The Megyn Kelly Show - September 17, 2021


The Russiagate ‘Scandal’ and Media’s Shaming of the Unvaccinated with Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 162


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Length

1 hour and 34 minutes

Words per minute

190.27817

Word count

17,906

Sentence count

1,098

Harmful content

Misogyny

29

sentences flagged

Hate speech

35

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On today's show, Megyn and Glenn discuss the latest in the ongoing saga of the Russiagate scandal, and the new indictments handed down against Michael Sussman, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer who worked for Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.480 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:11.680 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show on a Friday. Joining me today,
00:00:17.400 Glenn Greenwald, one of my very favorite people, a brilliant, brilliant journalist,
00:00:22.040 and just all-around good guy. He's the co-founder of The Intercept, author of
00:00:27.360 Securing Democracy, and a Substack journalist. We've got so much to cover from the new crisis 1.00
00:00:33.060 at our southern border, the rising two-class system in America that pins the mask against 0.80
00:00:38.160 the unmasked, updates on General Mark Milley's communications with China, and now he's speaking
00:00:43.100 out in his own defense, and incredibly new proof today that the endless Russiagate scandal was,
00:00:50.400 as we now know, a setup. But wait until you hear the evidence that's just come out. Glenn,
00:00:55.400 so good to have you here. Thanks for being here.
00:00:57.360 Always happy to be here, Megyn. I think in addition to that very generous introduction,
00:01:01.620 I also need some kind of indication that I'm a very special friend to the show,
00:01:06.320 since some of your listeners may not know that I was actually the first guest,
00:01:09.760 the debut guest, that helped launch it. I'm very proud of that, and I'm thrilled to see your success.
00:01:16.060 Thank you. We owe it all to you. Really, we should have had you on the first day of the serious
00:01:19.360 launch, but this is close enough.
00:01:20.360 All to me, maybe like 80%. You've also done a lot of work for the show, too.
00:01:25.120 Well, you know, you actually were an inspiration when I started the podcast because our conversation
00:01:29.800 was so good. It remains one of our most downloaded episodes, our very first podcast ever,
00:01:34.460 September of last year, that I was like, I am doing the right thing. This is what I want to be doing.
00:01:40.220 Long-form conversations with smart people from whom I can learn. I don't have to get up and down on the
00:01:45.120 story in two minutes. You know, it was sort of a taste of what was to come.
00:01:49.960 That's nice. Yeah, I totally agree. I think this format brings out the best in everybody.
00:01:54.320 All right. So let's talk about the news of the day, which is which begins with a guy named Michael
00:01:58.500 Sussman. This story is incredible, and I recommend that everybody read. Well, you should read Andy
00:02:03.620 McCarthy on National Review, no matter what, because he's brilliant. But especially if it involves
00:02:07.280 something legal, he's always got great insights. And he has a great piece today that walks us through
00:02:11.460 what the story is with Michael Sussman. Broad brush. Here's what's happened. We've gotten an
00:02:17.100 indictment now in the John Durham investigation. He was the special counsel appointed to look into
00:02:22.200 how the hell did Russiagate happen? How did we have, you know, all of these accusations being hurled
00:02:28.360 around and an impeachment and all of this based on a bunch of nonsense. So we have the special counsel,
00:02:33.960 John Durham, looking into it, and he has just secured a grand jury indictment. His investigation is not
00:02:39.340 over, but he had to do it because the five year statute of limitations against this one guy was
00:02:43.160 about to run this Saturday or Sunday. So he's gotten an indictment against Michael Sussman.
00:02:48.840 Who is Michael Sussman? He's a prominent cybersecurity lawyer who happened to work for Hillary Clinton's
00:02:55.260 campaign, who went into the FBI five years ago and said, basically, there's there's a problem.
00:03:04.600 There's a back channel communication based on our expertise between Trump Tower and this Russian 0.75
00:03:11.820 bank that's essentially a front for Vladimir Putin and then did not disclose to the FBI that he was
00:03:19.760 working for the Clinton campaign. He went in there, Glenn, like, I'm just a public servant. I'm just a
00:03:25.080 cybersecurity expert who sees a who sees smoke where there must be fire FBI. And he's speaking to the
00:03:31.240 general counsel, the FBI at the time with whom he had a relationship and didn't disclose any of his
00:03:36.080 campaign ties. And apparently, according to the FBI, anyway, he's denying it when asked specifically
00:03:42.260 deny that he was representing the Clinton campaign. And what Andy McCarthy's reporting shows us because
00:03:46.640 he read the whole indictment is at the same time the guy was denying his relationship with the Clinton
00:03:51.780 campaign. Glenn, he was billing his very time meeting with the FBI back to the Clinton campaign.
00:03:58.540 So it seems like they've got him dead to rights if they can prove any of this. And all of this tells
00:04:04.560 us what. So this is the second indictment that the Durham investigation has uncovered or extracted.
00:04:13.480 The first one took place in January when an FBI lawyer pled guilty to having lied to the FISA court,
00:04:20.400 submitting altered documents to the FISA court in order to persuade that court to issue warrants to allow
00:04:27.240 them to spy on Carter Page, who, as everyone might remember, was a former official of the Trump
00:04:33.060 campaign. It was somebody that Russia gators and liberal fanatics adamantly believed was about to
00:04:39.300 be in prison, that he was a Russian agent. And when the Mueller report came out, they said they couldn't
00:04:43.860 find any evidence that Carter Page ever was acting as an agent for the Kremlin. But they lied to the
00:04:49.660 FISA court. The FBI did. And Durham got a guilty plea from the FBI lawyer who actually altered
00:04:55.260 documents to convince the FISA court to let them spy. So this is the second time now that he's found
00:05:00.720 alleged criminality, not as part of the alleged Trump Russia collusion that consumed the media and
00:05:06.560 our politics for four years or more, but as part of the origins of that scandal. Who is it that created
00:05:12.480 that scandal? And how is it that it got disseminated? And so the fact that, you know, people there were so
00:05:19.040 many media frauds, Megan, as part of the Trump Russia story that I think people have forgotten them all.
00:05:24.080 But this issue about Trump supposedly having a secret server that allowed him and his organization
00:05:30.240 to communicate with this Russian bank was very consequential during the 2016 campaign,
00:05:36.380 in large part because they got one journalist, Franklin Foer, who used to be the editor-in-chief
00:05:42.040 of the New Republic at Slate now, who wrote an article ratifying it all. They got Hillary Clinton
00:05:48.820 herself to issue a statement during the campaign, tweeting it saying, this is extremely disturbing.
00:05:55.220 We know that Jake Sullivan, who at the time was with the Clinton campaign, is now Biden's national
00:05:59.300 security advisor, was deeply enmeshed in this story. And then you had all of these Russiagate
00:06:04.560 personalities on TV who profited so much from pushing this conspiracy theory, Chris Hayes and
00:06:10.120 Natasha Bertrand, who now is at CNN, all of those MSNBC people who for two years claimed 0.98
00:06:17.060 that this story was very substantial. And one of the things the indictment says, and I think it's
00:06:22.180 the reason why they're so angry at this lawyer who went to them and pushed it, was the FBI quickly
00:06:28.640 concluded that there was actually no evidence to it, that this was a very ordinary kind of internet
00:06:34.140 activity, that there was no evidence there was any communication, let alone a clandestine server
00:06:38.380 between Trump and the Russians. So the FBI learned very quickly that the story was false, but let
00:06:44.580 the media for two years treat it as though it were real. And they're now kind of trying to scapegoat
00:06:51.060 this lawyer who definitely is to blame by saying, oh, he tricked us. If he had told us the truth that
00:06:57.100 he was working for Hillary Clinton's campaign, we wouldn't have even looked at it. We would have
00:07:01.180 known it was just a political trick. But by hiding from us the fact that he was working for the Clinton
00:07:06.180 campaign and pretending he was just an ordinary citizen, we spent our time and resources chasing
00:07:10.760 it down, but quickly realized there was nothing to it. Mm hmm. This is what Rick Grinnell just said
00:07:15.560 on Fox News. He was like, he's basically thrown the hooey card on the claim by the FBI that they
00:07:21.240 didn't understand right from the get go that this guy was a Hillary Clinton campaign operative and was
00:07:27.540 not there as just Joe Good citizen. Here's Rick on Fox the other night.
00:07:32.320 I don't believe that the FBI officials were duped by an outside lawyer working with Hillary Clinton
00:07:39.960 who lied about his client inside the FBI. The Russian collusion investigation continued,
00:07:46.380 not because some lawyer lied to them about who he was working for, because the FBI leadership
00:07:53.160 knew this information was wrong. They knew it was made up. They continued the investigation because
00:07:59.760 it would help Hillary Clinton. Mm hmm. And that's what you're saying. But that doesn't really help
00:08:05.020 Michael Sussman today because you can't lie to the FBI, even if the FBI was like, this guy's probably a
00:08:10.780 liar. You can't do it. And they have a new problem to deal with, which is this investigation. Right. I
00:08:16.100 mean, John Durham, he he didn't waive any right to to pursue this claim. And so Michael Sussman is going
00:08:22.500 to have to answer for, you know, mistruths that he offered to the FBI. But it's beyond that, Glenn.
00:08:28.100 Right. Because what they allege is that this guy, Michael Sussman, was working for the Hillary Clinton
00:08:32.860 campaign and for another client and the other clients unnamed. But apparently this other client
00:08:38.440 expected to get an important government cybersecurity position in the Hillary Clinton administration.
00:08:44.240 And this guy, this unnamed guy, ran a tech company and the FBI or John Durham, I should say, his people
00:08:51.300 have spoken, I guess, with the employees of this tech corporation who say our boss made us run extensive
00:08:57.120 queries regarding Donald Trump and his campaign and their databases. And we were uncomfortable doing
00:09:03.600 this kind of spying because, you know, we knew it was wrong. But our boss is a very powerful person
00:09:10.060 and made us do it. And we went to our boss and said, you know what? The evidence is pretty weak.
00:09:14.660 This is a weak sauce. Like, as you point out, this is sort of very benign server activity that you're
00:09:21.200 trying to claim as a link to Russia. And that that executive was like, I don't care because basically
00:09:26.320 this is a political project. So this is what we have here is this tech exec who wanted a job in the
00:09:31.680 Hillary administration and Hillary campaign, the Hillary campaign lawyer, very connected with the
00:09:37.380 Clinton campaign, using privileged access to nonpublic information. This is from Andy McCarthy
00:09:43.200 now for political purposes. They concoct it into a political narrative that they know is baseless,
00:09:49.220 but they can convincingly spin it to suggest Donald Trump is in cahoots with Putin.
00:09:54.380 They simultaneously peddle it to lie to the media and the FBI. By the way, they got it placed in the
00:10:00.880 Steele dossier to the infamous Steele dossier. And the FBI opens an investigation of Donald Trump
00:10:06.980 because team Clinton, team Clinton has made it happen. It's all there, black and white.
00:10:14.680 Yeah. I mean, there's so much there. And to me, the overarching point of everything you said,
00:10:19.380 of what Andy McCarthy wrote, of what Rick Grinnell said on Fox, to me, the overarching point is that
00:10:25.440 whatever wrongdoing there was on the part of Trump related actors, most of which, if not all of which
00:10:34.920 took place, not prior to the Mueller probe, but during it, almost all of the convictions
00:10:39.160 were process crimes. If they lied to Mueller, they covered up evidence, things like that.
00:10:43.660 No one was convicted or even charged on the core allegation that launched the entire scandal and
00:10:50.260 launched the Mueller investigation, which is, did any Americans criminally conspire with the Russian
00:10:56.120 government to interfere in the 2016 election? That was the core foundational claim that the Clinton 0.55
00:11:02.740 campaign made that led to that four year scandal. And not only did Robert Mueller close his
00:11:08.340 investigation by indicting zero people, zero Americans on that central claim, he also issued
00:11:15.100 a report in which he said he couldn't find any evidence to establish any criminality with regard
00:11:19.320 to that. So what I think this is starting to show is that there was real criminality in connection with
00:11:24.980 Russiagate. And during the 2016 campaign, it just is the, the, the criminality and the corruption
00:11:31.200 was done by those who propagated the Russiagate conspiracy theory and peddled the scandal, both in
00:11:38.660 politics and law and in media and in government and not the people who they spent all that time
00:11:43.300 accusing. Let me just make a couple of quick points, um, on, on some of what you just said. So
00:11:48.260 as to Rick Grinnell's point that like, he seriously doubts that the FBI really believe that,
00:11:53.880 uh, this Clinton lawyer, David Sussman was just some average citizen, kind of like a whistleblower
00:11:58.420 on his own accord going in. Of course, that's the case. You know, David Sussman was a partner
00:12:05.540 in Perkins Coie. Is it David or Michael? I think it's Michael. Michael Sussman. Michael Sussman.
00:12:09.700 I think David. How many Sussmans are there? Okay. Michael Sussman. Keep going. Yeah. So he's a 0.99
00:12:14.060 partner in Perkins Coie, which is a huge Wall Street or Washington law firm as well. That's highly
00:12:20.980 connected to the democratic party. One of the partners in that firm is Mark Elias,
00:12:25.840 who has received a lot of social media stardom over the last four years. He was the general
00:12:30.380 counsel to the Clinton campaign, the lead lawyer in the Clinton campaign. He served in the same role
00:12:35.980 during the John Kerry campaign in 2004. So the idea that there's a partner at this law firm
00:12:41.900 that is very intertwined with the Clinton campaign and the democratic party for years and years and years,
00:12:47.080 one of the most influential in Washington, just happened to stumble on this information as a private
00:12:51.740 citizen, of course, is something that the FBI would never have believed. But I, you know, for me,
00:12:58.300 Megan, I keep getting back to the fact that what to me, this really is more than anything is a media
00:13:04.480 story. You know, when I was at the Intercept in 2016, when the story was published, we immediately,
00:13:09.620 all of us, even the kind of hardcore liberals said, this story doesn't add up at all.
00:13:14.180 There's zero evidence to justify a claim, but this incredible. And we actually published an
00:13:20.100 article by four journalists, all of whom have extensive technology tech experience and analyzing
00:13:25.260 internet data. And it essentially said the story has huge evidentiary holes in it. But MSNBC and CNN
00:13:32.160 and the Atlantic and the New Yorker and the New York Times were all off and running with it.
00:13:36.380 And it became a major part of the campaign. So we can debate the legalities of it. I mean,
00:13:42.600 it is interesting. The question of whether lying to the FBI should be a crime is something that was
00:13:47.640 debated, at least for me, during the Michael Flynn prosecution. I actually agree with Ruth Bader
00:13:54.240 Ginsburg and other longstanding liberals on the court that it shouldn't be a crime to lie to the
00:13:59.680 FBI without more conduct to it. Otherwise, the FBI can kind of lure you into becoming a criminal like
00:14:05.240 they did with General Flynn by saying, tell us about that conversation. And you should have the right
00:14:09.640 to deny to the FBI that you've done something you've actually done. But leave that debate aside.
00:14:14.740 I took that side with the Michael Flynn case. It's still my view. It's Ruth Bader Ginsburg's view.
00:14:19.580 That's not the prevailing view. The prevailing view is if you lie to the FBI, you're a criminal.
00:14:23.220 That's how they prosecuted General Flynn. They prosecuted Martha Stewart that way. 1.00
00:14:26.640 And they're now prosecuting this Hillary lawyer that way. So, you know, I still think, though, that the story is
00:14:32.500 a political and media scam, that it was the media who participated in knowingly disseminating a story
00:14:39.200 that had no basis in evidence from the start because they thought that it could manipulate
00:14:43.900 the outcome of the election in Hillary Clinton's favor.
00:14:47.600 Mm hmm. Yes. No, I agree with you. So and I don't even think that that the Durham investigation
00:14:52.900 is all that interested in Michael Sussman. They had to pull the trigger on this because the statute of
00:14:56.700 limitations was about to expire. But I think he much would have preferred to come out with a full
00:15:01.260 kit and caboodle when he's done and say this is these are all the wrongdoers and this is how they
00:15:05.460 concocted this narrative. But what's interesting about this case is that the indictment tells the
00:15:09.640 story. You know, for for the first time, I think we get in great detail where John Durham's going,
00:15:14.800 what evidence he's found. And you have it exactly right. This is going to be a sweeping indictment
00:15:20.120 used not in the criminal sense, but possibly of the Hillary Clinton campaign and how she and her media
00:15:25.540 and legal operatives unleashed this entire false narrative on all of us. And the media desperate
00:15:33.680 to bring down Trump ran with it, completely checked their skepticism, their willingness,
00:15:39.400 their their responsibility to investigate and went with any story from the Steele dossier to all of this
00:15:45.760 nonsense without bothering to check because it was too good.
00:15:49.900 Yeah, I mean, that to me is the one of the principal scandals of the Trump years in the
00:15:57.620 Trump era is what happened to American journalism. I've always been a critic of colleagues in the
00:16:03.080 media. I've always had different views about how journalism should be done than a lot of people in
00:16:07.600 kind of the corporate world of media companies. But my views of them radically changed as a result of
00:16:15.960 their conduct during primarily the Russiagate scandal when I saw their willingness to, and this
00:16:23.300 isn't an exaggeration, relinquish and sacrifice every pre-step of journalistic ethics and limitations
00:16:30.700 on what we're supposed to do as reporters in this monomaniacal pursuit to first help Hillary Clinton win
00:16:36.700 and then when she didn't to destroy Donald Trump's presidency. And it really is true, Megan. And I saw it
00:16:42.760 from the inside. I saw it from reporting on this story for four years at the to the exclusion of almost every
00:16:48.660 other that it wasn't just recklessness that they just weren't careful enough and how they were vetting this
00:16:54.160 information. Anytime the CIA or the FBI or Adam Schiff or other Democrats on the committee on the House
00:17:01.200 Committee or the Senate Committee investigating Russiagate leaked to them information that was
00:17:05.420 incriminating about Donald Trump, they would instantly publish it without caring whether it was true or false.
00:17:11.820 It wasn't that, oh, they looked and they didn't do such a good job. It was they didn't care. They
00:17:17.400 wanted information in their hands, in part because it served their political interests, but in part it
00:17:23.000 also served their pecuniary interests. You know, I know you've talked about this before. In 2015,
00:17:28.940 MSNBC and CNN both were on the brink of collapse. Nobody was watching their shows. The New York Times was
00:17:35.860 having serious financial difficulty. Trump in general, but Russiagate in particular, was a huge
00:17:42.600 boon to their to the whole media industry. People, you know, were not just watching cable news at record
00:17:50.200 rates for years because of their fears of Vladimir Putin and his relationship with Donald Trump and this
00:17:54.780 conspiracy theory that he had taken over our country through blackmail, through the Steele dossier and the
00:17:59.920 Blake. They were buying books and making many, many people rich who were peddling these conspiracy
00:18:05.340 theories. The people who wrote it most, like Natasha Bertrand and others, got promoted. She started a
00:18:11.540 business insider, then moved to the Atlantic. Now is at CNN on television. It was great for all of their
00:18:16.740 careers. It was great for the industry. And it also served their political interests of destroying
00:18:20.200 Donald Trump at the expense of all of our politics. Our politics was swallowed up by this fake scandal,
00:18:26.340 hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars spent chasing a non-existent scandal. And they were
00:18:33.200 lying and disseminating knowing lies the entire time, both the political circles of the Clinton
00:18:37.960 campaign and their allies in the security state and their media partners. And that to me is the huge
00:18:45.160 scandal. The the lies told by the media over and over, democracy dies in darkness, Washington Post.
00:18:51.600 OK, I look forward to their front page article about what what we've just learned and what we've been
00:18:55.840 learning about the John Durham report and where it's going. But look at look at MSNBC. You mentioned
00:19:01.060 Chris Hayes. Rachel Maddow has never backed off of that. She was as deep into all this nonsense as
00:19:07.140 anyone. There was a report report. She was just renegotiating her deal with MSNBC. They reportedly were
00:19:12.260 trying to get her to stay for thirty five million dollars a year. That's what that kind of lying gets
00:19:18.260 you. Thirty five million dollars a year at the NBC empire. OK, there's no accountability. There's no
00:19:24.700 disincentive to keep doing it. And people who watch her think that she's the most credible
00:19:30.020 person in news. You know, there's I would say there's four journalists who were most responsible
00:19:37.160 for this Trump Alpha Bank story, which the indictment itself. And remember, this indictment
00:19:42.560 was issued by John Durham, who's a longtime respected prosecutor, but with the approval of
00:19:47.480 Merrick Garland, Biden's attorney general. So there's zero partisanship going on in the
00:19:52.020 German investigation, at least so far as we know. But certainly Merrick Garland approved this
00:19:58.300 indictment. And this indictment says that this story was fake and that the FBI concluded early
00:20:02.560 on that it was fake. The reporters most responsible for pushing it, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Natasha
00:20:08.640 Bertrand and Frank Fowler, not one of them, not one, has even acknowledged this indictment or
00:20:15.600 mentioned it, let alone held themselves accountable for what they did in light of these new facts.
00:20:21.040 Why? Because they know their jobs don't require that. They know that their viewers don't care
00:20:26.720 if they tell lies as long as those lies serve the right political side. That is the warped incentive
00:20:33.220 scheme that has been created. I mean, you know, look, I was close friends with Rachel Maddow for a
00:20:39.480 long time. I used to go on her show all the time. She's an extremely smart journalist, an extremely
00:20:44.120 smart human being. But over the last five years, she became probably the single most partisan
00:20:51.060 loyalist on television, even more than some of the people on Fox who I would put into that same
00:20:56.360 category, willing to say or do anything as long as it advanced the cause of undermining Donald Trump.
00:21:02.540 And as a result, she made one falsehood after the next, peddled one insane conspiracy after the next, 1.00
00:21:08.980 theory after the next. You could watch her virtually crying on TV, talking about how Vladimir Putin is
00:21:13.460 going to cut off all the heat to people in North Dakota. I mean, crazy, crazy stuff that got debunked
00:21:20.880 over and over. She was the prime champion of the Steele dossier that has been now wildly discredited.
00:21:25.540 And as you say, not only didn't she suffer any repercussions, she got richly rewarded. And that
00:21:31.280 was the incentive scheme that has now been created, which is if you lie on behalf of American liberalism,
00:21:37.180 that is the way to succeed and thrive in journalism. And that's what's so deeply concerning.
00:21:41.040 Right. That's the thing. I don't even know that. I was going to say she was used. She was used by 1.00
00:21:45.520 them. But I think that's too generous to her. I think she was on the inner circle. She she
00:21:50.380 understood. I don't think she was duped. I think she understood that there was very good reason
00:21:55.540 to doubt all of this. But she's so agenda driven and perhaps driven to line her own wallet that she
00:22:01.980 didn't care. Yeah. You know, it's always hard to know other people's motives. Right. I mean,
00:22:07.300 it's hard to know our own. But sometimes it could just be that you become such a fanatic,
00:22:12.820 right? You become so fanatical and convinced that your cause is just that you lose willingly
00:22:20.300 any moral constraints on what you do. You just tell yourself, I never need to pull back and ask
00:22:26.380 whether what I'm doing is right or whether what I'm saying is true. Because what I know foundationally
00:22:32.080 is that my cause is so just I'm such a deeply good person that anything I do is justified kind
00:22:38.420 of a means justify and then justify the means mentality. And I think that was at least part of
00:22:43.780 of what her and so many other people in media ended up getting swept up. And some of them are just
00:22:49.320 dumb. Some of them are just kind of susceptible to group thing because they don't have very good
00:22:52.940 critical faculties. Yeah. A lot of them are. And they're kind of worse. Yeah. All right. Now I have
00:22:59.160 to take this opportunity to give my husband, one of my husband's books, a shameless plug. He's he's
00:23:04.060 an author. His name is Doug Brunt. And he wrote a book called The Means, as in the means justify the
00:23:08.400 ends. And it's about politics and media and how party people within both of those groups too often
00:23:14.660 have that very mentality. And it's a great novel that sort of takes you in depth on a presidential
00:23:19.360 campaign. Anyway, it was a bestseller. You'll love it. All right. I am joined by one of my favorite
00:23:23.820 people, Glenn Greenwald. We're going to pick it up with him after the break on a couple of things.
00:23:27.000 Mark Milley now speaking out in his defense. We'll tell you what he's saying. And we're going to dive
00:23:31.300 into immigration because a new crisis has sprung up along our southern border, a surge of 10,000 people
00:23:37.260 under a bridge right now. It's a humanitarian crisis. What is the Biden administration doing
00:23:41.540 about it? Plus, Don Lemon is now calling for the shaming and shunning of some Americans. We'll get into
00:23:48.240 that. Stay tuned. Welcome back, everyone, to The Megyn Kelly Show, joined today by Glenn Greenwald,
00:24:00.060 Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. I want to turn out of the southern border. 10,000 immigrants have 1.00
00:24:05.820 arrived in Del Rio, Texas over the last few days. And the FAA has implemented a two week temporary
00:24:12.580 flight restriction over the area. So no news drones can get proper footage right now of this unfolding
00:24:19.480 crisis. Glenn's got some thoughts on that and says everyone who cares about journalism should be
00:24:24.620 demanding an explanation. And yet they're not. So let's just frame up the crisis before we get to the
00:24:31.080 the the ban on the airspace. Glenn, already we've got illegal crossings at a 20 year high,
00:24:37.540 21 plus year high. Thousands of Haitian immigrants that are down there right now. They cross the Rio
00:24:42.740 Grande. They're sleeping outdoors under a bridge in South Texas. It's being described as a humanitarian
00:24:47.560 emergency. Customs and Border Patrol is saying this is unprecedented, an unprecedented logistical
00:24:53.620 challenge. They don't they take they don't know what to do. How are they going to take care of all
00:24:57.100 these people? There's like a bunch of port-a-johns. That's about all they have. They have no running
00:25:00.100 water. They got nothing. This in the midst of a time in which in July we had 200,000 people
00:25:06.380 apprehended at the border. That was a record in August. We had another 200,000 people apprehended
00:25:11.420 at the border and only half of those were returned to Mexico. So that's a net of just 200,000 people
00:25:18.560 coming into the United States. And, you know, sure, I'm sure they're being processed right now.
00:25:24.040 In reality, what happens is they say they want asylum. We say, OK, show up for a court proceeding
00:25:28.980 and only 15 percent ever get asylum. And then they're released back out into the United States.
00:25:32.620 So the system is completely messed up from the get go. But this is happening because they believe
00:25:38.720 Biden's going to give them a pass, that they're going to be able to stay in the United States.
00:25:42.020 This is their one chance. Now they're here. We don't know what to do.
00:25:44.940 Yeah. I mean, you know, there is an element of truth to the argument that in a lot of these
00:25:50.620 countries like Guatemala and El Salvador and Nicaragua, the United States has been interfering
00:25:56.480 in those countries for a long time, often fueling civil wars and over engineering coups. And that
00:26:02.840 a lot of the suffering that these people confront in these countries can be attributed to the fact
00:26:07.360 that our own government has been a cause, not the only cause, but a cause of instability in that
00:26:14.000 region based on the Mondo Roe doctrine that we control out in America. So you can make the argument 0.73
00:26:18.640 that we have some responsibility to the people in these countries. Like, you know, like a lot of people
00:26:22.880 believe we have responsibilities to certain people in Afghanistan after having been there for 20 years,
00:26:27.720 who we made promises to after destabilizing their country and the like. So that's an argument that
00:26:32.080 I think we can debate about what is our responsibility? Should we be helping those countries? How do we
00:26:36.260 help them? The problem is, is that this issue of immigration was probably the single most politicized
00:26:42.640 one during the Trump years. Whenever I would try and get answers from people, what is it that Donald
00:26:47.160 Trump has done that is so morally evil that justify these comparisons to like Adolf Hitler that make
00:26:53.280 him the worst president in the world in your view, things that you said about George Bush, but now
00:26:56.920 you like Bush and say that about Trump, they would instantly say his cruelty in terms of his treatment
00:27:02.720 at immigrants. And so Biden made this a big campaign issue, started the Democrats saying,
00:27:06.720 we need to welcome these people. We need to be more humane to these people. And they heard that
00:27:11.000 message as you should come. If you come, we will welcome you. And you don't need to debate that.
00:27:16.960 That's what they say. And so the Democrats extracted a huge amount of political capital
00:27:21.800 and political gain, manipulating the emotions of these immigrants who are fleeing for a lot
00:27:26.880 of times very good reasons. Their country is drowning in crime and joblessness and all
00:27:32.980 other kinds of problems. They're not evil people for wanting to leave. But the Biden administration
00:27:36.900 played with their emotions by encouraging them to come, but then doing absolutely nothing to
00:27:42.980 process them and hoping. And it turned out that it would be the case that the media would
00:27:46.800 lose interest in everything that's happening at the border now that Donald Trump is no longer
00:27:51.060 president. That's exactly right. And she, Kamala Harris, was basically saying, OK, I'll do it.
00:27:56.240 I'll be the person who takes care of the root causes of corruption down in Latin America. And 1.00
00:28:01.640 forgive me for not remembering whether it was Guatemala or Ecuador, but she was like,
00:28:05.460 I'll speak truth to power. I will hold you accountable. And the president was like, it was not
00:28:13.060 me. I'm good. And then all this corruption started to unfold around him. All these stories started
00:28:17.480 coming out about his corruption. She was like, I do not hear a thing. I don't know. Never mind
00:28:22.120 all that stuff I said. So we're not holding anybody accountable for anything. We're not addressing root
00:28:27.000 causes and we're not addressing acute results right here at our southern border. It's basically Greg Abbott
00:28:32.900 who's going to have to deal with this by himself. You know, it's so interesting is the
00:28:36.880 politics, the way the politics have changed around immigration is so fascinating to me.
00:28:41.080 When I, you know, I first started writing about politics in 2005. That was when I kind of
00:28:45.480 transitioned out of being a lawyer into being a journalist. And back then, the idea of what they
00:28:51.240 called comprehensive immigration reform was being championed by George Bush and Dick Cheney.
00:28:55.960 And it was viewed as kind of a pot by the Chamber of Commerce and big business and,
00:29:01.180 you know, international capital to flood various markets with cheap labor in order to undercut
00:29:09.160 unions and undercut the American worker because people who are pro-business wanted a huge flood of
00:29:15.980 immigrants because they wanted the labor market to be as saturated as possible so that wages would 1.00
00:29:20.340 decline. And people on the left, like Bernie Sanders and labor unions, were famously
00:29:25.920 anti-immigrant as were a lot of civil rights groups on the grounds that the people who are going to 0.83
00:29:31.780 suffer most from this uncontrolled immigration were likely to be African-Americans, American citizens who
00:29:37.720 are black who are going to lose their jobs as a result of this glut of immigrants. And now it's virtually 1.00
00:29:43.560 unmentionable, taboo on the left, to even raise the question of whether it's fair to American workers,
00:29:51.400 the people that the left is supposed to represent, or fair to these immigrants to have this huge flow 1.00
00:29:57.800 of thousands and tens of thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of people coming from the
00:30:02.400 region in which I live, South America and Central America, that the United States is absolutely
00:30:06.440 completely ill-equipped to handle. And you see a humanitarian crisis, but also the more that enter,
00:30:11.620 the more the American worker is harmed. And the politics have changed so dramatically that if you're a
00:30:17.120 Democrat, if you're a liberal, even if you're on the left, you have to see it through like an identity
00:30:21.420 prism, that either you're a racist or you're in favor of uncontrolled immigration. And I think that's
00:30:26.860 really distorted the debate. All right, stand by, because we're going to be right back with Glenn
00:30:31.220 Greenwald in one second.
00:30:39.700 Welcome back, everyone, to The Megyn Kelly Show. I'm joined now by Substack journalist Glenn Greenwald,
00:30:44.480 and we're going to dive into General Mark Milley, because in recent days, this guy's been in some
00:30:49.500 hot water over revealed communications with his Chinese counterparts. And Glenn, he is coming out
00:30:55.440 today and defending himself. This is, and keep in mind, this comes from a new book that's coming out
00:31:00.140 from Bob Woodward and Bob Costa. No more Woodward and Bernstein, now it's Woodward and Costa. And so we
00:31:06.400 haven't seen, I haven't confirmed any of this stuff. No one has, but this is what they report, that
00:31:10.880 Milley basically subverted the chain of command and conspired with the Chinese to let them know that 0.94
00:31:18.440 if Donald Trump launched a nuclear attack or some other attack in his waning days in office, that
00:31:23.280 Milley was in charge and he'd make sure it didn't happen. And that he looked at all of his top
00:31:29.180 generals and said, you understand, procedure runs through me if Donald Trump gives such an order.
00:31:34.580 Milley comes out today and says,
00:31:36.040 I think it's best that I reserve my comments on the record until I do that in front of the
00:31:40.620 lawmakers who have the lawful responsibility to oversee the U.S. military. I will go into any
00:31:45.100 level of detail that Congress wants to in a couple of weeks because he's supposed to be speaking to
00:31:49.680 them. But apparently he's saying that he believes his behavior was perfectly within the duties and
00:31:54.620 responsibilities of his job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, saying that these calls are routine
00:32:01.100 and we're done to reassure both allies and adversaries in this case in order to ensure
00:32:06.720 strategic stability. Seems like just another way of saying I did it, but I had a good reason to do
00:32:12.680 it. Your thoughts?
00:32:14.340 This was, I think, a really underrated dynamic in the Trump years, which is right from the beginning,
00:32:20.740 there were all kinds of reports about the CIA purposely undermining Trump. They would celebrate
00:32:27.540 it. In the media, they would say the CIA has decided that there's certain classified information
00:32:33.280 they don't trust Trump to have because they're afraid he'll pass it to Russia or handle it
00:32:38.560 irresponsibly. There were stories about Trump ordering troops to be removed from Syria and
00:32:44.200 Pentagon officials and CIA officials deceived him into believing they had when, in fact, they just
00:32:49.160 kind of moved them around, believing that it was a bad choice and their decision making was
00:32:53.360 better. And so there was always this, you know, fine line that the media had to walk between
00:32:59.700 cheering these generals, you know, like John Kelly, who was the chief of staff of President Trump and
00:33:05.860 General Mattis and H.R. McMaster, who was an national security advisor, heralding them for saying
00:33:11.920 these are the people who are going to save us from Trump. And then on the other hand, saying, oh,
00:33:16.860 there's no such thing as a deep state in the United States. Only crazy conspiracy theorists
00:33:22.620 believe that when the whole idea of a deep state, which comes from decades of foreign policy scholarship,
00:33:29.360 is that if you have a democracy on the surface, but in back of it, have this kind of permanent
00:33:35.820 military and intelligence apparatus that acts as a backdrop or a safeguard against a president who was
00:33:43.280 elected doing bad things, that's what a deep state is. It's something there that will override the will
00:33:49.060 of the elected leader by exercising their own judgment about what's best for the democracy.
00:33:54.300 This is what happened repeatedly. And this seems to me to be to be what happened here, which is
00:33:58.320 this was not a case where General Milley called a concerned adversary or other country worried about
00:34:05.380 something to reassure him. He was calling the Chinese to essentially tell them that he would go behind 0.98
00:34:11.820 Trump's back if Trump was doing anything that he thought was too threatened to the Chinese and
00:34:16.960 would tell them about it without permission and would act to stop Trump. That is an extraordinary
00:34:23.360 thing to do because it's to take away some civilian control of our government and hand it to the 0.92
00:34:28.780 military. Yep. And now you've got it's I think it's 26 Republican representatives, a retired general
00:34:36.340 calling for a military treason probe of General Milley saying, look, this is blatant disregard of
00:34:42.260 civilian control. He gave aid and comfort to America's principal adversary, the Chinese Communist 0.99
00:34:46.940 Party. His pledge to China is nothing less than outright treason, they say, to conspire with a
00:34:51.620 communist, malfeasant, hostile and genocidal government about our intentions or lack thereof with utter 0.59
00:34:57.800 disregard to the implications of said promise on our national security or our service members. It's
00:35:02.680 nothing short of craving at best and treasonous. I mean, that's the thing that I can't get past,
00:35:06.000 Glenn. If Milley did this, it's telegraphing so much to the Chinese, right? It's basically saying,
00:35:12.760 I got a guy in the Oval Office who's a nutcase, who in his waning days in office might launch a
00:35:17.660 nuclear attack on you. Now, maybe Milley's counterpart over in China was grateful for the 0.98
00:35:23.040 information, but who the hell knows what the Chinese would have done with that information? Who 0.50
00:35:26.360 knows whether they would have had plans to grab some of our guys so that if they were in a hostage
00:35:30.060 situation or wanted to create one to sort of hold over our heads or if they scrambled some sort of jets
00:35:34.620 or if they moved some aircraft carrier? I have no idea what the Chinese did, but you can make a good 0.99
00:35:39.880 argument that we were less safe after Milley's phone call to his Chinese counterpart than we were
00:35:45.220 beforehand. And I do feel like this guy, he might not only need to lose his job, he might wind up in
00:35:50.900 cuffs. Look, I mean, beyond all that, like, do you trust Mark Milley more than Donald Trump, which is
00:35:57.200 the debate that they want to have? Because they know a lot of people view Donald Trump as this kind of
00:36:01.940 maniacal figure, especially after he lost the election and was mentally decomposing or whatever
00:36:07.900 they claim. There's the founders in drafting the Constitution foresaw the possibility that the
00:36:14.960 elected president would become mentally imbalanced or unstable or otherwise incapable to exercise the
00:36:20.720 duties of his office. And there's a provision in the Constitution about how you handle that.
00:36:26.420 The 25th Amendment, which is the cabinet can initiate those proceedings, the Congress can,
00:36:31.020 you can remove or temporarily suspend a president if they're actually, you know, kind of crazy in the
00:36:37.080 way that Mark Milley was suggesting to the Chinese Trump had become. He didn't do any of that. He bypassed
00:36:42.280 all of those constitutional processes, those democratic safeguards to basically seize control of the levers of
00:36:49.240 power on his own, even though nobody elected him. And so, you know, I've been trying to think of an
00:36:55.120 analogy to convince people who hate Trump to find this alarming. So, you know, you can imagine, say,
00:37:00.660 in 2011, when Obama and the Obama administration really wanted to get involved in the NATO war in
00:37:06.880 Libya to take Gaddafi out. Obama didn't really want to, but Hillary Clinton did and Susan Rice did and
00:37:12.760 Samantha Power did and convinced him along with the French and the British to do it. And there was a big
00:37:16.800 debate at the time. And the Republicans who controlled the House actually voted against authorizing
00:37:22.260 that war and Obama ignored that and went ahead with with bombing Libya anyway. And to this very day,
00:37:27.660 Libya is a huge mess as a result. Imagine if a right wing general inside the Pentagon had called
00:37:33.420 Gaddafi during that debate and said, hey, I just want you to know that anything Obama's planning with
00:37:40.140 this war that I'm against that I think is crazy and will unleash a huge crisis. And in that area and
00:37:45.660 in Europe, I'm going to tell you about in advance. You'll never be taken by surprise by anything that
00:37:50.660 we do. And I also give you my word that I'm going to do everything to stop Obama from executing this
00:37:58.080 war, even though he is my commander in chief and under the Constitution, I'm duty bound to follow
00:38:02.300 his orders. That would be treason, clearly calling an enemy of the United States with whom we were at
00:38:07.340 war and vowing to give them inside classified information and to subvert the president in order
00:38:13.540 to protect that country. That's exactly what General Milley did here. So whether it's illegal or not
00:38:19.420 is something that I don't want to rely on Bob Woodward and Bob Costa's book in order to conclude,
00:38:23.840 I'd like to see a process that investigates that and surfaces the evidence. But politically,
00:38:29.260 it seems extremely dangerous, not just that it happened, but that so many people seem comfortable
00:38:35.180 with it. Mm hmm. Yeah, I was talking about this with Michael Smirconish on his show on SiriusXM
00:38:40.840 earlier today. And he was saying, and I agree with him, Milley probably is the source. Milley's
00:38:46.380 probably Woodward's source. Milley wanted to make himself look good. Milley thought an adoring
00:38:50.560 liberal base would think this is amazing that, you know, he was the stalwart. He was the he was
00:38:55.020 the barbarian at the gate, right, to prevent the the evil Trump from doing something awful.
00:39:00.340 And I think, you know, I'm I'm hoping that cooler heads who can put their politics to the side will
00:39:06.060 prevail and say, prevent protecting us from the duly elected commander in chief is not your job. And in
00:39:13.220 fact, it may have been treasonous. And it's absolutely grounds for you to be removed.
00:39:18.380 But what's happening, Glenn, is a collective yawn right from Biden on down. And and in fact,
00:39:26.240 that letter I was referencing from the Republicans says the corporate media is reporting the story,
00:39:31.600 quote, as if America were rendered a great service by General Milley. By the way, that's what Milley's
00:39:36.620 been counting on, I believe, if he's the source. And we just took a quick look. Here's I mean,
00:39:41.740 CNN analyst Mark Hurtling said what Milley did was ensure the guard where the guard rails were in
00:39:47.260 place. I give him high marks for this based on what's described in that book. MSNBC analyst,
00:39:52.180 retired General Barry McCaffrey. It's part of the deterrence of unwanted combat. It says,
00:39:57.360 I think we ought to be fortunate. We got this Princeton grad tremendous combat officer,
00:40:02.580 extremely intelligent, law based, trying to safeguard the transition to a duly elected
00:40:07.360 President Biden administration. That's where the media is going with this. It's dangerous on many
00:40:12.660 levels. It's despicable. These are the same people who spent four years screaming about democratic norms
00:40:21.080 and about the threat to the constitutional order that the Trump administration poses. And yet here they
00:40:29.140 are explicitly, not implicitly, explicitly advocating that the person who, whether you like him or not,
00:40:36.980 is the person who is duly elected by the American people in a free and fair election in 2016 to be their
00:40:42.240 president, in their view, has such poor judgment and is intellectually inferior to people like Mark Milley,
00:40:48.740 who went to wherever, Princeton or whatever, and who studies the sacred text of white rage and white
00:40:54.680 fragility, that it is legitimate and even desirable to clandestinely transfer power from the person the
00:41:03.460 American people erroneously elected and instead put it in the hands of somebody who's the guardian of the 0.99
00:41:09.660 republic who nobody elected. That, Megan, this is, you know, it's kind of like the thing that ties
00:41:14.660 together everything we've discussed since we started today, which is the reality is, is that the liberal
00:41:21.600 sector of the United States, led by the vast majority of the corporate media, which identifies with
00:41:27.640 American liberalism and serves its agenda now, genuinely believes that Donald Trump and the
00:41:34.240 Trump movement are inferior to them intellectually and morally and are a grave threat to the United
00:41:40.260 States. And therefore, anything they do, anything they do in the name of stopping him, whether it's
00:41:46.520 disseminating lies, whether it's deceiving this FBI, whether it's, you know, consuming our country in a
00:41:52.160 fake scandal for four years, whether it's allowing generals to subvert and ignore presidential orders,
00:41:58.280 they believe it's all justified because they're battling against a group of people, half the
00:42:03.700 country that they regard as their inferiors. And that is the spirit that's animating what they're
00:42:08.840 saying. And who knows whether General Milley might have thought, you know, we got the 25th Amendment.
00:42:14.120 Maybe I should do something with that if he saw Trump decompensating. Right. I have no idea what went
00:42:18.940 through his head. But that really wasn't an available option to him, if that's what he in fact felt,
00:42:25.000 because that card had been played so many times, just like the impeachment card had been played so
00:42:32.460 many times to have actually rendered something like impeachment, kind of a shoulder shrug yawn
00:42:38.800 situation, like another impeachment. OK, this is what they do now. But you couldn't you can't do 25th
00:42:44.460 Amendment now because they said that from almost day one of Trump's presidency.
00:42:49.260 They completely burned all of their credibility with the public justifiably. You know, I think
00:42:55.200 there's a good analogy to that, which is there really is racism in the world and there really
00:43:00.780 is misogyny in the world. And there really is homophobia and transphobia and anti-Semitism in
00:43:05.820 the world. But if you get to the point where you exploit those concepts and weaponize them cynically
00:43:12.140 over and over for political advantage by just calling any one of your political adversaries a white
00:43:17.260 supremacist or accusing reporters who are reporting on you of being misogynistic the way that Jennifer
00:43:22.940 Rubin of The Washington Post did today because Politico was going to report on her, or if you accuse
00:43:28.320 anyone who questions or criticizes the Israeli government of anti-Semitism, you drain those
00:43:32.580 concepts of all their meaning. It no longer stings because people come to believe that that just
00:43:38.400 gets tossed around and that when it does, it no longer is meaningful. They trivialize those concepts.
00:43:43.100 That is absolutely what has happened, that what happened with these constitutional safeguards
00:43:48.240 like impeachment, they trivialized it and toyed with it and played with it for so long. They
00:43:52.340 impeached them twice over trivialities. And as you say, they constantly talked about using the 25th
00:43:58.660 amendment against him to sow doubts in the public mind about his mental stability that maybe we don't
00:44:03.960 know. We weren't there. Maybe the way that Trump handled his election defeat was so kind of
00:44:10.940 unhinged that it got to the point where there were questions about his mental stability in the 25th
00:44:16.080 amendment might've been a viable process. I don't know. But as you say, we don't know it wasn't an
00:44:21.000 option because they burned their credibility to do that. You know what? It's if Trump really was
00:44:27.180 having mental faculty decline in a meaningful way at that time or thereafter, I would like to know
00:44:32.200 it would be relevant to the media, be relevant to the country as he might run again. But none of that
00:44:36.460 will ever be taken seriously. Now, none of the, none of that will be, it'll all be seen as a
00:44:40.040 political move against him. Thanks to things like this. And just for the record, the notion that
00:44:44.400 Trump was going to unleash war against China in his last few days in office, this, this president was
00:44:49.800 going to do that. It makes no sense, Glenn. So one does have to wonder what the hell was Millie doing?
00:44:54.200 Like, why would he have been doing such a thing?
00:44:57.160 You know, it makes so little sense for so many reasons, including the fact that the charge against
00:45:02.480 Trump was that he was always too soft on China, that he wasn't sufficiently confrontational with
00:45:07.900 them at the start of the COVID pandemic, that he seemed to like the leaders of China or respected
00:45:13.960 them in that Trumpian way for being strong and tough. But he also prided himself on the fact that
00:45:19.540 he was the first president in decades. And whatever you think about him, this is just indisputably true,
00:45:24.420 that didn't start a new war. He didn't get the United States into a new war in the four years of
00:45:29.800 his presidency. You have to go back many decades to find a president about whom that's true. So
00:45:34.900 the idea that in his last days, an office was just like randomly start a war with China,
00:45:38.940 which he really never exhibited much animosity towards to begin with is, I mean, it's incomprehensible
00:45:47.220 that that could possibly be true. And, you know, the problem again is, is that I just don't trust any
00:45:52.500 of these people anymore. I don't trust what the Washington Post and the New York Times say, or what,
00:45:57.740 you know, generals and intelligence officials and governments say, I wish I did. It would be so
00:46:03.460 much better if we could. But we just don't. But I have to say, I feel like we're never going to know.
00:46:08.560 You're selling yourself short because you didn't trust these people ever. Really,
00:46:12.540 it's been 20 plus years since you trusted any of them. And we've all just gotten a lot smarter lately,
00:46:17.680 thanks to you and others like you. All right, stand by. Up, we're going to talk about with Glenn
00:46:21.860 Greenwald about Don Lemon now calling for the shunning and shaming of Americans who don't believe
00:46:26.440 exactly as he does. We'll get into it. Welcome back, everyone, to The Megyn Kelly Show. I'm joined
00:46:35.580 today by Substack journalist Glenn Greenwald, also a Pulitzer Prize winner. The wedge dividing
00:46:42.000 Americans into this COVID caste system, you know what I'm talking about, right? It's growing larger 0.99
00:46:46.880 by the day. And Glenn recently published a Substack piece on the visual class division at the Met Gala.
00:46:53.240 But I have to tell you, before we get to the Met Gala, Don Lemon, Don LeMond, as Tucker calls him,
00:47:00.160 on Wednesday night, took it to a new level. He was taking aim at the some 46 percent of Americans
00:47:07.080 who are not fully vaccinated. And he wants them to know, Glenn, he wants you to know and me to know
00:47:13.380 he's had it. Here he is just the other night. I think we have to stop coddling people when it comes
00:47:20.700 to this and the vaccine saying, oh, you can't shame them. You can't call them stupid. You can't
00:47:25.820 call them silly. Yes, they are. The people who aided and abetted Trump are stupid because they
00:47:30.760 believed his big lie. The people who are not getting vaccines, who are believing the lies on the
00:47:36.200 Internet instead of science. It's time to start shaming them. What else? Or leave them behind. 0.85
00:47:41.200 So it's time to start shaming people, Glenn, because our moral arbiters, Don Lemon and Chris
00:47:47.820 Cuomo, know better. Yeah, those intellectual and moral giants, Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo,
00:47:53.800 are going to guide us in our choices and punish us if we don't instantly submit to their superior
00:47:58.380 wisdom. You know, I feel in part so enraged hearing that, just that condescension for so many
00:48:06.920 millions of people for the crime of not immediately agreeing with their point of view. But I also think
00:48:12.620 it's really important to hear them say that, that openly and that explicitly, because that is how
00:48:17.560 they think. And, you know, I don't know what your experience has been, Megan, but, you know, in terms
00:48:22.280 of the question of the vaccine, I did decide early on that I was going to take the vaccine, but I was
00:48:28.300 very happy that I had the ability to inform myself about all the pros and cons and read as much as I
00:48:34.600 could and make that decision for myself in consultation with my doctors based on my age
00:48:39.480 and my health and every other consideration. And, you know, my husband had a different set
00:48:44.200 of choices. He actually had COVID. He's a little bit younger. So we debated whether he should take
00:48:49.500 it given the natural immunity that he had. And we were happy he he had that choice. He took it
00:48:53.420 today. My 14 year old son got the vaccine. In fact, he just got it while we've been talking. I just
00:48:58.000 got the picture. And I still am in doubt about whether that was the right thing to do. You know,
00:49:02.200 we ultimately decided he should. But given that he's 14, do you know that 74 million people in
00:49:08.540 the United States, 74 million are 18 years or younger? And the grand total of people who have
00:49:15.840 died from COVID since the beginning of the pandemic 16 months ago who are 18 or younger is 362, 362 out
00:49:24.780 of 74 million, a virtually non-existent risk for children who are now injecting with this vaccine,
00:49:32.060 despite not knowing the long term risk. So I hope people get vaccinated. I believe in the vaccine,
00:49:37.800 but I would want to be persuaded to take it and not bullied or coerced. And what they're going to do
00:49:43.340 is they're just it's going to backfire because the more you hear people like Don Lemon telling you
00:49:47.940 that you're stupid if you don't obey, the more the instinct is to just purposely defy what he's telling
00:49:53.880 you to do. That's how we got Trump in the first place. And they still haven't learned that lesson.
00:49:59.220 I want to talk about Don Lemon for a second. Don Lemon thought that that Malaysia airplane was
00:50:05.080 sucked up by a black hole. Don Lemon thought a woman being allegedly raped by Bill Cosby could
00:50:11.060 have stopped it by biting his penis while she was being forced to perform oral sex. Don Lemon's an
00:50:15.400 idiot. And Don Lemon is in no position to be lecturing anyone when it comes to morals,
00:50:21.300 nor is Chris Cuomo. Right. Chris Cuomo decided to dismiss all of the accusers against his brother,
00:50:26.860 whose claims were backed up and verified by independent witnesses as part of, quote,
00:50:31.340 cancel culture. He didn't give a shit about any anything his brother had done and is in no
00:50:35.760 position to lecture us. Don Lemon is credibly accused of shoving his hands down, fondling his
00:50:39.540 own balls and then rubbing his hands along the face of a complete stranger in a bar witnessed by a
00:50:45.640 bartender who is independent, not connected to either man. OK, there's a lawsuit about it right now.
00:50:49.420 Lemon denies it. But I don't want to hear from Don Lemon on morals, on stupidity,
00:50:55.120 which he is an expert on. I don't want to hear from him at all. And this is a pattern for him.
00:51:00.160 Yes, you're right. It's important that we see them say it so that we know what they really think
00:51:03.600 about half the country. But we've had many lessons from Don Lemon when it comes to that.
00:51:08.260 Who could forget this now infamous segment that he had with Rick Wilson and the guy,
00:51:14.300 I forget how you pronounce his first name. Forgive me. But here they are talking about
00:51:19.700 Trump voters before the election. Listen, that Donald Trump couldn't find Ukraine on a map if
00:51:24.140 you had the letter U and a picture of an actual physical crane next to it. He knows that this is,
00:51:29.720 you know, an administration defined by ignorance of the world. And so that's partly him playing to
00:51:36.320 their base and playing to their audience. You know, the credulous boomer rube demo that backs
00:51:42.040 Donald Trump that wants to think that Donald Trump's a smart one in there. Oh, y'all elitist are dumb.
00:51:50.720 You elitist with your geography and your maps and your spelling, even though my math and you're reading.
00:51:56.880 Yeah, you're reading, you know, your geography, knowing other countries, sipping your latte.
00:52:04.060 All those lines on the map.
00:52:08.180 Only them elitist know where Ukraine is.
00:52:11.480 And those those Democrats with their maps, they think they're so smart. Look at him. He's crying.
00:52:16.760 He's laughing so hard. All right. Forget Don Lemon. I've had enough of him. But this is not it's not just
00:52:20.820 Don Lemon. It's not just Chris Cuomo, Glenn. It's a lot in the so-called elite media who are
00:52:26.400 disturbingly in control of popular thinking. And, you know, I think the important thing to remember
00:52:33.240 is that the history of the coronavirus pandemic is one of grave error. You know, in January,
00:52:42.040 the World Health Organization endorsed the claim of the Chinese government that there was no evidence
00:52:46.960 of person to person transmission in order to downplay the pandemic. In February and March,
00:52:52.680 Fauci and the World Health Organization said that not only was wearing masks unnecessary,
00:52:56.400 if you were asymptomatic, but that it could actually be harmful. And they told us that for
00:53:00.900 several months. For five months in the beginning of 2020, they said it's your moral duty to stay
00:53:06.460 home and not go out for any reason, even to go to a deserted beach. If you do that, you're sociopathic
00:53:11.140 and killing grandma. And then suddenly the Black Lives Matter riots happen. And they told us it was 0.56
00:53:16.680 our moral duty to go participate in densely packed street protests because racism was a greater threat to
00:53:22.880 the public health than the coronavirus pandemic. And then, of course, for an entire year, we were told
00:53:28.400 that you're not even allowed to suggest that we don't know the origins of the coronavirus, whether it
00:53:34.120 came from a lab in Wuhan or whether it jumped species from bats or other animals. And now suddenly
00:53:40.540 everyone recognizes that we have a real debate about that. So over and over, there are decrees from the
00:53:46.440 really smart people who stop at the idiots who don't obey has been nothing but one of one error
00:53:54.260 after the next in competence and ineptitude. And yet they still continue to be so enamored of their
00:54:00.420 own intellect that they actually want to now structure a society, Megan, no exaggeration of
00:54:05.940 segregation, where you are a second class citizen. If you don't adhere to their judgment about what
00:54:12.440 substances you should put into your body, regardless of how old you are, regardless of your health
00:54:16.700 condition, regardless of whether you've already had COVID once or more and thus have natural
00:54:20.760 immunity, they want to prevent you from having a job, from going into public places, from going on
00:54:25.440 an airplane. They really do want a society where disobeying their superior judgment results in severe
00:54:32.060 restrictions on your life, your ability to talk on the internet, your ability to express yourself.
00:54:36.940 It is such an authoritarian mindset grounded in extreme condescension toward the intellect and
00:54:43.960 morals of anyone who doesn't see the world as they see it. The only way around it is to be an Afghan 1.00
00:54:49.120 refugee or someone sneaking across the southern border, none of whom is required to get a vaccine.
00:54:53.640 That's that's your only way to avoid the big thumb of the federal government. But you're right. And
00:54:58.760 their judgment is everywhere. I mean, there was a there was an article out on the Daily Wire today
00:55:02.680 talking about how Amazon temporarily in error. It was human error, Glenn, censored an advertisement
00:55:09.060 for a new book coming from the Heritage Foundation that's critical of Black Lives Matter. It's called
00:55:13.540 BLM, the making of a new Marxist revolution. Oh, you know, it was a mistake. We didn't really mean to 1.00
00:55:18.320 censor the ad, but, you know, it's been rectified. That mother of the fallen Marine killed with 13
00:55:23.780 service members in Afghanistan while trying to evacuate people. She was critical of Joe Biden. She got her 0.80
00:55:29.620 Facebook account suspended and her Instagram post taken down. Oh, it was done in error that we didn't
00:55:35.880 mean to do that. Michael Flynn's wife just got her account suspended or canceled by Chase Bank
00:55:41.720 because they didn't think it would be good for their reputation to do business with her. Oh,
00:55:46.220 sorry. That was a mistake. You know, that was done in there. Why do all the errors always go
00:55:50.080 against one particular party or people with one particular viewpoint or ideology?
00:55:55.040 I mean, this is what I'm saying is, you know, there was a recent announcement from PayPal,
00:56:01.820 which is now, you know, central to our financial system. A lot of people need PayPal in order to
00:56:07.520 earn a living, in order to transfer money and pay bills and receive money that they are now partnering
00:56:13.360 with the Anti-Defamation League, which used to be a well-respected organization against anti-Semitism
00:56:17.820 and has since earned a well-deserved reputation for being just a liberal advocacy group,
00:56:23.180 kind of like the ACLU and others. And they're going to defer to who the ADL says is an extremist
00:56:29.480 and cut off their ability to use PayPal. So we're going to have segregated financial services,
00:56:35.840 segregated social media accounts, different ways that people can or can't access the media. Just
00:56:41.160 this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Adam Schiff each separately wrote a letter to Amazon
00:56:48.100 complaining about certain books that Amazon was quote unquote promoting because they're bestsellers
00:56:53.460 that are about COVID and contain information that those politicians believe is misleading or
00:56:59.180 otherwise unproductive. And they're essentially demanding that Amazon censor it. Censorship has become
00:57:05.460 one of the dominant priorities of the Democratic Party. I mean, they've hauled CEOs of Twitter,
00:57:12.140 Facebook and Google to their committees three or four times in the last year to explicitly demand that
00:57:17.020 either censor more or suffer regulatory and legal reprisals. So this is becoming a really dangerous
00:57:23.380 political faction. Speaking of people throwing out, you know, ridiculous claims, you mentioned Jen
00:57:31.600 Rubin today of the Washington Post. They're so-called conservative at the Washington Post. Such a joke,
00:57:36.540 just like Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt are MSNBC's conservatives. What? I don't know that story.
00:57:43.260 What is she doing? So the Politico was writing an article on the obviously bizarre fact that Jen Rubin
00:57:51.680 has become the single favorite columnist for the Biden White House. They retweet her more than any
00:57:57.380 other journalist by far. They pass around her articles more than any by far because she is basically
00:58:03.180 a more loyal spokesperson for the Biden White House than Jen Psaki is. So they love her.
00:58:08.200 And Politico did an article on how unlikely it is that she would serve that role, given that she
00:58:14.620 was one of the most vicious critics of Barack Obama, you know, claiming that he was his allegiances were
00:58:20.260 to Islam and not to the United States. Every toxic attack on Obama she was voicing because she was a
00:58:26.860 huge fan of Mitt Romney just eight years ago. And now suddenly she's the leading Democrat.
00:58:30.180 So they sent her, you know, a request for comment and she wrote back this deranged email to Politico
00:58:36.300 and it's at the top. It said off the record. They didn't agree to that. She just proclaimed it.
00:58:41.200 That doesn't work.
00:58:41.920 Basically was this rambling message saying, oh, of course you people at Politico are yet again
00:58:47.160 attacking a powerful woman. Your misogyny is so evident, you know, accusing them of just being
00:58:52.680 misogynistic for reporting on her bizarre trajectory from, you know, GOP propagandists,
00:58:59.200 lover of Mitt Romney to the leading propagandists for the Biden White House. And she just pulls out 0.90
00:59:04.040 this misogyny accusation out of nowhere. And they published the email and near attend another Biden
00:59:09.320 White House officials accused Politico of having breached on off the record agreement, which they
00:59:14.480 never actually met entered with her as a journalist, you know, making you someone can't just send you
00:59:18.840 an email and put it at the top off the record that then you have to agree that they're allowed to
00:59:23.180 order you not to report it. So that was that was the little controversy of which she knows very
00:59:28.980 well. Jennifer Rubin knows and Neera Tanden knows, too. But the sort of the overall elitism
00:59:34.140 in all of this and the and the the one sided censorship when it comes to points of view or
00:59:40.300 behaviors, right, what have you, it's it's evident everywhere. And you've been on this sort of
00:59:44.220 elitism for a long, long time and you've lived it. Unlike AOC and her stupid dress, you've actually
00:59:49.760 been consistent in pointing it out and calling it out when you see it. And it's everywhere when it
00:59:54.340 comes to go to COVID. I saw you had a great piece not long ago talking about how when it comes to
00:59:59.040 COVID, they refuse that sort of the press and those in charge refuse to apply the cost benefit analysis
01:00:03.880 to any of these COVID debates. You know, it's like the elites can run to the mountains and to the
01:00:08.420 beach and to Florida to avoid all of these restrictions that they're imposing on people.
01:00:13.040 But it's the poor working class that have to stick around and suck it up. And you had a bit in there 1.00
01:00:17.580 about Nancy Pelosi and mask restrictions. And I guess it was a fundraiser not too long ago. What
01:00:23.660 happened with her? Yeah, so Nancy Pelosi had a fundraiser for rich donors to the Democratic 0.88
01:00:30.880 Congressional Campaign Committee, the DCCC in Napa, the very upscale wine region near San Francisco,
01:00:38.180 where she has her sprawling mansion. And it was an outdoor event. But it was held about a month after
01:00:46.840 Los Angeles County had reimposed its mask mandates for large outdoor gatherings. And San Francisco had in
01:00:53.480 place just a few miles away where she lives and where liberals govern a mask mandate that says that 1.00
01:00:59.240 you should wear a mask anytime that you're in close contact with large numbers of other people, even
01:01:03.540 outdoors. And yet this event was a huge number of rich Democratic donors, almost all of them white,
01:01:11.340 sitting at tables one on top of the next, like not a molecule of social distancing. In fact,
01:01:17.060 I would have been uncomfortable, regardless of COVID sitting that close to people, you know,
01:01:23.140 even before COVID, they were right next to each other, breathing on each other, talking to each
01:01:27.560 other. And then she was up front, speaking, they were listening, sort of not one of them, Megan was
01:01:34.080 wearing a mask of the rich white donors who were seated at the table before even eating, they didn't
01:01:38.680 have food. And then they had servants, almost all of whom are non white, walking around bringing water, 0.99
01:01:44.040 you know, getting ready to serve the food, and they were all masked. And this is something that
01:01:49.100 has become very commonplace now where the kind of servant class has to wear a cloth over their face
01:01:54.980 all of the time, while somehow people who are in richer or more elite positions don't have to,
01:02:02.180 they're allowed to show their face. And that doesn't seem very scientific to me. I don't understand how
01:02:07.400 people who are working hourly wages are more vulnerable to transmitting or contracting a virus
01:02:14.020 than people who are wealthier in an elite position. It's something we saw at Obama's
01:02:18.660 birthday party, where his 400 closest friends partied in the indoor tent with no mask while
01:02:23.020 the waiters and servants wore masks. And then we saw it again at the Met Gala, where AOC was walking
01:02:28.940 out of, you know, the Met Gala, and there was a servant carrying the train of her gown. She was unmasked,
01:02:36.120 waving like royalty to the adoring fans. And the servant behind her was wearing a mask. And it just is a
01:02:42.720 very kind of vivid illustration of this growing chasm between cultural, political, and financial
01:02:48.700 elites on the one hand, and the way that ordinary people on the other are treated that most people
01:02:53.380 in this country are very well aware of. And sadly, all of our kids are in the surf class,
01:02:59.800 and all of them, they will be the ones masked and holding the train of AOC's dress. And that's exactly
01:03:04.960 the way she wants it. And then when called out on her ridiculous hypocrisy, I've been trying to get
01:03:10.360 this quote on the air for three days. I finally remembered to pull it, Glenn. This is this is her
01:03:15.100 defense after she took an appropriate rhetorical beating for her nonsense. In response, okay, wait,
01:03:21.680 here it is. I thought about the criticism I would get. But honestly, I and my body,
01:03:27.760 I and my body have been so heavily and relentlessly policed from all corners politically,
01:03:37.660 since the moment I won my election, that it's kind of become expected and normalized to me,
01:03:44.340 you see that she's just like Jennifer Rubin, no abuse that she takes from the press or any criticism
01:03:49.580 she gets is real. It's just part of the ongoing policing and abuse of her and her body. Because I
01:03:58.000 presume she's a woman, she's a woman of color. She's, you know, a woman standing up for socialism
01:04:02.340 by putting weird letters on a weird dress. Well, yeah, the second part of the statement even
01:04:07.400 makes more explicit that that is what she's saying. She said, you know, a lot of this discomfort and
01:04:12.760 anger about what I did is just people's discomfort from having a woman of color be in power. She blamed 0.51
01:04:18.780 it on white supremacy and misogyny. She described her and her designer, who is engaged to someone who's in
01:04:28.200 the family of the family that founded Lehman Brothers and who's close to a billionaire, if not
01:04:31.900 a billionaire, as a working class immigrant. She emigrated from Toronto, you know, the trek from
01:04:39.260 Toronto to Manhattan is a very, very arduous one where people face all kinds of trauma and dangers.
01:04:45.200 And she made that trek and arrived safely in Manhattan with her, you know, billionaire boyfriend.
01:04:50.540 So, yeah, of course, that was the response. And, you know, honestly, what you're saying,
01:04:55.660 I, you know, my view as a parent has changed in a lot of ways, for instance, becoming a parent,
01:05:00.660 it does infuriate me that my kids have to wear masks all day in school for nine hours and not
01:05:06.120 see each other's faces. And, you know, despite the fact that the risk is so low. And then I watch AOC
01:05:11.440 traipsing around on a red carpet with no mask of any kind, nor do any of the other celebrities near
01:05:18.120 her have it. You just see that it's not about anything scientific. It's about social control and 0.98
01:05:23.420 creating a cast of people who believe they're exempt from the rules they impose on everybody else.
01:05:29.300 Oh, it's infuriating. We've got to discuss the Met Gala because I want to get a little bit more on
01:05:37.540 that. But I also want to talk about there's this new series. OK, you may not have heard about this,
01:05:42.460 but it's called it's it was it's coming out on CBS or it was and it was going to be about activists.
01:05:47.200 Right. And it stars Usher, Julianne Hough and Priyanka Chopra Jones, Jonas. And I cannot wait
01:05:54.320 to tell you what's happened to it and why I'm very much in favor of them not hosting an activist
01:05:59.640 show. We'd love to know your thoughts on General Mark Milley in the in the meantime,
01:06:04.020 on his less than ethical phone call. We're going to take your calls in just a minute.
01:06:06.880 Give us a call here. Eight, three, three, four, four. Like Syracuse is 44. That's why we put that in
01:06:11.160 there. Megan, M-E-G-Y-N, like O-B-G-Y-N, but M-E-G-Y-N. That's a whole story, too. Thanks to my 0.95
01:06:17.660 mom. Eight, three, three, four, four, six, three, four, nine, six. Call in now. We're going to take
01:06:22.720 your calls shortly. Welcome back to the Megan Kelly show, everyone. It's Friday, so I'm ready to answer
01:06:31.220 your calls and have some fun. Do you want to send a message to Don Lamont? Thoughts on the border?
01:06:36.860 Maybe a personal question about my life or career? We'll see. Call me at eight, three, three, four,
01:06:42.480 four. Megan, M-E-G-Y-N. That's eight, three, three, four, four, six, three, four, nine, six. In the
01:06:49.020 meantime, back with me is Substack journalist Glenn Greenwald. So Glenn, I had to ask you because I
01:06:54.500 have been to the Met Gala and it was just as insufferable as you would think, but I thought it
01:07:00.060 was it. I didn't realize that Anna Wintour a couple of years ago was sad about the Met Gala and really
01:07:06.660 thought that there was a massive problem with it and did something to fix it. Can you tell us what
01:07:11.700 that was? Yeah, it was in 2014 and she started believing that it was insufficiently exclusive,
01:07:19.340 that people who didn't deserve to be there were able to get in because in her view, the ticket
01:07:24.980 prices were too low. They were only $15,000 a ticket and she felt that enabled kind of a certain
01:07:31.180 form of riffraff to be able to vandalize her event. And so she raised the prices to $25,000 a
01:07:38.860 ticket in order to maintain the high level that she believes the Met Gala should exhibit.
01:07:44.620 Oh, my God. And meanwhile, they're like, this is a charity event. This is a charity event. And
01:07:48.100 that the charity they're supporting, it's like the Mets costume wing. They talk about it like trying to
01:07:55.500 defend the $35,000 a ticket that it's now by saying like it's it's for like it's like starving kids in
01:08:00.860 Africa. No, it's to help the costumes at the Met have more money in better cases. Yeah, well, that was 0.88
01:08:07.460 you know, that was the joke of AOC's going is that, you know, it's probably like one of the most vulgar
01:08:13.500 testaments to the excesses of capitalism and inequality that has been conceived of since, you know,
01:08:21.640 the parties of Louis XIV and the French aristocracy. And obviously, she just wanted to go because she
01:08:28.500 wanted to hang out with Rihanna. And instead, you know, but she also wanted to keep her socialist 1.00
01:08:33.680 street credibility. So at the last second, she's like, hey, why don't we just spray paint, you know,
01:08:38.460 tax the rich on my dress as though like any of those liberal celebrities are going to be offended by
01:08:43.620 that message. And that way, I'll get to, you know, make my presence there something noble.
01:08:48.600 Um, but yeah, you know, there's there's been articles in like town and country and sort of the
01:08:53.720 the magazines of the landed gentry about how the Met Gala used to be the best of high society. 0.98
01:09:01.200 And now it's been vulgarized by the fact that celebrities go who don't even care about the
01:09:05.940 Met and probably don't even know what they're raising funds for. But you're right. If AOC is
01:09:09.380 going to go to a charity gala, you would think it would be to help homeless people or people on the
01:09:14.980 verge of eviction or something like that, as opposed to buying more extravagant costumes for
01:09:20.960 the Met. Yes. And by the way, when I went to the Met Gala in the bathroom at the Met, there were a
01:09:26.460 bunch of people whose names you would know, like pretending to be humping one another. Very classy
01:09:32.340 event. And then the men's. So I went into the women's restroom and I saw that men and women in 0.81
01:09:36.980 there doing that. All names you would know. And my husband went in the men's restroom and we met,
01:09:41.660 you know, afterward. And there were two very well known people snorting cocaine off of the bathroom
01:09:46.380 in his bath. It was like, oh, this is very classy and exclusive and a well done. Now, one of the groups
01:09:52.540 that Anna Wintour is obsessed with is tennis players. And so it's no accident that, you know,
01:09:56.620 she's had Roger Federer there. She had she had Naomi Osaka there this year. And I wanted to spend a
01:10:02.680 minute talking to you about that, because Naomi Osaka was not only at the Met Gala, but she also wound up 0.68
01:10:08.780 on time's most influential people this year, along with Meghan and Harry. I mean, it's crazy to me,
01:10:14.220 Glenn, that you've got Alexi Navalny on there as one of the world's most influential people. And he
01:10:19.980 really has been along with like Harry and Meghan, Meghan Markle, like a C-list actress who wound up
01:10:26.460 marrying a prince and royal life was too hard for her. So they ran kicking and screaming to their 14
01:10:30.780 million dollar Montecito mansion. OK, so that's who's on the list of the time 100 this year.
01:10:35.760 But I do have to tell you, I've been fascinated to talk to you and hear your thoughts on on sort of
01:10:41.800 Naomi and Meghan, for that matter, two women of color in very, very prominent positions who you
01:10:48.420 are not allowed to criticize at all. And you tell me why that is. Yeah, you know, well, so it's
01:10:56.180 interesting. Tennis has been, you know, probably the sport that has played the biggest role in my life.
01:11:01.780 When I was young, I was obsessed with watching tennis like my childhood hero was Martina Navratilova.
01:11:07.020 I was actually actually signed a contract to do a film about Martina Navratilova, along with
01:11:11.780 Reese Witherspoon. And then Martina made some comments about the trans movement and whether
01:11:16.960 trans women should be able to participate in sports that got her kicked out of a bunch of LGBT groups 1.00
01:11:21.440 and kind of rendered radioactive. And so the project was killed. So I've been really interested in
01:11:26.880 tennis for a long time. I have a couple of friends who play professionally on the on the circuit now.
01:11:31.780 And when Naomi Osaka made that announcement about how she was going to refuse to do press 0.97
01:11:39.020 afterwards, the press conferences that are mandatory for every player, you know, she sort of said,
01:11:44.380 well, find me, go ahead and find me as though like her wealth, which is vastly greater than almost every
01:11:49.900 other tennis player means she just gets to buy off having to abide by the same rules as the other 0.98
01:11:55.280 players who can't afford to get those fines. And the sympathy that was so overwhelming in her favor,
01:12:03.360 as though the minute you utter the term I'm suffering or I'm engaged in mental health or a
01:12:08.680 young woman of color meant that she's the marginalized person. When in reality, Naomi Osaka
01:12:13.980 is one of the most powerful people on the planet. She's one of the richest people on the planet. She 1.00
01:12:18.940 is the highest earning female athlete in the world. She made $55 million last year. She's well on her way
01:12:24.920 to being a billionaire. By the time she's 30, a billionaire, she carries incredible cultural
01:12:30.600 cachet. But if you criticize her or Meghan Markle, and you just told the story of Meghan Markle,
01:12:35.380 you get accused of bullying because they're supposed to be looked at as these weak and marginalized
01:12:41.880 people, which A, is incredibly ironic to talk about strong women athletes as being these fragile
01:12:48.880 little China dolls who crumble at the minute you criticize them. But I also think it exhibits the
01:12:55.540 kind of framework that we've been taught to see the world through, which is class is totally irrelevant.
01:13:01.860 So if someone's extremely rich, it doesn't really count as a metric for how you evaluate them. The only
01:13:07.140 things that matter are gender and race. So a black woman who's on her way to being a billionaire at 1.00
01:13:13.260 the age of 23 is supposed to be considered marginalized and less powerful than, say, some
01:13:19.000 out-of-work white coal miner in West Virginia whose entire community has been ravaged by the opioid
01:13:25.860 epidemic and who hasn't had a decent job in 20 years because it got shipped overseas. It's such a distorted
01:13:31.720 way of looking at the world, but people like that are the beneficiaries of it.
01:13:35.460 That's so well said. So well said. And that the one that really, incident that really showed it
01:13:41.400 with Naomi was when she had that moment, she got emotional at a press conference after all the
01:13:46.140 nonsense, after she said she's an introvert and she can't deal with press and so on and so forth, 1.00
01:13:49.600 but then went on the cover of Time and went on the cover of Sports Illustrated and was the last
01:13:54.260 person who she lit the Olympic torch. Now she's at the Met Gala. Now she's Time 100. She has a Barbie.
01:14:00.080 She had a documentary made about her. But this one little guy from, I think it was like some
01:14:03.560 Cincinnati sports paper says to her, like, you know, how do you reconcile all the media appearances
01:14:09.160 plus what you say is an introverted nature? And she was like overwhelmed. And then her her agent 0.89
01:14:15.880 came out and he was like, he's a bully. He's disgusting. Came after this poor guy probably
01:14:20.780 makes a 40 grand a year if he's lucky. And he and the media went with that. He was her bully.
01:14:25.960 I mean, there's no job more difficult than working for a local paper, especially in like a smaller
01:14:31.280 midsize town like Cincinnati. And then you're a sports columnist on top of it. So you're totally
01:14:35.900 dispensable. I'm sure he makes exactly what you said, maybe even less. He has no job security at
01:14:42.000 all. These papers close more often than they hire and lay off huge numbers of people. He has a very
01:14:47.480 precarious job. That's very difficult. He probably has to write, you know, 20 articles a week. So just
01:14:52.700 working day and night. And he I don't know if you heard it, the audio, but the question was asked
01:14:56.960 so respectfully. Yes. And it was a very valid question. It was just like, hey, you on the one
01:15:02.100 hand, you say you have a great deal of problems dealing with press. But on the other hand, you're
01:15:06.040 doing a lot of press for these other ventures. Like, how do you as you say, how do you reconcile
01:15:10.220 that? She burst into tears, left the press conference, did come back. But then to call him who is as
01:15:18.440 marginalized as it gets in society, her bully, even though most people couldn't dream of having
01:15:24.360 life like Naomi Osaka, shows that really distorted prism through which everyone insists we we view
01:15:30.840 the world. The hypocrisy of it. I mean, it just it it drives me nuts and it drives me nuts that Meghan
01:15:35.420 and Harry are out there saying, be kind, be kind as they stick the knife into the royal family while
01:15:40.000 Prince Philip is dying and say somebody in the family is a racist. And by the way, they didn't care
01:15:44.180 if I was about to kill myself. But be kind, everyone be kind. And by the way, protect the
01:15:48.380 environment. Oh, wait, I'm just going to go on this private jet and go off for my polo match in
01:15:52.040 Aspen, which is what Prince Harry did while he's lecturing us about preserving the environment.
01:15:56.720 I mean, and how they want their privacy, except for their 50 million from Netflix and Spotify.
01:16:01.140 And now the Time 100 and the airbrushed cover, which I was saying on GB News the other night,
01:16:05.540 was absolutely perfect because it reduced him, made him smaller, which is exactly what's happened since
01:16:09.840 he married her, made airbrushed away all of their realities, right? Like their flaws, whatever they
01:16:15.360 may be, whether it was receding hairline or what have you. That's exactly what they want done and
01:16:19.460 what they're doing in their sort of PR campaign. I could go on. But I got to tell you about this one
01:16:24.140 thing. OK, this is Debbie Murphy, our producer. She's really been wanting us to get to this.
01:16:28.520 She also is one of those hard, trodden immigrants from Canada. God knows what she had to do to get here 1.00
01:16:34.160 from there. Actually, she went the other way is the truth. OK, CBS is now scrapping its competition
01:16:40.640 show, The Activist, after backlash and turning it into a documentary. This is from the website
01:16:47.080 Mediaite. They had they'd been launching the series called The Activist, and it was going to be a model
01:16:52.880 for a competition show where they showed a wide audience the passion, long hours and ingenuity that
01:16:58.840 activists put into changing the world, hopefully inspiring others to do the same. Well, even the
01:17:04.940 far left Glenn didn't like it. I mean, the right, I'm sure, was rolling its eyes. And but the far left
01:17:10.100 said this is performance activism. That's not the real thing. We can't have a show about that.
01:17:16.180 And the thing that jumped out to me about this is just perfection. And it is still going to be a
01:17:20.820 documentary. So we're still seeing these people. It's going to be hosted by Usher, Julianne Hough and
01:17:27.920 Priyanka Chopra Jonas. OK, now, Julianne Hough got in trouble a couple of years ago. I know this. 0.99
01:17:35.320 I saw it after I left NBC because she actually wore blackface. She went as one of the characters 0.84
01:17:39.800 from Orange is the New Black. She wore blackface on Halloween. It was photographed by many people
01:17:44.360 had to do a big public mea culpa. Priyanka Chopra Jonas endorsed skin lightening and got in a lot of 0.59
01:17:51.000 trouble over for endorsing this cream in India to make your skin lighter, which, you know, is sort of a
01:17:55.460 racist thing to do because it suggests that lighter skin is better than darker skin. And Usher was
01:18:00.020 repeatedly infected or was accused and sued many times of repeatedly infecting women with herpes
01:18:04.820 without telling them, as required under the laws of several states. So these are the three.
01:18:12.040 I'm sorry. Couldn't be more perfect in a way. They should be interviewed by Don Lemon and Chris
01:18:19.060 Cuomo about their new show. Yeah, I mean, the backlash to it was so intense. I think it was one
01:18:26.760 of the most ratioed tweets on Twitter when they unveiled it. And it's very rare to see a show that
01:18:32.000 planned and that promoted have to be radically reworked because, as you say, it wasn't just one
01:18:37.620 sector of the society that reacted with revulsion. It was pretty much everybody thought it was the most
01:18:44.340 preposterous thing in the world that you're going to take social activism and turn it into some kind
01:18:49.200 of like commercialized competition led by celebrities. Those in particular. It's amazing.
01:18:55.760 And, you know, it's just it's a good reminder because we do get lectured at every turn in our
01:19:01.360 lives now, whether you're, you know, trying if your wife gets canceled at the bank or your book doesn't
01:19:07.500 get promoted or, you know, even if you're a black conservative, you can't get your films made. 0.59
01:19:12.660 Just ask Shelby Steele. Right. Who's like had had real trouble getting his his movie. What killed
01:19:18.400 Michael Brown on Amazon? It's just a reminder that the people judging us all the time are frankly
01:19:24.640 human. They make mistakes. They do and say stupid shit, just like everyone does. And we used to be
01:19:31.140 at a place in our society where we understood that and we weren't so awful to one another about it.
01:19:36.000 Glenn. Gosh, I love talking. I could talk to you every day of the week. We got to do like a
01:19:39.600 co-host situation because you're so interesting. Thank you for doing this.
01:19:43.200 I love being here, Megan. It's always great. I'm always happy to come back anytime.
01:19:46.640 Yeah. I'm going to take you up on that. All right. Up next, we're taking your calls and we
01:19:50.580 have a special announcement up next. I'm excited to bring to you. Call us in. Let us know what you
01:19:55.200 think about the 10,000 immigrants waiting to cross. Well, they've crossed our southern border and
01:20:00.100 they're sitting there under a Texas bridge right now. Or let us know whether you think General
01:20:04.500 Mark Milley should be tried for treason. 833-44-MEGYN. That's 833-446-3496.
01:20:16.400 Welcome back to the Megyn Kelly show, everyone. Our phone lines are open at 833-44-MEGYN. That's
01:20:22.660 833-446-3496. And we have a very special first caller today and it involves a special announcement
01:20:32.300 that we want to bring to you about our executive producer, Steve Krakauer, who you may know if
01:20:38.640 you've been listening to our podcast this past year. He's not with us this week for a very good
01:20:43.440 reason. He and his wife just had a baby. They have a new daughter named Mia. Steve, how are you?
01:20:52.120 Hi, Megan. First time caller, long time listener. This is exciting to be on this side.
01:20:56.700 Congratulations. We're so happy for you. And how is it going so far? We're showing some pictures
01:21:03.340 of you and the babe. Oh, thank you so much. Yes, it's going well. You know, this is our second
01:21:08.120 child. It's been five years. We had our son, Jack, five years ago, almost for the day. And
01:21:14.120 Mia came Monday. Everyone's doing really well. You're kind of piecing together about three hours
01:21:19.400 of sleep or so a night. So I'm a little bit delirious, but otherwise it's been going great.
01:21:23.500 She's doing great. And mom's doing well. And I was just kind of a bystander, but very happy
01:21:28.500 with everything. Everything went OK with the delivery? Everything went OK. Yeah. I mean,
01:21:33.460 it was it was pretty smooth. I mean, you know, I say that as someone who was just kind of sitting
01:21:37.020 in the chair next to my wife. It was so easy for me. I know, exactly. They were trying to get me to
01:21:42.180 cut the umbilical cord. I was like, please do not give me the scissors. And it was just I just wanted
01:21:46.660 to kind of be a moral support. I don't want to have anything, you know, potentially go wrong.
01:21:50.360 But everything went well. I was there to cheer up. That totally reminds me of Doug. He was he is not
01:21:56.900 somebody who deals with needles or blood very well at all. He was like, I'm going to stay on this side
01:22:01.120 of the drape, right? I'll be on this side of the drape. Exactly. I just looked right at Megan. I
01:22:05.500 was not I was not looking anywhere else. I was like, just look at me. Lock eyes. I'm not looking
01:22:09.540 where I'm going to. I think that's very smart. But Steve's wife is named Megan, too. I think it's
01:22:14.640 very smart because let's let's face it. I mean, a good husband wife relationship has to have, 1.00
01:22:18.920 you know, a lot of things that in order to make more babies, you need to be able to look at the
01:22:23.140 other person and think, think certain thoughts that are tough. If you see certain things.
01:22:28.740 Yes, I just wanted to, you know, just keep my focus. I did my part, which was very minimal,
01:22:34.920 the best of my ability. But no, it was great. Everyone's doing well. And yeah, it's been,
01:22:39.680 you know, it's just sort of getting the getting back into the into the mode of having a newborn now.
01:22:44.220 Which is challenging, but also fantastic. How about Jackson? How he how is he doing with baby
01:22:49.280 Mia? It's funny. And he's been, you know, he's real, real cute about it, you know, talking about
01:22:53.720 how how excited he is. And he's wearing his, his new brother's shirt yesterday, the soccer practice,
01:22:58.840 but he's very like nervous around her. He we haven't even gotten to be the point where he can like
01:23:03.520 hold her. He's I think he just thinks of her as she's like very fragile, and he doesn't want to,
01:23:08.820 you know, do anything that's gonna mess up. So he's been very cautious. Although I think I think
01:23:12.640 we're gonna we're gonna approach that this weekend. Perfect. Good. That's not a bad way
01:23:18.100 to start off when you've got a little toddler at home and introduced to a new baby. So have you been
01:23:22.440 listening to the show? What critiques? How do you think we're doing without you?
01:23:26.120 I have no, it's been so interesting. I have to say, you know, I, I would listen to some of Brett
01:23:31.560 Weinstein on Spotify. And I got some YouTube with the fifth column guys yesterday. And I actually was 0.98
01:23:36.780 on Wednesday, I was in the car. And I was like, let me turn on and there was Scott Galloway. It was a
01:23:41.100 great conversation. I loved it. And so yeah, it was it was very unique to kind of be for,
01:23:46.040 you know, a year of being behind the scenes. And now being kind of a listener and a fan.
01:23:51.240 I thought it was a great week of shows. I was playing Greenwald before I got on it.
01:23:54.360 That was great. Awesome. Well, we've had a couple of technical snafus, which now I can't blame on you
01:23:58.760 because you're not here. But you know, we're working it out. As you know, we're a new show. We don't
01:24:03.100 don't haven't figured we haven't figured everything out yet.
01:24:05.940 That's right. Week two, I still will take the blame. You know, I'll still serve in that role.
01:24:11.200 Well, we can't wait for you to come back. Debbie's doing a great job holding on the 0.97
01:24:14.120 fort without you. But everyone misses you. And just so much love to you and Megan
01:24:18.020 and little Jackson and newest little Mia. We love you guys and wish you all the best.
01:24:22.760 And don't even think about us other than as a as a source of news and entertainment
01:24:26.460 until you come back. That's right. I'll be I'll be a consumer still. But no,
01:24:30.640 thank you to everyone there. I'm excited to get back. But now I'm going to go back to Mia.
01:24:35.480 Yeah. Much love. The newest member of the Devil May Care media family, little Mia Krakauer.
01:24:41.820 All right. We're going to take our first caller as well. And we're our phone lines are still open.
01:24:45.880 So you can call in. We've got a good chunk reserved today. We're figuring that out as well.
01:24:49.120 833-44-MEGAN. That's 833-446-3496. All right. Let's talk to let's see Dale in Iowa.
01:24:57.840 Caller number two. What's on your mind, Dale?
01:25:00.660 Hey, Megan. I am a 12 year veteran of the U.S. Army. I'm a first time caller, but a longtime viewer
01:25:06.500 and listener from America Live. Kelly File, your podcast and your book Settle for More is still one
01:25:12.440 of my favorites. Thank you. I'm calling regarding General Milley. And yes, the call to China is
01:25:19.700 problematic. But to me, the call to if it's true that Speaker Pelosi called him and then he met with
01:25:28.000 all the people that report to him and then reached out to the command generals of whether it's Pacific
01:25:34.060 Command, Central Command, the fleet. To me, that's illegal. He is prohibited by law
01:25:42.000 from he has no command authority. He's an advisor to the president. So if he did that, that would fall
01:25:48.580 under the UCMJ. Obviously, you're a lawyer. That's the military's code of justice. So if that's true,
01:25:58.140 then he should be tried under that for potential court martial. Then the call to China, whether
01:26:06.720 it's again true that the secretary that Miller, secretary of defense at the time, and he made
01:26:14.260 that call, then we were talking about in the area of treason. Yeah. I mean, I hate to throw that word
01:26:21.080 around, but I have to say, I think you're right. I think this circumstance warrants it. It's like,
01:26:26.580 I mean, if you're if calling up the Chinese and telling them there's some there might be something
01:26:31.040 off with the sitting U.S. president and you're going to stop a potential military strike against
01:26:36.320 them is a treason. I don't really know what is. And we better get to the bottom of this. I mean,
01:26:42.600 the Republicans are not in control of the House at the moment, but I don't see how the Democrats
01:26:46.720 blow this off and don't have any hearings on this. I mean, they are going to have him in front of them
01:26:50.800 next week. So you can guarantee that there's going to be questions about it. We'll see what Milley
01:26:54.660 says. But this this looks terrible and is a dangerous, dangerous precedent. I think, you know,
01:27:00.260 honest Democrats will admit that, too. All right. Let's talk to Gene, number caller number four,
01:27:07.580 who's got some thoughts on Don Lemon. Hey, Gene. How are you, Megan? So good to hear you on the
01:27:13.500 radio. I miss you on TV and you're a beautiful and talented voice that needs to be heard. And
01:27:20.260 now you come on right after Glenn Beck on my drive home or drive to work and here in Texas. And
01:27:26.380 I'm glad you're on the radio. That's nice. I love thinking of that.
01:27:30.000 Love thinking about you down in Texas and my other friend up in Iowa, you know, like out in the
01:27:34.700 heartland and outside of the coastal elites. Just get in the news in a way that you trust. I
01:27:39.840 appreciate it. Thank you. You bet. Yes. I have a brother who is a veteran that has chosen not to get
01:27:48.100 the vaccine for religious reasons. And, you know, for our for this administration and for Don Lemon,
01:27:57.940 you know, you know, basically, you know, basically telling people that they're as bad as the Taliban,
01:28:04.600 you know, because they don't want to get the they don't want to get the vaccine.
01:28:09.980 And the entire thing, you know, the entire time, you know, during the debacle in Afghanistan,
01:28:16.680 you know, both women and Maddow as well, all they could talk about was mask mandates, 0.99
01:28:22.020 you know, about a vaccine that, you know, back in a year ago, they would never want to touch.
01:28:30.120 Yes. You know, it had something to do with Trump. And now it's just the hypocrisy.
01:28:35.400 It's it's overwhelming. Yeah. It's plain as a nose in your face. 100 percent. You know,
01:28:42.480 one of the soundbites we didn't get to today was Joy Reid going off about how, yes, I did have my
01:28:46.540 doubts under Trump of the vaccine. She was one of the people who stoked those doubts and others.
01:28:50.780 And now they want to look at all the others who have some doubts, not based on that nonsense about
01:28:55.440 like Trump's going to do something to the vaccine, but about, you know, based on a year of Fauci misleading
01:29:00.080 us and reversing himself and say, oh, you're a bunch of rubes. You're also dumb. We know better. 0.84
01:29:05.040 And it is it is infuriating and it is maddening. I feel the same. I'm like,
01:29:10.900 who are these people to lecture to us? And by the way, all of the media censorship has played
01:29:15.560 into it as well. Right. Because the people don't trust the media. They think that some
01:29:18.960 hidden truth is being hidden, you know, concealed from them. It's better. It's better to let people
01:29:25.020 figure it out for themselves. But we've decided to go a different way. Anyway, I appreciate the call.
01:29:31.220 Thank you very much. Right now. I want to talk to you. Let's see. Looking for Ron from North Carolina.
01:29:37.080 Hey, Ron. Hey, Megan. Good to talk to you again after 10 years.
01:29:42.480 Did we talk 10 years ago?
01:29:43.580 I was on your talk show or not your talk show, your midday news show, November of 2011 on the
01:29:50.420 baby Lisa case. I'm a private investigator. Oh, my God. Ron, that's so crazy. Can I tell you,
01:29:55.440 I was just talking about that case the other day with two people who were involved in it. Now,
01:29:59.540 we may do an update on that. Oh, it's so nice to talk to you again. Thank you for being here.
01:30:03.740 Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I was actually heavily involved in that. You I don't I don't want to bore the
01:30:10.460 listeners with it. But you interviewed me on the missing phone part of the case. And, you know,
01:30:17.020 that somebody allegedly made some phone calls. And actually, ironically enough, it was the only
01:30:23.420 time I was on because Bill Stanton, the guy who was trying to do some investigations, told one of
01:30:30.100 your producers that if I was ever on again, he would not appear on your show. Oh, I love wild Bill
01:30:35.800 Stanton. I don't I don't know. Well, what's on your mind today? Well, I just want to see if you
01:30:42.800 you're going to do I know, you know, you're in a different medium now and want to see if you're
01:30:47.440 going to do any follow ups on that. It's still very open here. And I was actually called in the
01:30:53.580 FBI's office a few months after you and I spoke and was told to stop interviewing people on the case.
01:30:59.760 I'm a former news, news director, radio news. And that's kind of how I got involved with this
01:31:06.960 through that. And I'm being a private investigator here. And that's crazy. Hey, we don't want you
01:31:13.320 talking to any more people of potential interest. And we also don't want you to admit publicly that
01:31:17.880 we even talked to you today. Oh, well, yeah, I can see you took that direction very well.
01:31:23.100 Well, we may we may indeed do a follow up on baby Lisa. People may remember this is this little 10
01:31:30.260 month old baby that was taken from her crib in the middle of the night. I mean, seemingly without a
01:31:35.160 trace, no fingerprints were found on the windowsills, on the cribs, on anything. And everyone thought it
01:31:40.160 was the parents. But there was no proof of that. And she she never was found. Let me go to Kevin in
01:31:47.360 New York, who's got a question, as I understand, about journalism. Hey, Kevin.
01:31:51.040 Hey, Megan, you know, every time I hear congrats, by the way, in the show and all that, and every
01:31:56.400 time I hear you throw out your name and spell it, I remember you saying this a while back, I forget
01:32:00.760 who said it, but someone aggravated you by calling you Medgen. Yeah, I can never forget that story.
01:32:07.040 Anyway, when it comes to, you know, you mentioned like Don Lamont and the others, and even on all
01:32:13.100 sides and stuff. I just wonder, you know, what is the who is in your opinion, other than yourself,
01:32:17.780 who could be like the neutral? Who is it possible to have a neutral person to have some kind of like
01:32:22.800 journalism summit to get everybody all these characters from whether it's, you know, you know,
01:32:28.880 TV or radio or wherever, and just have it out? Wouldn't that be fun? And that would possibly
01:32:34.100 broker that who would just do battle? You mean like a like a Hannity versus Maddow type of situation?
01:32:40.080 Oh my God, wouldn't that be great? Because it just, it seems to be, it's all, it's very frustrating to
01:32:45.380 have it like every, you know, four years or eight years when you have like a national, you know,
01:32:50.600 presidential debate, and you get to see all the bullshit flat right out on in the open. It seems
01:32:56.280 that should happen more often now. Yeah. Well, it's funny, because I don't know if anybody's ever
01:33:00.060 going to do that, because everyone's so like, they're well paid, and they're well healed, and they
01:33:03.960 don't want to have to subject themselves to that sort of cage match. But I will say, picking up on
01:33:09.260 a couple of calls that we've had now, and your point, someone asked me recently whether I think
01:33:14.260 we could get back to objective journalism and less partisanship. And I don't think so,
01:33:18.280 because I think not only did the media totally reveal its bias in the past election and under
01:33:24.580 Trump, they revealed their hatred, their hatred for the other half of the country, right? For anybody
01:33:30.240 who's not a far left progressive. That's tough to forget. Even if they start reporting in a way that's
01:33:35.040 more fair, you know they hate you. And that's a deep, deep, ongoing problem. Listen, I'm so excited
01:33:42.500 to talk to you guys. I've never had a show where I get to talk to the viewers and the listeners,
01:33:45.360 and I appreciate it. And I don't want you to miss the show next week. On Monday, we're going to have
01:33:49.960 Dr. Drew here, and we're going to talk about anything and everything. And then next Friday,
01:33:55.100 my pal Tucker Carlson's coming on the show. Really looking forward to that. Today's show is going to be
01:33:59.520 available on any podcast platform for free and on YouTube at youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. Thanks, everyone.