The Megyn Kelly Show - Omicron Panic and Limbaugh's Legacy, with Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, Matt Welch, and James Golden

00:00:00.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.720 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.

00:00:16.440 Hope you had a nice time with your family over Thanksgiving. I certainly did.

00:00:20.340 We actually went across the pond to London for a bit.

00:00:24.320 Have never done that before with a fam and it was truly wonderful.

00:00:28.000 It was so wonderful. More on that this week because I'm going to show you something really cool that happened.

00:00:34.400 But now it's time to panic. Let's just kick the show off today with widespread panic.

00:00:39.640 That certainly seems to be the message that we're getting from the headlines out there now regarding the new COVID variant.

00:00:45.620 Doesn't it seem like these media folks are enjoying it? It seems like they're like, ah, yes, another variant. Ah, yes. Right?

00:00:53.160 I'm like, would you calm down? Calm down.

00:00:56.560 At the same time, of course, Dr. Fauci refuses to rule out more lockdowns.

00:01:02.640 He loves to lock us down. Fauci loves the lockdowns, telling us to prepare for the worst and also to trust him because he, quote, represents science.

00:01:12.140 Those days are gone, Doc. Sorry to tell you. I don't know if you're the last to know, but we don't trust you anymore.

00:01:16.680 The left trusts you implicitly and does whatever you say, but the rest of the country no longer trusts you because you've misled us so many times.

00:01:23.960 There's a lot to get to this afternoon. In our second hour, we're going to be joined by James Golden.

00:01:29.960 I'm looking forward to talking to him. You may know him better as Bo Snurdly, the longtime producer for Rush Limbaugh and a big part of Rush's show for 30 years.

00:01:40.040 He's got a new book out on Limbaugh's legacy. He's been deeply affected by Rush and I loved reading it.

00:01:46.380 It really brought back some memories of my own of Rush, who I knew well.

00:01:49.380 So we'll talk to him in just a bit. But first, I'm so happy to have back with me now three of my favorite guests.

00:01:55.400 They are the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast, Michael Moynihan, who's a correspondent for Vice News Tonight, Matt Welch, who is editor at large for Reason Magazine, and Camille Foster of Freethink Media.

00:02:09.060 Welcome, guys. Great to have you back.

00:02:11.200 Howdy, Megan.

00:02:11.860 Hi, Megan.

00:02:13.040 All right. So just for the audience at home, it's Michael, the people watching on YouTube, Michael's on the left, Matt's in the middle and Camille's on the right.

00:02:20.020 Am I wrong? Doesn't it seem like there's a bit of celebration in the media? It's like, ah, another variant. Yes, I feel it. I feel it from Fauci. I feel it from the media. Like, would you calm, calm down?

00:02:31.120 I think folks are afraid we would enjoy all of our Turkey Day festivities a little bit too much.

00:02:35.520 So to have something awful that they can throw over the whole thing, like a wet blanket, you can't pass that up.

00:02:41.240 Doesn't matter if we don't know how infectious it is. Doesn't matter if we don't know how deadly it is.

00:02:45.100 It doesn't matter if there aren't many people who are even necessarily positively confirmed cases that are infected with this variant.

00:02:51.940 Or if it's in the United States, we should all panic. We should all freak out right now. And lockdowns are imminent.

00:02:56.200 I feel like it's almost the new Russiagate. You know, it's like another tidbit of indication.

00:03:00.520 That's what happened with me. I typically, because it's my job to pay attention to the news, I try to pay attention to the news.

00:03:06.520 So over Thanksgiving, I said, you know what? I am going to pay attention to my lovely, beautiful 10-year-old daughter and my friends and my family for the first time in 10 years.

00:03:16.840 That's the first time she's met me. And so we're really excited about this. And I'm going to not pay attention to the news, right?

00:03:21.580 So I start paying attention yesterday and I just was like, oh my God, it's all over. So I get how people panic about this stuff.

00:03:30.360 So if your interaction with this is mostly headlines. So then I start reading a little more and I was like, oh, okay.

00:03:35.020 So you notice this in the markets too. The markets tanked in response to this. And then pre-market this morning and so far today, roaring back because they were like, oh yeah, that's just, that's a bit hype.

00:03:44.740 I mean, it's very early indications and we'll have to consult Dr. Science about this sometime soon, but I haven't seen anything that suggests that it is more deadly, that it sounds like we're doing Delta all over again, except it's a little bit more infectious than Delta.

00:04:02.560 Well, what did we do last time? What happened when Delta happened? We forgot everything we'd learned the previous 12 months.

00:04:08.720 We're like, oh my God, we're going to have to close schools because, you know, think about the kids. Well, the kids are still very comparatively not infectious, not, and thankfully they don't get hurt comparatively to the rest of the population.

00:04:23.160 It's crazy. The numbers are still less than 700 people under the age of 18 in America out of the 775,000 people who've died were kids.

00:04:32.380 So we're doing it all over again. If there is no difference ultimately in how much this affects people, right? The deadliness of it.

00:04:41.180 We're living in a world now where we have vaccines and we have therapeutics and we know we should know by now that we shouldn't freak out, especially about kids.

00:04:49.320 And people are just starting the engines back up again. It's Matt.

00:04:51.980 Yeah, I think it was you, Matt, was pointing out that more kids died of pneumonia last year than died of COVID.

00:04:59.300 And yet we don't impose anywhere near these crazy restrictions on our schools because of pneumonia.

00:05:03.760 All right. It's like we've lost the thread. But the glee over it to me, I was saying, it's almost like the way they loved Russiagate so much.

00:05:12.900 Any incremental information on Russiagate would lead the news every night on the left wing channels because they were looking for confirmation of their worldview, you know, of their having already settled on a narrative and a story that they liked.

00:05:30.780 And I almost feel like the approach to these new variants is the new version of that.

00:05:35.140 They they've decided to panic over COVID. They've decided that anybody who downplays it in any way is a denier, right, as opposed to just to quote some someone we all love, a person of reason.

00:05:46.900 Right. And and I see it in the reporting. And so to me, it's upsetting that we've gotten to this place where it's like it's an it's a chance to affirm your worldview as a Democrat in order to celebrate when you celebrate a new variant.

00:05:59.320 Yeah. And if you're at all concerned about COVID and you think that Americans should take a pandemic seriously or that people around the world should take things seriously, then you should be concerned about hysteria related to to health security theater or public health theater, because people can't take the reporting seriously.

00:06:17.460 They certainly can't take the guidance of public officials seriously if they are freaking out about absolutely everything.

00:06:23.620 And if the media coverage is driven more by a desire to sensationalize or to to to cater to particular political biases, then it is actual tangible evidence that there is something that we should all be concerned about.

00:06:36.320 You know what else is problematic about these things?

00:06:39.140 You know what else is problematic? It's a slow news week. It always is over the Thanksgiving holiday.

00:06:43.060 Yeah. And that means the media, especially cable news, but also papers.

00:06:47.220 They've got to fill the headlines. They've got to fill the paper. They've got to fill the hour after hour.

00:06:50.640 And this is what they do. They'll just take it, report on every little line item and blow it up like, you know, the plague has returned.

00:06:58.300 In fairness, there is, you know, three countries have have stopped travelers from entering the country anymore.

00:07:04.080 Right. Israel and Japan and and Mulvania. I think it was the third.

00:07:07.840 But I want to I want to give one shout out to the contrary voice out there in the in the MSM wilderness, which is David Leonhardt from The New York Times, who's who has been like this this this very morning said it's not science based to preemptively freak out at everything before.

00:07:28.060 Or, you know, and actually that's that's deleterious to mental health.

00:07:31.320 If you do that, we don't know yet whether it's more dangerous. So maybe maybe calm down.

00:07:35.360 But he's like he's the one who's like trying to tell neurotic upper class lefties that that it's OK not to completely be irrational, crazy people.

00:07:45.180 Well, the terrifying thing about that and the David Leonhardt thing is that he has been a voice of calm and reason.

00:07:52.660 And, you know, when he was writing writing about economics, The New York Times, I used to throw the paper out the window.

00:07:57.740 And now I'm like, oh, this is interesting. But the incredible thing about how much this has been a culture war waged on both sides in the mainstream media.

00:08:06.200 We hear often about people, you know, they're not masking and they're protesting and they're Trump people.

00:08:11.640 The culture wars rage in a much more kind of sharper way from the left.

00:08:16.580 And you can see that within The New York Times. I've heard this from people that there is anger at David Leonhardt for actually being calm and rational.

00:08:24.580 And it's a very, very simple equation here. Why do people freak out about this?

00:08:28.480 And why do people freak out about the new variants when they know nothing? It's it's a very, very simple thing.

00:08:33.140 It's they're pointing their finger at people who have taken the masks off and say, everybody, calm down.

00:08:37.960 We hate Fauci and say, see, here's another one. Here's another one. And you're not doing anything.

00:08:42.020 If you don't take this seriously, look, it's going to get bigger and it's going to expand and it's going to envelop us all and kill us all.

00:08:47.000 And that is the simple equation for these people. They don't care about the actual science behind it, because science, of course, is not a word that means anything anymore.

00:08:54.360 I mean, Anthony Fauci has become he was appointed by science. He's apparently a science.

00:08:59.420 He's gone to the University of Science over there. I'm going to start doing that. I'm just going to start saying I am journalism. I am law.

00:09:07.540 Yes, that's it. You've been saying it quietly over here with your face on it that says she's journalism.

00:09:14.040 What kind of a weird way of defending your positions is that I just so.

00:09:18.500 So but just a little fact check for people out there who are wondering about the Omicron variant here.

00:09:26.160 The here's what the she's the director of the South African Medical Association.

00:09:30.420 She's the person who jumped up and down, sounded the alarm and said, hey, we got a new one.

00:09:34.960 Dr. Angelique Cozy, quote, it's all speculation at this stage.

00:09:39.220 It may be it's highly transmissible. But so far, the cases we're seeing are, quote, extremely mild, extremely mild.

00:09:47.820 So we have no evidence to believe this is any more dangerous than the earlier variants, nor even necessarily more transmissible.

00:09:56.020 Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, came out citing her and said, look, so far, the symptoms seen are mostly mild.

00:10:02.060 We have not seen a spike in hospital admissions.

00:10:04.100 And then he criticized all these travel bans we're seeing, saying there is too much we don't know, too much we don't know to impose economically, socially ruinous policies on South Africa and other nations.

00:10:16.280 Ready, fire, aim is not prudent public health policy.

00:10:20.220 Vaccine testing requirements requirements for incoming travelers could be prudent.

00:10:24.120 Outright travel bans can hurt more than help.

00:10:28.820 And yet, as you point out, those bans are everywhere now against these South African nations.

00:10:32.240 The United States, Canada, Russia, Italy, Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Malta, the Netherlands, Hong Kong.

00:10:37.260 I could go on. Israel plans to ban all foreigners for two weeks after one case was confirmed there between seven and 10 suspected others.

00:10:46.020 They're tracking people on their iPhones if they've got it.

00:10:48.880 There's a legal challenge already to that.

00:10:50.920 Great Britain. Yes, travel ban.

00:10:52.480 We want to have this illusion that there's a button that we can push to make the thing go away.

00:11:18.260 And especially that there's a button that the bad people that we don't like aren't pushing so that we can blame them for this traumatic virus that's killing people.

00:11:29.780 It's a bad instinct that we should have.

00:11:32.800 The instinct should be, what can we do?

00:11:34.960 What do we know works at this point?

00:11:36.340 Well, we know that probably the best thing for people to be is vaccinated.

00:11:41.220 OK, so like what can you do as a government to speed up that process?

00:11:46.700 Well, you can do a hell of a lot more than the FDA has done, not just of vaccines, but also of testing.

00:11:50.820 Right. Like if if if we should have had easily affordable, easy to get home testing kits to everybody such a long time ago, we don't.

00:12:01.860 Right. And that doesn't feel to stupid culture war political people like a button to push.

00:12:08.340 And yet that's the thing that we need to be thinking about is how do you get vaccines more widely distributed and approved quicker?

00:12:15.520 And then how do you get the diagnostics available? But it doesn't fulfill our stupid animal desires to punch somebody in the face and have a cultural argument about it.

00:12:24.940 It's very frustrating.

00:12:26.080 Yeah, it's also I mean, we don't have many conversations about what has worked and what hasn't at this point.

00:12:30.740 And we have enough time and enough data that one would think, you know, for the first six months, I lived in Sweden for many years.

00:12:36.660 I followed that debate very closely that people were saying, can you believe what the Swedes are doing?

00:12:41.620 They're saying let her rip, don't wear masks, et cetera. Now, can we go back to the data of countries that shut down, countries that didn't, countries that had tight lockdowns, countries that were looser, countries that demanded masking and said that, you know, this is your choice and see what has happened.

00:12:55.680 Because when you look at this stuff, it's not clear that any one thing has actually worked really well, travel bans included.

00:13:02.400 So, I mean, this reaction and to be clear, this could be bad.

00:13:06.000 We don't know. And the message, and I think that we're all kind of in agreement on this, is that there's no data to suggest that it is.

00:13:11.380 But that doesn't mean that it won't be. But so far right now, to Scott Gottlieb's comment of like, do not, you know, panic first and then see what happens later. It's complete nonsense.

00:13:22.240 But we've gotten to that place of where panicking feels good. It feels like an affirmation that our earlier predictions of doom and gloom were right, right? Before we know anything. And then you've got Fauci out there. I mean, once again, refusing to rule out lockdowns.

00:13:38.240 It's like I we're I don't you you're going to tell me I'll play the soundbite. But my position is we're not doing that again. Americans are not going to do that again.

00:13:49.160 Maybe his acolytes on the far left will. But the rest of the country won't. But here's what he said to George Stephanopoulos.

00:13:58.060 Do we expect to be seeing more lockdowns again, new lockdowns, more mandates?

00:14:02.220 You know, I don't know, George, it's really too early to say we just really need to, as I've said so often, prepare for the worst.

00:14:14.800 Would we do it? I don't think we'll do it again.

00:14:16.400 It's not too early to say you you do lockdowns when you don't understand anything and when there's no vaccine, we understand a lot more.

00:14:25.520 And there's a vaccine and a booster and great therapeutics. There's all kinds of stuff to mitigate this.

00:14:30.880 Now, you don't do lockdowns. They don't work. I'm not going to bang the pot again at seven o'clock.

00:14:35.040 No, he's become done with the pot at talking about these things in the most urgent way imaginable as opposed to it.

00:14:42.120 And I actually rewound and went back and looked at some of the earliest responses to COVID.

00:14:47.080 Stuff that people would say now, oh, we moved too slow. We weren't fast enough.

00:14:50.460 We should have locked down immediately. As you just mentioned, Moynihan, the countries that did lock down very early on, it's possible that they saved some lives early on.

00:14:58.260 It's also the case that New Zealand and Australia are still struggling with COVID despite those early lockdowns.

00:15:04.480 And it just seems as though this is our new reality and you cannot lock down in perpetuity.

00:15:09.520 So knowing what we know now, it seems like some of that early restraint was probably appropriate.

00:15:16.020 And what we could do with is a great deal more of that early restraint.

00:15:19.140 And Fauci early on was on board with the restraint train. Don't freak out. Don't panic. Be prudent.

00:15:24.920 Those are precisely the things that he could be saying now. And you're absolutely right, Matt.

00:15:29.940 If you watch that whole 15-minute segment, it's a sequence of questions where is it more infectious? We don't know.

00:15:35.400 Is there evidence that it's just kind of like breaking through and more people are going to die? We don't know.

00:15:40.700 OK, why are we doing this?

00:15:42.520 I mean, what are we going to talk about?

00:15:43.640 Early responses. Do you remember the early responses?

00:15:45.920 I was getting like text messages from the city of New York and saying, could you please go to Chinatown?

00:15:51.460 Go to the parade.

00:15:52.500 Eat soup dumplings and hug people.

00:15:54.120 If you don't come.

00:15:54.760 If you can do that with them to prove that you're not racist, start kissing people randomly.

00:15:59.040 But that actually might violate some other Me Too things.

00:16:02.040 But you go back and look and there's some chaotic response.

00:16:05.600 But to Megan's point, not only is it silly to even mention lockdowns, but to Megan's point, people won't do it.

00:16:12.240 And it is not people in kind of red states, which is this kind of myth.

00:16:16.400 I don't think people in New York will do it after having gone through this.

00:16:19.920 Now we're back at restaurants.

00:16:21.380 Now we're out in New York is even a little crazier than out in Long Island.

00:16:24.820 Nobody wears masks out there.

00:16:26.160 Rest of the country, people aren't really wearing masks.

00:16:28.220 But if you look, and this is the utter stupidity of these myths, that there's some sort of kind of Trump virus amongst these people and sort of brain virus.

00:16:36.640 Look at Europe.

00:16:38.080 There's like riots in Austria, in Netherlands, in Belgium.

00:16:42.400 People got shot in the Netherlands by the police.

00:16:44.300 They were literally open fire.

00:16:45.640 Wow, the police have guns in the Netherlands?

00:16:47.080 They borrowed them.

00:16:47.940 Yeah.

00:16:48.280 So they just gave them back.

00:16:49.920 But it's insane because these people are out there doing the exact same things.

00:16:53.560 They're Trump-free countries.

00:16:54.860 They're very social democratic.

00:16:56.320 But yet, for some reason, tens of thousands, if not in some places, hundreds of thousands of people on the streets saying, we're not doing this again.

00:17:03.320 Mostly peaceful?

00:17:04.500 Yeah.

00:17:04.960 Sometimes.

00:17:06.860 There's only one right answer by Fauci or anybody else to are we going to lock down again?

00:17:11.120 And that is, no, we're not going to.

00:17:13.120 We tried that when we were in an uncertain place and it had disastrous consequences.

00:17:17.640 But, no, we're not going to do that again.

00:17:19.640 But he can't let it go.

00:17:21.320 So Joe Biden, speaking of things that, you know, we haven't learned from Joe Biden, ripped on Trump for his travel ban.

00:17:27.900 The day after Trump implemented it, Joe Biden tweeted out, and I quote, we are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus.

00:17:36.800 We need to lead the way with science, not Donald Trump's record of hysteria, xenophobia and fear mongering.

00:17:43.480 Then he also promised that he would eradicate COVID if we elected him.

00:17:47.000 So he's been elected and here he is, not even a year into office, implementing what?

00:17:54.060 A travel ban, a travel ban against several of these South African countries, although he was criticized by some for saying, it's going to kick in in a couple of days.

00:18:03.100 We're going to let everybody travel in for the next 72 hours, but then we're going to ban.

00:18:07.500 And some people are saying, how does that work?

00:18:10.220 Aren't we supposed to like, you know, we're shutting it down?

00:18:12.680 Isn't it supposed to be shut down?

00:18:14.320 I don't know. But you tell me whether there's been a bit of a double standard by the president when it comes to these bans and even by the media.

00:18:20.280 We're now trying to defend his ban, whereas they thought Trump's was racist.

00:18:24.460 I mean, the ban makes so much less sense now, again, because we have all this stuff that we didn't have back then.

00:18:30.980 The place I don't think the bans were a good idea to begin with from an American point of view, but the place where made the most sense is a place like New Zealand, right?

00:18:38.540 Or Australia. You have an island country.

00:18:40.920 You don't have a vaccine. I'm like, all right, maybe let's cut down on the incoming visitors while we try to figure something out.

00:18:48.300 That is an island nation.

00:18:50.540 And that is 2020 in April.

00:18:52.960 We are not an island nation and it's 2021 and we have all this stuff.

00:18:57.540 It doesn't make any the the virus is going everywhere.

00:19:00.660 That's what they do.

00:19:02.140 And we have all this protection for it.

00:19:04.880 It doesn't make any sense at all.

00:19:06.820 And he should be held to a more exacting standard, actually, than Donald Trump was back then.

00:19:12.820 And most certainly is not.

00:19:14.060 And he most certainly is not standard now.

00:19:16.320 I mean, it's you.

00:19:18.020 Politics is annoying in the sense that I mean, remember that Mitt Romney was brutalized for saying Russia was our greatest geopolitical enemy.

00:19:26.840 People were like, can you believe this, Cold Warrior?

00:19:29.460 Donald Trump comes into office.

00:19:30.840 It's like we literally have to bomb Leningrad.

00:19:33.200 It's actually called St. Peter's for now, but fine.

00:19:35.400 People freak out, right?

00:19:36.640 They change on a dime if the politics demands it.

00:19:39.580 And the politics is demanded it.

00:19:41.060 And nobody is actually offering that assessment of how well Joe Biden is doing in numbers, in rhetoric and in policy, because there's actually, you know, there's no future in it for them.

00:19:51.360 They know it's going to kind of even out with what they saw with Donald Trump and they prefer not to talk about it.

00:19:55.520 Can we just spend one minute on the loony New York governor, Kathy Hochul?

00:19:59.880 She's already declared a state of emergency.

00:20:02.660 This allows non-essential procedures in the hospitals to be postponed in order to increase capacity, despite no evidence that we need any increased capacity.

00:20:11.540 She says she did it to deal with, key words, staffing shortages and to boost bed capacity amid an anticipated anticipated spike in new cases.

00:20:21.560 Oh, great.

00:20:22.020 Okay, so who's anticipating it?

00:20:23.720 Because it doesn't sound like the CDC necessarily is, the WHO, Scott Gottlieb doesn't seem to necessarily be.

00:20:30.860 And by the way, new cases doesn't mean new hospitalizations.

00:20:33.720 And you guys tell me whether staffing shortages caused by her vaccine mandate are what she's really looking to cover for here.

00:20:40.380 Well, I mean, that is, that is the, the ultimate sort of gotcha, isn't it?

00:20:44.700 Like the staffing shortages induced by your policies that were supposed to be this precautionary thing.

00:20:50.720 Everyone who works in a hospital has to be vaccinated.

00:20:53.580 If, if any population, if there's any population I'm not uniquely concerned about with respect to their voluntary decision not to get vaccinated,

00:21:01.980 it's probably the people who have been dealing directly with COVID for almost two years now.

00:21:08.220 I would like for as many people as possible to get vaccinated.

00:21:11.500 It seems quite clear to me that there are plenty of people who are actively making the decision not to get vaccinated.

00:21:18.260 And some of them are probably doing so in response to the mandates.

00:21:22.900 I mean, they, they have my sister and in law and brother, both work in the healthcare industry, both vaccinated.

00:21:32.500 Hope I'm not outing them.

00:21:33.720 But there's a, there is a, a, a countrywide nursing shortage right now, just as there's a labor shortage in general.

00:21:41.640 But nurses and people in the medical profession are burned out, understandably, but also if there's a labor shortage everywhere,

00:21:50.400 which there is, and you add the special extra sauce of a vaccine mandate that you cannot test your way out of.

00:21:57.360 You can't just get a test at once a week.

00:21:59.440 You can't show, you know, antibodies from having had COVID before.

00:22:03.860 That's not enough.

00:22:04.920 If you add that little extra thing, one, you know, the, the media was full of reports of like, well, you know,

00:22:09.140 that people were, were upset at the vaccine mandates, but you know, 97% of healthcare workers complied with it.

00:22:14.440 So what's the problem?

00:22:15.360 What's the problem?

00:22:16.520 That 3%, you have a staffing shortage.

00:22:19.300 You have absolutely no increase really of hospitalizations happening in New York.

00:22:23.940 Although there is the regional, the predictable regional and seasonal surge of COVID cases.

00:22:29.160 But that little 3% means that you have to have, or the governor thinks you have to have an emergency order of your own creation.

00:22:36.840 And this is going to replicate all over the place in California, all over the country.

00:22:41.200 People are doing these vaccine mandates, including of students in K through 12 students all over California, which is crazy.

00:22:47.120 They're going to kick students out of school over the next couple of months, tens of thousands, and send them into remote learning, which we know is terrible.

00:22:55.640 Send them to their families, right?

00:22:57.500 Which is going to make them more at risk probably too.

00:22:59.620 And we're doing this just because we want to see that we pressed that button called science and did this thing that wasn't really scientifically based.

00:23:08.420 Can we create a panic tracker?

00:23:10.140 We need one of these things.

00:23:11.740 Because, you know, we have beyond the map.

00:23:14.080 Oh my God.

00:23:14.840 Because you remember, people forget this.

00:23:16.960 I mean, remember Rochelle Walensky in, I just didn't look up the date, it was in March, when she was literally crying.

00:23:23.260 Do you remember she was always crying on television?

00:23:24.780 The head of the CDC is weeping.

00:23:27.540 Literally, there's no crying in baseball and or the CDC.

00:23:30.460 And she's weeping and she says, impending doom.

00:23:33.200 That's what's around the corner in March of, you know, 2021.

00:23:37.880 This is crazy.

00:23:39.040 And then now we have the guy, we have so many great governors of the state in New York, is that, you know, we're just, we know what's going to happen.

00:23:45.440 It's going to be awful.

00:23:46.220 So we're declaring a state of emergency.

00:23:48.140 State of emergencies, like executive orders, should be used sparingly.

00:23:51.480 And we should not put that much power into the hands of people when there's actually no impending crisis other than one that's been created.

00:23:58.580 How much more emergent can we be?

00:24:02.140 Because we still, if you have a kid in New York City Public School, and I know a couple of you guys do, you still have your kids eating lunch outside still with a mask on, socially distanced, in what last Wednesday was 39 degree weather.

00:24:15.740 So, I mean, now what?

00:24:17.340 In a state of emergency, but they don't get to eat at all because you do have to take your mask down for two seconds.

00:24:21.200 But what happens, Reagan, as you know, is that they're now just, like, closing schools.

00:24:25.660 My favorite is that they were doing this around, just coincided with Veterans Day, which was on a Thursday.

00:24:31.580 So that Friday became a mental health day for a whole lot of students to help you cope with COVID.

00:24:37.360 Nothing to do with the mental health of teachers who wanted a four-day weekend.

00:24:40.520 But we're seeing these preemptive and also staffing shortage-led closures all over the country.

00:24:47.420 There's been a huge spike everywhere, and especially in blue states, places where the teachers' unions have more sway and can dictate terms a lot more.

00:24:56.200 So we're seeing that as well.

00:24:57.440 And this is exactly the opposite of what those kids need.

00:25:01.120 And all of the hysteria has probably hit that population, people under the age of 18.

00:25:07.100 They've suffered from adult hysteria more than any other population in the country over the last two years.

00:25:12.300 I think we're going to be dealing with the aftereffects of that for years.

00:25:16.640 Hopefully they can all bounce back.

00:25:17.860 But it's awful.

00:25:18.940 And I think people are going to lose those.

00:25:20.360 There's going to be a lot of parents.

00:25:21.040 Do you think people are mad in Virginia in November?

00:25:24.260 If they reimpose school lockdowns and closures and things like that, there's going to be a lot of otherwise really good Democrats who eyes are going to pop out of their skulls and look for anyone to vote for except for those people.

00:25:36.460 Well, and that's a good place to pause it because we hold that talk.

00:25:39.860 We'll kick it off there when we come back after a quick break because there was some polling and apparently a big meeting amongst these top-notch Democrats trying to predict what's going to happen with the party.

00:25:49.320 And they're – speaking of panic, they're there.

00:25:52.660 More with the guys of the fifth column in just a minute.

00:26:03.140 Let's kick it off here.

00:26:04.320 I don't want to move on from COVID and the latest variant without talking about Fauci because to me he's getting more political in his statements.

00:26:13.320 And I think it's a mistake.

00:26:14.380 I realize it must be very irritating to get attacked all the time.

00:26:16.900 But, you know, it comes with a job, especially in times like these.

00:26:20.640 And here he was on one of the weekend shows over the summer – I mean, over the weekend, Sunday, trying to respond to attacks by Ted Cruz on him.

00:26:32.720 Listen here.

00:26:33.020 My job has been totally focused on doing what I can with the talents and the influence I have to make scientific advances to protect the health of the American public.

00:26:46.560 So anybody who spends lies and threatens and all that theater that goes on with some of the investigations and the congressional committees and the Rand Pauls and all that other nonsense, that's noise, Margaret.

00:27:02.100 That's noise.

00:27:03.300 Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted.

00:27:06.580 Yeah.

00:27:06.840 I have to laugh at that.

00:27:11.440 I should be prosecuted.

00:27:13.460 What happened on January 6th, Senator?

00:27:16.240 I'm just going to do my job.

00:27:18.080 And I'm going to be saving lives and they're going to be lying.

00:27:21.400 Anybody who's looking at this carefully realizes that there's a distinct anti-science flavor to this.

00:27:29.420 So if they get up and criticize science, nobody's going to know what they're talking about.

00:27:33.780 But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there's a person there.

00:27:40.520 So it's easy to criticize.

00:27:42.600 But they're really criticizing science because I represent science.

00:27:48.120 OMG.

00:27:49.360 The God complex, the referral to himself in the third person, the obvious partisanship, you know, raising January 6th.

00:27:57.160 What's happening?

00:27:58.900 Yeah, it's very odd.

00:28:00.220 I mean, there's one he said on numerous occasions that he represents science.

00:28:05.480 Like on numerous occasions.

00:28:06.720 I can almost give you one of those, right?

00:28:09.440 Like maybe just, you know, inelegantly you say this thing and it kind of comes across the wrong way.

00:28:13.960 It's a little boisterous.

00:28:14.820 When you do it repeatedly, what the hell is wrong with you?

00:28:18.620 Like either you just don't get it or like something is actually off in here.

00:28:23.500 Like it's very strange to have someone talk in that particular way.

00:28:26.900 And we call this fallacy appeal to authority.

00:28:29.680 We know that that is not an adequate substitute for actually having a conversation on the basis of facts.

00:28:37.140 And it is all nakedly partisan and nakedly political.

00:28:40.760 And it's not as though in his ongoing feud with Rand Paul, Dr. Fauci has been extremely forthcoming.

00:28:48.560 It is fair to say that people are being partisan and political on multiple sides.

00:28:52.420 But his comments publicly about gain-of-function research and the difference between what he has funded and what others have funded or what others have talked about is less than honest and less than forthright.

00:29:05.880 And it is the case that it is almost certainly not true that there's any connection between the stuff that Fauci was funding to the tune of what, like $200,000, $250,000.

00:29:15.700 It's very unlikely that that is what caused the pandemic.

00:29:19.680 But if you were more candid about this from the outset, this wouldn't be an issue.

00:29:25.120 It's too complicated.

00:29:26.080 Because you're a powerful active operator now.

00:29:28.320 The gain-of-function stuff was too Byzantine and complicated for people to really get upset at him for.

00:29:33.720 Because, you know, what money went where and what does gain-of-function even mean?

00:29:38.040 So, I mean, he kind of skated on that one in a lot of ways.

00:29:40.580 But, you know, and Rand Paul just looks like he's bullying Mr. Science.

00:29:43.720 I mean, that's how it's played.

00:29:44.960 But the science thing is weird because at what point are you Mr. Science?

00:29:50.420 Because the science, in quotes, has gotten things wrong, as it will.

00:29:54.980 Because what is science?

00:29:56.260 It is not a thing.

00:29:57.080 It is a process of discovery.

00:29:59.080 And in that process of discovery, things change.

00:30:01.980 You know, facts change.

00:30:03.880 You know, ideas change when numbers come through.

00:30:05.780 So, like, if he says at one point, you know, I am Mr. Science.

00:30:10.640 Go to Chinatown and just, you know, be nice to everybody.

00:30:14.060 Don't panic about this stuff.

00:30:15.900 Don't wear masks.

00:30:17.100 Masks can't help you.

00:30:17.860 Masks cannot help you.

00:30:18.940 I mean, what are the things?

00:30:20.240 When are you Mr. Science and when are you not?

00:30:22.900 I think it's unbelievably manipulative to actually say that there is one thing called science and I am the representative of it.

00:30:30.120 And if you question that, you're somebody that hates science.

00:30:33.340 There's a lot of this around, particularly in this city and people that I know, that wields science as this kind of, you know, talismanic thing that I believe in it and you don't.

00:30:42.160 It's that simple.

00:30:43.260 And if you believed in science, then all of this would go away.

00:30:46.280 That's, it's simply not true, number one.

00:30:49.360 And it's just implausible in almost every possible, you know, iteration of the way he talks about this.

00:30:54.560 The CDC about 10, 15 years ago came out with a document of what to do during a pandemic.

00:30:59.940 And one of the biggest underlying resolutions of it was the public messaging has to be key.

00:31:07.080 Explain what you know in a timely and honest fashion, including what you don't know.

00:31:11.940 That is so important.

00:31:13.980 That just hasn't happened here.

00:31:15.680 When Donald Trump was president and he was doing the daily press conference, that didn't help that process at all.

00:31:22.000 But Tony Fauci hasn't helped either.

00:31:23.820 Why is he talking about himself, by the way?

00:31:26.540 Is that his job is to, like, reflect on his role in the politics?

00:31:32.360 No, it's actually not.

00:31:33.580 We should be.

00:31:34.120 And also, why are we going to him about lockdowns anyways?

00:31:38.120 That is not a science.

00:31:39.760 That is a public policy thing of which he might have something to say.

00:31:43.240 But I want to hear him come up with a scientific measurement of how these lockdown things happened.

00:31:49.340 And did they work?

00:31:50.140 Did they not?

00:31:50.600 In Sweden, did they not?

00:31:51.460 That's not what we're hearing.

00:31:52.500 Yeah, that's not what we get from Mr. Science.

00:31:54.340 We get from like, oh, we have to prepare for the worst.

00:31:57.020 That's not science.

00:31:57.960 January 6th was pretty bad.

00:31:59.960 It's one thing to have a politician in office.

00:32:03.980 We're used to this.

00:32:04.800 Who is a partisan hack, who we understand at heart really kind of hates half the country.

00:32:09.100 Like, I think we've had a lot of those recently.

00:32:12.740 But it's another thing to have our public health leader.

00:32:15.440 I mean, he's the face of public health, at least in the United States, be so dismissive

00:32:19.740 of the millions of Americans out there who have questions about his messaging and to raise the

00:32:24.500 January 6th thing.

00:32:25.600 You know, to me, I was like, talk about pressing political buttons that you don't need to press

00:32:30.120 Fauci.

00:32:31.240 He's gotten a little too offended, I guess, by Ted Cruz and the attacks on him.

00:32:35.000 But he needs to shift into a lower gear if he wants the right half of the country to listen

00:32:39.940 to him at all anymore anymore.

00:32:42.900 And they do matter.

00:32:44.440 They do matter from his fear, public health.

00:32:48.220 I mean, a reasonable response to Ted Cruz suggesting you ought to be put in jail and

00:32:52.580 prosecuted from someone in Fauci's position is, listen, I'm not going to politicize this.

00:32:57.540 This isn't about me.

00:32:58.860 My job is to give you the best possible information I can about this pandemic.

00:33:03.620 And if you have questions about that, I'm happy to answer them.

00:33:06.080 I can understand how someone might take this very personal, personally, and make this about

00:33:10.780 themselves in that context.

00:33:11.860 But once that starts to happen, your boss, maybe president of the United States, someone

00:33:16.760 ought to weigh in and say, hey, you know what?

00:33:19.180 This isn't how we ought to be doing public health at the federal level.

00:33:22.940 It just isn't.

00:33:23.840 This is too important.

00:33:24.640 That answer was so good, Camille.

00:33:25.780 You should call him or let's send him this segment.

00:33:28.980 Instead, it's, I am science.

00:33:32.060 I don't know what he thinks about January 6th.

00:33:35.520 But I like him.

00:33:38.100 Okay.

00:33:38.540 I wanted to ask, I think it's you, Matt, who had an article recently about the affinity

00:33:44.440 groups in the New York City schools, right?

00:33:46.860 Was it you?

00:33:47.800 Yeah.

00:33:48.440 I read it and I was horrified, but also not surprised, right?

00:33:51.560 Now they're doing, or they did in the New York City public schools, or at least one of

00:33:55.320 them, this sort of lower Manhattan community middle school, which is public in the highly

00:34:00.580 coveted district two affinity groups to kick off the day.

00:34:05.020 And so you tell me what they, what they thought was a good way of promoting diversity amongst

00:34:08.680 children, anti-racism as it's called.

00:34:11.540 So in first period, you stand up and you get to choose which affinity group you belong to.

00:34:16.420 And these are groups that you can go and talk and feel like in both a safe and brave way.

00:34:21.460 I'm using their language, um, talk about issues about cultural identity and racism in this

00:34:26.400 country.

00:34:26.660 So you got to choose, um, uh, that you can go into the Asian group.

00:34:30.880 Uh, you can go into the whites, uh, group over here.

00:34:34.840 Uh, you can go to this special group called African-American and Hispanic.

00:34:39.000 They're one group.

00:34:40.080 It's the, we call the David Ortiz group over here, um, there's multi-racial.

00:34:46.600 So David, is he multi-racial?

00:34:48.120 I saw you get to choose.

00:34:49.660 And then there's the, I don't really want to choose group.

00:34:52.120 Um, it's also called racist.

00:34:56.620 And, uh, what is, what's brilliant about it is that, um, people are genuinely baffled.

00:35:03.140 This came, this became a subject of, of at least small controversy, you know, it's written

00:35:07.060 up in the tabloids in New York.

00:35:09.000 Um, and the people who are, are, uh, promoting this, um, the, the district of, uh, or the

00:35:15.540 department of education in New York said, you know, this is, this is a two day celebration.

00:35:19.360 This is an opportunity for a celebration to wake up in the morning.

00:35:22.860 And in the name of fighting segregation, just segregate yourself in these groups that

00:35:27.700 don't really necessarily mean much of anything.

00:35:29.940 I mean, if you think about what is, what is a more common, uh, if you were going to do

00:35:34.640 this and I won't wouldn't.

00:35:36.340 And, and, and, and I, you know, because of the influence of Camille, I just opt out of,

00:35:40.400 of racial categories whenever given the, uh, the option to, but if you're going to lump

00:35:44.680 together people, what would be a more unifying thing?

00:35:46.620 If you are a off the boat immigrant from any country, you have more in common with the off

00:35:51.160 the boat immigrants from all the other country than you do about what color of skin you have.

00:35:54.900 My God, it's that it's, it's so much more obvious, but the way that Americans talk about

00:35:59.280 and the way that sort of race industry talks about this and sorts people into these affinity

00:36:03.240 groups, which is bananas to, I would guess 90% of the country to them.

00:36:08.660 It makes total sense.

00:36:09.700 We're creating safe spaces for people to talk about races.

00:36:12.100 And that's the thing.

00:36:12.880 This is the thing that people tend not to notice when just they're outraged by it and they

00:36:16.660 should be outraged by it, but there's a purpose to this.

00:36:19.300 And one of the purposes to this is what you said, you're quoting them, um, saying we're

00:36:24.260 segregating people into these affinity groups, uh, so they can be brave and safe.

00:36:28.900 What is the presumption there?

00:36:30.020 The presumption is if you don't do this, people are wandering around New York city, public schools,

00:36:34.980 not a very right-wing place feeling unsafe and not very brave because they're being set

00:36:39.960 upon because of their race.

00:36:41.200 So it establishes this thing that doesn't exist and solves it.

00:36:45.480 I mean, it is, it is like Orwellian in the actual sense of the word Orwell of, you know,

00:36:50.520 1984 creating problems out of whole cloth and then having big brothers.

00:36:54.260 It's absolutely ridiculous.

00:36:55.480 If people do feel racially oppressed in New York city, generally speaking, they probably

00:37:00.740 need therapy.

00:37:01.780 Like that's, that's the truth, but more than that.

00:37:04.820 And it's, it's worth like coming back to this all the time.

00:37:07.580 We were having the conversation about the pandemic and about all of the politicization

00:37:10.780 of everything.

00:37:11.280 And what actually matters is people's health.

00:37:13.360 And when we're talking about the schools, what actually matters is whether or not these

00:37:16.580 kids are learning, whether or not the schools are at all any damn good.

00:37:20.660 And there are so many ways in which these schools have been failing these kids for now going

00:37:25.900 on two years in the midst of this pandemic, kids like at home schools closing for mental

00:37:31.760 health breaks, not taking into consideration that the best thing that they could possibly

00:37:35.940 do for mental health or the mental health of the parents.

00:37:38.300 And likely the students is one stop segregating them on the basis of race.

00:37:42.580 I thought we figured that out.

00:37:43.820 And sit there in class and allow them to learn things.

00:37:47.580 Stop shaming them.

00:37:49.020 Stop screwing up with them, screwing with the math curriculum for the purposes of racial equity.

00:37:54.120 Do the things that you know are absolutely essential.

00:37:56.860 Focus on the universe of things kids ought to be learning in K through 12 and stop the insanity.

00:38:03.140 But instead, all of this garbage is a cover for people who have been inept and who have

00:38:09.120 been derelict in their duties when it comes to educating their children.

00:38:12.020 And that is, that really is the thing that we have to focus on with respect to the culture

00:38:16.500 wars.

00:38:16.880 The reality is that so much of this insanity is going to fail in much the same way that

00:38:22.100 DARE, the program to eradicate drugs in public schools and drug addiction, did not work.

00:38:28.180 The critical race theory phenomena is not going to inspire a race war.

00:38:34.380 What sane people who see this garbage for what it is need to do is recognize that deficiency

00:38:40.300 and say, take the moral high ground here and say, the thing we ought to be prioritizing

00:38:44.600 is education.

00:38:46.440 What are kids learning?

00:38:47.820 What are the standardized testing results look like?

00:38:50.420 In most of the places that are focusing on this stuff in obscene ways, they aren't doing

00:38:54.640 great.

00:38:55.080 No, they haven't been doing great for a very long time.

00:38:57.020 And they just want to attribute it all to systemic racism as opposed to, let's take

00:39:01.120 a look at our teachers and our unions and how we allow, you know, passing of the trash

00:39:04.200 when it comes to bad teachers and so on.

00:39:05.820 You know, I looked at this and I thought, okay, first of all, the way they're grouping

00:39:09.340 the kids, it comes straight out of the Democratic National Committee, you know, like the Hispanics

00:39:14.240 with the black kids.

00:39:15.600 That's exactly how they want people to vote.

00:39:17.260 That's why they're so upset that Hispanics are slipping away, right?

00:39:19.520 When they went for Trump down in Texas and they were like, no, no, no, Hispanic, you're

00:39:23.300 black adjacent.

00:39:24.000 You're not white adjacent, right?

00:39:25.080 But if you did go for Trump, then you're white adjacent.

00:39:27.020 But they're like, come back, come back to the minority group that we can control with

00:39:30.200 the Democratic Party.

00:39:31.680 And the other thing I thought was, okay, great.

00:39:33.260 I'd love to walk around and just be like a little, you know, bird listening to the conversations

00:39:37.880 of the kids in the affinity groups.

00:39:39.680 I guarantee you, if you have a conversation in the Hispanic and the African-American group

00:39:44.640 that goes like this, what's it like to be, you know, a person of color?

00:39:47.500 I feel strong.

00:39:49.320 I feel empowered.

00:39:50.380 I feel smart.

00:39:51.240 I feel special.

00:39:52.120 They'd be like, yes, it's working.

00:39:53.820 You heard that same conversation in the Asian or the white group.

00:39:56.880 The school would shut down.

00:39:58.380 Like, what?

00:40:00.980 Oh, my God.

00:40:02.360 We're going to proud to be white.

00:40:03.520 You might even say I have a type of white pride.

00:40:06.120 I'm not going to get over well.

00:40:07.500 And it shouldn't go over well, by the way.

00:40:08.980 You told me.

00:40:10.240 You told me to group by race and talk about what it's like, right?

00:40:12.760 I mean, there is nothing on earth more racist than this idea that Hispanics are one contiguous

00:40:19.540 unit, that there's no difference between Mexicans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and people from South

00:40:25.260 America now being lumped into this.

00:40:27.020 You know, somebody who's the ambassador to Spain's daughter is the same as somebody who

00:40:31.520 grew up on the Hamilton Heights in the Puerto Rican neighborhood.

00:40:34.860 That's the flattening of this stuff, which is so dumb.

00:40:37.620 But I have to get one thing off my chest because I am a little too annoyed by this.

00:40:41.300 We really have to destroy this cult of mental health.

00:40:44.300 And what I mean by that, to be clear, is that this overuse and the misuse of it, so it allows

00:40:50.120 people to do crazy things.

00:40:51.620 So if you say speech is violence, for instance, you don't like violence.

00:40:55.780 So, you know, nobody wants to say I'm against free speech.

00:40:57.880 That's a bad thing.

00:40:58.660 So you say it's violence because people can be against violence.

00:41:01.620 This is the same thing in these public schools.

00:41:03.080 They say like, oh, it's a mental health issue.

00:41:05.000 We need a mental health break.

00:41:06.120 You oppose mental health.

00:41:07.240 I mean, look, the other day, best buy.

00:41:09.360 Best buy told people they can have a mental health day because of the verdict in the

00:41:13.920 Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

00:41:15.720 No.

00:41:16.160 I'm trying to get a hard drive.

00:41:18.280 What are you talking about?

00:41:19.820 You're sad?

00:41:21.340 Like, what is this?

00:41:22.260 Did you get a day back on?

00:41:24.100 Did you have to work double time because of the Arbery verdict?

00:41:26.220 Was it a good verdict?

00:41:26.840 I don't understand this stuff at all.

00:41:29.040 Relax.

00:41:30.280 Your mental health is fine.

00:41:31.520 You're making mine horrible.

00:41:33.580 I'm losing my mind, as you can see.

00:41:34.860 You guys are making all of ours better.

00:41:36.540 Quick break.

00:41:37.180 Then we'll get back with this Democratic meeting.

00:41:39.040 Don't go anywhere.

00:41:40.420 And don't forget, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph

00:41:43.720 Channel, 111 every weekday at noon east.

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00:41:49.680 slash Megyn Kelly.

00:41:50.680 If you prefer an audio podcast, subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher

00:41:55.260 or wherever you get your podcasts for free.

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00:42:02.120 So if you want to send me a message, go on over there.

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00:42:06.520 You could be the one to get us over to 22,000.

00:42:09.680 Look forward to reading.

00:42:13.920 All right.

00:42:17.860 So before we get to the Dems, there's an ad.

00:42:21.360 It's a Norwegian ad.

00:42:22.860 And it's making headlines because in it, they make Santa gay.

00:42:29.300 So Santa's not only gay, but he kisses another man.

00:42:33.360 I'm going to play it.

00:42:34.040 And if you want to go to YouTube later, you'll be able to watch it.

00:42:35.980 I just watch it for the first time.

00:42:37.140 And I say it's very awkward.

00:42:39.220 And it's an ad, gentlemen, for the postal service.

00:42:45.040 People listening on Sirius XM, it shows Santa and he's looking at a man in a suit and they've

00:42:51.240 got loving eyes.

00:42:52.260 They're getting closer.

00:42:53.340 Their lips are getting closer, closer.

00:42:54.660 They're cocking their heads to the right and to the left, respectively.

00:42:57.020 And now they're kissing.

00:42:58.640 They're making out.

00:42:59.880 They clearly love each other.

00:43:01.200 And my question to you guys is, two, one, why is this necessary?

00:43:04.560 And two, what the hell happened to Mrs. Claus?

00:43:07.440 This is bullshit.

00:43:09.400 I mean, that's the most Norwegian thing I've ever seen, by the way.

00:43:12.200 Because the face of the postal service, as someone who lived in Sweden, they will take

00:43:15.580 any opportunity to just make characters gay.

00:43:18.060 They will?

00:43:19.420 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:43:20.240 Santa is nice as he likes this man.

00:43:23.120 I thought, first of all, that it was Wilford Brimley making out with that guy.

00:43:26.000 But apparently he has diabetes and died.

00:43:28.200 But yeah, that is the most insane thing ever.

00:43:30.740 Because it's about the postal service.

00:43:32.840 Yeah.

00:43:33.080 What is the connection there?

00:43:34.360 It's like a long production.

00:43:36.060 I mean, it is an intense thing where they're following this man and his relationship with

00:43:40.760 Santa as it falls over the course of years.

00:43:43.200 It is so bizarre.

00:43:45.160 So is he cheating on Mrs. Claus with this random Norwegian thing?

00:43:47.640 We don't know.

00:43:48.460 There's no mention of Mrs. Claus.

00:43:49.960 But you know what?

00:43:50.740 The Claus's have a notoriously open relationship.

00:43:52.760 Open relationship, yeah.

00:43:53.840 It's been a source of scandal for some time.

00:43:56.800 Please let the next one be Mrs. Claus with the pool boy, for the love of God, if there's

00:44:00.300 justice in this world.

00:44:01.180 I want to direct everyone's attention to the, was it the 1972-ish?

00:44:07.860 Was it Santa Claus is Coming to Town?

00:44:09.380 There's one in which it's young Kris Kringle and young Mrs. Claus.

00:44:13.700 Yes, it is.

00:44:14.280 Jessica.

00:44:15.420 Jessica.

00:44:16.060 And she has a breakthrough kind of drug and sex moment.

00:44:20.580 What?

00:44:20.940 Like she sees the light.

00:44:22.220 What?

00:44:22.600 The rainbows.

00:44:24.980 I can sing the song.

00:44:26.420 I watch it all the time.

00:44:27.020 Megan's got that on her phone.

00:44:28.600 She's incredible.

00:44:29.800 You may have heard I'm obsessed with Santa issues.

00:44:31.820 That's incredible.

00:44:34.200 Okay.

00:44:34.980 I had to get that in.

00:44:36.000 It was too good.

00:44:36.420 Now, the Democrats are apparently in a panic.

00:44:38.880 They had a big meeting, Third Way, which is described as a center-left group, and its

00:44:43.180 pollsters met and report bad news for us.

00:44:46.540 The Democrat band is broken.

00:44:48.240 The infrastructure bill is not fixing it.

00:44:50.740 They had this meeting after the Virginia losses.

00:44:52.980 They looked at a focus group at polling.

00:44:55.060 The voters couldn't name anything that they had done.

00:44:57.360 They said the infrastructure spending bill, it's too late.

00:45:01.600 One strategist said we're effed.

00:45:03.340 This guy advises major donors.

00:45:04.800 Love this quote from Megan Jones, former Harry Reid advisor and Nevada-based dam consultant.

00:45:10.840 Her brother recently told her that the Build Back Better plan sounds like a fucking fitness

00:45:15.460 plan.

00:45:16.000 Nobody knows what it is.

00:45:16.980 That is great.

00:45:21.020 That is amazing.

00:45:22.860 Hire that one.

00:45:23.480 Are they right to panic?

00:45:25.820 Wow.

00:45:26.580 Oh, my God.

00:45:27.240 Are they?

00:45:27.480 Yes.

00:45:27.940 I mean, they're right to panic.

00:45:29.440 And I never thought I would say this, you know, 20 years ago, advising the Democratic

00:45:33.440 Party to go get the dregs of the Clinton administration advisors, because they're the only ones that

00:45:39.420 are actually making any sense.

00:45:40.540 I mean, this is, of course, an era that was an era of free trade and ending welfare, as

00:45:44.500 we know it, et cetera.

00:45:45.600 But it's, you know, James Carville, every time his little turtle head pops up, he's all

00:45:50.720 making sense about the faculty lounge.

00:45:53.060 If you say, like, you know, we can't use the language of the faculty lounge, which is

00:45:56.860 true, which is the kind of, you know, Nicole Hannah-Jones sort of thing.

00:45:59.880 And actually talk to people about this sort of average issues.

00:46:04.300 And this is why Republicans won in 2016, why they're doing well now amongst working class

00:46:08.040 voters.

00:46:08.560 Nobody, including Republicans, talked to or about working class voters for a very, very

00:46:12.680 long time.

00:46:13.360 And when Democrats are out there fighting these battles, you know, in the media sphere

00:46:17.780 of issues that have literally zero resonance to the average Democratic voter, you know, on

00:46:23.240 top of what Megan pointed out, is that people just can't point out what they have done.

00:46:26.980 It explains the cratering poll numbers and, you know, the media fell in love with AOC

00:46:31.400 and the squad.

00:46:32.360 And that is the wrong sort of direction for the party in the future if they want to win.

00:46:37.140 Biden won because of independents who were sick of Trump and sick of like the tumult around

00:46:42.400 it.

00:46:42.940 Independents didn't vote for Biden.

00:46:44.440 That's also third party voters who voted a lot for third parties in 2016.

00:46:48.200 And they came back to major parties in 2020.

00:46:50.640 They voted for him not so that he would do transformative $5 trillion spending, you know, whatever.

00:46:56.980 On party line, you know, tiebreaker votes.

00:47:01.300 That's not why.

00:47:01.660 Try doing that.

00:47:02.220 Try doing that spending and then lock us down again and see how that goes in the next election.

00:47:07.000 Guys, always such a pleasure.

00:47:08.560 You guys are so fun.

00:47:09.740 Michael, Matt, Camille, to be continued, I hope.

00:47:12.500 Coming up, Bo Snurdly, James Golden.

00:47:15.920 This is actual name, but we know him better as Bo on Rush Limbaugh's legacy.

00:47:20.260 Don't go away.

00:47:20.680 Joining me now, James Golden.

00:47:28.740 He is here to discuss his new book, Rush on the Radio, a tribute from his sidekick for

00:47:34.880 30 years.

00:47:36.040 Think about that.

00:47:37.340 Millions, millions of Americans loved Rush Limbaugh, the man with the golden mic, the man

00:47:41.720 who completely invented talk radio.

00:47:44.000 He really did.

00:47:44.620 But to really know Rush was to understand the true generosity of a man with insane, insane

00:47:50.100 natural talent and the ability to captivate listeners for decades.

00:47:54.580 Only one person had the truly best seat in the house, and that is James Bo Snurdly Golden.

00:48:00.400 Welcome, James.

00:48:01.040 Thanks so much for being here.

00:48:02.600 Oh, Megan.

00:48:03.120 What a pleasure it is.

00:48:04.240 How are you today?

00:48:05.280 I'm good.

00:48:06.220 Boy, oh boy, did you have the best seat in the house.

00:48:08.260 And I love that this book captures Rush's, as we pointed out the intro, his generosity

00:48:13.700 and his kindness.

00:48:15.520 I know you experienced it.

00:48:17.000 I experienced it personally.

00:48:19.060 You're a you're a black man.

00:48:20.680 I'm a woman.

00:48:22.160 He was called racist.

00:48:23.440 He was called sexist.

00:48:24.960 His life said different.

00:48:27.320 People took comedy bits and his irreverence for anyone and everyone.

00:48:31.980 Right.

00:48:32.440 And tried to turn that to make him into this monstrous figure.

00:48:36.400 But the way he actually treated people was, as his microphone, golden.

00:48:42.880 Yeah.

00:48:43.060 You know, Rush was just such a unique human being on so many different levels.

00:48:49.040 I and Megan, you're so right.

00:48:51.080 Being around somebody for decades, you really do get a chance to see who they are.

00:48:56.680 And when when as when the cameras are off, when the microphone is off, you get to see

00:49:01.720 them, you get to know them.

00:49:02.900 I can tell you that every single day, regardless of whatever interaction it was, Rush was the

00:49:09.060 epitome of politeness, of kindness with people.

00:49:13.000 That's not to say, I mean, we all have our moments.

00:49:15.460 Yeah, you do something that would would would harm his show.

00:49:19.040 He'd throw you under the bus pretty quick.

00:49:20.660 If you if you but but but but what a generous, wonderful human being he was generous.

00:49:29.960 Some of the stories of his generosity is still emerging because one of the things that he

00:49:34.840 insisted was that people not talk about it.

00:49:38.360 You know, he would do something and he said he didn't want the credit for it.

00:49:41.460 He would just do it because it was he felt it was the right thing to do.

00:49:45.300 And in terms of his kindness, look, we had a staff of about 24, 25 people, Megan, on the

00:49:54.920 everyday staff.

00:49:56.440 And most of the people that were with us were there for decades, not for a year or two,

00:50:01.600 but for decades.

00:50:02.420 Why?

00:50:03.240 Because Rush hired people based on their merit, number one, and then he let them do their

00:50:09.540 jobs.

00:50:10.140 We didn't have a lot of meetings.

00:50:11.540 We didn't have a lot of back and forth.

00:50:12.980 He just hired people, let them do their jobs.

00:50:15.600 And like me, I say anybody on our staff could have written the book because we all had this

00:50:21.720 in common.

00:50:22.540 We love Rush very deeply as a human being, not liked our boss.

00:50:28.180 No, we loved our boss.

00:50:30.380 We love the man and we wanted to please him.

00:50:33.960 We wanted to be excellent.

00:50:35.740 He set a bar for excellence and we all strove to meet it every day.

00:50:41.000 And that was what working with him was like.

00:50:43.760 He was fallible as any man or woman is.

00:50:48.460 And of course, his critics want to use, weirdly, things like his drug addiction against him.

00:50:53.580 I mean, if it were a liberal, they would never mock one's drug addiction because it was Rush

00:50:57.280 Limbaugh.

00:50:57.740 People like Joy Behar thought that would be fair game to just try to completely delegitimize

00:51:02.740 him.

00:51:03.300 But he said, and I learned this from your book, he loved not being addicted to drugs,

00:51:10.420 but he thought it was a gift.

00:51:12.040 And the rehab that he went to to get over the oxy, it was Oxycontin, I think, addiction,

00:51:17.560 he thought was directly from God.

00:51:19.860 Can you talk about that?

00:51:20.760 Well, let's start with where it started.

00:51:25.020 It started because he was in physical pain.

00:51:28.360 He had a back surgery.

00:51:30.440 Look, I remember these days so well, Megan.

00:51:32.600 He did some shows on the West Coast at a remote radio station, and he could not even sit down

00:51:39.020 for the shows because his back was in such bad shape at the moment.

00:51:43.880 So he had surgery to correct it.

00:51:46.140 The surgery didn't work.

00:51:47.600 How many people have that story and know that story?

00:51:50.760 So to help mitigate the pain, his doctors prescribe pain medication.

00:51:57.320 What happens when you are in pain that doesn't stop and there's no one really doing a very

00:52:03.260 serious pain management regime on you?

00:52:06.420 Most people get addicted to the drug, and that's what happened to Rush.

00:52:10.740 When it became apparent that he was addicted and that he had to stop, he stopped the behavior,

00:52:17.960 and he didn't relapse and relapse and go back and relapse.

00:52:21.300 He stopped.

00:52:22.720 But it also, during the time that he was in rehab, he said that it really did allow him

00:52:29.600 to understand so much more about himself and some of the ancillary reasons why he was using

00:52:36.840 the drugs as well as the pain.

00:52:38.140 And that's why he viewed it as a gift.

00:52:41.260 And I think it's a remarkable testament.

00:52:45.300 Anybody that's been addicted to anything knows how hard an addiction is to break.

00:52:50.960 He broke that addiction, never went back to it.

00:52:54.600 And that was a willpower for him.

00:52:57.940 And it was strong willpower.

00:52:59.640 Look, I've had my own addiction issues over the years with cigarettes.

00:53:02.620 You know, you quit, you go back.

00:53:03.880 You quit, you go back.

00:53:05.360 It's very, addictions are very hard.

00:53:07.640 And so many Americans addicted.

00:53:09.660 Pain medications, particularly, because they are given so freely to combat pain, have become

00:53:16.000 a real problem in most American households.

00:53:19.400 We know somebody in our family, our immediate family, our distant family, or our circle of

00:53:25.320 friends that has had issues with pain and pain addiction.

00:53:29.380 That's right.

00:53:29.820 And especially like Rush had, you know, back in the 90s, and we've had this in my own family,

00:53:35.320 when you were becoming addicted to Oxycontin or an opioid, you didn't know that you were

00:53:41.380 part of a sea of millions across the country that was being overprescribed these drugs and

00:53:47.360 told that they were not nearly as addictive as they turned out to be.

00:53:51.780 And so, you know, for somebody as smart, as rich, as famous as Rush to, you know, talk

00:53:58.800 about that, to be an example of it, I think helped a lot of people ultimately.

00:54:02.720 And that's, I don't know, if you believe in a God that sort of guides our collective lives,

00:54:06.420 you could see why he would make somebody like that, you know, a public figure, the face of

00:54:11.520 it for a time, just to let other people know they're not alone.

00:54:14.360 Um, I said in the intro, he basically invented talk radio.

00:54:17.940 I mean, he, it existed before Rush, but there in that field, there's Rush Limbaugh, and then

00:54:24.400 there's everybody else.

00:54:26.400 Rush had a unique talent.

00:54:28.340 He came prepared when he was fired multiple times for trying to be the person that he wanted

00:54:35.720 to be on the air for injecting his personality when program directors didn't want the personality

00:54:42.600 injected, strong about his own ideas of what radio should be.

00:54:50.240 He left radio for a while and went to work for the Kansas City Royals.

00:54:55.060 He decided he was going to give radio one more shot.

00:54:58.760 And when that opportunity came, it was in Sacramento for him.

00:55:03.080 He took it and he, finally, he was given the license to just be himself, to do what he

00:55:10.580 wanted to do.

00:55:11.540 And the show exploded in Sacramento.

00:55:14.420 And that's when, um, Ed McLaughlin and his other broadcast, uh, partners that saw what

00:55:21.840 was taking place in that show decided this is a show that we want to syndicate.

00:55:25.720 Now, Megan, in radio, one of the rules, quote unquote, rules at the time was, you don't put

00:55:31.020 a syndicated program on in midday because no one is going to really listen to it.

00:55:37.220 Within months of that show being on the air, the number of stations started multiplying like

00:55:44.320 crazy.

00:55:45.260 The number of listeners started growing.

00:55:46.960 Growing first a million, then three, then five, five million a week up until the time

00:55:54.720 rush died.

00:55:55.900 The show was still growing 33 years later.

00:55:59.260 There was still new audience coming in.

00:56:02.980 It was a remarkable feat that nobody in our radio professional.

00:56:08.520 We have some great people in talk radio, great people with lots of talent.

00:56:13.560 And by the way, you're one of them now.

00:56:17.000 That's right.

00:56:17.460 I crossed over.

00:56:19.440 Yes.

00:56:21.300 Yes.

00:56:21.980 With immense talent, but nobody could do, could do radio like Rush did.

00:56:27.560 He understood every single nuance that a radio performer, because it is a performance.

00:56:33.920 You're on a radio stage.

00:56:35.100 You're there talking to a microphone, maybe two or three people in the room looking at

00:56:39.700 you while you're doing it.

00:56:40.860 And with now with cameras, with now millions of people, perhaps looking, but he knew every

00:56:48.420 element of that business.

00:56:50.160 He could make, and even those of us on the staff joke about this, how he can make almost

00:56:55.260 anything, the most mundane topic that he found interesting.

00:57:00.180 He could persuade you that it was interesting for you.

00:57:04.160 That's right.

00:57:04.740 That's right.

00:57:05.560 Just a remarkable talent.

00:57:07.440 As he used to say, I was born to host and you were born to listen.

00:57:10.880 Well, he used to say it in jest, but I really do believe, going back to what you said about

00:57:15.600 God preparing you for things in your life.

00:57:18.040 God gave him the tools to be as persuasive as he was and to have that, his tool set shine

00:57:25.900 uniquely.

00:57:26.380 Doug and I went down there and visited Rush a couple of times at his home and saw him

00:57:34.440 in front of a group of people and then on his marriage to Catherine.

00:57:38.480 And one thing I can tell you, the audience, about Rush, you've seen it many times, James,

00:57:42.940 is whereas some of us, we can get up in front of a crowd and we can handle speaking in front

00:57:48.280 of a crowd, may not love it, you watch Rush Limbaugh do it and you do realize the difference

00:57:54.440 between an introvert and an extrovert.

00:57:57.080 He thrived on it.

00:57:59.300 He came alive in front of people.

00:58:02.320 He, you know, his chest would puff out and his energy would shoot up and his body language

00:58:06.560 got big.

00:58:07.280 And you just saw this larger than life figure rally the troops to do anything.

00:58:12.720 You were willing to do anything.

00:58:14.220 Whatever he wanted you to do, you would do it.

00:58:15.780 Because he was, in a way, a great salesman for whatever the cause was.

00:58:20.160 But it was inspirational as a matter of public speaking.

00:58:23.260 You know, for me as a public figure, I was like, this is it.

00:58:26.780 He's got it.

00:58:29.480 Yeah.

00:58:30.020 And that's something no one can teach you.

00:58:32.320 You either have it, that thing, or you don't.

00:58:35.440 No one can teach you how to not have butterflies in your stomach when you're crooked or not have

00:58:39.800 it.

00:58:40.260 No one can teach you how to read an audience, to see and make adjustments.

00:58:45.780 To how you're speaking or to whether the audience is absorbing what you're saying or not.

00:58:52.080 Those are all the things that he could do.

00:58:54.340 He could be in an audience situation, really understand what it is that he needed to do to

00:59:00.840 be persuasive.

00:59:02.560 And he would do that.

00:59:04.000 And he was also so quick-witted.

00:59:07.100 But see, Megan, look, you know this, both in your broadcast career, but I suspect, Megan,

00:59:13.300 that you know this even from your career in the law.

00:59:17.400 None of that comes without preparation.

00:59:19.980 That's right.

00:59:20.360 All those hours, by yourself, reading, preparing, becoming more knowledgeable about your subject

00:59:27.560 matter.

00:59:28.600 Maybe even reading things and you're not quite sure how it's going to be used someday.

00:59:33.500 All of that counts.

00:59:35.280 Because in those moments, you draw on everything that you innately know in that moment.

00:59:43.980 And that's what West was able to do extremely well.

00:59:46.720 And he never stopped preparing for a show.

00:59:48.920 He never handed off those duties to anyone else.

00:59:51.780 He spent hours every single day that he did a radio show.

00:59:56.980 He spent hours and hours preparing for it.

01:00:00.320 Yeah.

01:00:00.780 And he, I mean, he's, he talked about how he understood people loved him.

01:00:04.980 His audience loved him.

01:00:06.200 He said it was surpassed only by his love for his audience.

01:00:09.680 But I would say it was, it must've been damn near equal because one of the thoughts, I

01:00:15.000 had forgotten about this, James, but tell us about what happened when they tried to, to

01:00:20.780 boycott Rush.

01:00:21.880 It was the Florida Orange Juice Commission that was, that was running, I guess they spent

01:00:26.980 a million dollars advertising its product on, on Rush's program.

01:00:32.180 And then a group of feminists got upset and tell us what happened.

01:00:36.060 Now, this was remarkable because this was early on in the program.

01:00:40.820 This is while the program was still in quote unquote, its infancy.

01:00:44.980 The Florida Orange Juice Commission was the first million dollar sponsor to the program,

01:00:51.840 which was a big deal.

01:00:54.160 They came up, they had meetings, they had decided, okay, this, we want to advertise on

01:00:58.540 the show.

01:00:59.380 They did it.

01:01:00.360 So before the advertising started, Patricia Ireland and what later Rush would call the

01:01:09.300 NAGS, the National Association of Gals, that was the National Organization of Women, decided

01:01:15.700 that they were going to run a quote unquote nationwide boycott on Florida orange juice.

01:01:21.340 They went to Florida in an attempt to begin the rally.

01:01:27.280 They were surprised because what they were met with were people, Rush Limbaugh fans, who

01:01:35.500 had beat them to their location and had bought out every single container of orange juice in

01:01:43.440 the store that they were holding their boycott.

01:01:46.460 Where they went after that.

01:01:48.360 They were met with Rush Limbaugh fans, who cleaned the shelves of orange juice in support.

01:01:56.300 I think this was important because this was also the first time that I think we saw that

01:02:01.400 the left was hollow.

01:02:05.080 This idea, you know, they can show up with 12 people and you get national news coverage.

01:02:10.240 When it became apparent that they were being outnumbered by hundreds of people who were coming

01:02:19.220 to support Rush, all of a sudden, the news coverage on that story stopped cold.

01:02:27.020 Did not want the leftists that run much of the mainstream media did not want to see their

01:02:36.180 ideological allies in the National Organization of Women embarrassed as thoroughly as they

01:02:43.840 were embarrassed by that so-called boycott?

01:02:47.680 It was hilarious.

01:02:48.940 And Rush had a lot of fun with it on the air.

01:02:51.160 You know, I feel like it was Dave Rubin who said in a tweet during Trump, and I was like,

01:02:56.460 this is so good.

01:02:57.200 This is this really sums it up.

01:02:58.420 He said, Trump taught Republicans how to fight.

01:03:02.200 And that is true.

01:03:03.640 You know, that is one of the reasons why so many Republicans love Trump.

01:03:06.940 He didn't roll over.

01:03:08.560 Brett Kavanaugh is the best example of it.

01:03:10.160 You know, what other what other president would have stood by Brett Kavanaugh?

01:03:15.460 And the fact that Trump did it allowed the process to play out in a way that totally exonerated

01:03:19.540 Brett Kavanaugh.

01:03:20.260 You know, otherwise he would have skulked away his reputation ruined his Supreme Court dreams

01:03:24.500 dashed and Trump would have replaced him with some generic other candidate.

01:03:28.440 But only Trump, I really think, had the guts to say no.

01:03:31.300 He had the guts to fight.

01:03:33.260 Rush Limbaugh did the same.

01:03:35.140 He he fought.

01:03:36.140 He didn't.

01:03:36.560 It took so much.

01:03:37.480 Like, Rush would not just lie down if you came for him.

01:03:40.120 He would fight.

01:03:41.480 And I just wonder if you think his Rush was one of the people he he didn't really endorse

01:03:46.540 Trump early, but he he kept the door open for him.

01:03:49.380 He wasn't one of those early people to be like, no, never screw this guy.

01:03:52.720 He's terrible at a time when most of the Republican Party was saying that.

01:03:56.880 So how did you do you think it was that connection?

01:03:59.480 You know, the appreciation of a fighter, of an outsider, of somebody who wasn't like,

01:04:03.260 what do you think made Rush be able to see the potential of Trump when virtually no other

01:04:07.780 Republicans were seeing it?

01:04:09.600 Well, as always, you're quite perceptive.

01:04:11.860 You know, I can tell you just from some of the inside discussions that we would have

01:04:15.240 with Rush in the studio about it.

01:04:17.380 Not only was the door open for Trump, he was very, very cognizant of what was going on

01:04:23.960 in the Trump campaign.

01:04:25.360 And I do believe that he recognized those same qualities about Trump that he had himself.

01:04:31.300 And in fact, Rush actually said it.

01:04:33.000 He said he said, like me, the only person that can screw my career up is me.

01:04:42.080 Rush would say this all the time.

01:04:43.380 He said the mainstream media didn't make me, and therefore they can't break me.

01:04:49.020 The connection, Rush would say, that I have with my audience is the connection that was

01:04:54.780 established based on a trust between the audience and I.

01:04:58.040 And only I can destroy that.

01:04:59.280 And the same thing with Trump and his base of voters.

01:05:02.000 The voters that voted for Trump, the people that came off of Trump, Donald Trump, trusted

01:05:06.420 him, and by the way, they still do trust him, much to the chagrin of establishment Republicans

01:05:12.580 and Democrats.

01:05:14.100 There was a piece today I just read, another one of these endless pieces on how Donald

01:05:19.120 Trump is so awful for the Republican Party.

01:05:21.900 The Republican Party has never run like it has with Donald Trump.

01:05:26.280 And yet you still find these establishment types in the Republican Party and Democrat Party

01:05:30.420 who are still so engrossed in their Trump hate that they can't think of anything but that.

01:05:35.420 But it is the same kind of thing.

01:05:38.760 Rush had built a bond with his audience.

01:05:41.440 Donald Trump has built a bond with many people on the conservative side.

01:05:47.940 And by the way, on some Democrats, many Democrats.

01:05:52.500 He actually enlarged the tent for the Republican Party, something they've been saying they want

01:05:59.060 they've wanted for decades.

01:06:01.020 Donald Trump did it.

01:06:03.160 But the Republican establishment, they don't want to have any parts of it.

01:06:08.660 And this is the same Republican establishment that decade after decade, like the Democrats

01:06:14.780 keep promising Black folks that things are going to get better, things are going to get

01:06:17.940 better, just stick with us, we're your heroes, and nothing ever gets better.

01:06:22.020 Your last segment, by the way, dealing with education and what's going on with these failing

01:06:27.040 schools, that point, that is crystal clear to that point.

01:06:31.120 How for years and years, Democrats have claimed they're going to lead people to the promised

01:06:35.280 land, and instead they lead them into abject misery that's just sustained for decades.

01:06:41.300 Well, these Republicans have kind of done the same thing.

01:06:45.220 They've promised conservatives for years and years they're going to be pro-life, and yet

01:06:49.340 they bail on the pro-life movement.

01:06:51.140 They've promised Republicans that they're going to nominate conservatives, and yet what you

01:06:56.920 get is a bunch of milquetoast people on the course.

01:06:59.640 They've promised for years and years they would fix immigration.

01:07:02.880 When they were elected to power and they had the power, they did nothing.

01:07:06.440 Donald Trump actually came in and did what the voters did for the voters, what he said he

01:07:12.560 would.

01:07:12.860 Donald Trump, I think his biggest accomplishment is barely even talked about, in that he won

01:07:20.260 a trade war with China, and we did win a trade war with China, followed very quickly, by the

01:07:27.000 way, by the coronavirus, which threw the economy of the United States and the world into chaos.

01:07:33.040 But before that, the big story was the trade war with China, and Donald Trump had backed China

01:07:40.360 up into a corner over their theft of intellectual property, over their misusing the world currency

01:07:52.740 and devaluing their own currency when it wasn't necessary, and their unfair trade practices

01:07:58.940 with the United States.

01:08:00.280 And he did what no Republican or Democrat in the last century dared to do, which was to

01:08:07.980 take on this giant, which, by the way, holds billions and billions, little Carl Sagan there,

01:08:16.700 billions and billions of dollars in United States debt.

01:08:20.800 Well, you know what's interesting about China is, you know, Joe Biden was very critical of

01:08:25.700 Trump's tariffs on China, and he's kept most of them.

01:08:28.340 So it's like, well, anyway, listen, there's so much more to go over with James Golden.

01:08:33.980 You're a goldmine of information about Rush, the radio business.

01:08:37.380 And I want to get to a couple of things, including the terrible trick that was played on you when

01:08:41.140 you were up and coming in radio, for which you wound up thanking the prankster.

01:08:46.200 And we've got to spend a minute on Rush's announcement when he knew the end was coming

01:08:50.580 and how much dignity he showed in that final year.

01:08:54.160 Back with me now is James Golden, author of the new book, Rush on the Radio, a tribute

01:09:02.960 from his sidekick for 30 years.

01:09:06.320 And James, you were his call screener, but also his sidekick.

01:09:09.460 And I know you call yourself his chief discriminator and had to determine you were the guy who would

01:09:14.440 determine who would get on to speak with Rush and who would not.

01:09:16.920 Right. So what how I mean, I have I have one of those guys right now.

01:09:20.840 He's doing that at this moment, talking to people, calling in.

01:09:23.420 What would you say is the most important piece of that job?

01:09:26.520 Finding the people that will bring out the best in your host, whether the best is a disagreement,

01:09:32.880 whether the best is something that they can bounce off of to to just go into areas that

01:09:40.420 they want to go into or maybe unexpected areas to just bring the best people that they are

01:09:46.420 likely to have a great conversation with.

01:09:49.220 And it's as easy as that sounds, it's not because you have so many people that and some

01:09:55.380 of them don't want to listen.

01:09:56.700 Some people just want to do their own little diatribe.

01:10:00.820 Other people, you know, they may not be able to articulate their point of view quite as well.

01:10:05.580 Sometimes you have to actually help them reach that point of view so that they can express it.

01:10:12.240 And you're talking to a lot of different people with a lot of different agendas and being able

01:10:16.940 to sort out all of that so that the on air product, as we call it, is as good, compelling

01:10:24.000 to listen to as it possibly can be.

01:10:27.260 That's smart.

01:10:28.160 And I know Rush loved to have people you write in the book how he wanted the people who disagreed

01:10:32.040 with him to go first, not last.

01:10:33.680 He wanted them to get right on.

01:10:35.580 Yep, exactly.

01:10:36.840 This was not a man who was afraid to confront opposing views.

01:10:43.780 He wanted them because it gave him a chance to further articulate why he believed what

01:10:50.840 he believed.

01:10:51.620 And he was just exceptionally gifted at doing that and doing it in a way that didn't alienate

01:10:56.980 the person that called very polite to everybody.

01:11:00.580 Well, that's what I was going to say.

01:11:01.640 You know, that's that speaks well, not only of Rush, but of his audience, because then

01:11:05.520 who was listening to Rush?

01:11:06.600 It wasn't just sycophants.

01:11:08.220 You know, it wasn't just hard right.

01:11:09.480 Yes, go.

01:11:10.180 You know, we hate Obama.

01:11:11.460 We love Trump.

01:11:12.160 It was a vast array of people and parties and the people who would disagree with him.

01:11:17.600 Some of them wouldn't much like Rush, but they listened.

01:11:20.400 They listened.

01:11:21.200 They'd call up.

01:11:22.420 And he was just as kind to them.

01:11:25.160 Absolutely.

01:11:25.600 One of the things after one of the particularly bad outings that Democrats had when Tom Daschle

01:11:31.940 was still the majority leader of the Senate and then slipped, I think, into minority leader

01:11:38.180 status that he revealed was that the Democrat Party had done some polling.

01:11:42.620 And one of the things that they were really concerned about was the number of Democrats

01:11:48.380 who were listening to the Rush Limbaugh show and who were being affected by it and were

01:11:53.520 converting their votes over to conservative or Republican candidates.

01:11:59.180 They were extremely worried about that.

01:12:01.360 Well, you know, I can speak to this having grown up in very blue New York state.

01:12:05.220 You don't get exposed to a lot of Republican ideas.

01:12:07.720 You really don't.

01:12:08.140 It's not that it's certainly not in the K through 12 schooling.

01:12:10.460 It's not really, you know, your your parents, friend circles are mostly Democrat and so on.

01:12:14.600 And even for me, you know, Roger Ailes asked me, how does a daughter of a nurse and a college

01:12:18.900 professor wind up a fair and balanced person?

01:12:21.140 And I explained to him, you know, I was never particularly ideological, my parents, nor I.

01:12:24.580 But then I went out.

01:12:26.060 I got put myself through school, started to pay off my debt, saw what was happening to

01:12:29.220 my paycheck, got exposed to other people at a big law firm who had different views, listened

01:12:33.840 and started coming to my own decisions about this world instead of stuff force fed

01:12:38.120 to me.

01:12:38.760 And that's the danger to a lot of far left people is if they see their troop, their troops

01:12:44.260 exposed to some of the really wise ideas on the right, they understand they may lose them.

01:12:49.900 And for me, very interesting experience you related there, because for me, I grew up in

01:12:55.740 a conservative household, but we didn't identify as conservative.

01:12:58.480 My parents are Democrats.

01:12:59.620 My mother was part of the Democrat hack party machine out in Queens and loved being a proud

01:13:06.500 Democrat hack all of her life.

01:13:09.220 But when I first started with the rest of Megan, she came to me one day and said, you know,

01:13:14.960 James, my friends at church are wondering what went, what has happened to you?

01:13:20.500 What happened to you?

01:13:22.700 And I just said, mom, you know, I, I still maintain the same values that I was taught in

01:13:30.040 this house.

01:13:31.100 I still maintain the same values that I was taught in the church.

01:13:36.600 The question isn't what happened to me.

01:13:38.960 The question is what happened to you guys?

01:13:41.540 Mm hmm.

01:13:43.040 Yes.

01:13:43.700 So you, you came into that, this job with Rush, honestly, because you had your own history

01:13:50.040 in radio from, from your teenage years, you knew you wanted to be involved in this in some

01:13:54.540 way.

01:13:55.100 And during and after your time with Rush, you yourself have been on the radio doing shows.

01:14:00.360 And I didn't know the story of the mean prank that was played on you.

01:14:04.720 Um, when you were 17 years old, you got a letter from WWRL AM that from that station and tell

01:14:11.080 us what happened and what your takeaway was.

01:14:14.000 I had gone, this was the first station that I had ever visited.

01:14:17.020 My cousin was a disc jockey, Gerald Bledsoe, Jerry B.

01:14:20.300 And he was a celebrity in New York in his own right.

01:14:22.980 Just an amazing broadcaster.

01:14:24.800 Also television, did a dance show for local television and national commercials.

01:14:30.440 Big star.

01:14:31.180 Anyway, um, I went to the station to see him when I was 14.

01:14:34.720 10 years old, walked in, fell in love.

01:14:37.300 I knew I wanted to be in radio that first day.

01:14:40.880 And I would continue to go to the station for years.

01:14:43.880 We call it now gopher.

01:14:45.620 I wasn't paid to do anything, but I was always hanging around the radio station, going for

01:14:49.880 this, for this person, going for that.

01:14:52.240 Um, and when I was 17, I got a letter, big show biz break, WWRL, this station wanted to

01:14:59.120 hire me.

01:15:00.440 So I get dressed up best suit, best, you know, the suit and tie routine, go to the station.

01:15:07.960 I can't believe my good fortune.

01:15:10.140 I get there, show the letter to the receptionist.

01:15:14.060 And I have an appointment with the program director.

01:15:16.380 She has a really puzzled look on her face.

01:15:18.520 Hmm.

01:15:18.980 I didn't know about this.

01:15:20.660 Calls up more sort of what's going on here.

01:15:24.360 I finally meet with some of the people on the program director's staff and they had to

01:15:30.360 break the news to me.

01:15:31.360 We're sorry.

01:15:31.980 This letter is a fraud.

01:15:33.860 We didn't send this letter.

01:15:34.980 It was our station letterhead.

01:15:36.620 So wrong.

01:15:37.840 It was so humiliating.

01:15:41.120 I was, yeah, yeah.

01:15:43.280 I was so humiliated for years, but it also fuels something in me, Megan.

01:15:47.420 And I was determined after that, that no matter what, I was going to work in this industry

01:15:53.860 and I was going to get a job at that station.

01:15:56.820 And a few years later, that's exactly what happened.

01:15:59.780 Ah, I got to chill.

01:16:01.220 Yay.

01:16:01.840 I honestly, I love that.

01:16:03.120 And you talk, you write about it in the book.

01:16:04.460 She's talking about how in the end, you basically said, thank you.

01:16:09.320 This is how the book reads.

01:16:10.440 Whoever forged that letter, if you're reading this, I want to say thank you.

01:16:14.040 Out of that humiliation came a relentless desire to achieve my first goal in radio, to

01:16:19.460 land a job at WWRL no matter what.

01:16:24.220 And it does say sometimes, you know, you can't see it at the time when you have a setback like

01:16:28.060 that, how it's going to fuel your fire later, right?

01:16:30.520 I love there's a t-shirt out there you can get that reads.

01:16:33.440 Underestimate me.

01:16:34.200 See how that works out, right?

01:16:35.520 See how that turns out.

01:16:38.080 So it's good.

01:16:39.080 Like sometimes just a little, I don't know, kick in the ass.

01:16:41.980 We, Doug and I went to see that movie, I, Tanya, and it features, it's about Tanya

01:16:47.100 Harding and it features her, her mother played by Allison Janney saying the meanest, nastiest

01:16:51.320 things to Tanya Harding before she got on the ice every time because she knew it would

01:16:56.500 fuel her to skate her best to prove the naysayers wrong.

01:17:00.740 And I love that you have that in you.

01:17:02.060 I can relate.

01:17:04.320 Yeah.

01:17:04.780 You know, I am just, well, I, Megan, I am just incredibly grateful for my career.

01:17:10.780 I have worked with professionals, some of the best professionals in the business, not

01:17:15.800 just with Rush, but the people I work with at WWRL were great.

01:17:20.900 Some of them are my mentors, my lifelong friends.

01:17:23.240 Some of them I look at now is, is like one Gary Bird, my older brother who spent so much

01:17:28.600 time with me, helping me understand how to think big and how to execute those thoughts.

01:17:34.260 Then I moved over to WABC and I was, it was like graduate school.

01:17:41.200 And I really learned the ways of corporate radio and I succeeded there.

01:17:47.140 But I also worked with some of the biggest names in the business up until that time.

01:17:51.180 WABC was the biggest, most iconic radio station in the world.

01:17:55.220 Big time.

01:17:55.600 This was WABC where the Beatles came.

01:17:58.800 This was WABC that set the standard for all of the music that was played in top 40 radio.

01:18:05.300 So I produced their very last music show, Megan walked into another studio and produced their

01:18:12.200 first, first talk show.

01:18:13.660 We'll go back to something you started in the beginning about the way God prepares people

01:18:17.400 for what it is they wanted to do throughout all of this throughout the time.

01:18:22.280 I also wanted to be a musician.

01:18:24.140 I was still always keyed into the news.

01:18:27.580 My first memory as a human being with my father was sitting on his lap and he was reading

01:18:34.700 to me.

01:18:35.560 I grew up in a household that promoted education, promoted reading.

01:18:40.320 I was reading the New York times, the, of the long Island press, the daily news, the New

01:18:47.440 York post, the Amsterdam news.

01:18:50.780 My friend, we had papers all the time in the house every single day.

01:18:55.820 And so when it was time for me to make a transition from music, which I love, and I still love to

01:19:01.340 this day very deeply, but I was also equally well prepared to move into the news talk side

01:19:08.780 of the business because of this self, this never ending self-education I had with politics.

01:19:14.720 And a lot of that happened in school too.

01:19:17.360 I had teachers that challenged me.

01:19:20.080 I had one teacher that challenged, um, not just me, but a bunch of us to, um, to become

01:19:28.420 better by giving us special assignments in history.

01:19:32.280 All of that, all of those things helped me become prepared to do what I was supposed to do.

01:19:38.420 Well, maybe it's your connection with music.

01:19:40.580 Maybe it's your family.

01:19:41.700 I don't know, but I can say that a lot of people who are steeped in news make the mistake

01:19:46.500 of losing heart, you know, they get kind of cold, they get kind of separated and I think

01:19:52.780 it can make them a little hard.

01:19:53.940 That didn't happen to you.

01:19:55.200 And the one thing the book shows us is your heart, like your connection with rush, your

01:19:58.540 connection with the audience.

01:20:00.260 Um, I don't know that to me, like, I think we're fully in love with you by the time we

01:20:04.960 find out about the rush diagnosis and just hear more about how it all went down.

01:20:10.100 The day he announced that he'd been diagnosed.

01:20:13.140 And I know you point this out in the book that he used the term advanced, advanced lung

01:20:17.120 cancer.

01:20:18.000 You knew before the audience knew.

01:20:21.120 Tell us about that day.

01:20:23.320 The day I'll never forget.

01:20:24.500 I learned we were going to have a meeting.

01:20:26.380 That was the first jitter because we never had meetings.

01:20:29.480 We had a meeting, rush walks in the room, stoic as ever, wouldn't know anything's wrong

01:20:33.480 and tells us he has advanced lung cancer.

01:20:36.480 Immediately, Megan, he apologizes to us.

01:20:40.240 Oh gosh.

01:20:41.000 What the hell?

01:20:44.100 No.

01:20:44.680 And I scream.

01:20:45.640 No, you, how are you apologizing to us?

01:20:49.900 Um, it had to be the worst day of his life because he felt he let us down.

01:20:53.480 It is still so heartbreaking to me.

01:20:56.120 Um, but he, after the meeting, went back in the studio, did his show for two hours and

01:21:02.700 45 minutes.

01:21:03.500 And you wouldn't know that anything was wrong.

01:21:05.360 Just, we all knew it was coming.

01:21:07.500 And we were all trying to keep the tears and everything else in check during the show.

01:21:13.140 Those of us that were in there, Don Bachinski, Brian Johnson, me, um, we were all just looking

01:21:19.900 and just trying to give each other comfort because we knew what was coming.

01:21:22.900 And then at two 45, he announced it to, uh, to the world.

01:21:26.980 And of course, life was never the same after that.

01:21:29.420 But I'll tell you what, Megan, Rush had a bucket list.

01:21:33.600 His bucket list was his audience.

01:21:36.280 Every single day that he was healthy enough to come in, he came in prepared and did an

01:21:43.580 amazing show.

01:21:44.500 Only those of us in there saw what that took out of him every day.

01:21:49.000 Some days after the show, he could barely move.

01:21:51.060 It was just heart.

01:21:52.100 It was.

01:21:58.000 He did an amazing show every day up until the last show that he did.

01:22:04.560 And he really loved what he did.

01:22:07.260 He loved his audience.

01:22:08.620 He loved his family.

01:22:09.720 He loved this country.

01:22:11.600 But boy, did he love being Rush Limbaugh.

01:22:14.500 He was amazing.

01:22:16.200 He did.

01:22:17.160 And then Trump gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

01:22:21.240 And I love that.

01:22:22.760 I was thrilled to see that happen.

01:22:24.060 Of course, the left lost his mind, which was also perfect, right?

01:22:26.940 It was just like, that's all part of Rush's legacy.

01:22:28.840 He just doesn't, you know, whatever.

01:22:29.900 OK, go ahead.

01:22:31.000 But he he did inspire millions of Americans.

01:22:33.660 If you're not a Republican or you're not conservative or you're one of Rush Limbaugh,

01:22:36.800 who who was a Democrat, you may not have fully understood Rush and who he was

01:22:41.720 and his talents and so on.

01:22:42.840 And you just have this snapshot of the person that has delivered you by the mainstream media.

01:22:47.900 To me, it would drive me nuts because they take bits he would do as a comedy.

01:22:51.020 He was funny.

01:22:52.000 He would do these comedy bits and they were irreverent, same as Dave Chappelle's are.

01:22:55.660 And then they would try to make this the measure of a man to say this is what he thinks about

01:22:58.920 certain groups of people.

01:23:00.340 Anyway, that fine.

01:23:01.780 You can't spend too much time worrying about those.

01:23:03.140 But you point out in the book, and I thought this is such a great point.

01:23:06.180 Rush did what President Trump did, what no one else could do.

01:23:11.700 He gave Rush the highest civilian honor in America and made sure almost every elected

01:23:16.800 Democrat attended the ceremony.

01:23:19.940 Yes.

01:23:20.500 And I will forever be grateful to President Trump for that.

01:23:24.240 That was as beautiful and well-earned and just delightful as it was to see Rush honored

01:23:30.820 in such a fashion.

01:23:32.400 That was also just incredibly delicious was to look at the reaction of Democrats in the

01:23:39.980 chamber as this happened live in front of their faces.

01:23:43.920 At the State of the Union.

01:23:45.660 Yes.

01:23:46.380 At the State of the Union.

01:23:47.320 Forget it.

01:23:48.240 Which, of course, led Nancy Pelosi, I guess, all that pent up frustration for her tearing

01:23:53.120 up the State of the Union speech.

01:23:55.120 How undignified at the end of it.

01:23:57.700 But that's just, thank you, President Trump.

01:24:01.140 It was pretty perfect, I have to say.

01:24:02.980 And you know what?

01:24:03.820 You know what it said to me?

01:24:05.220 I was surprised.

01:24:06.100 Like, there was one of the few times that Rush got emotional and you could tell it really

01:24:10.660 meant something to him.

01:24:12.500 Why do you think it really meant something to him?

01:24:14.860 It meant a lot to him to be honored in such a way.

01:24:18.500 It really did.

01:24:19.280 Because he had, and he so deserved it.

01:24:22.780 And we all knew that.

01:24:24.200 But I think he never expected it.

01:24:26.420 He never expected that that would happen.

01:24:28.800 And it did.

01:24:29.640 And it was just incredible that it happened that way.

01:24:33.200 Mm-hmm.

01:24:34.040 So what do you think?

01:24:34.980 I mean, I miss him because I would love to hear his take on what's happening in today's

01:24:38.860 day and age.

01:24:39.340 You know, I'd love to hear him on the latest panic about every iteration of the variants

01:24:44.120 and, you know, the potential lockdowns and Fauci, I am science.

01:24:48.680 And, you know, Biden bit by bit seemed to lose his faculties.

01:24:52.460 And by the way, I should tell our audience, you say nice things about Biden in here.

01:24:55.200 He may not be your political cup of tea.

01:24:56.520 But to your credit, you talk about how, you know, you saw a good man in many years going

01:25:01.300 on to Capitol Hill.

01:25:02.520 And I like that about you.

01:25:03.680 You're not hard partisan and can't see goodness where it presents in your face.

01:25:08.320 But what do you, I don't believe you ever, like, you know, when you know somebody really

01:25:11.540 well, you can tell others what his opinions would be.

01:25:14.140 Do you have that with him?

01:25:15.060 Most of the time.

01:25:17.080 But see, here's the problem.

01:25:19.900 Every time I would think that I knew what Russia's opinion, I know what he's going to say.

01:25:24.480 He always said something completely different.

01:25:27.140 I think I know what he would say with some things, but I'm never quite sure because he

01:25:34.460 was just so unique and he could come up with such unique opinions and things you had never

01:25:39.220 thought of before because he had his own viewpoint of the world, his own lens to look through

01:25:45.520 and would always come up with something that was compelling, unique.

01:25:48.820 And wow, what a take.

01:25:50.460 Only Russia could come up with that take.

01:25:53.120 It's so true.

01:25:54.200 Gosh, that's that's what's so painful.

01:25:55.900 It's like I've just got to be quiet, be still and hope somehow he channels into my

01:26:00.260 mind so I can know what he was saying.

01:26:01.780 And honestly, like, obviously, Russia was definitely more conservative than I am, although

01:26:05.280 I don't know.

01:26:05.840 By today's standards, I think I might be Rush Limbaugh.

01:26:08.120 You know, it's like things there's the ground is shifting underneath us.

01:26:11.520 Right.

01:26:11.720 It's like I don't even know what a conservative, what a liberal is anymore.

01:26:15.020 But I liked hearing his point of view because he could articulate it wisely, smartly in

01:26:19.780 a way that was very entertaining.

01:26:21.360 I am thinking about, you know, the staff and wondering what February 17th, 2022 will be

01:26:29.000 like, because you always dread the anniversaries when you lose somebody.

01:26:31.500 Plans for our staff.

01:26:32.700 We're making plans.

01:26:33.580 I don't want to go into too much detail, but we're starting to talk about among ourselves

01:26:37.940 about coming together that day because we are a family and we so badly miss our rush.

01:26:44.960 Mm hmm.

01:26:46.720 I can relate.

01:26:47.360 But it's it's so great to see people like you in a way carrying on the legacy.

01:26:51.260 Right.

01:26:51.540 Like you're out there doing it.

01:26:52.840 You know, you're doing more and more hosting.

01:26:54.460 I look at your schedule.

01:26:55.100 I'm like, does he does he ever take a day off?

01:26:56.440 I mean, are you working seven days a week right now?

01:26:58.580 But I think you'd love that.

01:27:00.520 Yes, I do.

01:27:01.560 And I love what I'm doing.

01:27:03.260 I'm back in one W.A.B.C.

01:27:04.940 now six days a week and I'm having a blast being on the air and doing the show.

01:27:09.220 But see, Russia's legacy is going to go on.

01:27:11.240 We have so many young conservatives out here, millions.

01:27:13.840 And by the way, many of them are activists, too.

01:27:16.660 They're not just sitting on the sidelines.

01:27:18.700 They're actually getting engaged in the process.

01:27:22.120 And Megan, you have your own following that's huge.

01:27:26.060 And you inspire so many people as well.

01:27:29.460 And so all these legacies are coming together.

01:27:31.820 That's why I am so optimistic about America.

01:27:34.540 Look, we are still such a young nation, Megan, and we are going to be OK.

01:27:40.980 Man, I hope you're right.

01:27:42.300 I believe you're right, too.

01:27:43.980 And I I believe most people can see through the nonsense of all this focus on identity

01:27:48.420 politics and remember our deep connection to one another as Americans, first and foremost.

01:27:53.560 And I also believe it's worth fighting those who who are trying to smother that legacy.

01:27:58.000 It's they must be defeated.

01:27:59.740 And so there is a time to fight.

01:28:01.180 And, you know, though we've lost one of our generals, the rest of us are still here, you

01:28:06.940 know, ready to go.

01:28:08.060 And I know you're one of them, James.

01:28:09.280 I am, too.

01:28:10.120 Such a pleasure.

01:28:10.900 You've always been such a gentleman.

01:28:11.940 So kind to me.

01:28:12.740 It's great to see you in person.

01:28:14.520 And good luck with the book.

01:28:16.320 I just say one thing, Megan.

01:28:17.660 Thank you for reading the book.

01:28:19.040 See, folks, this is what I'm talking about prepared.

01:28:21.540 She read the book, which is amazing.

01:28:24.620 It was my pleasure.

01:28:25.740 It was 100 percent my pleasure.

01:28:27.840 All the best, James, to be continued.

01:28:30.120 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

01:28:32.320 No BS, no agenda and no fear.

01:28:35.540 Thank you.

01:28:46.020 Thank you.

01:28:47.180 Thank you.

01:28:48.060 Thank you.

The Megyn Kelly Show - November 29, 2021

Omicron Panic and Limbaugh's Legacy, with Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, Matt Welch, and James Golden ｜ Ep. 210

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