The Megyn Kelly Show - Tariffs and Markets Perspective, Exclusive Info From Nashville Shooter's Journals, and American Held in Russia, with Victor Davis Hanson and Chris van Heerden ｜ Ep. 1043

00:00:00.480 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:12.180 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:15.620 He's been called the disruptor-in-chief, and that's exactly what Trump's tariffs are doing to the market today.

00:00:21.440 False reports of a Trump tariff pause saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average erase a morning 1,700-point loss to go up over 800,

00:00:35.140 only for the market to go back to a loss of over 800 when it turned out the rumor wasn't true.

00:00:43.220 Currently at 12 noon on Monday, it is down 500 points. Back and forth. Look.

00:00:51.440 You can't look. You can't look at it.

00:00:57.640 I'm sure we've lost a lot of money. My mom is on a fixed income.

00:01:02.880 It doesn't matter the income level. You can't look at a moment like this.

00:01:07.880 You're supposed to be in this market for, you know, a long-term payoff if you're a younger person.

00:01:15.740 And if you're an older person, you're also not supposed to sell when the market drops precipitously off of an event like tariffs.

00:01:23.800 That's generally what they say.

00:01:25.780 So looking is just bad for the soul and ultimately the pocketbook for many, many people.

00:01:32.840 That's a general rule.

00:01:34.380 And hopefully you've got a financial advisor telling you exactly what to do because, you know,

00:01:41.640 people who just want to play the market like they're in a casino, okay, I guess you should look.

00:01:47.360 But somebody was just recirculating an old Trump quote because he used to own a casino in Atlantic City.

00:01:52.840 You know, there's no crying in the casino.

00:01:55.420 The market is like a casino.

00:01:59.540 I mean, it is a better place to go.

00:02:02.060 It is not a guaranteed source of income.

00:02:04.620 It can go up and it can go down and we have volatility right now in our economy.

00:02:10.460 So, you know, hold the line.

00:02:13.580 Like, hold. Don't panic.

00:02:15.680 Do not panic.

00:02:16.580 That's actually what Trump is saying this morning.

00:02:18.740 Don't panic.

00:02:19.400 So we're going to talk about what's happening because these tariffs are having a greater effect on our market, at least.

00:02:26.720 And we'll see what they do to our economy.

00:02:28.480 But, boy, he is getting such pushback now from establishment Republicans, the ones who didn't really want him.

00:02:35.280 I mean, like, I'll look.

00:02:37.120 Elon's not a fan of the tariffs from what we're gleaning on Twitter.

00:02:41.120 But core MAGA so far seems to be still in Trump's corner.

00:02:44.740 Establishment Republicans like the journal.

00:02:47.280 They don't like the tariffs.

00:02:48.780 We knew that.

00:02:50.040 They also don't like the immigration reforms.

00:02:52.540 We knew that.

00:02:53.360 They also didn't want Trump.

00:02:54.620 They wanted Nikki Haley. 0.91

00:02:55.860 We knew that.

00:02:57.740 And Democrats who just want to hate Trump to hate him, they're all against him.

00:03:02.380 But what can we just hold on?

00:03:05.860 Just hold on.

00:03:07.160 And don't let these Wall Street hot shots who live and die by a two-point market move dictate the wisdom of Trump's tariffs, which are a longer-term strategy.

00:03:19.300 Look, President Trump is far from panicking.

00:03:23.760 He posted this morning on Truth Social, quote, the U.S. has a chance to do something that should have been done decades ago.

00:03:29.780 Don't be weak. 1.00

00:03:30.900 Don't be stupid. 1.00

00:03:32.220 Don't be a panicking. 1.00

00:03:34.520 It appears to be a new party name he's thrown out there.

00:03:37.360 Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:03:37.740 In fact, the follow-up line is a new party based on weak and stupid people. 1.00

00:03:42.040 Be strong, courageous, and patient, and greatness will be the result. 1.00

00:03:46.020 So you heard it from the president.

00:03:47.160 Don't be a panicking.

00:03:48.460 A panicking.

00:03:49.660 We're going to get into it, plus more of our exclusive reporting on the Nashville School Shooters journals, which we broke exclusively this morning on AM Update, which you should check later today after this show.

00:04:02.460 I just want to tell you what happened there.

00:04:04.800 We received an exclusive on the Nashville Shooters manifesto from the FBI.

00:04:12.540 We exclusively had permission to report on it, though not to post the documents.

00:04:17.200 And we spent the weekend reviewing the over 1,000 of them.

00:04:21.380 And what we concluded, and it's outlined in Morning Update, which is on YouTube and on our podcast feed, is that we were misled by Nashville authorities last week who said, there's not one document called the manifesto.

00:04:36.320 So we're just going to tell you, based on our reading of these 1,000-plus documents, what the motives here were.

00:04:44.340 And guess what didn't make the dance?

00:04:46.800 The shooter's trans ideology.

00:04:48.840 At all.

00:04:49.960 At all.

00:04:50.620 So, we read through the documents.

00:04:53.700 And again, we've been misled.

00:04:57.020 This woman was obsessed with trying to trans herself, wanting to trans herself, trans ideology.

00:05:03.320 I mean, it was like reading a leftist playbook on race, gender, and hatred for America.

00:05:12.780 And now it's becoming really clear why this wasn't shared with us for two years.

00:05:17.880 Well, we've seen it.

00:05:18.720 And we don't have the same agenda as the people making those decisions.

00:05:23.000 And thanks to Kash Patel and his transparent efforts at the FBI, we will bring you the full report later today.

00:05:30.720 We begin today with Victor Davis Hanson.

00:05:33.200 He's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the book, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend Into Annihilation.

00:05:40.480 What are you doing this Easter to celebrate with your family?

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00:06:42.220 Angel.com slash Megan.

00:06:45.440 VDH, welcome back.

00:06:47.380 Thank you.

00:06:47.720 The meltdown on the establishment right and the Trump-hating left over the volatility caused by Trump's change in tariffs is everywhere.

00:06:59.460 Good luck tuning into a podcast, a television show, picking up a paper without being told how terrible these decisions are and how Trump doesn't know what he's doing.

00:07:13.580 You actively have to work to find somebody like you who says, let me tell you another way of looking at this and try to disabuse some of these establishment types of their very, very well-held wisdom.

00:07:29.800 So VDH, your thoughts on the tariffs?

00:07:32.500 Well, there is a lot of misinformation.

00:07:34.360 The first thing is that I know this, I'm like you, I have a 401k and it's been really hurt, but Donald Trump did everything Wall Street wanted his first term.

00:07:48.240 He repealed Dodd-Frank, he deregulated, he cut taxes, he encouraged, accelerated depreciation.

00:07:59.020 And the market went up, Megan, 65% under Donald Trump, higher than even Biden, even though that he suffered through the COVID.

00:08:07.720 So I was looking at the Dow when it's 37 or 38,000.

00:08:11.580 It's pretty much where Biden was in 2023.

00:08:16.160 And over the Biden and Trump eight years, it's gone up 100%.

00:08:22.620 It's gone from 1900, when Trump first entered office, up to 38,000, low point.

00:08:29.340 But if you look at wages, and this is what it's all about, even though the productivity over the last 50 years has almost doubled per worker, wages only went up 35%.

00:08:41.440 Now, as far as the psychodrama goes, you and I are elites, and we understand that.

00:08:47.680 But 10% of the country owns 93% of the value of the stock market.

00:08:54.360 50% are only invested at 1%.

00:08:57.480 So a lot of this paranoia is that these people are not making over a 10-year period what they think they deserve.

00:09:06.400 In other words, their portfolios over the last decade went up by 80% and no longer at this particular point have doubled into 100%.

00:09:15.580 But they're not interested on the people below who would have dreamed of having wage returns to be comparable to the stock market.

00:09:24.840 The other thing is, and I don't understand this, that they are not offering any constructive alternative.

00:09:37.120 I keep thinking, well, maybe the left, I remember Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi said that our policy toward China was a job loser.

00:09:46.700 I remember Paul Krugman said he was a mercantilist.

00:09:49.500 I can remember Warren Buffett writing that we are being wiped out by, that was 20 years ago, by asymmetrical trade.

00:09:57.940 So I'm waiting for all these voices to come up and say, no, this is what we should do to address the $1 trillion annual trade deficit or the trade deficits that have been, without exception, continuous since, what, 1975 or half century?

00:10:15.360 They can either say, well, you know, trade deficits don't matter, and I'll tell you why, or here's a better way of doing it, or yes, we're paying $3 billion a day in interest on the national debt, but here's what I would do, or here's how I'm going to get to it.

00:10:27.880 They don't do any of that, especially the left.

00:10:30.020 So it's just, and then when you look at the whole totalitarian, the totality of the Trump 80 days, it's, well, we went from 10,000 a day to zero on the border.

00:10:43.560 Nobody said that was possible.

00:10:45.000 We've already identified $150 billion that everybody on both sides admits is probably waste and fraud already.

00:10:52.560 For the first time in a decade, you can navigate through the Red Sea.

00:10:57.260 The Houthis are pretty much in withdrawal.

00:11:00.560 Iran is completely emasculated, and somebody's talking about ending the Ukraine war, which instead of just, we'll give them whatever it takes to the end. 0.92

00:11:10.160 So there's been dramatic changes that there are no, there's no appreciation.

00:11:14.660 And, you know, one last thing, I think workers understand that even if they don't buy stock in the company in which they work, the stock market is important.

00:11:24.200 Donald Trump used to brag that he was, he had raised it 60% his first time, and people said, oh, the stock market, that's not a good barometer, workers' wages and unemployment.

00:11:32.460 But Donald Trump already had provided this week, you'd think the stock market would take note, 100,000 more jobs than the government said would be produced.

00:11:43.280 And the interest rate at an annual rate maybe at this month is about 2%, 5%.

00:11:49.400 And so he's getting to some data, and then you think, well, given this hysteria by the 10% and the media and academia and politics and the corporate world, he's done for.

00:12:00.980 And then you'd look at the Harvard-Harris poll, and he's still 49, 46, down a point or two.

00:12:07.380 So I guess what I'm saying is I'm not, this for me, I like to do exactly what you said, take a deep breath, and then contextualize this with the Russian collusion hoax that we all said was a fake and were not disbelieved.

00:12:23.280 The COVID lockdown debacle, the Hunter laptop disinformation fable, the lie that Joe Biden was fit as a fiddle, the idea that Kamala Harris had closed the distance and she was three points ahead in Iowa and going to win that.

00:12:39.200 And these all were these psychodramas that turned out to be not what they were.

00:12:43.900 And finally, one last rant, though, they keep talking about tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, recession, depression.

00:12:50.460 I can't think of a tariff that caused a major recession of depression.

00:12:54.720 It didn't cause a 2008.

00:12:56.700 That was Wall Street.

00:12:57.920 That was this reckless Wall Street hysteria that we're seeing now only channeled into subprime mortgage securitization in the market when there wasn't capital there that they said there was.

00:13:09.840 The Smoot-Harley lack did not cause a Great Depression.

00:13:13.300 We had a surplus at the time.

00:13:16.040 It was unnecessary, yes.

00:13:18.120 It was punitive, yes.

00:13:19.460 But it was two years after when it fully was implemented.

00:13:22.500 It was two years after what?

00:13:25.340 Who caused the Great Depression?

00:13:27.360 Buying on the margin and reckless Wall Street investors.

00:13:32.020 So it's kind of ironic that Wall Street has a tendency to go bananas, speculate, and hurt the rest of us.

00:13:39.540 And now they're trying to cite Smoot-Harley that had nothing to do with the Depression.

00:13:44.020 And they should look to themselves.

00:13:45.840 And the final thing is that they think there's going to be help from the Democrats on deregulation, tax reduction, investment, protecting American companies, dealing with the debt, dealing with the deficit.

00:14:00.880 I don't think there is.

00:14:02.380 Nothing's coming out of the left.

00:14:03.940 Everything that's coming out of the left is antithetical to what the Wall Street Journal, for example, believes.

00:14:09.340 So I just would like to hear what their alternative scenario is.

00:14:13.280 Donald Trump's communication, I would only suggest to them that he have a tragic tone.

00:14:19.280 He should, instead of saying beautiful tariffs and we're going to make them pay or Europe has been ripping us off or repertory, he should say, you know, I didn't want to do this.

00:14:29.040 But we've had 50 years of this and nobody brought anybody's attention to it.

00:14:33.740 They're offshoring.

00:14:34.740 They're outsourcing that has destroyed the industrial base of this country.

00:14:39.240 I don't like cutting federal workers, but who had ever cared about the $37 trillion debt?

00:14:48.020 Who cares about the $3 billion in interest per day?

00:14:51.280 I was tasked to do this in a way that nobody else has addressed it.

00:14:55.020 I don't like doing it, but I'm going to do it for the good of the country, even though I'm going to be hated for doing it.

00:15:00.660 If he said that, I think it'd be—the other thing he could say is he's got to talk—cease all the talk about repertory tariffs, where he says, well, we're going to make them pay for all the stuff they did in the past.

00:15:12.580 Or they manipulate the currency, true.

00:15:16.220 They use health and safety gimmicks to forbid import, true. 0.97

00:15:20.480 But for right now, at this moment, he's got to talk about reciprocity, that American people will back him the whole way if he just says, I would like zero tariffs with partners.

00:15:33.260 And barring that, I want our tariffs to be what their tariffs are.

00:15:37.220 And just stop all the talk about we're going to have a 10 percent on everybody regardless, or we're going to tariff Australia even though they have a trade deficit with us.

00:15:44.740 He can get in in the second round to the currency manipulation, the VAT tax, the scams that countries use to say your products aren't clean enough, or they may have disease, all of that.

00:15:57.200 But for right now, the American people just want to be due unto others as they do to us.

00:16:03.040 And they will back him to the end of the earth when he makes the argument, I am just—it's on autopilot.

00:16:10.020 The fate is in these people's hands.

00:16:11.860 If China wants to be happy, then just do tariff what we do, or I'll go with them on zero tariff.

00:16:19.480 That's a winning argument, but not, well, Australia had a 19—you know, 2003 little quirk, and they stopped beef.

00:16:28.160 That's too intricate right now.

00:16:30.000 Australia has basically zero tariffs.

00:16:33.480 They run a deficit with us.

00:16:35.000 We should not be tariffing them.

00:16:38.220 The Chinese is—that's a special case. 0.93

00:16:41.860 And it's amazing, like, the disparity in terms of what they import to us versus what we import to them.

00:16:49.760 And, you know, people have been talking about—well, they—Trump really added a lot of tariffs on them, 37% on top of the pre-existing tariffs that were already there under Trump 1.0 that Biden claimed to hate but then kept in place.

00:17:02.280 And it affects virtually nothing because they don't buy from us.

00:17:07.040 So, like, it's almost just an exercise in—well, okay.

00:17:09.760 It's like a thought exercise because compared to what we buy from them, they buy next to nothing from us.

00:17:14.620 But today, they actually had the nerve to issue a retaliatory tariff after Trump's 34%.

00:17:22.520 And Trump just issued this statement on Truth Social.

00:17:27.500 He writes,

00:18:27.500 Let's talk about China because, you know, the general thinking seems to be what's going to happen in North America is ultimately going to be done by deal between Trump, Canada, and Mexico.

00:18:37.820 That, you know, he already struck a deal with them first time around, and they'll probably strike another deal because we're all on the same continent and we have an interest in having healthy trading relationships with our upstairs and downstairs neighbors.

00:18:50.460 Then there's Europe, which now is, you know, acting as a bloc, some 27 countries.

00:18:56.040 And I think the general wisdom is that we'll reach a deal with them, too, some sort of a deal.

00:19:00.900 Like, maybe this is a negotiation to hit something better.

00:19:03.400 So it's really about Asia.

00:19:04.640 These tariffs are, in large part, about Asia.

00:19:06.900 And China, the number one, where there's this huge disparity.

00:19:10.660 And then when we hit them with tariffs last time around, they outsourced a lot of their manufacturing to some of these other Asian countries, like Vietnam.

00:19:19.000 We're like, oh, okay, we don't have to do it here.

00:19:20.620 China will do it in Vietnam. 0.87

00:19:22.380 They're not subject to the new increased tariffs on us.

00:19:25.060 So now Trump has included Vietnam and all these smaller Asian countries in his net.

00:19:31.980 So I don't think it's any accident that he's making an example out of China with this Truth Social post, Victor.

00:19:40.680 And I think he's right on because I think Americans understand on an inherent level that everything we buy was made in China.

00:19:51.680 You can't avoid it if you try.

00:19:54.160 You know, from food to toys to clothes, the electronics, you name it.

00:20:01.980 They make it there.

00:20:03.060 They export it to America, and we pay through the nose for it. 0.82

00:20:08.780 And now Trump's trying to right that balance by bringing American manufacturing back and decreasing our dependence on this country that hates us.

00:20:19.340 Your thoughts on Asia and China and how that all plays in here?

00:20:22.220 Well, traditionally in these trade wars, the country that is running a big surplus is more vulnerable because their industry and their economy has been geared toward mercantilism.

00:20:34.320 And that's true, especially of China. 0.93

00:20:36.040 The second thing is there's going to be a lot of opportunistic countries, Vietnam in particular, that are going to come to us and say, we can do what China is doing to you, and we will give you a better deal.

00:20:49.460 We'll have reciprocal tariffs with you.

00:20:51.740 But if you go after China, we're here, and they're going to pop up. 1.00

00:20:56.020 It's kind of like musical chairs.

00:20:57.480 If the music goes off, everybody wants a chair.

00:21:00.240 Once he starts to do these deals, a lot of countries will say, if I don't cut a deal with them, I'll be the last one to get into the American market.

00:21:07.840 And so China is vulnerable in that aspect.

00:21:10.440 They also have 300,000 students here.

00:21:13.660 We don't have hardly any there.

00:21:15.920 They are buying hundreds of thousands of farmland in strategically located places.

00:21:22.400 The FBI, CIA has estimated that 1%, and that was very generous, of students and people from China on green cards are actively engaged in espionage.

00:21:34.140 That could be 3,000 or 4,000 people.

00:21:36.000 So my point is this, is that they see us as naive and as ripe for exploitation in 360-degree thinking.

00:21:46.200 If Trump gets into a tiff with him, as he is now, he has all sorts of levers.

00:21:53.240 He could say to China tomorrow, we're restricting the number of Chinese students that are coming to the United States by 100,000.

00:22:00.220 They would go ballistic, and so would the universities who are using those and charging them 110% as a way of cash to subsidize a lot of the things they shouldn't be doing.

00:22:10.780 So he could say that tomorrow that the Chinese cannot buy land in the United States, especially farmland within a vicinity of a military base.

00:22:20.320 He could really clamp down on patent, copyright theft, military exchanges.

00:22:26.960 Some of our allies have exchanges with China, which they appropriate American technology.

00:22:33.360 So they think that we are completely dependent on them, and we are in the short term.

00:22:39.480 But on the long term, their entire growth has been predicated on American magnanimity, and they know that.

00:22:46.200 And, you know, getting back to Wall Street, we were sold this, Megan, by the Clinton administration, the George Bush administration, the Obama administration, that the more laxity and deference that you gave China, the more that they would rack up surpluses, become affluent, create a middle-class consumer class, get plugged in globalization, have their students in Western universities.

00:23:12.680 Then they would liberalize, and then they would become a constitutional society and join the family of nations.

00:23:18.560 That never happened.

00:23:19.820 They used this asymmetrical relationship with Europe and us to make a lot of money, to build a lot of weapons, to bully their enemies and create the Silk Road, Belt and Road, Mercantile Empire, and all as a way of dethroning the United States. 0.86

00:23:38.160 So they have no goodwill among Americans, and they're much more vulnerable than everybody thinks.

00:23:46.060 We were watching, you know, the usual suspects, for the most part, beat up on Trump.

00:23:52.300 There are a few outliers.

00:23:53.400 But what I am gleaning is that some of the people who are defecting from Trump on this plan or just giving him time to see how it works are people who are extremely heavily invested in the market.

00:24:05.340 You know, it's like, OK, I get it.

00:24:09.000 You're not his priority right now.

00:24:11.780 He wants you to benefit, too, eventually.

00:24:13.360 But right now he's doing something that he thinks long term could help the bottom half of the country.

00:24:20.760 But they're not used to that, Victor.

00:24:22.600 You know, I've been following Bill Ackman's X feed, and he actually he had a post about you tweeting directly to you, saying you made a compelling case for the tariff strategy, but that you had one issue incorrect.

00:24:37.020 He claimed that the Trump he describes the Trump tariffs as reciprocal and proportional to these other nations and what they've assessed on us.

00:24:44.740 In actuality, the Trump tariffs were set at levels substantially above and in many cases at a multiple of the counterparty country's tariff levels and goes on, as Bill Ackman tends to do, with a very, very long post.

00:24:56.620 Yeah, I don't I don't think it's it's the way you calibrate whether it's reciprocal or not.

00:25:00.500 So I think that most of them are reciprocal.

00:25:02.460 Well, I know what you mean, because, I mean, there are some countries who they don't have a tariff on our goods necessarily, but we're just not allowed to sell our cars there.

00:25:10.740 They've they've created such a like a green scheme that keeps us out that it's might as well have a hundred percent tariff.

00:25:17.500 You know, we we I can tell you from agriculture, we dip chickens because we don't want people putting a whole chicken on the counter for more than 24 hours.

00:25:27.140 So we dip them in chlorine tinge water.

00:25:29.100 European does not want Europe's don't what they say.

00:25:32.340 Oh, we're going to make a law of chlorines too deadly.

00:25:34.500 Or the Australians say in 2003, one Canadian cow came across the border with mad cows.

00:25:41.340 So we're going to ban all beef.

00:25:42.720 And they did until 2019.

00:25:44.240 And then even after that, they made it difficult.

00:25:46.660 All of that we can do in a round two.

00:25:49.460 But I do think it's a parody.

00:25:51.880 I live in a very poor community.

00:25:54.080 And when I go to the supermarket, people will come up and talk, mostly Mexican-American people.

00:25:59.100 And I can tell you that not one person the last week has mentioned the stock market.

00:26:03.600 All they have talked about is trade, trade and jobs, jobs, jobs.

00:26:08.760 And these are the 50 percent who account for one percent, 50 percent of the country that accounts for one percent of the market capitalization value in Wall Street.

00:26:19.700 But that's not the people who are reporting.

00:26:21.780 That's not the people who are weighing in.

00:26:23.400 That's not the people who.

00:26:25.080 And I think people, you know, and when you say reps, when they say reciprocity, that's what I was getting to earlier.

00:26:32.500 The first thing they'll say is they would say, I talked to four or five people and they said, is it true that Mexico has 170 billion trades?

00:26:40.740 That's not fair.

00:26:41.700 Is it true that Canada has 101?

00:26:43.460 Yes, that's all people care about.

00:26:46.800 They don't want to have inordinate.

00:26:48.300 They don't want to be the bully.

00:26:49.480 They would either like zero tariffs or tit for tat.

00:26:52.620 And if Trump can stick to that, he will not only get a lot of foreign investment and change of attitude, but he will get the overwhelming support of the American people.

00:27:02.880 But if he gets into all of this stuff that we just talked about, which is valid and legitimate, but if he does it in round one, then people are going to come.

00:27:11.380 Well, Trump's I think the Wall Street Journal runs almost every day.

00:27:15.360 Trump is lying and not reciprocal or that is a losing argument at this stage.

00:27:19.620 Well, just to finish the point on Bill, so then by Sunday at 5 p.m., he called for a 90-day pause in the terrace.

00:27:27.740 So first he was, OK, I disagree with Victor a little, but he said we have to help Trump succeed.

00:27:33.320 It's the least we can do.

00:27:34.600 Then by Sunday at 5 p.m., the earlier exchange was Saturday.

00:27:40.460 He called for a 90-day pause.

00:27:41.960 We've got to pause it.

00:27:43.240 We've got to pause it.

00:27:44.280 The president's losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe.

00:27:47.160 This is not what we voted for.

00:27:48.520 Got to call a timeout.

00:27:50.400 Then he followed up by saying, if you haven't noticed by now, I speak the truth regardless of the consequences to me personally or what other people think.

00:27:57.720 Then by Sunday night, he was taking shots at Howard Lutnick, saying I just figured out why he's indifferent to the stock market and the economy crashing.

00:28:04.760 He and Cantor Fitzgerald, which he runs, are long bonds, meaning they profit when the economy implodes.

00:28:10.400 It's a bad idea to pick a secretary of commerce whose firm has leveraged long, fixed income, an irreconcilable conflict of interest.

00:28:17.140 By Monday morning, he was saying he had been unfair to Howard Lutnick.

00:28:21.680 I don't think he's pursuing his self-interest.

00:28:23.660 I'm sure he's doing the best he can for the country.

00:28:25.560 I'm just frustrated watching what I believe to be a major policy error.

00:28:29.140 Okay.

00:28:29.260 So with all due respect to Bill, I mean, I've seen this from quite a few very heavily invested people.

00:28:35.920 They're against this because they're watching their own fortune or the fortune of their company go up and down precipitously.

00:28:44.240 They see these massive falls and they want to stop it.

00:28:48.600 And I get that.

00:28:49.360 But of course, you know, waiting it out long term and letting things settle is what every investment advisor tells you to do.

00:28:56.980 But separate and apart from that, they don't understand that this isn't about helping the Bill Ackmans of the world.

00:29:05.640 It just isn't.

00:29:06.440 And Republicans in particular are used to a president who is devoted to helping their pocketbooks.

00:29:14.320 It goes back to the wisdom of my nana who lived to be 101.

00:29:17.880 And when she saw I was working at Fox News and I was saying certain things on certain policies and starting to sound more right wing, she said, Republicans.

00:29:28.120 She goes, we're we're Republicans are for the rich.

00:29:31.860 We're not rich.

00:29:33.080 We're Democrats.

00:29:34.180 Right.

00:29:34.780 That's that was my nana's wisdom born in 1915.

00:29:38.180 And she wasn't wrong. 0.96

00:29:39.340 And I think there's still a very large portion of the party that is used to that being the basic approach.

00:29:46.620 Absolutely.

00:29:47.100 When I grew up in a Democratic, I grew up in a Democratic.

00:29:51.300 All my siblings are Democrats.

00:29:52.760 And what I was told was the Republicans, all they care about are capital gains tax and privatizing Social Security.

00:30:00.240 That's what I was told.

00:30:01.780 And Trump comes along.

00:30:03.340 And for the first time, he has it's not what he said.

00:30:07.000 It's what he did.

00:30:07.800 He recaptured the middle class.

00:30:09.360 You look at every statistic data point from the 2024 election.

00:30:14.020 He redefined American politics.

00:30:18.640 The Democrats are the party of the professional and wealthy and the subsidized poor.

00:30:24.400 And he just he wiped out the Democrats in middle class voting.

00:30:28.020 And that and this is the reason why.

00:30:30.480 And that's why he hasn't really he hasn't taken a Wall Street hit of the same magnitude in his polls, because, as I said, 50 percent of the people have one percent of the value of the market.

00:30:42.800 Well, on that point, on that point, here's let me just play the soundbite.

00:30:45.960 It's for it's Scott Besson, our Treasury Secretary, who sat down with Tucker last week and spoke to that a bit.

00:30:51.260 Here it is.

00:30:51.600 We have President Trump's previous term when everyone said none of this was going to work.

00:30:58.040 Oh, the China tariffs are going to do this. 0.98

00:30:59.820 They're going to cause inflation. 0.85

00:31:01.300 They didn't.

00:31:02.740 This is going to happen to working.

00:31:05.640 It's going to be bad for working class Americans. 0.94

00:31:08.220 Well, guess what?

00:31:08.940 Working class Americans that hourly workers did better than supervisory workers.

00:31:14.400 The bottom 50 percent of households, their net worth increased faster than the top 10 percent of households.

00:31:22.880 And I'm not happy with what's going on in the market today.

00:31:27.760 But the distribution of equities across households, the top 10 percent of Americans own 88 percent of equities, 88 percent of the stock market.

00:31:38.720 The next 40 percent owns 12 percent of the stock market.

00:31:43.040 The bottom 50 has debt.

00:31:46.440 They have credit card bills.

00:31:48.300 They rent their homes.

00:31:49.780 They have auto loans.

00:31:51.120 And we've got to give them some relief.

00:31:54.800 And that top 10 percent, Victor, as you know, includes all of the Acela media, all these anchors on CNN, all these op-ed writers for The Wall Street Journal.

00:32:06.460 Those are in the 88 percent.

00:32:08.280 They are the ones who own the market.

00:32:10.000 Yeah, and because they're running around like a chicken with their head cut off.

00:32:16.180 And as somebody who lived on a farm, I mean, chickens really do run off.

00:32:19.140 It's something to see.

00:32:20.460 Oh, boy.

00:32:22.240 And this is why I use that metaphor, because they remind me of when my Swedish grandfather would say, cut the chicken's head off and then see this thing flop around.

00:32:32.340 Oh, my God.

00:32:33.120 And that's what they're – yeah.

00:32:35.640 They've lost their mind is what I'm saying.

00:32:38.620 And if they would just take a deep breath and they would just say, hey, job growth shocked everybody.

00:32:45.160 It was up 100,000 jobs that they said would not happen.

00:32:48.780 The inflation rate is looking good.

00:32:51.660 Oil prices are down – energy are down 10 percent.

00:32:56.240 On the foreign market, it looks like Iran is not going to be the disruptor that everybody said would happen.

00:33:03.980 It looks like there is some pathway to Ukraine, a ceasefire.

00:33:08.820 It looks like the Red Sea is navigable again.

00:33:11.600 It looks like the southern border is calm.

00:33:14.200 It looks like we can deal with Canada and Mexico, even though they have these huge surpluses with us. 0.89

00:33:20.740 It looks like if you look at Trump, what he's talking, extending tax cuts, deregulate.

00:33:26.040 It looks like the first term in which the market went up 60 percent.

00:33:31.420 If they would just look at that and calm down, I think – I don't know what they're trying to do. 0.95

00:33:37.780 If they're trying to do a 2008 or 1929 psychological meltdown, but they look ridiculous. 0.99

00:33:45.220 They look ridiculous. 0.77

00:33:46.140 And you know what's going to happen if Trump cuts all of these deals and this investment, and you and I have this same conversation nine months from now, and there's $4 trillion investment, then they're going to say, I was with Trump the whole way. 0.95

00:33:59.920 I tried to calm people.

00:34:01.300 It reminds me so much of all the people that swore that Christopher Steele was a genius or the laptop.

00:34:10.300 They just knew it was cooked up in a Moscow headquarters or that Joe Biden was fit in the fiddle, Joe Scarborough.

00:34:18.540 I've seen this guy.

00:34:19.680 He's never been better.

00:34:21.580 And, you know, I got a call on election night from a very good journalist.

00:34:26.640 I said, oh, Victor, I think it collapsed.

00:34:30.520 This Des Moines poll is the most reliable.

00:34:33.740 He is down three points.

00:34:35.220 If he's down in a red state like Iowa, he's lost.

00:34:38.700 And I said, this is bogus.

00:34:40.660 He won that state by 12 points.

00:34:43.120 So that class of this elite that owns stock, it's synonymous also with the people who follow every breath in the media and academia and the corporate boardroom and the legal community.

00:35:00.060 But they're not Americans. 0.93

00:35:03.600 Not like most Americans is what I mean to say. 0.73

00:35:06.500 The majority of Americans don't think like they do.

00:35:08.680 And I'm not making fun of them.

00:35:10.980 I'm just saying they get touchy.

00:35:13.020 They get edgy.

00:35:15.020 They get impulse.

00:35:17.080 They're kind of, I don't know what the word is, but I drive over to the coast, you know, each week on the Stanford campus.

00:35:25.600 And by the time I'm there 48 hours and I come back to central rural agricultural California, Central Valley, it's like, wow, I just went to Mars and I'm now back on Earth because they, they're not representative of most people.

00:35:40.420 I know what you mean.

00:35:41.400 No, I think about it all the time because now, of course, I've been in media for a long time and we have some nice trappings surrounding us as a family.

00:35:50.440 But we used to live in this three bedroom duplex that was in an okay area of town in this small little town in Westchester.

00:36:02.420 You know, no, like a one car garage was fine.

00:36:05.600 I'm not saying we were poor, but we were, we didn't have a lot of money.

00:36:08.700 That's for sure.

00:36:09.180 And we were absolutely happy.

00:36:12.240 We were so happy as a family.

00:36:13.940 And we drive by that all the time.

00:36:16.000 And our kids remember living in that house when they were toddlers.

00:36:20.040 And I always say, like, you remember what life was like there.

00:36:23.260 You don't need all this money.

00:36:24.880 You don't need a swimming pool.

00:36:26.800 You don't need this stuff in order to live a really happy life.

00:36:30.240 You need family.

00:36:31.180 You need friends.

00:36:31.960 You need something ideally that occupies your time on a daily basis that makes you feel like you're contributing to society.

00:36:37.420 But I don't, I just, I can't help but feel that there's an underlying, like, missing value here in the rush to condemn his plan by the so-called elites.

00:36:49.120 It's like, could you just hold on and come to terms with a moment?

00:36:53.720 Like, what if, what if you did have a massive wipeout on Wall Street that didn't rebound?

00:36:59.160 I don't believe for a minute that Trump will leave it there.

00:37:01.380 He too loves wealth.

00:37:03.000 He loves wealth.

00:37:03.900 He loves rich people. 0.99

00:37:04.920 He surrounds himself with rich people because he so admires them and what they, there's no way he's going to tell the rich base, you're screwed.

00:37:12.920 But like, let's just imagine a world in which they do get a little screwed and they actually lose a fair amount of money and the lower half of the country rises up.

00:37:22.980 I just think there's like this piece of the people covering this, the ones who are having the meltdowns that cannot imagine a life without their immense wealth.

00:37:32.280 Well, I, I mean, I, I can give you examples.

00:37:38.160 I, I have, I live in a 150 year old house.

00:37:40.760 It was falling apart.

00:37:41.560 So I had, you know, people work on it to rewatch.

00:37:45.080 So Juan was one of the electricians.

00:37:47.060 He had long COVID.

00:37:47.820 He could hardly walk.

00:37:48.720 I said, Juan, how long have you been working?

00:37:50.420 He said, I never took a day off.

00:37:51.900 I can't.

00:37:52.980 He was, he was a genius.

00:37:54.280 A genius when you looked at this old house, how he figured out circuit, the panels and everything.

00:37:59.340 And then there was Jose and he was a painter.

00:38:01.540 And I said, you don't look good today.

00:38:03.400 He said, I have a kidney infection.

00:38:04.560 I have to go up for injections that you see every weekend.

00:38:08.040 And I said, how do you take the fumes?

00:38:10.780 The fumes must add to your kid. 0.78

00:38:12.920 You could, what, he said, what is, what is my, what's my alternative?

00:38:17.040 And he said, I, I have a mortgage on my house.

00:38:19.340 I have car payments, California, I can't even afford, you know, 550 for diesel.

00:38:25.260 That's what everybody goes through.

00:38:27.040 And they're not melting down right now.

00:38:28.960 And you know what else?

00:38:29.960 The people who are melting down did not melt down when whole towns were wiped out.

00:38:35.760 They didn't care because they were offshoring and outsourcing and getting returns on investments

00:38:42.120 beyond their wildest dreams.

00:38:44.860 When the legal class, the academic class, the investor class, the corporate class, the

00:38:49.460 media class woke up in the seventies and eighties and said, oh my God, the market is not 280

00:38:55.160 million Americans.

00:38:56.240 For my skills, there's 7 billion consumers.

00:38:59.620 And I have a skill set or I have a service or I have goods or I have the know-how to capture

00:39:06.480 that 7 billion.

00:39:07.540 But as far as those muscular classes that assemble, manufacture, farm, mineral, whatever, well,

00:39:14.380 we have a special vocabulary for them.

00:39:16.480 As Joe Biden said, you go down on a mine, we close it, you'll learn how to code or program.

00:39:22.940 Hillary, oh, you know, calls off, you know, we're going to put you and the mine out of 0.98

00:39:27.140 business, okay?

00:39:28.100 And then we had that language of disparagement for the same people, but now they were tagged

00:39:33.820 with Trump. 0.96

00:39:34.300 They were deplorable. 0.98

00:39:35.140 They were irredeemable. 0.98

00:39:37.220 For Obama, they were clingers. 1.00

00:39:39.260 For Biden, they were chumps. 1.00

00:39:41.660 They were dregs and garbage. 1.00

00:39:42.820 So that's who they are. 1.00

00:39:46.120 And I'm not just saying this to say it's okay to see the market go down.

00:39:51.880 I think the market is going to settle down.

00:39:55.840 I think it's going to digest this.

00:39:58.540 And if these countries start to come in and think, I got to come in before I'm the left

00:40:03.780 out and Trump is wise enough to take the deal that results in either a no tariff or semi-reciprocal

00:40:13.040 and not worry, as I said earlier, about the past or, and then just says, we're going to

00:40:18.000 discuss the issue about health or gimmicks and that later.

00:40:21.580 This economy is going to take off.

00:40:24.880 I think interest rates are already going to go down.

00:40:27.440 Right, exactly.

00:40:28.440 Trump's pushing for that.

00:40:30.040 He's going to, it's going to be, my only worry is that there's going to be something like a

00:40:35.400 Chinese bioweapon or COVID 2.0 or something. 0.98

00:40:39.340 But I think he's got enough people around him that are brilliant and they are determined

00:40:44.560 and they're, they're addressing all at once, budget deficits, trade deficits, long-term

00:40:50.460 debt.

00:40:51.520 And it's something to watch.

00:40:54.420 I'll tell you what, here's, here's a little bit of comfort for all the people who are part

00:40:59.080 of the Acela media and the 1% and all that.

00:41:01.920 Um, Trump, there were some grumblings out of the Trump white house that he might raise

00:41:09.080 taxes on the rich or at least let them raise.

00:41:13.080 In other words, when the Trump tax cuts expire later this year, he is expected through reconciliation

00:41:19.220 to put them back into place for people.

00:41:21.960 And there was some talk that maybe he would exclude the richest Americans from that in order

00:41:26.940 to pay for his no taxes on tips promise and his no taxes on social security promise.

00:41:32.820 And I don't know whether that, whether he's going to do that or not, but I would say if

00:41:37.120 the market continues to bathe in uncertainty and volatility between now and then you have

00:41:42.900 a much higher chance of Trump, not letting your tax cuts expire as a rich person, because

00:41:48.580 he's just not, he's not going to completely thumb the middle finger at the, you know, wealthier

00:41:54.440 half of his base.

00:41:55.400 He's just not, it's, that's his whole family.

00:41:57.500 It's every single friend he has, it's him and he hates taxes and he hates paying the

00:42:03.320 government for things.

00:42:04.000 So it's like, just let's use our heads, take a deep breath, calm down.

00:42:08.380 Okay.

00:42:08.840 And that applies triple to the leftists, Victor, because not only are they lamenting what's

00:42:15.720 happening with the stock market, even though they were pro tariff their whole lives long,

00:42:18.780 the left has been pro tariff for a long, long time.

00:42:21.060 Now there's a, there's a soundbite of Nancy Pelosi from 1996 making the rounds.

00:42:24.340 I don't know if you've seen it, but she's totally pro tariff. 0.89

00:42:26.680 Actually, we have it.

00:42:27.480 Here it is.

00:42:29.480 How far does China have to go?

00:42:32.840 How much more repression, how big a trade deficit and loss of jobs for the American worker and

00:42:40.280 how much more dangerous proliferation has to exist before members of this house of representatives

00:42:46.040 will say, I will not endorse the status quo.

00:42:49.760 Right now we have a $34 billion trade deficit with China, the 1995 figure.

00:42:56.940 It will be over $40 billion for 1996.

00:43:00.760 That the average US MFN tariff on Chinese goods coming into the United States is 2%.

00:43:06.320 Whereas the average Chinese MFN tariff on US goods going into China is 35%.

00:43:13.420 Is that reciprocal?

00:43:15.560 The US allows China to flood our markets with 30, a third of their exports.

00:43:22.240 By the way, so she said it was a $34, $34 billion trade deficit then.

00:43:26.280 Now it's like $250.

00:43:28.580 I think Trump should really call her up and ask if he can hire her and she can do that again

00:43:34.600 and update it.

00:43:35.900 She can really explain to people.

00:43:37.100 Yeah, I just read this too thick.

00:43:39.240 Suddenly, Richter, they're all about free trade.

00:43:41.520 The left, it's suddenly all about free trade.

00:43:43.640 They don't like tariffs now because it's Trump's plan.

00:43:46.560 And of course, they don't like Trump and they don't like Elon and they're having like severe

00:43:52.400 meltdowns coast to coast.

00:43:54.560 Not only in the protests that we saw over this weekend, completely astroturfed, right?

00:43:59.380 Like hands off.

00:44:00.360 What does it even mean?

00:44:01.160 I don't even know what it means.

00:44:02.040 Hands off.

00:44:02.600 Um, I guess they don't want Elon doing anything.

00:44:05.740 No, no cutting government waste, no finding efficiencies, none of that.

00:44:09.680 And then we get this, the Federalist, uh, producing a survey.

00:44:15.820 It was done by the Network of Contagion Research Institute, NCRI, in partnership with Rutgers

00:44:21.800 University that finds 55% of self-identified leftists say killing Trump is justifiable. 0.91

00:44:30.380 They go on to say that this is about something more than just the desire to kill Trump.

00:44:36.300 There is a broader assassination culture that appears to be emerging within segments of

00:44:42.840 the U.S. public on the extreme left.

00:44:46.740 Quote, these attitudes are not fringe.

00:44:49.440 They reflect an emergent assassination, assassination culture grounded in far left authoritarianism and

00:44:56.360 increasingly normalized in digital discourse.

00:45:00.060 The reports found widespread justification for lethal violence, including assassination

00:45:04.920 among younger, highly online and ideologically left aligned users.

00:45:11.020 The report points to disturbingly high levels of support for political violence, particularly

00:45:15.280 against Trump and Elon Musk.

00:45:19.000 Your thoughts on that?

00:45:19.900 Well, I don't want to be accusatory, but when you have the president of the United States

00:45:25.180 telling donors that they got to put a bullseye on Trump, as Biden did, or you've got people

00:45:32.580 like Jasmine Crockett saying they've got to take right in the middle of all this hysteria,

00:45:36.680 take Elon down.

00:45:38.460 Or even back earlier when Chuck Schumer led a throng of abortion protesters to the gates of the

00:45:46.300 Supreme Court while it was in session and said, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, you reap the wind, you're

00:45:52.120 going to reap the whirlwind.

00:45:53.440 You're not going to know what's going to hit you.

00:45:56.520 And you mainstream it.

00:45:58.780 And then you look at the recent act of violence, the ideological rannings such as they were of 0.96

00:46:04.720 the two foiled assassins, plus the Steve Scalise shooting and the trans thing. 1.00

00:46:11.560 You're getting the impression that a lot of really stupid, crazy people on the fringes 1.00

00:46:17.600 believe that if they were to come out and commit violence against Trump or Elon or some 1.00

00:46:24.260 major person like that, they wouldn't be ostracized.

00:46:28.000 They would be canonized.

00:46:29.420 And that is a very dangerous narcotic.

00:46:32.740 If they, that language of our elite, they've got to stop it. 1.00

00:46:36.040 And we're already, you know, this, if, if anybody on the right on January 6th had started

00:46:44.380 a key, let's say a Mercedes or something around the Capitol, they would have gone, they would

00:46:49.600 be in jail today.

00:46:51.300 And, and the swatting, you know, I was gone and I've lived here my whole life and I've never

00:47:00.040 had more than one County Sheriff come up.

00:47:02.280 Three County Sheriffs came out when I was gone.

00:47:05.180 My wife was here alone. 1.00

00:47:06.440 She was terrified.

00:47:07.460 They came out, they were armed.

00:47:09.100 They went through the whole property.

00:47:11.220 We have 40 acres.

00:47:13.240 So you were swatting.

00:47:15.000 Yes.

00:47:15.360 They were worried because somebody, they said it called up and said that there was a

00:47:19.060 armed danger here.

00:47:20.980 And they do that.

00:47:21.940 So every, they do that a lot.

00:47:23.140 Yeah.

00:47:23.300 It's happened.

00:47:23.940 And it's, it's normalized. 1.00

00:47:26.100 And you start getting email the last seven or eight months and it's not, uh, you're an idiot. 1.00

00:47:33.280 I thank you. 0.99

00:47:33.960 It's be careful if I ever see you and that kind of email.

00:47:38.540 And a lot of people are getting that.

00:47:40.260 And all of that is this climate that we have no, in the left wing mind, we don't have the

00:47:46.720 house.

00:47:47.040 We don't have the Senate.

00:47:47.800 We don't have the white house. 0.76

00:47:48.560 We don't have the Supreme court.

00:47:49.840 We lost the popular vote, the electoral vote.

00:47:52.660 All the issues that we're for are only 20%.

00:47:55.420 He, the Trump people are on the right side of 70, 80% of all these issues.

00:48:00.200 So what are we going to do?

00:48:01.320 We're going to go take to the street.

00:48:03.160 We're going to SWAT.

00:48:05.300 We're going to demonstrate.

00:48:08.060 We're going to, we're going to have a few nuts that'll take out a United health executive 0.99

00:48:13.200 or stuff.

00:48:13.640 It's really, it's been encouraged by, there hasn't really been one major democratic politician

00:48:23.280 who got up and said, this is horrible.

00:48:27.560 What you guys are doing to Tesla.

00:48:29.580 Instead, you have people like Tim Waltz that looks at and brags that he's driving down the

00:48:34.200 value of his own public portfolio as, you know, governor of Minnesota by Tesla stock dropping.

00:48:40.640 No, it's outrageous.

00:48:44.640 They could stop it if they wanted.

00:48:46.880 Let me give you the numbers.

00:48:48.280 They say those who identified, who self-identified as left of center, 48% say they can see that

00:48:59.380 it's at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk.

00:49:02.400 55% said the same about murdering President Trump.

00:49:05.760 55% of those who simply identify as left of center think it is somewhat justified to murder

00:49:14.820 Donald Trump. 0.77

00:49:16.300 55. 0.99

00:49:18.160 That's sick.

00:49:20.460 There's something deeply wrong inside the Democrat party.

00:49:24.340 This is not how Republicans talked about Joe Biden.

00:49:27.180 Certainly not 55% of the Republican party would be out there justifying murder.

00:49:33.240 It's, it's, there's something wrong.

00:49:36.500 There's a sickness.

00:49:37.260 There's a cancerous illness bubbling up inside of their party.

00:49:41.020 The, these, you know, the, the assassination attempts on Trump, the burning of the Tesla

00:49:45.520 facilities, the firebombing of the charging stations, it, they're not one-offs.

00:49:50.380 The praise of Luigi Mangione, Luigi Mangione.

00:49:53.420 It's all connected.

00:49:55.100 This is not, there's a theme because it is thematic in describing the left today.

00:50:00.880 I have to take a quick break.

00:50:02.200 There's so much more with VDH and we'll pick it up right after this.

00:50:05.200 Let's talk about that car you own, but don't use the one you're paying to keep registered

00:50:09.520 and insured.

00:50:10.540 It's just sitting out there, taking up space out front and it's not doing anybody any good.

00:50:15.840 You have a choice.

00:50:17.640 You can give cars for kids.

00:50:20.040 That's cars with a K, a call and have them take care of it for you.

00:50:23.680 Just give them the info and they will come to you as soon as the next day and take that

00:50:28.020 car off your hands at no cost to you.

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00:51:16.040 Welcome back to the Megyn Kelly show.

00:51:17.880 On Friday night, we received more than 1,000 pages of writings by the Nashville school shooter,

00:51:23.460 chilling journals that local officials in Nashville did not want you to see.

00:51:28.920 The FBI sent the files to the Megyn Kelly show as well as to Congress on the heels of a report

00:51:34.560 from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department last week that was severely lacking.

00:51:40.840 Our team reviewed the documents created by the perpetrator of the March 2023 shooting

00:51:45.260 that tragically took the lives of three children and three adults.

00:51:48.760 The documents provide clear insight into the depraved mind of this killer, critical context

00:51:57.060 that was excluded from the 48-page report released last week, and that has been withheld

00:52:02.340 from the public for two years.

00:52:04.660 At one point, about a year plus ago, Stephen Crowder got his hands on three pages, which

00:52:09.840 was great.

00:52:10.500 It was something.

00:52:11.660 Three pages out of 1,000 they have been withholding for years, saying it's somehow too much for us

00:52:18.160 to see.

00:52:18.800 We've seen every other shooter's manifesto, rantings, writings.

00:52:24.380 Why not this one?

00:52:26.260 We here at the Megyn Kelly show do not name school shooters, but due to the nature of this

00:52:30.880 news, we will mention that the shooter's given birth first name is Audrey.

00:52:35.660 However, in the years leading up to the horrific act, she instead went by the name Aiden and used

00:52:41.440 he, him pronouns.

00:52:42.880 On our AM update show this morning, that's another show we're doing now, it's a 15-minute

00:52:47.160 news update for you in the mornings.

00:52:48.720 You can get it on youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly or our podcast feed.

00:52:52.020 We delved into some of the writings, and we will continue here.

00:52:56.480 We'll repeat a couple, but we will add.

00:52:58.620 Because the report from the Nashville police barely touched on the full scope and breadth

00:53:03.140 of what was contained, the killer's struggles with her gender, her obsession with gender

00:53:10.660 identity, alarming racial animus toward herself as a white person, and how those factors contributed

00:53:17.480 to the act that she committed that day.

00:53:21.000 Why do you think they excluded all of this?

00:53:23.200 Why are those two things too hot to touch?

00:53:25.860 The families of the victims do not wish for this information to be made public.

00:53:31.660 We understand that.

00:53:32.940 But we are sharing a sampling of necessary context omitted by the Nashville police, and

00:53:39.460 that has been hidden for far too long from the public.

00:53:42.740 The public has a right to know as a matter of safety in preventing more of these.

00:53:49.500 The FBI has given us permission to say what is written, but not to show the actual documents.

00:53:54.200 The journals contain many pages expressing the shooter's belief that she is a man and was

00:53:59.660 born in, quote, the wrong body.

00:54:01.980 In one entry dated April 12th, 2022, this is a year before the shooting, titled Let Kids

00:54:07.960 Choose Their Sex, the killer writes, quote, how dare God hand me a training bra when I

00:54:13.660 didn't know WTF it was as a kid. 0.98

00:54:15.980 I hated it. 1.00

00:54:17.240 Much more, I'd like to dispose my vagina. 1.00

00:54:20.100 We should all choose our gender. 0.99

00:54:22.100 And keep in mind, as you hear just these samplings, I'm going to read you that what the Nashville

00:54:26.580 police represented was that her trans ideology, her gender confusion had absolutely nothing

00:54:32.320 to do with a horrific act she took from.

00:54:34.380 How do you why?

00:54:35.820 How do you glean that?

00:54:37.180 This stuff is all over her writings.

00:54:39.900 She's clearly deeply disturbed by it.

00:54:42.040 But somehow that's the part you can excise from her motivation.

00:54:45.820 Wrong.

00:54:46.300 In another, she writes, quote, how does it feel to grow up the gender you were born with

00:54:51.620 and are comfortable and happy with?

00:54:53.700 Well, I don't know that feeling. 0.99

00:54:55.360 I never did, you senseless people, that you don't know WTF comes out of your mouth telling 0.99

00:54:59.520 me I'm female. 1.00

00:55:01.040 Female pronouns make me feel like I want to die, especially called woman. 0.99

00:55:05.120 I never was, ever. 0.99

00:55:07.240 I hate being in a woman's body. 1.00

00:55:08.880 Need to die. 1.00

00:55:10.500 But this had nothing to do with the act she took at Covenant School.

00:55:13.820 In an entry marked June 6th, 2021, the killer writes, quote, Eric and Dylan, that's a reference

00:55:19.800 to the Columbine killers, were gods. 0.98

00:55:22.420 All those little dumb shits in other school shootings during the 1990s were not gods, just 1.00

00:55:27.800 cowards. 1.00

00:55:29.000 Even if maybe they had a reason, they left it a mystery. 0.96

00:55:31.980 I realized that after knowing Columbine, I immediately became attached to it.

00:55:36.060 Not just the notorious outcome, but the preceding evidence leading up to it.

00:55:39.720 I feel I am the reincarnation of Dylan Klebold.

00:55:42.180 My thoughts of depression are forever linked to his and my experience as well.

00:55:47.060 In a diary entry shortly after that, the killer writes about how epic it would have been if 0.99

00:55:51.740 she had shot up her own high school, quote, kill all the white kids, kill my own race. 1.00

00:55:57.880 F yes, destroy all the white people who are teachers. 1.00

00:56:01.220 Let all the black kids go. 1.00

00:56:02.580 Unless if I don't like you. 1.00

00:56:04.560 About a month later, the killer writing several pages about why black pain is different from, 0.74

00:56:09.000 quote, white pain, quote, black people were given fate, given nothing. 0.74

00:56:13.980 While white people get power in the White House, have all the privileges, even to white people 0.97

00:56:17.960 like me. 0.97

00:56:19.060 White people are born with privileges. 0.99

00:56:20.480 Black people aren't. 1.00

00:56:21.860 Black people always had to earn and fight for their needs and wants. 1.00

00:56:24.780 It was like that in history.

00:56:26.140 It's like that now. 1.00

00:56:27.520 The killer goes on, quote, being white sucks. 1.00

00:56:30.060 But being black is so cool. 1.00

00:56:32.040 Black people should rule. 1.00

00:56:33.120 White people should fall. 1.00

00:56:34.660 Every white person who lived and died. 1.00

00:56:36.180 I hate you all. 1.00

00:56:38.000 July of 2022, the killer writes about wanting another therapy session, but not having the 0.63

00:56:43.580 money, quote, I need to have another session with my therapist.

00:56:46.980 I need her.

00:56:47.920 It's been two months.

00:56:49.180 I don't deny needing help.

00:56:50.720 I loathe the reality of my fate as an autistic dependent 27 year old.

00:56:57.060 Later on in the journal, three pages that appear to have been printed and affixed into the journal 0.73

00:57:02.300 titled in all caps, I hate the American people.

00:57:07.440 The killer writing America was doomed from the very beginning, quote, America started with 0.99

00:57:12.060 slavery and white people ruling land. 0.98

00:57:14.820 Black people were objects and owned by white landowners and farmers from the start of July 1.00

00:57:18.680 4th, 1776.

00:57:20.400 There are no African-American rights.

00:57:22.740 Slavery is still happening.

00:57:24.760 It goes on, quote, government agencies have all the freedom.

00:57:28.140 White people who want to take away instead of adding more. 0.91

00:57:30.820 What do you call that? 0.97

00:57:32.460 America is not the land of the free. 1.00

00:57:34.040 It's a land full of idiots. 1.00

00:57:35.760 It will only get worse in this country. 1.00

00:57:37.680 Not near enough gods like me, America and its people, all destined to soon be destroyed. 0.98

00:57:43.680 The entry signed, quote, I hate you all, Aiden. 0.57

00:57:48.300 The journals outline more ideas about how animals are better than people, about how she hates

00:57:54.940 life.

00:57:55.340 She hates money and a wish list for the day of the attack involving hopes of, quote, lots of 1.00

00:58:00.600 blood, lots of victims, 20 plus dead. 0.99

00:58:05.440 Sick, sick stuff. 0.77

00:58:08.500 Back with me now, Victor Davis Hanson.

00:58:10.880 I'm sorry, Victor, but nothing, nothing in there makes it too dangerous to release.

00:58:19.380 This is apart from the fact that it's completely in line in the ways that I just read with what

00:58:26.560 leftist schools and leftist thought is pushing right now in American children.

00:58:32.220 There's nothing especially controversial about this versus manifestos we've seen in other cases.

00:58:39.560 So why wasn't this released for two years, either by the local authorities in Nashville or by the FBI

00:58:45.560 under Joe Biden?

00:58:47.340 And why, when the Nashville cops finally released some 48 page summary of the thousand pages last

00:58:52.700 week, did they specifically dissect the gender ideology as not not a causal relationship with 0.81

00:59:01.920 the act she committed?

00:59:03.260 Not not the gender, not the race craziness she'd suffered. 0.87

00:59:07.900 This wasn't a racial crime, but I'm just saying all the inconvenient.

00:59:12.680 Sicknesses get excised as the reasons, and it took Trump's FBI to submit this thing to us

00:59:22.100 and also to Congress for us to have a clear airing of what was behind this woman's sickness, sick 1.00

00:59:28.920 mind, and what caused her to do this horrendous act. 0.90

00:59:33.080 Yeah, I mean, why wasn't it released?

00:59:36.580 Because under the Obama and Biden administrations, and even earlier, they established this principle

00:59:43.020 that there's a binary, that it's kind of a neo-Marxist binary, and on one side are oppressors

00:59:49.160 and on one side are oppressed, and once you find yourself self-declared on the oppressed

00:59:55.480 side, then they feel that there's opportunities, last exemptions that are accorded to you.

01:00:01.740 Sometimes they're at the university and they're trivial, you know, you get a safe space, you

01:00:06.060 get to pick the race of your roommate, you get a special graduation, but then there's been

01:00:12.020 a movement, we see it in the UK a lot, that penalties, and we see it in San Francisco,

01:00:17.920 fines will be predicated on sexual orientation, gender, race.

01:00:23.760 So this person, I shouldn't say this person, the people who dealt with this case were aware

01:00:32.160 of that, and they felt that they would not release the stuff because she was part of this

01:00:37.700 protected group, and if you were to attack this, not even attack it, if you were to treat

01:00:43.140 this special person who has exemptions the way you would any other person, then the powers

01:00:48.460 that would be would come down on you, and they've created this climate of fear.

01:00:52.380 The other thing about it is, everything she said, you can find in either the School of Education

01:00:58.360 or the general campus.

01:00:59.780 I could go into the Stanford bookstore and look at what is assigned and pull out a book within 0.98

01:01:05.640 five seconds that had every one of those tropes she talked about, evil white people, black people 0.97

01:01:12.160 are still slaves, et cetera, et cetera. 0.97

01:01:14.300 That is inculcated and absorbed, not just on the campus, but it drifts off in all these

01:01:20.760 different ways.

01:01:21.840 That's where our teachers are taught, these in the schools of education.

01:01:25.980 This student probably had a class with one of those types of teachers, or the general night

01:01:32.380 classes, it's not just Harvard, Yale, Stanford, it permeates the community college, the high

01:01:38.640 school, the K-2, you know, everything.

01:01:41.280 Can I just jump in there?

01:01:42.400 Can I just jump in there?

01:01:43.180 Because I read this before, but my friend's son, elementary school son, I think he was in

01:01:53.780 fourth grade when this was written, it could be third or fourth, and she pulled him from

01:01:59.160 this school, and it was the same school we pulled our kids from, but he was asked to write

01:02:06.300 something up in school, and the question was, what would you teach people about, I guess, if you

01:02:12.240 could teach, and he wrote the following, it's short, the event I would teach people about is

01:02:18.280 slavery.

01:02:19.200 The reason I think it's important to teach people about this event is so then we can see

01:02:23.920 that America was built on black people, not on whites. 0.98

01:02:27.740 Behind the scenes, it's all black. 0.96

01:02:29.720 The reason we have picked crops, built houses, and America is because black people did it 1.00

01:02:34.840 all. 0.82

01:02:35.700 The only thing white people did was take credit for the work they didn't do.

01:02:39.660 As a white person, I stand with black people all the way.

01:02:43.480 This is a sweet boy, and he has absolutely no animus at all inside of him, but they're curating

01:02:50.320 it.

01:02:51.040 He's clearly been spoon-fed this same diet, and he had loving parents who said, oh, no,

01:02:56.700 you don't.

01:02:57.840 And he knows there's two themes he also is aware of, or he reflects.

01:03:01.640 One is that he will be rewarded in some ways for mouthing or repeating this orthodoxy, and 0.99

01:03:08.540 second, he's ignorant. 0.98

01:03:10.420 So when he talks about white this, he has no idea what the Battle of Shiloh was, or Gettysburg, 0.99

01:03:16.460 or 700,000 people were wiped out over the question of slavery.

01:03:22.540 He has no idea what it was like on Okinawa, or what it was like on Iwo Jima, or at the

01:03:29.660 Bulge, where people died to give this country its preserve, its freedom, and this self-critical, 0.63

01:03:36.000 always re-examining nature of the United States.

01:03:39.720 He has no idea of that.

01:03:41.160 He has no idea.

01:03:42.140 I can tell you that for 20 years at a state college as a professor, when I wanted to send 0.86

01:03:48.520 a student to graduate school from a kind of a state college that didn't have a great

01:03:54.300 reputation, the calls that I would get from the admissions committee in law, in medicine,

01:04:00.600 in PhD programs is, do you have anybody who is African-American or Hispanic?

01:04:06.460 And I did a lot because I was in a minority community, but if I had a white male, they

01:04:12.520 would say, don't even, we do not want a white male from Cal State Fresno.

01:04:17.760 I had that, I'm not saying that that balances out anything, but the last 50 years, since the

01:04:26.440 civil rights movement took a different direction, we have had institutionalized and exempt biases

01:04:33.760 and prejudice and set-asides to try to level the playing field, et cetera, et cetera.

01:04:40.040 And to just forget all of that and your ignorance, that's why we have people that do these things.

01:04:45.940 Nobody ever cross-examines them. 0.93

01:04:48.580 They're narcissistic, and I hate to say it, they're arrogant because they don't ever feel

01:04:53.560 that they have to hear a opposite point of view, or they're too lazy to go out and just

01:04:58.440 pick up any book in the library that would give them a different take on things.

01:05:04.440 They're filling these kids' heads with hate.

01:05:09.160 This Audrey's head was filled with hate, self-loathing, loathing of her country, loathing of her race,

01:05:18.860 loathing of her gender.

01:05:20.080 I mean, it was severe, and while she did wind up going to see her therapist there, you heard

01:05:27.860 a reference to it, and the mother urged the therapist to see her, and they came up with

01:05:34.300 a plan to take away her guns because she was obsessing over killing her own father, she 1.00

01:05:41.020 wound up going and getting a gun anyway, and that's what she used to kill all these poor 1.00

01:05:45.600 little students and their teachers in Nashville, Tennessee.

01:05:49.780 And I asked myself, why would the Nashville police officers be trying to scrub the record

01:05:56.120 for us?

01:05:56.760 You know, like I kind of get Biden's FBI, but I don't really get ... But Kamala Harris won 1.00

01:06:03.380 Nashville.

01:06:04.700 Nashville, just because it's in Tennessee, doesn't make it right-wing or Republican.

01:06:09.200 It's not.

01:06:09.780 And, you know, I think there's probably somewhat of a shared instinct to take out the most incendiary

01:06:18.480 social hot buttons from the full explanation of what was in this person's head.

01:06:24.140 You know what?

01:06:24.600 Maybe in some people's minds, they're totally unrelated.

01:06:28.200 I don't see how you make that argument.

01:06:29.720 But the point is, it's not for the Nashville police to scrub the record of the evidence

01:06:35.340 of what she was obsessing over before she took the lives of six innocents.

01:06:39.320 That is not okay.

01:06:41.340 That's not what we've been doing in these school shootings.

01:06:44.660 And I say good for Trump's FBI for being honest, while trying to be respectful of the families.

01:06:48.900 They didn't blast it everywhere.

01:06:50.460 But we have to have an honest account of when these things happen.

01:06:55.360 Well, I mean, all of the rewards, psychological and career rewards, are on one side.

01:07:00.800 And everybody makes the necessary adjustments anywhere, geographically.

01:07:03.960 In Los Angeles, why would a black firewoman say that if she goes into a burning house and sees a white male,

01:07:13.620 and she's supposed to pick him up and maybe cannot, then it's his fault for being in the wrong place? 0.87

01:07:18.760 That would get you fired anywhere.

01:07:20.540 But that would get you resonance or maybe promoted.

01:07:23.640 And the whole thing about, if you look at the autopsy of the LA fire from the public works person to the assistant fire chief,

01:07:30.520 to the regular fire chief, to the mayor, to the deputy mayor,

01:07:33.840 where everybody was freelancing in creative ways to try to think up of a DEI woke angle that would draw attention to themselves

01:07:43.620 and be self-congratulatory performance art and lead to career enhancement.

01:07:50.140 And that's the landscape we created.

01:07:52.380 And everybody, according to their station, tries to fit in.

01:07:55.800 And we see it everywhere.

01:07:58.360 And that it's illiberal, that it's contrary to the Constitution, that it's contrary to the whole Enlightenment.

01:08:05.900 Nobody cares. 1.00

01:08:06.780 They're ignorant. 1.00

01:08:07.880 And that's what we're dealing with. 1.00

01:08:09.180 It's all on the list. 0.87

01:08:09.200 The self-hatred, the white hatred, the hatred of country.

01:08:12.900 It's just, it's all there. 0.91

01:08:14.800 It's all there.

01:08:16.620 I appreciate you walking through it with me.

01:08:19.080 And again, to the listening audience, you can check out the AM update for other recitations.

01:08:23.660 It is not, as I pointed out on that show, our habit to read manifestos of these school shooters.

01:08:29.680 I take no joy in repeating their thoughts and their crazed musings.

01:08:35.420 But given what's been done in this case and how it's not available anywhere else,

01:08:41.380 I felt we had no choice.

01:08:43.480 And it was the last responsible move to make on this.

01:08:46.840 Anyway, moving on.

01:08:47.780 The, many of the same people who went through those types of adult educations or K through 12,

01:08:55.240 even if they're younger, were out on the streets this weekend in protest of,

01:08:59.900 I don't really understand, to be honest.

01:09:01.700 It's like the Cory Booker speech.

01:09:03.380 No one really knows what exactly they're protesting.

01:09:06.620 Just, they want you to know they're angry and hands off,

01:09:10.040 which seems like a better slogan for the Me Too movement than whatever this,

01:09:13.980 what do you mean, hands off?

01:09:16.240 She's wearing the Statue of Liberty outfit, or is that a he? 0.94

01:09:21.140 Forgive me, madam.

01:09:22.120 It's difficult to tell.

01:09:24.200 And there was plenty of that weird mania on the streets at these protests, too, Victor.

01:09:30.640 I'm going to give you one that has it all.

01:09:33.580 Here's a taste of what we heard from these, I don't know, how many groups?

01:09:37.840 150 groups at various protests, the hands-off protests this weekend.

01:09:41.100 Take a listen to SOT 8.

01:09:42.400 I am black.

01:09:44.760 I am Filipino-Japanese, second generation.

01:09:47.980 And I'm a disabled trans man.

01:09:51.040 But I'm also a Medicaid patient.

01:09:54.800 Oh, God.

01:09:55.340 I'm also a person who uses food stamps.

01:09:58.900 I'm also a person who has been through houselessness in this country.

01:10:03.240 I'm also a person who has gone through substance use and addiction.

01:10:08.240 And most of all, I am a patient of Planned Parenthood.

01:10:11.520 Oh, my Lord.

01:10:15.560 What?

01:10:16.080 I am everything that Donald Trump and Elon Musk want to erase.

01:10:23.800 I'm gluten-free.

01:10:25.960 I mean, she hid it all.

01:10:29.980 Yeah.

01:10:30.120 The thing about all of them is they never present any evidence.

01:10:33.540 So she says, I am everything he wants to erase.

01:10:35.940 And this is what he said.

01:10:37.600 And this is what he did that proves my point.

01:10:40.580 It's the same thing with a not. 1.00

01:10:41.680 Donald Trump is a fascist. 1.00

01:10:43.180 Chris Matthews the other day would say, no, he's a moose. 1.00

01:10:45.360 Just tell us exactly what he's done and if it's any different than any other president and then make your case.

01:10:52.200 And, you know, I was always taught by my fifth grade composition teacher that when you're writing or speaking, she would say, now, Victor, remember to limit the first person I to one or two times.

01:11:05.620 All these people have one thing in common.

01:11:07.640 She says, I am, I am, I am, I am.

01:11:11.000 It wasn't about the message.

01:11:13.620 It was about me, me, me.

01:11:15.020 And that's something that we forget sometimes.

01:11:17.580 This entire therapeutic left-wing movement is predicated on narcissism and I.

01:11:24.440 I don't really care what their stories are.

01:11:26.460 I want to hear their ideas and their arguments and whether they'll stand antitheses.

01:11:31.560 But that's always about me, me, me, me.

01:11:35.340 Let me give you one more.

01:11:36.940 This person is playing right into your hands.

01:11:39.260 Watch this.

01:11:39.720 This is from the D.C. Rally.

01:11:41.080 Seven.

01:11:42.040 My name is Greisa Martinez-Rosas.

01:11:44.660 I am an immigrant.

01:11:46.300 I am undocumented.

01:11:48.280 I'm afraid.

01:11:49.660 Queer and unashamed. 1.00

01:11:53.700 I, I, I and all of the proper boxes are checked.

01:11:57.900 You're exactly right.

01:11:58.600 So what, what, what would be so hard to say?

01:12:02.100 I came here illegally.

01:12:04.780 I have mastered the English language.

01:12:07.120 I'm obviously have some means.

01:12:09.140 And I took a couple of weeks and filled out some porn, some forms and got a green card.

01:12:16.040 And then I decided I wanted to get citizenship and I applied for it.

01:12:19.480 What is so hard about that?

01:12:20.980 Instead of just saying, I came to the country.

01:12:23.700 I found out I was illegal.

01:12:24.800 I didn't do anything about it.

01:12:26.260 And if anybody wants to enforce the law of my host, then blah, blah, blah.

01:12:31.500 But again, it's this arrogance.

01:12:33.140 It's all about me, me, me, and what I have to do and what you have to do for me.

01:12:37.980 And a lot of people who listen to that just say, I don't have to do anything for you.

01:12:42.020 I follow the law.

01:12:43.020 I can't pick and choose to say, you know what?

01:12:44.920 I am Victor Hansen and I have had this happen to me and I had that happen.

01:12:49.920 And I don't have to go 60 miles an hour in a 50 mile hours.

01:12:54.160 I can just do what I want.

01:12:55.180 And that's what people are tired of.

01:12:57.220 It's this therapeutic, narcissistic self-infatuation.

01:13:01.100 The meltdown, though, about Trump's alleged excesses, Elon's a different story.

01:13:09.360 I know we'll see.

01:13:10.300 But the Trump alleged excesses are interesting to me.

01:13:14.320 They're interesting to me because people who you and I both know and like are joining in

01:13:21.120 on some of that.

01:13:21.780 You know, your old pals and my pals, too, at National Review have been very critical of

01:13:27.480 Trump, the deportations, taking people to the El Salvadorian prison, his crackdown on

01:13:34.560 a couple of law firms saying, you know what?

01:13:36.940 You're no longer where the federal government doesn't want to do business with you, Perkins

01:13:39.660 Cooey, you who unleashed through Hillary campaign spying and Russiagate on me. 1.00

01:13:46.820 I don't actually think the federal government should be doing business with you.

01:13:49.260 And same for you, Paul Weiss, who rushed to hire the one guy who made it his mission to

01:13:54.920 prosecute me when he worked for Alvin Bragg.

01:13:56.700 And when Alvin Bragg wouldn't prosecute me, wrote a whole book about how I should be prosecuted.

01:14:00.480 And ultimately, Tish James took up the mantle and sued me and got an award for $500 million 0.86

01:14:06.680 bankrupting or threatening to my company.

01:14:09.540 Trump said, you know what?

01:14:10.560 I don't think the federal government should be in business with these two particular law

01:14:13.280 firms.

01:14:13.800 Well, my friends in National Review, who are honest brokers, wrote very, very critical

01:14:19.160 pieces, saying that's basically a bill of attainder and that, you know, we're shipping

01:14:22.940 off people without to a to a jail without having them tried and convicted on criminal

01:14:29.400 charges.

01:14:31.220 And so that's what they're talking about.

01:14:33.400 They thought this is fascism.

01:14:34.700 This is not us.

01:14:35.820 And this guy, I don't lump in with the National Review crew, but he is a lawyer.

01:14:42.560 He is definitely a Trump hater.

01:14:44.980 And he is starting to lose it over in the case of Paul Weiss, that one of those law firms,

01:14:50.320 they bet the knee to Trump and said, we'll do whatever you want us to do.

01:14:53.640 Please don't do this to us.

01:14:54.560 And Trump got his way.

01:14:55.980 And half of Paul Weiss is just apoplectic now.

01:14:58.680 They're very sad.

01:14:59.540 Paul Weiss, one of the founding partners, two grandchildren, wrote this scathing letter

01:15:05.120 like, our grandpa would never have wanted this.

01:15:08.240 Shame on you.

01:15:09.300 And here is George Conway, formerly married to Kellyanne Conway and a respected lawyer,

01:15:15.080 along with Sarah Longwell, who I believe is also a lawyer and his partner on his podcast,

01:15:20.160 talking about the legal profession and Trump sought to.

01:15:24.400 And when I read that letter, I was just, I was really, I was just moved by it,

01:15:31.880 because it really conveyed everything.

01:15:34.360 People want to stand up for something.

01:15:37.280 And I wanted them to know people are listening to them.

01:15:42.420 And it was good to know that people are listening to us.

01:15:46.440 We're all in this together.

01:15:47.660 And this is a fight for so much more than profits for partner.

01:15:56.100 This is a fight for democracy.

01:15:57.500 This is a fight for the rule of law. 0.99

01:15:59.640 And some people just don't give a shit. 0.99

01:16:01.680 And that makes me angry. 0.99

01:16:03.080 You know, you join the legal profession and they hit you with, I have a lot of really good

01:16:07.180 friends who are lawyers.

01:16:07.760 They hit you with a lot of like, this is a revered profession.

01:16:10.960 You have a real role that you play in society.

01:16:13.140 There are these invisible lines that you help maintain for the constitution.

01:16:16.880 Um, and, and then to have everybody just act then like it doesn't matter at all.

01:16:22.580 Friends.

01:16:23.780 Bizarre.

01:16:24.420 Spouses.

01:16:26.280 You know, it's, um, it hurts.

01:16:30.440 Literally in tears.

01:16:32.460 But I heard none of that when they unleashed the lawfare campaign against Trump, Victor.

01:16:38.720 Those norms don't count when we're summing up the norm breaking.

01:16:42.340 I would ask Mr. Conway, why do you think that on November 18th of 2022, three things happened

01:16:52.160 simultaneously?

01:16:53.640 Nathan Wade, the paramour lead prosecutor of Fannie Willis' circus was in the White House

01:17:01.580 talking with a White House counsel and billing him the hours.

01:17:04.940 The same day, Michael Cole Angelo left the DOJ under Merrick Garland, and he had come there

01:17:12.960 from working with Latina James.

01:17:14.720 He left to go to work for Alvin Bragg.

01:17:17.500 And third, on that same day, Joe Biden had Merrick Garland appoint Jack Smith, the federal

01:17:22.940 prosecutor.

01:17:24.320 And why did they do that?

01:17:26.200 Because they knew Donald Trump was going to, uh, announce his candidacy, uh, to run again.

01:17:33.840 That happened all the time.

01:17:35.980 All of that was lawfare.

01:17:38.100 And Joe Biden would, was on record saying, why didn't, why wasn't he indicted?

01:17:42.820 After he left office, he said he had a regret about Merrick Garland because he didn't go

01:17:46.760 after Jack Smith.

01:17:48.320 Jack Smith didn't go after soon enough.

01:17:50.480 Everybody knows that.

01:17:51.320 They know the whole thing that they, they staged the whole Mar-a-Lago raid to get a hundred

01:17:56.400 files out of taking 13,000 of them.

01:17:59.880 It was 0.008%.

01:18:02.140 And they brought little tags to, to do it.

01:18:04.420 And they messed it up and took an arranged photograph.

01:18:07.440 25 states tried to take him off the ballot and they knew that was illegal.

01:18:12.920 Kevin Clinesmith, one of the lawyers in the entire Russian collusion FBI law, doctored and

01:18:20.220 forged a document.

01:18:22.440 And, um, uh, he went before the, one of the judges involved in all of these, and he got

01:18:27.420 just nothing, no sentence at all compared to what the people who were, you know, parading

01:18:31.640 around non-violently on January 6th.

01:18:33.960 So the whole legal system has been weaponized.

01:18:36.580 Everybody knows that.

01:18:38.240 And Donald Trump says, we're not going to do business with Perkins Coley.

01:18:42.760 It's because they volunteered to be a paywall so that Hillary Clinton could get dirt on Donald 1.00

01:18:49.400 Trump.

01:18:49.860 So she had, went through the DNC and then the DNC went through Perkins Coley and then they

01:18:55.020 went through Fusion GPS and then they hired Christopher Steele to make up 99% of that.

01:19:01.160 And all Trump is saying that each one of you are culpable.

01:19:03.860 And I wish the National Review would just say, why are those 51 intelligence authorities

01:19:09.820 that lied, Brennan, Clapper, Panetta, who were the architects of it, along with Anthony Blinken

01:19:16.960 and Mike Morrell.

01:19:17.920 Why don't they just say, what happened to them?

01:19:20.620 They pulled one of the greatest hoax right before the debate to arm Joe Biden with a lie.

01:19:26.700 And they probably influenced some of the voting, uh, 10 days later.

01:19:30.240 Nothing happened to them, nothing.

01:19:32.840 So all we saw the last four years was a concentrated and often, uh, connected legal to warp the law,

01:19:42.240 warp the law. 0.94

01:19:43.620 And if Donald Trump had just said, you know what?

01:19:46.200 I'm tired.

01:19:46.740 I'm not going to run for office.

01:19:48.020 Or if he had not been the candidate, it would not have happened.

01:19:51.780 It was all aimed at one person's of their hatred.

01:19:55.220 And they thought that they had the moral and legal right to use the law for their own

01:19:58.980 political purposes and there would be no consequences.

01:20:02.040 And so far there hasn't been until Trump says, you know what?

01:20:05.420 I'm not going to do business with you who abused your ethical and legal responsibilities.

01:20:11.700 Right.

01:20:12.300 It's like Trump's not trying to throw these guys in jail.

01:20:15.240 Trump's saying these don't seem like respectable law firms to me.

01:20:19.260 One saw a man who tried to throw me in jail unjustly and said, that's the guy for us.

01:20:25.620 Let's hire it. 0.99

01:20:26.220 Let's run and hire him. 0.97

01:20:27.200 That's one of the things that Paul Weiss did.

01:20:29.900 And so they made this bed themselves.

01:20:32.300 I mean, Paul Weiss is a very political firm.

01:20:34.120 It's full of Democrats.

01:20:35.820 They decided to get political.

01:20:37.580 They understood that they might alienate someone like Donald Trump.

01:20:41.600 They just didn't bank on him becoming president again and having power.

01:20:45.040 And so I don't see anything wrong whatsoever with what Trump is doing to them.

01:20:48.740 And I think they did the right thing in caving.

01:20:50.500 And who gives two figs what the granddaughters of the founder thinks? 1.00

01:20:55.140 They don't have to save the firm.

01:20:57.160 The head of the firm has to save the firm and save the client base and, of course, save their fat cat salaries and their private school tuitions that they're paying.

01:21:05.180 Like, he has to be practical about this because they made some very bad decisions prior to the moment Donald Trump did that.

01:21:12.500 But George Conway will not cry about any of that.

01:21:15.040 He will not cry about the weaponization against Donald Trump because he was for it.

01:21:19.540 So spare me, spare me.

01:21:21.620 And what's even worse is the bill of – when the National View calls bill of attainder, there's only two examples that are clear cut.

01:21:29.660 The New York state legislature passed with its Democratic majority a law that said after Donald Trump was being investigated for tax returns,

01:21:40.400 and they passed a law that said anybody who is being investigated currently for their tax account, we will turn over his state return to the commission.

01:21:51.960 Then they passed – when E. Jean Carroll came forward and had all of those fantasies and fables,

01:21:57.480 at the first ruling it said these are way past – 30 years past the statute of – and you know what?

01:22:03.600 The same legislature passed a bill that said for the next 12 months, anybody who claims that they have a – that they were sexually assaulted has one year to file charges no matter how long ago.

01:22:17.000 There is no statute of – that was aimed at Donald Trump.

01:22:19.960 And they admitted to that.

01:22:21.040 And by the way, a bill of attainder is where you – like a governmental body declares somebody guilty without a trial.

01:22:27.500 There is no question that these two law firms did the things that Trump believes they did.

01:22:33.720 It is not – it's not a mystery.

01:22:35.740 It's not even something in dispute that the hiring of this employee either happened or didn't happen.

01:22:40.120 It did happen.

01:22:40.920 It's knowable.

01:22:42.020 Perkins Coie's role in Russiagate is very well documented up and down the record.

01:22:48.380 It's known.

01:22:49.640 There's no need for a trial.

01:22:51.200 But it isn't –

01:22:51.680 It's not –

01:22:52.440 And it's not guilt as a criminal matter either.

01:22:54.240 Go ahead, Victor.

01:22:54.820 But it's not even a law.

01:22:55.900 A bill of attainder says that you see – you post facto create and pass to the legislator a particular piece of legislation to go after what somebody did in the past.

01:23:07.040 He's not doing any of that.

01:23:08.660 He's just saying, I have choices to use all different types of law firms.

01:23:12.980 And I just don't want to use those because I feel they're unethical.

01:23:16.240 It's not like the New York legislature deliberately thinking Donald Trump can – he's now under investigation in two –

01:23:25.360 We are going to change the law to go after him for something he's already done.

01:23:30.340 And that's what they did.

01:23:31.600 And nobody at the National Review where I worked for 21 years said a word.

01:23:37.620 What do you – well, I mean, they – I love National Review.

01:23:41.500 I just want them to be a lot more fair and balanced.

01:23:42.820 I like National Review.

01:23:44.060 You can have the bash piece.

01:23:45.780 Definitely have a bash piece.

01:23:46.840 That's fine.

01:23:47.280 But at a place like NRR, we expect there to be a piece on the other side.

01:23:51.460 Like, half of the Republican Party is MAGA or loyal to Trump.

01:23:56.160 And then there are the establishment types.

01:23:57.800 And what – you know, you can't just have – thankfully, they did get John Yoo on there recently to defend some of the Trump immigration actions.

01:24:04.780 But they've been extremely hard on Trump with the tariffs and the immigration.

01:24:08.880 And I did want to ask you what you thought about the lawfare, Victor.

01:24:13.440 I mean, it's every day.

01:24:15.280 Just now, just as we were coming to air, we got this.

01:24:19.280 The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, I believe it was an en banc panel, meaning all of them came and sat.

01:24:25.420 But they basically said these two leaders of federal boards who were fired by Trump – one was on the NLRB and one was on something called the Merit Systems Protection Board – he fired them.

01:24:37.760 They were appointed by Biden.

01:24:39.540 And they sued saying, you don't have the power to fire us.

01:24:43.200 And long story short, Trump – he just lost.

01:24:47.400 The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on bancs said, you didn't have the power to do this.

01:24:51.660 The Supreme Court's going to have to decide, and this, too, is getting funneled up to the Supreme Court.

01:24:56.740 So every single thing – he's every single executive order, they're trying to stop it dead in its tracks, Victor, by clogging it up in lawfare.

01:25:08.260 Yeah, they filed more in the first month than they did – than all lawyers did in the four years of the Biden term.

01:25:14.940 So you have about three to four hundred of these 750 district judges, and they are the refined version of the Tesla stuff, the disrupting the joint session of Congress if you're Al Green, or the antics of making videos with smut mouth threats, kickboxing.

01:25:34.100 All of that stuff is the street theater.

01:25:36.380 And then the other side is this stuff, cherry-picking Obama or Biden-appointed judges to delay, delay, delay, and then hope that you can, as Robert Mueller did, eat up a year or two years of the Trump term, fighting, fighting, fighting all this.

01:25:53.840 The weird thing is that we saw that in almost all these cases, these liberal judges, they kind of mirror-image the lawfare that went out – just as we saw Ingeron was very biased.

01:26:06.180 We saw that Mershon's daughter kind of gripped it off her father.

01:26:11.200 She was a Democratic consultant.

01:26:13.940 And, you know, Judge Furman, I think his brother was an advisor, an economic advisor to the Biden administration.

01:26:20.260 I think Judge Bozberg has people in his family that are in very left-wing activist groups.

01:26:30.040 So the more that they can establish – these judges can establish that they're very left-wing, either their familiar relationships or themselves, the more they're likely to be picked out.

01:26:42.200 And now they've gone – it's all gone to their head.

01:26:44.800 And some of them are more powerful than the national security advisor, the secretary of state.

01:26:50.320 They are exercising U.S. national security policy right now.

01:26:54.320 They are determining what a president can do vis-a-vis relations with foreign countries, even.

01:27:00.040 And it's gone to their head, and they really have an impression of themselves that's not warranted.

01:27:04.860 And it won't stop until Justice Roberts and the Supreme Court say this is enough.

01:27:12.920 And if they don't stop it, these people on the left never realize that it can be done to them just as easily.

01:27:20.720 And the Republicans did it a little bit.

01:27:23.460 But it's kind of like the filibuster.

01:27:26.120 When they were in the majority, they said that the filibuster was a racist relic.

01:27:30.260 That's what Obama said.

01:27:31.300 And then when they were in the minority, he filibustered Judge Alito's appointment.

01:27:37.480 They don't have a consistent philosophy, really, other than whatever the right does, we're going to oppose and make the necessary adjustments to fit the case.

01:27:48.280 Yeah.

01:27:48.700 The Supreme Court is going to have to shore up and take these cases on and take them on faster so that we can get governing underway. 0.96

01:27:57.720 They cannot just be this black hole where cases go to die, along with the entire Trump agenda.

01:28:04.900 So sooner or later, they're going to have to take them on, and they're going to have to decide them.

01:28:08.300 And it's going to have to be done at a more expedited pace.

01:28:10.860 Even Judge Henderson from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said that in the opinion she authored in this case.

01:28:18.040 Like, it's got to be taken up by the Supreme Court.

01:28:20.400 And the sooner, the better.

01:28:22.100 Like, get to work.

01:28:23.660 Tick-tock, people.

01:28:25.340 No time like the present.

01:28:26.720 Victor, a pleasure, my friend.

01:28:28.500 Thank you so much for being here.

01:28:30.040 Thank you.

01:28:30.200 Thank you for having me.

01:28:31.860 Okay.

01:28:32.180 When we come back, we've got a story that you will not see anywhere else on a U.S. citizen right now detained in Russia.

01:28:40.620 Wait until you hear this.

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01:30:56.340 I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.

01:31:00.460 It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.

01:31:08.680 You can catch The Megan Kelly Show on Triumph, a SiriusXM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love.

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01:31:54.360 Now we're going to talk about a woman named Ksenia Karolina. 0.63

01:32:03.320 She's a 33-year-old dual Russian-American citizen and amateur ballerina who has been wrongfully detained in Russia for almost 15 months.

01:32:13.500 And wait until you hear how she's living. 0.65

01:32:15.080 Last August, Ksenia was convicted in Russia of, quote, treason and handed a 12-year prison sentence in a Russian labor camp.

01:32:25.600 Her crime?

01:32:27.760 She donated $51.80 in 2022 while in America to a U.S.-based nonprofit that helps children and the elderly who have been impacted by the war in Ukraine.

01:32:40.460 Vladimir Putin increased the penalties for treason back in 2023, and Russian authorities took her into custody in January of last year while she was visiting her elderly grandmother, her first visit to the country in three years.

01:32:56.860 And before you knew it, she was in jail first for some ridiculous charge, and then they said she had committed treason with that $50 donation.

01:33:08.820 And she's been convicted.

01:33:12.200 She pleaded guilty because she was told that she'd have to do that in order to avoid some genuinely lengthy prison sentence.

01:33:19.740 And so she did, thinking it would just be a slap on the wrist.

01:33:22.180 She could get out of there over this $50.

01:33:24.180 No, she's there a dozen years.

01:33:27.100 She's been sentenced to a dozen years in a Russian prison.

01:33:30.240 The State Department tells our show that the U.S. government has officially designated Ksenia as wrongfully detained.

01:33:36.080 That's a good designation for her to get because it means they will work for her release.

01:33:40.920 And now we believe the Trump administration is.

01:33:43.820 But a source close to the situation tells us Ksenia is having numerous health problems as she endures reportedly horrific work conditions at a penal colony over 1,000 miles east of Moscow.

01:33:57.960 Luckily, Ksenia has a fighter literally fighting for her. 1.00

01:34:02.640 It's her boyfriend, Chris Van Yerden.

01:34:06.760 And Chris is a former international boxing organization, welterweight champion, who retired from the sport last year to work full-time on Ksenia's release.

01:34:16.440 Here's a video he narrated at FreeKsenia.com.

01:34:20.280 There's a proverb in the Bible that talks about making plans, but recognizing that God has the final vote.

01:34:28.260 That is how I feel.

01:34:29.920 I celebrated the past New Year's Eve while vacationing with my amazing girlfriend, Ksenia Carolina.

01:34:36.480 She is who I've been waiting for my whole life.

01:34:38.580 She's beautiful, funny, and adventurous.

01:34:42.040 She sneaks food to our bulldog boots. 0.99

01:34:44.460 She lights up every room with her energy and her optimisms.

01:34:47.620 My Christmas gift to Ksenia was to pay for a trip to Russia.

01:34:52.040 Maybe I thought that would make it go faster and she would be back home with me in Los Angeles sooner. 1.00

01:34:57.180 But something intervened.

01:34:58.680 I'm not sure it was God, but it was something.

01:35:01.440 When the Russians found on her Venmo that she had made a $51 donation to a U.S. non-profit organization,

01:35:08.340 she was told she was facing charges and could not leave the country,

01:35:10.960 I am appealing to the Russian government to be the responsible actor here.

01:35:15.080 It was a mistake to arrest her.

01:35:16.500 Please let her go.

01:35:19.320 Show the world you are better than being afraid of my better enough.

01:35:24.140 Chris joins me now.

01:35:25.580 Chris, thank you for being here.

01:35:27.100 I'm so sorry this has happened to your love.

01:35:31.320 So just to get the chronology right, it was 2022 she made this $51 donation.

01:35:36.940 It was 2023 that Putin upgraded the penalties for treason, making it punishable by life in prison.

01:35:45.100 So this was what we call ex post facto.

01:35:47.900 After the fact of her alleged treason, which was the donation, he decided to make this crime punishable by life in prison.

01:35:55.140 Then in January of 2024, she went over there completely not expecting any trouble from the Russian government.

01:36:02.560 She's got dual citizenship.

01:36:04.300 But suddenly found out she was very, very wrong about that assumption.

01:36:08.540 So tell us how the trouble for her started when she got to Russia.

01:36:12.240 Megan, thank you for having me.

01:36:15.920 And yes, the way you just explained it exactly, it's bogus.

01:36:20.560 It just blows my mind, these treason charges.

01:36:24.740 I'll tell you what.

01:36:25.600 We went to Istanbul.

01:36:26.600 She wanted me to go with her to Russia to meet her parents.

01:36:30.400 I didn't like the idea.

01:36:31.580 I didn't like the idea of her going in the first place, but she convinced me.

01:36:36.180 I'm a Russian citizen.

01:36:38.300 I speak the language.

01:36:39.780 I'm going to Yekaterinburg.

01:36:41.460 It's not the main city.

01:36:42.740 She convinced me that it's safe.

01:36:44.400 And I bought that plane ticket.

01:36:46.840 And I decided to go to Istanbul with her for New Year's.

01:36:50.120 And from there, she'll go home.

01:36:51.960 I'll come back to LA.

01:36:53.720 And the flight from Istanbul to Yekaterinburg was four hours.

01:36:58.380 My flight back home to LA was about 10.

01:37:01.000 So I knew that by the time I get back in LA, she's already settled in.

01:37:07.520 I'll have a message from her.

01:37:09.480 Well, I got back to LA and I haven't heard a single word from Gersenia. 0.94

01:37:14.180 I tried for about six hours that day, like trying to get all of her.

01:37:18.380 Then out of nowhere, I got a message.

01:37:20.080 That simple message sent me a message and it said,

01:37:23.740 crazy, I've not yet seen my family speak to you later.

01:37:28.980 And I replied and I said, oh, is everything okay?

01:37:31.480 And I haven't heard from her again for about six hours.

01:37:34.960 Then I received a phone call from a random Russian rumba.

01:37:40.500 It was Gersenia in tears.

01:37:42.460 I said, what's wrong?

01:37:43.520 She explained to me that she was arrested, interrogated for 16 hours at the airport.

01:37:49.560 I said, for what?

01:37:53.540 And they said, well, I don't know.

01:37:55.440 They took my phone.

01:37:56.260 I was flagged, asked her a bunch of questions to the extent where they didn't want to give her water.

01:38:03.760 They didn't want to give her food for 16 hours because they believed she's part of something bigger.

01:38:09.900 And she said, I don't know what you want me to say, but I'm just here to visit my family.

01:38:14.580 After 16 hours, they released her to her family, but held on to her cell phone.

01:38:20.180 And that was the start of everything.

01:38:21.720 That was the January 2nd.

01:38:23.180 That was the start of everything.

01:38:25.520 So they held on to her cell phone, and it was on her Venmo receipts that they saw she had made this donation while in America as an American citizen to 50 bucks to help children and the elderly displaced by the Ukraine war.

01:38:40.620 And they said that that was, in fact, a $50 donation to pay for weapons?

01:38:48.720 Yeah.

01:38:49.380 Yeah, you're right.

01:38:50.480 So $51, after they took her phone, they sent her back to her family.

01:38:57.180 So they released it to her family, and they said, you're not allowed to leave your Katerenburg.

01:39:01.460 You will hear from us.

01:39:02.520 And we now know within the three weeks from January 2nd to January 27th, they investigated every single thing on her cell phone.

01:39:12.860 This is where they came across the Venmo, $51 on Venmo, charged her for treason, funding the enemy state.

01:39:19.700 That's what she was charging for, funding the enemy state, buying weapons. 1.00

01:39:24.540 And if you know, I started laughing and crying at the same time, because I was like, if you know my Ksenia, she is the sweetest, kindest person you'll meet.

01:39:37.400 She goes out of her way to do good for people. 0.76

01:39:41.320 She hates seeing people hurt.

01:39:43.180 So you can imagine elderly people, young kids, without food and water.

01:39:48.620 She would be the first to donate money.

01:39:51.300 And I remember listening to these charges they charged her with and how the Russian media proclaims or the portrait they sculpt for the Russian audience is bogus.

01:40:07.420 Like, for example, she was charged for hooliganism, for attacking two male officers. 0.98

01:40:13.720 I was like, I am a fighter.

01:40:15.920 Yes, I am a fighter.

01:40:17.880 Ksenia is the opposite.

01:40:18.920 Ksenia has got a soft heart, sweetheart, cries easily. 0.97

01:40:22.480 She doesn't have a bad bone in her body. 1.00

01:40:25.340 So when I heard that, it broke my heart.

01:40:29.120 So, yeah, originally they said they arrested her for hooliganism, as you pointed out, and then they upgraded the charge to state treason.

01:40:38.740 So she's been slapped with this crazy charge of treason.

01:40:43.180 She's just there to see her grandmother and she gets a Russian lawyer, which I imagine one has to do in order to fight charges by the Russian authorities.

01:40:52.740 And so how did that happen?

01:40:55.720 And did she not have any counsel, you know, back from the States to help guide her through this process?

01:41:01.240 Yeah.

01:41:01.700 Well, you're taking me back now.

01:41:03.680 The last, like, I'll tell you the process to get that lawyer was, it was very, very difficult.

01:41:08.960 Because, first of all, I'm dealing with the mother and father, which are in Russia, and they want to be hands-on with a lawyer.

01:41:15.860 They want to be able to see the lawyer in person, and they barely speak English, so I need a Russian lawyer.

01:41:24.020 So the process started to get a lawyer, and I will tell you, every lawyer turned us down, because they said it's too risky.

01:41:32.620 They said, you're fighting in Russia, like, we can lose our license.

01:41:35.760 And eventually, we got all of the lawyer we have right now, or had, and met the parents.

01:41:44.120 The parents loved him.

01:41:45.220 I didn't like him at all.

01:41:46.620 I just didn't like him.

01:41:47.800 I said, we can do better.

01:41:50.940 And the parents was persistent on, no, we like this lawyer.

01:41:55.400 We'll go with him.

01:41:56.720 Anyway, go with the lawyer.

01:41:58.620 Long story short, the lawyer ended up telling Cassidy to plead guilty.

01:42:03.220 Now, I was very upset about that.

01:42:05.440 I was like, why would you do that?

01:42:06.720 And he said, look, she's going to get 20 years in prison. 1.00

01:42:09.880 I can get that down to five years if she pleases guilty.

01:42:15.740 I was like, I don't like this, but the parents liked the idea.

01:42:20.220 So the lawyer got her to plead guilty.

01:42:23.060 And guess what?

01:42:24.360 She got the minimum of 12.

01:42:26.900 It didn't work.

01:42:27.760 But it painted this picture of Cassidy now acknowledging what she did.

01:42:34.060 And it made me very, very upset.

01:42:37.040 This lawyer, as the time progressed in this whole battle, we realized this lawyer is like

01:42:43.860 a puppet to the KGB. 0.79

01:42:46.760 Just a puppet.

01:42:47.740 He's doing everything they want.

01:42:49.280 He made Cassidy sign letters. 0.96

01:42:50.740 Cassidy was never supposed to sign. 1.00

01:42:52.600 And she signed it because the lawyer said, no, everything is going to be good.

01:42:58.180 So the lawyer wasn't really representing her best interests at all?

01:43:00.800 No, the lawyer, the lawyer, no, no, no, no.

01:43:04.140 What, was there any other evidence against her that they used, or did it all boil down to

01:43:10.520 this $1.51 payment?

01:43:14.160 That's what has been released, is the $51, illegalism, funding the enemy state.

01:43:20.200 She's part of a...

01:43:21.220 First, they painted this whole piece of her being a spy.

01:43:28.140 Basically, because she had dual citizenship.

01:43:30.380 Yeah. 0.94

01:43:30.860 And I was like, this is ridiculous.

01:43:32.700 But it came down to the $51, which is shocking, right?

01:43:37.660 But it's still, to this day, it blows my mind that she's losing her life for $51.

01:43:45.540 So what do we know?

01:43:46.940 I mean, those Russian prisons are no joke.

01:43:50.720 What do we know about the conditions in which she's being held?

01:43:55.060 I got to be very smart here, because I want to tell you, but I got Cassidy on trouble already 0.95

01:44:00.280 one because of being in the media and sharing some stuff she writes in the letters.

01:44:03.520 Because you would think, she's written to me before where they blank out some stuff in

01:44:08.380 the letters, which means clearly she tries to tell me something.

01:44:11.380 They came across it.

01:44:12.380 They blanked it out.

01:44:14.320 But if there's things they don't blank out, you would think, I'm okay to share it.

01:44:19.320 So I want to be careful, but the conditions are bad.

01:44:22.620 I can tell you right now, it's harsh.

01:44:24.180 Like, she's in a labor camp, right?

01:44:29.080 So she wakes up at 6 a.m. in the morning.

01:44:32.260 She works till 9 p.m. at night.

01:44:35.180 She gets two 15-minute breaks in between for lunch or coffee break or to brush her teeth

01:44:42.300 or whatever.

01:44:42.700 It's snowing in Siberia, close to where she's held at, close to Siberia.

01:44:50.460 It's snowing.

01:44:51.220 It's freezing, cold out.

01:44:52.180 They're working now.

01:44:55.360 I want to say something with you, which is, it's heartbreaking, but I'm at the same time

01:45:01.560 I'm so proud of Ksenia, because she's very strong-minded, yet she's very, she's delicate.

01:45:07.140 And she's not, she's not cut out for this.

01:45:11.300 She's not.

01:45:13.600 I don't even think I am.

01:45:15.180 I'm a fighter.

01:45:16.280 I will deal with it.

01:45:17.760 But the thing that Ksenia's in there, she was speaking to me, and when all of this happened,

01:45:22.660 she was locked up.

01:45:24.620 She's an esthetician now.

01:45:27.120 So she's all about beauty and taking care of herself. 1.00

01:45:30.460 Skincare.

01:45:31.120 Her beauty.

01:45:32.020 So she explained to me, she's got, she's making, she's finding humor in all of this,

01:45:36.180 because as I read the letters, she will write, ha, ha, ha, can you believe this?

01:45:40.900 So she's explaining to me how she ended up chewing, chewing on her clothing to get the 1.00

01:45:49.000 material loose.

01:45:50.360 And then she would take the material and floss her teeth through it, just to make sure she's 0.63

01:45:55.920 taking care of her teeth.

01:45:57.260 And reading that for the first time broke my heart, but it also made me very proud to

01:46:01.860 know that she's strong-minded, she's finding a way.

01:46:04.200 You know, they go...

01:46:06.380 How often do they let them shower?

01:46:09.480 Good question.

01:46:10.560 Once a week.

01:46:11.700 Okay?

01:46:12.700 But it depends on how they feel.

01:46:16.120 There was a moment of her not going to the showers for two weeks.

01:46:18.720 But again, Ksenia, knowing her, she would write to me, she'd go, babe, your mom, her

01:46:25.240 mother would send her some wipes and stuff.

01:46:27.040 And she was like, I would use the toilet water to clean myself. 0.98

01:46:37.840 Oh, boy.

01:46:38.640 And I know this woman.

01:46:41.740 I know her.

01:46:42.940 And for her to now live in that circumstance, it's heartbreaking.

01:46:49.160 You know, she's got problems with her legs. 1.00

01:46:51.400 And this worries me.

01:46:52.520 This really worries me.

01:46:53.640 She's now all of a sudden got, she's got leg pain.

01:46:56.120 She's got some big veins popping out on her legs from all the standing. 1.00

01:47:00.100 And she had a, what they think, she had a minor seizure because of the labor, the hard

01:47:08.900 working labor.

01:47:09.740 She had a seizure, which they think, we don't know.

01:47:13.760 She collapsed, shaken.

01:47:15.080 There was a whole thing.

01:47:16.160 The medical, medics were rushed in.

01:47:19.300 She explained to me in the letters how she's peeling thousands and thousands of potatoes 1.00

01:47:25.220 every day, but you only get a few seconds.

01:47:27.740 There's people yelling and sweating at you all day and you got, you got to rush.

01:47:30.840 And then you've got to put the potatoes in the boiling water.

01:47:33.700 So she's got blisters on her hand from the boiling water, burning her hands.

01:47:37.720 And she's getting basically no attention.

01:47:42.120 Like it's, it's harsh.

01:47:43.640 It is, it is.

01:47:45.780 And that's why I'm on you.

01:47:46.840 Do you think she could do 12 years in these conditions?

01:47:48.560 No, she cannot, Megan.

01:47:49.900 And she's written that to me in the letter.

01:47:51.640 And she said, Chris, if I'm, I'm, but my love, I'm sorry, but I, I'm not going to do

01:47:58.220 12 years.

01:47:59.040 I'm telling you right now, which is obviously put one-on-one together, put one-on-one together

01:48:05.060 and you can imagine what she's trying to tell me.

01:48:07.780 I know that you, you, you've tried to move heaven and earth.

01:48:10.440 This is an incredibly difficult problem to solve.

01:48:13.560 And you know, the Biden administration, you got the designation under, under Biden that,

01:48:18.380 that this is, you know what, they were not, they were not going to give it to me.

01:48:21.640 They were not going to give it to me.

01:48:23.400 I can tell you right now, the Biden administration was not going to give me that wrongful detention.

01:48:28.440 Working with the Biden administration, I want to bring this across.

01:48:31.300 First of all, I want to say I'm grateful that I got that wrongful detention under the Biden

01:48:35.760 administration, but there's, there's, there's only a handful of people in that Biden administration

01:48:40.100 that I have a lot of respect for.

01:48:41.840 And one of them is Roger Carstens.

01:48:44.520 He was, he was an amazing man trying everything to help me get Ksenia out, but he was limited

01:48:49.780 as far as what he could do.

01:48:53.020 I was, I was fighting to get this wrongful detention.

01:48:56.620 I mean, you have to meet this, there's a, I've been in this game now.

01:49:00.580 I call it a game, but it's because I realized it's a political game for the, for, for the

01:49:04.940 US and Russia.

01:49:05.860 It's just a game.

01:49:06.660 It's someone's life.

01:49:08.000 It's Ksenia's life, but it's really just a political game. 0.88

01:49:12.140 And you have to meet 16.

01:49:16.100 I think you have to meet 16 criterias on a list in order to be declared wrongfully detained.

01:49:20.360 Now I've done that in August, by August, as soon as by, by March, by April, I said, guys,

01:49:27.760 what are we still waiting for?

01:49:28.980 Like Ksenia's clearly wrongfully detained.

01:49:30.880 And I pointed out everything and they were like, yeah, I'm playing the games.

01:49:33.900 And I said, look, there's no rush for any of this.

01:49:36.100 Let's do this right.

01:49:37.020 There will be no prison swap.

01:49:38.260 Take your time.

01:49:38.900 Take your time, which upset me.

01:49:40.600 And then there was the first prison swap and Ksenia wasn't included because she's not

01:49:45.600 being declared wrongfully detained.

01:49:47.180 I was very upset.

01:49:48.360 Anyway, so I meet these criterias and I'm speaking with the State Department under the Biden

01:49:54.100 administration.

01:49:55.480 And I said, okay, we've met these criterias.

01:49:59.140 Can we get Ksenia declared wrongfully detained?

01:50:00.860 Because there might be a next prison swap and I want to make sure Ksenia's on that list. 0.99

01:50:05.200 No, Chris, don't rush.

01:50:06.460 Don't rush.

01:50:08.320 There will be no swap.

01:50:09.720 I can promise.

01:50:10.300 They guaranteed me.

01:50:11.740 They said, we guarantee you there will be no prison swap until maybe the elections.

01:50:18.460 And I was like, I took a breather.

01:50:20.280 I was like, okay, I guess I can't do much.

01:50:22.080 Guess what?

01:50:22.920 There was a prison swap on August 1st.

01:50:25.520 And I missed my opportunity because the Biden administration told me, no, Russ, we'll take

01:50:29.440 this slowly.

01:50:30.000 We want to make sure we do it right.

01:50:31.780 Even though by April, May, I've had the criterias and we missed an opportunity.

01:50:39.920 Then I met the criterias.

01:50:42.460 I met them.

01:50:43.120 There's two people I want to thank.

01:50:44.860 Other than the people I work with right now, a man with the name of Peter Berg, big Hollywood

01:50:50.300 producer, very close friends, like a dad.

01:50:52.360 Friday Night Lights.

01:50:53.700 Yes.

01:50:54.240 Peter Berg.

01:50:54.800 Lone survivor.

01:50:55.240 He's currently, he's, right, the list goes on.

01:51:01.260 He's currently playing such a big role in helping me get Cassino back.

01:51:05.520 It was for Peter Berg made a phone call.

01:51:08.140 Peter Berg made a phone call to the US government and he put some fire under them and he said,

01:51:14.200 look here, this girl is clearly being wrongfully detained. 0.99

01:51:17.480 And after that phone call, they declared Cassino wrongfully detained.

01:51:22.480 Another name I want to thank is Dana White.

01:51:25.240 Dana White being very, Dana White being very good friends with President Trump is on board

01:51:31.240 as well.

01:51:31.760 And Dana's advocating for me and Dana's pushing.

01:51:35.060 Now I'm on your show, Megan, because I know, I know President Trump has a lot of respects

01:51:40.460 for you.

01:51:40.760 I've watched his interviews here, watched your shows.

01:51:42.680 He takes note to what you say.

01:51:44.960 And I'm on you and I'm begging.

01:51:47.040 I'm not a begging man, but I'm begging for this girl's life.

01:51:51.160 It is not looking good for her.

01:51:52.620 And if there's somebody that can bring Cassino back, it's President Trump.

01:51:57.160 I know it.

01:51:59.040 And I'm begging him.

01:52:00.360 I know he can bring her back like this.

01:52:02.640 She's not doing well.

01:52:03.860 I heard that you were in touch with Steve Whitcoff, President Trump's envoy, which would be excellent.

01:52:13.400 I mean, he's empowered.

01:52:14.840 We definitely can put you in touch with Rick Grinnell, too.

01:52:18.040 And we can be in touch with him.

01:52:19.520 But what's the messaging right now from the administration?

01:52:23.000 Well, it's quite the last three weeks to a month.

01:52:29.120 There's really no, nothing following, nothing happening.

01:52:32.920 That's why I was, I want to thank you, Megan, for giving me this platform.

01:52:37.440 That's why I feel like there's nothing happening right now.

01:52:40.360 And I'm on you and I'm begging you and I'm begging President Trump.

01:52:44.180 Something needs to happen.

01:52:45.640 Whitcoff. 0.91

01:52:46.460 I'm trying to get him.

01:52:47.780 I'm trying to get on a phone call with Whitcoff.

01:52:50.280 It's not happening.

01:52:51.380 I don't know why.

01:52:52.180 And I'm on your show and I'm trying to connect with Whitcoff to get out of his mouth.

01:52:58.000 I know Senator Rubio is on it as well.

01:53:02.120 Adam Bauer is on it as well.

01:53:03.680 Because of what's happening with the attempt to reach a settlement on the Ukraine war.

01:53:10.500 I wish, you know, it's like she was probably in a better position prior to things hitting

01:53:16.600 this roadblock, right?

01:53:17.700 When things were a little better between Trump and Putin, they were getting along a little

01:53:21.400 better.

01:53:21.960 Right now, I'm sure Trump doesn't want to inject something new that they need to bargain over,

01:53:27.380 argue over.

01:53:28.480 He's trying to get a war resolved.

01:53:30.780 But that doesn't mean it won't happen.

01:53:32.860 I just, I can, I'm sure you felt the change of fortunes when the talk about each other and

01:53:38.180 about resolving this conflict got worse, but that doesn't mean it won't happen.

01:53:42.640 We just need to make sure she stays in their focus.

01:53:46.140 And I'm sure, you know, I'm sure that they're aware.

01:53:49.200 There's no way, I mean, President Trump is not the kind to leave an American behind over

01:53:52.180 there, especially Ballerina, who's in jail for treason because she gave a $50 donation 0.64

01:53:57.600 to the Ukrainians.

01:53:58.420 I mean, it's just, it's outrageous on its face.

01:54:00.660 I wish I could say it could appeal to Vladimir Putin and, you know, his sense of justice on this.

01:54:05.780 I don't think that's going to work.

01:54:08.180 So, I promise I will call attention to this segment, to my administration context, and

01:54:15.240 we'll hope for the best.

01:54:16.480 I feel your pain.

01:54:18.020 This is deeply, deeply wrong.

01:54:20.180 She's lucky to have you, Chris.

01:54:22.600 Megan, you know what?

01:54:24.020 Thank you.

01:54:24.580 Thank you so much.

01:54:26.200 I'm lucky to have her.

01:54:27.740 Like, if you get to know Christina, like, I'm very lucky to be part of her life.

01:54:32.500 And I'm not stopping, you know, I want to say this, but just, again, you've painted a picture

01:54:43.000 already, but people, I get a lot of, you know, mixed messages, hate messages, mixed messages.

01:54:48.400 She gets what she deserves.

01:54:49.720 No.

01:54:49.900 Now, I just want to remind people that Ksenia is a normal human being, loves her friends,

01:54:57.900 loves her family.

01:54:58.860 She'll put them above everything.

01:55:01.120 She's outgoing.

01:55:02.620 She's active.

01:55:03.900 She's being charged for treason for something she did as an American citizen in the United

01:55:11.400 States in 2022.

01:55:13.080 That millions of Americans have done.

01:55:15.200 She's charged for treason, a law that was passed in 2023 by Russia, a year after Ksenia's

01:55:21.840 donation.

01:55:22.240 She did not, she's not part of any organization other than being a good, loving, kind-hearted

01:55:32.620 human being that loves exercising, laughing.

01:55:43.060 And I'm begging the American people to not forget Ksenia and help me.

01:55:49.520 How can you help me?

01:55:50.620 Go to the website, freeksenia.com, and share the content we share and help me keep her name

01:55:56.740 out there and help me keep this story alive because she's already given up.

01:56:04.040 She's already 90% given up, but we will not give up on her.

01:56:09.020 I will not give up on her.

01:56:10.200 You know, I feel like I'm reliving my dad's experience.

01:56:14.660 And I believe he could get Ksenia home too.

01:56:16.780 I want to tell the audience again, it's free Ksenia. 0.94

01:56:19.060 The way that's spelled is K-S-E-N-I-A, free K-S-E-N-I-A.com, freeksenia.com to learn more

01:56:32.060 and donate if you feel inspired to try to help Chris in his quest to get his love back

01:56:39.380 home and out of a terrible, terrible place where she does not belong.

01:56:42.740 Chris, thank you.

01:56:43.460 We'll continue to follow it and we'll follow up with you behind the scenes as well.

01:56:47.400 Megan, thank you so much.

01:56:49.520 All the best.

01:56:50.360 Wow.

01:56:51.160 Jeez.

01:56:51.860 This is stuff like this happens.

01:56:53.920 And, you know, what I was saying, I think is really true.

01:56:56.380 It's, it's now Trump's in a tough position.

01:56:58.600 He's negotiating for something that involves, you know, many, many lives.

01:57:04.640 And that's unfortunate, right?

01:57:06.860 Because in a, in a calmer time, her life would get more priority, but, you know, President

01:57:13.060 Trump got Mark Vogel home, even though he was trying to negotiate the end of the Ukraine

01:57:17.620 war.

01:57:17.900 And I think he can get Ksenia home too.

01:57:19.700 Um, I think, I think Putin will let her go.

01:57:22.860 I just don't think Putin's going to let this dual citizen, young ballerina stay in a Russian 1.00

01:57:27.600 jail for 12 years.

01:57:28.960 I actually don't think he will, um, but it's gotta be made a priority and we have to stay

01:57:33.360 on it.

01:57:33.860 Thank you all for listening.

01:57:34.880 Uh, tomorrow, really looking forward to bringing you Dr. Mark Hyman.

01:57:39.040 And this guy is amazing.

01:57:42.700 He's got so much good information to give you about your health, your doctor, what you

01:57:48.280 need to be worrying about, what the future holds, um, whether you need to change your

01:57:52.300 doctor.

01:57:53.460 Um, and I think you're going to enjoy the conversation.

01:57:56.160 Great talker and super smart.

01:57:57.880 So, uh, we'll do that together tomorrow.

01:58:02.740 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.

01:58:04.740 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:58:09.040 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.

The Megyn Kelly Show - April 07, 2025

Tariffs and Markets Perspective, Exclusive Info From Nashville Shooter's Journals, and American Held in Russia, with Victor Davis Hanson and Chris van Heerden ｜ Ep. 1043

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