Jason Whitlock and Seth Dillon join me to discuss the Colin Kaepernick documentary and the latest in the Aaron Rodgers saga. Plus, a new video from Microsoft that takes wokeness to the next level and a new Barstool Sports scandal involving Dave Portnoy.
00:16:16.460He experienced some things in his life, uh, that, you know, he couldn't let go of.
00:16:21.620Uh, and so my father, uh, I can remember coming home from college and staying with my father one summer and, and my father, Hey, uh, these white girls calling this house that needs to stop.
00:16:34.640And so parents say, and do some things that aren't always appropriate, but air them out this way, portray them as, as this kind of idiots.
00:16:50.380And this kind of is absolutely ridiculous.
00:16:53.780And for, for, for it not to be stated clearly in some sort of way in this mini stage, because Colin's narrating.
00:17:01.700And so let's say that these events, which I think are fabricated, but let's say they're accurate.
00:17:09.180Colin had every opportunity as the narrator to come and put some context around what we, what he just showed.
00:17:18.180And it would be just like me saying, look, cause my father did not like white people.
00:17:23.080I can put a lot of context and reasons why he did not like them, things that happened to him in his life that made him that way.
00:17:31.800So you put the context around it so people can understand it.
00:17:34.640There was no context other than these people are idiots and they're despicable.
00:17:38.720And they allegedly had some problem with him taking some black girl to a dance and Megan, I'm 54.
00:17:44.180I've known a lot of people in a lot of different situations.
00:17:48.780I've never met a white person who has a problem with any black boy or biracial boy or mixed race boy.
00:18:47.480Like it's, it depends on the context of the circumstances.
00:18:50.860And so if a white, a white boy with his dad and or mom, if he grows his hair too long, the word may not be thug, but there's some sort of, again, some sort of negative connotation.
00:19:06.880Like, hey, cut your hair, you look like, you look like, you know, a druggie or you look like something.
00:19:14.460And so parents and arguing about the hairstyles of their kids, this goes on.
00:19:20.400And so what Colin isn't smart enough to understand is this like, this is what parents do.
00:19:30.260And maybe if Colin needs to have a kid.
00:19:32.560When I watch this, the whole thing is like, he is so aggrieved at everything.
00:19:37.920He's mad that the umpire on the baseball field allegedly said no fraternization when he did a head nod to one of the one other black player on the field.
00:19:52.860But for that to wind up in a movie about his life, like that's that's the key moment of racism.
00:19:58.080He wants to point people back to his coach telling him he really needed to play baseball professionally, not football professionally, because he was better at baseball and he was only going to be second best if he went to football.
00:20:14.240He's got, you know, person after person who he thinks have done him wrong and made him, quote, second choice.
00:20:20.940As you point out, he points out how America doesn't believe in black women as beautiful.
00:20:25.440And I'm sitting there thinking like, OK, tell to Beyonce, tell to Holly Berry.
00:20:29.320Maybe maybe years and years ago, he goes back to the 1930s to talk about the one baseball player who has said you got to play as a white man if you want to.
00:20:37.020You got to sort of pass as a white man.
00:21:36.380He shows his this thing was told in such a stupid, illogical way.
00:21:45.760His dad every day is driving down the highway, speeding and waving at the cop as he drives by.
00:21:54.220And the cop clocks him going past the speed limit.
00:21:57.020And then the one day Colin gets in the car and drives, the cop immediately pulls him over.
00:22:03.100But they literally show like his dad waving at the cop as he drives by speeding.
00:22:06.700And I'm like, Colin, Ava, are you suggesting that in this very white town that that this guy lived in, that they only pulled over white black people?
00:22:20.980So they only wrote a ticket a month or two?
00:22:24.780I mean, this is just comical the way he portrayed racism and how it impacted him.
00:22:32.020It all felt fabricated because I just don't think he experienced much racism.
00:22:38.580He has no idea what it actually looks like.
00:22:41.660So he portrayed and neither does Ava, clearly.
00:22:44.600So they portrayed it in the most farcical way possible.
00:22:47.860I mean, it's a fascinating way to think about him as this figure that, you know, kneeled during the national anthem and it was the one who started that.
00:22:57.200And what you're positing is it makes perfect sense because it's it's on the heels of a lifetime of fakery, of glomming, of somebody who who is sort of adjacent to people of color who have had an actual black experience.
00:23:11.360But you don't actually buy it, given the way that he actually was raised.
00:23:15.760And I mean, I'm sure he does have a black dad.
00:23:29.000I will say the whole thing made me uncomfortable.
00:23:30.860The way he portrayed black families, the way he portrayed white people as well and the way he portrays our country.
00:23:35.640And the fact that he's being celebrated by Netflix, you know, for for this kind of storytelling and Ava to comparing the NFL draft to slavery is an embarrassment.
00:24:06.680Hollywood is going to hop behind it and give it some sort of award and make it one of my favorite, like not one of my favorite movies, but I enjoy the movie Clueless.
00:24:17.520And it's about, you know, blonde girl.
00:24:21.060And that's this was the the half black version of Clueless.
00:24:59.860OK, so Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports finds himself on the wrong end of Business Insider in what they deem an exclusive article written by Julia Black.
00:25:11.580She's apparently been working on it for months.
00:25:13.840He claims she gave him just a few hours to respond to these claims.
00:25:18.220The headline is, quote, I was literally screaming in pain.
00:25:21.440Young women say they met Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy for sex.
00:25:25.600And it turned violent and humiliating.
00:25:59.680That's apparently a reference to something that was on her shirt in the picture that she sent him.
00:26:04.240A 20 year old college student at the time, Port and Portnoy was a 43 year old multimillionaire.
00:26:08.960The conversation soon moved to Snapchat and text where it quickly turned into the topic of sex.
00:26:14.160He sent her graphic videos of other women he'd slept with, according to Madison, and he pressed her to tell him about her sexual fantasies.
00:26:21.380She responded like a rape fantasy where I don't have any control over what's going on.
00:26:57.060She said she first became uncomfortable when Portnoy pulled out his phone and started filming her without asking permission as she performed oral sex on him.
00:27:10.280And then she goes on and I'll get to the remainder.
00:27:13.080But I have to say, Jason, when I read this as a mother of a daughter, as a woman who's grown up in a man in a world that was probably far more patriarchal when I was his girl's age than it is today.
00:27:24.780All I could think was, oh, you felt uncomfortable when he pulled out his phone and started filming you as you were fellating him after not knowing him at all, accepting his first class class plane ticket and getting down on your knees with a man who you only knew the public persona of.
00:27:41.440And then you were surprised it wasn't working out well that he wasn't your prince charming.
00:28:54.960And I don't think we get ahead in the Me Too movement or as women in general by not accepting that we, too, have some responsibility for our own actions and placing ourselves in situations that can lead to bad results.
00:29:07.740I'm going to turn it over to you, my friend.
00:29:10.260And I can't disagree with anything you said.
00:29:13.500And I think as a woman, I think that's a natural first reaction.
00:29:20.020As a man, I have a different first reaction.
00:29:23.720Yeah, this is why I love talking to you.
00:29:24.940And it's it's it's and again, I think your reaction is perfectly appropriate.
00:29:29.740And that's why, you know, men and women should work together in conjunction with the raising of their kids.
00:29:36.920And so I guess and, you know, I'm 10 years older than Dave.
00:29:41.500And so if I were Dave's older brother or father, you know, I look at I hear that story and I'm repulsed by his behavior and I'm repulsed for a couple of reasons.
00:35:07.120I swear to God in my life, I'm telling the truth.
00:35:11.520The second one, at least I have something to back it up.
00:35:14.160It's an interesting point you're making, which is, even if you believe his denial, you don't let him off the hook.
00:35:21.500I want to add that I tend to believe what Portnoy is saying.
00:35:28.060However, and again, the point of view of my show, my worldview, is like, we're at a time in America where the whole country is in chaos, moral decay.
00:35:41.220And it's because men have fallen and failed.
00:35:45.400And that's why I'm critical here of Dave Portnoy.
00:36:14.800If we're going to get this country back on track, men are going to have to step up and answer to a higher standard of behavior than what he's exhibiting here from a leadership position.
00:36:34.580This is why, you know, Marxism and just our whole country is just out of line because men can only think about momentary pleasure and whatever satiates them instantly.
00:36:49.460I've been a public figure for a long time.
00:36:52.340I don't have hundreds of millions of dollars like Dave Portnoy, but I've been wealthy for a long time and I've been in position.
00:37:01.500Two weeks ago, I'm going up my elevator in my building and I hit the penthouse level, a 21 and a 22 year old girl.
00:37:12.060Hey, you want to go up and see your apartment?
00:37:13.980They're not going to say I behaved anything like what Dave Portnoy just did because I understand my position.
00:38:05.060They're they're young adults and they need to make better choices.
00:38:08.220Young women have been sexualized, over sexualized and taught by modern day media that their sexuality should be exploited to the max and that that's somehow empowering.
00:38:33.100And if you don't remember that, things are not going to go well for you in your life inside or outside of the bedroom because it speaks to some recklessness, recklessness on both sides.
00:38:43.440OK, I got to ask you about Aaron Rodgers.
00:38:45.700So he is in big trouble because he suggested that he was vaccinated and now he has covid, which doesn't mean he's not vaccinated.
00:38:54.100But ESPN is reporting he is not vaccinated.
00:38:57.320And he lied when he said the following.
00:39:07.160You know, there's a lot of a lot of conversation around it, around the league and a lot of guys who have made statements and I made statements.
00:39:39.940Like Stephen A. Smith came out and said, like, he wasn't man enough to just admit, like some of the other guys, I didn't get it and I'm not going to get it.
00:39:46.280He wanted he didn't want the media pounding.
00:39:50.080Look, I think it's ridiculous that we're requiring these young people in the prime of health, people that micromanage everything that goes into their bodies so they can perform at the highest level.
00:40:04.860I think it's ridiculous that we're forcing these vaccines on them in the NFL and the NBA.
00:40:10.480So because I lean that way, I'm I'm I'm I'm given Aaron Rodgers a pass.
00:40:18.480I wish that he had been mad enough to handle it the way that Kyrie Irving has handled it in the NBA.
00:40:24.460And because we need Aaron Rodgers, like I think Lamar Jackson, another great NFL quarterback.
00:40:31.220He hasn't taken the vaccine and he's been up front about it.
00:40:35.100Kirk Cousins, he's been up front about it.
00:40:37.580But if Aaron Rodgers and I believe Tom Brady should have been and I know Tom Brady pretends or says or maybe he has actually taken the vaccine.
00:40:47.960It's hard for me to believe, but I don't think Aaron Rodgers is alone in the athletic world in in ducking the vaccine.
00:40:56.400And so I'm I'm I'm just not going to be hypercritical of him because I think all these young people in in professional sports, COVID is no risk to them.
00:41:06.280They don't want to take the vaccine and they shouldn't be forced to.
00:41:28.520We're like, liar, liar, because that's how society is behaving toward people who haven't gotten the vaccine there that they're there to be demonized, ostracized.
00:41:37.520No wonder the guy didn't want to say he hadn't done it.
00:41:41.360You get pilloried now as though you've done something really evil.
00:41:45.580And then we we paint ourselves as the moral arbiters when we catch you, you know, saying, ah, liar.
00:41:53.300Well, we're the ones who put you in that position to begin with.
00:41:55.600It shouldn't be any of our business should not be any of our any of our business, Jason.
00:41:59.200Well, football teams hate distractions.
00:42:04.160And if Aaron Rodgers is on the record, as big a profile as he has in the NFL, if he's unvaccinated, his whole season would be dominated by questions about his vaccination status.
00:42:18.120When it's Kirk Cousins, who's not on Aaron Rodgers level, it's a it's a story for a day or two and then it goes away.
00:42:26.140But when it's Aaron Rodgers, it's an everyday story.
00:42:29.520Again, people say, well, no one's harassing Lamar Jackson.
00:42:33.060And just quite frankly, Megan, that's because Lamar Jackson's black and most of the media is afraid of being critical of any black athlete because they'll get smeared as racist.
00:43:39.920But I don't believe in the mandates either.
00:43:41.820And I do believe the vaccine can definitely reduce your hospitalization risk and your death risk, especially if you're older and, you know, certainly older than 50, which I will be as of November 18th.
00:43:53.040But in any event, you're looking good.
00:44:30.020And remember, everyone, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips when you subscribe to our YouTube channel.
00:44:40.920Go to YouTube dot com slash Megyn Kelly.
00:44:43.980It was one week ago today that we caught a bird invade our studio and Abby, my huntress assistant, had to save the day and it's all caught on cam.
00:44:54.080See what you're missing if you're not watching the YouTube show?
00:44:56.960Or if you prefer, by the way, you can just subscribe to the audio podcast, download an Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, and that's a good way of sharing it with folks who missed it.
00:45:05.080There you'll find our full archives with more than 190 shows, including an interview with Dave Portnoy and some great ones with Jason prior to today as well.
00:45:19.800So one of the things we wanted to bring to you today was the reaction to Tuesday's big electoral victories by Republicans, including Winsome Sears as lieutenant governor of Virginia.
00:45:29.540You would think that people would be celebrating her first black official to hold that office in the state of Virginia.
00:45:36.120Very different reaction on places like MSNBC and with Joy Reid and her guest.
00:45:49.740They want white supremacy by ventriloquist effect.
00:45:52.320There is a black mouth moving, but a white idea through the running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices.
00:46:05.240So to have a black face speaking in behalf of a white supremacist legacy is nothing new.
00:46:11.840If you tell black people, look, I support a Negro.
00:46:15.000Look, there is a person of color that I am in favor of.
00:46:18.160And that person of color happens to undermine and undercut and subvert the very principles about which we are concerned.
00:46:25.220You do yourself no service by pointing to them as an example of your racial progressivism.
00:46:31.900Our executive producer, Steve Krakauer is a media critic, Steve.
00:46:35.420So it's a ventriloquist situation if a black conservative wins and the white people are presumably the puppeteers.
00:46:45.820This is actually something Michael Eric Dyson has said previously about another black politician, Daniel Cameron, who's been on the show on another MSNBC interview, I believe also with Joy Reid.
00:47:45.440It must be so fun for you when someone like The New York Times actually tries to engage in a fact check of you guys or tries to call you out as misinformation,
00:47:55.820only to be checked by you on its misinformation because you're a satirical site not offering facts up for actual consumption is journalism.
00:48:04.560Well, I'm glad you make that point because that's the point I always like to make is that it's just this like rich irony that they're accusing us of misinformation while using misinformation to smear us in the same breath.
00:48:15.860So, yeah, it is it is a little silly and ridiculous.
00:48:18.820And I'm glad they retracted that statement about us because it was pretty slanderous and false and silly.
00:48:24.960I mean, look, we're we're trying to make people laugh.
00:48:26.820We're trying to make them think, too, but we're trying to make them laugh.
00:48:28.820And satire is a legitimate enterprise.
00:48:30.320And just because we're making jokes that you don't like doesn't mean that we're somehow maliciously trying to mislead people.
00:48:53.660Yes. You've been misinterpreted as a truthful reporting site by everyone from The New York Times to Donald Trump while in the Oval Office, though.
00:49:02.060I understand you were assured he knew it was satire, though the tweets suggest otherwise.
00:49:06.680But here are just a couple of headlines.
00:51:26.960Well, I mean, so what what in particular is being canceled is, you know, jokes that are aimed at the wrong target.
00:51:34.560You know, you're allowed to joke about plenty of things.
00:51:36.280You're allowed to joke about, for example, a straight white Christian man like me.
00:51:40.820I'm you know, that's perfectly allowed.
00:51:43.000What they're trying to outlaw is this this whole notion of like punching down.
00:51:47.600And it's making jokes of people who are beneath you, essentially, and on this like hierarchical structure of intersectionality and oppression.
00:51:57.600You know, if you're privileged and powerful and you're joking about somebody who isn't privileged and powerful, that's a no, no.
00:52:05.500You should probably lose your career and your livelihood and be out on the street, you know, begging for food and money.
00:52:12.340But, you know, we reject that whole thing.
00:52:14.040I think it's the most silly thing in the world.
00:52:15.440I'd be interested to hear your take on it.
00:52:16.740But as far as I'm concerned, when you when you start talking about punching down on people, for example, someone like me, if I was to make fun of women, that would be punching down because women are presumably beneath me.
00:52:25.480But I don't think of women as being beneath me.
00:52:27.640So I don't think it's punching down to joke at them.
00:52:29.540I think we're all created equal and that we should be able to joke about each other indiscriminately.
00:52:33.180So I reject the whole structure that views things as, you know, I think it only reinforces these ideas that there are some people who are above other people when you start talking about punching down and how that should be off limits.
00:52:42.700And the other point I'd make there is that this this this whole thing that happened with like Dave Chappelle and and and how everyone was trying to cancel him for the jokes that he was making.
00:52:50.580You know, these people that claim to be so marginalized and oppressed literally have the power to end the careers of anyone who makes fun of them.
00:52:59.600So I don't think that they're really marginalized or oppressed when they have that power.
00:53:03.140If you have the will and the power to punish people who simply make fun of you, then you're actually the oppressor, not the oppressed.
00:53:25.500Even when you actually go to a comedy club, if you hear your particular ethnic group or socioeconomic class or even yourself made fun of, it's funny.
00:54:30.940And my point is, it's fun to be made fun of.
00:54:33.640And we used to recognize that universally here in America.
00:54:36.660Only now, thanks to these uptight wokesters, do we have to word police all the time.
00:54:42.500It does happen on the other side a little bit, too.
00:54:44.440I mean, look, I think it's very healthy to look at yourself and examine your own beliefs, your own ideology, your own behavior, and hold it up to mockery and ridicule and see if you pass the test.
00:54:57.020I mean, it's a fun and healthy exercise.
00:54:59.720I think when I go to a comedy show and people are joking about things that apply to me, I still laugh.
00:55:06.840I think it's and I think the Babylon Bee does a really good job of doing that.
00:55:09.800We do hit both sides of the aisle quite a bit.
00:55:11.720You do make fun of people on our side.
00:55:13.520It's a Christian site run by Christians that makes fun of, you know, little idiosyncrasies and silly things going on in the church and evangelical Christian culture.
00:55:21.300And, you know, for the most part, the audience is receptive to that and they like to laugh at themselves every now and then, you know, people will bristle and they tend to object to satire and comedy really only when it lands on them.
00:55:34.640They're fine making fun of everybody else.
00:55:36.640It's the minute the joke applies to me, then it's really offensive and it's really hurtful.
00:55:40.340But I think a lot of what you're seeing in our culture today, a ton of what you're seeing in our culture today is not people who are genuinely offended.
00:55:46.800They're not they're not distraught and upset over the joke that was made at their expense.
00:55:55.020It's this it's this fake indignation and anger that's meant to really give them the upper hand in a conversation, in a debate about ideas that they want to win.
00:56:04.540And they don't want to they realize that ridicule and mockery and comedy are effective ways of making ideas look silly and exposing them for what they are.
00:56:14.260And so when they want to win that that argument, they want to win that debate.
00:56:18.120They're trying to shut down people who are effectively pushing back on them.
00:56:39.980They really are sort of the I don't know, canary in the coal mine in some circumstances to show us what the way forward is or the way you're going to get whacked.
00:57:21.120Joel Osteen took flack over the weekend for closing up his church to flood victims and all but disappearing during the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
00:57:28.580The megachurch pastor reportedly returned to the city on his luxury yacht, SS Blessed, to make amends Tuesday by tossing copies of Your Best Life Now to stranded flood survivors.
00:57:40.220Osteen had his on-call yacht captain steer the large vessel toward the flooded streets of the city, pulling up to survivors stranded on their roofs and on the roof of their cars as the prosperity gospel preacher smiled, waved, and threw out signed editions of the best-selling Positive Thinking book.
00:57:58.680Believe and declare you are coming into a shift, Osteen yelled through a bullhorn, according to reports.
00:58:12.780When you think positive, excellent thoughts, you will be propelled toward greatness, he called out to one family floating on a raft on a freeway-turned river whose earthly possessions had been destroyed the previous day.
00:58:27.580Now, see, that perfectly illustrates the point.
00:58:30.440If I tell you straight-faced on this show, you know, the prosperity gospel doesn't preach to everybody.
00:58:36.260There's people going through hard times and, you know, to tell them that they're going to experience health and wealth if they just give their life to God when they're actually in real life struggling and when there's something that could be done about it to, you know, if you have wealth and resources to give them and you don't, instead, you just tell them that there must be some sin in their life.
00:59:11.920Is it one guy who's just a machine who comes up with the most clever things?
00:59:16.220Or is it a collaborative effort wherever you sit down, you know, you sit down that morning and you say, this is ripe for, you know, us, grist for the mill, and you all, like, kick around headlines to come up with the funny stuff?
00:59:29.080I mean, we have some very talented individuals who are extremely productive and can just churn out one idea after another.
00:59:37.180But we have a whole team of writers who are in a Slack channel communicating with each other throughout the day about what's going on in the news or, you know, in the church or just in the culture in general.
00:59:53.620So that's what we start out with is just these endless headline pitches back and forth.
00:59:57.380And then if we get kind of like a good seed thought there that that looks like it's going to turn into something, we'll iterate on it a little bit to try to get it right.
01:00:06.280And we work together on it until we really land on some that we know are going to get a good response from our audience once we put it out there and pair it with a funny image or Photoshop.
01:00:14.700Was it easier during the Trump era or harder?
01:01:38.720They wanted to believe that Trump had actually said something like that.
01:01:40.900You fast forward to a month ago and Trump went on a radio show and said he's done more for Christianity and religion in general than any other person in history.
01:01:48.240So he's like actually fulfilled that joke now as if it were a prophecy and made it come to pass.
01:01:53.920And that's the reason why people like Trump are difficult to satirize is because, you know, it's hard to go beyond what they're already doing.
01:02:00.160And then if you do, it ends up coming true like a prophecy.
01:16:51.680But the regular brain has got a part that controls hunger, cognitive planning, imagination, joy, wonder.
01:16:58.740The woke brain, which is all colored in sort of peachy orange, offended, offended, offended, offended, offended at every part of the brain at all times.
01:17:09.700And the book does make the point about, you know, tackling, tackling racism, which is a serious thing.
01:19:07.000You know, you have like this Virginia election that just happened.
01:19:10.100The women that came out in droves to vote in that election for a Republican were accused of white supremacy because because they simply didn't vote the way that they were supposed to vote.
01:19:22.180So there's a certain way you have to vote in order to be woke, too.
01:19:26.800You have to get used to being called those crazy terms if you're going to talk about the news in any sort of an open way or just life in any sort of an open way, because they will call you that.
01:19:35.780You talk about how to spot oppressed women, long, pretty hair, making a sandwich, smells like essential oil surrounded by cute little adoring kids.
01:19:44.720How to spot liberated women, womb slowly turning into vacant husk.
01:19:52.180So short hair, bags under eyes from working 80 hour a week, Tinder dating app on phone, birth control and purse surrounded by cats.
01:20:02.280Say purple hair, purple hair should be on there somewhere.
01:20:59.600Does this does this result in any actual blowback in your business model or your personal life?
01:21:06.020Well, I mean, the business model is under threat from stuff like we were talking about earlier with like the New York Times maligning us or misrepresenting us or like the fact checking resulting in our content not getting, you know, as much reach as it used to get on the social networks.
01:21:23.220But, you know, these are the kinds of jokes that we've always made.
01:21:27.380And it's not really like any one particular joke gets people really mad and they can like cancel us.
01:21:32.340There is no real direct way to cancel us because we're not like we're not like on some network somewhere where we could be taken off the network.
01:21:38.840You know, we don't have bosses who could fire us.
01:21:40.640We, you know, we're not going to cancel ourselves and go away.
01:21:44.180So ultimately, you know, there's these roundabout ways that they try to come after us by saying that we're hate speech under the guise of satire or misinformation under the guise of satire.
01:21:53.860And those are the ways that they're trying to come after us.
01:21:55.880So there have been like real world actual effects of that.
01:21:58.640But honestly, a lot of the things that they're trying to do to silence our voice amplify it.
01:22:03.680We end up doing more media appearances and talking about this stuff more.
01:22:06.700There's a lot of backfiring that happens whenever they're trying to get somebody to shut up.
01:22:42.820Our reach on Facebook is like 30 percent, 20 percent of what it was a year or two ago when our when we had a much smaller, smaller audience than we have now.
01:22:54.460I joked recently on Tucker about how like we had one article that that got viewed by like 11 people when we posted on Facebook and we could have reached more people if we printed it out and like nailed it to a telephone pole in a small town.
01:23:04.720It's like they are throttling how much our trap our articles get shown.
01:23:09.440And I think it's because we're fact checked so much and they've given us a news quality score and it's like a low score.
01:23:15.660They're scoring us as like an unreliable news source.
01:23:18.780And the whole point is not a news source at all.
01:23:29.740They're either, you know, offensive and hurtful hate speech or they're, you know, acceptable forms of, you know, conforming ideologically correct, politically correct speech.
01:23:39.300So, you know, it's a weird time to be doing comedy, that's for sure.
01:23:42.540But there are certainly some of those effects going on.
01:23:46.220It's like you've got to please the bosses at Facebook in order to get the traffic that you're entitled to, you know, that you otherwise would have if they just didn't interfere.
01:23:53.420But, yeah, and I'm sure if your jokes were going the other way, if they were at the expense of Trump or Trump voters, you wouldn't be having this sort of suppression.
01:24:04.300I just know that they're a lot more careful about checking people like John Stossel, people like even me, but certainly the Ben Shapiros of the world and the Babylon bees, because you're out there very openly not saying the things they want.
01:24:19.000Well, I'll give you one example of one that was like so silly that it got fact-checked.
01:24:25.040If you've seen like a list of our fact-checked articles, it's really, really funny.
01:24:28.780It's funnier than the articles themselves.
01:24:30.420But we did one about how the Ninth Circuit Court had overruled the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, overruled her death.
01:24:39.140It's like the washing machine joke we did back in 2018 about how CNN had purchased an industrial-sized washing machine to spin the news in before publishing it.
01:24:45.860Like, it's one of those just outlandish, silly stories.
01:25:05.740If you scroll down to the bottom of it, it says Facebook paid for parts of our fact-checking department are like funded by grants from Facebook or something like that.
01:25:14.040So Facebook is out there paying fact-checkers to rate jokes false, so then Facebook can then go to those comedians who told those jokes and say, stop sharing this false information or we're going to take you off the platform.
01:25:26.940Another one, Reuters fact-checked the article by the Bee saying, Nancy Pelosi thanked babies for sacrificing their lives for women's rights.
01:25:36.080I mean, all I could think was how stupid are people.
01:25:41.220People are so stupid, right, that they, A, believed this, and that, B, that Reuters would then take the time, Reuters, to actually figure out, you know, how you got it wrong, how Nancy Pelosi never said that.
01:26:15.700So, you know, men or women, black people or white supremacists, you can't make this stuff up.
01:26:21.400The world is too absurd to be satirized.
01:26:23.400And so I give people a pass when they believe these jokes are real, because in a current climate that we're in, you watch real headlines, and they're just as unbelievable as the satire.