Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joins Megyn on The Megyn Kelly Show to discuss his campaign for president, his new book, and why he thinks vaccines are a scam. Megyn also discusses why she doesn t believe in vaccines and why she thinks they should be legalized.
00:02:42.320And when I answered it, they cut that segment out, which was very, I think, unusual and was disturbing to a lot of people.
00:02:49.420We need to stop treating the American people as if they're babies that need to be protected from dangerous information or from, you know, that they're too delicate to hear thoughts that are arguments about public health issues, other issues.
00:03:06.340We need to start having frank, open debates that are candid, that are congenial, that are respectful to each other and respectful to the audience.
00:03:17.620The American people can handle truth and they can handle things that aren't true.
00:03:24.140The remedy for that is the remedy for bad information and misinformation is not censorship.
00:03:46.220I remember being on the chairlift with a friend of mine in December of 2021, I think it was, and she was reading your book.
00:03:55.840And maybe it was a few months before I interviewed you.
00:04:00.720And I said, oh, you know, you should be careful because, you know, you sort of if you take in the wrong information, then you're saying the wrong thing to everybody.
00:04:08.920And she was like, well, he has some really interesting things to say.
00:04:12.900Started looking at your book, started reading it, started looking up the sources that you cited and support.
00:04:16.960Then went to my team and said, let's check his sources.
00:04:20.020Let's see what other people say about his sources.
00:04:22.040Is he citing the right sources turned into this long interview we did and your claims checked out the most controversial stuff that you get labeled a kook for saying checked out time after time after time.
00:04:37.800And this is not a full endorsement of everything you've ever said.
00:04:41.020But my my takeaway was this guy has been unfairly maligned by people who are so pro vaccine that they just needed to silence him.
00:04:52.040So it works to the point where there's a fair amount of people say like, oh, he's a kook.
00:04:55.880My friends at National Review, we pulled it just not to insult you.
00:04:58.360But Jim Garrity, who I really like, said, you're kookoo for Cocoa Pops.
00:05:14.340I mean, what I say to people is show me where I'm wrong.
00:05:17.860Just show me the facts because, you know, I'm I'm susceptible to to change.
00:05:24.080If somebody shows me where I'm wrong, I'm not going to stay on an opinion that is based upon a bad factual foundation.
00:05:30.240I'm I'm I'm accused constantly of promoting misinformation, but nobody actually show is able to show me a single factual assertion that I've made that is wrong.
00:05:43.500And and I'm sure there are some out there who are very, very careful on social media.
00:05:49.340I probably have the most robust in-house fact checking operation right now in the media.
00:05:55.340We have three hundred and like fifty PhD scientists, MD physicians on an advisory board that looks at the things that I post.
00:06:05.620None of them would stay with me if I was promoting misinformation, you know, regularly or even occasionally.
00:06:11.880But if I do it, you know, my reaction is shut.
00:06:15.960And I say this at the beginning of my book.
00:06:18.380Show me if there is a fact in this book that you disagree with and show me a counterfact and we will change it.
00:06:25.720We've been through, I think, 12 or 15 editions of that book.
00:06:29.400And if somebody comes, if somebody sends a letter to us and says, I spotted something on page two twelve, that is not true or that's challengeable, we'll just change it.
00:06:39.000Well, here's what I think is happening instead.
00:06:41.880Here's what they're deciding just to shut you up.
00:06:44.000I make I make occasionally because I tweet a lot now.
00:06:49.480So the other day I made a I made a tweet that said that there was ageist missile systems in Ukraine.
00:08:04.260That is how people come to their own conclusion about, oh, he's right or no, I don't believe it or what.
00:08:10.620That's how journalism used to work and is supposed to still work.
00:08:13.860But instead, we get this from ABC News, which, as you point out, interview you and made an obvious cut on the subject of vaccines.
00:08:22.020And after the exchange that I'm about to show the audience, the anchor comes back on and says to the effect of he said a bunch of nonsense on vaccines,
00:08:31.000which we edited because he's full of it.
00:09:02.240So she cut out everything that followed.
00:09:04.760Then she offered a 33 second disclaimer on how wrong you are on vaccines, rebutting claims.
00:09:12.660We didn't get to hear just whatever you had said and what wound up on the editing room floor, which was longer than the 22nd exchange ABC chose to air.
00:09:22.300Yeah, I mean, what I did after that with Lindsay is I laid out the scientific studies, which I cited.
00:09:29.300I cited the names of the author of the authors of those studies, in-house studies at CDC, et cetera, that actually confirmed that link.
00:09:37.740And I, by the way, I'm not, I didn't go on there saying I'm going to push this, you know, this issue between autism and vaccines.
00:09:52.740And when I pushed back on that and cited scientific studies supporting it, of which there are hundreds, she cut my, she left her propaganda in place and cut mine out.
00:10:06.060And then at the end, it gave this very unusual statement saying we have censored him because he was promoting misinformation.
00:10:14.660And so, you know, it ended with a kind of a defamation.
00:10:39.580And you were one of the first people to have a conversation with me on this show.
00:10:44.300And you did something very unusual, which is you would interview me.
00:10:49.000And then you'd play a section in that interview.
00:10:50.920And then you would play your fact check.
00:10:52.840And people called me up and said, you know, that's not fair what Megan's doing because she's, you know, she's putting these, she's after checking you rather than having an argument about you.
00:11:05.420And I said, what she's doing is the only way that she could allow me on.
00:12:29.920You know, some of the stuff we had an actual back and forth on, like this is what somebody says.
00:12:33.320And some of the stuff I stole the last word with those, you know, this is what his critics are saying about it.
00:12:37.340But I think people walked away from it really enjoying it.
00:12:39.760You know, my critics and yours saying, I learned something, you know, and I, they saw you in a new light because all you need to do is talk to you to realize there's much, much more to you and your advocacy and what you're about than this one issue.
00:12:52.220You're a lifelong environmental lawyer who spent his entire career trying to clean up the rivers and the environment and the ocean from, from toxic chemicals, which are killing us.
00:13:01.780I mean, that's something even your critics would, would admit.
00:13:04.660So it's, it's the vaccine lane that they've used to try to dismiss you.
00:13:11.120And I, that's one of the reasons I'm glad to see you run because you're talking about a lot more.
00:13:15.000And frankly, you sound in some ways, I've heard other people say this, but a lot more like my friend Tucker, who we've been talking about since his exit from Fox.
00:13:21.660Then, then maybe you do like Joe Biden, you know, I mean, he too sees government actors, elites who work in a coordinated way to snuff out the middle class, to snuff out the lower class, to snuff out the middleman or anyone who threatens their interests.
00:13:36.360This is something you are appealing to people with this same kind of messaging.
00:13:41.120I mean, Tucker, you know, I, I really admire Tucker for what he did and I don't agree with Tucker on all of his issues and during the, you know, a lot of his career, I was, as I considered him a villain.
00:13:58.460But I have gotten to know him and I saw the courage that he demonstrated over the last couple of years since the beginning of COVID in talking about civil liberties when nobody else was talking and talking and defending freedom of speech, which, you know, that it used to be that journalists were absolutists on the First Amendment.
00:14:19.500Every journalist, if you mess around with the First Amendment, every journalist in this country would be against you.
00:14:25.460And yet during COVID, they all went silent.
00:14:28.460At a time when government imposed censorship was becoming the norm.
00:14:34.380And Tucker was the one guy to, you know, to talk about it.
00:14:38.320He, he was the person who was, who was pushing back against the Ukraine war narrative.
00:14:44.700And, and he's been, you know, pushing on all these populist issues about the corporate control of our government and all of the things that Democrats should be saying in this country.
00:14:55.940And that, you know, you know, people who care about the destruction of the middle class should be talking about.
00:15:02.420And, you know, and, you know, most journalists today become kind of propagandists for the, you know, for the official narrative.
00:15:11.580But what, what Tucker shows, what you show is that there, that these networks are not monolithic, that there's a lot of really good people in them who are still trying to practice journalism, who are still functioning on, on, on, on, from idealism rather than ideology.
00:15:30.860And, and, and are, you know, pushing back even when their jobs are at stake.
00:15:35.720I spoke recently with Matt Taibbi and we discussed this story about how, when Joe Biden was running against Donald Trump and we had the Hunter Biden report in the New York Post saying that, you know, the laptop had come out and it had all this stuff on it.
00:15:50.360And it was dismissed instantly by 51 so-called security experts as, or Intel experts as, as Russian disinformation.
00:15:56.940We now know that was coordinated between the Biden campaign and the actual CIA, which helped get people to sign on to this thing.
00:16:14.860And so this is direct coordination between a presidential campaign and the CIA to snuff out a bad development for a presidential candidate with what was itself disinformation.
00:16:28.700These claims about the laptop being a bunch of made up BS from the Russians.
00:16:41.320And, you know, without sort of taking sides on the issue, it is so alarming that the CIA is now, you know, participating actively as basically as an agency in presidential campaigns and choosing favorites.
00:16:58.360And, you know, this is exactly at the beginning, you know, when the CIA was created in 1947 by President Truman, there was almost unanimity among Democrats and Republicans who were very, very alarmed at allowing the creation of an intelligence agency, of a secretive intelligence agency in the United States.
00:17:21.480It hadn't existed before in American history, and most Americans believe that that was the province of totalitarian regimes like the Gestapo in Germany, like the KGB in Russia, like Savak in Iran, and the Stasi in East Germany.
00:17:37.900But it was inconsistent with the United States, but it was inconsistent with the values of a democracy or the continued existence of a democracy.
00:17:45.400And then in 1973, through 1975, the Church Committee hearings, when all of these, you know, it was a two-year hearing on the assassinations and on the involvement of the CIA and assassinations all over the world and fixing elections and doing dirty tricks.
00:18:05.160And also, Operation Mockingbird, which was an illegal project by the CIA, because the CIA and its charter is not allowed to propagandize American citizens, which is exactly what the 100 Laptop, you know, story is about.
00:18:23.140It was one of the key negotiating provisions that were added to bring on people who were very, very nervous that the CIA could never propagandize American citizens.
00:18:38.100And yet, and so in 1975, when all this information came out about Operation Mockingbird, which was a project of the CIA to compromise American journalists, and there was over, I think, 500 journalists at that time.
00:18:52.200And Bob Woodward, or Carl Bernstein wrote an article in the Rolling Stone, a couple years later, detailing, you know, the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of these other journals, the CBS, ABC, NBC, all had high-level CIA officers in their management, in their editorial section, that many journalists were on the CIA payroll.
00:19:21.580And after that, the CIA promised that it would no longer, that it would disband Operation Mockingbird, which was illegal, and that it would now just propagandize foreign journalists.
00:19:36.040So the CIA today, through USAID, is the single largest ponder of journalism in the world.
00:19:43.040They were supposed to only do it in foreign countries.
00:19:45.940But now we know that they're doing it here, too.
00:19:48.920And, you know, during the COVID epidemic, the White House provided, with Facebook and with Twitter and the social media sites, provided a portal to the FBI, through which the CIA, we now know, was censoring people like me who were speaking out against government policy.
00:20:09.220Oh, this is kind of the worst nightmare of the CIA at the outset, which is that it would become an instrument for the president of the United States punishing dissenters or people, you know, his critics.
00:20:24.360And that story that you talked about is so alarming.
00:20:32.880And, you know, and yet the press, the regular journalists in this country do not seem to understand how horrifying this is, how threatening this is.
00:20:41.360You need to be horrified when they do it to either side, not just to the side you oppose.
00:20:50.200They like it as the ends justifying the means.
00:20:52.680And it's a this is a very dangerous road we're going down.
00:20:56.700You're you know, we talked about this before, about how it used to be the Republicans would be very defensive of agencies like the CIA and the FBI and the Democrats would be more suspicious of them.
00:21:05.240And now we've sort of flipped roles in this country on that front.
00:21:09.780Now, when it comes to Ukraine, I don't want to say you have unanimity between the Dems and the Republicans, but it's you know, the Dems seem very in support of this.
00:21:18.560This, you know, our our support of Ukraine and what we're doing over there.
00:21:22.640Most Republicans also say that they support what we're doing, though.
00:21:26.140There's a growing body of dissenters within the GOP.
00:21:29.540And Trump certainly seems to be one of them.
00:21:32.580Now, he participated in this CNN town hall last night and was asked about Ukraine.
00:22:30.760And it was interesting, just anecdotally, it's a small room, but those are all Republican primary voters in New Hampshire clapping for his answer.
00:23:08.820The infrastructure is wrecked the country now because of the prolong, uh, prolonging of this war, which is a U.S. project.
00:23:18.200The neocons in the White House have prolonged this war and, uh, much longer, rather than treating it as a humanitarian crisis and trying to end it quickly.
00:23:28.600Every step of the White House has taken, particularly the neocons in the White House has been to prolong the war and, uh, and expand and increase the bloodshed.
00:23:38.980Um, President, I, we were told, we were sold on the fact that this was the humanitarian issue, that a humanitarian intervention.
00:23:45.480My son went over there and fought, you know, and that was his impression too.
00:23:50.320He went over and he fought, you know, as a machine gunner.
00:23:54.080Special Forces Unit and, uh, Kharkiv Offensive, um, my, and, and, but when President Biden was asked about the objectives of the war, he said it was to get, depose Vladimir Putin to do regime change, which is a neocon project, an aspiration to neocons for decades, for a decade.
00:24:13.700When his, his, uh, Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, spoke about the war in April of 2022, or, yeah, 2021.
00:24:24.080In 2022, excuse me, he said that the objective, our objective in the war was to exhaust the Russians and degrade their capacity to fight in any other part of the world.
00:24:35.060Well, that is not a good idea for the Ukrainians.
00:24:38.460That means we are turning this country into an abattoir for Ukrainian kids in order to achieve a geopolitical objective of, you know, of weakening Russia.
00:24:50.060And by the way, I don't think it's a good idea for us to be weakening Russia.
00:24:54.180We are pushing Russia into the camp of China.
00:24:57.900And, uh, and so the whole thing is, is kind of a nightmare.
00:25:01.700And it's, the Ukrainians are a victim of U.S. policies and Russian policies.
00:25:07.080Now, you know, I like what President, uh, Trump said during his administration.
00:25:13.520He actually laid the groundwork for this war.
00:25:16.300He began selling for the first time Ukrainians offensive weapons.
00:25:20.500He walked away from the ABM treaty, which was the treaty that limited and made the Russians very nervous, because that was the treaty we had signed with the Russians to say neither of us are going to deploy on the intermediate level, intermediate range nuclear weapons.
00:25:35.600That from the Ukraine is, Ukraine is only 400 miles from Russia, and we could hit Moscow in minutes with those weapons.
00:25:43.940So it destabilized the area, made the Russians very, very anxious.
00:25:47.880And then he continued to push the, uh, the borders of NATO right up to the Russian borders, which the Russians had said was a red line.
00:25:56.820So his administration, although he, his intentions, I think were good, his administration was filled with neocons and warmongers and, you know, swamp creatures and, uh, and, and pharmaceutical executives who were making decisions that, you know, did not reflect what President Trump was saying to his base.
00:26:19.280Can I ask you a question that just to tie it all, not to make it all about Tucker, but we talked about him a minute ago and, um, I did see you tweet that you thought maybe the, one of the reasons he was axed was because yes, he's spoken out on Ukraine and much in the way you just did, but you thought it may had to do, it may have had to do with big pharma.
00:26:36.820Now you and I discussed the last time in depth about how it is very true that big pharma finances most big media.
00:26:44.700They pay half the bills of these companies and it's, it's potentially perilous to speak out against them, against the vaccine and so on.
00:26:55.060He was doing that, but that's just your supposition, right?
00:26:58.260You don't have any inside knowledge on that being a reason.
00:27:00.900It's my supposition, you know, on that particular transaction.
00:27:05.760But, um, in 2014, I had a conversation with Roger Rails and that has bearing on that.
00:27:13.960This, you know, on my kind of the background of my assumptions going into this and Roger, I, I had spent, when I was, I had this weird relationship with Roger, um, where it was Roger else.
00:27:25.700Because I spent the summer in a tent with him in 2019, I spent three months in a tent in Africa with Roger.
00:29:35.920And by, and since then, and he told me at that time, he said, he said, I think he said 75% of the, of the, uh, primetime news hour revenues come from pharmaceutical companies.
00:29:50.400And he also said, as I remember that 17 out of 22 ads on the typical evening news show are pharmaceutical ads.
00:30:01.460And, and so then when I saw Roger, when I saw Tucker the night, he introduced me and we had an interview, but before he introduced me,
00:30:11.060he did this long monologue about how the pharmaceutical companies were controlling content on network news and how bad it was for our country.
00:30:23.040The other channels took hundreds of millions of dollars from big pharma companies, and then they shilled for their sketchy products on the air.
00:30:30.320And as they did that, they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products.
00:30:34.540At the very least, this was a moral crime.
00:30:38.260It was disgusting, but it was universal.
00:30:40.840It happened across the American news media.
00:30:44.420So at this point, the question isn't who in public life is corrupt, too many to count.
00:30:49.380The question is who is telling the truth?
00:30:54.120And I was sitting there saying that is exactly what Roger said he would get fired for if any new, if anybody on network news said that.
00:31:03.240So when he was fired five days later, I disconnected some to us.
00:31:07.880But, you know, I'm sure they had, I know they had other reasons to fire Tucker.
00:31:13.040There were other things that they didn't like about what he was doing.
00:31:15.800He wasn't, you know, bucking the trend.
00:31:18.960But it, but it shows that he had this enormous popularity.
00:31:23.000His show was what he was getting 3.5 million viewers a night on an average night, 5 million on a good night.
00:31:31.600That's CNN gets, I think, about 350,000.
00:31:36.560So he was getting 10 times what CNN was doing.
00:31:40.600He was such a huge revenue generator for that network.
00:31:44.180And what his firing showed is that the ideology and it trumps popularity and even revenues, that they were willing to get rid of a guy like that because he wouldn't, you know, he wouldn't follow the narrative.
00:32:03.600I have to say that's, that's a new theory and just as plausible as any of the others.
00:32:09.200You know, I made this point, but I will say, you know, Fox net right now is trying to run cover for itself, but putting out the head of its ad sales department to say, oh, the, the ads are going up in the 8 p.m.
00:32:18.840hour, getting more revenue from blue chip brands now that he's gone, now that we just have generic hosts doing this hour.
00:32:24.440But that's sort of a head fake because, yes, they make some money, but they make some money off of their ads.
00:32:30.580It is interesting, but that really Fox News makes most of its money off of its subscription fees from the cable providers who pay Fox to have Fox on their lineups so that they, the cable providers, look more attractive to their audiences.
00:32:43.760Hey, you, if you, if you go with us instead of dish, you're going to have Fox News or whatever, however they do the pitch.
00:32:50.800And it's more like if we don't have Fox, they're not going to choose us.
00:32:54.380And in order to drive those numbers up, they have to show good ratings.
00:32:58.220That's so Fox uses the good ratings that its hosts deliver to jack up subscription fees.
00:33:05.660So, yes, Tucker wasn't getting blue chip brand advertisers on the 8 p.m.
00:33:09.200because of all the left wing boycott calls against him.
00:33:12.060But he was helping drive that all important subscription rate up higher than ever because he was bringing in huge numbers, as you just pointed out.
00:33:21.480Yet another one of the mysteries to this whole thing.
00:33:23.660And I'll bring the audience's latest numbers because they're also not good.
00:34:33.360Let's talk about what's happening in Democratic politics, because you are crowbarring your way into this race and the DNC is very much against you.
00:35:15.800I think the Democratic Party is making a mistake from the point of view of the party, the kind of long term credibility of the party to not have debates for a couple of reasons.
00:35:30.680One is, you know, if President Biden at some point is going to have to debate President Trump, you know, who's the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, President Trump has shown himself to be the most devastating debater, probably since Abraham Lincoln.
00:35:48.740And, you know, in terms of just his capacity to obliterate and dispatch opponents and President Biden really needs to be on his toes in doing that.
00:35:57.260And, you know, asking him to not train for that.
00:36:01.740President Trump is going to have to go through a series of debates in his own political party, presumably.
00:36:07.280And and to have President Biden not being going through his own debate process and getting his, you know, getting in shape for that is like asking a prize fighter to, you know, to train for a championship fight by sitting on a couch and eating Chick-fil-A.
00:36:25.100You know, he should be out there showing what he can do and also showing a Democratic base that, you know, here I here's that I can do this.
00:36:36.780I'm able to do it. I'm going to care. I'm the guy who's going to carry the flag for the party against President Trump.
00:36:43.220And I'm the most capable person to do that.
00:36:45.540But I also think we're at a time in history, Megan, where, you know, with the January 6th demonstrations and all that, you know, the riots, whatever, that there are people in this country who believe that, who have strong, strong doubts and anxieties about the integrity of the electoral system and the integrity of our democracy.
00:37:06.800And it's not just Republicans, by the way, I, you know, most Democrats believe that the 2001 election or 2000 election was stolen from from President from Vice President Gore under the Bush Gore election.
00:37:24.460And in 2004, I wrote an award winning article for Rolling Stone showing how the 2004 election when Bush ran against John Kerry had also been fixed in the six counties in Ohio.
00:37:39.760In 2016, Hillary believed that the election had been fixed against her.
00:37:47.620And and then, you know, Bernie Sanders followers believe that the Democratic Party had fixed the election against them.
00:37:54.460We should all be focused right now, both political parties, but particularly Democratic Party, which is supposed to be Democratic, should be focused on making ourselves templates or role models for for for for electoral integrity and for persuading the American people that the system is not rigged against you.
00:38:16.320So this is not the Soviet Union where the party picks the candidate and the whole thing is fixed all the way through.
00:38:22.700But there's real democracy at work here and that we're going to go out and meet people.
00:38:27.760We're going to debate our opponents. We're going to shake hands. We're going to do retail politics.
00:38:31.460We're not just going to carpet bomb the country with, you know, billions of dollars in advertising.
00:38:36.220And have nobody actually question the candidate or challenge them on their issues or their beliefs, their ideologies and see them in action, make sure that they understand what's happening on a human level and communities across this country.
00:38:53.500I don't think that's a good thing for our party. I think we should be, you know, we should be making our party the role model for how democracy works and how it is not fixed.
00:39:05.340It's not rigged. We're supposed to be the party of the new deal, not the party of the rigged deal.
00:39:11.120You talk about how the prize fighter or the one heading into a prize fight needs to get off the couch.
00:39:17.000This isn't like a Chris Christie or a Newt Gingrich, you know, guys who have a natural facility with words and you could just put them up there tomorrow and they could probably do very well in a debate.
00:39:27.980That is not Joe Biden. Every day we get new videotape of him confusing people, muffing the words up.
00:39:35.560Just yesterday we had he went to an event. He didn't go out when they played Hail to the Chief.
00:39:41.160He seemed confused that that was him. And then when he finally got out there, it was time to leave.
00:40:45.020I don't know if it'll work. I don't think it's good for our country.
00:40:48.580I think I don't think that's good for our country.
00:40:51.200I don't think anybody can think that's good for our country.
00:40:54.840And I think the optics and the rest of the world, you know, where we're already losing our leadership, where our moral authority is diminished.
00:41:02.220We're supposed to be the exemplary nation.
00:41:04.440We invented democracy in this country, modern democracy.
00:41:07.380The Greeks invented it before us and modern democracy in 1776.
00:41:11.600We were the only democratic nation in the world at that point.
00:41:16.700By the Civil War, by 1860, there were six democracies, all modeled on the United States.
00:41:27.200We're the ones that they're looking to and saying, you know, we want to be like the United States of America.
00:41:33.340And this is just it is it's very troubling to me.
00:41:40.120And it should be troubling to most Americans that we cannot, you know, model democracy for the world, that we're going to we're going to have leaders that are picked, you know, by spending money, you know, by getting money from wealthy people in corporations.
00:41:57.200And then propagandizing the American people and that they never have to meet anybody.
00:42:02.140They never have to do a town hall that's not all set up with, you know, people whose questions they already, you know, know and the answers that are already written out for them.
00:42:18.380And people are angry in this country right now.
00:42:20.820People are angry and they're they're they're they're riddled with anxiety on their, you know, the middle class is being destroyed in this country.
00:42:38.860He kind of hid information about his full mental state in his last official exam because he didn't release the results of any mental exam.
00:42:50.020Same as John Fetterman, frankly, that they hid information about his well-being before the election.
00:42:55.680He got in and then promptly had an emotional breakdown and spent six weeks in inpatient at Walter Reed.
00:43:02.660And so there's a real concern here about how well Joe Biden is.
00:43:06.700Do you do you share those concerns about his mental well-being, his fitness for the job?
00:43:13.340You know, I really don't have a way to make I don't have any insight that's different than what the American people see.
00:43:19.180I see the things, you know, that you showed and that, you know, I read an article the other day, Megan.
00:43:25.720And I don't know whether it was in The New York Times or The Washington Post, but it was a major journal in which some pundit, a Democratic pundit, was making the argument that it's OK if the president is non-compass-mantus.
00:43:40.280It's because you don't really need a mental acuity to run the country.
00:43:46.660You can be more of a figurehead and you're surrounded by, you know, technocrats and tax policy for you.
00:43:53.560I saw this. You say age, whatever. So he's age. So he's old. So he might be potentially infirm.
00:43:59.700You know, and then they pointed out that FDR was in a wheelchair. Oh, that's the same.
00:44:04.700FDR was in a wheelchair. His legs were disabled, you know, but he was not mentally disabled.
00:44:10.480At the end of his last presidency, where he'd been, you know, his fourth election, by that time, he was extremely infirm.
00:44:18.760And, you know, you can make an argument about whether that was good or because we're in the middle of the war.
00:44:23.520People did not want to switch towards the mainstream, in the mid-stream.
00:44:27.180But the problem is, if you're surrounded by people, a lot of times, and I'm not making a judgment on his mental acuity, you know, or not, because I don't know.
00:44:37.120I don't have any insight into it, but I don't think it's good to have a president who's not on his toes.
00:44:43.380Because what happens is it empowers the people around you.
00:44:46.080And those people are, in his case, are people who are, you know, the neocons who are warmongering, who are these, you know, who are technocrats, who are people from the pharmaceutical industry and lobbying firms.
00:45:00.800And it's just, it's a license for those, you know, the military industrial complex and these large corporations to pillage our country and to complete the destruction of the American middle class.
00:45:15.500And we need a vigorous president who's robust, who's ready to tackle these real problems and not just keep the ship sailing.
00:45:23.540You know, one of the things with FDR, when he was on his fourth term, he had a ship that was sailing to victory.
00:45:32.340He had, you know, he was building the American middle class.
00:45:36.040He was winning the war against the Nazis and against Japan and against fascism across the globe.
00:45:42.340He was building alliances around the world.
00:45:44.400So he had this long success story, and America was on an uphill trajectory.
00:45:48.340Today, America's on a downhill trajectory, and there's nobody in this country who can disagree with that.
00:46:39.360You know, hearing you talk and talking about some of these issues, you definitely have a fair amount in common with President Trump when it comes to policy.
00:46:47.220And also, I would say, as an outsider, you know, just coming in and saying, I see all these things differently.
00:46:55.540So we're going to come back, but quickly before we go to break, if you had to choose, if you didn't get the nomination, you had to vote for either Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
00:47:04.800Could you see a world in which you supported Trump?
00:47:18.520They're on rebuilding the middle class and reindustrialized, rebuilding the industrial base in this country, protecting the environment, ending corruption in government.
00:47:29.060And those are things that kind of avoid the culture war issues and look for common ground with Americans.
00:47:35.900And I think I share those with people of both parties.
00:47:38.840And that's why I think I have a lot of support from both independents and Republicans as well as Democrats.
00:48:16.620Don't forget, folks, while I have your attention, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
00:48:23.200Full video show and the clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash Megan Kelly.
00:48:27.660You can also get it via audio podcast.
00:48:29.660And don't forget to go to Megan Kelly dot com to sign up for the American News Minute.
00:51:03.800And it's, you know, as you said, the campaign is getting a lot of traction, which has been I think it's been really exciting for both of us.
00:51:12.380You kind of assume the risk when you marry a Kennedy, that political office or campaigns could be in your future at some level.
00:51:20.960She probably knew that it is not necessarily all of Cheryl's positions, your positions.
00:51:26.380And some people need to remember that when they talk about her and her Hollywood career.
00:51:33.560All right, let's talk about some of those culture war issues, because I did see you weigh in on one of them, and that's the trans issue.
00:51:40.240So last month, Republican lawmakers in the House, they tried to pass legislation that would prevent trans athletes from running or competing in girls and women's sports.
00:51:52.700And in fact, it was to the point where President Biden said if that bill ever came to his desk, he would veto it.
00:51:58.240He's so committed to letting trans athletes participate in girls sports.
00:52:03.560Now, latest I could find was there was a poll out just this week from The Washington Post showing something like two thirds of the American electorate is not in favor of this.
00:52:12.700They do they do not want trans people running in women's sports or competing in women's sports was let's see.
00:53:11.040And I didn't make it, you know, I didn't do a poll before I answered that question.
00:53:15.420I just and I don't know what the bill says.
00:53:18.820And I don't know if there was something else obnoxious.
00:53:21.500And by the way, if trans, you know, individuals want to participate in intramural sports or, you know, on either side, I don't, you know, I think it's not nice to have the kind of rules that, you know, laws that say they can't do that.
00:53:43.040But, you know, when I, you know, for example, first of all, I think we need to be respectful about everybody's choices and particularly what they do with their body.
00:53:54.820And people should not be shamed for that.
00:53:57.540And people should not be treated in a way that is disparaging or derogatory.
00:54:04.200And that is, I think, the key thing that all of us need to be sensitive to these issues and respect each other.
00:54:11.340But on this particular issue, my uncle, Ted Kennedy, wrote Title IX.
00:54:18.400And I was, you know, I was very, very conscious of that and campaigned for him during that period and understood what a hard fight that was because, you know, his idea was that women should have the ability to participate in sports and have the same awards and attention and investment as men.
00:54:38.760And women had fought for that for years and years and years, women athletes.
00:54:42.740They'd been treated as redheaded stepchildren of the system, you know, as second class citizens.
00:54:50.720And so I, you know, I was conscious of how of the hard battle.
00:54:56.040And women have fought to be able to develop college sports and professional sports and develop themselves as professional athletes.
00:55:04.560And it just doesn't seem fair that a person who's born as a man and has all these advantages of heights, of, you know, of musculature and all these other biological advantages that, you know, they should be able to walk onto a team like that.
00:55:21.860I have a niece who's, who is, who worked so hard her whole life to get and put thousands and thousands of hours in and made huge sacrifices in her lives and to get a scholarship to play softball at Boston College where she is today.
00:55:39.920And it just seemed to me to be unfair if a person with biological advantages can take that away from her.
00:55:49.720So just, you know, I answered that question the way that I saw it without really thinking much about it.
00:55:56.800You know, when, when I think CNN broadcaster asked me about it, and it just seems to be me to be common sense that, you know, and, and my assumptions, again, are based upon a long, long fight of watching women achieve, fight so hard to achieve what they've achieved in sports.
00:56:17.540And it just doesn't seem to, you know, fair to, for somebody to be able to take that away from them.
00:56:23.900Yeah, it's not fair. And it's not safe. In a lot of these instances as well, we had on a young volleyball player who was forced to play against a trans player who was biologically male, who really hurt her, who really hurt her.
00:56:36.900And some of our viewers actually wrote in after the fact and explained that if you have a male volleyball match, the net is higher to accommodate for the heights.
00:56:45.180And I haven't checked this, but this is from one of our viewers. And that, you know, because they can spike it, they, they can spike it so hard if the net is low enough.
00:56:54.940And this girl got seriously hurt and came on and talked about it. Just a quick follow up on it, though, because now 19 states have banned the medicalization of the trans issue for minors.
00:57:03.680No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:57:10.220No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:57:11.520No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:57:13.280And who really, the study show that maybe over 90%, it varies on a study, but I've seen any place from 72 to 98%
00:57:21.100of kids who left or are left alone will grow out of any trans confusion and will revert back to
00:57:26.300their biological sex and gender with no problem. Um, where do you stand on that? The, the push to
00:57:32.560ban medicalization of this issue for minors? Uh, I think it should be banned without certainly
00:57:39.980without parents permission. I, I don't know enough about it, Megan to make a, um, a, uh,
00:57:47.980you know, make a decision about whether it should be banned altogether. I just, I think without
00:57:53.060parents permission, it would, should certainly be banned for the reasons that you just gave.
00:57:58.780Well, I'm telling you, it should be banned altogether. You get, we can talk more about
00:58:02.280it later, but even with the parents permission, the problem is that they're, they're saying yes to
00:58:05.760having, having girls have their breasts cut off at age 15. You know, these are, some of these parents
00:58:10.820are kooks and they've got an agenda and they've got sort of a belief that this is what's in the
00:58:14.740best interest of the child. And literally they're chemically castrating boys and girls. If you go
00:58:19.200from puberty blockers to cross sex hormones at a young age, you will never have an orgasm.
00:58:24.660You are rendering yourself in most of these instances sterile. So you will never have a child
00:58:29.340women chopping off their breasts who then have regrets will never breastfeed each. I mean,
00:58:33.520it's just absolute. It's a, it's a monstrosity. That's my view. So you have to come over here if you
00:58:39.300want to get my vote. Okay, go ahead. Good points. I just don't know. You know,
00:58:44.480I'd love to hear arguments on both sides, but you make a very, very compelling argument, Megan.
00:58:50.420All right. Let's talk about the book we've been talking about. You've written a few,
00:58:53.380but the one that first got me started on the RFK lane, Jay, was the real Anthony Fauci. And he was
00:59:00.860in the news last week when he admitted to, was it the New York times? Yeah. New York times magazine
00:59:07.440that masks are only 10% effective against COVID. After everything they put us through, he admitted
00:59:13.660masks were at best 10% effective against COVID just around the edges. It absolutely was an
00:59:22.620obscene, belated, and also still untrue admission, right? I mean, I think 10% is being generous,
00:59:30.100but what do you make of this, this come to Jesus moment for him?
00:59:33.140Oh, I mean, you know, we knew at the beginning that they were not effective. And he knew that
00:59:38.040because not only did he say it publicly, but he also advised his boss at HHS when his boss asked him,
00:59:45.540should we be married wearing masks? He said, no, they're useless against, you know, these
00:59:50.200respiratory infections. And we actually, at that point around when they first started using them in
00:59:56.140in April, March and April of 2020, we went into the scientific literature on the PubMed, and we went
01:00:05.300and mined every single mask study that we could find. And, you know, agnostically, just trying to
01:00:12.980figure out, do they work or don't they work? And I was shocked by what we found, because what they
01:00:18.520showed is even in surgery theaters, the studies that had been done were inconclusive. In other
01:00:27.760words, there was a big study in 1982 that the University of London did, University of London
01:00:33.200Hospital, where they actually took a mask off of everybody in the hospital for a period of time,
01:00:40.900even in the surgical theaters, and they saw that infection rates went down. So the advocacy of
01:00:48.300masks has never been shown, even in, you know, those kind of clinical settings. And then the
01:00:55.420Cochran Collaboration came out recently. The Cochran Collaboration is the ultimate kind of arbiter of
01:01:01.620clinical trial data. And they did a meta review of all of the mass studies that they could find that
01:01:08.920were good. You know, they grade the studies according to a weight and a scale. And they came to the
01:01:14.980conclusion that the masks were ineffective. But this HHS knew this. Anthony Fauci knew this from
01:01:20.220the beginning. And that was what was alarming, I think, to some of us, because we could read the
01:01:25.740science that was available to him. And it made no sense what he was. The lockdowns also. Lockdowns
01:01:33.440violated every pandemic preparedness protocol by the WHO, by the CDC, by the National Health Service
01:01:41.500in the UK, by the EU Medical Agency. All of them had these pandemic plans. And they all said lockdowns
01:01:48.220don't work. You quarantine the sick. People have been thinking about this and planning for it for ages.
01:01:55.140You quarantine the sick. You protect the vulnerable. But you let society continue to function because
01:02:00.740the penalty for not doing that, for locking down a society, is cataclysm on the economy,
01:02:06.580on deaths, deaths from other sources, in access to medicines, from heart attacks, from distress,
01:02:15.240from suicides, from isolation. You know, these things kill people. And they kill people at rates
01:02:20.240that are comparable to infectious diseases, you know, that have rates like COVID.
01:02:25.060It would have been nice to hear a question like that asked of President Trump last night. Let me,
01:02:30.280my last minute with you, ask you about today's news, which is unbelievably, unbelievably,
01:02:36.380EcoHealth Alliance is getting $2 million more of taxpayer money. The very organization that was
01:02:41.660caught doing gain-of-function research in that Wuhan lab on our dime the last time that lied about it.
01:02:48.760They lied. Peter Daszak, who runs it, lied about it. Anthony Fauci lied about it to Rand Paul.
01:02:53.440We're giving them more money. Now, supposedly, we're not supposed to worry about this $2.3 million
01:02:59.420because they have agreed, EcoHealth has, not to subcontract the work to China,
01:03:04.960collect new virus samples from the wild, or carry out gain-of-function research. That's what they
01:03:10.740promised the last time. That's what they said the last time that they weren't doing it. It turned out
01:03:14.740to be a lie. So your thoughts on the fact that we're giving them another $2.3 million?
01:03:20.360That's insane. But also, you know, President Biden has now allocated $88 billion
01:03:25.060for more gain-of-function science. So we're, you know, we're doing this not only through,
01:03:31.740you know, in, in not, not, not, maybe not anymore, hopefully at the Wuhan lab, but we're doing it in
01:03:39.200labs in Ukraine, doing it in labs in Georgia, in the nation of Georgia. We're doing it here in the
01:03:45.980United States, the University of North Carolina, at Galveston, at, at, um, at, uh, Boston College or
01:03:52.740university, or Boston University and, uh, and the other NIH labs that are continuing this, you know,
01:03:59.340with biowarfare development. And we should, we, we signed a treaty in 73 that says we're not going
01:04:06.640to do that anymore. And then, you know, when we passed the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act gave an
01:04:12.000exemption that said, okay, that treaty still exists, but we're going to give an exemption for federal
01:04:16.580officials who do biowarfare development, they cannot be prosecuted. And that relaunched this
01:04:22.880arms race, this explosion in gain-of-function studies. So now the Chinese are doing, the Russians
01:04:29.320are doing it, everybody's doing it to keep up with us. And they're developing some really horrendous
01:04:33.760weaponry. They're developing both the Chinese, the Russians, and the U.S. are working on weapons
01:04:38.360that are ethnic bioweapons, organisms that will kill people to certain races, you know, and we
01:04:44.640don't want to unleash this stuff on humanity. We need to just sign a treaty, make it enforceable,
01:04:49.700make it verifiable, and everybody just stops doing it. Either way, that's a, that's a happy note on
01:04:56.480which to end, the bioweapon that's going to take out certain races. Okay, sleep well,
01:05:03.760Megan, you don't want to get me started. I know. I do. I do want to get you started,
01:05:08.180but for now we'll pause and say to be continued until the next time, because we're going to move
01:05:12.080on to our next guest, Charles C.W. Cook. RFKJ, great to see you again. Bobby Kennedy will be
01:05:17.900watching. And as I said, to be continued. Thank you, Megan. All right. Up next, Charles C.W. Cook
01:05:24.620and my thoughts on last night's Trump CNN town hall. My thoughts on the CNN town hall last night.
01:05:34.760It failed on every front except one. It was wildly successful in giving Donald Trump an hour of free
01:05:40.920airtime to make his case without laying a glove on him. Congrats, CNN. My biggest takeaway on this
01:05:47.040thing is town halls or debates meant to help primary voters decide on a candidate ought to be
01:05:52.440hosted by anchors who understand what is important to that candidate's party. I realize Caitlin Collins
01:05:58.620once worked for the Daily Caller, but her days of connecting with the GOP audiences are apparently
01:06:02.580over. The topics pushed by CNN in this thing might as well have been selected by Rachel Maddow
01:06:07.400or the Never Trump Lincoln project. It's actually possible. It's possible they did it, though.
01:06:13.020Chief Lincoln project guy Rick Wilson did not seem too happy about the execution by CNN.
01:06:19.120And whatever the fuck they thought they were going to get out of this, they instead have set a match
01:06:25.780to democracy. This insanity should be pulled off the fucking air. Chris Lick, you should be ashamed
01:06:31.680of yourself. This is astoundingly bad for the brand of CNN. It's astoundingly bad for the country.
01:06:38.220And it's astoundingly bad, honestly, folks, for every other Republican candidate in the primaries.
01:06:43.140Wrap that shit up. It's done. You saw this tonight. You know you can't beat him on the stage
01:06:48.460because he's going to be the nominee. This shit is un-fucking-believable. I've never seen anything
01:06:53.880like it. It is a disaster of the highest fucking degree. So you liked it.
01:07:01.900January 6th, election denialism. Mar-a-Lago documents the E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse case.
01:07:07.960Are these the topics Republican voters want to devote their town halls to in order to make the
01:07:12.880best primary decision? Only a liberal would think so. And though the questions were supposed to come from
01:07:17.860the audience, it was Caitlin Collins who raised most of these or who refused to move on from them
01:07:23.380once Trump had answered, in some cases, repeatedly. Where were the questions about inflation or the
01:07:29.640banking crisis and what to do about it? She spent three minutes on the economy and 20 on January 6th
01:07:36.860in the last election. How about a question on why he didn't fire Fauci, whether he regrets the
01:07:41.640lockdowns, where he stands on women's rights vis-a-vis the trans community, what his plans are to
01:07:46.020address the intelligence agency's capture by hard partisans, whether government should be used to
01:07:50.400shut down corporate ideologies that Republicans don't happen to like, as his rival Ron DeSantis is
01:07:54.500trying to do in Florida. What would he, President Trump, do about tech censorship of conservatives?
01:08:00.540One third of the debate on whether he lost the last time around the insurrection and pardons for
01:08:06.780its participants may be catnip for the left, but it is not what's driving GOP voters.
01:08:11.760CNN tried to thread the needle here. It's dying in the ratings, absolutely dying. It's truly a
01:08:17.860dreadful situation over there. They're under new ownership, which reportedly wants to restore
01:08:22.280CNN's reputation as a somewhat boring but mostly nonpartisan news channel that might be acceptable
01:08:28.180even to Republicans. I support that mission, but I don't believe it's possible with the cast of
01:08:33.120anchors that drove those Republican viewers away in the first place. Firing Don Lemon and Brian
01:08:38.620Stelter was a start. But let's face it, their lineup from start to finish not only hates the GOP,
01:08:43.660they don't know the first thing about them. CNN lured Trump back on its air with an hour of primetime
01:08:49.380while surrounded with Republican voters in New Hampshire. He said it was an offer
01:08:53.500too good to refuse, but it was train wreck TV. It was like they forgot everything we know about Donald
01:09:00.200Trump, like how hard he is to control, how he likes to filibuster, how difficult it is to fact check
01:09:06.180him in real time, how important time limits on answers are when dealing with him, how the way
01:09:12.720to stop him from talking is to remind him to respect the audience and their time, not just to start
01:09:18.660talking during his answers over and over and over. Then you look rude instead of Trump.
01:09:24.920So the thing quickly spun out of control and Caitlin Collins was ill-equipped to stop it.
01:09:30.240A town hall is about the audience and the candidate. She should have faded into obscurity while he had
01:09:36.180changes with the audience. Instead, she hijacked the event by trying to turn it into something about
01:09:42.200her and her supposed toughness, trying to fact check him at every turn and worse by not knowing
01:09:48.300when the horse is dead and there's no reason to keep beating it. Here is one example.
01:09:54.720Would you sign a federal abortion ban into law?
01:09:57.820What I'll do is negotiate so that people are happy. But the fact that we were able,
01:10:01.860I was able, I'm so proud of it. We put three great justices on the Supreme Court. We have
01:10:06.440almost 300 federal judges on the Supreme Court.
01:10:10.560So you, just to be clear, just to be clear, Mr. President, you, you would sign a federal abortion
01:10:15.660ban into law. I said this, I said this, I want to do what's right. And we're looking and we want
01:10:21.080to do what's right for everybody. But what's right. But now for the first time, the people that are pro-life
01:10:25.980have negotiating capability, if they send it to your desk, would you sign it? Some people are at six
01:10:33.100weeks. Some people are at three weeks, two weeks. President Trump is going to make a determination what
01:10:39.560he thinks is great for the country. All right. At a certain point, the audience knows the candidate
01:10:46.580is dodging. You don't have to try to extract the answer like a guard down in Gitmo. Just move on.
01:10:51.560They get it. They get it. He's not going to answer. You risk making the moment about yourself and worse,
01:10:57.160you're wasting precious time. Collins is young. She's inexperienced in the future. Hopefully she
01:11:01.580will do better. This time she was not up to the job. As for the fact checking, well, that is nearly
01:11:06.180impossible in a live event with Donald Trump. We know this. He will say whatever he wants. And she
01:11:11.400did a decent job of trying to correct certain things, but it's spun into her opinion versus his.
01:11:17.180That's not good. Why did she say the 2020 election wasn't rigged, for example? What does rigged mean?
01:11:24.260You have to be careful as a news anchor. Rigged does not necessarily mean Dominion voting machines
01:11:29.380switched votes. That's nonsense. It could mean mail-in balloting was misused. Laws were changed to
01:11:35.780facilitate more votes from Democrats in questionable ways. Stories about Joe Biden were unfairly suppressed
01:11:42.320by big tech. The media was fawning in his coverage of Joe Biden. For example, they blacked out his long
01:11:49.700history of racism, but pummeled Donald Trump with accusations of racism every day. They buried the
01:11:55.140Tara Reid story in which she accused him of sexually assaulting her, but made a heroine out of E. Jean
01:12:00.260Carroll. It's going on to this day. Who is Caitlin Collins to declare to GOP voters, 63% of whom do not
01:12:07.360believe Biden legitimately won the election, that everything was fair and square. She wanted to appease
01:12:13.320CNN's existing audience and her media critics. She knew she'd get points if she injected her opinion
01:12:20.200disguised as fact checks in there. That's not the job of a journalist. Had the topic selection been better
01:12:27.460and more germane to this audience? Had she interfered less and only when it mattered? And had there been a
01:12:34.000time limit on his answers, her interruptions would have been less needed and more effective when
01:12:38.740deployed. Instead, you had an anchor who looked out of her depth and partisan, a candidate who seized
01:12:44.560the opportunity and won the night, and a network that pleased approximately no one. Joining me now
01:12:51.480with his thoughts, Charles C.W. Cook, senior writer at National Review and host of the Charles C.W. Cook
01:12:56.960podcast. Charles, welcome back. What'd you think? Well, I have a somewhat cynical take on this,
01:13:06.560which is that both sides were trying to get what they want out of their relationship, but that CNN
01:13:16.000failed. It helps Donald Trump to pretend that he hates CNN when in fact he hugely benefits from
01:13:25.120CNN as he did last night, as he did in 2015 and 2016. And it helps CNN to pretend that it hates
01:13:33.640Donald Trump when in fact Donald Trump helps CNN by boosting its ratings, allowing it to sell advertising
01:13:42.440and permitting its journalists to play hero. And many of the criticisms that you just advanced
01:13:50.080against Caitlin Collins are best understood as being part of the plan. If you remember back when
01:13:59.880Trump was running and then when Trump was president, figures such as Jim Acosta cast themselves as great
01:14:07.380heroes. They talked as if they were journalists in the Soviet Union. That didn't hurt them. That helped
01:14:14.020them. They got book deals out of it. They became celebrities out of it. I just think that CNN
01:14:20.460miscalculated the event. I don't think Caitlin Collins was strong enough to act as a foil for
01:14:29.300Trump. There were far too many pro-Trump people in the audience so that it ended up not just Trump
01:14:36.300versus Caitlin Collins, but Trump plus the audience versus Caitlin Collins. And it helped Trump a great deal.
01:14:42.960Now, it's worth saying as a caveat here that it didn't help Trump as much as last time around.
01:14:49.400The numbers just came out. I think there were 3.1 million. That's obviously pretty good if you're
01:14:54.120comparing it to where CNN usually is at that time of night. It's pretty good compared to Fox and MSNBC
01:14:59.800last night. But it's not what we were dealing with back in 2015 when Trump was covered wall to wall.
01:15:07.780Uh, I, I wonder if this return of the Trump and CNN show will be short-lived because Trump turned it to his