The Megyn Kelly Show - Rise of Alternative Media as Corporate Press Implodes, with Glenn Greenwald, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski, and Entrepreneur Omeed Malik

00:00:00.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:11.140 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.

00:00:15.140 Former President Trump has been ordered to pay a gigantic amount to E. Jean Carroll,

00:00:21.940 the woman accusing him of having sexually assaulted her 30 years ago.

00:00:25.640 I can't quite be sure on when or even the year, but a jury found in her favor.

00:00:31.580 And now the only thing at issue in this trial was the amount of damages and it's a whopper, a whopper.

00:00:37.140 Now she's spiking the ball on a softball media tour where she's getting approximately zero tough questions.

00:00:45.740 We'll play you some of that.

00:00:47.160 While our struggling White House press secretary has another embarrassing moment,

00:00:50.920 this time related to fallen troops. And we get new information today about Moderna targeting journalists

00:00:58.780 who dare to report the truth about vaccine problems, including yours truly.

00:01:04.360 Just a short time ago, the corporate press had a monopoly on the truth and you wouldn't even hear

00:01:10.000 about some of these stories. They were able to suppress and spin stories that didn't go along

00:01:15.380 with the official corporate narratives beloved by big money and big Democrats who control the media.

00:01:23.480 But now, thanks to the rise of alternative media platforms, you can get the truth.

00:01:28.000 You can hear debates on important issues. You can get various points of view and make up your own mind.

00:01:34.260 And today we have guests at the forefront of this push, leading the charge for free speech.

00:01:39.060 We begin with one of the most fearless journalists working today who has moved over to Rumble

00:01:45.700 and Locals to continue his important work. Our friend Glenn Greenwald, host of System Update,

00:01:52.740 is here with me. Glenn, welcome back. Great to have you.

00:01:56.080 Great to be here, Megan. Always good to see you. Thanks for asking.

00:01:59.480 My pleasure. Okay, so let's just start with the E. Jean Carroll verdict.

00:02:03.480 Eighty-three point three million dollars. Most of it in punitive damages against Donald Trump.

00:02:10.800 The sole question was how much he owed her for allegedly defaming her by saying she was a liar

00:02:17.320 on this claim that he sexually assaulted her 30 years ago. So the judge did not allow Trump to even

00:02:24.320 take the stand to deny the sexual assault in this trial because a jury had already found that he had

00:02:30.900 sexually assaulted her. And as a result, this jury, not tempered at all by the fact that they were

00:02:38.120 getting to punish him by saying, hey, you did it, decided to just throw the hardball punch with just

00:02:45.440 a damages number. And now she's on, as I say, a softball media tour where she is just getting

00:02:52.000 arms thrown around the neck and hugged by Rachel Maddow tonight, by CNN, by George Stephanopoulos.

00:03:02.140 I'll show you some of that in a minute. But first, what do you make as a lawyer of this damages award?

00:03:07.920 Yeah, you know, I sometimes forget that I worked as a lawyer and I always forget that you did as well,

00:03:12.440 which I think is a favorite of both of us. But I know from that experience that

00:03:16.900 this is an extraordinarily severe penalty, especially given even the allegations in the case.

00:03:24.860 I mean, this is not some case alleging some enduring sexual assault or some kind of a power

00:03:31.420 exchange or something brutal or violent. I mean, I don't want to downplay it if the jury found

00:03:37.080 that it actually happened, although it does seem extremely bizarre to be able to dredge up a case like

00:03:42.820 this from decades ago. And that's one of the reasons why they will relay the statute of limitations

00:03:49.100 when it came to allegations like this. But at the same time, we are clearly seeing the weaponization

00:03:53.520 of the judicial system against people who have the wrong political ideology. We saw the case of Alex

00:03:59.680 Jones with this, you know, now almost close to multi-billion dollar verdict. We're seeing it,

00:04:05.000 you know, you follow every one of these cases with Donald Trump. The judges are just so

00:04:09.280 unabashedly anti-Trump in a way that they barely try and disguise it. It seems very clear to me that

00:04:15.760 overall there is this attempt to destroy political enemies. And one of those weapons is the judicial

00:04:22.020 system. The case that E.G. and Carroll brought against Trump was, I mean, it had a ton of holes

00:04:30.100 in it. As I said, she couldn't even remember when it happened. She didn't have a police report.

00:04:34.420 She didn't have a medical report. She had nothing other than two friends who said,

00:04:38.320 yeah, she mentioned it at the time. These are friends of hers. And even their memories being

00:04:42.360 tested now, 30 years after the fact, Trump or any man accused like this, if it had happened a week,

00:04:48.480 a year later within the criminal statute of limitations, they'd have the chance to defend

00:04:52.900 themselves. They'd be able to go back and look at their date book and say, I wasn't even in Bergdorf,

00:04:57.560 Goodman, when you allege I threw you into a dressing room and committed a near public sexual assault.

00:05:02.580 30 years after the fact, good luck. What man, especially as busy as Donald Trump,

00:05:07.640 is going to be able to defend against this? However, Trump didn't bother to try to defend

00:05:12.700 at all. And that was a mistake. He didn't even show up at the trial that, you know, asked whether

00:05:18.020 he should be found liable. And not surprisingly, the jury went against him. So I think he was like,

00:05:24.460 kind of not caring. Like, they're not going to believe me. The jury's going to hate me.

00:05:27.940 It's New York City. And he didn't do much to defend. But then she filed this request for

00:05:34.580 defamation damages. And the judge didn't let him re-litigate the sexual assault at all. It was just

00:05:40.660 how much does E. Jean get paid? And her lawyer told the jury, he's super rich. You've got to punish

00:05:47.840 him. You've got to make it big in order for him to feel it so he can stop saying that she's a liar.

00:05:53.440 You know, the thing about this has been bothering me all along, Glenn, is he does think she's a liar.

00:05:59.460 You know, maybe. Maybe he knows she's telling the truth and he's falsely saying she's a liar.

00:06:03.720 Or maybe he just denies the charges and says she's a liar. If you get accused of sexually

00:06:07.640 assaulting somebody and you didn't do it, they're basically saying all you can say is,

00:06:13.200 I deny the charges. It is not true. I did not sexually assault anyone. But if you say,

00:06:18.840 she's a liar, you can get sued like this if a jury finds it's 51 percent more likely than not that you

00:06:25.580 committed the assault. I mean, that's the position Trump was placed in here.

00:06:31.260 This is why I just refuse to believe that there's not a political and ideological component,

00:06:36.920 not just a component, but arguably the driving factor, because that's what I was alluding to

00:06:41.520 earlier. I mean, it is almost unimaginable in my experience as a lawyer, you know, doing civil

00:06:45.600 litigation to imagine a case like this producing consequences of this kind in terms of the punitive

00:06:53.280 damages, in terms of the way that it's been treated. I think Trump's mentality from the start

00:06:58.120 was exactly what you said, which is, I don't even know this woman. You know, it was obviously something

00:07:02.960 that if it had happened would be very important to her. But I think it would also be something that

00:07:07.580 he would be aware of, too. But the fact that he took this approach, I think, was understandable,

00:07:12.620 given that the kind of allegation it was is the exact kind you want to avoid in court systems.

00:07:18.200 That's the reason we have statutes of limitation, because memories fade, they get distorted, evidence

00:07:23.460 becomes unavailable. And yet they really purposely remove statute of limitations barriers in the case

00:07:29.840 of sexual assault for reasons that sometimes might even be commendable in terms of the motive.

00:07:36.900 But in terms of the justice system, it makes it extremely difficult to get to the truth.

00:07:41.100 And so to end up with a kind of double verdict, one where he's being punished both for having done it

00:07:46.140 and then also for denying it and have it be this amount, is something that is extraordinary.

00:07:52.220 It's very much similar to the way he, you know, the judge in the Washington case, the case brought

00:07:57.600 by Jack Smith, tried to impose a gag order on him. There's clearly a political motive to these cases.

00:08:03.500 They're trying to say that he led some sort of insurrection or violated the law in response to the

00:08:09.200 2020 election. It's obviously intended to impact the presidential race.

00:08:14.160 They're all but admitting they want this case to come to trial before the election happens.

00:08:18.360 And then at the same time, this judge says you're not allowed to discuss it publicly.

00:08:23.120 You're not allowed to deny it. It just it seems so clear that this is a weapon that of the judicial

00:08:30.040 system. And that is what is so concerning. The judicial system is very powerful.

00:08:33.320 It can do all sorts of things to you. It can take your money away. It can put you in a cage.

00:08:36.780 It can even kill you. It's vital that it not be contaminated with political motives.

00:08:41.340 And I think in this case and so many others like it that we've seen, that's exactly what's happening.

00:08:46.260 That's the thing. So E. Jean Carroll wrote this book in 2019 claiming this happened to her.

00:08:50.520 She said she was inspired by the Me Too movement to finally tell her story.

00:08:53.980 Trump was the sitting president at the time. And he said, the woman's a whack job.

00:08:57.140 This never happened. That was the first alleged case of defamation.

00:09:00.040 Then he continued saying that after he left office and these incidents became the basis for

00:09:07.200 her defamation claim, saying, you know, you said more than I deny it. You called me a liar.

00:09:12.260 You called me a whack job. Just put yourself. The media has already run to say it's true because

00:09:16.280 a jury, a civil jury found it 51 percent more likely than not that he did it. Based on that 51 percent,

00:09:24.140 they've declared him a sexual pervert, basically.

00:09:27.100 And they want us all to go along with it. They want us all to say it's horrible how Trump keeps

00:09:34.140 dismissing this woman as opposed to let's just entertain for a minute the possibility that Trump

00:09:39.500 is the truth teller here, that Trump actually has no memory of this person and certainly didn't

00:09:44.360 sexually assault her and that she really is some sort of a kook who decided to make up a story about

00:09:50.520 him to get her name in the headlines, to potentially get money from a deep pocketed guy.

00:09:55.040 The media has zero appetite for entertaining that possibility. And therefore, they take

00:10:03.300 umbrage at his. She's a whack job. What's he supposed to say if somebody came out against you,

00:10:08.000 Glenn, from when, you know, 20 years ago when you were 20, right, you'd be like, this person's a nut

00:10:14.300 case. I don't know them. And so that's really what Trump has been saying. And for that now, he's going to

00:10:19.580 have to pay almost a hundred million dollars maybe. Um, meanwhile, I'll just give you a flavor

00:10:24.800 on this. She can go out all over the media and talk about him like this. Listen to what she said.

00:10:32.600 This is just a, the latest taste. I could give you a lot of these. Uh, this is her describing him

00:10:37.400 in the courtroom in Sot 2 on her victory tour. Listen.

00:10:43.220 I hadn't seen him since, uh, he has told me in, uh, in the dressing room, uh, and, um, preparing

00:10:51.720 to see him was terrifying. I hadn't slept. I hadn't eaten. I couldn't think I lost my language

00:11:02.540 when she was trying to prepare me to go, uh, to do testimony in front of Donald Trump. And

00:11:08.860 there he was, and he was nothing. He would just no power. He had, he was zero. He's an emperor

00:11:23.400 without clothes. It's like looking at nothing. It was like nothing.

00:11:31.960 If, if he starts talking about her that way, she's going to slap him with another defamation

00:11:35.580 suit, Glenn. No, if he continues for sure. And not only will she stop with another defamation

00:11:41.760 suit, but these courts will be very receptive to it. You know, I don't know about you, Megan,

00:11:46.180 but you know, when I went to law school and like I embarked on my legal career at this

00:11:50.040 very idealistic image of what the law was like, you know, I didn't, I don't think I was super

00:11:53.480 naive, but I basically thought that the legal system was this well-constructed process for

00:11:58.980 getting to the truth that judges took seriously, their obligation to be neutral. And one of the

00:12:03.440 things that I guess disillusioned me about the work more than anything was to see how easily

00:12:08.180 judges could kind of tinker with the process to tell things in one direction or another based on

00:12:15.240 whatever motives they had for doing so. And I don't think we can ignore the fact that Donald

00:12:20.840 Trump is probably the single most polarizing figure in the United States. All of these judges

00:12:26.100 who are part of the federal judiciary or state courts have very strong political opinions. They're

00:12:30.500 people who are politically engaged. If they're in New York, they're overwhelmingly likely to be

00:12:35.020 ideologically opposed to Trump. And as we know, people ideologically opposed to Trump aren't just

00:12:39.460 opposed to him, but they hate him viscerally. So I think what we're seeing in all of these cases,

00:12:45.580 just watching, you know, from a distance and not in the courtroom, but I'm following pretty closely.

00:12:50.500 It's just these gratuitous rulings constantly against him. The way in which these judges are speaking

00:12:55.300 is designed to kind of show that they don't respect Trump, that they don't, they're not

00:13:00.140 intimidated in any way over Trump, similar to what she was just sort of saying, that he's powerless,

00:13:03.680 to show that he's powerless there. None of it really feels like justice to me. And so to allow her to

00:13:09.180 go around hurling every accusation against him, and then to have him basically constrained, because

00:13:15.720 you say like a jury in New York decided 51% more likely that she was telling the truth. And now every time

00:13:21.180 he opens his mouth, he's liable to pay millions more, is just so viscerally unjust. And then you

00:13:27.480 add on top of that, the media, which has the same bias. And you're exactly right. Like, I want to thank

00:13:33.080 you, by the way, for how generous you were in your mouth about when I was 20 years old. But it would

00:13:36.920 be I hope anybody should think about that. Like if you go back and someone just from your distant past

00:13:42.120 emerges with this very sketchy allegation, of course, you're going to want to defend yourself publicly.

00:13:47.260 And he's basically barred from doing so. It's perverse. Yeah, he has. If he does so,

00:13:52.400 he has to do so in exactly the forensic terminology defined by E. Jean Carroll and a court. He can't

00:13:58.180 just say she's a lunatic. This didn't happen. Or she's going to keep getting tens and tens of

00:14:03.200 millions of dollars against him. So, OK, there are tons of problems with E. Jean Carroll's allegations

00:14:09.080 against him, as I outlined a second ago. And just think about it. If somebody said the allegation is

00:14:12.880 that she worked she was in Bergdorf Goodman. He went into Bergdorf Goodman and she he was asking

00:14:19.500 her a question about lingerie before she knew it. He had her in a dressing room and was sexually

00:14:24.940 assaulting her. The jury found him liable. Again, not a criminal case. The statute has expired on that

00:14:31.140 of sexual assault, not of rape and then of defamation. And here we go on the damages.

00:14:35.900 If that had happened to him and she had filed the suit within a timely basis,

00:14:41.100 he could have pulled surveillance tapes, let's say, you know, anything. There would have been

00:14:46.540 some record even on the street to see whether a Donald Trump was walking into Bergdorf Goodman.

00:14:50.920 None of that was possible for him. Then the reason she was able to bring that case now for sexual

00:14:56.520 assault all these years after the criminal statute had expired is because a Democrat who hates Trump

00:15:00.660 pushed to change the law here in New York state to allow these so-called survivors of these old

00:15:06.340 sexual assaults to bring civil cases long past the date when the statute has had expired. There's a

00:15:11.300 real question about whether she did this with Donald Trump in mind in particular. And then you have

00:15:16.120 people like George Conway online celebrating that this was an idea he had to connect her with this

00:15:21.820 lawyer and it was Democrat funded by big donor Democrats to make sure that she could bring the

00:15:26.160 case. I mean, all of this has the stench of politics all over it. So now she wins this 83

00:15:31.660 million. Will it be reversed on appeal? I don't know. Her lawyer says she doesn't think so. She's

00:15:36.600 smart woman. The lawyer is very smart, says she thinks the punitive damages award is within line.

00:15:42.000 If you compare it to the compensatory damages, which I think were 11 million. She said she thinks it's

00:15:47.700 in line with what the federal court of appeals, the second circuit has upheld in the past.

00:15:53.700 And, uh, so if that's true, then Trump could be actually looking at paying it. No, even this

00:15:59.480 leads me to the media. You would think the media at some point might ask E. Jean Carroll some tough

00:16:05.320 questions like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Why didn't you, you only had two friends. Why isn't

00:16:11.200 there a surveillance tape? Why isn't there a contemporaneous witness? Why didn't you write all

00:16:15.020 the stuff? Like you could, you could set it up just to be fair. Even if you didn't believe

00:16:18.500 these were good points, just to be fair. Instead, we get this. Here's George Stephanopoulos this

00:16:24.400 morning interviewing her. Has it settled in yet? It's been reported the exchange smiles with the

00:16:30.440 jurors on the way out. Is that true? You said you want to do great things with this $83 million

00:16:35.360 settlement. Give us an idea about that. What was it like being in the courtroom with Donald Trump?

00:16:39.780 What was it like to be with Donald Trump in that courtroom? Did you make eye contact with him?

00:16:44.020 A little bit of a CNN in the back end there. Really tough, Glenn. Really hard hitting.

00:16:50.900 I mean, so predictable. You put together Donald Trump and a woman claiming to be a survivor of

00:16:56.880 sexual assault. And obviously the media is going to fall on the ground and prostrate itself

00:17:00.720 in front of her. You know, I think the broader point here though to Megan is,

00:17:06.860 and I think this is something that American leads are really not coming to grips with in a way that

00:17:12.380 I think is quite dangerous, which is, it is an extraordinary state of affairs that Donald

00:17:18.660 Trump has been indicted four separate times in felony cases throughout the country on top of

00:17:25.640 civil suits like this. And yet he is still not just winning Republican primaries and is all but the

00:17:31.640 inevitable GOP front runner, but also leading the incumbent president in most polls as well.

00:17:37.800 And how can that possibly be? You know, it used to be the case 20, 30 years ago that if a politician

00:17:44.860 got anywhere near a serious indictment for anything, you know, felonious, that they would be instantly

00:17:52.340 removed from consideration for high office. What we have here is a country in which the vast bulk of

00:17:58.660 the population has lost its trust and faith in all of the leading institutions of power that we have.

00:18:05.340 The judicial system, obviously everybody hates the media, the government, you know, all these

00:18:11.020 institutions, centers of finance that have essentially made a coalition against Donald Trump

00:18:16.180 willing to do and say anything over the past seven years of getting increasingly desperate to prevent

00:18:21.540 him from being empowered as sabotaging him when he is. The fact that we have a country where people

00:18:27.680 just don't trust the justice system. They're willing to send back to the White House, somebody accused

00:18:32.740 four times of being a felony. I doubt this case will have the slightest impact on the population.

00:18:37.140 People have an intuitive sense that institutions of authority are being not just politicized,

00:18:41.980 but corrupted. And that, of course, begins with the media, but it encompasses so many other

00:18:46.800 institutions. And this case is such a perfect illustration of why.

00:18:51.260 It's so true. Just as a refresher, here's Rachel Maddow back in May of 2023 with E. Jean Carroll.

00:18:57.820 Um, again, and by the way, Matt, I was billing her interview with E. Jean Carroll, which happens

00:19:03.400 tonight as an exclusive and as E. Jean Carroll's very first sit down, um, post her, her verdict

00:19:09.220 award. E. Jean Carroll was all over the news. Sorry, Rachel. It didn't work out. I love it. I'm sorry,

00:19:15.020 but I love it. This woman, Rachel Maddow is getting paid $30 million a year for one show a week.

00:19:23.000 And this is the kind of journalism we get during that one hour of work she does. Watch this from

00:19:30.560 May. E. Jean Carroll and her lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, have proven in a court of law that Trump

00:19:37.140 cannot tell lies with impunity. They have done that for the country. I just want to stand up and give

00:19:42.680 you a standing ovation. Did things go the way that you thought they would? I wasn't doing it for

00:19:47.920 myself. I was doing it for the women in the country. Robbie, you, you have sued this former

00:19:53.840 president a lot. And I wonder how that's changed your life. Well, he doesn't like me very much.

00:19:58.880 That's for sure. I'm sorry to put it in these terms because I feel like I'm a little like casting a

00:20:03.040 movie about it or something. But you saying that it's a disadvantage that he lies so much. I feel

00:20:08.940 like it's the first time I've heard that in seven years. The ability to lie without shame

00:20:13.660 and without any sort of tell, without any sort of remorse about it whatsoever at about even the

00:20:20.440 most important things has always seemed like a political superpower to him. You've turned it into

00:20:25.380 the opposite. No self-awareness, the ability to lie with impunity without any tell. It's a superpower.

00:20:34.520 Yes. And you have it, madam. You exercised it for four years while he was in the White House.

00:20:39.340 I mean, Rachel Maddow is, I think, probably the, I guess, if you want to call her a TV journalist,

00:20:45.940 you can, but let's do that to be generous. Like the TV journalist who probably has the largest record

00:20:50.940 of making claims that ended up being completely debunked as utter falsities, as complete lies.

00:20:56.980 Her obsession with every prong of Russiagate and the Steele dossier, her claiming that the New York

00:21:02.600 Post reporting on the Biden family in Ukraine and China was the byproduct of Russian disinformation.

00:21:06.620 Everything that she's been doing and saying for the last seven years, everything about how it was

00:21:12.600 proven that COVID came from natural origins and that only lying conspiracy theorists believe that

00:21:18.740 it came from a lab in Wuhan. There is almost nobody that you can find who has peddled disinformation

00:21:24.200 more flagrantly and aggressively than she. And as you say, there's zero self-reflection. I don't know

00:21:29.220 if you tried to reach out to E.J. Carroll to ask for an interview, but I seriously doubt that she

00:21:35.200 would be willing to grant interviews to outlets that she knew would be adversarial. And there you

00:21:41.160 see her saying, I want to give you a standing ovation. Clearly, there's a huge amount of political

00:21:45.120 sympathy between Rachel Maddow and E.J. Carroll, just like there is between all these anchors to whom

00:21:49.900 she's giving interviews. And that political ideology is the one that we easily recognize as being

00:21:54.980 monomaniacally devoted to destroying Donald Trump. This is a political person engaged in a political

00:22:00.480 project. And the media barely tries anymore at this pretense that their job is to ask hard questions.

00:22:07.380 I don't even think if you ask them, they would say they see their job as that. I think they see their

00:22:11.700 job and would admit it as being this kind of overarching duty to do everything possible to stop Donald Trump

00:22:17.900 from returning to power. And if the media's primary allegiance, primary mission is one that is

00:22:25.460 making me political like that, and that's what explains all these interviews, there's no wonder

00:22:30.520 that the country hates the media and no longer trusts it. At least that part of the media, I think it's

00:22:35.020 giving rise to independent media that obviously benefits both you and me and I think benefits the

00:22:38.880 country. But these people in the media are held in complete contempt. And all the things you're

00:22:44.260 showing explain the reason for that. It's amazing. You know, when I was on NBC, I interviewed three

00:22:52.280 Trump accusers. Like I really feel like I'm the only one who's done both accusers and the accused. I'm

00:22:59.920 very open minded on these claims. I'm not somebody who's a knee jerk. No, it didn't happen. You know,

00:23:05.160 I'm not a I'm certainly not a believe all woman person, all women, but I'm not a believe no women

00:23:10.760 person either. And you know what I did? I had one of the women who testified at Trump's first trial

00:23:16.300 because not only did they have E. Jean Carroll testify, they brought in two others who claimed

00:23:20.740 that they had been sexually assaulted by Trump to tell the jury me, too, because New York state is

00:23:25.280 allowing that, too. That's what happened to Harvey Weinstein. And I had one of them on my show at NBC,

00:23:29.480 the woman who claims he groped on an airplane. And, you know, I asked her, they say that that you

00:23:34.240 were in the first class and that middle section doesn't come up. And how could he have gotten across

00:23:38.360 to you? Whatever. You don't have to make it uncomfortable and painful when you've got

00:23:44.460 somebody who's claiming they were sexually assaulted. I get that there needs to be some

00:23:47.480 a ginger approach, but you don't have to be completely derelict in your duties as a journalist.

00:23:53.780 Right. You can ask some tough questions like, gee, why didn't you go to the police?

00:23:58.560 Gee, you know, whatever. It's just they have no interest in it. And the reason is there's no

00:24:04.500 interest. His name is Donald Trump. They want to get him. And by the way, when I was interviewing

00:24:08.300 those women while I was at NBC, I wasn't some huge fan of Trump. I understood like I was very

00:24:14.200 open minded to the fact that he might have done it. But I had to ask those those tough questions

00:24:18.420 of the women because it's our job. This is the problem, Glenn, is that when when it's Trump,

00:24:24.200 all ethics go out the window. Rachel Maddow doesn't care. George Stephanopoulos doesn't care.

00:24:29.000 CNN doesn't care. And not only that, their organizations don't care because normally NBC or ABC or CBS

00:24:33.980 early ABC morning, there'd be somebody there to say you must ask some tough questions here

00:24:38.520 in order to be fair to the other side. Zero. Zippo. Stephanopoulos. Gee, gee, like a schoolgirl.

00:24:45.000 What was it like? What are you planning on doing with the money, all the good things you're going

00:24:50.020 to do with money? And look, we have a counter example. You know, ordinarily in these cases,

00:24:53.820 we would have to say, like, oh, imagine if a woman were accusing a leading Democrat of this.

00:24:58.140 Imagine how different they would be acting. We don't have to engage in that hypothetical. There

00:25:01.820 was a woman who accused Joe Biden of having engaged in a similar sexual assault. There were

00:25:06.940 actually a string of women alleging that he had done things to make them uncomfortable in the

00:25:10.420 workplace. But one in particular who alleged that she was the victim of violent assault, Tara Reid.

00:25:14.960 I know you had her on on your show and you interviewed her in the way that you're suggesting

00:25:18.980 that E. Jean Carroll should be interviewed. But the media treated her much, much differently

00:25:24.160 than they're treating E. Jean Carroll or any Trump accusers. They talked about her like she was just

00:25:29.520 a psychopath, like she was. It was like discourse from 70 years ago from any female sexual assault

00:25:36.360 accuser, you know, and no one in media wanted to take her claim seriously. They did everything to

00:25:41.200 debunk it. And you just look at the contrast. And this is what I mean. It's, you know, most Americans

00:25:48.280 are not political junkies. They're not spending all their time focused on politics. But the corruption

00:25:53.540 of the media has become so glaring that you don't even need to spend that much time looking at it.

00:25:59.220 People notice these things. They observe these things. And the hatred that the media has earned,

00:26:05.640 I think, is just that very well earned because of this kind of behavior. I mean, we all have

00:26:11.060 political biases. We all are subjective. But part of the job is supposed to be to be even minded,

00:26:17.140 to confront everybody with hard questions. As you say, you want to be sensitive with

00:26:20.900 electorate survivors and victims. But you still have to ask hard questions, especially if they're

00:26:27.100 putting themselves in the media and there's a political impact in their case. They did it when

00:26:31.640 there was an accuser against Joe Biden. They're doing the opposite when it's someone accusing Donald

00:26:36.440 Trump. And that kind of means says it all. That's exactly right. I mean, I remember speaking to

00:26:41.840 this leads, this woman NBC saying, you know, there was a man there. There was a British man on board

00:26:47.200 the plane who said he saw nothing improper. There are real questions about whether Trump could have

00:26:50.760 gotten over the armrest to you in the first class cabin. And with Tara Reid, same thing. I came out

00:26:57.240 of my couch when I didn't even have a show, Glenn. It was like the first thing. Go back and look at my

00:27:02.900 YouTube feed. It was it was like the launch of my YouTube feed to put her on because nobody was

00:27:09.560 talking to her. It was ridiculous. And I asked her tough questions, too. Like, come on, you're saying

00:27:15.940 this happened in a hallway in the Senate building. Nobody saw you. And by the way, you said nice

00:27:21.020 things about him years later. It's not fucking hard. Just grow a pair. Ask a couple of tough

00:27:26.360 questions to do your basic job. They won't. They're too motivated by the end result. And it's just an

00:27:33.900 abomination. OK, having said that, it's wonderful now that there are new avenues to to to these people

00:27:41.960 don't control the narrative the way they used to. MSNBC doesn't control the narrative. NBC doesn't

00:27:46.940 control the narrative. CNN doesn't control the narrative because you do have alternative media

00:27:51.080 places. And thank God for them, because we now thankfully get our our our queen, Taylor Lorenz,

00:27:59.920 to stick up for us when things go wrong in the digital.

00:28:08.000 The giant of American journalism. She's very upset about the layoffs at mainstream outlets like

00:28:16.760 WAPO, L.A. Times and so on, but also what's happening in the digital lane. And given her long

00:28:22.800 and historic and important journalism career, she's out there trying to sort of be everyone's

00:28:29.720 spokesperson on how important journalists are. I don't know. You tell me, Glenn, whether we need

00:28:33.880 a new spokesperson. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I've looked far and wide to find accomplishments

00:28:40.260 in Taylor Lorenz's journalistic career that justify this perception of hers that he's floating in to

00:28:46.620 advise all of us about how to save journalism in the media. And it's very hard pressed to find anything

00:28:51.420 that would warrant this kind of lofty idea that she has of herself. But the diagnosis she made is

00:28:59.680 actually correct. What she's essentially saying is the digital media, the digital liberal media in

00:29:05.520 which I, Taylor Lorenz emerged and grew up in has been basically completely destroyed. Like there's

00:29:12.000 really no more BuzzFeed. There's no more Vice. There's kind of like the Huffington Post, but not

00:29:17.940 really all of these digital outlets are failing. And at the same time, even the larger media outlets

00:29:23.120 that have the same ideology as them, especially in the era of Trump, are failing as well. You

00:29:27.680 basically have two or three major media outlets, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and a couple

00:29:32.400 others. Obviously, Fox still is doing okay in the ratings, but you have a couple of big media outlets

00:29:40.080 that are still thriving and everybody else is failing. And there's some macroeconomic factors

00:29:46.860 or some influence of big tech. The reality is though, and the strength of independent media proves this,

00:29:54.360 is that if you offer somebody things that they are interested in hearing, if you are willing to

00:30:00.300 tell the truth to people, even if they don't always agree with you, if you're willing to

00:30:04.300 find different ways of looking at things that the major mainstream media outlets don't permit,

00:30:10.680 you will find an audience, really often a large audience. I mean, probably the single most influential

00:30:15.800 media figure in the country is Joe Rogan. And the thing that characterizes him more than anything is

00:30:21.740 it's very hard to pin him to a political party or to a political ideology. He just kind of found a

00:30:26.900 gigantic audience in a way that these major media corporations could only dream of. And there's been

00:30:31.320 this big independent media that has arisen that's very similar. You're obviously a part of it. I'm obviously

00:30:37.260 a part of it. And there is no self-reflection on the part of the Taylor Enzies of the world and all these

00:30:42.740 other people losing their jobs, which, you know, I don't necessarily celebrate. I don't like, I try not to

00:30:48.120 take pleasure in the suffering of others, but I do take pleasure when harmful, toxic, destructive

00:30:54.380 industries lose influence and lose power. And there's no attempt on the part of any of these people to ask,

00:31:00.340 why is it that people don't trust us? What have we done that have caused people to turn away from us to the

00:31:05.860 point where our work is irrelevant, can't be monetized? There's no way to even sustain it. And they blame

00:31:11.540 everybody else. And the last thing that they ever do is look in the mirror.

00:31:15.780 Here she is. We played a soundbite of her last week. She was upset about the media layoffs, which, you know,

00:31:20.020 it's a meritocracy. Do better, do better journalism and the companies will do better. I mean, I can only speak

00:31:26.580 from my own show, my own media company, but we're thriving. We're adding people. We're, we're hiring

00:31:30.920 right now because there's a market for actual facts, like true journalism. Um, here she is

00:31:38.820 on Friday, doubling down on her criticisms and trying to defend her, her, her, her new profession.

00:31:46.100 That doesn't mean that all journalism is inherently good. A huge part of the resentment,

00:31:51.720 a lot of people are feeling towards the press these days is due to the harm corporate media

00:31:55.260 has caused various communities. The ways that many reporters stoke outrage, feed extremist ideology

00:32:00.360 and use their platforms irresponsibly is reprehensible. Local and national media have

00:32:05.220 inflicted enormous harm over the years on black people, trans people, and other marginalized groups.

00:32:10.100 I would love to see the rise of a robust worker owned news journalism landscape.

00:32:14.600 You see, that's the problem, Glenn. That's, that's the reason we're having layoffs

00:32:19.700 and the MSM is cratering because they've been stoking outrage, feeding extremist ideologies and

00:32:26.220 using their platforms irresponsibly and reprehensibly and inflicting harms on black

00:32:30.740 people, trans people, and other marginalized groups. That's, that's the problem.

00:32:35.980 Right. That's the, that's the diagnosis that she gave for why media is feeling that they're

00:32:40.140 insufficiently left-wing, that they're insufficiently woke on culture war issues.

00:32:43.660 I mean, how completely delusional and blind do you have to be to think that's the reason that

00:32:49.300 media is failing? In fact, all of these outlets that she began that video by naming, which was

00:32:55.680 part of the milieu in which she emerged, you know, are, are all left-wing, left-liberal, uh,

00:33:03.020 outlets, particularly on cultural issues. You know, everything was America is structurally racist

00:33:07.780 with George Floyd. Everything was the Me Too movement. Everything is LGBT heavy. I mean,

00:33:13.000 you can't get away from it. And I think, I actually, I think the main reason that media outlets

00:33:19.020 fail, as you say, it is a meritocracy. They're just boring because if you are ideologically banal

00:33:24.100 and predictable, and if you don't allow any vibrancy and debate and discussion, and if everybody is

00:33:28.740 dealing to the same script, you can get that from the New York times. No one needs these other

00:33:33.560 outlets. And that's what they all became. The other reason is they don't, they lost the trust

00:33:38.440 of people because they were willing to lie. But a major reason is, is because they became so

00:33:43.340 intensely focused on these kinds of issues, harm to black people, harm to LGBT people and the

00:33:48.800 trans community to the arm, that all these other issues that actually people care most about in

00:33:53.660 their lives, including members of those groups that she named were being neglected and ignored.

00:33:58.520 Like when I thought about journalism and when I wanted to go into journalism, it was about,

00:34:02.360 you know, infronting powerful institutions and exposing the secrets of like the rich and the

00:34:07.000 powerful and government institutions, not, you know, just babbling on forever about the culture

00:34:12.480 war. And so many of them decided that that's where their nobility lay. And people just, that is not what

00:34:18.040 determines the happiness of people's lives. That is not their priority.

00:34:22.180 It's so true. It makes me laugh. I remember when Jim McGreevey went down, the governor of, was it New Jersey?

00:34:27.580 And they did some parody of him, like jumping into the air going, I'm gay, I'm gay. And it was,

00:34:39.240 it was perfect. It was a perfect clip because this is how the mainstream sees LGBTQ people or black people

00:34:45.920 or women. Like we're all about, I have a vagina, a vagina. And they cover the news accordingly. Here,

00:34:55.020 here are just the past couple of articles. Taylor Lorenz, I should have told this to the audience

00:35:00.140 because no one knows who she is, but she's a ridiculous reporter for the Washington Post. She

00:35:03.500 was at the New York Times and she made a name for herself targeting 17 year old boys who wanted to

00:35:08.240 remain anonymous on the internet, but she wouldn't have it. Here's one. Substack wanted to be neutral.

00:35:14.040 It's tolerance of Nazis proved divisive. Next. If you didn't share a recap video, did 2023 even happen?

00:35:21.240 Next. How a toilet themed YouTube series became the biggest thing online. And then there's

00:35:29.160 anti-Semitism was rising online. Then Elon Musk's ex supercharged it. So we can see what Taylor Lorenz

00:35:36.840 cares about. I saw your tweet, your tweets, Glenn. Um, I don't know if there were tweets actually,

00:35:43.060 but you were saying that, uh, her biggest story. Yeah, it was on your show that her biggest story

00:35:48.420 was uncovering the private citizen who ran the libs of ticks, tick tock account, uh, who was

00:35:53.040 amazing. And the second biggest story you said is, uh, that one time she was in the app clubhouse

00:35:58.880 and she heard someone use the word retarded. Great job.

00:36:04.020 Not only did she run to Twitter to tell them, but she misattributed it. She claimed it was Mark

00:36:08.060 Andreessen, the Silicon Valley financier who had said that and it wasn't him. So on top of like this

00:36:13.700 childish act of like tattling to the teacher about somebody using a bad word, which she thinks is

00:36:17.540 journalism. She even got the whole story wrong. I mean, I think the, you know, that I think is

00:36:23.300 really the point. It's a little bit elusive to understand, but you know, I think people turn to

00:36:29.660 media and to journalism in order to tell them the things they need to understand about the world

00:36:35.380 around them. That's most affecting their lives, like their cost of living and their security and,

00:36:41.080 you know, all the things that everyone thinks about. And, you know, if you're black,

00:36:46.340 if you're LGBTQ, if you're a woman, those are all the things you think about too. You don't wake up

00:36:50.260 every day thinking about like, Oh, a new day as an LGBTQ person. Like you think about all the things

00:36:56.200 that everybody else thinks about. And so this demand constantly that there be this endless amount of

00:37:02.360 like catering with this language that nobody uses. I mean, it's so obviously a reason why people

00:37:08.040 have turned away from journalism. They don't confront anyone in power. They kind of serve power.

00:37:12.720 They dig up the identity of private citizens. I mean, like the daily beast actually spent resources

00:37:18.760 to find out who it was who posted some meme of Nancy Pelosi that she had, that apparently had

00:37:24.960 enraged her. And they like dragged out this person who was just a private citizen and patted themselves

00:37:29.280 on the back. It's just, it's, it's not even journalism, like in terms of the ethos, as I understand it.

00:37:34.240 And that's why I say it deserves to fail. And it is failing, you know, in a very serious way.

00:37:39.720 Like it's unraveling. These institutions are, I mean, Sports Illustrated, you know,

00:37:44.020 a mainstay of American culture for decades, basically doesn't exist any longer. And you go

00:37:49.080 one by one and you're seeing the same thing. And like I said, you know, if all of a sudden I started

00:37:53.660 losing my audience and nobody cared anymore about what I was saying or what I was doing,

00:37:58.240 of course, the first thing I would do is look at myself and say like, what am I doing wrong?

00:38:02.840 But they have a long list of everybody else that they blame. And they're, I mean,

00:38:06.520 I'm telling you, go look for it. Anytime they're lamenting the collapse of media,

00:38:10.440 they will never, ever, ever ask what is it that we have done to contribute to our own failures?

00:38:16.120 No, never. Absolutely. That's absolutely right. There was an amazing, let me see if I can find it,

00:38:21.020 but an amazing piece was by Sebastian Younger and it's posted on national review today. It's leading

00:38:26.480 national review and it was so powerful and it was so good. And he was talking about, you know,

00:38:32.040 the real, the true call of a journalist and what it actually means and holding the powerful to

00:38:36.600 account just exactly as you've always done, Glenn, irrespective of party. I mean, you left your own

00:38:42.020 media organization that you founded because they had lost the mission to, you know, what was afflict

00:38:46.680 the powerful and however the saying goes. So Sebastian Younger, people may know him from authoring

00:38:52.360 The Perfect Storm, which became a very popular movie, but he's a war correspondent. He's a journalist

00:38:57.720 and he covered the war in Afghanistan for 10 years, among other things. And he wrote this. I love

00:39:03.080 this. Love, love, love this. A journalist is a person who is willing to destroy his own opinions

00:39:10.340 with facts. A journalist is a person who is willing to report the truth regardless of consequences to

00:39:18.820 herself or others. A journalist is a person who is focused on reality rather than outcome. I love

00:39:27.700 that. And I'm not just saying that because he called me out in this piece by name favorably.

00:39:31.920 I appreciated it. But a journalist is a person who is willing to destroy his own opinions with facts.

00:39:37.840 There it is right there, Glenn. We've gotten so far afield of that in the mainstream.

00:39:45.980 Yeah. You know, I remember, you know, not to be super complimentary, but like,

00:39:50.160 I think it was 2013 or 14 or something when I was very much considered to be on the left,

00:39:54.740 you were at Fox and people assumed you were on the right. And I remember like political did a

00:39:58.740 profile of you or some outlet like that. And they talked to me about it because I had recently seen

00:40:03.320 an interview that you had conducted with a Republican conservative senator that was incredibly

00:40:07.940 adversarial. And I said something like you would never, ever see a Democratic Party politician

00:40:12.400 interviewed this way on MSNBC or CNN. And if you go and look at the earliest writings that I would

00:40:19.100 publish about Donald Trump's candidacy in 2015 and 2016, it was extremely negative. But in 2016,

00:40:26.000 in mid-2016, when this narrative emerged of Russiagate and for me, it was like a rejuvenation of

00:40:33.540 McCarthyite, you know, scripts from the CIA, like what is Donald Trump in Moscow? What is this allegiance,

00:40:39.560 this secret loyalty that Trump has to the Kremlin? You know, I was repulsed by it in part because

00:40:46.060 it did resonate for me, this kind of 1950s attack on people's loyalties based on nothing,

00:40:51.120 but also just as a journalist evident from an evidentiary perspective, there was never any

00:40:56.920 substantiation to these allegations that Trump had collaborated with or conspired with the Kremlin

00:41:01.940 in the hacking of the DNC email and John Podesta's email, which was the central conspiracy that led to

00:41:06.900 everything, let alone things like the Steele dossier. And it just offended me journalistically,

00:41:12.440 you know, that I would watch these leaks every day from the CIA and the FBI be trumpeted by the

00:41:16.680 New York Times and the Washington Post, for which they showered themselves with Pulitzers,

00:41:20.120 even though there was so clearly never any evidence to it. And so it just became, you know,

00:41:25.400 an obsession of mine to say that every day. And of course, the perception emerged,

00:41:29.140 well, I must love Donald Trump. And think about what that perception says, that journalists can't,

00:41:34.180 you know, go against a certain narrative or question the evidentiary basis for it,

00:41:38.940 unless they somehow secretly love the party or the candidate that they're questioning helps.

00:41:45.880 And for me, that was never the case. I was never a fan of Trump, to put that mildly.

00:41:49.860 But at the same time, Russiagate, to me, was so journalistically offensive. And if you can't do

00:41:54.420 that as a journalist, if you can't question a narrative that might be politically helpful to

00:41:59.520 you or reject one, or if you, you know, aren't willing to affirm a narrative that might be

00:42:05.240 politically harmful to you, there's no point in calling yourself a journalist. You're just a

00:42:09.140 political operative or an activist. That's the difference.

00:42:12.560 Yeah, that's exactly right. And there's, there's, there's just no interest whatsoever to hold the

00:42:17.520 powerful to account anymore. If it's their party, it's only Donald Trump that the journalists will

00:42:21.660 be very, very quick to unfairly hold him to account for everything. But when it's their party,

00:42:26.100 it's a different story. And it really like when we have, you know, possibility of wars breaking

00:42:31.520 out, it's more important now than ever, now than ever to, to not let party dictate your coverage,

00:42:39.100 right? To not let your own political affiliations and desires prevent good coverage and objective

00:42:45.540 coverage. This is one of the things Sebastian Younger was writing about in this piece when

00:42:48.900 journalism dies on National Review. He was saying, when I was out there covering the Afghanistan war,

00:42:53.980 he writes, my belief in the mission, it was complete. Like he was completely on our side. He thought it

00:42:58.900 was just and so on. He was outraged after 9-11. He says, my belief in the mission, however, did not

00:43:03.320 prevent me from calling out American missteps and failures. I was a journalist after all, not a

00:43:08.380 Pentagon press spokesperson. And he goes on from this, well worth everyone's time to give it a read. But

00:43:13.440 it reminds me of today. Today we have terrible news out of the Mideast, out of Jordan, where three

00:43:22.020 U.S. service members, members of the army were killed. New York Times says at least 34 others

00:43:27.400 were injured. Some have said it's more like 25 injured. It's still undetermined. Killed after a

00:43:34.680 drone attack carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq was

00:43:39.080 unleashed. Iran is denying that it had anything to do with it. But the hit happened near the outpost

00:43:47.280 living quarters. And three of our guys are dead. All right. So these are three army members who are

00:43:51.840 dead today and some number of dozens injured. Corrine Jean-Pierre, who is an idiot, goes on the

00:44:01.720 Today Show to talk about it. I mean, this is the number one. So if you are the White House, this is

00:44:06.880 number one. So she goes on MSNBC. She knows this question is going to be coming. My God.

00:44:12.640 And listen to her.

00:44:15.800 What I will say, our deepest, obviously our deepest condolences go out and our heartfelt condolences go

00:44:22.900 out to the families who lost three, three brave, three brave, three brave, three folks who are,

00:44:30.760 who are military folks who are brave, who are always fighting, who are fighting on behalf and

00:44:35.660 of this administration of the American people, obviously more so, more importantly.

00:44:40.040 She doesn't, she doesn't know what she's saying. Three folks, three folks. It's disrespectful.

00:44:48.500 The lack of preparation is disrespectful. And she clearly doesn't understand the news

00:44:54.740 that she's been appointed to speak about. She's the White House spokesperson and she is not a bright

00:45:02.460 person. I mean, Megan, her job is to communicate, right? So you have some very smart people who might

00:45:09.560 not be verbally articulate. We all have our strengths, you know? So that's understandable.

00:45:16.180 You can be smart, but not very good at expressing yourself verbally. But her job, that's her only job,

00:45:22.820 is to communicate on behalf of the White House to the public. And she is incapable of forming a

00:45:27.840 sentence. That was the easiest sentence. What she was trying to say was these are three brave

00:45:32.020 patriots who have lost their lives. Her brain broke, like in the middle. And she, she couldn't

00:45:36.380 reconstruct the sentence by just calling, figuring out how to call them brave and patriotic at the

00:45:42.280 same time. She like worked her way around this with the word folks. That's like a very, just like

00:45:46.560 informal leftist way of calling people to avoid gendering them. And I don't, I know what you can

00:45:52.980 make too big of a deal out of like one clip, but this is something we've seen over and over with her.

00:45:57.360 I, I'm always amazed, you know, if you ask her any question, I don't mean like an obscure question,

00:46:02.380 but like the two or top three topics of the news each day, she cannot answer until she like flips

00:46:08.620 that book and then finds like exactly the phraseology that she's supposed to read. You know,

00:46:14.600 I mean, Jen Psaki was somebody who was willing to lie all the time, but she was good at her job in the

00:46:18.860 sense that like, I thought she was like an effective spokesperson. Korean John Payer just can't speak

00:46:24.420 without a script in front of her, even on the issues that you know, that she knows they're going

00:46:30.260 to, she's going to be asked about. And it's embarrassing, especially when it is an issue as

00:46:36.260 grave and serious as what the United States is going to do now in retaliating because of these

00:46:41.500 three dead soldiers. There's a lot of important questions here about our involvement in the Middle

00:46:45.940 East, about why we're there, about how much we can let Iran get away with this, whether we should

00:46:50.840 hold the person responsible, whether we should attack targets of theirs outside Iran or inside

00:46:54.740 of Iran. These are all serious, serious questions. And to have somebody who can't form a complete

00:46:59.720 sentence speaking on behalf of the White House, and by the way, her boss can't either, is just not

00:47:04.500 something that inspires a lot of confidence. And neither can her boss's number two. Lastly,

00:47:10.120 on the subject of misinformation and platform silencing people, it comes out that thanks to Lee Fang,

00:47:18.200 who did an investigation. And, uh, he has revealed that Moderna was very, very upset among other

00:47:25.760 things about the fact that I said on this show that after I had gotten my third COVID shot, my booster,

00:47:32.940 which you needed in order to operate in New York to do anything. Um, I developed a positive on an

00:47:38.460 autoimmune test that my general practitioner gave me. And then I had to go to a rheumatologist and all

00:47:43.180 this stuff. I revealed it on the show. And I got targeted by Moderna who was very worried that

00:47:49.940 this would add to the growing concern around autoimmune disorders following COVID-19 vaccinations.

00:47:57.060 That's your problem. Yes, it should add to that Moderna. And, uh, apparently they attached internally

00:48:03.140 their national institutes of health report highlighting a link between the COVID vaccines and autoimmune

00:48:11.080 issues. So they're in, they're admitting internally that it's a problem, but they're upset that I am

00:48:17.080 talking about it. And Alex Berenson and Russell Brand and Michael Schellenberger and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

00:48:21.700 are talking about it, Glenn, because they don't want it discussed. And the mainstream media outlets

00:48:26.880 were only too happy to comply. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, Lee Fang is, I think one of the best

00:48:34.340 journalists in the country. Um, he's a friend of mine, but he's my former colleague at the

00:48:37.820 Intercept. That's somebody I worked hard to recruit there because he does exactly the kind of journalism

00:48:42.120 that we were just saying earlier, way too much of the press doesn't do. And of course he ended up

00:48:46.640 having to leave the Intercept and now he writes a sub stack, which is generally what happens to people

00:48:51.360 who want to do real journalism and find they can't. And this is a perfect example of the kind of story

00:48:56.000 that people ought to know, which is that you have these gigantic corporations, extreme amounts of

00:49:00.400 financial power. They had in this case, a serious interest in constraining and restricting the range

00:49:07.860 of debate that could be expressed. And they succeeded for a long time. They had Dr. Fauci pressuring a lot

00:49:15.960 of the world's immunologists to change their minds in what they originally said, that this was almost

00:49:21.580 certainly a lab leak and got them to sign onto a letter in the Lancet saying, this is a crazy conspiracy

00:49:25.780 theory. And then you want to suggest it should be banished. And then obviously questions about

00:49:29.680 the vaccine, its efficacy and its safety were something that was all but banished from mainstream

00:49:34.680 media. People got banned from YouTube, from Facebook for saying it. And this is evidence that

00:49:41.120 the whole time Moderna was playing a huge role in surveilling people, questioning their product.

00:49:46.960 Without caring whether there was truth to it, they just didn't like it. Well, that's, that's what's led

00:49:52.760 in part to the power and strength of outlets like ours. Glenn, all the best. We'll be right back with

00:49:57.680 the CEO of Rumble. Welcome back to the Megyn Kelly show. The battle for free speech in America is

00:50:06.020 increasingly taking place online and on social media. Until recently, a small handful of powerful

00:50:12.040 tech giants had complete control over what you could say online. And if you said the wrong thing,

00:50:18.100 they might very well shut you up. Hi parlor. Remember them? Apparently they're coming back,

00:50:24.260 but they got completely screwed by Amazon and others because they were alleged to have been a

00:50:28.840 hotbed for the planning of J6. Forget Facebook. Facebook got a pass, even though most of it took

00:50:34.160 place over there because it's owned by Mark Zuckerberg who got Joe Biden elected. But thanks to my next

00:50:40.300 guest, this is all starting to change. Chris Pavlosky is the founder and CEO of Rumble, where you can

00:50:46.680 watch the Megyn Kelly show at rumble.com slash Megyn Kelly every weekday. Chris, so great to have you.

00:50:53.580 How are you? Megan, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be on with you.

00:50:58.580 No, the pleasure is all mine. So you guys are growing by leaps and bounds over at Rumble. And I

00:51:06.380 mean, it's like what I read was in 2020, the, the revenue was like a million. And by a couple of years

00:51:12.420 later, it was already at 20 million and now you've gone public and you're worth billions of dollars.

00:51:18.320 So it's going very well for you. Why is that? Yeah, it's been an unbelievable ride. So I'll kind

00:51:26.500 of step back and give you a little history. I started Rumble in 2013, late 2013. But the genesis of

00:51:35.340 how it all happened was about a, over a decade ago, like 2010, 2011, I started to notice that the

00:51:42.020 incumbent tech platforms, think YouTube, in particular YouTube, they were starting to

00:51:47.840 prioritize big influencers, corporations, big brands, and really started to deprioritize like

00:51:55.780 the small creator, our friends, families, aunts, uncles. So we stepped in in 2013 to really try to

00:52:02.560 help that small creator, bring them the tools of distribution and monetization that they were

00:52:07.740 struggling to get on the large tech platforms. And that's, that's kind of the premise of how Rumble

00:52:13.140 started in 2013. Fast forward to 2020. And it was the late summer, summer of 2020, when I got a phone

00:52:23.520 call. I'm Canadian, by the way. So getting a phone call from the, I think at the time, the chairman

00:52:29.500 of the House Intel Committee of the United States Congress, Congressman Devin Nunes calls me. I was

00:52:35.720 like, oh, wow, am I under some kind of investigation? But he had a really simple question though. And his

00:52:43.660 question was, if I bring my podcast and my content to Rumble, and I search for my name, will I be able

00:52:50.740 to find my content? And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. So he ends up bringing his content onto Rumble. And

00:52:57.780 within two to three months, he accumulates like two to 300,000 subscribers on Rumble. Whereas on

00:53:03.480 YouTube, after being on for over four years and, you know, having road signs in his congressional

00:53:09.080 district, promoting his podcast only had 10,000 subscribers. So once people saw that the floodgates,

00:53:16.220 you know, completely opened up, we had people like Dan Bongino join the platform. And by early 2021,

00:53:22.740 2021, I would say Rumble became like one of the leaders in the video space, especially in the

00:53:29.180 conservative sphere. So yeah, in the first few years, you had just over 1 million users as of July

00:53:35.980 2020. Less than a year later, in early 2021, Rumble had grown to over 30 million users. And it's far higher

00:53:43.160 than that now with all the big names that you guys have gotten. The big difference between you guys and

00:53:50.800 YouTube is censorship and putting your thumb on the scale when a conservative says something that

00:53:57.340 doesn't flow with the mainstream narrative. You and I have talked before. This isn't about promoting

00:54:03.800 conservatives. It's about promoting free speech. Yeah. If, you know, if I were to name our politics

00:54:11.420 prior to, you know, at any time, our politics were cats and dogs at the very most. It was,

00:54:17.500 it was literally when you have like a congressman create an account on Rumble and be able to get a

00:54:25.060 significantly bigger yield during an election year prior to a general election, you know, that's,

00:54:31.080 that's something very shocking. It's something that shouldn't happen, but it did happen and it is

00:54:37.220 happening. And Rumble grew on the backs of basically treating everybody fairly, whether you're conservative

00:54:44.040 or liberal or whoever, whatever you may be, it doesn't really matter to us. The point is, is that

00:54:48.860 we weren't tipping the scales and preferencing content, unlike the other platforms, how are they

00:54:54.160 were doing it? You know, that's up, up in the air. Some were getting banned. Some were getting shadow

00:54:58.360 banned. It, the game that they can play is, you know, can be very deep and it can be very difficult to

00:55:04.800 see. But at the end of the day, um, we, we stood on the, we stood on the grounds of, uh, allowing people

00:55:11.380 to, you know, speak on the platform and not tilting the scale of one way, shape or another for, um,

00:55:18.560 our own political beliefs. And, uh, that's the foundation of this business now. And, uh, it's

00:55:23.820 something that, uh, has continued, continuously been one of the, um, the hallmarks of Rumble.

00:55:29.500 Thank God for Rumble because it's happening on platform after platform. When Elon Musk did not

00:55:36.100 own Twitter, when it was Twitter and not X, they were suppressing all kinds of discussions. Uh,

00:55:42.200 you just weren't allowed to say certain things, whether it was about the COVID vaccines or the

00:55:45.360 trans insanity. Now that's changed thanks to him. And before Rumble came along, YouTube was the only

00:55:51.600 real game in town and they would, they're, they have all sorts of wacky ways of punishing you on

00:55:56.640 YouTube. You can be demonetized. Like we saw happened to Steven Crowder. And I think Dan Bongino

00:56:01.520 too, or you can just have a video suppressed where it doesn't get as much of a circulation because it's

00:56:07.180 not one of their favorite topics. They just don't really like you talking about something,

00:56:10.860 or they can add their little YouTube warning on your COVID speech. Even if what you're saying is

00:56:15.920 a hundred percent true, somebody you've never seen who probably doesn't know Jack gets to decide

00:56:21.020 whether you get the warning or I'll give you another example. And there's plenty of them. Um,

00:56:25.720 we actually have been fortunate because we are a journalistic operation and we stick to hard

00:56:30.860 facts. I give my opinions too, but we stick to hard facts. And the only time we've actually

00:56:35.500 been demonetized is, um, when we interviewed president Trump, former president Donald Trump,

00:56:42.500 and he, and we had a discussion about the transgender thing. And he said, we use the term

00:56:48.500 mutilation and YouTube didn't like that. And so the former president of the United States

00:56:54.280 wasn't allowed to say that we were going to be penalized for that. Um, and a discussion about,

00:56:59.420 of course, the 26, uh, the 2020 election, which you're just not allowed to say anything about

00:57:04.860 that, unless you talk about it the way YouTube wants you to, you guys just don't operate like

00:57:08.780 that on rumble. Why?

00:57:11.640 Well, I, I actually think like being authentic is creates the best type of content. Um, it's, uh,

00:57:19.220 it's something that you don't really see on the internet anymore. The authenticity and content,

00:57:23.480 because there are platforms like YouTube that are dictating what you can and cannot say and what

00:57:28.940 people can and cannot, you know, listen to or watch, um, rumble is the complete opposite. Uh, I think

00:57:35.140 the authenticity in content is what, uh, is what's really important. And as a viewer and as, you know,

00:57:43.200 even myself, like I want to watch authentic content. I don't want to watch someone that is like,

00:57:47.540 you know, Oh, I can't say this. Oh, I can't say that. I want to watch something that where I'm

00:57:53.440 listening, that person, I know they're being honest and they're truthful. And I know they're

00:57:57.380 independent and someone's not, you know, manipulating what they say. I think that's, uh,

00:58:02.340 that's, that's the cornerstone of great content. And, uh, I don't think any platform should be

00:58:07.520 influencing content. And if they are, everyone should know, and everyone should know what they're

00:58:12.300 listening to because they're, they're not getting the true authenticity of the character behind the screen.

00:58:16.340 So they, for us, you know, obviously it's a pillar of ours to stand for free expression,

00:58:21.740 to not influence and to not, you know, preference. Um, and that's something that we will continue to

00:58:27.120 stand for. I think that in the test of time, we've been the one that's been doing it the longest.

00:58:32.760 Um, I, I see us as being the tip of the spear. We've gone as far as shutting off countries like

00:58:38.780 Brazil, um, and shutting off countries like France, uh, when they came to us to try to turn content off on

00:58:45.320 rumble, not based on like illegal content or any content that violates our terms of service, but because

00:58:52.700 they did not like the creator on the platform that, that, that was on our platform. It didn't violate

00:58:59.140 any of our terms of services. They just said, Hey, we want this creator removed. Um, we don't want to

00:59:04.820 tell you why. France wanted you, you mentioned France. They wanted you, you to take off Russia

00:59:09.280 today, RT, right. From your, from rumble as a punishment to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine

00:59:15.300 that, you know what, there may be people in America who find that interesting content.

00:59:19.980 Maybe they're persuaded by it. Maybe they just want to see what Russia is saying about it. Maybe

00:59:23.560 they view it as propaganda and it's interesting. Well, I don't know what their reasons are. Who cares

00:59:27.900 that France comes to rumble to say, take that channel off of rumble. And you said, I'll do you one

00:59:34.960 better. I'll take you off of rumble France. You're done. Our relationship with you is done.

00:59:40.620 Yeah. That's exactly what happened. And a very similar thing happened in Brazil as well. It was,

00:59:45.160 uh, you know, creators that were opposing the, the current, um, Supreme court, I believe. And, uh,

00:59:52.660 they, uh, asked to remove and, uh, we said basically no. And, uh, we left Brazil as well. So like,

01:00:00.920 I think like when it comes to fighting for free expression, rumble is the tip of the spirit where

01:00:05.880 the only company that I know of at our scale, that's actually turning off countries and following

01:00:10.660 U S law rather than, you know, following, let's say another jurisdictions law. Like we're not a

01:00:16.160 company that operates in China. We're not going to fall Chinese, Chinese law. Um, then the same thing

01:00:20.540 goes for France and Brazil. And if they want to be in the same bucket as China, that's their

01:00:25.080 prerogative, but, uh, rumble is going to stand strong and we're going to stand really strong when it

01:00:30.020 comes to our values. And, uh, I, I enjoy being the tip of the spear. It's a, it's something that,

01:00:35.680 uh, I take a lot of pride in. And, uh, if, uh, hopefully more countries don't follow that,

01:00:42.300 but, uh, definitely if they do, we, they all know how we'll react. Yeah, no, I, I applaud your

01:00:49.100 strength. I I'm thinking about just the two issues that I just touched on COVID and the trans insanity

01:00:55.560 that's sweeping the nation on, on both of those issues on YouTube, you're, you're, you weren't

01:01:01.480 for a time allowed to say that the vaccines can cause heart damage, myocarditis, especially

01:01:08.180 in young men. And we actually had people dying as a result of this. And you weren't allowed to

01:01:16.540 discuss it on YouTube. It was deemed because of interference from Moderna and Pfizer along the

01:01:23.380 lines of what I just said. It's one thing to say, Oh, I don't like what Megan Kelly said. It's

01:01:26.900 quite another say, I object to what Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford medical is saying. That's

01:01:32.700 somebody who knows very well what he's talking about. So that's, that's the vaccine example.

01:01:38.260 And on the trans stuff, why, why can't I say on YouTube that cutting off genitals of minor

01:01:48.780 children is a mutilation and it cannot be done consensually because they are too young to consent.

01:01:57.240 That is true. And if you keep stopping me from saying that more children are going to get hurt

01:02:03.060 because you're stifling an important discussion that puts information out there to people to make

01:02:09.260 up their own minds on rumble. You can say all of that. You always could say all of that. And the

01:02:15.440 business model is rewarding you for these decisions. I mean, I suppose where you sit,

01:02:20.500 it's not such a bad thing that YouTube has these policies.

01:02:24.040 Yeah. Megan, you touch on something that's I think so key. And that's like, when you,

01:02:29.500 when you're mentioning the COVID stuff, we were demonized as like the worst place on the internet

01:02:34.560 because people were, you know, talking about their experiences with the vaccine

01:02:39.140 and saying things that at the time people thought were horrible to say, and you're not to be saying

01:02:45.420 these things. Rumble was like the only place, one of the only places, at least with the scale that we

01:02:51.040 had the biggest place that were, where people were actually having conversations about these things.

01:02:56.080 And looking back now, you know, I see that as like one of the greatest achievements because of all

01:03:02.340 the issues that we are seeing coming up with that. And, you know, the fact that we held the line in

01:03:07.800 that, in that period of time, it ultimately could have saved a lot of people and helped a lot of

01:03:11.860 people in a lot of different ways. Like you can't shut off conversation with people that are, that

01:03:18.800 want to, you can't shut off anybody from expressing themselves. And the fact that we were doing that

01:03:23.300 is like, is like the worst thing. It's like, you don't have freedom and you don't have democracy

01:03:28.260 without like freedom of speech. You don't have that ability. You're not going to have the civil

01:03:32.640 rights movements without freedom of speech. You're not going to have women's rights movements

01:03:36.960 without freedom of speech. You need the ability to speak. And anybody that upholds that at any

01:03:42.500 point in time, when it's hardest to uphold it, I think does a great service. And during COVID,

01:03:48.540 I think that was like a major service that Rumble did, is allowing people and allowing doctors to

01:03:55.020 speak on the platform and be able to give their side of this story. And it looks like a lot of their,

01:04:00.040 a lot of people that were speaking on the other side of the story had a lot of good things to say,

01:04:03.980 and people should have been listening a lot earlier. Right. Let it play out. It won't always

01:04:09.060 work out that way. On some, you'll be wrong, not you, but you know, the people you're allowing to

01:04:13.920 speak who are being silenced elsewhere, but you've got a pretty good track record. These people who

01:04:18.680 have been silenced time and time again, I've got a pretty good track record of raising some good

01:04:22.440 points. Ukraine's another example. But we're living in a whole new world. And I, I, I do wonder

01:04:29.520 whether you were afraid at all, because like on the COVID thing, the crackdown was pretty massive

01:04:36.280 and the pressure, the, for lack of a better term, peer pressure to go along was enormous. They,

01:04:43.020 the narrative from everyone else was you're costing lives, you're endangering people by allowing

01:04:49.740 this dangerous misinformation to be peddled. So if you're in the place where everyone's telling you

01:04:56.100 that, and you as a non-doctor don't know what the truth is, you're hearing the one side, you're

01:05:02.300 hearing the other. Is there, were you worried at all? You know, like what if I, what if we are doing,

01:05:07.880 how do you make those decisions? Yeah, it's it actually, it was Glenn Greenwald when he came to

01:05:14.620 the platform, uh, the Washington post wrote an article about him joining the platform. And in

01:05:19.760 that article, you know, they were accusing rumble creators of all this misinformation, disinformation

01:05:26.580 around COVID. And in particular, the thing they called out was that the COVID vaccine wasn't durable.

01:05:34.860 And cause that's what creators on the, on the rumble platform were saying and looking, you know,

01:05:40.120 back at that fact, obviously you have to take more than one, more than two. Um, the durability of the

01:05:46.740 vaccine clearly didn't, you know, wasn't exactly durable, but it's funny because like at the time

01:05:52.900 it was looked on and perceived as like, we're doing so wrong by allowing people to say that people should

01:05:59.680 say it's durable. And then now when you look back, obviously the durability of the vaccine is,

01:06:04.600 is not really there. Um, yeah, it was, it was scary. It was tough. It was like, it really hardened

01:06:10.780 me though, uh, going through those moments, uh, makes it a lot easier to go through them now today

01:06:15.680 than, than ever. Um, so it, it, it was scary at the time. Um, and it was tough, but, uh, you know,

01:06:22.860 we have it, we have an incredible team here. Um, and we all believed in the mission. And I always go

01:06:27.860 back to the fact that, you know, the civil rights movements, uh, the woman's rights movements,

01:06:33.740 all these great movements over time, uh, were, were all brought on because of freedom of speech,

01:06:40.580 like freedom of speech allowed us always to make society better. And, uh, giving up on that

01:06:46.500 principle is something you just can't do no matter what the circumstances. I think that is like,

01:06:50.840 that's in the constitution. It's the first amendment. Um, it's, uh, it's, it's article 19 of

01:06:57.420 the UN declaration of human rights. It's a human right. When you, when, according to the UN,

01:07:02.480 um, it's something we just cannot give up and we have to stand for at all costs. And that's

01:07:07.260 kind of what you stick to. Yeah. It gets scary. And, you know, it was scary when you're first

01:07:11.960 approaching it, but, uh, you know, looking back now and seeing how we are today, I think it's only

01:07:16.780 made us stronger and, uh, allows us to, to run harder and stronger and, uh, and forward.

01:07:21.920 Well, it lets you stay in your lane. You're, you're not, you never promised to be anyone's fact

01:07:26.700 checker or God, the ultimate authority on these debates that are playing out. That's what Mark

01:07:32.420 Zuckerberg tried to do. And it's where he started to go South on Facebook. I remember distinctly the

01:07:37.740 few years ago when he decided we're going to now fact check political ads as if that's his job.

01:07:44.020 That's the other candidates job. That's not your job. You're a platform. You should not get out there

01:07:49.880 trying to correct what somebody's political ad says or doesn't say it was a dangerous spigot to

01:07:56.120 open. And he did it at his own peril. And now here we are in 2024 America and Facebook is basically

01:08:01.820 moving away from news. It's just gotten so overwhelming and toxic and just uncontrollable

01:08:07.940 for them that they're like, this isn't a good business model for us. Forget it. And the way they

01:08:12.820 want to do it, they're right. It's not a good business model. You're just a platform. Just let people

01:08:17.700 have the debate. I myself, my audience knows I do not believe the 2020 election was quote stolen.

01:08:23.660 I don't think it was fair, but I don't think it was quote stolen with votes being switched.

01:08:28.160 A lot of my audience disagrees with me. That's fine. They disagree with me. They can still hear

01:08:32.140 me say it. I can disagree with them after having heard that from many people. I know just hearing

01:08:37.680 the idea has not been toxic to me. It hasn't plagued my mind with misinformation. I'm able as a

01:08:44.680 thinking human to make up my own mind as is my audience. The disrespect that the other model

01:08:50.040 shows to the audience is palpable and rumble what goes a different way. So one of the best,

01:08:55.060 one of the best things you guys did was with Russell Brand. And this is another area in which

01:09:01.800 I think I, I diverged from my audience because I believed some of the accusations that were made

01:09:09.040 against him and I found them very troubling. I did not, however, want to see him de-platformed.

01:09:13.980 I don't, I don't much like the Andrew Tate guy either. He's on rumble, but I don't want to see him

01:09:18.980 de-platformed either. These there's a, there's an audience for it. There are people who feel

01:09:22.900 differently than I do. That's fine. Why should they be punished? Because they don't have this view

01:09:28.480 that's blessed by the gods at rumble, the gods at YouTube. So what, tell us what happened when

01:09:33.740 Russell Brand got in trouble, the BBC, the other media and the great Britain did a huge me too hit

01:09:39.600 piece on the guy and literally governments were asking you to pull his channel. Yeah. So, you know,

01:09:48.860 I never thought I'd live the day to see where, uh, well, I've seen, I've seen it so many times now,

01:09:54.020 but like, I never thought I would see these days where, you know, you'd have MPs or government,

01:09:59.820 uh, I think it was an MP from the UK send us a letter to, to, yeah, to, to remove, um, Russell

01:10:08.020 brand from rumble and demonetize Russell brand on rumble. And, you know, the thing that was like

01:10:15.340 most shocking to me is that here we are having an MP ask us to remove somebody for an allegation

01:10:22.380 that happened off platform. So this has like absolutely nothing to do with rumble. Um, rumble is

01:10:28.460 a video platform where people can express their viewpoints, defend themselves if they're in

01:10:33.980 trouble, um, talk about topics. Um, and Russell brand uses rumble. He also used YouTube and he used,

01:10:40.920 uh, he uses Twitter and he uses a whole bunch of different platforms, but, uh, he, he has a show

01:10:46.000 is exclusive shows on rumble and they asked us to remove him. And, um, you know, we responded back

01:10:52.700 saying this is absolutely abhorrent for an MP, a government official to be asking us to remove

01:10:58.440 somebody based on an allegation on a behavior that has nothing to do with our platform and

01:11:04.000 our terms of service. Um, we were judging, if we were to judge every single creator based

01:11:10.600 on their off platform behavior, if YouTube were to do that, that I'm telling you, there

01:11:15.460 would be a lot of creators on there that are, that should not be on there. Um, and that's

01:11:20.080 just allegations, just allegations. That's all they were.

01:11:23.140 Yeah. These are, these are not even exactly, these are allegations. These aren't even charges.

01:11:27.260 These aren't, there's no, there's no proof. Like this, these are just allegations right

01:11:31.540 now. And it's not the business of a platform, especially not rumbles to get involved in

01:11:38.880 deciding whether or not Russell brand should be able to have a voice to speak or not. That's

01:11:43.220 the, that, that, that's the, that's the law side. That's the, that's society side that

01:11:48.080 that's not rumbles, rumbles a place to do that. If he, um, and that's what we said,

01:11:54.320 we said, no, absolutely. This is abhorrent. This is disgusting. And, uh, we're absolutely

01:11:59.400 not going to say something like, I remember you, you said something like we fought a whole

01:12:03.900 war over here so that we didn't have to listen to you people over in the UK and what you,

01:12:09.260 what you tell us to do. It was some great line. I can't remember, but I loved it.

01:12:12.740 But yeah, we, it was, uh, it was crafted in a, in a way that, uh, you know, I thought

01:12:19.520 it was appropriate to craft it like that, but, um, it was, uh, it was definitely a moment

01:12:24.980 though, because I never once did, did we, did I think that they would be asking us to

01:12:30.720 remove somebody on a platform based on an allegation? Like there's people that have like

01:12:35.100 criminal behavior that are on YouTube that have gone to jail, that've done things. And I

01:12:40.420 I don't think they should be removed from YouTube either. Like that's, that's not YouTube's job.

01:12:44.680 YouTube's, if they're going to violate YouTube's policies or rumble's policies on the platform,

01:12:49.160 that's when we take action. But like, if they've done, if they're using rumble for good purposes and

01:12:54.500 they're using rumble to, if they want to defend themselves, like that's, that's the whole point

01:12:59.980 of it. And, uh, you know, it's, it was absolutely imperative that we stuck up for that and the ability

01:13:05.780 to, to speak, um, and allow him to speak. And, uh, I'm very proud that we did that and continue

01:13:11.680 to be proud about that. What do you do about, oh, so my team, I just asked my team checks,

01:13:16.480 Sammy, the bull, Sammy, but the bull Gravano who killed 19 people. I interviewed him myself.

01:13:21.400 They allow him on YouTube. How can he be on YouTube and Russell brand cannot be on YouTube.

01:13:27.720 It's insane because one is sort of catering to the woke crowd. That's decided all the allegations

01:13:32.520 are true. Look, I got my own beliefs, but that doesn't make him. So, uh, and I don't want to

01:13:36.680 see anybody punished. And even honestly, even if Russell brand were found liable in a court of law

01:13:41.600 for these acts, I don't know that I know. I do know that I would not want to see him de-platform.

01:13:46.080 Like it is up to the audience to decide whether he's got something valuable to say, not up to our

01:13:51.560 corporate gods. It's just wrong what people are doing. Um, what are you going to do now over in the UK

01:13:57.360 though? Because I know you, okay. So you, you said middle finger to France after they tried to crack down,

01:14:01.760 but the UK just passed this new law. That's pretty draconian when it comes to the disinformation

01:14:09.620 on their television. And they've got Ofcom that now oversees like every lane it's going to be

01:14:15.740 digital too. Right. So there's, there's a problem unfolding in the UK that I guess potentially could

01:14:20.380 affect you and everyone. Yeah. And, you know, I think there's a lot of differing opinions on how that

01:14:26.880 will play out and what, what, what it'll like, what it'll amount to, but yeah, the, what we're seeing

01:14:32.680 in a lot of jurisdictions around the world is, uh, this encroachment, like just this ever moving,

01:14:40.880 um, line of, uh, inability to, to try to censor and, uh, take away, you know, the human rights of,

01:14:49.440 uh, freedom of expression. Um, and it's, uh, it's sad to see, like, I, I, I don't, I don't know if the

01:14:57.120 people though, I, I, I do, I do start to feel though in the last year, um, with X and Elon,

01:15:03.380 uh, that the scales are starting to tip a little bit the opposite way. There is now a real pushback

01:15:08.920 and it will these, um, will they actually get rid of freedom of expression in a lot of these

01:15:15.180 other jurisdictions, um, is, if they do, are you going to pull rumble from the UK? I mean,

01:15:20.860 because if they start saying, no, that violates our content. No, you're, you're, you're penalized

01:15:24.920 for that. You owe fines. We're, we're boycotting you. I don't know how they'll do it. Like,

01:15:29.340 will they ban rumble or just pull it? Yeah. If we can't operate under the principles that we,

01:15:34.660 that we currently operate under, then there's no, there's no reason for us to, to, to operate in any

01:15:39.740 jurisdiction. Um, you know, we're not going to abide by any jurisdiction, uh, because they say,

01:15:45.180 that, uh, you have to do, you can't say this or that. Um, it, we're an American company and, uh,

01:15:52.280 we are going to follow the laws of the United States and we're not going to be pushed around

01:15:56.600 by any jurisdiction that tells us otherwise. Uh, I think that would be a huge disservice to,

01:16:02.120 you know, the majority of users on rumble, which are, are in the United States. And, uh, it's something

01:16:08.060 that, uh, that we'll, we'll fight and we are fighting, we're fighting in France and we're feeling

01:16:12.980 confident that, you know, we, we could prevail there in the long run. Um, we're also fighting

01:16:17.600 in Brazil and, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll fight for freedom expression all around the world,

01:16:22.160 including the UK. If it gets to that, I don't think it will personally. Um, but it is looking

01:16:27.480 like it's going in a bad direction, but I, I have a feeling I I am hoping that it doesn't,

01:16:32.900 doesn't continue down that bad path. Um, just with all the pressure that I'm starting to see,

01:16:37.760 it seems like it is starting to turn and people are starting to wake up and, you know, our numbers

01:16:42.760 are that are for, um, freedom of expression are, are growing, um, a lot, you know, three years ago,

01:16:50.300 freedom of expression was free speech was like, people were scared to even say that word. Um,

01:16:55.620 now everyone is really for it. So I, I think that, uh, um, I think in the long run, it will,

01:17:02.380 it will come out on a, on our end and, uh, people, the smart minds will prevail here. Like

01:17:08.140 how is, how is the UK going to stand and do something like that? When article 19 of the UN

01:17:14.660 declaration of human rights says that it's, you know, a human right, like how can they find a way

01:17:21.480 they're, they're very pro censorship there as they are in Canada. I mean, there's a certain irony that

01:17:27.300 it took a Canadian to come down here and form a company that would stand up for American

01:17:32.280 free speech and tell everybody to pound sand. You got to go home and you got to talk to your

01:17:37.540 friends who are letting the 50 year old dude swim against the 12 year olds. Tell them they need to

01:17:43.760 find their inner voice, just like Chris Pavlosky did. Thank you so much for starting rumble for

01:17:49.360 pushing it, for not giving up during the lean years and for keeping the pedal down, uh, now more

01:17:54.980 than ever. When you guys stood by Russell brand again, even given my own feelings about that story,

01:17:59.080 I, I just completely sat back and cheered. It, it gave me hope for the future of this country

01:18:05.320 and, and the prospects of being able to have free and open debate. God bless you.

01:18:10.760 Thank you, Megan. Thank you for having me on all the best. Talk again soon.

01:18:14.980 I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly show on Sirius XM. It's your home for open,

01:18:21.600 honest and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political,

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01:19:13.300 apply. Welcome back to the Megan Kelly show. Are you sick of supporting companies that don't

01:19:24.360 support your values? There's so many of them. They're everywhere. If you are at all right leaning,

01:19:29.520 you suffer from this problem. Do you think DEI and ESG are ruining corporate America? Yes,

01:19:36.460 I do. My next guest agrees. He's someone fighting to change the way business is being done and to

01:19:42.220 offer you some more options. If you're in this frustrating category, Omid Malik is an entrepreneur

01:19:47.940 and investor and founder and CEO of 1789 Capital. Omid, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Great to

01:19:54.860 see you. It's a pleasure. So couldn't agree more, share the frustration. And I feel like we're just

01:20:01.380 sort of at the, in the Renaissance of people like you recognizing this problem and trying to create

01:20:08.660 a new lane to combat it. If Vivek Ramaswamy spent most of his time in this lane before he ran for

01:20:16.140 president, just trying to create alternatives to these left wing platforms that kept conservatives out,

01:20:22.420 whether it's media, an Amazon type offering. We had on a guy who's offering a Google alternative

01:20:28.860 and that's sort of your new mission, even though you're at least a former Democrat. I don't know if

01:20:35.400 you're a current Democrat, but you've been a Democrat for most of your adult life.

01:20:39.700 That's definitely true. Although I would say that, you know, the Democrat versus Republican

01:20:44.120 distinction to me is more or less meaningless for the last five or six years these days.

01:20:48.820 I actually think of it being either normal or abnormal or competent versus incompetent. Those

01:20:55.300 are the way I look at that distinction these days. On the normal versus abnormal front, I just have a few

01:21:01.300 things I think are obvious and truisms and that I believe in, like there are two genders. We need a

01:21:08.180 border. China's a huge problem. Big tech's gotten too big. And I believe in free speech. So if that

01:21:17.000 makes me a Republican or a Democrat, I don't care, but those are things I think are obvious.

01:21:21.820 And so that's on the normal side. And then as it relates to competency, I'm a former New York City

01:21:28.340 resident for over 20 years. And I think people should just look at, because I'm a finance guy,

01:21:34.080 the results of New York and California versus the model of Texas and Florida. And show me who has

01:21:40.460 the highest taxes in the nation. Then show me the states that have zero income tax. And then explain

01:21:46.080 why the ones with zero income tax have surpluses and the other have deficits. This is all right in

01:21:51.040 front of people to read and understand data and then make a determination and not get so caught up

01:21:56.260 in the partisan distinctions. That's less interesting to me. But yes, that's a roundabout way of saying

01:22:01.360 that I used to be a Democrat in New York City. But it's also a segue as to why I think we need a

01:22:07.080 parallel economy, to your point, which is really around COVID. I saw this bifurcation across

01:22:13.840 approaches culturally and politically. And at the same time, we saw the real ascendancy of this scam

01:22:20.500 known as ESG start permeating the private sector. You know, you and I are both lawyers. We learned

01:22:27.120 that shareholder primacy was what governed corporate America when we were going to law school. That was what

01:22:33.540 mattered, the shareholder. But then in 2019, the business roundtable told me that they had

01:22:38.400 introduced something called stakeholder capitalism, which you got to take in consideration all these

01:22:42.820 other things. And I don't think that's true. So all you needed was, I guess, the tipping point,

01:22:49.420 which was COVID, where we saw private actors working with the government to suppress our

01:22:54.120 constitutional rights. And that's when I knew I had to move to Florida and start financing free

01:22:59.800 from the private sector. Oh, God bless you. You've got, as I mentioned, Vivek has created a

01:23:06.040 company that does something like that, tries to encourage companies who don't believe in that

01:23:10.680 nonsense, who just want to create profits for their investors. I mentioned Todd Ricketts. He came on the

01:23:17.120 show to talk about Freespoke, which he created as an alternative to Google, because they weight results

01:23:21.900 on Google that will suppress things like I mentioned before, vaccine information that's true, but that

01:23:27.460 doesn't go along with their narrative. We just talked to Chris Pavlovsky of Rumble as an alternative

01:23:32.340 to YouTube. So it's starting to happen more and more, which is which is hopeful. It's hopeful. And

01:23:36.320 and you have Public Square, which is an alternative to Amazon. So how how is Amazon? I mean, I can think

01:23:42.680 of a couple of examples off my head that we've covered on the show, but how is Amazon a part of this

01:23:47.120 problem? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, Vivek is a good friend of mine. I helped him. He's approaching

01:23:53.780 the problem just to give a distinction from the top down. So what he's trying to do is change the

01:23:59.120 behavior of existing public companies and invest in them through his ETFs, the way BlackRock does

01:24:06.260 super important. And, you know, I'm an ally of his. What I'm doing is a little bit different with

01:24:10.600 1789 Capital is I'm taking private money as and try to contrast myself to venture funds. So I'm doing

01:24:17.880 it from bottom up. I'm trying to find the companies to compete against these incumbents. He's trying to

01:24:23.600 change the behavior of existing incumbents, if that makes sense. I just wanted to provide just a

01:24:28.560 little bit of distinction for the audience. And then the other thing I do is I take companies

01:24:32.740 public with my SPACs. So those are companies that are already public. They don't have any operations.

01:24:37.940 And I find a private company that I want to take public and list, which will compete against these

01:24:42.980 existing companies. So there's basically two things. There's 1789 Capital, which is the private fund

01:24:47.780 that we invested in our mutual friend, Tucker Carlson with. And then there's the SPACs where I

01:24:53.380 find a company that I say, this is so important, it needs to go public right now. And that's exactly

01:24:58.480 what I did with Public Square that you're asking about. They fall into what I call the replication

01:25:04.140 bucket, where you're trying to take on an existing incumbent the exact same way that my other friend,

01:25:09.480 Chris Kowlofsky, you're just talking to, is doing the rumble. He's a response to YouTube.

01:25:14.340 The reason why Amazon falls into the problem, it's not as obvious as just the fact that most of the

01:25:19.160 stuff you buy there is made by the Chinese Communist Party and you're enriching an enemy

01:25:23.620 every time you buy products. It's also that their tentacles are all over the economy.

01:25:29.180 My business partner in 1789 is a woman named Rebecca Mercer. She started a company called

01:25:34.360 Parler, you may recall. And Parler at one point was one of the most downloaded social media apps in the

01:25:40.940 country. What ended up happening is that a bunch of big tech companies colluded then to de-platform them.

01:25:47.980 So you had Apple and Amazon work together to basically, and Google. So on the Google and Apple

01:25:56.660 side, you could not download it because those are the two folks that have all the ability to have the

01:26:02.260 app stores, either on an Android or an Apple phone. So they wouldn't let you download it. And then the

01:26:06.920 thing that Amazon did is Amazon has Amazon web services. People don't realize that most platforms

01:26:12.140 are hosted by Amazon web services. They just took them off the web and violated a contract.

01:26:17.980 And so you have to ask yourself, look, that's collusion in one respect that should be troubling.

01:26:23.780 But it starts begging the question, are they getting their marching orders from the federal

01:26:27.380 government or various intelligence agencies? And I think after what I observed with the Twitter files,

01:26:33.400 what they were doing is that they are, which means that the government is using these large incumbents.

01:26:38.800 And I think it's a devil's bargain, by the way. They're not busting them up with antitrust laws

01:26:43.340 because these companies are doing their bidding for them and suppressing the free speech of American

01:26:48.960 citizens. That makes perfect sense. And yes, we have every reason to believe that's true.

01:26:54.040 I'll say this, Amazon, it's not just on the big ticket items that we need to worry. You know,

01:26:59.240 they're suppressing speech or they're putting the thumb on the scale. I've had people on the show,

01:27:03.220 Eli Steele, son of Shelby Steele and Shelby too. They made a movie called What Killed Michael Brown

01:27:09.000 with the truth about what happened in Ferguson. These are two black men, by the way. I mean,

01:27:12.660 Shelby Steele is an icon and took a hard look at actually what was happening in Ferguson, Missouri.

01:27:17.280 And so, and Amazon wouldn't promote it, wouldn't, wouldn't offer it for time until the pressure got

01:27:22.300 too big. Abigail Schreier's book, Irreversible Damage, one of the most important books of the past

01:27:28.300 three, four years, but bar none also was suppressed by Amazon, anything on the trans stuff. So

01:27:33.760 they're just like YouTube in too many circumstances. And the old Twitter, not under Elon's Twitter is

01:27:40.920 X, uh, they choose their favorites and they decide what we can talk about. So we do need an alternative.

01:27:46.980 So I, if I go on Amazon and I want to buy hairspray and I want to buy, you know, I don't know,

01:27:53.520 dog treats. Is that still, if I go on public square, as opposed to Amazon, can I do that now? Is it,

01:27:58.300 is it up to the point where I can get whatever I want?

01:28:00.740 Absolutely. I mean, we have over 80,000 products, uh, and vendors on public square,

01:28:06.420 and this is all within a year. So, you know, the growth has been incredible when we were tracking

01:28:11.160 registered members. Now you don't need to register, but when we did in the first year,

01:28:14.900 we hit like 1.6 million registered users faster than like basically Twitter. Uh, and we did it as

01:28:23.480 fast as Facebook did, which shows how much people want something like this because there is no kind

01:28:28.220 digital marketplace alternative. The idea stems from, you're right. Lokeism has got completely

01:28:34.220 out of hand and we just thought about it. And what was the easiest way to kind of quantify the

01:28:39.700 opportunity is I just looked at election data. I saw that, you know, 73 million people voted for

01:28:44.820 Donald Trump. They basically comprised 30% of American GDP. And that's 7 trillion of GDP that

01:28:51.960 is not only ignored, but actively alienated. So I said, this is a huge market. I fall into that

01:28:58.260 category. Why aren't there companies that people can shop from that share their values? Because

01:29:03.860 there's this other part of the country, which is by the way, a lot more than 73 million people

01:29:07.140 that are sick of buying these products because every day there's a Bud Light that's doing stuff

01:29:12.420 to piss them off. The best part about public square for me though, is that all those 80,000

01:29:17.400 companies are small and medium sized American companies. So they're basically owned by, you

01:29:23.940 know, families. They're the kind of companies that were actually shut down and locked down during COVID.

01:29:29.680 So public square is also a way to support those American companies that are owned by really the

01:29:35.040 backbone of country, which is the middle class, which as you know, just like the family is currently

01:29:39.780 under assault. So I use it as a way to vote, not only at the ballot box, but with your wallet

01:29:45.300 every single day, because if you don't do that, then you get a situation where you're using products

01:29:50.740 and services where the fact you're enriching these oligarchs, you then go and take your money

01:29:55.220 to go finance things that are against your interests. It's really that simple, but unfortunately,

01:29:59.860 we don't think of it that way. We've kind of been lulled into thinking, oh, these products are so

01:30:04.080 great. They make myself, myself so convenient. But every time you're doing that, you should ask what

01:30:09.100 Reid Hoffman's doing with your money or Mark Benioff or any of these people.

01:30:12.720 Right. And why are you funding the Chinese? I really had never considered Amazon that way,

01:30:18.260 but you're absolutely right. And by the way, will your delivery drivers actually put the package

01:30:22.780 in the special box that I put on my front Porsche so my dog can't get them any longer

01:30:27.000 and actually put it says put packages in here, but they don't listen to me.

01:30:32.220 Right. Yeah. No, I mean, and what we're doing right now is every single vendor has their own,

01:30:37.580 you know, DTC ability to get it to you. The other interesting thing we're doing that I should just

01:30:42.120 point out, but I think that's a finer point on it is our average customer is a 30 or 38 year old

01:30:48.780 woman with about two kids on public square. And we could see what they were searching for.

01:30:55.000 And the number one most searched product were diapers and wipes. And so we did a little bit

01:31:00.200 of research and said, what options are out there? And what we found out is that the top three or four

01:31:05.600 diaper companies all affirmatively either financed Planned Parenthood or paid their employees to get

01:31:12.040 abortions. So we thought this is like kind of the most, I don't know, insane thing in business

01:31:20.260 marketing. So we've actually launched a company called Every Life, which is the country's first

01:31:26.260 affirmatively pro-life diaper brand. I know that sounds crazy, but it is. And it's probably the

01:31:33.940 fastest growing in history right now. And it's a wholly owned subsidiary of public square and that's

01:31:38.980 called Every Life. So that's really exciting. And so people. And I love the idea of 1789 too.

01:31:44.820 This is since we, we try to study that with our kids every 4th of July. That's when the bill of

01:31:49.520 rights was drafted. That's exactly right. Yeah. So we got to get back to that. So one of the,

01:31:56.420 it's one thing to have like your voice silenced on Amazon, Twitter, what have you. It's quite another

01:32:03.200 to have your bank tell you, you can no longer do business there. That's something else that's

01:32:09.180 happening. It happened to some of the people who have come on the show, including Nigel Farage across

01:32:12.960 the pond, but more and more Americans. If you are at all involved in J6, you've, you've been

01:32:18.400 threatened potentially with debanking. And most conservatives have heard of this because it's

01:32:24.140 publicized in right-wing circles. Saturday Night Live, not so much. They did a skit, a skit because

01:32:30.540 Trump used the term over the weekend, showing how clueless they are. Just watch this a little

01:32:35.240 bit. It's on 18.

01:32:37.120 Trump did have a slight stumble this week while talking about banks, and he introduced an

01:32:41.080 interesting new term called debank.

01:32:43.460 We're also going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to

01:32:49.400 debank you.

01:32:50.400 They want to debank you and we're going to debank.

01:32:52.780 I don't know what the hell debank means, but he might have to take deambulance to see the doctor.

01:33:04.440 I think that's the guy who's married to Scarlett Johansson. They don't have to worry about money.

01:33:10.180 They don't have to worry about getting debanked because they're woke liberals,

01:33:13.780 and they have no clue what's happening to real Americans. Your thoughts on the banking problem?

01:33:18.480 Thanks for the clip. That's a microcosm of the divide in this country. It's almost funny,

01:33:24.840 but it's also sad because it shows that we effectively live in two different worlds.

01:33:28.880 People on the island of Manhattan who watch that show or are stars on it have no understanding

01:33:36.400 of what's happened to people that either want to embrace their Second Amendment rights or are

01:33:41.640 standing up against certain levels of repression. You don't even have to look that far than Canada

01:33:46.480 as to what they did with truckers that wanted to resist taking the fake vaccine called a shot.

01:33:53.640 It's not a vaccine, by the way. I don't buy into their language because it has no attributes of a

01:33:59.100 vaccine, but that's a different conversation for another day. They tried to exercise their right,

01:34:06.700 and they were debanked. The government went and took away their bank accounts. There's a series

01:34:11.620 called Black Mirror where they started trying to show, this is like eight years ago,

01:34:15.500 the notion of, with technology, social credit scoring that they have, again, in a place like

01:34:20.740 China. It seems like the leftists that run a lot of these Western European and some elements of the

01:34:26.020 Democratic Party want to embrace that kind of social credit scoring. And the way that they're going to

01:34:31.060 do it, again, is exactly the thing that's become my life's mission. They're not going to do it,

01:34:35.300 obviously, through the government. They're going to use the private sector to make you irrelevant.

01:34:40.280 And that's how they do it. So they go to certain huge private actors. That's one of the reasons

01:34:44.380 why they want so much consolidation in the banking industry. Too big to fail, right? What did we do

01:34:49.300 after the financial crisis? Nobody went to jail. You made every large bank actually bigger, so they

01:34:55.000 are effectively stewards of the state. And they can control three or four. That's why it's really not

01:35:00.440 a big deal when you have two or three banking failures of the magnitude that you had under the

01:35:05.180 Biden administration. Because the less of these government-sponsored entities there are, and the

01:35:09.440 more that they can control them, and ultimately implement their will on people, which is what

01:35:13.440 Canada just did. That's also taken place in the private sector. I've observed with places like

01:35:18.580 PayPal, they were fining people for misinformation that they determined to be misinformation.

01:35:23.780 Yeah, that was crazy.

01:35:25.100 Parallel economy is so important. We need to finance alternatives to all of these institutions.

01:35:32.360 Okay, so let me ask you this. We have a minute left. How can people support you, right?

01:35:37.580 What exactly should they do?

01:35:40.680 Well, I think that one of the easiest ways is when I try to provide offerings, whether

01:35:45.540 helping Tucker get up and running or Public Square and other companies that we're putting

01:35:49.720 out there, please do your best. It's my job to get the word out there, and thank you,

01:35:54.740 Megan, for having me and being able to do that, is to patronize things like Rumble and Public

01:35:58.900 Square and other companies that share your values. That's the only way we're going to win.

01:36:03.300 The more you continue to patronize these other companies, the harder it's going to be.

01:36:07.300 But what we're doing, I think, is the essence of capitalism, which is to give people choice.

01:36:11.800 If those companies want to behave that way, like Bud Light or Amazon, fine, that's your

01:36:15.740 prerogative, unless the federal government's doing that and telling you to. However, we should have

01:36:20.400 every right to have our own products and services, and my mission is to finance those to do what you

01:36:25.640 said, ensure that private companies are not infringing on the Bill of Rights.

01:36:29.400 And we just need our own superhighway. We just can't rely on the mainstream for anything. They don't

01:36:36.440 want us, and we shouldn't want them either. Omid, thank you for what you're doing, and thanks for

01:36:40.520 coming on.

01:36:41.740 Thanks so much, Megan. I really enjoyed it. Have a wonderful day.

01:36:44.180 Yeah, come on anytime. If you think of another lane that you've created, I would love to talk to you.

01:36:47.900 All the best.

01:36:48.560 I will. Thank you.

01:36:50.220 All right, we're going to be back tomorrow with Glenn Beck. Don't miss that. We'll see you then.

01:36:53.860 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - January 29, 2024

Rise of Alternative Media as Corporate Press Implodes, with Glenn Greenwald, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski, and Entrepreneur Omeed Malik

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