The Megyn Kelly Show - Tech Censorship, Media Malpractice, and Woke Icons, with Victor Davis Hanson, John Stossel, and Ben Smith ｜ Ep. 174

00:00:00.600 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:12.360 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh my God, we have an unbelievable

00:00:16.400 show for you today. I'm bursting at the seams to get to this. In just a bit, Victor Davis Hanson

00:00:21.240 will be here to discuss the diminishing power of the American, of the American citizen, and the

00:00:28.360 silencing of dissenting voices. Case in point, President Biden's DOJ today is going to start

00:00:34.240 investigating upset parents who show up at school board meetings if their behavior can be considered

00:00:41.220 harassment or intimidation. Okay, you know how that's going to be abused. They're finding a way

00:00:48.380 to shut down these embarrassing school board meetings that we've seen. That's where this is

00:00:53.100 going to go. But when asked by news outlets like The Daily Caller to specify what exactly

00:00:58.200 it's going to classify as a crime or as a problematic incident, no response. Victor's got thoughts on

00:01:05.520 that. Plus, have you been following this crazy story about the media company Ozzy? The journalist

00:01:10.980 who first broke the news about this company appearing very much like a fraud is Ben Smith of the New York

00:01:17.200 Times. He's their media reporter, their top media columnist. He's going to be here. Do you guys remember

00:01:21.680 I had on Carlos Watson? And we had a lovely chat. And now the the company he built has basically been

00:01:29.940 accused of being a house of cards. I have taken a deep look at this case myself. I've got a bunch

00:01:35.880 of soundbites I'm going to go through with Ben and we're gonna get into it. But first, I'm joined by

00:01:40.900 someone who I know and love who's been fighting back against big tech censorship and now is suing

00:01:47.020 Facebook for two million dollars. And that's John Stossel, host of Stossel TV, which you should

00:01:53.580 definitely Google and check out if you haven't already. John, it's great to have you here. I love

00:01:57.520 that you're pursuing this. You've filed a federal court lawsuit in Northern California against Facebook

00:02:04.080 seeking two million bucks. Why? Because they lie about me and won't take it back even after we

00:02:13.220 point out the lie. You in particular, you take issue with them labeling two of your popular videos

00:02:20.560 as misleading. The first one is about 2020 wildfires in California. And I believe that

00:02:29.040 yeah, we have this. This is soundbite number one. Let's watch a clip. A large part of America is on

00:02:34.580 fire. Mother Earth is angry. Why would Mother Earth be angry? Because of climate change. Politicians are 1.00

00:02:42.640 eager to blame the fires on climate change. The debate is over around climate change.

00:02:49.280 California's governor smiles while he talks about it. All of this catastrophizing around climate change

00:02:55.620 is just a huge distraction. Michael Schellenberger, an environmentalist who Time magazine calls

00:03:01.240 a hero of the environment, says it's silly to blame the fires on climate change. Climate change is real.

00:03:08.480 It's not the end of the world. It's not our most serious environmental problem.

00:03:11.900 And it's not the main cause of the California fires. Governor Newsom tweeted out that last year

00:03:18.840 we had one-tenth of the area burned as we're having this year, and therefore it's climate change.

00:03:25.580 It's like, well, what? Did climate change happen between last year and this year? None of this makes any sense.

00:03:31.120 So what did Facebook do in response to that clip, to that video?

00:03:35.060 Well, Facebook is largely wonderful, and I sympathize with their problems, but they've partnered with these so-called

00:03:42.320 fact-check organizations to try to police the fake news off their airwaves. And they give it to

00:03:50.100 Poynter, a so-called journalism organization. That's a joke.

00:03:56.000 It's specifically a left-wing group. And they partner with this group, Climate Feedback, that wants

00:04:02.140 no discussion that climate change might not be a catastrophe. So they label this misleading and put up

00:04:10.680 a quote implying that I said the fires were not at all caused by climate change. And it wasn't my quote.

00:04:20.260 I never said that. We acknowledge climate change played a part, but we put Schellenberger on there to

00:04:26.080 put it in perspective. We called them government-fueled fires because they don't pick up the brush on the

00:04:33.140 floor of the forest, and that's what really causes the big fires. And when they label something

00:04:39.700 misleading, Facebook stops sending it out to people. And that's their right, but it's not their right to

00:04:46.920 reprint this quote in my name as if I said that, said something I never said. You can't appeal to

00:04:54.920 Facebook. You have to appeal to the fact checker that made the mistake in the first place. They

00:05:00.840 ignored me at first. And when they finally responded, they said, well, no, a quote doesn't have to be

00:05:06.360 exactly what you said. I would have been fired at my previous jobs if I made up a quote like that.

00:05:14.420 And they just won't change it. And then on top of that, we interviewed some of their reviewers and

00:05:22.080 it turned out they hadn't even watched the video. That's what's so crazy. They're labeling your claims

00:05:29.000 misleading, having no idea what your claims are because they've misrepresented your claims

00:05:34.240 as being something other than what your claims are. And then they admit they didn't even watch the

00:05:38.680 video after they slapped the warning label on it. We don't need to watch it because we know what's in

00:05:44.100 there. We know who you're interviewing. So here's so the audience understands you concluded in the

00:05:50.120 piece. You you say you repeatedly acknowledge in that piece, climate change plays a role. This is

00:05:55.660 a quote from you. Climate change has made things worse. California has warmed three degrees over 50

00:06:01.720 years. Then you have Schellenberger on who says climate change is real. But forests, you know,

00:06:07.420 the ones that were well managed, they survived the mega fires. So you're you're pointing out to the

00:06:12.600 audience. Climate change is a factor. But management of the fires or the forests is a

00:06:17.580 bigger factor. That's what you concluded. Concluding bad policies were the biggest cause of this year's

00:06:22.740 fires, not the slightly warmer climate. And they say you're missing context. They say click here to

00:06:31.640 see why you have the viewer clicks. They're sent to a page on climate feedback's website, which states

00:06:37.160 claim. Forest fires are caused by poor management, not by climate change. Verdict misleading. Well,

00:06:45.900 their claim about your claim is what's misleading. And putting it in quotes is misleading. These are

00:06:52.680 sleazy opportunists who are taking advantage of their relationship with Facebook and Facebook is too lazy

00:06:59.580 to do anything about it. Oh, it's time for your hit on the Megyn Kelly show.

00:07:06.920 No, wait. So I, cause I want to get to, yeah, go ahead. There was a second video that they smeared.

00:07:12.560 That's what I want to get to. I'm going to, we're going to, now let's get into the second video and

00:07:15.440 then I'll play the clip of you challenging the fact checkers because you actually got them to go on

00:07:20.620 camera with you, which is just unbelievable. All right. The next video that's in trouble that got you

00:07:25.740 in trouble with them is, um, are we doomed? Are we doomed? And, um, this, this questions claims by

00:07:33.600 environmental alarmists that hurricanes are getting stronger sea level and that the sea level rise

00:07:40.580 poses a catastrophic threat that humans will not be able to cope with. Uh, here's a clip from that

00:07:47.400 so-called problematic video. The alarmists have evidence that supports their fears. Temperature is

00:07:54.060 rising. The UN predicts that it'll rise another two to five degrees. What do we do in the land? We live on

00:08:00.440 this under attack. But does that justify the fear? Climate change is not a lie, so please don't let our

00:08:06.620 planet die. Does it justify this claim? We have 12 years to act. We have 12 years. We have 12 years before

00:08:12.560 the effects are irreversible. Really? 12 years? It's warmed up around one degree Celsius since 1900 and

00:08:19.580 life expectancy doubled the industrialized democracies. And, and yet that temperature ticks

00:08:25.320 up another half the degree and the entire system crashes. That's the most absurd belief.

00:08:32.340 I recently moderated this debate on climate change at the Heartland Institute. Well, not a debate because

00:08:39.000 the alarmists who were invited didn't show.

00:08:41.560 Mm-hmm. So you put that out and, and tell us what happened because you first published it in

00:08:47.440 November of 2019. Then you republished it again, same piece in April, 2021, and that it was treated

00:08:55.160 differently. Well, Facebook let it go out the first time it got 24 million views. Uh, and the second time

00:09:03.720 this group climate feedback called it, I forget what their label was, but instantly Facebook partly

00:09:11.220 false. Partly false. That's right. And they stopped sending it out to people. And that's my business

00:09:17.340 model for my videos. It's why I left Fox to do those 2020 like videos. Facebook was my biggest way to get

00:09:25.880 to people. And this Paris-based group of young activists just gets to cut me off. Um, the, the,

00:09:37.780 it just makes me so angry just to talk about it. Makes me angry too. But Facebook has a right to be

00:09:45.540 biased. I mean, maybe the scientists from Heartland are wrong. Maybe this will be a big catastrophe,

00:09:52.520 but it deserves being discussed, not being cut off entirely. Mm-hmm. And, um, it's crazy to me that

00:10:01.720 they thought it was fine. It stood basically for two years almost without being labeled problematic

00:10:07.500 or partly false. Facebook was fine with it. Then suddenly it magically in April, 2021, it's now

00:10:14.400 partly false and requires a warning label. And the, the, uh, once again, finally, finally,

00:10:22.320 so fact checkers finally got to it. And when one of them agreed to talk to me,

00:10:26.700 he actually said, oh, well, we didn't find any facts wrong. We just didn't like your tone. Oh,

00:10:33.660 and we criticized you for saying hurricanes haven't gotten stronger. Well, we shouldn't have done that.

00:10:39.060 They haven't. The IPCC doesn't say they have. So we were wrong about that part. But he said,

00:10:46.160 I disagreed where you said we can handle the sea level rise because it might rise 200 feet.

00:10:52.080 But nobody says that. And he, well, that would be over hundreds of years.

00:10:57.160 Right.

00:10:57.360 So they're going to dump my video because of what might happen in hundreds of years?

00:11:01.920 This is what's so crazy. The so-called fact checkers have an obvious left-wing agenda and

00:11:08.240 you're including their points of view in your videos. You're just offering the other point of

00:11:13.580 view too. And in the end, you may conclude that these left-wing fact checkers point of view

00:11:18.920 may not be entirely correct. And that's when you get the misleading label. It's like, they're the

00:11:25.100 God of all of these things that are not knowable. We don't know what the sea level is going to be

00:11:30.660 in 20 years. It's all projection and you're not allowed to have your POV. So here, so this is the

00:11:36.500 greatest part of the story until the lawsuit. You, unlike everyone out there, stay dogged and you,

00:11:44.220 you click through to these climate activists and you say, why was it labeled misleading? Why was it

00:11:49.280 labeled partially true? Um, you know, give me your facts and both the two guys, two out of the three

00:11:55.000 guys who labeled the first video problematic and the guy who got involved on the second video gave

00:12:01.760 you interviews, which I'm sure their lawyer is very sad about right now in your lawsuit. But here is

00:12:08.800 a clip of you cross-examining the fact checkers. You're smearing me based on something I didn't

00:12:15.060 say. Yeah. I mean, I've never commented on your article. That was a shock. He hadn't even seen my

00:12:21.000 video. If this is implying that we have reviewed the video, then this is clearly wrong. My assumption

00:12:26.840 is because Schellenberger pops up in there and his statements have basically been shown to be

00:12:34.040 partially wrong. This issue has become very political, uh, which is unfortunate. Zeke

00:12:39.000 Housefather's another climate feedback reviewer. He hadn't seen the video either. I certainly did not

00:12:44.920 write a climate feedback piece reviewing your, uh, segment. So we sent him a link to my video

00:12:50.840 and he watched it. Is that a fair label on the video that I did? I don't necessarily think so. You

00:12:57.100 know, while there's plenty of debates around how much to emphasize forest management versus climate

00:13:01.200 change, your piece clearly discussed that both were at fault here.

00:13:05.940 So you would think after that kind of exchange and you had a similar one after the second video

00:13:09.880 with a different guy, they would then take down their label and say, we kind of screwed over Stossel.

00:13:15.040 Oh, sorry. Our bad. That's not what happened.

00:13:17.320 No Facebook policy is you can appeal, but you appeal to the fact checker and they ignored it. And when then

00:13:24.080 they finally responded, uh, they said, no, our review was fair and you can say, so what if they call it

00:13:32.680 misleading, but Facebook gives them the power to cut us off. And, and what you're claiming in the

00:13:38.880 lawsuit is that they defamed you by labeling you a purveyor of, of bad information. It hurts your,

00:13:45.660 your role, your status, your reputation as a journalist and a, and a truth teller.

00:13:50.180 Well, he did defame me. He lied about me and it hurts me. Hurts me financially and personally to be

00:13:57.600 labeled as a liar. Some of the commenters on the Facebook posts are, oh, I used to trust you, but now

00:14:03.960 Facebook has labeled you misleading.

00:14:06.800 Hmm. And what, how does it hurt your business model, John? Like explain to us when they label

00:14:12.000 this video is misleading, what happens to the video?

00:14:15.600 As I said, I had the second video got 24 million views. Uh, we used to get most of our views from

00:14:22.980 Facebook. Now I get thousands of views. I get most of my views from YouTube. Facebook has throttled me

00:14:31.440 based on these climate feedback idiots. And so your monthly ad revenue on Facebook has, 1.00

00:14:40.080 according to your lawsuit, been cut in half. About that. But we get most of our money from

00:14:45.780 viewers donations. So when I'm reaching millions, fewer people, that's the big loss.

00:14:51.420 Oh, I see. All right. So let me run the response by you. Facebook basically gives the generic,

00:14:58.040 this case is without merit. We're going to defend ourselves vigorously. Climate feedback,

00:15:02.620 who we saw clips of there says as follows. Uh, Stossel misunderstands how fact-checking

00:15:07.940 partners operate on Facebook. Given that many pieces of content posted on Facebook can separately

00:15:12.940 make the same claim. It is not necessary to create a separate claim review article for each post we

00:15:22.520 rate. This is where they lump you in with everybody. It is of course necessary that the claim we reviewed

00:15:28.920 is representative of the claim in each post we rate, which is true in this case. So they're basically

00:15:35.600 saying, even though you didn't say the stuff they attribute to you, the claims that they red flagged

00:15:42.220 are representative of your overall message. And therefore they're in the clear.

00:15:47.720 Well, they aren't because they aren't representative. They put in quotes, something I didn't say. And in

00:15:55.760 fact, quite different from what I did say.

00:15:58.540 Mm-hmm. It's amazing that that's a response from a fact checker that we rely on our inaccuracy

00:16:05.280 and imprecision in doing our fact checking, even when we're on camera admitting we got it wrong

00:16:11.140 there. I, I do not agree with Facebook that they're going to defend this vigorously and that the case

00:16:16.220 is without merit. I think they're in trouble and I predict you get a settlement. What do you think?

00:16:19.920 I sure hope so. And frankly, in California, you have to ask for more than a million dollars.

00:16:24.540 And so I did, but I don't care about the money. I want these people to stop smearing people. And

00:16:30.840 they smear Jonathan Tierney of the New York Times, Jorn Lomberg, who does great environmental

00:16:36.460 reporting and Schellenberger. And I want Facebook to fire these guys and make them stop doing this.

00:16:43.440 Yay. Me too. All right. We'll continue to watch it. Go get them. It'll be fun to watch. Thanks,

00:16:48.180 John. Great to see you.

00:16:49.660 Thanks, Megan.

00:16:50.280 Coming up next, Victor Davis Hanson is here. He's one of my favorite, favorite people. He's

00:16:55.900 brilliant. And we've got so much to get to, including his new book, The Dying Citizen.

00:17:08.100 Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show, everyone. Joining me now, one of my favorite people,

00:17:12.100 Victor Davis Hanson. He is a conservative commentator, a Martin and E. Lee Anderson senior

00:17:17.420 fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the brand new book, The Dying Citizen, out today.

00:17:24.680 Victor, so great to have you here. Thanks for being on.

00:17:27.580 Thank you for having me, Megan.

00:17:29.260 Okay. So we'll get to the book in one second. But there's so many barn burner columns that

00:17:33.680 you've issued lately. I want to get into them. And I want to kick it off with AOC, who it hit the

00:17:39.100 news today that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got her booster shot already. She's only 31 years old. As far 0.86

00:17:46.600 as we know, she has absolutely no comorbidities that would justify a booster shot, but she works 1.00

00:17:53.560 in a crowded building. And so she says, you know, her physician has given it the thumbs up.

00:17:59.340 My thought on this was, you know, what about all the third world people who haven't yet gotten the 1.00

00:18:05.980 shots? This is what the sort of more socially conscious minded folks have been warning about.

00:18:11.460 Don't go get a booster shot unless you really need it, because there's lots of people in the world

00:18:15.300 who don't yet have their first shot. And people like AOC don't need a third one until we get more

00:18:21.380 globally vaccinated. And to me, it plays right into this column you had recently talking about

00:18:27.620 these wokest, I'll use the term losers, like AOC and the people at the Emmys and Obama's party

00:18:34.700 goers and Ibram X. Kennedy, all of whom lecture us constantly on how we need to be better in their

00:18:40.700 view, but live a life that bears no resemblance to their messaging.

00:18:45.480 Yeah, I think this whole woke revolution, Megan, is a top down phenomenon. It's an argument among

00:18:50.680 wealthy elites or want to be wealthy elites or celebrities. It's kind of musical chairs are

00:18:57.020 fighting for the chairs. They don't want to be left out, but it doesn't have a lot of

00:19:00.880 grassroots support from the middle classes. It really doesn't. So when they are successful, 0.92

00:19:07.440 if you're Kendi, then you can charge $20,000 an hour in Zoom for kind of medieval penance for

00:19:12.940 corporate executives. Or if you're Patrice Quellars and you're the Marxist, Marxist co-founder 0.72

00:19:18.520 of BLM, that allows you to get four homes in, of all places, all white Topanga Canyon, not too far

00:19:25.000 from Malibu. Or if you're LeBron, it doesn't really matter that you're hawking Chinese goods that

00:19:30.540 use wager forced labor, because it's kind of a cosmic justice, a cosmic wokeness, cosmic

00:19:39.260 abstraction. And then it allows you in the real world to be what you don't like. It's kind of

00:19:45.620 like Orwell talked about in Animal Farm. It's, it's, if you're woke and you virtue signal, it's like

00:19:51.880 taking out an indemnity policy against woke retaliation or enhances your career. But it doesn't

00:19:58.580 mean, it really doesn't mean materially that you're going to actually act that out. You're

00:20:03.880 going to be one with the people. You're going to wear normal clothes. You're not going to go to the

00:20:08.700 Obama's party. Or if you're the Obama's, you're going to go back to Chicago and work on those

00:20:14.620 inner city problems that's plaguing that city. It just means you don't have to, because in the

00:20:20.320 abstract, you sound so virtuous.

00:20:22.540 Mm hmm. And you've talked about how these sort of woke warriors give a pass to these

00:20:27.840 billionaires who ride on their private jets everywhere and corrupt our teenagers with their

00:20:33.140 product. But they get a pass just as long as they say the right thing when it comes to these

00:20:39.400 favorite issues. Meanwhile, these are the guys who have caused a lot of the very problems that the

00:20:44.500 wokesters claim to be fighting against.

00:20:46.580 Yeah, you can. And you can really see that with Joe Biden. I mean, if you look at any president

00:20:52.200 who's had, you know, we talk about Trump's tax policy, but we were just told that he found a way

00:20:58.340 to avoid not just $500,000, but $500,000 in payroll tax at the same moment he was making up this

00:21:06.400 new category of trillionaires that don't pay their fair share. And he's always talking about, we've got

00:21:11.980 to get unity and we've got to be woke and we've got to have a new attitude on race. And yet,

00:21:17.600 if you collate what he said, you know, the cornpot saga and you ain't black and called an African

00:21:23.280 American, very gifted journalist, junkie or a very sophisticated audience of black professionals, 1.00

00:21:29.280 he said, put you all back in chains or Barack Obama was in his words, the first articulate clean 0.92

00:21:36.720 black. I mean, that wasn't even true. Shirley Chisholm was a brilliant candidate and he does that. 1.00

00:21:41.340 And then Hunter Biden uses the N-word and he, the Biden family exchanges anti-Asian slurs while Joe

00:21:46.920 Biden says, you know, there's an epidemic of anti-Asian racism as if there's a bunch of clingers

00:21:52.780 doing this. And it gets back to this idea that they feel that once they've signed on to these,

00:21:59.740 the, uh, this woke revolution, they can do anything. It reminds me so much of the psychological

00:22:05.720 background of the whole medieval indulgence and penance right before the reformation,

00:22:10.740 where you actually sign something that you were going to give so much money, or you're going to

00:22:15.380 build, uh, a certain part of a church. And then in exchange for that, you were permitted to sin,

00:22:21.360 or you could work off your sin. This means if you sign up for the woke revolution, then you don't

00:22:26.760 really have to change your attitude, your material, uh, appetites, the way you live. And, uh, it's not

00:22:33.260 sustainable. I think there's going to be a correction against it.

00:22:35.620 Well, let's talk about that because that's, that's in your book, which I'm proud to have

00:22:40.040 gotten an advanced copy of. You and I are going to be doing an event on it later this week. Um,

00:22:43.660 but one of the points you make in the dying citizen is this wokeism is basically an appeal to return to

00:22:49.720 tribalism and tribalism doesn't bode well for societies like ours.

00:22:54.740 No, it doesn't. It doesn't bode well for any, but it particularly, as you say, and I wrote in the

00:23:00.700 book that if you're a multiracial democracy, a very rare concept, there are no multiracial

00:23:07.120 democracies in history that I can think of. Today, we have Brazil and India that are trying it not very 0.97

00:23:13.000 well because they do have these ethnic tensions and they lead to violence so often. But when you had

00:23:19.560 multiracial empires like Rome or the Ottomans or the Soviets, they had to have a degree of coercion

00:23:25.420 or the former Yugoslavia. But when you have a consensual society and it's multiracial, it's 0.75

00:23:32.500 dependent upon everybody's primary identity being American, an idea, and that your ethnic or racial

00:23:39.160 or religious identity enriching the body politic, you know, food, fashion, music, culture, but not

00:23:48.000 tampering with a core. But once you tamper with a core, it's going to be a war of everybody against

00:23:54.700 everybody, if that's your primary identification. You can already see it, Megan, with these,

00:23:59.620 we had a U.S. senator that was followed into a restroom while she was in a locked stall being 1.00

00:24:04.780 hectored and filmed. And that was excused because supposedly this cosmic justice about illegal immigration

00:24:12.480 outweighed not only common decency, but it's a felony to go film somebody without their knowledge

00:24:19.580 in a bathroom. Oh, it's been insane what's happened to her. Actually, we have that clip. 0.99

00:24:24.400 Let's watch that. Hi, actually, I am heading out.

00:24:28.660 But right now is a real moment that our people need in order for us to be able to talk about

00:24:33.440 what's really happening. We need a Build Back Better plan right now.

00:24:38.760 We knocked on doors for you to get you elected. And just how we got you elected, we can get you

00:24:50.900 out of office if you don't support what you promised us.

00:24:53.800 This is crazy. For our listeners who are taking this in on Sirius XM without the video, and you can

00:25:20.680 watch it on YouTube.com forward slash Megan Kelly later. But it's Kyrsten Sinema, who's a holdout

00:25:26.940 on this so-called reconciliation bill, being followed into a woman's room into the stall.

00:25:33.480 They're right outside of the stall as she's doing her business, shouting all the things you just heard 0.84

00:25:38.020 at her because she and Joe Manchin are the only two. The Democrats are going to ram this thing through

00:25:43.240 or through are going to they would like to try with only 50 votes, a three point five trillion

00:25:49.180 dollar spending measure on top of all the other trillions we've already had, the one point two

00:25:53.000 trillion that's going to that looked like it was going to go through on infrastructure, the one point

00:25:56.700 nine trillion that they spent on covid relief months ago. And she and he have got some reservations

00:26:02.300 about that kind of number. And and report. I don't know what her number is. Joe Manchin said his number

00:26:08.220 is one point five trillion. That's still enormous. We're way in debt as a country. And so they've got

00:26:14.000 some reservations. They're being castigated. I mean, it's basically a pile on. It's a it's a

00:26:18.840 countrywide, at least with a with a left gang up on them. I mean, just enormous pressure campaign.

00:26:27.720 And for what? You know, for what? We already basically have amnesty, Victor. I like what is

00:26:32.700 it exactly they want from her? I don't know. But when she said my people and our people in my community,

00:26:38.940 who is her community? No one forced her parents or her to come to the United States. That was the

00:26:44.400 brutal bargain. You came into the United States. You did so legally. And once you came in, you adopted 0.95

00:26:49.860 the customs and traditions and laws of your host. And that was your primary identity. That's why a

00:26:55.400 multiracial, multiethnic democracy work. But we didn't have people come in illegally as a first act

00:27:01.720 and as their second act reside illegally and then start telling their host, this is the way it's going to

00:27:07.820 be or else we're going to follow you into what? Your bathroom while you're relieving yourself and

00:27:13.400 we're going to film it. And we're so confident that nobody will dare question us, that we're

00:27:18.920 actually going. We're not going to be found out doing this. We're going to broadcast it on our

00:27:23.020 website. We're proud of what we did. We're going to follow you on an airline, even though we are

00:27:28.180 paranoid about mask and civil decency on airlines. No, we're going to come up and attack a U.S.

00:27:34.320 senator verbally on an airline and cause a sensation. So we have got to the point where not

00:27:41.420 only do we have no border and not only are two million people scheduled to come across illegally,

00:27:46.340 but there's a sense of entitlement that the non-citizen does not have to be vaccinated. But the people who

00:27:53.380 are guarding the border, who are citizens, do have to be vaccinated. We're worried about bringing 1.00

00:27:59.580 100,000 people from Afghanistan, whether they have culturally sensitive food, they don't have to be

00:28:05.060 vaccinated. The people who are escorting them in the military do. So it's not just that we're treating

00:28:10.040 residents who aren't citizens as citizens, but in some weird cases, we're giving them exemptions.

00:28:16.340 We don't even provide our own citizens. And back to the multiculturalism thing. I mean,

00:28:21.680 this is interesting because we used to, you know, I grew up in the 70s and we were told that we were a

00:28:25.080 melting pot and that was one of the beauties of America. And it was true because back then we

00:28:30.140 didn't care where you came from. No one cared about skin color or ethnic background or traditions

00:28:34.200 because the thought was once you came to America, that would become the tie that bound us together.

00:28:39.620 Love of country, patriotism, belief in America as an institution, belief, as you point out in The

00:28:44.180 Dying Citizen, that this is a better place to live than the place from which you came. 1.00

00:28:48.420 And what's happening now, though, is as we open up the southern border, I mean, that's absolutely what's

00:28:52.980 happening. We're letting it's a sieve now. No matter what Joe Biden says, the numbers show it

00:28:57.540 every month. We have another record 200 plus thousand cross into the country unaccounted for.

00:29:04.540 What's happening now is once they get here, the messaging is don't blend in. Don't love the

00:29:10.660 country. Stick to your tribe. Stick to your own native sort of traditions and cultures. And by the 0.99

00:29:16.960 way, if anybody who's already here tries to celebrate those, that'll be condemned as cultural

00:29:22.320 appropriation and some sort of racism. And it's it's encouraging a strange for a form of division

00:29:29.540 and tribalism that maybe not even all these people would adopt if they didn't have this messaging.

00:29:35.220 No, the messaging comes from the host. They adapt to it because they feel that it promises material

00:29:42.000 or courteous rewards. I live in a mostly a community of Mexican-Americans and many of them

00:29:47.060 are here illegally. But I have lunch or breakfast with a lot of my friends from high school, all

00:29:52.160 Mexican-American and professionals that are Mexican-American. And they always say the same

00:29:56.900 thing. Why would we come to this country if we were going to replicate what is going on in Mexico? 0.58

00:30:02.440 We left Mexico because as indigenous people from Oaxaca, we were treated as tribalists. Our tribe was not as

00:30:09.600 good as the Spanish aristocracy in Mexico City. So why would we come up here and then replicate that

00:30:16.480 same tribalism? Or why would we adopt the culture of a different country than the United States?

00:30:22.620 And the reason why the United States is materially prosperous, the legal code is transparent,

00:30:27.660 it doesn't there's a quality under the law is because it's unique and we don't want to tamper.

00:30:33.040 They understand that. But the message they're getting from our elites who aren't immigrants is that we find

00:30:38.740 you useful for our political agendas, short-term though they be. And we're going to tell you how

00:30:44.700 you react. I really, I don't want to keep bashing Barack Obama, but you know, Megan, about 2009,

00:30:52.160 he really institutionalized this kind of rare academic word diversity and he divorced it from

00:30:57.840 class. It used to be there was this binary that for Jim Crow and slavery, we had affirmative action,

00:31:04.040 civil rights, and we kind of included Hispanics, people who were poor on the economic scale because

00:31:09.920 of past bias. But what he did is, he said, we're going to call it diversity. So one thing that the

00:31:17.020 Punjabi millionaire has, or the Chilean aristocrat, or the Nigerian dentist, or the South Korean

00:31:23.240 immigrant who's a capitalist, with all of these other groups is they're non-white. And they're not just 10 or 0.77

00:31:29.900 12 or 3% or 30%. And we're not even going to talk about class. We're just going to say that you can

00:31:36.500 be oppressed. So all of a sudden, Colin Kaepernick, 50 million, is oppressed. Marxist Patrice

00:31:43.480 Quellar's fourth house to Ponga Canada, she's oppressed. Kendi, $20,000 on Zoom for an hour session

00:31:49.960 with him. He's oppressed. Oprah, $90 million home in Montecito, talking to Meghan Markle, 15 million.

00:31:57.600 They're oppressed. And what their oppression is, is they're not so-called white. So you look at, 0.52

00:32:03.040 it's very racist what we did. We completely ignored class. And we know now that of ethnic groups, 0.99

00:32:11.080 so-called people who identify white are about 16. They're behind a lot of Asian groups as far as

00:32:16.660 per capita and family income. We know in the last three years that middle-class wages for so-called

00:32:22.120 whites has not increased like minorities. I'm not trying to defend, you know, criticize it. I'm just 0.99

00:32:27.260 suggesting that the real problem is poverty that is transcendent across racial lines. And it's no

00:32:34.640 longer an absolute equation between not being white and being poor and exploited. And yet we're

00:32:41.320 told that. We're said, you know what, I think the left thought, you know what, this capitalist economy

00:32:46.080 is so effective and there's so much upward mobility and affirmative action works so well. We've got to be 0.64

00:32:52.100 very careful. We've created an upper middle class that's non-white, but we have to say they're still 1.00

00:32:57.880 oppressed. And so it's almost like a theater of the absurd when Obama comes out of a $25 million

00:33:03.940 Martha's Vineyard estate. And he said, he's worried about his children being stereotyped. And, you know,

00:33:10.840 if they were stereotyped, unfortunately, it might be by African-American youth, given the crime rate

00:33:17.660 that we see. And he surely doesn't want to go back to Chicago and community organized. So

00:33:23.340 it's, it's absurd. And I think a lot of the wokeness is sort of a substitution or a mental

00:33:29.700 projection or squaring the circle of elitism and feeling guilty about it and not acting out your

00:33:36.880 ideology with your daily life.

00:33:38.840 Mm hmm. So they can sit in the ivory tower and say, defund the police so that inner city

00:33:42.820 folks are in danger, but they're, they're not having any trouble. Like Cori Bush on the squad

00:33:47.380 defends all of her tens of thousands in security saying too bad, I'm going to do what I'm going to

00:33:52.200 do. And you've pointed out the three out of four members of the squad. I don't know who, how many

00:33:56.580 members of the squad, but they, but they are immigrants who have come here or they or their parents

00:34:02.400 have come here and that they, but they seem to hate America. It's like, well, why, why'd you come here?

00:34:07.080 What, what's the point? Like what, why? I mean, I didn't want to put words in their mouth. I didn't

00:34:11.840 want to put words in their mouth, but I wasn't AOC whose parents came from Puerto Rico. They were,

00:34:16.560 by the way, they were very successful professionals. She grew up in Connecticut in a very nice suburban

00:34:21.800 place, but she called the country garbage. We can be, we should be better than garbage. And I think it 0.99

00:34:27.260 was a representative Omar said, you know, we saw all these things in Somalia. Then we got to the United

00:34:32.580 States and it was just as bad. And then, you know, if you look at all of their criticism of capitalism

00:34:39.340 and everything, what was one of the first problems they all had as representatives? They all ran into

00:34:43.480 campaign finance violations, Omar, Presley, Tlaib, and AOC. And so it wasn't that, and when you see

00:34:51.620 AOC's taste in our designer clothes that, you know, we've talked about, you get the impression that

00:34:57.260 their ideological complaint of America was that they wanted to be somewhere very quickly. And the

00:35:05.460 fact that nobody appreciated their genius in the case of AOC, that she kept saying, I'm an

00:35:10.540 international relations person. I have an MA from Boston University, but yet I was a barista. This

00:35:15.620 is so unfair of the system. And a lot of their grievances seem to be about their own particular

00:35:22.320 trajectories. And now once they found out that they're a megaphone for all the discontent,

00:35:27.260 their real tastes are starting to come out and they, they want to be sort of what Orwell said,

00:35:33.420 you know, two legs are bad, but now suddenly two legs are good if you're an animal. And that's what

00:35:38.620 animal form was all about. And a lot of his work was. That's right. That's what it's been a while.

00:35:43.360 Two legs are better. I can't read out. I remember. Okay. So I'm joined today by Victor Davis Hanson.

00:35:48.180 You can hear how brilliant he is, right? It's just like, like, I don't, it's, it, with all due respect,

00:35:53.100 it reminds me of Charles Krauthammer listening to him. It's just like a special brand of

00:35:56.880 brilliance. You just want to be quiet and listen. Victor Zmartin and Ely Anderson,

00:36:01.000 senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the new book, The Dying Citizen,

00:36:04.820 out today. Up next, we're going to take on General Milley and Dr. Fauci.

00:36:14.940 So Victor, a couple of news items that play into my question here. In Canada, news came out today

00:36:20.680 that a restaurant worker was just awarded $30,000 because his manager, their manager refused to use

00:36:29.900 their pronouns, the they, their, and kept referring to, I guess it's a biological woman, her as she, 0.98

00:36:37.340 her, whatever. So that person gets $30,000 for it, for the refusal to use the pronouns.

00:36:42.620 This as France, um, is rejecting American woke culture. Listen to this. Uh, some people,

00:36:48.960 including president Emmanuel Macron have rejected our woke ideology. And there's a cover story in

00:36:53.280 La Spectacle du Monde, one of France's leading magazines recently running a piece titled,

00:36:59.400 and I feel like they stole this from you, the suicide of America, very close to the dying citizen,

00:37:04.360 uh, in which they blame the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan on a woke dictatorship over here

00:37:09.500 and question whether the American empire is collapsing. Your thoughts on that?

00:37:14.940 Well, the French are right, but they're not entirely right because all during the 19, late 1.00

00:37:21.480 seventies and eighties, and I kind of wrote a book about it called Who Killed Homer with John Heath

00:37:26.460 about 24 years ago. We had, uh, Lacan and Derrida and Michel Foucault. These were all French

00:37:32.880 ideological imports, authors who were postmoderns. In other words, they said, there is no absolute

00:37:39.080 truth. It's all created by people who have power, white male, Christian, heteros, all that stuff.

00:37:45.520 So what we're seeing with the woke movement was critical race theory, critical legal theory,

00:37:50.480 new monetary theory. It all came from France. And we kind of, as we do in America, we swallowed it and 0.59

00:37:58.160 vomited it back in atrocious manner. And then they were mad at what happened, but they create,

00:38:03.740 they helped create it and they don't want anything to do with it because they understand where it

00:38:08.700 leads to, it leads to an end of national, uh, singularity, exceptionalism, and it's, uh,

00:38:16.880 socialism and everything that we see in the world that doesn't work racially. We saw it in the former,

00:38:23.340 uh, Soviet union, Rwanda. We see it in tribalism in Iraq. We saw the, the, the economic model in 0.96

00:38:30.140 Venezuela and Cuba. We see all of it. And why would anybody want to emulate those failed paradigms?

00:38:36.820 Okay. But let me ask you this on brass tacks. How, how does woke ideology translate into

00:38:42.580 a loss of power for the United States?

00:38:45.940 Yeah, I think a lot of ways. The first thing it is that one of the reasons that, you know,

00:38:50.800 I travel a lot in the middle East and I asked a lot of people and I said, why doesn't the middle

00:38:54.840 East work? And they said, because every, I hear it again and again, we hire our first cousin

00:38:59.120 rather than somebody who's meritocratic, somebody that's in our tribe, somebody that is in our

00:39:04.780 religion, but especially familiar. So if we start adjudicating who gets into which particular school

00:39:10.560 or who becomes in the United pilot training program, or if the CEO of American airlines can't

00:39:18.580 guarantee that when you take off, you'll have enough fuel. I've been in two American airlines

00:39:22.740 where you had to divert to get fuel, but he has time to comment on the Texas voting law or the Delta

00:39:29.680 CEO or Chick-fil-A, or we have General Milley who can tell us, along with the joint chiefs and the

00:39:37.060 Pentagon hierarchy, that they're going to go after white rage. They're going to go after white supremacy.

00:39:43.580 They're going to hunt through the ranks, but there's a success. There's progress in Afghanistan. 0.99

00:39:48.300 So it's a zero sum game, Megan, when you invest enormous amounts of capital and labor and time

00:39:54.740 in a commissary system where you're looking over your shoulder all the time, or somebody without

00:40:00.240 talent, a diversity inclusion and equity coordinators don't look at your syllabus and doesn't know

00:40:06.140 anything about Virgil or Sophocles or in the old days, your chairman would say, you know, Victor,

00:40:11.980 I think you're reading a little bit too many Euripides in that class. Why don't you put some

00:40:15.760 Sophocles or Thucydides, or if I was in English, teaching English classes, they'd say, you know,

00:40:20.980 get another play of Shakespeare in there for balance. They don't know any of that. They're

00:40:24.940 just going to say, well, what is racist or sexist in that text without any attention to quality or

00:40:31.440 what's good for the student? So we're wasting a lot of our time on this wokeism and attacking it and

00:40:38.720 defending ourselves from it. And we know from the former Soviet Union, that commissary system is 0.58

00:40:43.960 disastrous. And we're promoting people not on the basis of talent. You know, we used to say, well,

00:40:50.420 wokeism is just an affectation of the nutty academic where it started. They never have nuclear

00:40:56.320 plant operators or surgeons do it. They would always say, we're going to be meritocratic. But,

00:41:02.880 you know, United Airlines just announced that their pilot training program, the acceptance would not be

00:41:08.600 based on prior military experience with planes or aviation test scores, but it would be on

00:41:15.760 criterion of diversity. So we're going to get into some very interesting territory where we're

00:41:21.580 promoting people on criteria and other criteria other than merit.

00:41:27.000 Wow. And then next thing you know, air traffic control, which, you know, there should be only one

00:41:32.100 skill there, and that is steady as she goes, right? You can handle yourself well under pressure. It

00:41:37.480 shouldn't have to do with skin color or gender or any lady parts. I will tell you this as a practical,

00:41:42.840 as a practical matter, the wokeism, you know, we've talked about this, but I, we pulled our kids out of

00:41:47.460 the New York city private schools because they went so hard left on the wokeism and the divisive

00:41:52.620 messaging. And I just heard an update on the boys school that we left. They're no longer referring to

00:41:56.660 the boys as boys. They're no longer calling the boy. It's an all boys school. They no longer say

00:42:01.280 your sons. They just say your child, your children, your individual. And one of the parents

00:42:07.140 recognized this, you know, they didn't announce it, but one of the parents recognized this during

00:42:11.360 like a grade wide zoom and called up one of the administrators after the fact to say, is this,

00:42:16.920 is this by design, right? Like I've, I've noticed the absence of son or boy and the guy owned it and

00:42:22.380 he claimed he inherited it from the previous, uh, head of school, which is a lie. Uh, he owned it.

00:42:26.860 They're, they're not going to call the boys boys anymore at one of the oldest and most prestigious

00:42:32.620 boys K through 12 schools in the country. Yeah. It's almost unbelievable because we all grew up

00:42:39.420 with the idea that the Chinese Maoist system or the Russian system where you had, you could no longer

00:42:45.100 call anybody, anything other than comrade. Everybody became a comrade or in the Chinese system.

00:42:51.420 When you embarrass somebody, you wore a cone and you sat in the corner where everybody laughed at you.

00:42:55.980 You were an enemy of the people. Why would we, why would we emulate these systems that are,

00:43:01.020 they're anti-liberal, they're destructive, they're nihilistic, they're anarchistic.

00:43:06.180 To be inclusive, to be inclusive, to be kind, to be non-bullying, to be right. That's the answer

00:43:11.060 you get, right? It's the mere use of the term boy is somehow offensive. Use of the term breastfeed

00:43:15.620 is offensive. Use of the term woman is now offensive. But, and then I don't want to keep being

00:43:20.600 reductionously cynical, but you get the impression that the people who are implementing these ideas

00:43:26.960 from on high are worried about their own careers. They have no knowledge of history or language or

00:43:32.560 what's good or bad. They just were told the prevailing ideological agenda is critical race

00:43:40.560 theory. I better, for my own protection or my own advancement or my own career, I better adopt it.

00:43:45.840 The only positive thing about that, Megan, is that we can defeat it. And because they have no

00:43:52.680 ideological allegiance to anything other than themselves, if you get just a scenario, if you

00:43:59.600 would get a huge change in the House in the midterms, as in 2010 or 1994 or 1938, or take back the Senate,

00:44:11.080 and there was this clear expression of these protests against school boards, that would be

00:44:16.880 the prevailing wind. Then these people would change on a dime because they would be at odds and they

00:44:22.080 would, and that's because they're cynical and they don't really believe in anything. I mean, there are

00:44:27.020 hardcore ideologues, but that's not the majority. They would have no power. They amplify their power

00:44:32.240 because they control social media, entertainment, Hollywood, K-12, academia, Wall Street,

00:44:38.600 of the media in general, but they don't have a majority support. But if we could convince people

00:44:46.560 in those institutions that it's not in your interest, if you're in the NBA, to lose all of

00:44:52.560 your American audience, or we're going to really criticize you for doing business with an autocratic 0.95

00:44:58.420 China, or we're going to take our children out of your Tony school or the public schools, or we're

00:45:04.740 going to look at homeschooling or charter school, then I think they would make the necessary

00:45:08.760 adjustments. At least the majority would. They wouldn't follow these very cynical, and they are

00:45:13.620 cynical, as we said. Patrice Quellars is cynical. Kendi is cynical. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was sort of the

00:45:20.340 architect early on about wokeism, he's making a fortune translating African-American-focused comic books

00:45:28.680 into screenplay movies. So he's a big believer in capitalism and money and upward mobility and

00:45:35.140 et cetera, et cetera. They all are. And I think people need to point that out, that the people

00:45:40.940 they're hurting are the people who are in the inner city, and they don't have access to a curriculum that

00:45:47.640 improves their grammar and their knowledge of history and inductive thinking that wouldn't allow

00:45:51.560 them to be competitive. They're almost the foot soldiers in this that are terribly used and

00:45:57.140 manipulated by the elite. Well, this is where we're going to pick it up, because I want to ask you on

00:46:01.780 the subject of, will people rise up in the midterms to push back against this? Will there be some

00:46:07.080 resounding message? It's pretty interesting that today the news is that the Attorney General Merrick

00:46:12.460 Garland has just ordered federal law enforcement authorities to confer with local leaders on how to

00:46:18.040 address harassment, intimidation, and threats against educators and school board members. Maybe they

00:46:23.500 don't like what they're seeing in these viral videos. Is it really about threats or is it about

00:46:28.340 parents just expressing their consternation? We'll get to that. We'll get to Millie. We'll get to Fauci

00:46:33.060 as we continue our talk with Victor Davis Hanson, author of the new book, The Dying Citizen. Don't go away.

00:46:44.280 So courtesy of Politico, the reporting today is that not long after, less than a week after,

00:46:50.260 the National School Boards Association pressed Joe Biden for federal assistance to review whether

00:46:55.940 violence and threats against public school officials could be considered a form of domestic

00:47:00.740 terrorism and hate crimes. We get news that our Attorney General Merrick Garland is ordering federal

00:47:07.480 law enforcement authorities to, quote, huddle with local leaders in the coming weeks to address what

00:47:12.060 the nation's top prosecutor called a recent disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation,

00:47:17.620 and threats of violence against educators and school board members. No one wants to see

00:47:21.580 threats, intimidation, or harassment of school board members. But the question is obviously,

00:47:27.800 what are they going to categorize as threatening behavior or harassing behavior? We've already had

00:47:34.160 reports of a lot of these school board meetings being made private now. You're not allowed to videotape

00:47:39.700 what happens because parents are finding a way to be heard and the school boards don't like it.

00:47:45.800 Yeah, I mean, you see these clips and the people who are asking for explanations and

00:47:52.540 clarifications, they're usually pretty polite. And they're making all these rules, as you say,

00:47:57.540 that you have to even live in the district or people are going to the extent of renting a home just so

00:48:02.160 they can speak. And, you know, look at the asymmetry, Megan, that we just talked about a left-wing

00:48:08.960 political action group that went in and broke the law and filmed a U.S. senator while she was 0.77

00:48:14.000 attending to herself in a bathroom stall and then went on a plane and harassed her at a time of 0.86

00:48:20.160 increased tensions and air travel and nobody said a word. It's this whole DOJ has been so politicized.

00:48:26.660 We see it with these, even at the local and city and municipal level, with all these DOJs that will

00:48:31.760 not follow the law. And I think the left is, once they get in control, I think people really don't

00:48:36.540 understand that this is not the Democratic Party. This is a hardcore, not even progressive,

00:48:42.320 they are hardcore leftists and they believe that any means necessary are justified by their

00:48:48.840 utopian ends and they will do almost anything. And I think Marilyn Garland is politicizing the DOJ 1.00

00:48:54.980 that's coming off a politicalization under Obama's, as we saw with everybody from Bruce Hoare

00:49:00.720 and Loretta Lynch. And so they feel it's an arm of the progressive war, that the ideological struggle

00:49:09.780 for utopia, and they're willing to use the DOJ in a non, you know, in a political fashion.

00:49:16.660 And it's like, what are these parents objecting to? The, the, the wokeification of the schools,

00:49:20.880 critical race theory and masks and mandatory vaccines and school closures. And, you know,

00:49:26.400 just the government overreach that we've seen as this pandemic wanes and the refusal to acknowledge

00:49:33.000 it. So I want to get to Fauci in one second, but let me, let me not leave. Let me not get to that

00:49:38.140 without sticking with General Milley. I do think his, his wokeification, his disastrous withdrawal

00:49:46.060 from Afghanistan, and then his testimony last week about subverting President Trump, essentially

00:49:52.120 saying I had the permission of the acting defense secretary, and I didn't do anything that wasn't

00:49:57.240 in the normal course of business. Um, and admitting that he's basically deep throat for Bob Woodward,

00:50:03.180 among other reporters at every turn. I don't know when he had time to actually come up with any plans

00:50:07.260 to get out of Afghanistan because he was dealing with the press so often, but what do you make of

00:50:11.000 General Milley and sort of the way he's emerged over the past few months?

00:50:15.040 Well, he's kind of emblematic, emblematic or iconic of all of these pathologies we talked about. And I

00:50:21.960 kind of talked about in the book. I mean, he violated the statute. Uniform Code of Military Justice

00:50:28.780 says that no high ranking officer can disparage the commander in chief. Now we've seen that

00:50:33.060 routinely broken, but when he told a journalist that Donald Trump emulated Mein Kampf, Hitlerian

00:50:40.100 tactics, he violated that. And the 1947, 53, and 2006 Goldwater-Nichols specifies in an increasingly

00:50:48.520 restricted fashion that the chairman of the Joint Chief is an advisor. He has no operational command.

00:50:55.080 So General Milley comes along and says, ha, I'm an operational officer because I'm interpreting a

00:51:01.780 conversation from the opposition leader, Nancy Pelosi, who thinks Donald Trump is dangerous.

00:51:07.500 I agree with her. So I'm going to change the operation of the nuclear chain of command as far

00:51:13.860 as nuclear weapons. I'm going to tell them the protocol has to go through me now. I'm in the

00:51:18.560 chain of, that's a violation of the statute. And then he goes back to the statute and says,

00:51:23.840 I'm not responsible for Afghanistan. I'm only the chairman of the Joint Chief. I'm not in that

00:51:28.460 operational command. And as you say, he says, the duty of the chair of the Joint Chief is to meet with

00:51:35.780 the media. And then we're supposed to equate that with getting on the record and disclosing

00:51:40.960 confidential conversations with political military leaders that favor yourself. And then remember when

00:51:49.060 he said that he had to apologize for the photo op he did with Donald Trump in June of 2020. And

00:51:56.040 Donald Trump was accused of militarizing Washington and clearing out Lafayette Square with tear gas. And

00:52:03.480 he was very political. He leaked to his supporters. I might resign. Promises, promises. But the inspector

00:52:10.840 general, the interior department found that to be absolutely false, that whole scenario. And he

00:52:16.340 didn't really object to the use of military to quell civil disturbance because he was a big supporter

00:52:22.560 putting 25,000 troops in Washington after January 6th. And they sat there and there was no threat there

00:52:28.640 and no existential threat. So I think it's time for him to go on about every, he's violated the law.

00:52:34.820 He called our existential enemy, and it is an enemy, the Communist Party's People Liberation Army, 0.54

00:52:41.320 and warned them that if he, he, he, General Milley felt that there was a problem in the United States,

00:52:49.000 in his opinion, that he would warn them of aggression. It'd be sort of like a chief of naval operations in

00:52:54.820 World War II in November calling up Admiral Yamamoto and saying, you know, Franklin Roosevelt's not as

00:53:01.720 well as everybody thinks. And we were very punitive about that embargo. And if, if, if they might want

00:53:07.700 to start a war with you, but I will call you if we think that the fleet's going to go out from Pearl

00:53:13.220 Harbor. That's ridiculous. And we're in such a crazy, surreal time that we've lost our sense of 0.98

00:53:19.280 proportion because in normal times we would say, be gone. We would say what they said to Oliver Cromwell,

00:53:24.240 we've done with you, get out. And so he should resign. He should have resigned immediately.

00:53:31.860 Just as an aside, because you mentioned the tear gas, I saw something in one of your recent pieces

00:53:35.600 that I didn't know about Beverly Hills and tear gas. Do you know what I'm, yeah. Can you tell us

00:53:42.040 about that? Well, I mean, when the woke people and the BLM and the Antifa marchers got wise and they

00:53:50.400 thought, why are we going into the working class areas and the downtown areas of Los Angeles when

00:53:56.280 the capitalist insects, as they see them are all associated in Beverly Hills, we're going to go up

00:54:01.840 there. And they were met, if you saw the pictures with a, with a tear gas and they were met with a

00:54:08.300 phalanx of shields and they didn't get very far and they didn't press it because they were also given,

00:54:15.080 you know, friendly advice that the people in Beverly Hills, some of them at least were on their

00:54:20.080 side. So that, that, that was, that was ended. If you notice something that for supposedly a ground

00:54:26.100 up revolutionary moment, they go in and attack downtown. They attack working classes. They burn 1.00

00:54:33.680 down during those 120 days of riot and looting and arson, et cetera. They burned down the working

00:54:39.960 class, but they did not go into the very wealthy, wealthy areas. And I think they knew that there

00:54:45.400 might've been a more muscular police response. And those very, very wealthy people have avenues of

00:54:51.700 exercising their influence, uh, that affected them. And so they were very selective in who they

00:54:58.220 attacked and whom they didn't. I must've missed the headline about the Beverly Hills tear gas. Cause

00:55:02.840 that's just, that's so emblematic of, of what's wrong with America right now. How the, you know,

00:55:08.520 the whatever one fake story about it and one real story about it, that gets absolutely no coverage.

00:55:12.900 Um, all right, Dr. Fauci and COVID a couple of items in COVID news today. First, it breaks today

00:55:20.160 that Louisiana is going to charge workers extra money if their spouses or domestic partners choose

00:55:26.940 to remain unvaccinated. I think the report was as much as a hundred bucks a paycheck. They're going 0.96

00:55:32.020 to withdraw extra. If your domestic partner doesn't get the vaccine because they say, you know,

00:55:37.820 we employ you. And, uh, it costs a lot to take care of an unvaccinated person who winds up in the 0.80

00:55:42.340 hospital. And therefore you're going to have to pay more. I mean, so once again, it's like,

00:55:45.940 how about if my domestic partner is obese? How about if my domestic partner is an alcoholic?

00:55:50.380 How about if they're a drug addict? You know, it's no, it's just the COVID unvaxxed,

00:55:54.780 irrespective of whether they have natural immunity and have had COVID. And on top of this, um, Dr.

00:56:00.960 Grinch, I mean, Fauci comes out, he's tried to walk it back since. Cause he got a lot of

00:56:04.680 flack for it, but he's, he told CBS over the weekend, it's too soon to say whether we're going

00:56:09.640 to be able to have Christmas gatherings. He's then he said it was misconstrued. It was like,

00:56:13.860 well, you know, you're on camera anyway, uh, that it was too soon for Christmas gatherings.

00:56:17.820 And you tell me whether he's in denial that this pandemic, thank God seems to be finally waning.

00:56:25.200 Yeah, he is because of the irony is, and there's a lot of ironies with him that he doesn't follow

00:56:30.360 the science, because if you do the math of the number of people who have been vaccinated,

00:56:35.360 it's well in the high fifties. And if you do the math of people who've had COVID, I know there's

00:56:39.900 overlap between the two groups. It's up to over a hundred million. So we're getting to that 65 to 75%

00:56:46.500 that either have antibodies or vaccinations. So the number of people becoming seriously ill has peaked,

00:56:53.360 but he's not interested in that. And I say that not emotionally, but empirically, because remember

00:56:59.320 from the very beginning, he told us that masks would not be valuable, but then one mask would,

00:57:04.860 but two masks might be better that herd amount. Immunity would kick in at 60, but maybe 70,

00:57:09.960 but maybe 80 or 90, but there was no way that this virus was engineered in a lab. It was naturally

00:57:16.420 occurring from bats or pangolin, but maybe it may not, or may be, but he would never give money to the

00:57:23.040 Wuhan lab, but he did. And he routed it through Echo Health, but it was not a gain of function.

00:57:27.940 But in fact, if you read the description of the Chinese grant, it obviously was. So he doesn't

00:57:33.000 have a lot of credibility. So what is he doing and what is the theme that we see? And I think the

00:57:38.180 biggest problem he's had before I answer that question, Megan, is that he cannot answer when he's

00:57:44.020 asked. The science now suggests that if you've had COVID, you will have a natural level of antibodies

00:57:50.560 that might offer superior protection than, than artificially from a vaccination. And therefore,

00:57:56.720 could we develop a sophisticated antibody test? So you could either choose or one or the other,

00:58:02.760 he can't answer that. He just says, well, we'll look into it. So what is, what unites all these

00:58:07.840 contradictory things? And I think he's, he's a practitioner of what the noble lie is. And that

00:58:13.820 is an elite who feels that if he tells the truth, the unwast or the uneducated will do what he doesn't

00:58:20.200 want them to. So if he says, well, you can, if you have natural immunity, don't get vaccinated

00:58:25.300 because you don't need to, then people might wait and not get vaccinated and thinking they might have

00:58:29.820 a better chance of getting, you know, less side effects from the virus. Or he might think if he

00:58:37.000 doesn't tell people that masks are valuable at first, then they won't go out and buy them. And then

00:58:44.180 the medical practitioners will have enough. He said that, but he's always changing the story to what

00:58:49.300 he thinks will be good for all of us in his particular view. And he's lost now all credibility.

00:58:56.120 He too is like Millie. He should, he should be gone. He's, he's not doing, he's not doing his job and

00:59:01.960 he's casting doubt. And he can't tell us the questions that people have that you mentioned.

00:59:08.260 They're angry. They say things like, well, I have a, is it true or is it not that somebody under 12

00:59:14.780 is either not as likely to get the virus or if they get the virus will not have serious consequences.

00:59:22.160 Or if somebody's 18 to 24 and a healthy male or the side effects, maybe swelling and cardio

00:59:29.760 swelling or something like that is about as serious as the side effects from getting the virus.

00:59:35.380 Or if you've had the virus and you get a shot, you have a higher propensity for side effects.

00:59:41.360 And if you look at his logic, it's absolutely Alice in Wonderland. He says, well, even if you've

00:59:47.940 had COVID, you've got to get the vaccination, even though the vaccination is not as phylactic as the

00:59:54.220 virus, as getting the virus. And if you take that upside down, you would say, okay, so you need two,

00:59:59.640 two sources of immunity. You need double indemnity. Okay. Dr. Fauci, everybody who's got the

01:00:05.500 vaccination, since you want double protection and we know it's not as effective as COVID, should they go

01:00:10.580 out and take the mask off and be around people so they can not only get COVID, but get the

01:00:15.580 vaccination because that's what you're saying. And it doesn't make any sense. And I think he's lost

01:00:21.200 credibility. And I think he's going to end up like Ruth Bader Ginsburg tragically did. And Robert

01:00:27.680 Mueller, remember they're both for a while, they were representatives of the, they made, they

01:00:32.640 romanticize them. They made them into icons, movie stars. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was standing against the 1.00

01:00:38.880 court. Robert Mueller was going to hold Trump to account. And then suddenly Mueller found nothing.

01:00:43.840 And they said, Oh, Bob Mueller was a joke. And then Ruth Bader Ginsburg wouldn't step off the court 1.00

01:00:48.400 and she lost the liberal slot and they got angry at her. And that's what the fickle left does. And I

01:00:52.780 think they're going to find that when Fauci is no longer useful, that he won't be St. Fauci with

01:00:57.660 bubble head dolls and cartoons and all that stuff about him.

01:01:01.600 So what's going to force states like yours, California and my former state as of a couple

01:01:05.980 weeks ago, New York and the state I'm in now, Connecticut, to, to be honest about where we

01:01:11.520 are when it comes to the pandemic, take off the masks, get rid of these mandatory masks in the

01:01:15.940 schools and heaven forbid ease up on the mandatory vaccinations and stop firing 1400 healthcare workers

01:01:23.080 in states like New York, because they won't like, what is it going to take for them to admit

01:01:28.640 that we're not back to normal because that's not realistic anymore, but that we're at the

01:01:34.440 endemic stage of this thing. And we should be able to go about our lives without government

01:01:37.860 putting its thumb on us at every turn.

01:01:40.620 I think nature is the answer and nature has a law of its own. And nature basically says that

01:01:45.840 when X number of people have some sort of immunity, they either don't get sick or they don't get

01:01:51.140 sick in a fashion that hurts them permanently. And we're getting to that point. If you look at the

01:01:56.260 statistics, I don't really look at the statistics of how many cases, but the statistics of death,

01:02:02.320 even in places where there's a high caseload, I mean, I've been vaccinated, you've been vaccinated,

01:02:07.520 but we, we may have had a case and we don't even know it. And so if we had been tested,

01:02:14.060 we thought we had a cold, then we would be a statistic of a, of a growing pandemic. But I think

01:02:18.880 we're starting to see now that the number of people who have been vaccinated and the number of people

01:02:23.880 have had COVID is reaching a point where it's starting to decline and it's starting to decline

01:02:29.660 fast. And the second thing, Megan, I think it's very important. We have forgotten medical treatments

01:02:35.180 for this virus. We put all of our psychological energy and vaccination, but Merck is coming out

01:02:41.660 with a drug that they think can limit it to one or two days of symptoms. We know from experience

01:02:46.700 that vitamin D, zinc, even some supplements may mitigate some of the symptoms that people outside

01:02:54.360 of the official channels are taking things and they're doing things, whether it's, you know,

01:03:00.560 taking a lot of zinc or vitamin D. And I won't mention that the dreaded ivermedicin or hydroxychloroquine,

01:03:05.920 but other things.

01:03:07.160 They are doing studies on ivermedicin.

01:03:08.360 Yeah. We know that monoclonal antibodies and other drugs can, can save people from dying. So

01:03:15.960 we're catching up to the, the morbidity of the, of the, and that always happens in science. And so

01:03:21.520 science is taking care of it. And I think once, once that's clear, what's going to happen is the

01:03:27.900 authoritarians are going to get desperate and get even doubled down. And the more they double down and

01:03:32.480 they're at odds with science, the more ridiculous they're going to become. They're, they're at odds with 0.95

01:03:37.180 science now. And it's very ironic because remember they told us they were the party and they were the

01:03:42.080 establishment of science.

01:03:43.960 Yeah. In so many ways. I mean, we talked about this yesterday when it comes to the trans situation,

01:03:48.100 they're very much at odds with science, but let me ask you about politics for a minute, because

01:03:52.680 now the buzz in Republican circles is who's going to be the, I know it's always off, but you know,

01:03:57.260 it's never too early to start talking presidential politics. Is it going to be Trump? Is it going to

01:04:01.280 be DeSantis? Is it going to be Pompeo? Like who is the likely standard bearer going to be on the GOP side

01:04:06.780 to take on? We have no idea on the democratic side. We genuinely, I think don't know right now

01:04:11.500 since Biden's promised to be a one-term president. And it does not appear from any single poll that

01:04:16.280 Kamala Harris has any chance of winning, uh, the presidency. So I don't know what the Democrats are

01:04:20.740 going to do, but what do you make as a, whether Trump should run again is a big question. There

01:04:25.080 was a pull out the other day saying DeSantis and he were pulling evenly. Trump said, I'll beat him

01:04:29.600 and Trump's definitely saber rattling that he's going to get back into it. Um, what are your

01:04:34.520 thoughts on whether that's a good idea? Well, I think whatever, whoever is the Republican nominee,

01:04:40.320 we're not going to go back to the Mitt Romney Republican elitist party that could not win.

01:04:47.780 And so I think there'll be the Republican party represents the upper middle, the middle and the

01:04:53.100 lower middle classes. Now it's not the rich and the poor, like the democratic party. And I do think

01:04:57.880 that getting tough with China and getting tough and legal only immigration and worrying about the

01:05:05.500 interior of the country and industrialization and manufacturing assembly, we can do that.

01:05:10.860 All of those issues and conservative justice won't go away. So the question really boils down to,

01:05:17.460 uh, we've seen Donald Trump and we haven't seen DeSantis and they seem to be the two is DeSantis

01:05:23.440 going to be as effective as he sounds like that. He has the Trump agenda without the, the downside of

01:05:31.000 the tweets and the polarization, or is he going to be sort of like governor Scott Walker, an ideal

01:05:37.240 candidate we thought, but when he got up on the debate stage, he was less than inspired. So that's

01:05:43.860 the known unknown. We don't know. And we don't know what Donald Trump will be like, not when he's,

01:05:48.980 you know, 72 or three, but when he's 78 and we don't know what he's going to be like in three

01:05:54.620 years. And we, we really applaud his agenda. But sometimes people say, you know, and I've said

01:06:00.300 that a couple of times, my criticism bore the debt. We spent way too much money under Trump. We

01:06:07.440 borrowed four or $5 trillion. And then my other criticism is that getting angry does not mean

01:06:12.960 getting even. And what I mean by that, Megan, if he had put his arm around Anthony Fauci months ago,

01:06:18.980 and said, Anthony Fauci did a lot of yeoman service for this country. He's run the Institute

01:06:26.120 of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wonderfully. And he's really given me advice, but at 80 years

01:06:31.940 old, he's deserved a well-merited retirement and he will be leaving. But instead he kept them,

01:06:37.840 but yet he, he tweeted things like, well, he does, he flows like a girl. So you combine the both,

01:06:43.060 the worst of both worlds, you insult somebody, but you don't get rid of them. And I think a lot of

01:06:47.720 people say, we want somebody that gets even, that understands what they're up against and

01:06:54.600 cools the rhetoric and talks quietly with a club and not loudly with a twig. So if there

01:07:01.020 is a criticism to be made of Donald Trump, his rhetoric was pretty tough, but he didn't always

01:07:06.240 get rid of the right people, the right, dash, wrong people quick enough. And he was buried by them.

01:07:13.040 And he didn't understand the nature of the deep state, I think, or administrative state or permanent

01:07:18.500 government. But, you know, that said, Donald Trump is chemotherapy. He attacked the cancer

01:07:26.640 effectively, but the side effects were such that we don't know whether that was always going to

01:07:32.260 happen, that to take on this stuff we've talked about today, media, corporations, foundations,

01:07:38.820 academia, that you have to be so toxic that you, you polarize people. And could Donald Trump have

01:07:45.280 been less toxic and survive the onslaught when he's still been able, can DeSantis get 50,000 people at

01:07:52.200 a rally? I don't know those answers, but I feel that there's people who want the Trump agenda,

01:07:57.320 but maybe they would like Trump to evolve into a position of senior statesman or kingmaker or

01:08:04.400 something. You really saw that very briefly in the, the, some people from the white house called me

01:08:10.200 and I said, right after the election, you're not going to change the election, but we're going to

01:08:14.740 get socialism because we have two unimpressive conservatives in Georgia and they have two

01:08:20.500 charismatic socialists and they're going to win that election. And then we're sunk. So you've got to

01:08:25.380 get Donald Trump down there and rally everybody to come out to vote. And then you've got to have him

01:08:30.140 as a senior statesman, barnstorming the country to win the house. But instead he went down there

01:08:36.320 and talked about all the grievances of the past election. And that made people lose confidence

01:08:41.340 in the election integrity in Georgia. And some didn't come out to vote. Some got turned off and

01:08:46.900 that was a needless loss. And that really put us in the dire straits of where you are today.

01:08:52.340 This is, this is why you're so brilliant. Donald Trump is chemotherapy. I haven't heard that before

01:08:56.560 that. Yes, that brings it home, right? Like you've got to have toxicity injected into the

01:09:00.880 host to fix it, but that doesn't mean there aren't going to be some very negative side effects.

01:09:05.680 Victor Davis Hanson, such a pleasure and honor as always. The new book is called The Dying

01:09:11.260 Citizen. It is out today. You've got to read it and read everything. Victor writes well worth your

01:09:15.780 time. Great to see you. Thank you for Megan, for having me on up next. I really looking forward

01:09:21.880 to this segment to wanting to talk about Carlos Watson. He came on this show. I've been on his

01:09:27.080 show. Then I find out is half of his business is all of his business a fraud. The guy who first broke

01:09:32.940 the story about subterfuge with Goldman Sachs and impersonating a YouTube executive is Ben Smith of

01:09:39.920 The New York Times. He's here next. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show. Joining me now is media

01:09:48.660 columnist for The New York Times, Ben Smith. Ben broke the story that kicked off the downfall of

01:09:53.640 Aussie media last week and of Carlos Watson, who has been a guest on this program and who we have

01:10:00.980 invited on again to explain some of the claims about deception of investors and more, though he

01:10:06.380 has not accepted our request. He actually hasn't gotten back to us at all, though he was on CNBC and

01:10:11.620 The Today Show yesterday. So he put himself out there, Ben. First of all, I mean, amazing reporting.

01:10:16.640 So I've got hats off to you because what turned out to be like a barn burner of a column turned

01:10:20.400 into the collapse of a media company, which I don't think many people saw coming. Carlos came on our

01:10:26.260 show and I repeated claims I'd read in the media about their amazing numbers at Aussie, the traffic

01:10:32.000 on the website, on his YouTube show, on his podcasts. And you you have reason to believe that

01:10:40.640 those were overstated. In addition to this out and out fraud that appears to have been committed

01:10:45.860 on Goldman Sachs, as it was considering investing 40 million dollars into Aussie just this past

01:10:52.820 February. Let's start with that big headline on what happened last February. Carlos is number two

01:10:58.400 guy, Samir Rao, who's a COO. And that's, by the way, the guy who Abby has been talking to whenever

01:11:06.420 they book me. That's the guy who contacts her, my assistant. She said she feels personally betrayed.

01:11:10.200 But tell us what he what he did. Well, what happened was, you know, Goldman Sachs, I think,

01:11:14.760 was fairly close to an investment. They'd been having great conversations and was trying to sort of

01:11:19.740 basically as part of their due diligence, talk to some partners, talk to a bunch of partners. I think

01:11:23.680 YouTube was among the last partners they were going to talk to and get on the phone with a guy

01:11:28.800 with a person that the Aussie folks tell them is a guy from YouTube. And at some point, the call is

01:11:35.180 weird. And they reach out to YouTube and the voice sounds weird. And they reach out to YouTube and say,

01:11:39.040 hey, was this we I wanted to follow up on our conversation. And the actual YouTube executive

01:11:43.940 says, you know, what conversation we never talked, which kicks off an investigation at YouTube,

01:11:51.300 which turns it over to the FBI. And, and subsequently, Carlos Watson then says, well,

01:11:57.760 it wasn't actually a YouTube executive. It was my partner, Samir Rao impersonating YouTube executive,

01:12:02.900 which he chalked up to a mental health crisis.

01:12:06.520 It's crazy. And they stood by him. So they, I never read anything more specific about what they

01:12:11.320 did with the COO, Samir Rao, for his to address this mental health issue.

01:12:15.040 He took time off, although the employees I talked to don't recall him taking time off.

01:12:18.420 I mean, has he gotten specific with you on what the mental health issue was?

01:12:23.400 Yeah, yeah, they've discussed it. They see it. They said he had a specific condition. And there

01:12:27.840 were some issues with his medication. I haven't seen any records or anything. I think that the

01:12:32.040 thing that I mean, you know, who knows? And I'm not trying to I don't I don't know. I think that

01:12:37.120 the problem with this story is just that. I mean, obviously, a lot of people struggle with

01:12:42.260 mental illness and don't commit alleged securities fraud. And and this was really was very much part

01:12:49.500 of a pattern of specifically lying about their relationship with YouTube. Yeah. Carlos had

01:12:54.260 sent an email to somebody a couple a month or two earlier that they had sold a show to YouTube,

01:12:58.040 for instance, which they had not. Was that the YouTube Originals claim?

01:13:02.400 Yeah. Yeah.

01:13:03.000 OK, so YouTube has its own has a separate section called YouTube Originals, and that's where they put

01:13:07.180 their own money behind your show and bring you over to YouTube. And Carlos had had told people that

01:13:12.040 they were going to do that for his show. And it turns out that's that's not true. He that YouTube

01:13:17.200 has gone on record with you saying there was never a YouTube original show for Carlos.

01:13:21.400 Right. And so this this deception and this phone call really was part of a broader pattern of the

01:13:26.320 company misleading people, particularly about its relationship with YouTube. And there were also

01:13:30.480 there were signs up all over the place, all over New York and L.A. that said in Chicago that said,

01:13:35.820 you know, fastest growing show on you, fastest growing talk show on YouTube. And I mean, it's

01:13:41.700 not you know, that's not an official category. There are lots of people talking on YouTube, but

01:13:45.620 there's just no reason. That's not a real number. And nobody kept attributing these these laudatory

01:13:50.920 you tell me because they kept attributing these laudatory quotes to people like, well, to publications

01:13:55.980 like The New York Times, like Variety, like whatever great publication.

01:13:59.800 And it turns out that wasn't true at all. What would happen was either organizations like yours,

01:14:06.060 The New York Times could find no evidence that quote ever appearing in your paper,

01:14:09.500 or it would be this guy Samira Rao again saying to Variety, Carlos Watson is on fire or something like

01:14:17.400 that. And they would attribute it to Variety instead of a guy who actually works at Ozzy,

01:14:20.680 who was just pumping the company. Yeah, it was pretty remarkable. I mean, the other one was

01:14:24.500 right, there were there were different ways that they also they didn't interview with Good Morning

01:14:29.380 America. And maybe this when you interviewed Carlos to where they provided a bunch of stats and the Good

01:14:33.560 Morning America host says, wow, seems like Ozzy is doing great, like sort of as a question when he's

01:14:39.240 reading the statistics that they've given him. And then sure enough, Ozzy is doing great.

01:14:44.360 This is Good Morning America. And I've never looked up to see whether my quotes were used. I certainly

01:14:49.020 hope not. But I want to go through a couple of them, Ben, because Carlos came out yesterday and in

01:14:53.280 a really bold, brash move, told CNBC and told the Today Show, I'm back. We are on Friday, you reported

01:15:01.900 they're closing the company. I mean, less than a week after your original report about the fraud and

01:15:06.080 their impersonation of the YouTube exec. Then it comes out, they're overstating their numbers when it

01:15:10.380 comes to their newsletter, when it comes to their online traffic, when it comes to their YouTube

01:15:13.860 views and so on, just to name a few of the problems. And they say we're closing. Then Monday,

01:15:19.120 he comes on NBC Properties and says, we're back open. We're back in business. This is my Lazarus

01:15:23.880 moment, reference to the figure in the Bible resurrected by Jesus. And this is my Tylenol moment.

01:15:30.200 Tylenol was brought down or suffered a major crisis in 82 and somebody put cyanide in their capsules,

01:15:35.900 but it wasn't them. It wasn't Tylenol. I'm not sure you can say this is a Tylenol moment when it's you

01:15:42.000 and your COO behind the problems. And I want to go through a couple of them because he's really

01:15:47.680 trying to downplay everything, Ben. He said, first of all, YouTube, it happened, but I wasn't there.

01:15:53.140 It's heartbreaking. It wasn't okay. Sumer did this, but it was a mental health episode and I wasn't on

01:15:58.500 the call. Okay. Then there was a guy who was Brad Bessie, who was brought in to be his executive

01:16:04.480 producer of his show. And you tell us what Brad Bessie's complaint was. So Brad was just a very

01:16:09.840 experienced TV producer, had run Entertainment Tonight. And I think he started the talk and ran

01:16:15.100 that for a bit and loved the idea of the Carlos Watson show and went to work for it and was told

01:16:20.640 we're launching on A&E next month. This is last summer. And they're all scrambling. And then finally,

01:16:26.120 it's, it's strange. It's unusual. And typically the, um, executive producer would be talking to

01:16:31.060 somebody at the network just to sort of figure out what exactly they want. And he, and Carlos and

01:16:36.320 Samir would never put him in touch with anybody from the network. So finally he reached out to a

01:16:39.480 friend at the network and said, Hey, like, look forward to getting the show on the air. And they

01:16:43.520 said, what show? And it turned out they had passed on the show months earlier. So Carlos's defense

01:16:49.800 on this yesterday, they were hiring people and particularly they were booking celebrity guests saying,

01:16:53.980 yes, come on this hot new talk show on A&E, not come on a YouTube video. We're going to post to

01:16:58.500 YouTube. Carlos had a defense to this. And they were telling advertisers other things. I have a

01:17:02.500 document where they sold a million dollar advertising campaign to the American family insurance company.

01:17:08.500 And in the document, it says that the advertisements will air on Hulu, which that show was not ever going

01:17:13.580 to be on Hulu. So it wasn't going to be on Hulu and it wasn't going to be on A&E. Uh, Carlos,

01:17:18.040 again, he did two interviews. One was with Craig Melvin over on, um, the today show. And one was with,

01:17:23.300 um, Andrew Sorkin, Becky quick, uh, over on squawk box. And this, I have to tip my hat. I have

01:17:30.800 criticized Sorkin in the past just because he's been snarky about me to be perfectly honest. Um,

01:17:36.300 but he did a great job. You know how it is, Ben. Um, he did a great job in that interview yesterday

01:17:45.540 with Carlos. I was very impressed. Um, and he, here he is asking Watson about the, um,

01:17:53.320 about the A&E claim about whether there was ever an A&E deal. Listen,

01:17:57.340 the company had represented at one point that your show was going to appear originally on A&E,

01:18:03.480 by the way, represented to me, cause I appeared on your show. And when I first got that email from

01:18:08.100 the producer, it said this show was on going to be on A&E with 95 million households.

01:18:13.400 So lots of miscommunication in that, but I want to clarify that one. Cause I think that that was

01:18:17.580 definitely one where we lost a lot of trust. We originally conceived the show with A&E and as

01:18:22.080 the summer moved on, we realized that they were on a different timetable than we were. And so we

01:18:26.560 shifted to YouTube. The executive producer that you hired believed that he was making a show for A&E

01:18:33.300 and in fact suggested on the record in the New York times this week or last week that the show that

01:18:40.040 every time he was told that he wanted to call someone at A&E, he was told effectively not to,

01:18:45.340 you know, I don't know about that, but I have to say this. Um, I made a really bad decision last

01:18:49.920 week and I didn't respond to your texts. I didn't respond to texts. Lots of other people I know.

01:18:54.940 And he went on to say this, you know, I, I, I should have not gone quiet. I should have defended

01:18:59.800 myself, but you tell me whether it's true. As he claimed yesterday, A&E's timing just didn't work for,

01:19:05.060 for them. And that's why his show never aired on A&E. No, it didn't air because they had already

01:19:11.120 said now. So once again, on his rehabilitation tour, he appears to not be, not be coming out

01:19:18.120 straight with it. Then his, then he allegedly said, uh, so claims Brad Bessie that, you know what,

01:19:22.800 it's going to be a YouTube original. The show is going to be a YouTube original and YouTube spoke

01:19:27.500 to you. They said what? Just, I mean, you know, that it wasn't a YouTube original. And honestly,

01:19:32.760 if you look at YouTube originals, they don't, they don't do news. They don't do talk shows like

01:19:35.820 that. It was not a possible path. Carlos yesterday denied that said, I didn't lie about YouTube

01:19:41.660 originals. I never claimed that it was, that it was, uh, going to be on the YouTube original.

01:19:46.040 And then Sorkin on CNBC said, I was personally told that I was told after, you know, when I said,

01:19:53.080 Hey, how come I'm not going to be on A&E? Somebody on your team told me, Oh, now it's going to be a YouTube

01:19:56.900 original. And Carlos said, well, I hope that was just a mix up. Okay. So we go from it's

01:20:00.660 heartbreaking. It's not okay about the YouTube call. Uh, you know, I'm sorry, but it's a one-off

01:20:04.620 now we're back on the, we're back on the A&E misleading and the YouTube original. Well,

01:20:08.620 I hope it was just a mix up. Then you've got, um, the newsletter they claimed. Ozzy told Axios

01:20:14.540 it had more than 20 million subscribers to its newsletters. Now it says 26 million. Can you just

01:20:19.660 put that perspective for us? Does anybody have 20, like what, what does a successful newsletter

01:20:23.360 company have in subscribers? Um, I mean, you know, for instance, morning brew, which is this

01:20:29.300 very successful sort of newsletter centric company has about 3 million, the New York times, which is

01:20:33.960 a big media organization with a big newsletter morning newsletter has about 5 million. Um, I think

01:20:40.080 they do have hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people opening that newsletter. They, um,

01:20:45.320 they also have internal correspondence where they're telling essentially telling each other,

01:20:49.060 don't allow anyone to unsubscribe. I mean, there are all sorts of actually laws around,

01:20:54.680 you can't just keep spamming people with your newsletter that they ignored. And, and they

01:20:59.160 acquired, they didn't, nobody, very few people signed up for Ozzy. I've heard from a lot, a lot

01:21:04.220 of people who said, wow, thanks for that story. It explains this random newsletter I've been getting

01:21:08.600 for years. Um, a couple, by the way, I had, I think two emails that said I, this newsletter came

01:21:14.220 out, this weird newsletter came out of nowhere, but I kind of like it. Um, there, there are

01:21:18.760 some people certainly who liked the product, but, but you know, not a lot. Like I think one thing

01:21:23.160 you'll notice on the internet now is there's not sort of a, a, you know, cadre of Ozzy heads out

01:21:29.600 there saying, how could you malign this company whose content we really love? And I think that's

01:21:33.820 kind of a tell in itself. Well, I I'm speaking for myself. I really liked Carlos. I never really

01:21:38.400 was a big Ozzy media consumer, but I liked him. And, um, it's sad. I kept my mouth shut about it for

01:21:44.680 the first week or so. Cause I just, I wasn't sure what was what, right. It's like, you don't want to

01:21:48.340 see a guy, you know, and like fall media executive going out on his own person of color, which of

01:21:53.780 course plays into this in terms of the advertisers, the investors really wanting to get behind him

01:21:57.900 and back him and see him succeed. Um, but this is not good. And the, like the facts that you continue

01:22:02.800 to report and others now too, uh, they're not good. And the newsletter he was asked about on CNBC

01:22:08.500 yesterday and, um, Sorkin said to him, Hey, you know, you're claiming he gets what? 26 million

01:22:14.340 news letter subscribers. Um, that doesn't seem real. You claim you have a 25% open rate. Like

01:22:21.920 that's the percentage of your subscribers who are actually opening, which is good. You put that in

01:22:26.180 a deck for your series D investment where you were seeking money from investors and Carlos responded to

01:22:31.800 him. Oh no, no. 25% open rate only amongst our best, most regular people. I hope that's what I was

01:22:37.720 just for our best, most regular people. And Sorkin followed up and just play the soundbite. Let me just

01:22:42.520 play the soundbite and I'll get you to respond. Sorkin followed up. Oh, this is soundbite number

01:22:46.520 12. Um, saying that's not true either. Watch. I asked you about the email opens before and I'm

01:22:52.760 looking at the deck. I'll show it to you right here. 25% email opens. Aussie email average 25%

01:22:58.900 open rate, two times, 2.5 times industry and, and, and, uh, 3% CTR. It doesn't have a star next to it

01:23:05.140 that says just the people who are actively, uh, engaged with you in some way. And, you know,

01:23:10.600 you know, I need to look at that more closely, but, but let's make sure that we do something here,

01:23:16.060 which is that I don't want, if you and I looked at any small company or any large company, we would

01:23:23.520 find a handful of things that aren't great. Just, just to be really clear, we would, we would find

01:23:28.280 him. And just because something is sloppy or stupid doesn't mean it's illegal. 0.96

01:23:32.580 Your thoughts on that, Ben? I mean, I do think that the question Andrew's asking, 0.60

01:23:36.500 which is basically, you know, is in some senses, did you commit securities fraud is going to wind

01:23:41.520 up being the central question here. Um, the, the first lawsuit hit, I think yesterday we just

01:23:46.380 reported that a, um, that a, um, uh, money manager in Los Angeles who'd invested $2 million of their

01:23:53.200 client's money sued basically saying you can, that, that they, that the failure to disclose this

01:24:00.280 incident with Goldman was itself securities fraud. You can't just go raising money for a company that

01:24:05.500 has a, you know, that has this massive skeleton in its closet and not tell potential investors

01:24:09.940 and they raised more than $30, 30 million, at least $30 million in this, this year after

01:24:15.460 the incident with Goldman. And I think you're going to see those investors try to get their money back.

01:24:20.700 And I think that's going to be, make it very hard for the company to operate going forward.

01:24:24.520 The, there were questions about the YouTube numbers, overstated traffic, um, there,

01:24:29.640 that they were paying for views. He defended that saying, you know, there's nothing misleading

01:24:35.340 about us doing that. Um, you know, lots, lots of people pump the numbers.

01:24:39.720 Like for people, for internet nerds, that's an important point. They were not fake views on

01:24:44.700 YouTube. It's the, the issue was that there was no organic fan base for the show. If you want to,

01:24:50.080 the people who were watching the Carlos Watson show were watching it because it was airing as a

01:24:53.380 pre-roll ad before the thing you were actually trying to watch. Carlos says like, those are great views.

01:24:59.500 Those are views. Those are people we paid to reach. That's how much we love our audience.

01:25:02.680 We pay to reach them. It is a unconventional, I would say, interpretation of how video works.

01:25:08.660 Yeah. I mean, they, they're claiming that they, um, I know that they were reaching millions and

01:25:13.660 millions of people and there's the, what they're, what you're reporting shows is that they'd have

01:25:19.800 a video that had 1 million views, just a small number of comments. And that's, that shows that this

01:25:26.040 is a paid boosted viewing. I will note for the record, I have never paid a dime for this company

01:25:32.560 to get a YouTube view or any sort of traffic, any place else. And if you look at, I just look by

01:25:37.200 comparison, my site, there's a video we did the other week that has 1.1 million views. It's got

01:25:42.500 8,415 comments. That's the kind of numbers you would expect to see if you have real live people

01:25:48.460 actually watching. Yeah. As opposed to like a kid on her parents' account, who's watching Peppa Pig

01:25:54.920 and suddenly there's Carlos Watson and she doesn't know how to skip it, which is often what pre-roll is.

01:26:00.800 Yeah. So he's asked about all of this yesterday. And one of the things that they asked him about,

01:26:05.260 because he had claimed on CNBC that Sharon, Sharon Osborne was an investor, Sharon and Ozzy,

01:26:10.700 who sued him because Ozzy Fest is very close to Oz Fest, something they put on. And he had said that.

01:26:19.580 And then Sharon Osborne came out yesterday and she said, oh, this guy's a liar. You know, 0.93

01:26:24.600 it's not true. We're not, you know, I've got nothing to do with him. And I want to cue this

01:26:29.180 up for you, Ben, because in an incredible twist, Carlos denied to Andrew Sorkin that he ever called

01:26:37.880 Sharon Osborne a friend. And Andrew was zeroing in on the, the dismissal, like, cause he had earlier

01:26:43.800 said, oh, and she's an investor. It turns out, well, they got in a lawsuit and she wasn't a real

01:26:49.320 investor. They gave her some shares as part of the settlement. So you can't run around saying,

01:26:52.900 oh, she's an investor. Like she gave me money. All right. So this is the point Andrew's trying

01:26:56.340 to raise with Carlos. You said she was a friend. You said she was an investor. Listen to Carlos

01:27:02.220 deny that he ever called her a friend. And then we went back to the original CNBC segment

01:27:08.600 that Sorkin was raising to show you who was telling the truth. Watch this.

01:27:14.460 Sharon Osborne, you made a comment on this program, by the way, saying that she was a friend and

01:27:20.260 investor in the company. I didn't say she was a friend. I think we can probably go back and get

01:27:24.500 the tape. You know what? Play the tape then. Please go ahead and play the tape. I don't know if we have

01:27:28.660 the tape. You know what? Cue up the tape. This is an Obama Romney moment. Cue up the tape. Show me

01:27:33.120 the tape. Ozzy's the name of our larger media company named after a great poem 200 years ago.

01:27:37.620 But fun fact, our friend Ozzy and Sharon sued us briefly. Did they? And then we decided to be

01:27:43.020 friends and now they're investors in Ozzy. It's spelled differently. Other investors know.

01:27:46.420 Now they're investors. They're part of the family. Not once, but twice he called her a friend.

01:27:51.600 He said that they are investors. He didn't disclose how they became investors.

01:27:54.580 I mean, to me, that was so indicative, Ben. It's just a pattern. It's a pattern of lying when you

01:28:01.640 don't have to, being deceptive or certainly not dealing in actual fact to try to make your company

01:28:08.060 and yourself sound and look better than you are. Yeah, I do think the central question going forward

01:28:12.480 is going to be to what extent they did that to investors, because that's where it becomes

01:28:15.900 securities fraud rather than lying on television, which is apparently not a crime.

01:28:21.600 Yeah. Um, you know, when he came on my podcast, it's now makes me sad. Um, there was an interesting

01:28:30.300 moment where I asked him about character and listen to what he said. This soundbite six.

01:28:37.400 I want to learn how you're thinking, how you came to that, what you do with that. Would you ever

01:28:42.600 consider something else? Like who moves you? And you're always going to end up being surprised,

01:28:48.300 right? Like, you know, and, and, and if you, if you stay in it and you're just with the person,

01:28:54.400 they're going to share something that reminds you that most of us are contradictions, right?

01:29:00.300 And, um, uh, what did, uh, Dr. King used to, he loved that quote that there was a famous quote that

01:29:06.240 you say, there's enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue. Right. And I think very few

01:29:12.940 of us are only one thing or the other. Hmm. It's sad. It's sad to see this happen. Um,

01:29:20.280 I will say, I want to give you the chance to respond. He's taking aim at you. He said,

01:29:23.800 Ben Smith shouldn't be allowed to report on me. He offered me $225 million for my company a few

01:29:28.120 years ago when he was running Buzzfeed. And this is all sour grapes.

01:29:32.740 He didn't actually say I offered him that much money, but it would not be true that I had offered

01:29:36.460 him money. And it's not, you know, he hasn't denied any of the things we reported. And I think that's,

01:29:40.840 it's not really, it's not really all that relevant to the story. I wasn't, I was not

01:29:45.860 privy to a deal that he was talking about with Buzzfeed around the time I was leaving.

01:29:50.460 You weren't involved in that at all.

01:29:51.940 I, I sent a two sentence email introducing him to my boss on my boss's request. That was,

01:29:57.240 that was my involvement.

01:29:58.360 I mean, the real question is whether this stuff is true, right? Even if you did have an ax to grind,

01:30:02.320 the question is.

01:30:03.140 Yeah. I mean, yeah, I don't, and I don't even understand how that's supposed to amount to some

01:30:06.160 kind of vendetta, but I, you know, I don't, he's, it's, it's, it's his right to say what he wants.

01:30:11.120 Do you, do you think they actually could come back at this point? The investors bailed,

01:30:15.700 the advertisers bailed. Is this just puffery with him out there saying we're, we're back or,

01:30:20.300 you know, we're not, you know, the question is going to be the, whether the people who

01:30:25.480 put money in after this Goldman Sachs incident are going to be able to get it back. I think if you

01:30:31.720 have a court say, sorry, you got to give all the money back and liquidate your company,

01:30:35.260 that'll make it very hard to go forward. I don't know what courts will say, but the first lawsuit

01:30:39.100 was just filed. And who's, who will be the advertisers and who would invest at this point,

01:30:45.860 seeing the pattern, listen, the, the, your reporting has been unbelievably detailed and

01:30:50.100 well-supported. And, um, you know, it is sad overall, but it's also kind of maddening. I,

01:30:55.800 I just, I don't know, Ben, maybe I'm too gullible, but I, I believed it. And, uh, I think a lot of

01:31:01.560 people believed it. He had a lot of well-known investors, a lot of well-known people go on the

01:31:04.760 shows. And, uh, I don't know, I'll give you the last word on what this story says about all of us.

01:31:09.580 Um, I think that at least for those of us in the media business, it's worth spending a little more

01:31:13.820 time, you know, just like in reality, because you run into people at the sort of highest levels of

01:31:20.120 media business who make claims about what's happening, but actually it's a public business,

01:31:24.700 like talk, you know, talk to people, you know, and if you haven't heard of something and you're a

01:31:29.380 normal person who consumes media, it's possible that it's like not as big as it says it is.

01:31:33.680 Um, it's one thing to go up here on the show. It's another to invest your money.

01:31:40.200 Yeah. And, and to your point, I mean, you've been good about pointing out 75 people are out of a job

01:31:45.700 now. It's not just the investors who have, you know, a lot of money, people like Lorraine jobs

01:31:50.260 or Steve jobs widow. It's real people who are depending on the Aussie paychecks who are now 0.76

01:31:55.500 struggling. Well, Ben Smith, always a pleasure. Thank you very much. We appreciate the update up next

01:32:01.860 folks. We're taking your calls. Love to know your thoughts on anything. Did you listen to the Carlos

01:32:04.920 Watson interview when I did it? Gosh, you remember that? Oh, I feel like such conflicting feelings

01:32:09.720 about the whole thing. Um, love to know any of your thoughts on Stossel's lawsuit on Victor Davis

01:32:15.100 Hanson, the genius, uh, on Aussie. Call me a three, three, four, four, M E G Y N eight, three,

01:32:21.260 three, three, four, four, six, three, four, nine, six.

01:32:27.400 You know, you guys were up against it, um, because we went a little long cause we packed

01:32:31.460 20 pounds of potatoes into the 10 pound bag today in the show. So we're not going to be able to

01:32:35.520 squeeze in the calls, but I just, I, you know, I have to tell you one of the things that it has

01:32:39.040 been so great about launching this show and having a direct relationship with you guys and me being the

01:32:43.400 CEO of my own media company is that everything is authentic. I mean, I, I would never, I would never do

01:32:48.520 what they did. I, he, he's describing it as smart. I would never pay for false views or fake pop-ups

01:32:54.960 or any of that nonsense. I think the relationship is authentic warts and all right. I'm not perfect.

01:33:00.060 I don't get everything right, but I try. Uh, and I think this is the future of media

01:33:04.840 developing a relationship with somebody who you trust, right. And, and severing relationships with

01:33:10.260 those you don't, uh, tomorrow we're going to pick it back up with COVID. We've got Josh Rogan of the

01:33:14.280 Washington post back. He's been doing great reporting plus Scott, Scott leave, former head of

01:33:18.460 the FDA. That'll be fun. Download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher and

01:33:22.680 watch us on youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. All views are real. See you tomorrow.

The Megyn Kelly Show - October 05, 2021

Tech Censorship, Media Malpractice, and Woke Icons, with Victor Davis Hanson, John Stossel, and Ben Smith ｜ Ep. 174

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript