The Megyn Kelly Show - Trump Wins CNN Town Hall, and if Tucker Got Fired Over Big Pharma, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Charles C.W. Cooke ｜ Ep. 548

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00:00:14.320 Yeah.

00:00:15.480 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:26.700 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:28.280 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Thursday.

00:00:31.100 Democrats, corporate media, and prominent never-Trumpers in a full-on meltdown right now.

00:00:37.660 Started last night, it's ongoing, over CNN's town hall with former President Donald Trump.

00:00:42.800 My God, I'm going to give you my full thoughts on that later, and there are a lot of them.

00:00:47.500 Stand by.

00:00:48.820 Meantime, President Joe Biden openly concedes our southern border is going to be, going to be, quote, chaotic,

00:00:54.720 as the immigration enforcement measure known as Title 42 expires just hours from now.

00:01:00.400 Joining me first, the man who wants to defeat both Trump and Biden and become our nation's

00:01:05.320 next president, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:01:10.380 As you know, I've spoken with him several times on this show.

00:01:13.280 You can find our past interviews, which are in-depth and great.

00:01:17.340 I think you'll love them, in episodes 282, 283, and again in 419.

00:01:22.740 282, 283, 419.

00:01:24.760 Bobby, welcome back to the show.

00:01:26.900 Thank you, Megyn.

00:01:27.740 I always love being with you.

00:01:29.480 That's great to see you.

00:01:30.600 You know, I have to say, the presidential run is exciting on a number of levels, but to

00:01:34.840 me, it struck me as genius because when I talked to you back in episodes 282 and 283,

00:01:41.360 you were still the victim of censorship everywhere.

00:01:44.920 You couldn't get anybody to talk about your book.

00:01:47.540 You couldn't get anyone to talk about your messaging.

00:01:49.640 You were being dismissed as part of the disinformation dozen.

00:01:53.700 And now, as a result of this run, they have to cover you.

00:01:58.280 They have to talk about your messaging.

00:02:01.100 To me, it's pretty brilliant.

00:02:02.540 Is that part of the goal?

00:02:05.140 No, the goal is to win.

00:02:06.960 And my wife would not have tolerated my run if it was just to hear me talk a lot more. 0.98

00:02:14.500 So, but the goal is, you know, I think I entered this because I think I could win.

00:02:22.680 I think I could change the country.

00:02:24.720 But you're right.

00:02:25.940 It's really kind of refreshing to be able to have conversations on television.

00:02:31.320 I'm still censored.

00:02:32.900 You know, ABC got a segment that I did the other day.

00:02:36.700 They asked me a question about vaccines, which I was not bringing up.

00:02:41.220 They asked me.

00:02:42.320 And when I answered it, they cut that segment out, which was very, I think, unusual and was disturbing to a lot of people.

00:02:49.420 We 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.

00:03:06.340 We need to start having frank, open debates that are candid, that are congenial, that are respectful to each other and respectful to the audience.

00:03:17.620 The American people can handle truth and they can handle things that aren't true.

00:03:24.140 The remedy for that is the remedy for bad information and misinformation is not censorship.

00:03:30.840 It's more information.

00:03:31.940 You know, it works, too, their censorship regime.

00:03:35.860 I'm going to play that ABC soundbite you just referenced so the audience can see it for themselves.

00:03:41.000 But I said this before when you were on.

00:03:43.980 I've had an evolution on you.

00:03:46.220 I remember being on the chairlift with a friend of mine in December of 2021, I think it was, and she was reading your book.

00:03:55.840 And maybe it was a few months before I interviewed you.

00:04:00.720 And 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.

00:04:08.920 And she was like, well, he has some really interesting things to say.

00:04:11.440 You might want to look at it.

00:04:12.140 So I did.

00:04:12.900 Started looking at your book, started reading it, started looking up the sources that you cited and support.

00:04:16.960 Then went to my team and said, let's check his sources.

00:04:20.020 Let's see what other people say about his sources.

00:04:22.040 Is 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.

00:04:37.800 And this is not a full endorsement of everything you've ever said.

00:04:41.020 But my my takeaway was this guy has been unfairly maligned by people who are so pro vaccine that they just needed to silence him.

00:04:52.040 So it works to the point where there's a fair amount of people say like, oh, he's a kook. 0.52

00:04:55.880 My friends at National Review, we pulled it just not to insult you.

00:04:58.360 But Jim Garrity, who I really like, said, you're kookoo for Cocoa Pops.

00:05:03.300 And there's similar.

00:05:04.500 But I'll bet you he hasn't done half the work my team and I have to actually see whether that's true.

00:05:10.420 So this censorship actually does have a negative effect on you.

00:05:13.900 Yeah.

00:05:14.340 I mean, what I say to people is show me where I'm wrong.

00:05:17.860 Just show me the facts because, you know, I'm I'm susceptible to to change.

00:05:24.080 If somebody shows me where I'm wrong, I'm not going to stay on an opinion that is based upon a bad factual foundation.

00:05:30.240 I'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.

00:05:43.500 And and I'm sure there are some out there who are very, very careful on social media.

00:05:49.340 I probably have the most robust in-house fact checking operation right now in the media.

00:05:55.340 We have three hundred and like fifty PhD scientists, MD physicians on an advisory board that looks at the things that I post.

00:06:05.620 None of them would stay with me if I was promoting misinformation, you know, regularly or even occasionally.

00:06:11.880 But if I do it, you know, my reaction is shut.

00:06:15.960 And I say this at the beginning of my book.

00:06:18.380 Show me if there is a fact in this book that you disagree with and show me a counterfact and we will change it.

00:06:25.720 We've been through, I think, 12 or 15 editions of that book.

00:06:29.400 And 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.

00:06:39.000 Well, here's what I think is happening instead.

00:06:41.880 Here's what they're deciding just to shut you up.

00:06:44.000 I make I make occasionally because I tweet a lot now.

00:06:49.480 So the other day I made a I made a tweet that said that there was ageist missile systems in Ukraine.

00:06:56.240 I was wrong about that.

00:06:58.060 They were in Romania and in Poland.

00:07:01.320 I thought they were in Ukraine.

00:07:02.900 I mistake because I'm tweeting very quickly all the time in response to current events.

00:07:08.380 Sometimes I don't get that kind of robust fact checking.

00:07:12.080 But immediately, you know, the reader said this is wrong.

00:07:16.860 And I went and looked it up.

00:07:18.020 And then I I printed an apology and errata.

00:07:21.440 And that would be my response in any case where somebody says you're wrong about this.

00:07:26.940 I want to correct the public record.

00:07:28.480 But no, what's easier is to just say this is the narrative is he's a nutcase on vaccines.

00:07:36.000 He's against the MMR vaccine.

00:07:38.200 Everyone knows that's important.

00:07:39.940 We have to stop listening to him as opposed to doing what you and I did on our four hour exchange,

00:07:45.900 where I actually got into each what you're actually claiming, what you've actually written and said this.

00:07:52.060 And we went to your worst critics.

00:07:54.060 We went to the people who can't stand you and said, where's he wrong? 0.99

00:07:57.760 And they gave us all their ammo and we presented you with it and you responded.

00:08:02.260 We that is how people learn.

00:08:04.260 That is how people come to their own conclusion about, oh, he's right or no, I don't believe it or what.

00:08:10.620 That's how journalism used to work and is supposed to still work.

00:08:13.860 But instead, we get this from ABC News, which, as you point out, interview you and made an obvious cut on the subject of vaccines.

00:08:22.020 And 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,

00:08:31.000 which we edited because he's full of it.

00:08:33.360 Here's part of it.

00:08:35.380 You've said in the past that there is a correlation between vaccines leading to autism.

00:08:40.720 That's totally been debunked.

00:08:42.820 Wait a minute, who debunked it?

00:08:44.160 We have not seen any kind of scientific connection from the CDC, the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences.

00:08:50.680 Those organizations are captive agencies, Lance.

00:08:53.040 And so you think they're all in cahoots?

00:08:54.780 Yeah, they're all captive.

00:08:56.100 You've discussed the Kennedy family as like any family.

00:08:59.380 There are disagreements.

00:09:01.580 Right.

00:09:02.240 So she cut out everything that followed.

00:09:04.760 Then she offered a 33 second disclaimer on how wrong you are on vaccines, rebutting claims.

00:09:12.660 We 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.

00:09:22.300 Yeah, I mean, what I did after that with Lindsay is I laid out the scientific studies, which I cited.

00:09:29.300 I cited the names of the author of the authors of those studies, in-house studies at CDC, et cetera, that actually confirmed that link.

00:09:37.740 And 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.

00:09:45.840 But she chose to ask me about it.

00:09:47.880 And along with the kind of propaganda statement, it's completely untrue.

00:09:52.280 It's been debunked.

00:09:52.740 And 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.

00:10:06.060 And then at the end, it gave this very unusual statement saying we have censored him because he was promoting misinformation.

00:10:14.660 And so, you know, it ended with a kind of a defamation.

00:10:18.740 But at least she allowed me on.

00:10:20.300 You know, one of the things that you did when you first let me on, it was at a time, Megan, that nobody was allowing me to speak.

00:10:29.280 I was just, you know, I was just a pariah in the media.

00:10:33.360 I was exiled.

00:10:34.500 Then it was, it was blanket.

00:10:36.160 It was, you know, wall to wall.

00:10:37.940 I was just not allowed on.

00:10:39.580 And you were one of the first people to have a conversation with me on this show.

00:10:44.300 And you did something very unusual, which is you would interview me.

00:10:49.000 And then you'd play a section in that interview.

00:10:50.920 And then you would play your fact check.

00:10:52.840 And 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.

00:11:05.420 And I said, what she's doing is the only way that she could allow me on.

00:11:09.480 What she is doing is great.

00:11:11.820 And I want people to do that.

00:11:13.360 I want people to fact check me.

00:11:14.820 People should not believe what I say.

00:11:17.360 And they should not believe what CDC says.

00:11:19.840 They shouldn't believe what the WHO says.

00:11:22.840 In a democracy, you have to do your own research.

00:11:25.880 That is part of the work of living in a democracy.

00:11:29.140 It's part of your civic duty.

00:11:30.500 And as a parent, you need to do that research to protect your children.

00:11:34.340 Everybody needs, don't just listen to your doctor.

00:11:38.100 Don't listen to me.

00:11:40.020 Do your own research.

00:11:41.580 You need to do that to protect your child today.

00:11:44.820 And what you did, Megan, I said to people who were, you know, who were questioning that.

00:11:49.540 I said, what she's doing is exactly what she needs to do to allow me for the first time to speak.

00:11:55.160 So I was very, very grateful for the way that you handled that.

00:11:57.940 You figured out a way to do that without enduring the kind of, you know, typhoon of criticism and hatred that you have gotten.

00:12:07.080 If, if you had just heard me unedited.

00:12:10.180 Well, we wanted it to live.

00:12:12.160 We wanted it to live on YouTube and Insta and all platforms that had been censoring you.

00:12:17.520 And it did.

00:12:18.340 And it does to this day.

00:12:19.460 I mean, we've considered it a feat, right?

00:12:21.160 We have four hours of RFK Jr. on all the most incendiary stuff.

00:12:24.760 And it hasn't been censored even a little, even one time.

00:12:28.620 And we appreciate it.

00:12:29.920 You know, some of the stuff we had an actual back and forth on, like this is what somebody says.

00:12:33.320 And some of the stuff I stole the last word with those, you know, this is what his critics are saying about it.

00:12:37.340 But I think people walked away from it really enjoying it.

00:12:39.760 You 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.

00:12:52.220 You'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.

00:13:01.780 I mean, that's something even your critics would, would admit.

00:13:04.660 So it's, it's the vaccine lane that they've used to try to dismiss you.

00:13:10.040 And there's much, much more to you.

00:13:11.120 And I, that's one of the reasons I'm glad to see you run because you're talking about a lot more.

00:13:15.000 And 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.

00:13:21.660 Then, 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.

00:13:36.360 This is something you are appealing to people with this same kind of messaging.

00:13:41.120 I 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.

00:13:58.460 But 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.

00:14:19.500 Every journalist, if you mess around with the First Amendment, every journalist in this country would be against you.

00:14:25.460 And yet during COVID, they all went silent.

00:14:28.460 At a time when government imposed censorship was becoming the norm.

00:14:34.380 And Tucker was the one guy to, you know, to talk about it.

00:14:38.320 He, he was the person who was, who was pushing back against the Ukraine war narrative.

00:14:44.700 And, 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.

00:14:55.940 And that, you know, you know, people who care about the destruction of the middle class should be talking about.

00:15:02.420 And, you know, and, you know, most journalists today become kind of propagandists for the, you know, for the official narrative.

00:15:11.580 But 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.

00:15:30.860 And, and, and are, you know, pushing back even when their jobs are at stake.

00:15:35.720 I 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.

00:15:50.360 And it was dismissed instantly by 51 so-called security experts as, or Intel experts as, as Russian disinformation.

00:15:56.940 We now know that was coordinated between the Biden campaign and the actual CIA, which helped get people to sign on to this thing.

00:16:05.860 And it was all false.

00:16:06.920 It was not disinformation.

00:16:08.360 The FBI was actually pursuing an investigation at the time of the laptop and had it.

00:16:13.360 They knew it wasn't disinformation.

00:16:14.860 And 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.

00:16:28.700 These claims about the laptop being a bunch of made up BS from the Russians.

00:16:33.540 It's an extraordinary story.

00:16:35.280 It too has been all but blacked out by the mainstream.

00:16:39.500 Yeah, it's a shocking story.

00:16:41.320 And, 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.

00:16:58.360 And, 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.

00:17:21.480 It 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.

00:17:37.900 But it was inconsistent with the United States, but it was inconsistent with the values of a democracy or the continued existence of a democracy.

00:17:45.400 And 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.

00:18:05.160 And 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.

00:18:23.140 It 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.

00:18:38.100 And 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.

00:18:52.200 And 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.

00:19:21.580 And 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.

00:19:36.040 So the CIA today, through USAID, is the single largest ponder of journalism in the world.

00:19:43.040 They were supposed to only do it in foreign countries.

00:19:45.940 But now we know that they're doing it here, too.

00:19:48.920 And, 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.

00:20:09.220 Oh, 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.

00:20:24.360 And that story that you talked about is so alarming.

00:20:32.880 And, 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.

00:20:41.360 You need to be horrified when they do it to either side, not just to the side you oppose.

00:20:49.240 That's the problem.

00:20:50.200 They like it as the ends justifying the means.

00:20:52.680 And it's a this is a very dangerous road we're going down.

00:20:56.700 You'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.

00:21:05.240 And now we've sort of flipped roles in this country on that front.

00:21:09.780 Now, 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.

00:21:18.560 This, you know, our our support of Ukraine and what we're doing over there.

00:21:22.640 Most Republicans also say that they support what we're doing, though.

00:21:26.140 There's a growing body of dissenters within the GOP.

00:21:29.540 And Trump certainly seems to be one of them.

00:21:32.580 Now, he participated in this CNN town hall last night and was asked about Ukraine.

00:21:38.900 Here's part of what he said.

00:21:41.200 Do you want Ukraine to win this war?

00:21:44.220 I don't think in terms of winning and losing, I think in terms of getting it settled.

00:21:48.220 So we stop killing all these people and breaking them.

00:21:52.320 You have to follow up on that, because that's a really important.

00:21:55.000 Excuse me. Let me just follow up there.

00:21:56.660 Can you say if you want Ukraine or Russia to win this war?

00:21:59.780 I want everybody to stop dying.

00:22:03.640 They're dying.

00:22:04.880 Russians and Ukrainians.

00:22:06.480 I want them to stop dying.

00:22:08.700 And I'll have that done.

00:22:10.240 I'll have that done in 24 hours.

00:22:12.220 I'll have it done.

00:22:14.060 Now he's getting pushback on that from the more, you know, pro-Ukrainian intervention folks saying, what does that mean?

00:22:19.880 He's going to give it up in within a day.

00:22:21.680 He's going to pull us out of it.

00:22:22.720 Start pull U.S. support.

00:22:24.740 Wave the white flag and let Putin have what he's taken thus far.

00:22:27.740 Um, people are upset about that.

00:22:30.760 And it was interesting, just anecdotally, it's a small room, but those are all Republican primary voters in New Hampshire clapping for his answer.

00:22:38.300 So what did you make of it?

00:22:39.160 Well, I was really happy to hear him say that.

00:22:43.480 And, um, you know, and I, I think his instincts are exactly right.

00:22:47.620 We just have to end this war and there's not going to ever be a winner or loser.

00:22:51.380 Both sides have been the loser.

00:22:52.680 We've killed now between 30,000 and 100,000 Russians, um, and over 300,000 Ukrainian troops and 14,000 to 15,000 civilians.

00:23:05.240 We've destroyed the Ukraine. 0.99

00:23:07.040 We've destroyed 60% unemployment.

00:23:08.820 The infrastructure is wrecked the country now because of the prolong, uh, prolonging of this war, which is a U.S. project.

00:23:18.200 The 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.

00:23:28.600 Every 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.

00:23:38.980 Um, President, I, we were told, we were sold on the fact that this was the humanitarian issue, that a humanitarian intervention.

00:23:45.480 My son went over there and fought, you know, and that was his impression too.

00:23:50.320 He went over and he fought, you know, as a machine gunner.

00:23:53.620 Talked about that.

00:23:54.080 Special 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.

00:24:13.700 When his, his, uh, Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, spoke about the war in April of 2022, or, yeah, 2021.

00:24:24.080 In 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.

00:24:35.060 Well, that is not a good idea for the Ukrainians. 0.99

00:24:38.460 That 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. 1.00

00:24:50.060 And by the way, I don't think it's a good idea for us to be weakening Russia.

00:24:54.180 We are pushing Russia into the camp of China. 0.99

00:24:57.900 And, uh, and so the whole thing is, is kind of a nightmare.

00:25:01.700 And it's, the Ukrainians are a victim of U.S. policies and Russian policies. 0.52

00:25:07.080 Now, you know, I like what President, uh, Trump said during his administration.

00:25:13.520 He actually laid the groundwork for this war.

00:25:16.300 He began selling for the first time Ukrainians offensive weapons.

00:25:20.500 He 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.

00:25:35.600 That from the Ukraine is, Ukraine is only 400 miles from Russia, and we could hit Moscow in minutes with those weapons.

00:25:43.940 So it destabilized the area, made the Russians very, very anxious.

00:25:47.880 And 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.

00:25:56.820 So 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.

00:26:19.280 Can 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.

00:26:36.820 Now you and I discussed the last time in depth about how it is very true that big pharma finances most big media.

00:26:42.500 I mean, they're all over big media.

00:26:44.700 They 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.

00:26:55.060 He was doing that, but that's just your supposition, right?

00:26:58.260 You don't have any inside knowledge on that being a reason.

00:27:00.900 It's my supposition, you know, on that particular transaction.

00:27:05.760 But, um, in 2014, I had a conversation with Roger Rails and that has bearing on that.

00:27:13.960 This, 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.

00:27:25.700 Because I spent the summer in a tent with him in 2019, I spent three months in a tent in Africa with Roger.

00:27:34.160 What?

00:27:34.660 And we, we had this weird relationship ever since because I kind of considered him politically, he was like Darth Vader.

00:27:41.200 He was, uh, and we were antithetical on everything, but we really had a lot of affection for each other.

00:27:47.740 And as you know, he was a very smart, very funny, um, very loyal friend, very endearing guy in many, many ways.

00:27:56.400 He had flaws, clearly, and those are well known to everybody at this point.

00:28:01.060 But, um, but anyway, he, he, he knew about this issue as a pharmaceutical relationship with neurological injuries to children.

00:28:12.080 And he believed that a family member of his had been possibly injured.

00:28:17.820 And we had, at that point, made a documentary that looked at all these issues, the science behind these issues.

00:28:24.900 And I was promoting it.

00:28:27.220 I went and showed it to him and I showed it to Michael Clemente and other people at Fox News and they loved it.

00:28:33.600 Roger brought me into his office and he said, I cannot help you on this one.

00:28:37.560 Because he always, you know, Megan, when, when I wanted to, I was the only environmentalist who was going on Fox News.

00:28:43.980 I went on Sean Hannity's show very, very regularly.

00:28:48.180 I did Neil Cavuto.

00:28:49.680 I did Bill O'Reilly.

00:28:50.780 I did all the major shows at Fox because I'd call up Roger and say, I am an issue.

00:28:55.640 I want to talk about, about warming or pollution or whatever.

00:28:59.720 And he would, uh, he would, he would get me onto these shows.

00:29:03.900 When I asked him about this show, about the vaccine show, he said, I can't do that for you, Bobby,

00:29:10.520 because if any of my hosts allowed you onto a show without asking my permission, I would have to fire them.

00:29:20.040 And if I didn't fire them, I would get a phone call from Rupert within 10 minutes.

00:29:25.700 And so that, so I, this was part of the background of my assumption that, okay, if you talk about this on Fox, you're going to get fired.

00:29:34.100 And that's what Roger said.

00:29:35.920 And 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.

00:29:50.400 And he also said, as I remember that 17 out of 22 ads on the typical evening news show are pharmaceutical ads.

00:29:59.380 That's what he told me.

00:30:01.460 And, 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,

00:30:11.060 he did this long monologue about how the pharmaceutical companies were controlling content on network news and how bad it was for our country.

00:30:23.040 The other channels took hundreds of millions of dollars from big pharma companies, and then they shilled for their sketchy products on the air.

00:30:30.320 And as they did that, they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products.

00:30:34.540 At the very least, this was a moral crime.

00:30:38.260 It was disgusting, but it was universal.

00:30:40.840 It happened across the American news media. 0.56

00:30:42.760 They all did it.

00:30:44.420 So at this point, the question isn't who in public life is corrupt, too many to count.

00:30:49.380 The question is who is telling the truth?

00:30:54.120 And 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.

00:31:03.240 So when he was fired five days later, I disconnected some to us.

00:31:07.880 But, you know, I'm sure they had, I know they had other reasons to fire Tucker.

00:31:13.040 There were other things that they didn't like about what he was doing.

00:31:15.800 He wasn't, you know, bucking the trend.

00:31:18.960 But it, but it shows that he had this enormous popularity.

00:31:23.000 His show was what he was getting 3.5 million viewers a night on an average night, 5 million on a good night.

00:31:31.600 That's CNN gets, I think, about 350,000.

00:31:36.560 So he was getting 10 times what CNN was doing.

00:31:40.600 He was such a huge revenue generator for that network.

00:31:44.180 And 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.

00:32:01.200 Well, that's fascinating.

00:32:03.600 I have to say that's, that's a new theory and just as plausible as any of the others.

00:32:09.200 You 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.

00:32:18.840 hour, getting more revenue from blue chip brands now that he's gone, now that we just have generic hosts doing this hour.

00:32:24.440 But that's sort of a head fake because, yes, they make some money, but they make some money off of their ads.

00:32:30.580 It 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.

00:32:43.760 Hey, 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.

00:32:50.800 And it's more like if we don't have Fox, they're not going to choose us.

00:32:54.380 And in order to drive those numbers up, they have to show good ratings.

00:32:58.220 That's so Fox uses the good ratings that its hosts deliver to jack up subscription fees.

00:33:05.660 So, yes, Tucker wasn't getting blue chip brand advertisers on the 8 p.m.

00:33:09.200 because of all the left wing boycott calls against him.

00:33:12.060 But 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.

00:33:21.480 Yet another one of the mysteries to this whole thing.

00:33:23.660 And I'll bring the audience's latest numbers because they're also not good.

00:33:28.560 I mean, the 8 p.m. just on Tuesday.

00:33:30.880 That's the latest we have.

00:33:31.880 My God, got 144,000 in the key demo, 144,000.

00:33:38.360 And when Tucker was there, let me see, I think I have this, but the let's see, we did the average when Tucker was there.

00:33:47.300 The last four weeks, his average at 8 p.m. was 429,000 in the key demo.

00:33:53.000 And this the most recent numbers are 144.

00:33:56.880 I mean, it's just a it's a bloodbath and it continues over there.

00:34:01.860 All right.

00:34:02.400 RFK Jr., RFKJ, stand by.

00:34:05.160 Quick break.

00:34:05.840 Back with much, much more.

00:34:07.160 I want to ask you what your plan is as they're trying to squeeze you out of the debates.

00:34:10.080 And yet you've got 20 percent of the Democratic vote, which is insane.

00:34:13.280 That's huge.

00:34:14.020 Stand by.

00:34:16.100 Beatboxing actually has hidden health benefits.

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00:34:29.180 Yeah.

00:34:33.360 Let'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.

00:34:43.440 It's extraordinary.

00:34:44.560 I want the audience to know, on average, you have about 19, 20 percent among the Democratic voters.

00:34:49.200 That's unheard of when you have a sitting Democratic president running for reelection.

00:34:53.860 We've had other challenges in the past.

00:34:56.060 We have maybe three percent, you know, two percent.

00:34:58.540 Now you've got 20.

00:35:00.240 But the DNC is saying we will not be having debates, period.

00:35:04.000 Go away.

00:35:04.900 So how do you get past that and rest this thing from Joe Biden?

00:35:10.620 I mean, we're an insurgent campaign.

00:35:14.640 I would say this.

00:35:15.800 I 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.

00:35:30.680 One 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.

00:35:48.740 And, 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.

00:35:57.260 And, you know, asking him to not train for that.

00:36:01.740 President Trump is going to have to go through a series of debates in his own political party, presumably.

00:36:07.280 And 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.

00:36:25.100 You 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.

00:36:36.780 I'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.

00:36:43.220 And I'm the most capable person to do that.

00:36:45.540 But 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.

00:37:06.800 And 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.

00:37:24.460 And 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.

00:37:39.760 In 2016, Hillary believed that the election had been fixed against her. 1.00

00:37:47.620 And and then, you know, Bernie Sanders followers believe that the Democratic Party had fixed the election against them.

00:37:54.460 We 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.

00:38:16.320 So this is not the Soviet Union where the party picks the candidate and the whole thing is fixed all the way through.

00:38:22.700 But there's real democracy at work here and that we're going to go out and meet people.

00:38:27.760 We're going to debate our opponents. We're going to shake hands. We're going to do retail politics.

00:38:31.460 We're not just going to carpet bomb the country with, you know, billions of dollars in advertising.

00:38:36.220 And 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.

00:38:53.500 I 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.

00:39:05.340 It's not rigged. We're supposed to be the party of the new deal, not the party of the rigged deal.

00:39:11.120 You talk about how the prize fighter or the one heading into a prize fight needs to get off the couch.

00:39:17.000 This 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.

00:39:27.980 That is not Joe Biden. Every day we get new videotape of him confusing people, muffing the words up.

00:39:35.560 Just yesterday we had he went to an event. He didn't go out when they played Hail to the Chief.

00:39:41.160 He seemed confused that that was him. And then when he finally got out there, it was time to leave.

00:39:45.120 This is what happened.

00:39:50.460 There he is for the listening audience, confused, turning, doesn't know where to go off the stage.

00:39:55.300 A handler comes out, tries to show him this is the way. OK, finally turns and waves.

00:39:59.940 I mean, we have one of these a day. This is if this is a one off, we wouldn't be showing this.

00:40:04.640 But I mean, it's daily where he looks confused or is doing word search or is mumbling his words.

00:40:11.380 It confuses a person, thinks a dead person is alive, thinks an alive person is dead.

00:40:15.560 I could go on. So now more than ever, they need this.

00:40:19.300 But there's talk now of potentially the Democrats, if Trump's the nominee, saying Joe Biden's not debating.

00:40:25.560 He's not going to debate and help platform this lying, you know, stream of consciousness person who cannot, you know, see the truth.

00:40:35.060 With the highest strength glasses like that's already what they're saying.

00:40:38.700 So they're going to do the basement campaign again or at least try and then not have him debate.

00:40:42.720 Do you think that'll work?

00:40:45.020 I don't know if it'll work. I don't think it's good for our country.

00:40:48.580 I think I don't think that's good for our country.

00:40:51.200 I don't think anybody can think that's good for our country.

00:40:54.840 And 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.

00:41:02.220 We're supposed to be the exemplary nation.

00:41:04.440 We invented democracy in this country, modern democracy.

00:41:07.380 The Greeks invented it before us and modern democracy in 1776.

00:41:11.600 We were the only democratic nation in the world at that point.

00:41:16.700 By the Civil War, by 1860, there were six democracies, all modeled on the United States.

00:41:23.580 And today there is 180.

00:41:25.380 And we are their model.

00:41:27.200 We're the ones that they're looking to and saying, you know, we want to be like the United States of America.

00:41:33.340 And this is just it is it's very troubling to me.

00:41:40.120 And 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.

00:41:57.200 And then propagandizing the American people and that they never have to meet anybody.

00:42:02.140 They 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.

00:42:14.300 And they're just reading stuff.

00:42:16.040 It's not real.

00:42:17.060 People know it's not real.

00:42:18.380 And people are angry in this country right now.

00:42:20.820 People 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.

00:42:30.500 And our democracy doesn't work.

00:42:34.760 I just think it's terrible for our democracy.

00:42:38.080 You know, he's.

00:42:38.860 He 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.

00:42:50.020 Same as John Fetterman, frankly, that they hid information about his well-being before the election.

00:42:55.680 He got in and then promptly had an emotional breakdown and spent six weeks in inpatient at Walter Reed.

00:43:02.660 And so there's a real concern here about how well Joe Biden is.

00:43:06.700 Do you do you share those concerns about his mental well-being, his fitness for the job?

00:43:13.340 You 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.

00:43:19.180 I see the things, you know, that you showed and that, you know, I read an article the other day, Megan.

00:43:25.720 And 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.

00:43:40.280 It's because you don't really need a mental acuity to run the country.

00:43:46.660 You can be more of a figurehead and you're surrounded by, you know, technocrats and tax policy for you.

00:43:53.560 I saw this. You say age, whatever. So he's age. So he's old. So he might be potentially infirm.

00:43:59.700 You know, and then they pointed out that FDR was in a wheelchair. Oh, that's the same. 0.95

00:44:04.700 FDR was in a wheelchair. His legs were disabled, you know, but he was not mentally disabled.

00:44:10.480 At the end of his last presidency, where he'd been, you know, his fourth election, by that time, he was extremely infirm.

00:44:18.760 And, you know, you can make an argument about whether that was good or because we're in the middle of the war.

00:44:23.520 People did not want to switch towards the mainstream, in the mid-stream.

00:44:27.180 But 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.

00:44:37.120 I 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.

00:44:43.380 Because what happens is it empowers the people around you.

00:44:46.080 And 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.

00:45:00.800 And 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.

00:45:15.500 And we need a vigorous president who's robust, who's ready to tackle these real problems and not just keep the ship sailing.

00:45:23.540 You know, one of the things with FDR, when he was on his fourth term, he had a ship that was sailing to victory.

00:45:32.340 He had, you know, he was building the American middle class.

00:45:36.040 He was winning the war against the Nazis and against Japan and against fascism across the globe.

00:45:42.340 He was building alliances around the world.

00:45:44.400 So he had this long success story, and America was on an uphill trajectory.

00:45:48.340 Today, America's on a downhill trajectory, and there's nobody in this country who can disagree with that.

00:45:56.280 And we need a course reversal.

00:45:59.340 And the president who is infirm is not a president who's going to make that kind of course reversal.

00:46:06.020 We need somebody who's vigorous and who's ready to make big changes to change staff and to change the direction of the country.

00:46:18.060 And so people have to make a judgment about whether Joe Biden is actually going to do that or whether it's going to be business as usual.

00:46:25.660 And the business as usual is a prescription or cataclysm for the American middle class. 0.50

00:46:32.440 Hmm. The article was in the Daily Beast, Daily Rothkopf.

00:46:36.200 Joe Biden is old. Get over it.

00:46:39.360 You 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.

00:46:47.220 And also, I would say, as an outsider, you know, just coming in and saying, I see all these things differently.

00:46:52.440 I my party's doing it wrong.

00:46:54.540 So listen to me.

00:46:55.540 So 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.

00:47:04.800 Could you see a world in which you supported Trump?

00:47:08.380 I don't think so.

00:47:09.640 I mean, I think you're right that a lot of my issues are are are, you know, cross party lines.

00:47:16.960 They're on free speech.

00:47:18.520 They're on rebuilding the middle class and reindustrialized, rebuilding the industrial base in this country, protecting the environment, ending corruption in government.

00:47:29.060 And those are things that kind of avoid the culture war issues and look for common ground with Americans.

00:47:35.900 And I think I share those with people of both parties.

00:47:38.840 And that's why I think I have a lot of support from both independents and Republicans as well as Democrats.

00:47:45.240 You do.

00:47:45.780 So you're not going to say if Joe Biden becomes the nominee, would you vote for him?

00:47:50.660 I'm not going to say I'd have to see what happens.

00:47:56.820 OK, stand by, because I do want to ask you about a couple of those culture war issues that you mentioned.

00:48:01.920 And and also whether is Cheryl Hines going to be able to handle this kind of stress? 0.90

00:48:05.940 You described her as a tender heart.

00:48:07.600 She's a tender heart.

00:48:08.760 This is going to be a rough battle already is.

00:48:10.980 And once your poll numbers continue to go up, even rougher.

00:48:13.560 So we'll go there next.

00:48:14.980 RFKJ stays with us. 0.97

00:48:16.620 Don'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.

00:48:23.200 Full video show and the clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash Megan Kelly.

00:48:27.660 You can also get it via audio podcast.

00:48:29.660 And don't forget to go to Megan Kelly dot com to sign up for the American News Minute.

00:48:33.920 That's my email to you on Fridays.

00:48:39.400 Let's start with Cheryl, your wonderful wife. 1.00

00:48:41.680 Cheryl Hines, very famous, well-known actress, is brilliant in Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm.

00:48:48.120 And people want to blame her because she's married to you. 0.56

00:48:52.020 She was there when you announced your presidential run.

00:48:54.680 And I wonder, because the last time we talked, you said she was you said, don't read that book.

00:49:01.060 You don't have to read my book.

00:49:02.280 You don't have to get involved in my professional thing, which is very controversial.

00:49:06.500 And you said she's a tender hearted woman.

00:49:08.860 And this was just a lot for her to take in.

00:49:11.600 So how on earth are you putting her through this?

00:49:14.960 How's this going to go?

00:49:18.780 That's a good question.

00:49:20.000 And she, you know, she's been amazing on this because it was.

00:49:26.620 And, you know, when I said to her, don't read the book and you describe her as tender hearted.

00:49:31.660 She's she is very tender hearted and she is a very gentle.

00:49:36.600 She I told you last time I was with you that she is she's the best human being that I've ever met.

00:49:43.300 I've never heard her say a single thing that was pretentious or self-promoting or had even had a molecule dishonesty.

00:49:55.260 And she she's and everything that she says is worth listening to.

00:50:00.860 And it's usually very, very funny.

00:50:03.660 But and she's super smart. 0.88

00:50:05.500 But she she's a comedian. 1.00

00:50:06.920 She said this to me.

00:50:07.820 I'm I'm making people laugh if I read that book, I'm going to be so depressed.

00:50:12.480 And so I said to her, don't read it.

00:50:15.140 And you're right.

00:50:16.120 It's a depressing book.

00:50:18.220 And, you know, you're quite the pitch man for your book.

00:50:22.640 Well, there I listen.

00:50:24.060 I have to live with Cheryl and I don't want her moping around. 1.00

00:50:27.300 I want her to be, you know, I want that positive energy that she has all the time. 0.99

00:50:33.680 But she's been amazing on this.

00:50:35.500 And she's been, you know, she's that we're both having fun.

00:50:39.140 You know, there's been she expects a roller coaster ride.

00:50:44.020 And, you know, she she calls it an adventure.

00:50:47.120 And, you know, she occasionally says, how did you get me involved in this adventure?

00:50:51.240 But she signed on to it.

00:50:54.020 And and I'm really happy because I I could not have done it without her.

00:50:58.460 And so and so far, we're having fun.

00:51:02.640 So far, things are good.

00:51:03.800 And 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.

00:51:12.380 You kind of assume the risk when you marry a Kennedy, that political office or campaigns could be in your future at some level.

00:51:20.960 She probably knew that it is not necessarily all of Cheryl's positions, your positions.

00:51:26.380 And some people need to remember that when they talk about her and her Hollywood career.

00:51:30.680 People I'm done.

00:51:31.440 I'm done watching that.

00:51:32.160 Really?

00:51:32.520 Why?

00:51:32.860 OK, whatever.

00:51:33.560 All 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.

00:51:40.240 So 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.

00:51:50.840 Every single Democrat voted no.

00:51:52.700 And in fact, it was to the point where President Biden said if that bill ever came to his desk, he would veto it.

00:51:58.240 He's so committed to letting trans athletes participate in girls sports.

00:52:03.560 Now, 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.

00:52:12.700 They do they do not want trans people running in women's sports or competing in women's sports was let's see.

00:52:18.340 I have it here.

00:52:20.640 Youth sports, 62 percent say it should not be allowed.

00:52:24.080 High school sports, 66 percent say it should not be allowed.

00:52:26.560 College sports, 65 percent say it should not be allowed.

00:52:28.840 And at the professional level, 65 percent say it should not be allowed.

00:52:31.800 I mean, that's a huge number.

00:52:34.340 I went back to try to find a breakdown, Dems versus Republicans.

00:52:37.300 I could find one of those from about a year ago, last June.

00:52:40.780 And that showed among Democrats, 46 percent support trans people running and participating in women's sports, 41 percent opposed.

00:52:51.140 So back then it was about evenly divided within the Democratic Party.

00:52:54.700 You do not agree with Joe Biden.

00:52:57.300 You, I think, agree with the majorities that this should not be allowed.

00:53:00.700 So do you think you are picking up on something within the Democratic Party that all these Dems who voted no and Joe Biden aren't?

00:53:08.440 Well, I don't know.

00:53:11.040 And I didn't make it, you know, I didn't do a poll before I answered that question.

00:53:15.420 I just and I don't know what the bill says.

00:53:18.820 And I don't know if there was something else obnoxious.

00:53:21.500 And 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.

00:53:43.040 But, 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.

00:53:54.820 And people should not be shamed for that.

00:53:57.540 And people should not be treated in a way that is disparaging or derogatory.

00:54:02.660 We need to respect each other.

00:54:04.200 And that is, I think, the key thing that all of us need to be sensitive to these issues and respect each other.

00:54:11.340 But on this particular issue, my uncle, Ted Kennedy, wrote Title IX.

00:54:18.400 And 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.

00:54:38.760 And women had fought for that for years and years and years, women athletes.

00:54:42.740 They'd been treated as redheaded stepchildren of the system, you know, as second class citizens.

00:54:48.400 And he wanted to put an end to that.

00:54:50.720 And so I, you know, I was conscious of how of the hard battle.

00:54:56.040 And women have fought to be able to develop college sports and professional sports and develop themselves as professional athletes. 0.99

00:55:04.560 And 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.

00:55:21.860 I 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.

00:55:39.920 And it just seemed to me to be unfair if a person with biological advantages can take that away from her.

00:55:49.720 So just, you know, I answered that question the way that I saw it without really thinking much about it.

00:55:56.800 You 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.

00:56:17.540 And it just doesn't seem to, you know, fair to, for somebody to be able to take that away from them.

00:56:23.900 Yeah, 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. 0.72

00:56:36.900 And 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.

00:56:45.180 And 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.

00:56:54.940 And 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.

00:57:03.680 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.

00:57:10.220 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, no.

00:57:11.520 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:57:13.280 And who really, the study show that maybe over 90%, it varies on a study, but I've seen any place from 72 to 98%

00:57:21.100 of kids who left or are left alone will grow out of any trans confusion and will revert back to

00:57:26.300 their biological sex and gender with no problem. Um, where do you stand on that? The, the push to

00:57:32.560 ban medicalization of this issue for minors? Uh, I think it should be banned without certainly

00:57:39.980 without parents permission. I, I don't know enough about it, Megan to make a, um, a, uh,

00:57:47.980 you know, make a decision about whether it should be banned altogether. I just, I think without

00:57:53.060 parents permission, it would, should certainly be banned for the reasons that you just gave.

00:57:58.780 Well, I'm telling you, it should be banned altogether. You get, we can talk more about

00:58:02.280 it later, but even with the parents permission, the problem is that they're, they're saying yes to 0.78

00:58:05.760 having, having girls have their breasts cut off at age 15. You know, these are, some of these parents

00:58:10.820 are kooks and they've got an agenda and they've got sort of a belief that this is what's in the

00:58:14.740 best interest of the child. And literally they're chemically castrating boys and girls. If you go 0.58

00:58:19.200 from puberty blockers to cross sex hormones at a young age, you will never have an orgasm.

00:58:24.660 You are rendering yourself in most of these instances sterile. So you will never have a child

00:58:29.340 women chopping off their breasts who then have regrets will never breastfeed each. I mean, 1.00

00:58:33.520 it's just absolute. It's a, it's a monstrosity. That's my view. So you have to come over here if you

00:58:39.300 want to get my vote. Okay, go ahead. Good points. I just don't know. You know,

00:58:44.480 I'd love to hear arguments on both sides, but you make a very, very compelling argument, Megan.

00:58:50.420 All right. Let's talk about the book we've been talking about. You've written a few,

00:58:53.380 but the one that first got me started on the RFK lane, Jay, was the real Anthony Fauci. And he was

00:59:00.860 in the news last week when he admitted to, was it the New York times? Yeah. New York times magazine

00:59:07.440 that masks are only 10% effective against COVID. After everything they put us through, he admitted

00:59:13.660 masks were at best 10% effective against COVID just around the edges. It absolutely was an

00:59:22.620 obscene, belated, and also still untrue admission, right? I mean, I think 10% is being generous,

00:59:30.100 but what do you make of this, this come to Jesus moment for him?

00:59:33.140 Oh, I mean, you know, we knew at the beginning that they were not effective. And he knew that

00:59:38.040 because not only did he say it publicly, but he also advised his boss at HHS when his boss asked him,

00:59:45.540 should we be married wearing masks? He said, no, they're useless against, you know, these

00:59:50.200 respiratory infections. And we actually, at that point around when they first started using them in

00:59:56.140 in April, March and April of 2020, we went into the scientific literature on the PubMed, and we went

01:00:05.300 and mined every single mask study that we could find. And, you know, agnostically, just trying to

01:00:12.980 figure out, do they work or don't they work? And I was shocked by what we found, because what they

01:00:18.520 showed is even in surgery theaters, the studies that had been done were inconclusive. In other

01:00:27.760 words, there was a big study in 1982 that the University of London did, University of London

01:00:33.200 Hospital, where they actually took a mask off of everybody in the hospital for a period of time,

01:00:40.900 even in the surgical theaters, and they saw that infection rates went down. So the advocacy of

01:00:48.300 masks has never been shown, even in, you know, those kind of clinical settings. And then the

01:00:55.420 Cochran Collaboration came out recently. The Cochran Collaboration is the ultimate kind of arbiter of

01:01:01.620 clinical trial data. And they did a meta review of all of the mass studies that they could find that

01:01:08.920 were good. You know, they grade the studies according to a weight and a scale. And they came to the

01:01:14.980 conclusion that the masks were ineffective. But this HHS knew this. Anthony Fauci knew this from

01:01:20.220 the beginning. And that was what was alarming, I think, to some of us, because we could read the

01:01:25.740 science that was available to him. And it made no sense what he was. The lockdowns also. Lockdowns

01:01:33.440 violated every pandemic preparedness protocol by the WHO, by the CDC, by the National Health Service

01:01:41.500 in the UK, by the EU Medical Agency. All of them had these pandemic plans. And they all said lockdowns

01:01:48.220 don't work. You quarantine the sick. People have been thinking about this and planning for it for ages.

01:01:55.140 You quarantine the sick. You protect the vulnerable. But you let society continue to function because

01:02:00.740 the penalty for not doing that, for locking down a society, is cataclysm on the economy,

01:02:06.580 on deaths, deaths from other sources, in access to medicines, from heart attacks, from distress,

01:02:15.240 from suicides, from isolation. You know, these things kill people. And they kill people at rates

01:02:20.240 that are comparable to infectious diseases, you know, that have rates like COVID.

01:02:25.060 It would have been nice to hear a question like that asked of President Trump last night. Let me,

01:02:30.280 my last minute with you, ask you about today's news, which is unbelievably, unbelievably,

01:02:36.380 EcoHealth Alliance is getting $2 million more of taxpayer money. The very organization that was

01:02:41.660 caught doing gain-of-function research in that Wuhan lab on our dime the last time that lied about it.

01:02:48.760 They lied. Peter Daszak, who runs it, lied about it. Anthony Fauci lied about it to Rand Paul.

01:02:53.440 We're giving them more money. Now, supposedly, we're not supposed to worry about this $2.3 million

01:02:59.420 because they have agreed, EcoHealth has, not to subcontract the work to China,

01:03:04.960 collect new virus samples from the wild, or carry out gain-of-function research. That's what they

01:03:10.740 promised the last time. That's what they said the last time that they weren't doing it. It turned out

01:03:14.740 to be a lie. So your thoughts on the fact that we're giving them another $2.3 million?

01:03:20.360 That's insane. But also, you know, President Biden has now allocated $88 billion

01:03:25.060 for more gain-of-function science. So we're, you know, we're doing this not only through,

01:03:31.740 you know, in, in not, not, not, maybe not anymore, hopefully at the Wuhan lab, but we're doing it in

01:03:39.200 labs in Ukraine, doing it in labs in Georgia, in the nation of Georgia. We're doing it here in the 0.97

01:03:45.980 United States, the University of North Carolina, at Galveston, at, at, um, at, uh, Boston College or

01:03:52.740 university, or Boston University and, uh, and the other NIH labs that are continuing this, you know,

01:03:59.340 with biowarfare development. And we should, we, we signed a treaty in 73 that says we're not going

01:04:06.640 to do that anymore. And then, you know, when we passed the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act gave an

01:04:12.000 exemption that said, okay, that treaty still exists, but we're going to give an exemption for federal

01:04:16.580 officials who do biowarfare development, they cannot be prosecuted. And that relaunched this

01:04:22.880 arms race, this explosion in gain-of-function studies. So now the Chinese are doing, the Russians 1.00

01:04:29.320 are doing it, everybody's doing it to keep up with us. And they're developing some really horrendous

01:04:33.760 weaponry. They're developing both the Chinese, the Russians, and the U.S. are working on weapons

01:04:38.360 that are ethnic bioweapons, organisms that will kill people to certain races, you know, and we 0.98

01:04:44.640 don't want to unleash this stuff on humanity. We need to just sign a treaty, make it enforceable,

01:04:49.700 make it verifiable, and everybody just stops doing it. Either way, that's a, that's a happy note on

01:04:56.480 which to end, the bioweapon that's going to take out certain races. Okay, sleep well, 0.99

01:05:03.760 Megan, you don't want to get me started. I know. I do. I do want to get you started,

01:05:08.180 but for now we'll pause and say to be continued until the next time, because we're going to move

01:05:12.080 on to our next guest, Charles C.W. Cook. RFKJ, great to see you again. Bobby Kennedy will be

01:05:17.900 watching. And as I said, to be continued. Thank you, Megan. All right. Up next, Charles C.W. Cook

01:05:24.620 and my thoughts on last night's Trump CNN town hall. My thoughts on the CNN town hall last night.

01:05:34.760 It failed on every front except one. It was wildly successful in giving Donald Trump an hour of free

01:05:40.920 airtime to make his case without laying a glove on him. Congrats, CNN. My biggest takeaway on this

01:05:47.040 thing is town halls or debates meant to help primary voters decide on a candidate ought to be

01:05:52.440 hosted by anchors who understand what is important to that candidate's party. I realize Caitlin Collins

01:05:58.620 once worked for the Daily Caller, but her days of connecting with the GOP audiences are apparently

01:06:02.580 over. The topics pushed by CNN in this thing might as well have been selected by Rachel Maddow

01:06:07.400 or the Never Trump Lincoln project. It's actually possible. It's possible they did it, though.

01:06:13.020 Chief Lincoln project guy Rick Wilson did not seem too happy about the execution by CNN. 0.90

01:06:19.120 And whatever the fuck they thought they were going to get out of this, they instead have set a match 0.95

01:06:25.780 to democracy. This insanity should be pulled off the fucking air. Chris Lick, you should be ashamed 1.00

01:06:31.680 of yourself. This is astoundingly bad for the brand of CNN. It's astoundingly bad for the country.

01:06:38.220 And it's astoundingly bad, honestly, folks, for every other Republican candidate in the primaries. 1.00

01:06:43.140 Wrap that shit up. It's done. You saw this tonight. You know you can't beat him on the stage 0.99

01:06:48.460 because he's going to be the nominee. This shit is un-fucking-believable. I've never seen anything 1.00

01:06:53.880 like it. It is a disaster of the highest fucking degree. So you liked it. 0.99

01:07:01.900 January 6th, election denialism. Mar-a-Lago documents the E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse case.

01:07:07.960 Are these the topics Republican voters want to devote their town halls to in order to make the

01:07:12.880 best primary decision? Only a liberal would think so. And though the questions were supposed to come from

01:07:17.860 the audience, it was Caitlin Collins who raised most of these or who refused to move on from them

01:07:23.380 once Trump had answered, in some cases, repeatedly. Where were the questions about inflation or the

01:07:29.640 banking crisis and what to do about it? She spent three minutes on the economy and 20 on January 6th

01:07:36.860 in the last election. How about a question on why he didn't fire Fauci, whether he regrets the

01:07:41.640 lockdowns, where he stands on women's rights vis-a-vis the trans community, what his plans are to

01:07:46.020 address the intelligence agency's capture by hard partisans, whether government should be used to

01:07:50.400 shut down corporate ideologies that Republicans don't happen to like, as his rival Ron DeSantis is

01:07:54.500 trying to do in Florida. What would he, President Trump, do about tech censorship of conservatives?

01:08:00.540 One third of the debate on whether he lost the last time around the insurrection and pardons for

01:08:06.780 its participants may be catnip for the left, but it is not what's driving GOP voters.

01:08:11.760 CNN tried to thread the needle here. It's dying in the ratings, absolutely dying. It's truly a

01:08:17.860 dreadful situation over there. They're under new ownership, which reportedly wants to restore

01:08:22.280 CNN's reputation as a somewhat boring but mostly nonpartisan news channel that might be acceptable

01:08:28.180 even to Republicans. I support that mission, but I don't believe it's possible with the cast of

01:08:33.120 anchors that drove those Republican viewers away in the first place. Firing Don Lemon and Brian

01:08:38.620 Stelter was a start. But let's face it, their lineup from start to finish not only hates the GOP,

01:08:43.660 they don't know the first thing about them. CNN lured Trump back on its air with an hour of primetime

01:08:49.380 while surrounded with Republican voters in New Hampshire. He said it was an offer

01:08:53.500 too good to refuse, but it was train wreck TV. It was like they forgot everything we know about Donald

01:09:00.200 Trump, like how hard he is to control, how he likes to filibuster, how difficult it is to fact check

01:09:06.180 him in real time, how important time limits on answers are when dealing with him, how the way

01:09:12.720 to stop him from talking is to remind him to respect the audience and their time, not just to start

01:09:18.660 talking during his answers over and over and over. Then you look rude instead of Trump.

01:09:24.920 So the thing quickly spun out of control and Caitlin Collins was ill-equipped to stop it. 0.97

01:09:30.240 A town hall is about the audience and the candidate. She should have faded into obscurity while he had 0.99

01:09:36.180 changes with the audience. Instead, she hijacked the event by trying to turn it into something about 0.85

01:09:42.200 her and her supposed toughness, trying to fact check him at every turn and worse by not knowing

01:09:48.300 when the horse is dead and there's no reason to keep beating it. Here is one example.

01:09:54.720 Would you sign a federal abortion ban into law?

01:09:57.820 What I'll do is negotiate so that people are happy. But the fact that we were able,

01:10:01.860 I was able, I'm so proud of it. We put three great justices on the Supreme Court. We have

01:10:06.440 almost 300 federal judges on the Supreme Court.

01:10:10.560 So you, just to be clear, just to be clear, Mr. President, you, you would sign a federal abortion 0.70

01:10:15.660 ban into law. I said this, I said this, I want to do what's right. And we're looking and we want

01:10:21.080 to do what's right for everybody. But what's right. But now for the first time, the people that are pro-life

01:10:25.980 have negotiating capability, if they send it to your desk, would you sign it? Some people are at six

01:10:33.100 weeks. Some people are at three weeks, two weeks. President Trump is going to make a determination what

01:10:39.560 he thinks is great for the country. All right. At a certain point, the audience knows the candidate

01:10:46.580 is dodging. You don't have to try to extract the answer like a guard down in Gitmo. Just move on.

01:10:51.560 They get it. They get it. He's not going to answer. You risk making the moment about yourself and worse,

01:10:57.160 you're wasting precious time. Collins is young. She's inexperienced in the future. Hopefully she

01:11:01.580 will do better. This time she was not up to the job. As for the fact checking, well, that is nearly

01:11:06.180 impossible in a live event with Donald Trump. We know this. He will say whatever he wants. And she

01:11:11.400 did a decent job of trying to correct certain things, but it's spun into her opinion versus his.

01:11:17.180 That's not good. Why did she say the 2020 election wasn't rigged, for example? What does rigged mean?

01:11:24.260 You have to be careful as a news anchor. Rigged does not necessarily mean Dominion voting machines

01:11:29.380 switched votes. That's nonsense. It could mean mail-in balloting was misused. Laws were changed to

01:11:35.780 facilitate more votes from Democrats in questionable ways. Stories about Joe Biden were unfairly suppressed

01:11:42.320 by big tech. The media was fawning in his coverage of Joe Biden. For example, they blacked out his long

01:11:49.700 history of racism, but pummeled Donald Trump with accusations of racism every day. They buried the

01:11:55.140 Tara Reid story in which she accused him of sexually assaulting her, but made a heroine out of E. Jean

01:12:00.260 Carroll. It's going on to this day. Who is Caitlin Collins to declare to GOP voters, 63% of whom do not

01:12:07.360 believe Biden legitimately won the election, that everything was fair and square. She wanted to appease

01:12:13.320 CNN's existing audience and her media critics. She knew she'd get points if she injected her opinion

01:12:20.200 disguised as fact checks in there. That's not the job of a journalist. Had the topic selection been better

01:12:27.460 and more germane to this audience? Had she interfered less and only when it mattered? And had there been a

01:12:34.000 time limit on his answers, her interruptions would have been less needed and more effective when 0.79

01:12:38.740 deployed. Instead, you had an anchor who looked out of her depth and partisan, a candidate who seized

01:12:44.560 the opportunity and won the night, and a network that pleased approximately no one. Joining me now

01:12:51.480 with his thoughts, Charles C.W. Cook, senior writer at National Review and host of the Charles C.W. Cook

01:12:56.960 podcast. Charles, welcome back. What'd you think? Well, I have a somewhat cynical take on this,

01:13:06.560 which is that both sides were trying to get what they want out of their relationship, but that CNN

01:13:16.000 failed. It helps Donald Trump to pretend that he hates CNN when in fact he hugely benefits from

01:13:25.120 CNN as he did last night, as he did in 2015 and 2016. And it helps CNN to pretend that it hates

01:13:33.640 Donald Trump when in fact Donald Trump helps CNN by boosting its ratings, allowing it to sell advertising

01:13:42.440 and permitting its journalists to play hero. And many of the criticisms that you just advanced

01:13:50.080 against Caitlin Collins are best understood as being part of the plan. If you remember back when

01:13:59.880 Trump was running and then when Trump was president, figures such as Jim Acosta cast themselves as great

01:14:07.380 heroes. They talked as if they were journalists in the Soviet Union. That didn't hurt them. That helped

01:14:14.020 them. They got book deals out of it. They became celebrities out of it. I just think that CNN

01:14:20.460 miscalculated the event. I don't think Caitlin Collins was strong enough to act as a foil for 0.78

01:14:29.300 Trump. There were far too many pro-Trump people in the audience so that it ended up not just Trump

01:14:36.300 versus Caitlin Collins, but Trump plus the audience versus Caitlin Collins. And it helped Trump a great deal.

01:14:42.960 Now, it's worth saying as a caveat here that it didn't help Trump as much as last time around.

01:14:49.400 The numbers just came out. I think there were 3.1 million. That's obviously pretty good if you're

01:14:54.120 comparing it to where CNN usually is at that time of night. It's pretty good compared to Fox and MSNBC

01:14:59.800 last night. But it's not what we were dealing with back in 2015 when Trump was covered wall to wall.

01:15:07.780 Uh, I, I wonder if this return of the Trump and CNN show will be short-lived because Trump turned it to his

01:15:16.560 advantage.

01:15:17.840 And that's why the left is freaking out. They are so mad at CNN. They were calling for a boycott that I played

01:15:26.560 just Rick Wilson with all his F-bombs sums up the anger. But here's just an example of a bit more with the, the

01:15:35.620 Democratic reaction and their anger at CNN for doing this and the way they handled it and sought nine.

01:15:41.200 I think it was a profoundly irresponsible decision. What we saw tonight was a series of extremely

01:15:47.700 irresponsible decisions. It was shameful.

01:15:49.940 It was the Hindenburg disaster of TV news. CNN must fire its CEO, Chris Licht, for an abomination

01:15:56.740 unprecedented in American television history last night. Its new owners must sell the network whose brand they

01:16:03.500 irreparably destroyed. It was disgraceful on every level. We've been criticized and complaining about

01:16:09.460 Biden. This is a horror show that we don't want a rerun of.

01:16:14.660 So they're upset, Charles. They, I don't, they didn't really like it.

01:16:21.260 Well, look, I didn't like it either, which is a separate question from whether it should have

01:16:25.520 happened. As I say, I thought that CNN played its part in the dog and pony show pretty badly.

01:16:31.900 And I don't want Donald Trump to be the nominee. And Donald Trump is a habitual liar. And much of what 1.00

01:16:38.740 he said was untrue. And he often refuses to answer questions, as you noted, that really are the whole

01:16:46.500 point of a presidential candidates being in the fray in the first place. So I didn't like it. What I find

01:16:55.680 so annoying, though, here, Megan, is the double standard, the Calvin ball that is played by media

01:17:05.560 outlets such as CNN, and by many people in the press, more generally, the excuse, and it was an

01:17:15.420 excuse that CNN gave for why it held this is that Donald Trump is a presidential candidate, and that

01:17:21.040 therefore he's newsworthy. Now, that is, of course, true. He is a presidential candidate, and he is

01:17:26.320 newsworthy. But in so many other circumstances, you would hear complaints about platforming,

01:17:34.040 we'd be told that disinformation is the higher value. The press seems to pick and choose which

01:17:41.540 one of those approaches it wants to take on the fly. So you end up with when the press wants to

01:17:49.820 cover a story, it says, well, look, this is obviously newsworthy, all we're doing is putting a camera in

01:17:55.200 the face of somebody who, by dint of his position, is worth our attention. And when the press doesn't want

01:18:01.840 to cover a story, it says, well, we shouldn't platform this, or this is hateful, or this is

01:18:07.400 disinformation, or what you will. And, you know, the result is pretty cynical. The result is is biased.

01:18:19.440 I think CNN wanted to host this town hall with Donald Trump, because he's good for ratings. And

01:18:26.140 because many of the people at the network would like him to be the nominee again. I'm not saying

01:18:30.600 those people agree with him necessarily. I'm not even saying they think he's good for the country

01:18:35.320 necessarily. But they may well think that he's good for CNN. And as a result, all of the so-called

01:18:43.500 sort of realist approach or journalistic ethics that we've heard so much about over the last six

01:18:48.260 years, all of the complaints that we heard there from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Keith Olbermann and

01:18:54.560 Van Jones immediately become irrelevant and CNN does whatever it wants.

01:18:59.240 Yeah, they definitely would like to see him to be the nominee because the Democrats are convinced

01:19:03.180 he's the most beatable Republican candidate. So it's a win-win for them. They get more ratings

01:19:10.120 because he is a ratings machine. 3.1 million isn't as much as he might have gotten on an average night

01:19:15.920 all those years ago in 16. But it's amazing for CNN. It's 10x what they normally get.

01:19:21.860 Um, and you know, it's it advances him toward a little closer towards the nomination, which they

01:19:27.380 like to. That's a little bit longer of covering him and potentially a Democratic win. But they seem

01:19:33.620 genuinely confused about who their audience is. Right now, their audience is all liberals. I mean,

01:19:38.960 they're Republicans don't watch CNN. They just don't. They were driven away during the last eight

01:19:43.840 years once they went hard partisan. And I guess it's a build back process. But I'm not sure you begin that

01:19:50.380 by dropping this kind of a bomb on your left wing audience of Donald Trump, who with an anchor who

01:19:56.300 can't control him at all in a format that wasn't built to. Well, yes. And that's why this was so

01:20:04.860 odd to watch. And it was so odd this morning to read at CNN's website. That's why you have this

01:20:11.660 really strange sight of CNN putting its time and advertising budget behind this event, making a big

01:20:21.700 deal of its decision. And then cutting to a whole bunch of its employees who are savaging the network

01:20:31.060 for having done it in the first place. Yes, it was so awkward.

01:20:34.760 Talking to Oliver Darcy saying this is not what CNN is. This was a disgrace. I mean, I don't think

01:20:40.880 it's necessarily wrong for institutions, be they CNN or the New York Times or whatever, to have an

01:20:46.460 ombudsman on staff, maybe one person who has some latitude to criticize the network. But this was really

01:20:53.540 either or. You had the event, which was defended. And then you had all of the other people in CNN's

01:21:00.100 orbit, savaging CNN, saying it would have been destructive to American democracy and should

01:21:06.120 never have taken that decision in the first place. And that's because of what you're describing,

01:21:09.900 which is this schizophrenia between wanting to attract a new audience, but actually not having

01:21:14.560 that audience yet. And not having anybody on board within CNN who actually understands real live

01:21:22.280 Republicans. They did, to their credit, put on Byron Donalds, Republican from Florida,

01:21:27.300 your home state on the CNN panel. And there were like eight or nine others. And then Congressman

01:21:32.340 Donalds and man, he unleashed a can on them. It was actually quite beautiful to behold because

01:21:38.140 it was so nice to hear somebody say what people actually cared about and give a different take

01:21:42.440 on it. And they just looked at him like he was an alien that nobody there could even, you could tell

01:21:48.260 it was all they could do to stomach his opinions. I had my team cut just a little bit of him

01:21:53.680 defending Trump. It was the sole voice anywhere on the panel doing so. Here's a little bit of

01:21:59.120 Byron Donalds in SOT 10. Town halls are for the voters, not for the press, not for the person

01:22:06.140 who's the moderator. Caitlin spent more time interjecting her own viewpoints or her own

01:22:10.820 views on a situation. Those are actually facts. Now, are you guys not going to interject your views

01:22:16.860 or do I get a chance to speak now? He did not say he was just going to give over Ukraine the way

01:22:20.520 you intimate van. He did not say that he said was, is that he would actually look for a solution

01:22:29.280 to end it quickly. He put 24 hours on it, but let's be very clear. What Joe Biden has done has

01:22:34.580 been a disaster. We spent 20, 22, 23 minutes talking about January 6th. We could have been

01:22:40.560 talking about a whole lot of other issues. What was said in this town hall about National Guard troops

01:22:45.520 that were authorized by Caitlin was wrong. I'm on the oversight committee. I was in two hearings

01:22:51.420 on January 6th. It was testified in oversight that Donald Trump authorized National Guard troops on

01:22:57.940 January 4th. Charles, they were like, what is it and why is it saying all the defensive things about

01:23:05.620 Donald Trump? Yeah, I mean, I'm in two minds on some of those criticisms. I think he's absolutely right

01:23:14.840 when he says that this should have been for the voters, not for the network. And that was the main

01:23:19.640 problem with last night's spectacle. The other one being that CNN forgot how entertaining Donald

01:23:26.820 Trump is. I don't say that as a compliment in every circumstance. I say as a fact, he is just a wildly

01:23:32.220 entertaining person. He's extremely talented in that regard. And he always has been. One thing I

01:23:36.780 slightly disagree with, with Byron Donalds on, and I think you to some extent in your opening remarks,

01:23:42.000 yes, CNN focused too much on the 2020 election and on January 6th. But that is also a criticism

01:23:49.100 that we can level at Donald Trump. I mean, if you look through Donald Trump's press releases and his

01:23:54.780 behavior on Truth Social, he is far, far more obsessed with the 2020 election and with January 6th

01:24:02.620 than Republican primary voters are. So we're going to hit CNN for it, which we should in 20 minutes is

01:24:08.240 absurd. We should also point that out about Trump. I mean, this is a big distinction between Trump and

01:24:13.760 every other Republican candidate is that he really is still very interested in relitigating 2020

01:24:18.860 and January 6th and the rest of them aren't. So it is going to come up. But yeah, perhaps not in that

01:24:25.380 proportion. Mm hmm. The of course, they opened the debate with a question about it from a GOP voter.

01:24:31.460 I mean, the people in the town hall were GOP voters. But of course, it is the network that

01:24:35.160 selects what questions will be fronted and which ones do not. And so all of those were orchestrated

01:24:41.200 really ultimately by CNN. They were the ones who crafted the editorial flow of the evening.

01:24:45.460 There's a reason they started with it. And then she stayed on it over and over and over trying to

01:24:50.480 give him get him to give a different answer. In fact, we have a sample of that.

01:24:53.540 Um, just a little bit of the exchange and sought to.

01:24:59.880 If you are the Republican nominee and you are in that 2024 race,

01:25:03.480 will you commit tonight to accepting the results of the 2024 election?

01:25:07.240 Yeah, if I think it's an honest election. Absolutely. I would.

01:25:09.780 Will you commit to accepting the results of the election regardless of the outcome?

01:25:13.840 Do you want me to answer it again? If I think it's an honest election, I would be honored to.

01:25:17.960 If I don't win, this country is going to be in big trouble. It's so sad to see what's happening.

01:25:22.040 But no commitment there on the accepting the results regardless of the outcome.

01:25:26.460 If it's an honest election, correct. Okay. So not committing to accepting the

01:25:29.960 2024 election results or acknowledging what happened in 2020.

01:25:34.820 I mean, again, that so that was more about forward looking. But again, Charles, you see

01:25:38.520 what I mean? As as the anchor, you need to know when to move on. You need to know when the audience

01:25:42.900 gets it. He's not going to give you a straighter answer than the one you've gotten. And if you just

01:25:47.340 continue browbeating the guy, you look a little silly. You look a little absurd. 1.00

01:25:52.040 And they start sympathizing with the guy. And you saw he was like, all right,

01:25:55.520 like, that's my answer. You don't like my answer. That's fine. I'm not here for you. I'm here for

01:25:59.740 them. It's just the whole thing. The whole night was like that.

01:26:05.440 Yeah, well, this is why I say they blew it. I mean, again, we shouldn't abstract this too far

01:26:09.500 out from Donald Trump. Donald Trump should not lie about the 2020 election. Donald Trump should not

01:26:16.160 have tried to convince the vice president to overturn the results of the 2020 election by

01:26:22.800 rewriting the electoral count act and the 12th amendment. But CNN knew what Donald Trump was

01:26:29.180 going to say. As I said earlier, this is where they try and have it both ways. On the one hand,

01:26:34.400 they say they're so worried about misinformation, and they don't want to platform Donald Trump's lies.

01:26:40.980 On the other hand, they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was going to stand there and say

01:26:47.820 what he's been saying for the last two years. There's no question about that. It's not as if

01:26:52.420 Donald Trump has changed his tune on this. It's not as if he was going to say, well, you know what,

01:26:56.900 Caitlin, now that you've asked this for five or six times in a row, I'm here to break news for CNN.

01:27:01.940 The 2020 election was fair. And I got the electoral contact interpretation wrong. And I apologize.

01:27:07.860 They knew he was going to say this. So if you know that, and if you genuinely believe that it's a

01:27:13.460 great threat to the country to have him say that and have it broadcast, then you can't invite him

01:27:18.000 on. But you can't have it both ways. You just can't.

01:27:21.740 Also, you have to try to advance the ball. You have to try to, I mean, this is half the game when you put

01:27:25.840 together questions for somebody like this in this kind of forum. You have to incorporate their prior

01:27:30.380 positions into your question so you can try to get past his normal rhetoric on it and advance the

01:27:36.040 ball, try to make news, try to get him to a new place, which was not done there. Just a quick

01:27:41.180 example of what they're saying internally. This is Oliver Darcy within CNN. He's the new Brian Stelter

01:27:46.520 saying CNN is facing a fury of criticism within CNN and without. It's hard to see how America was

01:27:53.640 served by this spectacle of lies that aired on CNN on Wednesday evening, though there are reports

01:28:00.300 that Donald Trump staffers were absolutely delighted with the event. We're not surprised

01:28:05.720 that one of the exchanges that's got a lot of horrified liberal reaction, Charles, was the

01:28:12.300 exchange on E. Jean Carroll. And I'd love to get your take on this. You know, Trump denied her

01:28:18.260 allegations. Yes, he was found liable, not guilty, liable by a civil court jury in Manhattan

01:28:23.500 of. A sexual abuse, not rape, and then of defaming E. Jean Carroll by saying she was a

01:28:30.660 con artist when she accused him of this. He says it didn't happen. He says he didn't know

01:28:36.840 her. A jury believed otherwise. He was asked about it last night. And the almost uniform

01:28:41.720 reaction on the left is how dare they allow him to say and do this to a sexual abuse victim

01:28:47.980 on CNN. Watch.

01:28:51.140 What do you say to voters who say it disqualifies you from being president?

01:28:55.060 Well, there aren't too many of them because my poll numbers just came out. They went up.

01:28:58.940 Okay.

01:29:01.660 This woman, I don't know her. I never met her. I have no idea who she is. I had a picture taken

01:29:07.740 years ago with her and her husband. She called him an ape. Happens to be African American. 0.59

01:29:12.840 Called him an ape. Her dog or her cat was named Vagina. This woman said, I met her at the front 1.00

01:29:19.880 door of Bergdorf Goodman. And a few minutes later, we end up in a room, a dressing room

01:29:24.940 of Bergdorf Goodman right near the cash register. And then she found out there are locks in the

01:29:30.280 door. She said, I found one that was open. She found one. She learned this at trial.

01:29:34.300 She found one that was open. What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up? 1.00

01:29:39.000 And within minutes, you're playing hanky panky in a dressing room. Okay. And by the way,

01:29:44.360 they said she wasn't raped. Okay. That was her charge. She wasn't. They found, they said he didn't

01:29:49.860 rape her. And I didn't do anything else either. You know what? Cause I have no idea who the hell

01:29:53.880 she is. I don't know who this woman is. Do you wish that you had testified? No, it wouldn't have 0.85

01:29:58.040 made a difference. And I swear to you, I have no idea who the hell she's a whack job. 1.00

01:30:02.960 All right. So your thoughts on the outrage over allowing him to speak this way about E.G. and Carroll? 0.71

01:30:14.120 Well, as you know, I'm a criminal justice squish, at least when it comes to the court system. And

01:30:22.020 I get very, very uncomfortable when I hear people, especially people who describe themselves as

01:30:27.920 liberals, saying that organs of information should not have people on to profess their innocence.

01:30:38.440 And I understand we have to and must respect the court system. Although as you say, this was a civil

01:30:44.640 trial, not a criminal trial, but the idea that once somebody has been found guilty in a, in a criminal

01:30:52.740 system, or liable in a civil system, that they should not be platformed, uh, so that they can say it

01:31:01.240 didn't happen. It makes me queasy. Um, I have no doubt that Donald Trump is bad news when it comes to

01:31:10.100 women. He seems to have cheated on all of his wives. Uh, he is not morally upstanding. He's

01:31:16.360 certainly not the sort of man I would like my children to emulate, but you know, this country

01:31:22.960 has a, uh, systems of free speech and of presumption of innocence. And yes, I know it works slightly

01:31:28.100 different than the civil context. Um, so I, I would rather have more speech in that respect than I,

01:31:34.080 than less.

01:31:34.760 To me, it's just, it's so absurd to expect the man who has denied the allegations from the start

01:31:40.400 to go out there and say, I respect Ms. Carroll. I understand. She thinks that I sexually abused her. 1.00

01:31:48.680 What would you expect? He's, he's mad. He's been saying all along it didn't happen. And I don't know 0.99

01:31:54.480 what actually happened and whether something happened, if it was consensual or what, all I know is

01:31:58.180 it took her almost 30 years to say she'd been raped and put him in a position almost 30 years later,

01:32:04.000 where he tried to deny a claim that had she alleged it a week later, he would have been

01:32:08.840 able to much more actively defend. You know, if I said to you, Charlie, you raped somebody 20 years 0.95

01:32:13.240 ago, be a lot. That's a lot different than saying you did it last Tuesday when you could go find your 0.99

01:32:17.880 records and, you know, defend it. Yeah. And of course he's going to, as anyone would say the same

01:32:24.460 thing, whether he's telling the truth or lying. And if he didn't do it, he's going to say, I didn't do

01:32:30.200 it and he's going to sound indignant. If he's lying, he's going to say he didn't do it and

01:32:34.500 he's going to sound indignant. I just don't want the press second guessing people who are

01:32:39.840 denying accusations, especially when the press invited that person on in the first place.

01:32:46.420 You just can't pick and choose. If you're going to have him on television and you're going to ask

01:32:50.700 him that question, then you have to let him give his answer. I mean, it seems, that seems to me a

01:32:56.660 question of sort of elementary liberalism. Agreed.

01:33:00.200 All right. So I know that you were standing by during our RFKJ interview and I wonder what you

01:33:08.580 think of him because 20% is pretty remarkable in a party in which, you know, they've got a sitting 0.98

01:33:15.960 president who's already a Democrat. So, I mean, you usually get 3%, maybe you get an 8%, but a 20%

01:33:21.220 entry is pretty significant. Well, he's not my guy. You know, he is down the line

01:33:29.980 fairly mainstream Democrat. And then he has some eccentricities, some of which he outlined on the

01:33:36.940 show. Now, a few of them I agree with. For example, I think his preference for free speech

01:33:41.500 is admirable, especially given the state of the current Democratic Party. But he is not in the

01:33:50.940 Charles C.W. Cook political mold. I think the president that he cited the most in that segment

01:33:59.060 was Franklin Roosevelt. So, you know, he's not my guy. That said, I think it is extraordinary

01:34:07.380 that he's at 20%. And I would be extremely worried about that if I were Joe Biden and if I were a

01:34:16.320 partisan Democrat, I say that for a couple of reasons. First off, we have not seen a challenger

01:34:22.940 to a sitting president hit 20% or even double digits since 1992. And when it happens, at least

01:34:31.800 historically, when it has happened within the era of the modern primary system, the incumbent

01:34:37.220 president has lost. Double digit challenges, let alone 20%, have taken down George H.W. Bush,

01:34:45.520 that was Pat Buchanan, have taken down Jimmy Carter, that was Edward Kennedy, and have taken

01:34:52.380 down Gerald Ford, that was Ronald Reagan. If this sort of statistical performance continues,

01:35:01.680 I think Biden could be in trouble.

01:35:04.140 Hmm. He's a charming guy. And I think he has been so censored that people are a lot of them

01:35:12.240 getting their first look at him. And I think he poses a bigger threat to Joe Biden than team Biden

01:35:18.040 would like, especially as he gets out there more and more with his messaging. So for sure,

01:35:21.880 somebody to watch. Charles C.W. Cook, thank you for your thoughts on it. We'll look forward to hearing

01:35:26.400 more on the editors, which should be released later today, right? Are you going off to tape that?

01:35:31.680 Have you already done that?

01:35:32.680 It's tomorrow.

01:35:33.880 What do you mean? Today's Thursday. Isn't today your day?

01:35:36.540 No, it's Friday.

01:35:37.040 Friday. You're right. It's Tuesdays and Fridays. How could I forget? All right. I'll listen to you

01:35:41.700 then. Thank you for being on today. And we're going to be back tomorrow to talk about all the chaos

01:35:46.740 at the southern border. It's bad and it's getting worse. We've got the best person on that. He's

01:35:53.540 going to come on. Stephen Miller, you know, he worked in the Trump administration on this very

01:35:56.880 issue. The Trump administration now, I mean, the Biden administration trying to sound like it's even

01:36:00.620 tougher on immigrants than Trump was. This is the new spin by some on the left. We'll talk about

01:36:07.180 that with somebody who actually knows. Stephen Miller will outline to you the crisis and what

01:36:12.620 to expect in the coming days, as now the plan is by many of these southern state governors to ship

01:36:17.200 more and more of these migrants up to sanctuary cities is one coming to a city near you. We'll talk

01:36:22.620 about it. See you then.

01:36:25.280 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda and no fear.

01:36:30.620 Thank you.

The Megyn Kelly Show - May 11, 2023

Trump Wins CNN Town Hall, and if Tucker Got Fired Over Big Pharma, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Charles C.W. Cooke ｜ Ep. 548

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