ticket. Oh, how,
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thank you for your sacrifice. Uh, she goes on May 31st, 2019. Anyone else love watching the credits at
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the end of a movie or a show, just to marvel at the diversity of names and surnames involved
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always gives me a happy goosebumps to see the world scroll by. And then there was this one from June of
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2020, getting a COVID test and love this little prompt of inclusion re reference to the wifi password
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at the testing site being he, she, they, and you know, she scolded Hillary for using the terms
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boy and girl because they're not inclusive. She's not well, this person she's out, but she's in
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Yuri's out. And NPR has shown zero self-reflection or desire to make this like, you know what, this could
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be a moment where we could try to work on bringing, bringing conservatives back into the fold. Remember
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like CNN tried when they changed ownership and they brought in Chris Licht and you know, that didn't
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go well for various other reasons, but at least they had the moment where they're like, Oh gee,
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Hey, Oh, all the conservatives are gone. They're all gone. What should we do? No, nothing.
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Yeah. They can't fix it because now their audience is all one thing. So in order to fix it,
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they have to, you know, withstand the slings and arrows that are going to be brought down on them
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by very vocal left-wing audience. And that just a vocal slice of that audience. But the one thing
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about this is I can't help feeling there's a little bit of pride go with before the fall here, because
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the domination, the left's domination of the news media, the entertainment media, and the academy
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has essentially cut them off from a large swath of the American people, which is why they were so
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taken aback, so shocked by Donald Trump's original presidential victory, because they had no idea
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that people of goodwill, people who really care about the country, people who are not racist,
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would vote for a man like this when they thought they had this basically under control. And what
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we're seeing in, for instance, these absurd prosecutions of Donald Trump covered, you know,
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given air cover by places like the New York Times, which treats them as if they have any seriousness
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whatsoever. What we're seeing is a kind of pride that they believe that their hold on the press is so
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complete, that it can't be gotten through. We're not going to be able to see the truth because
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they're going to make it invisible, as they did during the last election, when the Hunter Biden
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laptop story was, for instance, silenced before it could have any effect on the electorate. They think
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they can do that again, and they think they can do it forever. And I'm not sure, because what I'm
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seeing is I'm seeing a real shift in the way news is ingested by the public at large, especially by
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people under the age of, let's say, 50. They're now taking it in from various sites. They don't
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trust the mainstream. The COVID lies have completely alienated Gen Z. I mean, they're looking at this
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and saying, oh, you know, when you tell us that riots are mostly peaceful, that, you know, this
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COVID came, didn't come from a Chinese lab, when you lie and lie and lie and then silence people
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who try to get the truth out, we don't trust you anymore. That shift is happening without the left
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really seeing it. Because for now, and, you know, politicians only think in terms of the next
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election, for now, their grip is still very tough. But just things like the Daily Wire,
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the Megyn Kelly show, Elon Musk on X, all of these things are bringing out a lot of different
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information from a lot of different places. And I think they're going to be surprised when they find
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that everybody sees that they are actually lying to us all the time and covering up all the time.
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So, you know, I think this is a dangerous situation for the left to be in, which is
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all to the good. But it's the kind of pridefulness that they have so much power,
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so much control over the flow of information that nobody can hear anything. But I don't think
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they're right. I think that the internet has changed all of that. And slowly, people are waking
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up to what's going on. And when they hear the concerns expressed by the right half of the country
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about, you know, the policies that have gotten us here, the culture wars that have completely
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changed children's existence, their safety, and so on, they respond with just disdain. I mean, just
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dripping, oozing disdain for these people who might object to their view of how America must be.
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And that, unfortunately, leads me to Katie Couric, who sat down with Bill Maher and said the following.
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Take a listen to this. It's not 30. And I feel like, to your point, Bill, the socioeconomic
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disparities are a lot, and class resentment is a lot, and anti-intellectualism and elitism
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is what is driving many of these anti-establishment, which are Trump voters, or anti-establishment voters.
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So I think that is a huge problem that we have to address. I mean, globalization and,
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you know, the transition from an industrial to a technological society. I mean, I, and I don't know
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if you've ever been jealous of some, what someone else has or resentful. It is such a corroding
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Wow. Anti-intellectuals who are bitter, jealous, and corrosive over their envy for her half.
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You know, I, I used to call these people, uh, elites without mirrors because they couldn't see
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how awful they were, but I'm beginning to think that they're elite without windows because they can't
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look outside and see that Trump, for all his flaws, gave us four years without a new war,
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where this guy has set the world on fire. Biden has, in his weakness and his dithering and his
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complete, constant misunderstanding of the world stage, has brought us very, very close to a widely
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extended war, not just in the Middle East, but in Ukraine and with Ukraine and Russia. He has his
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economics. They keep telling us that his economics are great. It's, we just don't know it yet.
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They keep saying, oh, you know, like inflation is under control. Well, first of all, it's not under
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control, but their idea of it's being under control is that after, you know, years of it's
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being extremely high, it's a little less high than it was, but eggs are still, you know, what is it?
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I don't know, 65% higher than what they were. People see their bills, you know, they see that
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things are going badly. We see that our cities, you know, they keep telling us how crime is down in
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our cities. I don't believe it. It's possible that murder is down because they've kind of been
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policing that, but I don't believe that crime is down in cities where all you have to do is talk
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to people. It's a lie. It's truly just a lie because crime spiked. And then in some instances,
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it fell a little from this enormous spike. It's still above normal. And on top of that,
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they're not prosecuting anymore. So the cops, many instances, they just don't even arrest the people
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because they know it's going to be a revolving door out the police station with a note with a DA who
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doesn't want to prosecute it. Why fill out the paperwork? Why do it? Anyway, that's another
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thing. But I'm amazed to hear the disdain, like the, that was like another bitter clingers. It was
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another basket of deplorables, these anti-intellectual, you know, bitter, envious people
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who are Trump supporters. That's, that's the problem. They're, they're bitter. I mean, talk about not
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getting it, not, not even close to getting it. Um, I want to ask you about Molly Ringwald because
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before you became a star on the daily wire, you were a star in Hollywood, uh, screenwriting for
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many big movies and very well celebrated in your writing as an author as well. And Molly Ringwald,
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who was, you know, the star of the day when I was a kid, you know, breakfast club and pretty in pink
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and all these amazing movies, 16 candles has now spent most of her adult life. As far as I can tell,
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bashing them, bashing the movies. Um, she came out in 18 and talked about John Hughes and how the
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movies were too, uh, I can't remember her word, but it was something like too misogynistic and too
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me too-y and, um, she should have spoken out. And now she adds this to her latest running commentary
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at the Miami film festival last weekend. Take a listen. Those movies, the movies that, you know,
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are, I'm so well known for, they were very much of a time, you know, and, and if you were to remake
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that now, I think it would have to be much more diverse and it would have to be, um, you know,
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it, you couldn't make a movie that white. Now, now those movies are really, really very white
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and, and they don't really represent, um, you know, what it is to be a teenager in a school in
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America today. I don't think. I'm so sick of this nonsense. So what you're, you're sorry that you
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were in a film where white people were the dominant characters. Just stop. Let us enjoy it. Shut up for
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that matter. Go away so that we can just enjoy the acting version of you instead of the real,
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who gives a shit what Molly Ringwald thinks about anything. Just be quiet. Let your art speak for
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itself. We enjoyed it. And you're making us enjoy it less with your political commentary.
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You know, this is a real problem. First of all, I have to say it back in the day when she was in her
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prime, I was madly in love with Molly Ringwald. So my heart is breaking just a little bit. I'm,
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you know, I may have to recover from this, but you know, there is this thing going on. If,
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if you like movies, stories where everything you watch is an act of preachment, where they're telling
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you not just what the world is like, which is what art is supposed to do. They're telling you what
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they believe the world should be. And if you don't like it, there's something wrong with you.
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So everybody has noticed this. There's no such thing as a white person married to another white
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person. There's no such thing as a male hero. I recently watched the three body problem,
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a science fiction, an adaptation on Netflix of a science fiction novel, a novel of which I kind of
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enjoyed. And it was really interesting because the heroes were hard driving physicists, all of whom
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were women. And the men were all these kind of slightly neurotic, passive, you know, support
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staff. And I was watching this and going, I guess this is why they call it fantasy and science fiction,
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because that's not really what the world looks like. And it becomes kind of offensive after a
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while, because I don't care if you want to make a woman a hero. I don't care about who, you know,
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what color the person is. I care about being preached to by people I happen to know are some of the worst
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people in America, you know, people who are working on their fourth wife, you know, they're driving to
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their from divorce court and have to pick up their kid at rehab because they never took care of them.
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And they're going to stand up and preach to me about what my life should be like and what the
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world should look like, even though it doesn't look like this. So even when Molly Ringwald is saying
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this, she is essentially just kowtowing to an elite cabal of mostly white people who are imposing
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this on artists. So artists are being told what to say. And, you know, I'm telling you, Megan,
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I experienced this only a little bit because I'm so ornery at this point. I just won't change
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anything. But all I have to do in my last novel, I had a couple of remarks about transgenderism,
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a girl going through a phase of transgenderism before returning to sanity. And they wanted me to
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cut that out. And I said, you know, I'll pull this book before I cut anything out that is true
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simply to appease this establishment. It is the establishment. It's the powers that be.
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So my question is this. If the academy, if Hollywood, if publishing, if the news industry,
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if the deep state are all telling us one thing, how is we supposed to think that they are serving
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the powerless, that they are serving the weak? They are the power. They are the elites. And so when
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Katie Couric says we're anti-elite, what she's talking about is, yeah, we're the people.
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We're in an uprising against a series of lies where they butchered children, where they forced
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us to wear masks. They forced us to take medicines we didn't want. Of course, we're anti-elite. Our
00:19:03.900
elites stink. Our elites just went through years of screwing things up because a little flu passed
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through town. We get it. You don't like us. We don't like you either. And yeah, she's right. We
00:19:15.600
are anti-elite, but only because our elites are so bad. It doesn't mean that the people who are voting
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for Trump aren't elites in themselves. That anti-elite, she's not wrong about that,
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but the anti-intellectual, like, okay, right. She's just a bunch of dumbasses. Okay. Tell it
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to Victor Davis Hanson. Yeah. Like, okay. But to your point, Melissa Chen, who's a great follow on
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Twitter, was tweeting out about this NPR lady, the new CEO, and talking about how, you know,
00:19:39.420
there's a soundbite you referenced. It's too long to play right now, but she basically says you can't
00:19:43.480
find truth anymore. You just have to make a good faith effort, basically. You can't really find real
00:19:47.300
truth. And Wikipedia considers sites reliable under her, when she was at the helm, like Vox,
00:19:55.860
Slate, Mother Jones, The Nation. You know what's not? What's considered reliable? The Daily Wire,
00:20:02.680
Fox News, The New York Post, The Federalist, The Daily Caller. That's her world of, we're just doing
00:20:08.160
our best. You know, we can't get to actual truth, but we're doing our best. This is, if you think it's
00:20:12.220
just the head of Wikipedia or the head of NPR or, you know, these other organizations, you're not paying
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attention. They're everywhere. And they're really trying to program how our children grow up and
00:20:21.660
what their values are and how we live and speak. So good for you for pushing back on your book.
00:20:26.680
I'll give you the last word. Well, I think this is one of the reasons why one thing that I strongly
00:20:32.180
believe is any idea that you're going to transform Hollywood, transform the news media, transform the
00:20:38.060
networks is absolutely absurd. The only right way for us to go now is to build a parallel media. And the
00:20:45.100
fear there, of course, is that everybody sections off and goes into their little niche and only takes
00:20:50.080
the news that they want. And that's a legitimate fear. But the more likely thing is that the people
00:20:54.820
who tell the truth, the people whose predictions turn out to be true, the people whose ideas are
00:21:00.520
founded in reality and therefore make reality better, are going to attract a larger audience.
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I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM. It's your home for open, honest and
00:21:14.520
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00:21:18.920
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00:22:11.100
Let's talk about the Catherine Mayer soundbite that we've been referencing. So there's a couple of
00:22:15.160
soundbites that have been surfaced of her. The first one is from this TED talk when she was running
00:22:19.660
Wikipedia. And this is how she described truth and her relationship to it. Watch.
00:22:25.820
The hard things, the places where we are prone to disagreement, say politics and religion. Well,
00:22:32.420
as it turns out, not only does Wikipedia's model work there, it actually works really well. Because
00:22:38.860
in our normal lives, these contentious conversations tend to erupt over disagreement about what the truth
00:22:46.100
actually is. But the people who write these articles, they're not focused on the truth. They're focused
00:22:53.600
on something else, which is the best of what we can know right now. I've come to believe that they
00:23:00.380
are onto something that perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to
00:23:08.640
convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth
00:23:17.340
might be a distraction that's getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.
00:23:24.800
It's because the truth of the matter is very often, for many people, what happens when we merge facts
00:23:32.400
about the world with our beliefs about the world. So we all have different truths.
00:23:39.040
Okay. Let me tell you my problem with that. If she actually meant that, if what she meant was
00:23:44.380
when we have a dispute over the COVID origins, we do our best to say, some people believe it's
00:23:50.640
natural origin. And here's the evidence for that. And many people believe it's lab leak. And here's
00:23:55.180
the evidence for that. And, you know, hear what the leading scientists on both sides say.
00:23:58.820
That'd be one thing. That's not at all what Wikipedia or NPR have done at all. They have
00:24:06.360
her version of the truth, the left's version. That's what gets shoved down our throats. And only
00:24:12.180
when that version is proven wrong, do they start saying, well, there's another side. And then you
00:24:18.900
get like one quarter of the page showing some people think it's lab leak. There's a little bit of
00:24:25.080
evidence for lab leak. That's it. That's what she's actually talking about. And anybody who
00:24:29.200
spent a lot of time on Wikipedia, nevermind NPR knows that. That's absolutely right. I mean,
00:24:35.100
that's, that's the first thing they censor people who talk against the party line. They push the
00:24:40.500
party line as if it were somehow holy writ. It really is amazing when you go back and look at the
00:24:45.620
COVID lies. I mean, not to get mired in the past, but to get, look at the COVID lines and how anybody
00:24:50.580
who stood up against them, even if the guy was a doctor and really knew what he was talking about
00:24:55.200
was not just silence, but demonized, threatened with being canceled, threatened with losing his job.
00:25:00.060
The other thing is this searching for the truth is difficult. We all have to do it. We search for
00:25:04.640
moral truth, not just physical truth, which not just factual truth, but also spiritual truth. All of
00:25:09.120
us have to do this. The truth has a certain aspects about it that are universal to it. One is it makes
00:25:16.640
sense. You know, when you walk North from here, you get to Canada. When you walk South, you get to
00:25:21.580
Mexico. That will never change. It's never going to happen the other way around. You're never going
00:25:24.920
to walk South and get to Canada because life actually on a human level makes perfect sense.
00:25:30.240
It all fits together. So when somebody says, for instance, that bigotry is wrong and therefore we
00:25:36.260
have to hate white people and deprive them of their jobs in order to have more black people in their
00:25:40.260
jobs, we have a right to stop and say, well, wait a minute. If racial bigotry is wrong,
00:25:44.840
how is punishing white people for things that they never did right? That's the kind of thing
00:25:49.820
that doesn't make sense. And you have to be held accountable for that. And it doesn't change when
00:25:54.900
you call someone's name. The fact that you're not making any sense doesn't magically change when you
00:25:59.400
call somebody phobic or racist or sexist or hated. So when, for instance, Yuri Berliner comes out and
00:26:05.980
says, these things happened and here's the proof and here are the receipts. And you can listen to the
00:26:09.600
stories here, here and here. And here are the numbers of Democrats that work for NPR.
00:26:14.680
And the number of Republicans, which is zero, the answer that you're hurting my feelings and
00:26:19.600
you're mean and you stink. That's actually not a search for truth. That's a silencing of someone
00:26:24.760
who is offering a version of the truth that holds together and makes sense. So they're not really
00:26:29.720
talking about their various different truths, which has some kind of reality to it. We have different
00:26:36.460
opinions and we use those opinions. We argue those opinions. They're actually eliminating the means by
00:26:42.040
which we reach the truth. Megyn Kelly says, A, and Andrew Klavan says, B, we discuss it. And you
00:26:46.980
hold your reason up to my reason. You hold your information up to my information. And eventually,
00:26:51.600
if we're two people of goodwill, we kind of settle on where things make the most sense and where the
00:26:56.800
facts point. They don't do that at all. They ever, you know, if you take climate change.
00:27:01.900
The next soundbite. Her next soundbite makes your point. Exactly. You're exactly right. You're on to
00:27:07.320
her. This is from June, 2021, an interview that she gave with the Atlantic Council on exactly what
00:27:13.780
she thinks the problem is in reaching agreement on things like truth. Stop 36.
00:27:18.420
The number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States
00:27:24.980
is a fairly robust protection of rights. And that is a protection of rights both for platforms,
00:27:32.760
which I actually think is very important that platforms have those rights to be able to regulate
00:27:36.280
what kind of content they want on their sites. But it also means that it is a little bit tricky
00:27:41.200
to really address some of the real challenges of where does bad information come from and sort of
00:27:48.080
influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it? It's tricky. So that's
00:27:53.620
courtesy of Chris Ruffo, who found this. It's tricky. You see, the First Amendment is the number
00:27:58.780
one challenge in her fight against disinformation, because it allows people, checks notes, to say
00:28:05.400
things that challenge, again, her version of the truth. Right. And the thing is, you know,
00:28:12.780
when you take over major outlets like the New York Times, like Yale, like NPR, you do have this sort
00:28:20.360
of cultural weight that is based on the fact that you used to tell the truth, that these institutions,
00:28:26.800
the New York Times was always a liberal institution, but it had a good reporting staff and it wasn't all
00:28:30.860
dedicated to selling left wing lies as it is now. NPR, the same thing. They used to give you stories
00:28:36.420
that were slanted to the left, but they were actually factual and actually kind of held together
00:28:41.300
if you were looking for that kind of point of view. Now they're using the weight of that without the
00:28:48.060
actual basis in truth and factual journalism that they used to have. So they're like the guy in Men
00:28:55.360
in Black, you know, where the alien takes over the human being and dresses in a human suit, but he's
00:28:59.860
really a bug inside. That's what NPR is like now. They're using the NPR name and the NPR reputation to
00:29:06.880
sell this nonsense. They're just using the weight of their reputation without the reason they have that
00:29:12.840
reputation in the first place. And that is exactly what Yuri Beluner was complaining about. And so, you know,
00:29:18.940
look, I am, I am a, I love the First Amendment. I want to hear from everybody and believe me, you know, I hear
00:29:24.160
from people who hate my guts all the time and say horrible, horrible, dishonest things about me.
00:29:29.040
Well, they're wrong. What's that? They're wrong. They are. I mean, look at me. I'm so charming. How
00:29:35.080
could they possibly feel that way about me? But, you know, I believe they have that right. It's just
00:29:39.620
that in the end, you do have to have this discussion about what the facts are and you have to be able to
00:29:44.960
let the facts get out. And she is a person who's clearly not doing that. Simply, we know this because
00:29:50.120
of the suspension of Yuri Beluner on a technicality and the fact that he had to quit simply to keep his
00:29:55.420
reputation intact from this really, I mean, narrow minded, I think, loopy woman. And that's being
00:30:02.660
kind. I really think much worse about her than that. I think she is not being a moral person in
00:30:08.980
this exchange and she should be removed, really. Rosa Parks, what are you saying?
00:30:17.040
Right past the business class normally, I want to assure you.
00:30:20.960
Here's because today we had a statement from the Biden White House. It's a tweet from Biden,
00:30:26.880
the at POTUS account as follows. Women in sports continue to push new boundaries and inspire us
00:30:33.300
all. But right now we're seeing that even if you're the best, women are not paid their fair
00:30:37.980
share. It's time that we give our daughters the same opportunities as our sons and ensure women
00:30:43.800
are paid what they deserve. So first of all, who the hell wants to hear from this White House,
00:30:48.900
which is allowing and trying to make it more expansive for boys to play against girls in
00:30:54.340
women's sports about fairness. Right. Please spare me. Right. No one believes you. You have no moral
00:31:00.200
authority on this issue. Second of all, I believe this is a reference to Caitlin Clark, who is, you
00:31:06.060
know, this women's basketball star from Iowa, who's now going to the WNBA and for a relative pittance
00:31:12.800
versus what the men get going into the NBA. And I can't tell you the number of people who have tried
00:31:17.940
to get me upset over this, Andrew, you know, because they know I'm pro women. I'm pro women's
00:31:21.820
rights. But my reaction is everybody's been the same. Nobody watches the NBA. Nobody watches the
00:31:27.880
WNBA. Nobody watches the WNBA. Like, you know, if she brings more eyeballs to it, then her second
00:31:36.060
deal is going to be amazing. That would be great. She can say, look what I did. I mean, she did it
00:31:41.140
already at the college level. They didn't think that that was worth building into her first contract.
00:31:44.380
I get that. I think she probably should have had a better agent to say, look what she did.
00:31:49.120
There should be a premium built in. Apparently there wasn't. But this, the pay disparity that
00:31:54.640
he's probably talking about is as follows. She was the number one pick in the WNBA. She's going
00:31:59.480
to earn $338,000 over four years. $76,000 the first, $78,000, $85,000, $97,000. The number
00:32:06.820
one overall pick in the NBA in 2023 was Victor Wimbanyama. And he has a four-year, $55 million
00:32:14.520
contract, $12 million in year one, $12.7, year two, $13,000, and then almost $17 million in year
00:32:21.440
four. So am I a sexist pig? Like, am I not? Where am I going wrong?
00:32:29.020
I mean, they're not paying these guys in the NBA that much money because they love throwing their
00:32:32.760
money away. They're paying it because that's how much money they're bringing in. That's how
00:32:36.480
capitalism works. If you bring in the money, you get paid for what you do. And, you know,
00:32:40.720
listen, Caitlin Clark is a wonderful athlete. In fact, her college championship game was watched
00:32:46.100
more than the men's championship game. And if she can do that in the WNBA, believe me,
00:32:51.800
she'll be earning that kind of money when she renegotiates her contract. But the power to
00:32:56.080
renegotiate a contract is the power of what you get and what you bring in. What you bring in is what
00:33:01.020
you get. You know, that's the way it works. It's the only way of talking about things that make
00:33:05.360
sense. It's the only way to make sense of any kind of economic distribution. Otherwise, you put
00:33:10.140
companies out of business and you have these empty seats and you're paying somebody for bringing in
00:33:14.060
gate that's not coming in. So listen, the thing is men are better at sports and they bring sports
00:33:21.340
to a higher level and they're more interested in sports. Men are more interested in sports and
00:33:25.020
they're more interested in watching other men play sports, except in tennis, where the women's
00:33:30.180
game is an actual different game. So it's actually kind of interesting in and of itself.
00:33:34.340
But if you're not bringing those people in, you're not getting the pay. And that's all there is to it.
00:33:38.400
And why do we have to pretend? This is the other thing. You know, you start out, the left started
00:33:43.660
out by saying to us, there's no difference between men and women. We have to treat them exactly equally.
00:33:48.600
And now they're saying there's so little difference that a man can be a woman. And if you say that a man
00:33:53.600
can't be a woman and play sports at another level in the women's game, you're being somehow bigoted.
00:33:58.820
The entire thing is genuinely an attack on women. It genuinely is a hatred of women.
00:34:04.480
And I really do believe this, by the way. I believe the left despises women at their core
00:34:09.140
for the simple reason that the things that women do occur in a different moral structure
00:34:17.000
than the things that men do. Men enjoy competition. They enjoy hierarchy. They enjoy power.
00:34:22.580
They enjoy, you know, the competitive earning edge. Women, when they take care of families,
00:34:29.060
are actually dealing in something that's much more spiritual. That's not that based on power
00:34:33.120
politics. It's not based on competition. And the left hates that and always has. It started with
00:34:39.000
Marx and Engels saying we've got to get women out of the home if we're going to have socialism. And a
00:34:43.900
lot of the early feminists in America certainly were, in fact, socialists trying to accomplish
00:34:48.560
that goal. The destruction of the home that's taken place is, in fact, an assault on women as
00:34:55.440
well. And by the way, I hear some of this disrespectful talk about women from the right
00:35:00.800
as well. And it's absolutely infuriating because what I'm looking for is I'm looking to elevate the
00:35:06.780
things that women do in the respect of the general public. The things that women do in a home,
00:35:12.280
in a family, in giving birth, not just in giving birth, but in also nurturing children into
00:35:17.080
humanity, into their individual humanity. All of these things have been denigrated by the
00:35:21.500
feminist movement and has made women miserable. I keep reading stories that say, hmm, somehow in
00:35:27.120
spite of feminism, women are more and more miserable. It ain't in spite of feminism. It's
00:35:31.740
because of feminism. And this is obviously not the feminism that gives every woman a choice to do
00:35:35.720
what it is she wants to do with her life. This is the feminism that has been denigrating what women
00:35:40.520
normally like to do for now 50 and 60 years. And it is basically, it's unfortunate because the women
00:35:48.220
who benefit from that kind of feminism are women who make it into the public eye like yourself. I
00:35:53.980
mean, that's a wonderful thing. You're obviously a highly talented commentator, but that means that
00:35:58.020
the only people talking in public are the people who benefited from feminism and the people who have
00:36:02.880
been destroyed by it, which is the vast majority of women, don't have a voice at all. And I just think
00:36:08.720
it is this upturning of these men pretending to be women is to me the final step in that kind of
00:36:17.760
leftist feminism is the erasure of women altogether. And it's absolutely offensive. So listen, Caitlin
00:36:23.120
Clark, great athlete. Most women not as interested in athletics as men, obviously don't play as high a
00:36:29.420
level as men who are stronger, faster and care and more competitive, more aggressive. You know,
00:36:35.100
that's what sports is like. And the money just reflects that.
00:36:38.720
I mean, the finals game at the college level for the women crushed everything. I mean,
00:36:45.040
it was like number one by far from any game that we had seen. It was exciting.
00:36:49.680
The problem is it's just not there yet. I mean, I think maybe it'll get there. Who knows? I don't
00:36:53.900
really follow sports a lot, so I don't have any expert commentary on this. My only understanding is
00:36:58.420
I see people tuning into the NFL and droves and to the NBA and, you know, some of these other male
00:37:04.580
sports league. And it's just not there yet for women. If she can bring it, she'll get paid. But
00:37:08.780
she has no right to make what her equal over there in the men's league makes in being number one in a
00:37:16.420
far more competitive league. That's part of why he's getting so much more than she's getting that
00:37:21.180
league. This guy would crush her in a one on one. He's number one. She's number one. Right. But these
00:37:26.820
are not apples to apples comparisons. So clearly she was content to take the deal. And I think she should
00:37:32.520
do it. And can I just say one of the thing? I really think if we're going anywhere on sports,
00:37:37.020
it should be going more toward the Caitlin Clark salaries and not to this guy's salary. Remember
00:37:42.360
back in the day when like our athletes had to have second jobs and they, you know, like the NBA sucks
00:37:49.240
now. I know this from every male friend I have. They all want to watch the NCAA because these guys want
00:37:55.440
it. They put their heart on the court. You know, they give it their all the NBA. They're all worried
00:38:00.440
about their careers and getting hurt. And, you know, like, don't touch me. And everybody knows
00:38:04.820
they're not supposed to hurt this guy or touch this guy. They're phoning it in. Even I, as a
00:38:09.440
casual observer, can see it. And it's like it's for them. It's all about the paycheck. It's not
00:38:14.900
about the love game. I'm kind of sick of it. I wish what they really had to sing for their supper
00:38:19.260
and they played for the love of the game. You know, you know, this is a real problem. They once
00:38:24.240
asked Babe Ruth why he made more money than the president. Ruth said it because I had a better year
00:38:29.320
than he did. And I think that, you know, the problem is they really are bringing in that kind
00:38:35.060
of money and they really are that much better than the next level down. And I don't know how
00:38:39.660
you solve this because I agree with you, Megan. I watch and I mean, I love football. I love
00:38:43.780
professional football. I used to love baseball. Money ruins the game. There's no question about it.
00:38:49.060
This level of money ruins the game. But then how can you treat these guys unfairly when they're the
00:38:54.340
reason people show up? When you go to just one level down and watch a baseball game, you know,
00:38:59.820
these guys are like gods. They're like minor small G gods, but they are incredible athletes.
00:39:05.980
And I just above everybody else, you got to pay them for what they're worth because they're going
00:39:09.740
to bring in money that people have never seen before. And but on the other hand, you're absolutely
00:39:15.520
right about this. I would now rather watch, you know, college football than I would watch
00:39:20.940
professional football because money ruins the game. It's sad, but that's the way capitalism works.
00:39:25.980
You really need an entirely different system to have it work out differently.
00:39:30.540
We make everything and then ruin it. That's our thing. That's our special thing.
00:39:40.120
OK, speaking of capitalism, the Chinese said no one ever have decided to dip a toe into our world
00:39:48.020
and that they've done that through TikTok, which, as you know, is owned by ByteDance.
00:39:52.900
And now there's a push to get it banned. The U.S. Senate is going to have to take up
00:39:57.280
the question of whether TikTok should be banned in the United States. And there's a lot of
00:40:01.280
public animosity growing toward TikTok, because as people start to understand more and more
00:40:06.260
how it's used for propaganda, I was pushing the bin Laden letter. It's been elevating like Hitler.
00:40:11.420
It's like then they take it down when there's a backlash. But I think particularly on the right,
00:40:16.020
we've learned this is not a source for reliable information and actually is very corrosive.
00:40:22.740
They're fighting back with their own ad campaign. And much like the Biden White House for some time
00:40:28.680
went to these moronic influencers to try to get them to go on the social media apps and be like,
00:40:34.860
oh, Biden's crushing it. That didn't work. Now, so too is ByteDance turning to, I guess,
00:40:42.160
TikTokers, influencers, who it thinks will shore up its reputation amongst those on the right who
00:40:49.680
have been critical of it. And so I give you, I'm going to show you two. First, they went to a nun,
00:41:00.540
My name is Sister Monica Clare. Because of TikTok, I've created a community where people can feel safe
00:41:06.500
asking questions about spirituality. I try to provide a really accessible way of them learning
00:41:12.280
about religion and spirituality. That's not intimidating. Somebody in the comments said,
00:41:18.080
I have no idea how I got on Nuntalk, but I'm not mad about it. I'm going to teach you how to pray.
00:41:23.280
I'm going to teach you how to meditate, how to connect with a higher power,
00:41:26.760
because we need that. We need strength and comfort.
00:41:29.420
Okay. So this is going to get, I guess, Christians, because you can watch Sister Monica,
00:41:38.380
who's got 200,000 followers on TikTok. Nothing to shake a stick at. And don't forget about,
00:41:45.800
is it truckers? No, it's veterans. Okay. Truckers, yes, but also veterans. Here's that one.
00:41:51.760
When I say something, I didn't know nothing about TikTok. And once I got involved with TikTok,
00:41:57.480
I loved it. One day I had texted and texted and hadn't heard back from him. And I got really
00:42:04.660
worried. My scooter broke down. I went into a depression. Pretty sad. And I posted it to show
00:42:11.980
that Kenny's not always happy. Within 24 hours, people had donated over $5,000. And within a week,
00:42:19.660
people had donated $110,000. And Kenny hit a million followers. That moment was like, whoa.
00:42:27.840
It only felt right to give back some mobility scooters to veterans.
00:42:33.160
Okay. Kenny has 2.7 million followers on TikTok. So you can see what they're doing. And I love Kenny
00:42:40.240
and Sister Monica, but there are some serious problems with this app and this company that
00:42:46.640
Kenny and Sister Monica are not going to be able to solve. What do you make of it?
00:42:52.000
Well, I couldn't help thinking, you know, Congress has killed Kenny, but it's
00:42:54.820
threatening that you're going to kill this poor old guy if you get rid of TikTok. I want to just
00:43:00.440
clarify one thing you said. You said that Congress is trying to ban TikTok. But as I understand it,
00:43:06.900
what they're trying to do is get TikTok to break from their Chinese owners.
00:43:11.780
Yeah. And they're trying to force them to do that. And I have absolutely no problem with that. I don't
00:43:15.600
understand why a malignant power who is dedicated to destroying this country should have this
00:43:21.140
incredibly powerful social media tool piping garbage into the minds of the young, which
00:43:29.220
the Wall Street Journal has done ample investigation to show that they in fact are doing that. That
00:43:33.780
a young person who goes on TikTok is going to be ultimately guided to sexual perversion, pedophilia,
00:43:40.500
all kinds of suicidal ideation. And it works. It really is making people depressed. This is coming
00:43:46.420
from a country, China, which won't even allow a celebrity who is effeminate to appear on TV because
00:43:52.080
they don't want to undermine the strength and masculinity of their population. But they're
00:43:58.060
selling this to us in a purposely malignant way. I have absolutely no problem with Congress forcing them
00:44:04.620
to detach from their Chinese overlords and make, you know, let, let the nuns and the old fellows have their
00:44:17.280
It is really, I mean, it is dangerous. The amount of disinformation that they put out on a daily basis on
00:44:24.180
every topic. And it's always the leftist POV. I mean, it's always pushing the leftist POV. There's not, I respect
00:44:30.240
the fact that the sister's on there and Kenny's on there, but these are the exceptions, not the rule.
00:44:34.300
These are being amplified right now by TikTok in order to win a PR battle. This is not what TikTok
00:44:39.120
is actually like. I mean, just ask the students for the justice in Palestine protesters who are out
00:44:45.460
there every day with their TikTok. That's, they're living on that. They're getting all their information
00:44:48.860
on that. I mean, it's terrifying to me that half these Trump jurors who got voired are saying TikTok is
00:44:54.680
one of their main forms of news. Can you imagine what they've been served about Donald Trump?
00:45:02.140
Well, meanwhile, there's a site you've probably heard of, Libs of TikTok, where all she does is
00:45:07.480
put out things that are actually on TikTok and she keeps getting banned from social media for showing
00:45:13.060
what's on TikTok. So they're silencing her, not for what she says, but for actually showing what the
00:45:18.160
left says. So they're calling her hateful because she is showing what the left actually says. And yeah,
00:45:22.780
you know, this, you know, this is part and parcel of this kind of sexual deviance that is being sold
00:45:29.040
to us very aggressively by the left. I mean, I don't actually believe, and I'm as close to being
00:45:34.240
a First Amendment purist as you can get. I don't actually believe that pornography is covered by
00:45:39.120
the First Amendment. I believe the First Amendment is there to protect political and philosophical
00:45:44.580
opinions, the kinds of opinions that we have about the things that are going on in the country,
00:45:49.380
the realities of life, what somebody is doing. I don't necessarily think that watching somebody
00:45:54.300
beat the living hell out of a woman for sexual pleasure, I don't necessarily feel that that is
00:46:00.820
actually covered by the First Amendment. So a lot of this stuff is really ugly. And then when they
00:46:06.840
try to sell, for instance, pornography to little children, as they're trying to do, and we try to
00:46:11.880
stop them, they call that book banning. I don't think that is book banning. So all of this stuff,
00:46:16.380
I don't think this is actually endangering free speech. I think what's endangering free speech is
00:46:20.760
investigating Elon Musk because he lets other political sides have their say. I think what's
00:46:26.120
damaging free speech is HR departments threatening to fire you if you have an untoward opinion. I think
00:46:31.740
those are the things that are threatening free speech. It is not making this company break ties
00:46:36.720
with China, which it should do. Yeah, like the New York Times reporter who just came out with his story
00:46:41.580
about having to grab the pink starburst out of the jar on his opening day at the New York Times and
00:46:47.000
saying, oh, that means I have to say something about myself. I'll just tell you that I recently
00:46:51.180
had a Chick-fil-A sandwich and it was delicious. It was pulled aside by HR saying, we don't do that
00:46:56.400
here. We don't. Chick-fil-A. No. Sorry. No. Okay. Andrew Klavan, it's so fun talking to you. Thank you so
00:47:03.640
much for being here. And until the next time, sir. It's always a pleasure. Thanks a lot, Megan.
00:47:07.600
Okay. Go find more from Andrew and his son, Spencer Klavan, perhaps the lesser known Klavan,
00:47:14.860
but not for long because Spencer is incredibly gifted in his own right. And you can check them
00:47:19.880
both out at thenewjerusalem.substack.com. Talk to you all again soon. Thanks for listening to
00:47:28.280
The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.