Tuesday's Red Wave and the Kyle Rittenhouse Trial, with Victor Davis Hanson, Jonna Spilbor, and Arthur Aidala | Ep. 196
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 26 minutes
Words per Minute
183.4608
Summary
Victor Davis Hanson and Dr. Fauci join host Meghan on the show to discuss the latest in the Alec Baldwin case. Plus, we ve got new information on vaccines and vaccine mandates, and the Kyle Rittenhouse trial gets underway.
Transcript
00:00:00.500
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:11.380
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We have a big show for you
00:00:15.400
today, the fallout from Virginia still being felt, not just Virginia, but many states nationwide.
00:00:20.860
As President Biden and the media weigh in on how that state and so many other districts went so
00:00:27.900
red so fast. Plus, we've got new information on vaccines and vaccine mandates today, and the
00:00:34.940
Kyle Rittenhouse trial gets underway. We have our all-star legal panel here a bit later to talk
00:00:40.220
about that, along with the latest in the Alec Baldwin case. The Armorer has just put out a
00:00:44.500
statement, and Alec Baldwin is tweeting now again. So we'll get to all that. But first, we have
00:00:49.680
Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Dying Citizen, who is back with us. This is Dr. Fauci, right at
00:00:56.420
this moment is testifying before a Senate hearing again today, and he just had another contentious
00:01:02.820
exchange with Senator Rand Paul, which we are going to show you in one second. Victor, great to have
00:01:07.900
you. Before we dive into what's going on between Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci, let's talk about Tuesday and
00:01:14.860
your takeaway, because as the audience now knows, it's not just about what happened in Virginia. It's
00:01:20.000
about people voting Republican up and down the ballot, writing in candidates to avoid socialists,
00:01:27.720
voting for Republicans like Ed Durr in New Jersey, the guy who unseated this very powerful Senate
00:01:35.240
Democrat, State Senate Democrat in New Jersey, with $153 spent total on his, I mean, they just voted
00:01:41.520
Republican. And your takeaway from them doing that was what?
00:01:44.980
Well, they were all in blue states, weren't they? Whether they were initiatives or local races or
00:01:51.120
statewide races, whether it's New Jersey or Minneapolis or Virginia, or even the law and
00:01:59.740
order mayor that was really running as a conservative in New York in comparative terms. So I think we're
00:02:06.100
starting to see that people have concluded that wokeness that was an abstraction on the national level
00:02:11.840
is done two things. It's making life impossible to live, whether that on the national level means you can't
00:02:18.620
afford out here in California $5 gas or your natural gas bill, I just got mine, it's double $4 for natural gas
00:02:27.680
per cubic thousand feet. And when you look at you can't buy a car, you can't buy your shelves are empty. You don't
00:02:35.380
want to walk out Los Angeles or San Francisco at night anymore. So what I'm getting and there is no border, it's not
00:02:41.200
porous, Megan, there is no border, it doesn't exist. And we're starting to see people who are bussed into my
00:02:45.820
community from the border. So people are concluding that on the national level, it's not viable. And
00:02:53.300
that's what the polls show, but it's filtering down to the local level. So wokesters that are the
00:02:59.800
versions of the Biden administration are everywhere. And they're trying to advance those agendas and they
00:03:04.620
affect people's lives, whether it's the schools that have these transgendered issues or critical race
00:03:10.680
theory. And people are saying, this isn't political. This is whether America continues to exist and it
00:03:16.900
makes it possible to live. And with high inflation and high energy prices and an open border and a
00:03:25.740
collapsing foreign policy, it looks like a complete systems collapse. And then when they ask for answers,
00:03:31.420
they say, wait a minute, this wasn't Katrina. This wasn't the Gulf War. This wasn't the old Iranian
00:03:37.460
oil boycott. All of these problems were self-induced. We decided not to pump oil. We asked Putin
00:03:44.440
and Saudi Arabia to do it instead so that we didn't have to get our hands dirty, but they would.
00:03:49.860
We didn't have suddenly, you know, the wall collapse on the border. We did that on the border. We did that
00:03:55.820
with critical race. We ginned up this racial animosity, we being the government. And so people, when they
00:04:01.440
get angry and they ask for answers, and it's basically two things, you're a racist for asking
00:04:07.000
and Donald Trump's responsible. But in case of Trump, he hasn't tweeted. He's barred. He's been
00:04:14.240
given a great gift by social media. He can't communicate. So people are thinking, well, he's
00:04:19.920
not tweeting this crazy stuff. So I just remember that his agenda was better than Biden's. And so a lot
00:04:26.340
of things are happening. It's in flux right now. But I think the woke wave has broken. It's at peak
00:04:31.920
woke and we're going on the downside. It's so true. It's they took away Trump's sort of worst
00:04:37.960
characteristic, you know, his impetuousness, his thin skin nature, which he communicated through
00:04:43.560
Twitter. And you're right. While it's left standing is sort of the vague memory of some of those things
00:04:48.580
and policy and contrasted with our current policies. It's it's doing pretty well. I wonder what you
00:04:55.360
think, because to me, it was almost like a reality check where if you turn on the news, if you watch
00:04:59.720
Hollywood movies or television shows, if you watch sports, if you watch the NBA, MLB, NFL the past year,
00:05:07.880
we all we've gotten is the same kind of messaging. You know, these woke warriors telling us how bad
00:05:13.420
America is and how we finally need to come to terms with it. And that what's being shoved down our kids
00:05:19.000
throats in school is not it's not CRT. It's just, you know, benign history lessons about
00:05:25.060
slavery, about Jim Crow and anybody who tells you the opposite is lying to you. And the schools are
00:05:31.280
doing their best to get open and the teachers are trying hard. That's been the messaging. And it's
00:05:36.860
been very much a don't believe your lion eyes kind of messaging back to American voters who know this
00:05:43.360
isn't true. They've been feeling it. So going into Tuesday, I wondered what what's real? Who's going
00:05:52.540
to have the final verdict here? The ones who are on the television all the time telling us not to
00:05:57.860
believe the lion eyes or the real voters who may say one thing in front of their corporation or,
00:06:03.800
you know, be too afraid to take a bold stance even at the school board meeting or by liking a post
00:06:09.820
on Facebook because they could get in trouble, but are going to do what's in their heart and what
00:06:14.820
they know to be right when they're in those ballot boxes. Yeah, I think what it shows is that the echo
00:06:21.280
chamber that you're talking about this 360 degree, I guess you'd call it panopticon that just we're
00:06:27.560
surrounded by it really doesn't have popular support by that. I mean, there's enormous influence in the
00:06:33.540
media, in academia, K through 12, what we saw in Virginia, the corporate boardroom, professional
00:06:39.660
sports, foundations, the traditional network news, PBS, but they don't represent the majority of the
00:06:47.080
people. So they, as you said, they created a false impression that this was the future and everybody
00:06:52.140
had agreed on it. But when people, you know, sat home and contemplated, they said, wait a minute,
00:06:57.660
there was no mandate in that election. It was 50-50 in the Senate. The House has a thin margin.
00:07:04.280
It looks like there's going to be a correction in two years. And I don't have to take this anymore.
00:07:09.660
And again, we're not talking about Idaho or Oklahoma or Tennessee. We're talking about places like New
00:07:15.340
Jersey and Virginia and Minnesota and New York. So this is the bluest of the blue places. And even
00:07:21.620
there, people said, this isn't political for me anymore. It may have been political in the start,
00:07:27.040
but now it's just simply question is where they're going to have America or we're going to have
00:07:31.960
something that I don't know what it is, but it's not America that I know. It's not based on the
00:07:37.580
constitution. It's not based on our customs and traditions. It's not based on the majority of
00:07:41.900
support of the people. And it won't work economically, culturally, politically, socially, it doesn't work.
00:07:49.640
And the chaos is there for all of us to see it. And when they get press, these are very liberal people,
00:07:55.620
we're told, that believe in free speech and let it all hang out and do your own thing. They don't.
00:08:00.940
They call in Merrick Garland to sic the FBI on people, or they have weaponized the IRS, or they get
00:08:06.840
the Pentagon to enact the chain of command, fast track, or the woke agenda. So people also said,
00:08:13.620
these Silicon Valley people, these people in the Pentagon, James Comey and the FBI, these are not liberals.
00:08:18.880
This isn't Frank Church investigating the CIA in the 1970s as a Democrat. These people are,
00:08:25.900
I don't know what we're going to call them. Historians might say they're Jacobins, but they're
00:08:30.340
neo-Bolsheviks. They do not want any objections. They do not want any cross-examination because they
00:08:37.860
don't have a majority support. They rely on institutional support that they can control
00:08:44.300
and bully. And they have great wealth and influence at their back, but they do not have 51 percent of
00:08:49.600
the people. For, you know, several years now, I mean, since Donald Trump came onto the national
00:08:54.920
scene as a politician, but certainly over the past year since Joe Biden became president,
00:08:59.640
we've been told that basically anybody on the right is a racist. Certainly if you voted for Trump,
00:09:04.720
you're a racist. And now, of course, in Virginia, if you voted for Glenn Youngkin, you're a racist.
00:09:10.560
If you voted for the lieutenant governor there, Winsome Sears, who's a black woman,
00:09:16.200
you're still a racist because she's white adjacent. She's sort of become white in the eyes
00:09:20.520
of the left. You can sort of morph into whiteness, even if you're black, basically by being a Republican
00:09:26.340
or even a white supremacist, if your name is Larry Elder and so on. To me, it almost is starting to
00:09:31.580
have, I mean, before it was obviously untrue, but to me, in the wake of what we've seen on Tuesday,
00:09:37.020
it's starting to feel pathetic. And I'll, Gravian does these great mashups, super cuts of
00:09:43.840
the liberal media and what they say and sort of the narrative. They're very effective super cuts
00:09:49.320
because they really do gather, quote, the narrative, capital T, capital N. You'd think
00:09:54.420
that a memo goes out, but having been in the media at ABC, at NBC, at Fox, I can tell you there is no
00:09:59.560
massive memo that goes out telling you how to start talking about things, whether you're in your left
00:10:03.540
wing or right wing media. But most people on the left are in the same ecosystem and they just
00:10:08.820
believe it. So they don't need a big memo. And so Gravian captures some of that here. You tell me
00:10:14.000
to me, it's just starting to feel kind of sad and desperate. Listen. Yeah. Voters do have anxiety
00:10:20.640
about a changing America, right? That it is blacker. It is browner. You've got the Republicans
00:10:26.560
yelling like, hey, look, the black and brown folks are coming for us. Some Republican candidates
00:10:31.480
are perfectly willing to use race as a motivating factor for their base that has gone on for decades
00:10:39.080
and it happened this year. Race is just the most palpable tool in the toolkit. It used to be of the
00:10:44.940
Democratic Party back in the day when there were Dixiecrats and now of the Republican Party. This is
00:10:48.860
about the fact that a good chunk of voters out there are OK with white supremacy. Let's call a
00:10:54.700
thing a thing. Your thoughts, Victor? Translated, that means that this woke takeover is very careful
00:11:01.900
that people will not support it any longer by their indifference. They never supported it actively.
00:11:07.000
But passively, I guess they did by not objecting to it. What do we mean by that? That we mean
00:11:11.940
of universities massively hiring people to be really commissars, diversity, equity, inclusion people,
00:11:19.740
or to give preferences in hiring by race or to be disproportionate in racially selecting actors
00:11:28.360
or roles. In other words, it's not just proportional representation of the past. It's disparate. It's
00:11:34.320
sort of repertory ideas that we're going to have so many. We're going to have 20% or 30% of African
00:11:39.460
Americans who weren't commercials to make up for this, but it's just engineering. And the beneficiaries
00:11:44.380
of it are, we don't talk about class, Megan, but all the people that you show, they're very affluent
00:11:50.820
people. Don Lemon, just to take an example, is very affluent. LeBron is very affluent. The Obamas are
00:11:56.680
affluent. They're all privileged. And the people I work with in the university of all different ethnic
00:12:01.120
backgrounds that are woke are very privileged. This was a top-down elite squabble for people who said,
00:12:08.580
I want more airtime. I want a better role. I should get this. I'm a Jesse Smollett. I wanted to get
00:12:13.220
this role. Or, you know, I want to have four classes in the morning and not in the afternoon.
00:12:20.360
It's a squabble. It's not, you can see from the elections, it's not a grassroots, bottom-up,
00:12:26.700
populist demand that we do this stuff. And I think that's really hurting them. They don't talk about
00:12:32.600
class at all. But when you, as we said earlier, I think in a broadcast, when you have Oprah talking
00:12:37.540
to Meghan Markle and then Obama's weighing in on it or lecturing people, they all have something in
00:12:44.020
common. And that is they're from the very, very elite. And it doesn't sound convincing that they're
00:12:50.100
victimized. And that's why the lieutenant governor was so, Winston Cleary was so convincing because she
00:12:59.700
said, I'm very privileged. I'm very happy to be in America. It's the greatest thing that ever
00:13:06.720
happened. And then there's this empirical evidence they just don't deal with. Two million people
00:13:11.280
destitute, the majority in their definition, not white, but risking their life to break into the
00:13:17.500
United States, which is supposedly a toxic, racist place where they would have no future. They know
00:13:22.580
that's not true. They know that what their whole agenda is, is to bully, bully, threaten, cancel,
00:13:31.480
topple, deface, rename. And then therefore, they'll say, well, you give me the following concessions
00:13:39.160
and we'll stop. Of course, they'll never stop. They only get more bolder the more that you appease
00:13:43.920
them. And so they don't have a rational agenda. They don't have one that appeals to the majority of
00:13:50.220
people. And they're not going to stop me again. I think there's a lot of pundits after the election
00:13:55.620
said, well, they're going to make a correction. And I think I said on Fox, I don't think they will.
00:14:00.080
I think they're going to say, you pointed out, I think, that if you lost in Virginia, it was because
00:14:06.680
there was racism or it didn't matter or Virginia is always the opposite of what Washington is doing
00:14:14.060
or there was voter suppression. But they're never going to say, we have a message that's
00:14:19.520
extremist that alienates our own independent and mostly liberal voters. And we better change or
00:14:26.180
we're going to end up like George McGovern or something. I think they're going to go over the
00:14:31.460
cliff. And we're all divided, aren't we? We think, well, maybe they should just keep doing this for
00:14:38.320
two years. But look at the damage they did in 10 months. And some of these some of this damage is
00:14:44.620
not collateral. It's institutionalized. Yeah, I don't want to go on. I don't want to go on.
00:14:50.200
Institutionalized, but it's actually in the school setting, whether it's the covid mandates and
00:14:53.980
restrictions or the CRT and the trans and the highly sexualized lessons they're giving them.
00:14:58.960
It's abusive. It has to stop. It has to stop yesterday. And I do feel like in the latter lane,
00:15:04.640
either we're going to stop them, you know, at the voting box or the they're going to just get the
00:15:11.340
lesson after a night like Tuesday and realize it's not in their political fortunes. It's not
00:15:17.260
good for their political fortunes to keep doing as they've been doing. I don't know. I guess it
00:15:21.680
depends on where you fall on the Democrat ideological scale. It seems like if you are there still moderates
00:15:27.640
in the Democratic Party, if you were more moderate, you might be taking a correction from Tuesday night as
00:15:32.760
your lesson and say, you know, like it sound like James Carville saying you've got to go to woke
00:15:36.780
detoxification. This is an insane thing to be incorporated into Democratic politics. We need
00:15:42.260
to distance ourselves from these far left luxury, you know, scolds or not. Because to me, most of the
00:15:50.340
Democrats, even if they're moderate, are beholden to the to seeking the love and approval of the
00:15:56.520
wokesters in their party and will not willingly cross them because they don't have the stomach for being
00:16:01.820
called the names. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that things are very vulnerable. You
00:16:07.040
notice how sensitive they are when people say you're racist. You're the one that's tribalizing
00:16:11.480
America. You're the one that's saying our superficial appearance is everything to our persona. It's not
00:16:16.440
incidental, according to you. And that's why you, you know, we're, we're all black, black, black,
00:16:21.400
or Latino. We're not just people. And then second, you're very wealthy people. You're very privileged.
00:16:26.020
You've had a lot of opportunities, and you're doing quite well. And those are two charges that
00:16:31.540
they just plead from. They don't like the idea that anybody would ever suspect them of being
00:16:36.660
illiberal and racist or privileged and elite. And I think people have to keep making those charges
00:16:43.240
because that's what they really, really don't like. The other thing is that we're getting the
00:16:48.100
stages of reaction to woke. At first, it was bewilderment. People said, my God, nobody's serious
00:16:54.800
about this. You don't defund the police, or you don't just end the border and make it, you know,
00:17:00.580
northern Mexico and the United States, one country. You don't do that. Or you, you, nobody in their
00:17:06.120
right mind would, would tell fractures and horizontal drillers when we're energy independent
00:17:10.760
and we're doing so well without having to worry about Middle East oil that we're going to go back
00:17:16.160
and cut 2 million barrels plus out of development. But, so they were bewildered. And then they got kind
00:17:22.200
of fearful and said, wow, these people destroy careers. They make you have this indoctrination
00:17:29.940
training at work. Friends that you know won't speak out. And now they're angry. And I don't know
00:17:38.000
what falls after angry, but they want this to end. And they're going to vote, they're going to protest,
00:17:44.880
and they're not going to stop. And I think the left is terrified because they have, as I said earlier,
00:17:49.840
it's a minority of you. And I think if everybody will just kind of transcend, it used to be that
00:17:54.840
we were living in a monastery of our minds. A lot of people said, I don't watch the NBA anymore.
00:17:59.580
I'm done with it. I don't watch network news. I'm done with it. I don't go to the movies and get
00:18:03.840
that Hollywood crap anymore. I'm done with it. I don't really want my child to go to a prestigious
00:18:10.700
school anymore because I know what's going to happen when they come home for Christmas.
00:18:14.080
But now, and they kind of drop out of popular culture. They don't listen to particular types
00:18:19.460
of music. They don't know. Now I think they thought, you know what? Passive resistance wasn't
00:18:24.380
enough. I've got to get mobile. I was speaking to some women's group this last week in Seattle
00:18:30.660
and Los Angeles and in Central California. I have never seen, Megan, so many bright, active
00:18:37.480
women and not all white women, Asian women, Hispanic women. And I'm talking in the age group of 60 to
00:18:44.660
85 who are angry and they are organized and they had enormous people come out. And I've never seen
00:18:53.780
it my entire life, how angry they are. I've never seen it either, just in my own friend group,
00:18:58.540
most of whom are liberals, just because I've been living in New York for the past 20 years.
00:19:01.980
There's angry, red-pilled secret meetings, organization, finding ways to fight back,
00:19:09.200
celebrating these electoral results, even though they may still be registered Democrats.
00:19:13.680
And then they turn on the news and they're told this was all a conservative push. This is like
00:19:19.600
conservative racists who made this happen and oblivion to the fact that, no, independents have
00:19:25.300
rejected the Biden agenda. A lot of Democrats have rejected the Biden agenda. The working class,
00:19:30.940
you look at those, the white women who put Glenn Youngkin over the top, most of whom 75% were
00:19:38.120
without a college. If you, if you were a white woman without a college degree, you went, they went
00:19:41.660
75% for Glenn Youngkin. Is that because they're racist or is that because they're the ones who
00:19:47.960
couldn't get private tutors when the Virginia schools were closed for an entire year? Are they're
00:19:53.560
the ones who had to sit there with their kids in the class masked all day and had no alternatives?
00:19:58.220
They're the ones who can't stock their shelves and who actually shop at the dollar store and see
00:20:03.060
that it's now $1.50. And so they can't run from the downside of these policies. And by the way,
00:20:09.280
they live in a very pro-military state that certainly wouldn't like, have liked to see what
00:20:14.620
happened in Afghanistan and the national embarrassment of America, you know, international
00:20:18.580
on that kind of a stage. And instead, so they go in the ballot box and they have their say,
00:20:23.600
Victor, and what they see the next day on the news is you're all racists. It's the Don Lemons
00:20:29.260
again of the world, the millionaires looking at them from their high poaches or perches saying,
00:20:34.460
you're racists. And to me, I sit back and I say, great, keep, keep saying it. That's perfect.
00:20:40.880
I think, I think that's the attitude everybody has to mock it. It's incoherent too. I was talking
00:20:45.300
to some soldiers from the Central Valley and they don't know what to make of it because they've had
00:20:53.700
COVID and they have high antibody levels and they're going to have to get a discharge if they
00:21:00.220
don't get the two Moderna, the Pfizer vaccinations, even though they're told that with high antibodies
00:21:06.260
from a recent case of COVID, it's not such a good idea to get vaccinated. And yet when they look at
00:21:11.880
people coming in from Afghanistan, 2 million people across the border, the same government
00:21:16.540
says, all you non-citizens are going to be exempt from mandates, but all you soldiers who have COVID
00:21:24.200
and you have probably higher antibody levels and people, you're going to be vaccinated.
00:21:29.100
And even, and they, and we don't care because that's just the way it's going to be.
00:21:33.220
And so they've lost respect for the institutions, very dangerous because while this is happening,
00:21:38.420
there are people like Vladimir Putin who gave one of the most bizarre surreal lectures I've
00:21:44.240
ever heard. And he basically said, we went through Bolshevist. He's very cynical. He's happy about
00:21:49.940
this. And he said, we went through it. It destroys the institutions. We've suffered through it for 50
00:21:55.400
years. And if you want to go ahead and do it, this is great. Go ahead and do it. And then we've had
00:22:00.100
the Chinese who were bizarre as well in their reactions. And they think, you know, rather than Putin
00:22:06.800
egging them on, we'll just kind of, in saying it's ridiculous, we'll say it's great. So every
00:22:12.620
time you mentioned to the Chinese, what happened about the gain of function virus that leaked from
00:22:18.260
your lab? Or why didn't you tell people that were traveling all over the world from Wuhan that they
00:22:23.440
may infect people before the travel ban? They say one word, you're racist. You're racist. You hate
00:22:29.080
Chinese because you're racist. And so what I'm getting at is it's not just, it's not sustainable in the
00:22:34.900
United States, but it's been a gift, a gift for our existential enemies abroad, both Russia and
00:22:41.700
China. Now Iran is pumping oil like crazy and in violation of the embargo. And we're not doing
00:22:46.780
anything about it because we think, well, it's going to be more oil in the market. Maybe that'll,
00:22:51.160
that'll get the price of the gas down before the midterms next year. So it's, I think everybody just
00:22:56.600
says we have lost our collective minds. You know, I get a lot of friends overseas. So do you. And when
00:23:01.640
they email or call and they're not, they're not just conservative, they're liberals or moderates and
00:23:08.280
said, what has happened? You guys are gone crazy. And I say, well, you know, it's kind of like the reign of
00:23:14.060
terror in 1793 or the save them, which file this massive pet rocks, hula hoop craze. It's a massive
00:23:20.680
stereo. And maybe it'll, it'll subside if we stop it, but they, they can't, they're very worried about it.
00:23:26.900
There was a burst of reality on, on Tuesday night. I want to ask you about the COVID thing.
00:23:31.860
We'll squeeze in a quick break here, but that's where we'll pick it up because to what extent were
00:23:36.820
people voting against these restrictive COVID policies or are trying to object to how the
00:23:41.900
Biden administration has handled this crisis? It's one of the interesting questions and it's
00:23:46.280
actually, it's timely because Rand Paul is cross-examining Anthony Fauci right now about his
00:23:52.780
denials on the United States funding gain of function research, research where you make a virus
00:23:57.740
more transmissible or more dangerous. And it's fiery as always. We'll show you what just happened
00:24:03.880
right after this quick, quick break. More with Victor Davis Hanson in one second.
00:24:13.420
So let's talk COVID for a minute, because it seems to me that underlying a lot of these results on
00:24:19.280
Tuesday was a frustration with this administration and how it's handling the pandemic. It's, it's,
00:24:25.560
it's vaccine mandates, it's refusal to acknowledge natural immunity. It's punishment of the working
00:24:32.200
class guys, you know, the firefighters, the cops, even the teachers who helped get us through the
00:24:36.580
pandemic, um, with firing them or, you know, benching them without pay. If they won't get the
00:24:42.320
vaccine, even if they've got a valid medical exemption or religious exemption or natural immunity,
00:24:46.980
something they account for in Europe, but we've decided doesn't exist inexplicably here in the
00:24:51.320
United States. We just choose to totally ignore it. And all of this plays out against the backdrop of
00:24:56.100
how does it, how did this thing get started? The total unwillingness of our Intel agencies,
00:25:01.860
they had issued a three page summary months ago on their second look at how COVID got started.
00:25:06.640
Was it in a lab? Was it natural through an animal? Um, well, they just released the full 18 page
00:25:12.660
report about a week ago, and it was utterly benign and unhelpful. And to me, just, just betrayed their
00:25:18.580
unwillingness to really look, we won't press China. We won't punish China for hiding the data.
00:25:23.860
We're too beholden to China. And there's a real chance here that this was from the Wuhan lab. That
00:25:30.400
certainly should be the predominant theory, uh, and possibly with some nefarious actor behind it. We
00:25:36.660
don't know at a minimum, it appears we funded very dangerous research in that lab. And, uh, that is
00:25:42.480
one of the things that was on the topic today on the, on the docket today when Rand Paul was pushing
00:25:47.560
Anthony Fauci yet again, on whether we funded quote gain of function research. And just by way of
00:25:54.560
background, as you watch this clip for the audience, what happened was the, the NIH after
00:26:00.540
Fauci's last dustup with Rand Paul, where Rand kept saying you funded gain of function research and
00:26:05.360
Fauci kept saying, no, you don't know what you're talking about. That day, the NIH went back on the,
00:26:10.200
on the website and changed the definition of gain of function. Uh, so now Rand Paul gets another bite
00:26:16.780
at the apple and here's just a little bit of his exchange with Dr. Fauci. Watch.
00:26:21.660
So what you're doing is defining away gain of function. You're simply saying it doesn't exist
00:26:25.760
because you changed the definition on the NIH website. This is terrible. And you're, you're completely
00:26:31.380
trying to escape the idea that we should do something about trying to prevent a pandemic
00:26:36.080
from leaking from a lab. There's the preponderance of evidence now points towards this coming from
00:26:41.080
the lab. And what you've done is change the definition on your website to try to cover your
00:26:45.780
ass basically. And then on January of 2017, the office of science and technology policy of the white
00:26:53.780
house issued the current policy and coincidentally, I have definitely the definition on the same day.
00:27:01.320
The NIH said that, yes, there was a gain of function in Wuhan the same day. The definition
00:27:06.540
appeared the new definition to try to define a way what's going on a Wuhan until you accept it until
00:27:12.380
you expect, accept responsibility. We're not going to get anywhere close to trying to prevent another
00:27:17.440
lab leak of this dangerous sort of experiment. You won't admit that it's dangerous. And for that lack
00:27:22.080
of judgment, I think it's time that you resign. I have a great deal of respect for this body of
00:27:27.820
the Senate. And it makes me very uncomfortable to have to say something, but he is egregiously
00:27:33.140
incorrect in what he says. Thank you. History will figure that out on its own.
00:27:41.040
On and on it goes, Victor. And we're not, maybe we'll never have a final verdict, but I think the
00:27:46.700
American people are figuring it out for themselves. Yeah, I think he, I mean, he, what's he, what is
00:27:52.900
he doing, Megan? He's making the argument from authority. I'm Anthony Fauci. I'm a famous public
00:27:58.460
health servant. I'm the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases,
00:28:03.440
and what I say counts because of the letters after my name. But he's also talking to an MD who's a US
00:28:09.140
senator who's pretty well informed. And I think what he's basically telling us, Anthony Fauci and
00:28:14.600
also Rand Paul, is that if you just step back from the turmoil right now and put it in historical
00:28:21.640
perspective, we've got about 770,000 people that died. And this is the largest disaster that's hit
00:28:31.620
this country. If you look at the economic, cultural, social, all the things we've been talking about
00:28:35.940
earlier, Megan, in some cases were let off. They were IEDs that were exploded by this COVID stuff.
00:28:42.260
They were there, but they were, they were activated by this crisis. And really what we're talking about
00:28:47.920
is Anthony Fauci at the age of 80 is essentially can't deal with the reality that he spent US government
00:28:57.500
money when gain of function was not allowed and routed it through Echo Health. And it ended up,
00:29:04.680
I think he knew it and he intended it. So in the Wuhan's level four lab that had the Chinese military
00:29:11.180
oversight of it, and they created a gain of function virus that seems to be very pernicious
00:29:18.020
in its mutations, except for transmissibility. And in some way, we have culpability for it.
00:29:26.580
And we being America and him in particular. And at 80, I don't think he's able to resign or retire
00:29:33.240
with that legacy. So he's not. But the more that he digs in, the more it requires him not to tell
00:29:38.920
the truth and not to face reality. And it's another, I mean, look at the people, Megan, that we have
00:29:45.940
created in these positions of power. They're public servants. Sometimes they do very good jobs, but
00:29:51.620
Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, James Comey, John Brennan, Andrew McKay, Robert Mueller, they all get before
00:30:02.580
Congress and they cannot tell the truth or be candid. None of them can. And so it's a reminder,
00:30:08.820
we've given these people enormous powers of executive branch, legislative branch, judicial branch.
00:30:14.680
Anthony Fauci just a few months ago was determining whether rent landlords could collect rent from
00:30:22.120
their tenants based on the degree of COVID pandemic levels. And he would say, no, it's still dangerous.
00:30:28.680
And then the government would say, okay, you can suspend, you renters can suspend payment to your
00:30:33.260
landlords, not all of whom were wealthy. And so we've given these people so much power and they're so
00:30:38.760
unaccountable that they have an arrogance about them when they're caught. And they're, they're kind
00:30:45.000
of, they're, they're very scary people. And when they get caught, they always, I'm General Milley,
00:30:49.900
and I've got this chest of metals here and look at this. And that, you know what, that was a righteous
00:30:55.240
strike of that, that drone strike. And, and this was a logistical success getting out. And if you,
00:31:00.880
and if you question him, then you're on patriotic or I'm Anthony Fauci. And how dare you suggest that I
00:31:06.360
would have anything to do with gain of function? That that's beneath you. This body, that's the
00:31:11.740
reply, or I'm James Comey, or I'm Robert Mueller. I don't know anything about GPS, using GPS. I don't
00:31:17.740
know anything about the steel dossier. Why should I? Well, it's the basis of your whole investigation.
00:31:22.540
And so I think this is all caught up to what we're talking about. The people feel that they've lost
00:31:28.860
control of the government, that their elected officials, but especially their unelected officials
00:31:34.200
simply are not accountable. And they can't audit them. They can't hold them responsible. And
00:31:39.300
they're getting angrier and angrier about it. And yeah, literally said, I am science. Well,
00:31:45.640
he does. Okay. You know, we'll, we'll be the judge of that. But I think the COVID policies
00:31:51.380
forced on regular Americans by this administration definitely played out to some extent on Tuesday,
00:31:58.840
because I do think, you know, what part of what we saw at those angry school board meetings was
00:32:04.020
parents mad about the never ending masking. And this is before we've gotten to the mandatory
00:32:10.600
vaccinations for children. It's coming for five to 11 year olds. In many schools, it's already there
00:32:16.340
for 12 and up. In our school, it's there for 16 and up. And, and they're, they're going to expel any
00:32:22.820
child who doesn't get it, who's 16 years old. It doesn't matter if your child's been there since
00:32:26.880
he was a kindergartner, he's getting expelled. If you won't give him the vaccine, even if you have
00:32:32.020
a medical exemption, that's, that's our school. But my point is, parents are angry about that.
00:32:37.200
We saw that it wasn't all CRT issued, uh, driven anger. It was also the never ending COVID madness
00:32:43.740
and the refusal to, to be reasonable, not to mention Biden's promise that he would shut it down.
00:32:49.360
And he hasn't. So the virus isn't shut down though. It gets better. They won't loosen any
00:32:55.280
of these restrictive policies. Our children suffer. Our businesses suffer the working class
00:32:59.480
suffers. And I do think that was playing out there. I mean, in Northern Virginia, the schools
00:33:03.460
were closed for a year, Victor, they were closed for a year. They have zero credibility because
00:33:08.460
we've got to remember that Joe Biden came into office thinking that the vaccination program that
00:33:13.220
he inherited and the waning virus was going to be over with. So he told us that the president
00:33:18.840
Trump was responsible for all of those 390,000 deaths. That was the narrative. And they're
00:33:25.020
not going to happen on, I'm going to kill the virus. He didn't understand it was a gain
00:33:28.960
of function, highly mutating. So we got the Delta and here we are, uh, not even 10 months
00:33:35.180
into his administration, we have 370,000 deaths. We have more deaths per day since Biden took office
00:33:42.780
than when Trump was in office after the first case was reported. In other words, there was
00:33:48.200
about a thousand deaths per day under Trump to get to the 390. And we have about, uh, 1300
00:33:55.280
under Biden. That wouldn't matter, Megan. It shouldn't be matter. It's not fair to blame
00:34:00.240
the president, except that was what Biden said. He, the president is to be blamed. And then he
00:34:05.140
never thought that he would be boomeranged on that. And then we heard all of this one mass,
00:34:10.680
two mass, 60, 70, 80% immunity. The don't worry about anybody else. You go get the vaccination.
00:34:17.860
You don't really worry whether they're vaccinated. It's, it's the gold standard, 96% immunity. You
00:34:24.340
can be in a room with people and not back. And then we heard Biden say, you know what? I don't
00:34:28.600
want mandates. I'm not going to do that. And then everything is reversed. Everything is not true.
00:34:34.300
And now we're in a worker shortage and we're paying people not to work. And the least thing
00:34:41.080
imaginable that any leader would do would compound that worker shortage by firing thousands of people
00:34:48.740
in key industries and the military and the federal government, if they're not vaxxed, even though we
00:34:54.940
know that, uh, prior immunity naturally acquired is, uh, is good. You know, I had a very strange thing.
00:35:02.040
I went to a doctor's appointment. I got the Moderna in February. So it was, it's been nine,
00:35:07.980
nine months. And they gave me, I don't know why they gave me, but they gave me not only COVID,
00:35:12.400
but an antibody. And they called up and said, Victor, you have 2,200 antibody levels. What's
00:35:19.680
happened to you? Your, your antibody levels should have gone way down. Are you, we were going to give
00:35:24.700
you a booster. I said, I don't want a booster. And they said, well, you don't need one. You must have
00:35:28.960
had COVID. And then I remember I was teaching, you know, some kids got sick in my class. I had
00:35:34.580
101 temperature for a day. I didn't even, it was on a Friday. I didn't go in to get tested on Monday
00:35:40.200
because I woke up 14 hours later, perfectly fine. But I guess I did get some kind of COVID. But my
00:35:46.660
point is that natural immunity spiked so high that they thought that I had a booster. And they said,
00:35:54.120
wow, it's like you've had, just got your Moderna shot or a booster yesterday. What I'm getting at
00:35:58.760
is that we don't even talk about that. We don't talk about all of these people who suffered from
00:36:02.720
COVID. They have natural immunity. We don't quite know its relationship with vaccination immunity,
00:36:08.680
but it looks almost in many cases, there's parity. And yet we're telling them on anti-science,
00:36:15.480
really anti-science that they have to be vaccinated again. And so we started out with all these
00:36:21.620
conspiracists that said, you know what, this is a way for the federal government to gain greater
00:36:26.780
control of our lives, to empower people who are not elected to make economic and social decisions
00:36:33.560
based on suspect signs. And we didn't believe them. And now we do, because that's exactly what's
00:36:39.460
happening. They're controlling more and more aspects of our life. And when we get the vaccinations,
00:36:46.180
we get the boosters, they feel panic. And you know where we're going to end up, Megan,
00:36:52.800
we're going to end up with a engineered virus that's going to be like a bad flu, I suppose.
00:36:59.200
And all of us are either going to get vaccinated, we're going to have residual T cell or B cell
00:37:04.140
immunity or some antibody. And then we're going to make a choice every year whether to get a booster
00:37:08.860
or to get a day or two of COVID, because we probably will have immunity either from fire exposure
00:37:15.140
or the original shots. And it won't kill us. And that's not even considering the therapeutics
00:37:21.220
that are down the pipeline. We don't even talk about that. No, we don't even talk about the
00:37:25.220
therapeutics. We got the vaccine and then we gave up on the cure. Yeah, and they're going to be here
00:37:28.960
pretty soon. What do you think the odds are of Democrats, if not today or tomorrow, by the time we
00:37:35.220
approach midterms, at least, let's hope it's not that long, finally saying, oh my goodness, we are going
00:37:40.840
to have to relax these crazy policies because we're going to pay for it if we don't. All this firing of
00:37:49.180
cops and medical personnel and prison guards and teachers and health care workers and mandatory
00:37:55.260
masking of children who are not effective vectors of the disease all day long in school, we've
00:37:59.720
completely forgotten about them. We've muzzled them, stuck them in schools and forgotten about them,
00:38:03.720
except when we pull them out for two minutes to stick a needle in our five-year-old's arms
00:38:07.700
or they get expelled. That's really where this is. I do think that people will punish the Democrats
00:38:13.660
if they don't reverse some of this. I don't think that, I think they will punish them, but they won't
00:38:17.020
change. And their way of thinking, two things got them elected and they did not think that they would
00:38:23.020
defeat Donald Trump, much less control both houses of Congress. They said it. And what they feel worked
00:38:29.820
for them was the demonstrations, riots, and chaos after George Floyd that empowered critical race
00:38:37.040
theory that was an abstract academic, I mean, academic exercise into the mainstream. And so
00:38:42.900
they're never going to give up on that, that winning, what they feel was a winning ticket in 2020.
00:38:47.620
And the COVID crisis, because the COVID crisis, and I'm not getting into conspiracy about voting and
00:38:53.120
valeting, but there was 102 million absentee or early votes that were not cast on election day. And
00:39:00.360
they feel that that worked out for them. And I'm not just saying they feel, I mean, Jane finally,
00:39:06.120
members said, thank God for COVID, we wouldn't have gotten into Trump. Or Gavin Newsom said,
00:39:10.860
this gave us a chance to get a new progressive capitalism. Or Hillary Clinton said, this is a
00:39:15.880
chance to push through single payer healthcare. The Davos Great Reset people said, this is the chance
00:39:21.940
we've been waiting for. So in their mind, the longer you have the COVID threat, and the longer you have
00:39:28.080
racial tensions, and critical race theory, the more polarized, chaotic anarchy, the more anarchy,
00:39:35.460
the more there's a need to people will react in a way that they usually don't politically, and that
00:39:41.960
favors them. So I don't think they're going to give up. I think it's, they're going to say, you know
00:39:46.920
what, these boosters are necessary every year, the mask work, we've got to keep everybody locked down.
00:39:57.080
Or at least they'll say, you need to show this to a restaurant. I was in New York, you know, your city.
00:40:01.200
And I could not believe it. I went to about six restaurants, and I would call multi-racial,
00:40:07.920
multi-ethnic neighborhoods. And it was like being in the 1950s South. They were all white people.
00:40:14.320
And so I kind of asked one woman there, and I said, do you all, I showed my, I said, everybody,
00:40:21.060
I had this, I was asked to show my vaccination certificate. She said, everybody does. And she said,
00:40:26.200
of course, so-called affluent white people are more likely, and Asians could be vaccinated. So
00:40:32.240
there's no, minorities are not being treated very well. And I thought to myself, how many African
00:40:38.280
American people are Mexican American people, none of which are in this restaurant? And I wasn't the
00:40:44.920
high end restaurant. Some of them weren't. And I thought, how many of them really had COVID? And they
00:40:51.000
almost died, or they got seriously sick for a week, and they have sky high antibodies, and they cannot
00:40:56.320
come into this restaurant. Right, right. No, it's absurd. And by the way, while they sit at home,
00:41:02.240
God forbid, they have an emergency, no firefighters going to show up because they're not at work because
00:41:07.900
of this vaccine mandate. They've been benched one third of the fire department, and it's coming next
00:41:14.520
month in December for the prison guards and so on. And you can feel the anger. By the way, I mean,
00:41:18.880
there's a reason that the New York constituency just elected a former cop who's pro-gun and who
00:41:24.420
says he's revisiting these mandates that the lunatic de Blasio put on all the public employees
00:41:31.040
come January 1st. So hopefully Eric Adams is going to undo Mayor de Blasio's ridiculous and
00:41:37.540
non-science-based mandates on our working professionals. But stand by, because there's
00:41:42.620
so much more to go over with Victor Davis Hanson in a moment, including what about Trump? How are the
00:41:47.280
Republicans supposed to run now? Victor's a Trump fan. What does he think? I'll ask him next. And
00:41:52.220
remember, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at
00:41:58.060
noon east and the full video show and clips when you subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.com
00:42:03.880
slash Megyn Kelly. Or if you prefer an audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple,
00:42:09.680
Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a good way of sharing the show
00:42:14.760
with people who may have missed it when it was live. And there you'll find our full archives with
00:42:19.060
more than 195 shows. And here's a hint. Go back and listen to any single one with Victor. It's worth
00:42:24.480
your time. So, Victor, the president was asked by the White House correspondent for, who is it? Not
00:42:38.580
not NPR. PBS. Thank you. Yamiche Amador about the election on Tuesday. And he got a couple of
00:42:46.700
questions. First, he said, what we really need to do is get things done. We've got to pass my
00:42:50.000
infrastructure bill and we've got to pass my build back better bill, which is his $3.5 trillion
00:42:55.640
social spending bill, which, you know, thanks to Joe Manchin is now cut down to about $1.75 trillion
00:43:02.440
on top of the $1.2 trillion. I mean, the numbers are just they boggle the mind. But what he wants is more
00:43:08.060
spending. He says that's going to really change everybody's attitude. Then she zeroes in on him
00:43:12.380
on on strategy and race. And here's how that went. Listen.
00:43:17.880
Your message, though, for Democratic voters, especially black voters who see Republicans
00:43:22.380
running on race education, lying about critical race theory, and they're worried that Democrats
00:43:27.220
don't have an effective way to push back on that. Well, I think that the whole answer is just to speak
00:43:34.080
the truth. Lay out where we are. Look, I'm convinced that if you look at everything from my view on
00:43:48.060
criminal justice system to my view on equal opportunity to my view on economic issues
00:43:55.900
and all the things that I have and what I've been pushing in legislation, each of the elements
00:44:00.960
are overwhelmingly popular. We have to speak to them. We have to speak to them and explain them.
00:44:06.260
Look, I just think people are at a point and it's understandable where there's a whole lot of
00:44:16.360
confusion. To me, this is so classic. We hear this from Democrats every time they lose an election.
00:44:24.400
My views are extremely popular. I we just need to explain them. So the dumb dumbs at home
00:44:31.060
understand better why I'm so amazing. That's my takeaway.
00:44:35.560
Yeah, the more people understand them, the more they dislike them. That's his problem.
00:44:39.620
And he's not able to even if he were able to explain them and he's not.
00:44:43.220
If he did, then they would be even more appalled than they are. And the funny thing is that the
00:44:49.960
media and the hard left and the woke people want Biden to go over the cliff at a higher speed than
00:44:56.280
he's going. And he knows that and he doesn't know what to do about it because that's the people who
00:45:01.840
were going to sit out on the election. Remember the Faustian bargain that got him there. Bernie Sanders
00:45:07.380
and BLM and all those people that appeased Antifa said, OK, we'll we'll if Bernie doesn't get the
00:45:13.780
nomination, we'll support Biden. But once he's in office, he owes us and he's going to carry
00:45:18.180
this agenda across the finish line. And that's where he's trapped. And so he just says, like,
00:45:24.120
as you say that, as they always say that we need more information. But it really opens up a question
00:45:29.880
about the Republicans is that Young can found out a way to bring back the suburban voter,
00:45:35.740
the moderate voter by not disowning the Trump agenda. But actually, he got a higher turnout in
00:45:42.680
some counties and Trump did in Virginia concern the really hard red counties of Virginia. So he
00:45:48.160
didn't distance himself. And Trump being barred from social media didn't really hurt him because
00:45:54.960
Trump was not weighing in. So Young can was not being asked every day. What do you think of this
00:45:59.780
tweet five minutes ago? Wouldn't it be amazing if if now Twitter allows Trump back?
00:46:06.940
That's probably where it's going to go. This is probably what's going to bring him back after all
00:46:10.980
this time. All right. I got to run because we're up against a break. But Victor Davis Hanson,
00:46:14.320
you know, I love talking to you. I love your wisdom, your expertise. Thanks for being here and
00:46:17.620
sharing them with us today. Coming up, we're going to do Kelly's Court, Kyle Rittenhouse,
00:46:23.040
Alec Baldwin and more. Stay tuned. On Monday, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial got underway in Wisconsin.
00:46:34.600
All eyes in the nation are on this case. Rittenhouse is charged with reckless and intentional homicides
00:46:39.840
in the killing of two men and the wounding of a third during the Kenosha, Wisconsin protests
00:46:45.420
that followed the shooting of Jacob Blake by police. You remember Jacob Blake was encountering cops while
00:46:54.680
he was trying his his ex-wife or ex-girlfriend or sort of active girlfriend but distanced had called
00:47:00.860
police on Jacob Blake. They got there. He resisted arrest. He fought through a taser and then he pulled
00:47:06.560
a knife on cops and he got shot five times and he lived. But he's paralyzed. In any event, the police have
00:47:12.980
now been exonerated in that shooting. And but that didn't that didn't help the residents of Kenosha
00:47:18.960
in the days after the shooting because BLM was out on the streets saying, you know, this is yet another
00:47:25.060
unfair police shooting. Not true. And chaos unfolded in the streets there. Well, two days after the Jacob
00:47:32.680
Blake shooting, there was this chaos, this madness on the streets of Kenosha. And one of the people
00:47:39.400
involved was Kyle Rittenhouse, who had meandered over from Illinois. He didn't belong there, but he
00:47:44.400
had answered a call on Facebook saying, let's get there and let's protect these businesses and not
00:47:48.440
let, you know, buildings be burned and so on. Seventeen years old. Somebody who was over 18 got
00:47:53.560
him the rifle, which he was not allowed to have lawfully in Wisconsin, but he did. And, you know,
00:47:59.320
he was accused of acting as a vigilante, which is not entirely wrong. So his defenders say they needed
00:48:05.600
it because the cops are outnumbered. And those who are against Kyle Rittenhouse say he was completely
00:48:12.200
out of line and he wound up killing two people. Now, the jurors are going to need to decide they've
00:48:17.840
just been chosen. They have 20 jurors, 12 of whom will actually decide the case. They've got a bunch
00:48:21.700
of alternates just today. They had to bounce one of the jurors. We'll get into that. But they'll have
00:48:26.260
to decide whether Rittenhouse was an instigator or a victim who just used self-defense to protect
00:48:31.520
himself against an unruly mob. Joining me now to discuss it all, that and a couple other cases
00:48:35.900
too, two of my very favorite lawyers to ever appear on Kelly's Court, a segment we've had
00:48:40.120
alive since I was a young cub in the D.C. Bureau at Fox News 2004. That's how long we've been doing
00:48:46.680
this. Janice Bilboer, who's a criminal defense attorney and founding attorney of Janice Bilboer
00:48:51.960
Law and Arthur Idala, a trial attorney and managing partner of Idala, Bertuna and Kamens. He's a former
00:48:57.640
prosecutor, now defense attorney. Hey, guys, how's it going?
00:49:06.600
Oh, my goodness. Well, you're going backwards because you look absolutely beautiful. So
00:49:12.740
age of 2004, the years are very kind to you, Megan.
00:49:16.400
Same, same. You look awesome. Not to mention Arthur.
00:49:19.240
I'm the only one who's in bad shape, but that's okay.
00:49:22.160
Okay, let's get down to business. Could be worse. You could be on trial for involuntary
00:49:26.520
manslaughter, intentional, intentional murder. Okay, so just to set it up for the audience.
00:49:33.080
So Kyle Rittenhouse, I think, has got a very good self-defense case. It's not to sanction him being
00:49:41.120
there in the first place. He shouldn't have been, in my view, a 17-year-old should not take an AR-15
00:49:45.540
and go on the streets to try to play cop for a night. Doesn't end well. Didn't hear.
00:49:50.620
The two people he shot and killed were one guy Rosenbaum and one guy Huber. Then he shot another
00:49:59.380
guy named Gage Grosskreutz, sorry for the name pronunciation, who got injured but lived. He got
00:50:05.060
shot but lived. And the way it went down, as I understand, we're going to play a little video,
00:50:09.700
but basically what happened is, this is my notes from watching the whole video, the New York Times
00:50:13.860
put it all together from everybody's video that was taken. This guy Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum is dead.
00:50:19.700
Rosenbaum was not a well person. Rosenbaum was a convicted child molester. Rosenbaum had just got
00:50:25.200
out of some mental institution. Rosenbaum shouldn't have been there either. Rosenbaum sadly chased
00:50:30.980
Kyle Rittenhouse, which was a mistake. Then another guy shot his gun into the air. Another guy not
00:50:38.460
named Rosenbaum or Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse apparently got confused that he was getting shot at. That's
00:50:43.280
what his lawyers are going to argue. And then Rosenbaum lunged towards Rittenhouse, who fired at him four
00:50:49.980
times and killed him. All right, so that's death number one. Rittenhouse then fled away with his gun.
00:50:56.020
He was scared. He had just shot a man. And a guy named Huber, Anthony Huber, then chased Kyle
00:51:03.000
Rittenhouse. Huber's girlfriend says he was being a good Samaritan. He thought Rittenhouse was a bad
00:51:07.440
guy. He thought he was killing people. He was trying to disarm him, sort of do the public service.
00:51:13.420
I don't think that's the way Kyle Rittenhouse saw it. There was nothing on Huber that said police officer
00:51:17.980
or I am a good Samaritan. What Rittenhouse saw was Huber coming at him with his skateboard
00:51:24.200
attacking Kyle Rittenhouse, who had fallen on the ground. He attempted to take Kyle's gun.
00:51:29.640
Instead, he was on the receiving end of that gun's bullets and died. Then a third guy, this guy Gage,
00:51:36.960
Gage Grosskreutz comes by Kyle Rittenhouse with Gage's gun drawn. And Kyle shot him too.
00:51:46.060
So you can see how I'm sort of laying out the facts, but this is what this is why they're going to say
00:51:50.740
self-defense, you know, stupid ass moves, but self-defense. And just before I get you guys to
00:51:56.040
weigh in, I'm going to show the audience a little bit of video and those listening can listen to it
00:52:00.300
as well. This is going to be soundbite number nine, which is a 55 seconds. It's from the New York
00:52:06.020
Times mashup of the first and second shooting. Rittenhouse walks towards a parking lot where
00:52:11.720
cars are being vandalized. He passes Joseph Rosenbaum, who was fighting with the armed men at the gas
00:52:17.820
station earlier. Rosenbaum now starts chasing Rittenhouse and throws a plastic bag that holds
00:52:26.100
his belongings from the hospital. Close behind them, a man holds up a handgun and fires it.
00:52:33.120
We don't know why. Then Rosenbaum lunges towards Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse fires four times.
00:52:41.240
Rittenhouse trips and falls. Anthony Huber hits Rittenhouse with a skateboard and attempts to
00:52:49.820
disarm him. Rittenhouse shoots him in the chest. Here is Gage Grosskreutz with his gun drawn.
00:53:01.660
I need a medic. That's that's going to be one of the witnesses. All right. So,
00:53:07.300
Jonna, for the purposes of today, you are a defense attorney.
00:53:10.460
So you tell me why this is what I mean, should he have been charged at all?
00:53:18.040
Well, the optics are not very favorable. If you knew the story without listening to the context in
00:53:25.440
which it was in your. Yeah. I mean, he was not going to escape getting charged, especially when
00:53:31.360
you look at what was going on in the country during that time. And, you know, in the era of
00:53:37.300
George Floyd and the things that happened just prior and just after there was no way that optically
00:53:43.040
a prosecutor was not going to charge him. So here we are in trial. And the real question is,
00:53:50.260
what is this now 18 year old, then 17, 17 year old boy going to get convicted of, if anything.
00:53:58.680
And when you tell the whole story, when you get into this kid's mind, because that's going to be
00:54:03.820
crucial in determining whether his actions were reasonable. And that is the legal jargon that is
00:54:10.140
going to be applied. That's what the jury is going to have to sit with. And it's interesting for a
00:54:14.860
number of reasons, because I don't know if any of those jurors are 18 years old. I believe they're
00:54:21.140
older. And I, they're really going to have to put themselves in a place where we, the three of us
00:54:26.980
can sit here and say, man, that was dumb for him to go to Wisconsin and engage in this and try to
00:54:33.560
save somebody's business and protect somebody like stay home. We would say that now, are the jurors going
00:54:38.920
to be able to get past that as well and say, okay, well, he didn't, but he didn't, uh, he doesn't
00:54:43.980
deserve to be charged with, uh, these homicides because he truly was protecting himself.
00:54:49.280
Intentional homicide. First degree, Arthur, that's thanks to Keith Ellison, um, this far left
00:54:57.180
political operative who was in the, in the house of representatives. And now he is, uh, the AG out there
00:55:03.380
who decided to up the charge. They wanted to up the charge against Kyle Rittenhouse and,
00:55:07.700
and also is trying, um, wait a minute, I might be convincing or confusing my, my two prosecutors
00:55:13.760
because, so that's Kim Potter. That's the case we're doing next. He stepped in in that case to
00:55:17.560
try to up the cart to charge against a cop. Anyway, this one's first degree intentional homicide,
00:55:21.620
which was the result of pressure by the families in this case as well to, they wanted him charged
00:55:28.500
with, uh, with exactly this. They, they think this is murder. And, um, he's also been charged with
00:55:34.360
reckless homicide as well, which is a lesser charge, but you tell me whether showing up
00:55:39.360
stupidly can lead to an intentional homicide. Even if the cameras show us in the moment,
00:55:47.360
So to answer the question you asked, yes, even showing up, even stupidly, it can lead to that
00:55:54.800
charge. When a call goes out of a Facebook that we need some help from law enforcement,
00:56:00.840
if that was accurate, I don't think they're looking for a 17 year old kid who has no military
00:56:06.520
training, no law enforcement training with a weapon of mass destruction running out into a,
00:56:12.200
a crowd of people. They may have been looking for retired police officers, uh, off-duty correction
00:56:18.560
officers, off-duty court officers who have training, uh, military people. So it's beyond stupid. Um,
00:56:25.480
it is a degree of recklessness, criminal negligence that rises to a crime. Just the fact that he's
00:56:32.780
out, first of all, he's guilty. He's charged with being in possession of the weapon and being
00:56:36.600
underage. He's a hundred percent guilty of that. So we know we're going to hear at least one guilty.
00:56:40.500
There's no way to get out of that. But the self-defense statue in Wisconsin,
00:56:45.520
it's the same as the one I live with here in New York is it has to be equal force.
00:56:50.640
You can only use deadly force to meet deadly force. And look, if someone's coming at you with
00:56:56.040
a skateboard, it, there's a, what John has said is accurate. It's reasonable. If it happens to be a
00:57:02.580
football player who's 280 pounds and six, four, and one whack of the skateboard is going to kill you.
00:57:08.240
Then you may be able to be justified to shoot them. But if you're on the floor and a guy hits you once
00:57:13.020
with a skateboard, trying to take away your semi-automatic rifle, then a jury is going to
00:57:18.640
have to make a decision. Was it reasonable to kill that person and to kill the person before that and
00:57:25.280
to try to kill the person after that? You got almost three deaths here that I don't think this jury is
00:57:31.520
going to say, oh, no, that was fine. Hmm. That's that's the problem, John, is that it's like one
00:57:38.820
incident. You might look at it and say, oh, God, he was in a tough situation to been there. But like
00:57:43.940
but three, he shot three people, two of whom are dead. It makes it look like he really was a kid who
00:57:50.840
didn't understand this is a real gun. This isn't some video game. And, you know, making a split second
00:57:56.820
life or death determination. There's a reason we don't want 17 year olds having guns like that
00:58:01.640
and behaving that way. Well, that's true. And it's funny that you mentioned video game,
00:58:06.780
because when I view what happened, I look at the victims and sidebar. This judge is not allowing
00:58:12.900
the victims to be called victims, by the way, which I applaud. I agree. They can be called
00:58:17.740
fighters. They could be called looters. So so when you look at the victims, I thought they believe
00:58:22.460
they were inside some sort of video game and that they were all bulletproof. And we have to keep in
00:58:26.900
mind that we weren't there. But this was obviously a completely chaotic scene, right? Skateboards and
00:58:34.260
other people with guns drawn and the police and, you know, the fire and the brimstone. So when you take
00:58:40.380
all that collectively, that has to that has to be taken into consideration when you're determining
00:58:46.880
what was going through this kid's head at the time he was pulling triggers. And I think, you know,
00:58:54.760
and Arthur and I agree that if somebody is trying to whack your head off with a skateboard, to me,
00:59:00.560
that's deadly force. You see somebody else with a gun drawn to me, that's potentially deadly force.
00:59:06.240
If you people are screaming, I think one of these victims slash looters writers said,
00:59:11.760
let's get them or let's kill them. I mean, so these are all the things you have to factor into
00:59:16.320
what was going on inside his head. And the thing about the skateboard, that's one thing,
00:59:23.140
like he's whacking me with a skateboard, which could be bad. But I have a gun. I have an AR-15
00:59:26.720
and I know what he's going to do to me after he knocks me out with that skateboard. He's going to
00:59:30.680
take this gun and my life could be in danger. I have no idea that this is later going to be
00:59:35.640
claimed to be some good Samaritan. No, but the law, we have to look at what was in Kyle Rittenhouse's
00:59:40.880
head. And his lawyer seemed to telegraph he's going to put him on the stand and Kyle's going to
00:59:45.320
testify. And presumably he's going to say, I thought that guy was trying to kill me. I thought
00:59:49.440
the first guy was trying to kill me. He was chasing me. I heard a gun go off. I thought the second guy
00:59:53.840
was trying to kill me because I was down and he was beating me with a skateboard. And even his
00:59:57.420
friends say he was trying to take my gun. I didn't know it was for altruistic reasons. I thought he was
01:00:01.520
going to use it against me. And then the third guy actually had a gun on me.
01:00:05.160
So under that theory, Megan, all of these tragic cases that you and I have covered where people are
01:00:12.160
in the movie house and some guy pulls out a gun and starts killing people, would it be justified
01:00:17.040
if someone tackles him and he's trying to take the gun and then he kills that one person because
01:00:22.340
the original shooter says, well, I thought he was going to take my gun and kill me. But Rosenbaum
01:00:27.200
had no weapon. OK, he heard a gunshot somewhere else. But the clip you just showed showed it was
01:00:33.140
number one, distance wise and time wise, there was a separation. Unlike the guy who actually got
01:00:38.260
shot and lived, he threw a bag of medical stuff. Yes, he threw something at Kyle, but he chased
01:00:45.600
Kyle. He threw something at him and then he lunged toward him. I mean, you can't execute someone for
01:00:50.800
that. Otherwise, every street fight that took place, someone would be justified of pulling out a
01:00:55.280
weapon and shooting him and executing them. But you're forgetting that Kyle Rittenhouse heard a
01:01:00.240
gun go off repeatedly before that in the midst of all this. So he's going to argue, I thought he had
01:01:05.440
a gun. And I realize Rosenbaum is not was not a good man. Child molester, you know, convicted,
01:01:12.300
repeated, not good. But that's not going to come in. The judges excluded that. So the jury is not going
01:01:18.420
to know. I mean, not that it's relevant necessarily to this particular instance, but I'm just saying
01:01:21.880
he wasn't exactly some squeaky queen, squeaky clean Boy Scout on the scene trying to keep
01:01:26.920
order. The guy was, you know, Megan, that's only relevant. It's only relevant if the defendant knew
01:01:31.220
that. So if the defendant knew he wasn't a squeaky clean person, then it's relevant. But if he doesn't
01:01:35.560
have that knowledge, which he didn't, then that's not coming. It doesn't matter if he was the Pope
01:01:39.120
or the devil. So that doesn't count. OK, listen to this. Wait, to your point about the movie theater.
01:01:44.660
OK, listen, Arthur, this is the self-defense statute in Wisconsin. First, it says you can you can use force
01:01:50.420
against another person when you reasonably believe that they intend to do you harm only the force
01:01:54.900
necessary to prevent the harm. Then they say, OK, if you provoke an attack. All right. That's the
01:02:03.160
shooter in the theater. If you provoke an attack, you may not be able to claim legal self-defense
01:02:07.720
against the attack unless it's likely to cause your death or great bodily harm. Even then, you must
01:02:12.600
attempt every other reasonable option to escape, avoid or prevent the attack before resorting to
01:02:16.700
deadly attack, deadly force yourself. And then you may not be able to claim self-defense if you provoked
01:02:24.740
another person attack as an excuse for you to kill them. So that that your movie theater guy goes out
01:02:30.700
based on that last sentence. I don't know that Kyle Rittenhouse loses protection of this.
01:02:34.740
If a police officer acted in the same way as Rittenhouse, would he be charged for the police officer wearing
01:02:39.580
his shield? The same exact set of circumstances. Somebody's chasing him and throws his bag of his
01:02:45.260
medical stuff or his hospital clothes at him and he kills him. Then he runs the other way. He trips
01:02:50.440
and a guy comes after him with a skateboard. He kills him. And then the last one is the most
01:02:55.060
justified. A guy's got the gun in his hand. That's the one that he should be found not guilty of,
01:02:59.740
in my opinion, because that's their hand to hand combat. And that's it's deadly force against deadly
01:03:05.020
force. But I believe if a police officer did the same at the same set of circumstances,
01:03:09.980
that cop would be standing trial right now. Go ahead, John. Do you think so?
01:03:15.160
Well, I think it's a slightly different standard because we do hold police officers to a different
01:03:19.740
standard than we hold the average Joe. And here we've got to hold this 17 year old kid
01:03:23.880
to the reasonableness standard, given the totality of the circumstances, what he was hearing, what he
01:03:30.760
was seeing, what he was feeling. And I think when you factor all of that in, I mean, really,
01:03:35.820
this defense attorney is going to have to convince these jurors to be Kyle Rittenhouse for the duration
01:03:43.100
of this trial in order for him to, like I said, Arthur's right. He is going to get convicted of
01:03:48.080
the gun charges. There's really no way around that. But on the top charges on, on the homicides,
01:03:52.560
they really have to put themselves in his shoes and in between his ears. And that's going to be the
01:03:58.340
challenge for this defense attorney. Well, that's why he's going to testify. He's got to testify,
01:04:02.140
Megan. And almost in every, I shouldn't say every, but in many self-defense cases to put yourself,
01:04:07.980
like John just said, to put the jurors in his head, they have to hear what his head is. They
01:04:12.260
have to hear what, what he saw, what he, what his perception was, distances, lighting, sounds,
01:04:18.480
every little detail they have to put in there and, and make the jury feel the fear that he felt that
01:04:25.040
he was so terrified that he was about to be killed. He had no other choice. Like the statue says,
01:04:29.700
you have to take any reasonable steps to get out of there. I had no choice except to do what I did.
01:04:35.180
Therefore, find me, my homicide took place, but it was justifiable. Therefore, I don't go to jail.
01:04:40.920
All right. So I want to tell you that, uh, one of the jurors was dismissed today. Apparently he told
01:04:45.280
he or she told the deputy, you know, him escorting him to his vehicle. Yeah. On Tuesday, quote,
01:04:51.400
why did the Kenosha police shoot Jacob Blake seven times? Because they ran out of bullets.
01:04:58.260
So he's gone. Um, so they will, that they don't want anybody who's got biased pro police,
01:05:04.900
anti-police, what have you. There's already a dustup about the race of the jurors. Wisconsin
01:05:09.040
is overwhelmingly white as is the jury, uh, in this case. I mean, Kyle Rittenhouse is white and everyone
01:05:14.640
he shot is white, but it sort of stems out of an incident with a black man, Jacob Blake,
01:05:19.060
in which the cops again have, have not been charged and have been exonerated. Anyway,
01:05:22.580
we'll continue to follow it. They're up against it because it's turned political there too,
01:05:26.340
right? It's like become part of a movement. Kyle Rittenhouse is allegedly a white nationalist and
01:05:31.320
they're going to try to, you know, suggest that. I don't know that they get any of that proof in,
01:05:34.800
but they've got sort of pictures of him doing the okay sign, which is now, you know how that goes.
01:05:39.220
We'll continue to watch it. We've got much more with John and Arthur coming up. We're going to talk
01:05:42.300
Alec Baldwin, who's now speaking out and, uh, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, her lawyers are now making a
01:05:48.000
statement too. She's the armorer and wait until you hear what they're suggesting actually happened
01:05:51.880
on that set. All right, let's talk Kim Potter. This is the one I was confusing a minute ago.
01:06:00.740
Um, this is out of Minnesota, Brooklyn center, Minnesota. Kim Potter is the woman, the cop who
01:06:07.300
shot a man named Dante Wright, a 20 year old black man, um, who had been pulled over for driving
01:06:16.360
without a registration. Uh, I think that he had an expired registration and, uh, the tags showed that
01:06:21.880
they discovered that there was a warrant out for his arrest. Three officers tried to detain him.
01:06:26.040
Uh, he stepped back into his car in the midst of resisting. There was a brief struggle with the
01:06:31.060
officers and officer Kim Potter, who very clearly meant to taser him. Um, it appears accidentally grabbed
01:06:37.820
her firearm instead and shot him and he was killed. Here's the videotape of what happened.
01:06:44.480
You can hear her say, holy shit, I just shot him and I'll tase you. I'll tase you. And then
01:07:07.960
her obvious shock that she wound up firing her firearm at him. Um, she is the one who is now sort
01:07:14.100
of being targeted by Keith Ellison, this former, you know, democratic congressman who's very far
01:07:19.120
left. Who's now the AG there who stepped in to amp up the charges against her and amp up the possible
01:07:24.340
prison time she could be facing. She's looking at first and second degree manslaughter charges.
01:07:29.540
Um, manslaughter in the first degree would require imprisonment for not more than 15 years. Uh, you
01:07:35.480
have to intentionally cause the death of another person in the heat of passion provoked by such words
01:07:39.560
or act of another that would provoke a person of ordinary self-control under life circumstances
01:07:43.800
to commit the act. Anyway. Um, I, to me, this is a clear accident. I don't know how we get first
01:07:52.120
degree manslaughter out of this. Arthur, you explain to me how they make that charge to this jury.
01:07:57.100
I, I think, well, look, you previewed this perfectly regarding Ellison. So you have an attorney general
01:08:05.400
here who's not a real lawyer. He's not a real prosecutor. He's a real politician. And I'll tell
01:08:10.860
that to his face. Um, and he, he overcharged the case. I mean, if I'm playing the role of prosecutor
01:08:16.420
here, this is not how I would charge the case at all. Do I think a jury should determine whether
01:08:22.600
her negligence, whether that mistake was so horrific that it rises to the level of criminality.
01:08:29.940
That's why they have laws that are called criminally negligent homicide, which is that,
01:08:34.700
you know, there's zero intent. You're not trying to hurt anyone. The next step up is recklessness,
01:08:40.960
where if you just take a gun and you're firing it at no one, but you know, there's a lot of people
01:08:45.080
around and you could kill them. Well, that's, that's a charge that you can be sentenced to with
01:08:48.860
more time. But negligence is, it's just a mistake. It's just an accident, which is in my opinion,
01:08:54.420
looking at the evidence and having covered this for many times, that's what it was. It's so,
01:08:59.480
she's so genuine in her protestations up to herself that she shot him and I'll, you know,
01:09:05.880
oh my God, well, she curses as you heard. So the count here that a jury, 12 people weighing all the
01:09:11.900
evidence has to determine, in my opinion, is whether her mistake rises to a level of criminality,
01:09:16.460
which is typically called criminally negligent homicide. And usually those counts carry a much,
01:09:23.100
much lower jail sentence, like a year, two years, three years, not 10 or 15. This woman doesn't
01:09:28.260
deserve that. So she's charged, Donna, with first degree manslaughter and second degree manslaughter.
01:09:35.020
Second degree is culpable negligence, whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk and consciously
01:09:42.240
takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another. I don't know if that's this case either.
01:09:48.380
You know, I mean, this is accident. Is there is, is criminally negligent homicide less than second
01:09:57.520
degree manslaughter? Because that, that's not charged. Yeah, it's probably just a little bit
01:10:04.720
less, uh, egregious in the, along the continuum, but I agree. I don't, you know, why is it when a cop
01:10:12.500
makes the mistake that cop is now a criminal when really that's not how it should be? We don't just
01:10:18.640
have a system of justice that has a criminal law to it. We have civil law as well. And if somebody
01:10:24.700
makes a mistake and that mistake results in, in the tragedy of somebody dying, but because of an
01:10:31.140
innocent mistake, an innocent, albeit horrible mistake, the civil law steps in to say, you know
01:10:38.340
what? Well, now this person, you have to compensate the family. You have to compensate the injured
01:10:42.520
person. You have to compensate them with money to try to make up for it, but you don't need to throw
01:10:47.780
somebody in jail or prison because of it. But now if you're a cop, you cannot make a mistake because
01:10:55.040
the political environment is such that you have to be not only charged and tried, but we're going to
01:11:00.720
up the charges to make sure that you're tried as a murderer and not a human being on a stressful job
01:11:06.580
that made a horrible and horrendous mistake. This one is charged completely wrong. Probably should
01:11:12.300
not have been charged at all. Her biggest, the prosecutor's biggest point to the jury is she's
01:11:18.500
not, she's so far from a rookie. And when, again, I'm not talking about anything intentional. I'm still
01:11:24.520
going back to the mistake, maybe rising to the level of a criminality is, you know, she's, she got,
01:11:30.720
like, dozens of years on the force. And she received many times explicit training on the
01:11:37.320
difference between the taser and a gun, a handgun, and also the, the, the holsters themselves and how
01:11:45.600
they lock. And it basically falls into you knew or should have known that what you were pulling out
01:11:50.700
was your handgun and not your taser. And that's, that's the, if she was a rookie, I think she'd have
01:11:56.700
a stronger argument that said, look, this was just a mistake. I've only been on the job for nine
01:12:00.700
months and I, I'm, it's a horrible thing. And John is right. You know, the city will give you this
01:12:05.900
family, six, eight, 10 million dollars and let's call it a day. But yeah, but that, and I don't know
01:12:13.140
what the taser feels like in one's hand versus what the firearm feels like in one hand. And in this
01:12:20.000
particular jurisdiction, it must've been awfully similar. Otherwise one presumed she wouldn't have been so
01:12:24.460
confused. If it was markedly different, that's definitely going to be a point in favor of the,
01:12:28.080
the prosecution. But yeah, to me, it's almost like a surgeon though, who's performing an operation
01:12:34.700
and, you know, wrongfully uses the scalpel instead of another instrument or cuts where he shouldn't
01:12:40.060
cut and causes a death. It's pure accident. It would, it would be malpractice. It would lead to a big
01:12:45.220
civil payout, but the surgeon doesn't go to jail. The only reason she got charged is because of the
01:12:51.100
charged political environment that we're in. And this, this DA, who's a politician, you know,
01:12:56.280
this, this AG Keith Ellison, to me, that's unfair. This woman shouldn't have her, her freedom taken
01:13:01.900
away because we have a politically charged atmosphere right now when it comes to cops.
01:13:10.840
Yeah. All right. Well, here's one that we may or may not agree on. And that is Alec Baldwin.
01:13:15.100
This is another accidental shooting. And I was actually making this comparison the other day
01:13:19.340
because, you know, you can look at the media and certainly Democrats can look at Alec Baldwin's
01:13:25.580
shooting and say it was an accident. Obviously, obviously the guy did not mean to kill his
01:13:31.220
cinematographer, Helena Hutchins, but he did. It was an accident. Do most people think he should
01:13:36.700
face criminal charges? I'd venture no. They don't think that if you want him to go to jail,
01:13:40.800
you probably paid him for his politics, right? Like he doesn't belong in jail over this. He screwed up.
01:13:46.040
A number of people screwed up, but they can't look at Kim Potter and say the same, right? And yes,
01:13:50.340
she had an obligation to understand how to handle a firearm. So did he. So did he. The rules on a
01:13:55.320
movie set are, and the actor knows this, and he had been trained, according to those around him.
01:14:00.360
You don't point a gun at anybody in a movie set, period. You just don't do it. Even though it's so
01:14:05.560
rare that they have an accident like this, everyone knows something could happen. You know,
01:14:10.420
it's happened before with Brandon Lee. A blank went off and there was still a bullet cartridge in the
01:14:15.800
gun and he was killed. Anyway, the point is the politics blind people's ability to see these cases
01:14:23.280
clearly. So in the Alec Baldwin case, it's very interesting. He is both the producer and the actor
01:14:30.220
who fired the trigger and took this woman's life tragically. But he could be on the hook civilly
01:14:35.720
as a producer or potentially, I guess, I don't know if criminally he could be facing some liability as a
01:14:40.460
producer. Everyone in this case seems to be pointing at the young armorer. Her name is Hannah
01:14:47.440
Gutierrez-Reed. She's like 24 years old. She's very young to be in charge of guns on a set, but she's
01:14:54.440
done it before. And she's the daughter of like one of the best or the best known armorers in all of
01:14:59.480
Hollywood. So she had good training, one presumes. To me, I see it so interesting. The assistant
01:15:05.920
director who was supposed to make sure that gun didn't have real bullets in it admits he didn't
01:15:10.380
check the chamber before he handed it to Alec Baldwin. He was the last line of defense. Well,
01:15:15.440
Alec was, but he was second to last. They're all pointing at her. Now, yes, the armorer has
01:15:19.900
responsibility for the gun, but they're all pointing at her and she hasn't spoken yet. But her lawyer
01:15:24.120
finally spoke. They went on on the Today Show and here's where her defense is going. Very interesting.
01:15:31.160
Listen. There was a box of dummy rounds and the box is labeled dummy. Hannah did take from that box,
01:15:40.960
which she, by all accounts, should have been able to rely on. That contains only dummy rounds.
01:15:47.740
She loaded rounds from that box into the handgun. Only later to find out there is a, and she had no
01:15:56.140
idea. She inspected the rounds that there was a live round. Now we don't know, however, whether that
01:16:03.120
live round came from that box. We're assuming it did. We're assuming somebody put the live round in
01:16:09.500
that box, which if you, if you think about that, the person who put the live round in the box of dummy
01:16:16.300
rounds had to have the purpose of sabotaging this set. You have a round that's supposed to contain
01:16:22.300
only dummy bullets, prop ammunition that have a projectile, but are incapable of being fired.
01:16:29.620
And they resemble a real round. Why would someone do that? And the reason for that, Savannah, is that
01:16:33.560
when you look down. Why would someone do that? And who in your mind had the motive and the opportunity
01:16:38.200
to do it? I believe that somebody who would do that would want to sabotage the set, want to prove a
01:16:47.660
point, want to say that they're disgruntled, they're unhappy. And we know that people had already walked
01:16:52.700
off the set the day before, and they had been, and they're unhappy. And the reason they were unhappy
01:16:58.540
is they're working 12 to 14 hour days. They were not given hotel rooms in and around the area. So they
01:17:04.380
had to drive back and forth an hour to Albuquerque, and they're unhappy.
01:17:09.400
Hmm. He used the S word. Your thoughts on that, Arthur?
01:17:13.480
Well, I drive back and forth an hour to work. I mean, that's, that's the big, that's the big
01:17:18.500
complaint here. And, and the reaction, I mean, you know, you talk about overreacting, you put a live
01:17:25.920
bullet. I mean, that's what you do. That's not what you do. Maybe you give someone like a rotten
01:17:29.900
tuna fish in their sandwich, as opposed to a good tuna fish, or I didn't play some sort of practical
01:17:35.800
joke. You don't put a live round in the middle of, of, of film set where they're going to be firing
01:17:42.860
weapons. I mean, that's absolutely inexcusable. I do know that the sheriff is doing a very thorough
01:17:47.620
investigation. If they find out who put that live round in there, I mean, they should be charged.
01:17:53.220
It's not the easiest charge, but they should be charged immediately.
01:17:57.080
Mm hmm. So that's what we learned, because she released a statement to John,
01:18:01.720
Hannah Gutierrez read, which basically says she was dealing with a with a box of rounds that was
01:18:08.880
labeled dummy rounds. Now, yes, it's her job to know the difference, right? There's a way of telling
01:18:14.620
the difference between dummy rounds and live rounds. But to their point, to her point or lawyer's
01:18:20.480
point, if somebody other than the armorer herself, right, if she was negligent, she put something in
01:18:25.980
there. That's one thing. But if somebody actively put a live round in the box labeled dummies, this
01:18:31.340
case looks a lot different. Right. And that would be absolutely murder. But what's not flying with me
01:18:38.600
is there's no way that the armorer inspected the bullets that she put into the firearm and did not
01:18:46.740
notice that one or more of them was not a dummy round, that one or more of them was a live round.
01:18:52.740
So the only way that's done really could be sabotaged if you follow her theory is if she loaded
01:18:58.220
the dummies, inspected them like like her lawyer said she did, loaded the dummies, put the gun down,
01:19:03.580
somebody sneaks up, takes the dummy out, puts a live round in and she's nowhere around it. And
01:19:08.540
nobody rechecks the gun, which is also, as far as I'm concerned, negligent. But you can tell a dummy
01:19:14.640
round just like you can tell a blank. You can tell by looking at the primer is going to be dented in.
01:19:19.000
There's going to be no powder in there. They typically put something that makes noise. So if you
01:19:22.980
inspected like you said you did, you would have known that a live round was among them. So when
01:19:28.440
did the sabotage allegedly occur? That's going to be something that's probably going to be very
01:19:32.840
difficult to prove, if provable at all. So that's what's crazy. Apparently, the only way you tell a
01:19:39.200
difference between a dummy round, which does nothing, there's dummy rounds, which do nothing.
01:19:44.780
They're just there to look good, you know, to make the gun look like a real gun. There's blanks,
01:19:49.280
which actually do fire and create smoke and are potentially dangerous. You have to be super
01:19:54.520
careful. And then there's live rounds, which is a real bullet, you know, projectile. And the way
01:20:00.000
you tell the difference, I guess, between a dummy round and a live round is you shake it. And I think
01:20:04.720
it's it jingles the dummy rounds. If I'm not mistaken, I could have this backwards, but I think
01:20:10.820
it's the dummy round jingles and you hear a little jingle. And so either she heard a jingle
01:20:17.560
on all six of the rounds and loaded them and then somebody later messed with it or she heard a
01:20:25.720
jingle that wasn't really there and she loaded a live round, not realizing it, you know, so it was
01:20:29.840
either she was negligent or somebody else was intentionally sabotaging as the lawyer claimed.
01:20:36.400
And if they can prove sabotage that takes this case, I mean, that kind of gives you an explanation
01:20:41.940
of why the sheriff's taking his time. But Megan, if what you just said is accurate and right before
01:20:46.520
she puts that weapon, that bullet into the gun and hands it to Alec, she does the shake test.
01:20:53.020
Ostensibly, even if someone did put live rounds in that box, if she's shaking it, that's supposed
01:20:57.480
to be the line of last defense. Oh, wait a minute. It's not making a noise. Let me put this one
01:21:03.100
aside. It's not jingling. Let me put this one aside and let me use another one. So
01:21:07.380
OK, but wait, let me challenge you on that. Let me challenge you on that. If I were her lawyer,
01:21:11.740
I would say, OK, you have to understand in no world, because they made a point in their statement
01:21:19.240
saying something like this, but in no world would you ever be expecting live round. This is how their
01:21:26.400
statement ends. No one could have anticipated or thought that someone would introduce live rounds
01:21:30.780
into this set, into a box that was labeled dummy rounds. I realize ultimately she's the armorer.
01:21:36.600
She's responsible. But to her point, like it's never happened. Who the hell would put a live round
01:21:42.840
in a dummy box? Obviously, that's going to be there. It's going to be their argument. And I mean,
01:21:49.920
I've heard a couple of experts on saying it like it doesn't matter. Like when you take that cartridge
01:21:54.860
and you put it into a weapon as as the armorer, you're getting paid, whether you're 24 or 54,
01:22:01.680
you're getting paid to make sure that that round is not a live round. And that didn't happen yet.
01:22:08.080
And then the assistant director is supposed to be another line of defense to make sure he's
01:22:12.000
and he admits he didn't look at all the rounds before handing the gun to Alec. And then Alec wasn't
01:22:16.320
supposed to point it at an actual person, which he clearly did. So it's like there's plenty of
01:22:21.260
responsibility to go around. I will say he has he should stop tweeting and making Instagram posts.
01:22:25.940
He should stop posting stupid Halloween photos of himself. But he made seven Instagram posts this
01:22:31.980
week sharing the comment from a costume designer who also worked in the movie, who said the story
01:22:38.540
being spun of us being overworked and surrounded by unsafe, chaotic conditions is bullshit.
01:22:43.380
She said no one was too tired to do their jobs and the crew were offered hotels, but turn them down
01:22:47.800
because they didn't feel they were fancy enough. And he retweeted it saying, read this.
01:22:52.260
Just be quiet. Right. Just just be quiet. You're not helping. Right. I mean, you guys would be say
01:22:57.760
like pipe down Alec. OK, quickly, I got to ask you about Tiger King. Did you guys watch Tiger King
01:23:02.080
during the pandemic? The only thing that got me through 100 percent. Right. It was amazing.
01:23:08.320
Joe Exotic. So Carol Baskin has filed a lawsuit. She is suing Netflix over the sequel. Yeah,
01:23:16.960
hey, there's going to be a sequel. It comes out November 17th. And Tiger King, too, uses footage
01:23:22.240
of her. And she's mad because she says she's suing Netflix in this royal good production saying
01:23:29.500
you shouldn't be showing footage of me. You got footage of me the first time around under fraud,
01:23:35.100
fraudulent means. You told me you were doing one long documentary on the abuse of tigers by people
01:23:42.400
like Joe Exotic, not something that's going to make me look like I killed off my first husband.
01:23:49.240
So she doesn't want footage of her appearing in the second film. And she says the original release
01:23:54.240
she signed, allowing for footage of her in the first one, doesn't say anything about sequels or a
01:23:59.740
series. No mention of sequel rights whatsoever or derivative works. So, Jonna, does Carol Baskin
01:24:06.800
have a good case against Netflix? No, she might. And it's all going to be in the fine print,
01:24:13.900
because if, in fact, you know, she signed off on one project and they're trying to use her likeness
01:24:19.080
for something that she didn't agree to, you know, show me the money, honey, because that's what the
01:24:23.740
complaint is going to be about. And she actually may have a case, but it's going to come down to
01:24:28.040
what's in the four corners of whatever she signed way back when, before she became as famous as she is
01:24:34.060
now. Well, I wonder, because, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Arthur. No, no, that, well, that's
01:24:37.520
Jonna's last word about famous. Like, I don't know, does it become where she, point where she
01:24:42.840
becomes so famous, she's now in the public domain and they don't need, I mean, we don't know what
01:24:47.420
the doc, the second piece of the documentary is going to look like and what kind of footage
01:24:51.220
they're using. But now that she's crossed over that line from being a civilian to a celebrity,
01:24:56.420
where basically under the law, the rules change regarding slander and libel and defamation and all of
01:25:01.920
that. Hmm. She's definitely a celebrity now. I mean, I don't, if you haven't seen Tiger King,
01:25:06.740
you've got to watch it. And apparently I didn't totally understand this, but she, she thought
01:25:10.260
she was cooperating with them. They were going to do this nice piece showing like the abuse of tigers
01:25:14.940
by, you know, unsavory characters that Joe Exotic might be a very small part of it, but it was going
01:25:19.520
to make her look like a heroine. And she was stunned to watch Tiger King, which does not make Carol
01:25:25.560
look like a heroine and, um, you know, suggestion, suggest she might be a murderer and attacks her
01:25:31.660
wildlife sanctuary and all that. And now she wants nothing to do with this part two. Even apparently
01:25:37.400
the director had said, I don't, I don't want it to do like more in the series. Cause I just want it
01:25:44.240
to stand as is, but it was such catnip, pardon the pun for America. They had to do it. Uh, PS and sad
01:25:50.920
news. Joe Exotic today, uh, tweeted out or I don't know, he can't tweet. He's in prison,
01:25:55.420
but he released, uh, that he has an aggressive, an aggressive cancer. He said in June, he has
01:26:01.700
prostate cancer. And today he says it's aggressive. He wants to get out and compassionate leave. Um,
01:26:06.900
could be vying for a part three. We'll see you guys. Great to have you here. Great to see the
01:26:11.740
gang back together. I listen tomorrow. So excited. Jason Whitlock's going to be here to talk about that
01:26:17.580
insane Colin Kaepernick Netflix series. Yes. That's appointment listening. Download the show
01:26:23.100
on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, Stitcher, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. We'll see you tomorrow.
01:26:27.780
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda and no fear.