The Megyn Kelly Show - September 17, 2021


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


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 34 minutes

Words per Minute

190.27817

Word Count

17,906

Sentence Count

1,098

Misogynist Sentences

29

Hate Speech Sentences

35


Summary

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

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
00:00:33.060 at our southern border, the rising two-class system in America that pins the mask against
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
00:35:23.040 information, but who the hell knows what the Chinese would have done with that information? Who
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
01:17:35.320 I saw it after I left NBC because she actually wore blackface. She went as one of the characters
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
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.
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,
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
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
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,
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.
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.