Vivek's 9⧸11 Spin, Trump's Arrest Theater, and Prigozhin Dies in Plane Crash, with The Fifth Column Hosts | Ep. 613
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 35 minutes
Words per Minute
189.74808
Summary
Vivek Ramaswamy is in the midst of a controversy entirely of his own making, and it's irritating on a few different levels. He's been playing footsie with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, and I have to say it's just deeply offensive on a number of levels, not to mention disrespectful to the families of the victims.
Transcript
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
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Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. It's debate day in America.
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The first GOP debate tonight. It begins at 9 p.m. Eastern Time and we expect eight candidates on the stage, not Trump.
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He's going to be doing an interview, which we understand has been taped, with Tucker.
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Also, Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, may not be on the stage either, even though he qualified,
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because he was rushed to the hospital yesterday evening after an injury playing basketball.
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It's always something, though they say now he's out of the hospital and there's a question about whether he can stand at the lectern.
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Something tells me he'll find a way, right? It's like he went through all this effort to actually make it out there.
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I don't know what happened to him, but if he's out of the hospital, you got to imagine he's going to do everything within his power to actually get up on that stage.
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We'll see. Well, I'll tell you this. If the moderators and the other candidates do their jobs tonight,
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one topic will be Vivek Ramaswamy's recent comments about 9-11.
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Vivek is in the midst of a controversy entirely of his own making, and it's irritating on a few different levels.
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He's been playing footsie with 9-11 trutherism, the idea that 9-11 was an inside job.
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And I have to say it's just deeply offensive on a number of levels, not to mention disrespectful to the families of the victims.
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Why is he doing this? This is totally unnecessary.
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He's rolling along just fine. This is completely unnecessary.
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We know who was behind the 9-11 attacks, and it was not the U.S. government.
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When confronted with this odd decision, he denied that he had done it, and then he blamed the dishonest media.
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Well, that does not work when it is not actually the media's fault and where the press has not actually been dishonest.
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Not to mention, it undermines other legitimate accusations of media dishonesty
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when a politician throws that term around just to cover his own absurd missteps.
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Yes, I am aware he's not the only politician to do this.
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But Vivek's whole rap is, I'm the one based in facts and truth.
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On August 1st, the Blaze TV's Alex Stein asked Vivek a question during a rapid-fire exchange
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Okay, 9-11, inside job, or exactly what the government tells us.
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I don't believe the government has told us the truth.
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What I've seen in the last several years is we have to be skeptical of what the government does tell us.
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I haven't seen evidence to the contrary, but do I believe everything the government told us about it?
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It was a pander to someone he knew was looking for a little conspiratorial red meat.
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But he admits in that clip that at least as of that date, August 1st, Vivek had seen no evidence
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that the government failed to tell us the full truth about 9-11.
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Soon, when under fire for those comments, he would go searching.
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Okay, but we know as of that date, by his own comments, he did not have any evidence of this in his head.
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The Wall Street Journal, Mike Pence, and many others hit him for not clearly denouncing the suggestion
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that 9-11 was an inside job and for instead fueling the fire about a government cover-up.
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Well, by August 9th, Vivek thought it was time to take to Twitter.
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He dismissed this exchange as having been with, quote, a comedian podcaster.
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Having finally now done some homework on 9-11, Vivek went on to claim, quote,
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I wasn't referring to the baseless theories about controlled demolitions at buildings around the World Trade Center,
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but the very real possibility supported by recently declassified documents that al-Qaeda's attack was undertaken
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with support from Saudi intelligence officials.
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You were referring to the FBI report declassified in 2021?
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Because you told Alex Stein, quote, I have not seen any evidence of this,
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but I don't believe everything the government told us about 9-11.
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I don't like seeing somebody like Vivek come in and turn into your classic politician who just lies.
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The problem here for Vivek was, unbeknownst to the rest of us,
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Weeks before he spoke with Alex Stein, he had given an interview to The Atlantic
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And there, too, he pushed a form of 9-11 trutherism,
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making comments that seemed to suggest 9-11 was an inside job.
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Nothing about the Saudis there either, by the way.
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To Hendrickson, Vivek volunteered that it's totally legitimate for Americans to just ask,
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you know, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers?
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I thought we weren't pushing, quote, baseless theories.
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The Atlantic piece, including those comments, then hit this week, this past Monday,
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The comments caught fire online, with many conservatives and liberals criticizing them
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That same night, the fake goes on CNN with Caitlin Collins.
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Caitlin, I should have been more careful in commenting on something that is still an open wound
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This was no way to handle such a delicate, painful topic involving the murder of 3,000 Americans.
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No, the new approach is deny the remarks were even made and also defend them.
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A report in the Atlantic that you gave an interview to, you said, quote,
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I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents were on the planes
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I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.
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But if we're doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9-11, we have a 9-11 commission.
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Absolutely, there should be an answer the public knows the answer to.
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I mean, the Atlantic is playing the same game as CNN.
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What I said is, on January 6th, I do believe that there were many federal agents in the field,
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On 9-11, what I've said is that the government lied.
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And this is incontrovertible evidence, Caitlin.
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The government lied about Saudi Arabia's involvement.
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But your quote here, are you telling me that the quote is wrong here?
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But are you telling me that your quote is wrong here because it says
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how many federal agents were on the planes at the Twin Towers?
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Yeah, when I actually, and this is just lifting the curtain on how media works again,
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I asked that reporter to send the recording because it was on the record.
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The truth is, there are lies the government has told about 9-11,
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but it's not the ones that somebody put in my mouth.
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Which is that Saudi Arabia, absolutely, their intelligence was involved in 9-11.
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This is all media games by CNN and The Atlantic, according to Vivek.
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And The Atlantic has now released the audio tape so we can hear it for ourselves.
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Like, why can the government not be transparent about something that we're using?
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Terrorists, or the kind of tax abuse by terrorists,
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if we find that there are hundreds of our own in the ranks of the day that they were,
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a difference between the law enforcement agent identifying this.
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I think it is legitimate to say how many police,
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how many federal agents were on the planes that hit between towers.
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I've got no reason to think it was anything other than zero.
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But if we're doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9-11,
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absolutely, that should be an answer the public knows the answer to.
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absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of.
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and there are federal agents on the plane, we deserve to know.
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I think it's interesting to compare contrast 9-11 and January 6th.
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I don't think they belong in the same conversation.
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But I'm saying that I brought it up only because
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it was invoked as a basis for the Gen 6 commission.
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This is not something I'm staking anything out of,
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Now, Vivek is tweeting about the CNN reporter being a, quote,
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She's got about as much warmth as the Nancy Pelosi ice cream collection,
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It was wrong of the Democrats to compare the January 6th attacks to 9-11.
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But it is also wrong of Vivek to use baseless bullshit conspiracy theories
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There are certain things most of us in this country still hold inviolate.
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you have no business using the murder of 3,000 Americans
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to build your brand as an alleged warrior of truth, period.
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You're not doing yourself or the Republican Party any favors.
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I only wish I were moderating that debate tonight
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because I know exactly where I would go with him.
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and editor-at-large for Reason Magazine, Matt Welsh.
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They are the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast,
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The fact that this is happening 20 years later,
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I think there might have something to do with this,
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I think on the year anniversary of January 6th,
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and then he said something similar to Alex Stein.
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Well, weird how you never mentioned any of that.
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which you had seen absolutely no evidence of the lies.
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which begs the question or suggests the question.
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A lot of people who consume a ton of political news
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A lot of journalists who pay attention to this,
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But I suggest perhaps an even kind of darker idea,
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which is that he knows full well what he's doing
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and that it's not going to put a dent in his popularity.
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kind of outrage and criticism of what he said in this case.
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either by Pence or the other moderator or whoever.
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It's the same people who lied about Pat Tillman,
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who lied about the weapons of mass destruction,
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about how many police officers were in the field
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who lied about the Nashville Shooter Manifesto,
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their sense of righteous, in many cases, outrage
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over and over and over again in the last 25 years.
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which is the one that's front most on our minds
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that led to people having to change their lifestyles
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He knows that in the Republican primary field right now,
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and Donald Trump said a lot of just throwing things
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There's a lot of really rational-sounding things
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which is something that he's been coming up with
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and even, I'm sure he'll play the Megyn Kelly clip
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See, establishment Megyn Kelly's doing it again
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I know you're going to bury your fangs and claws at him.
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and all the normies are stuck in nowheresville.
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There is a faction of the Republican Party right now
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There is a faction that goes down a dark rabbit hole
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I don't think Vivek really thinks 9-11 was an inside job
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the poor terrorists into actually flying the planes
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That we actually were behind it the whole time?
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holding hands like a couple of these Saudi intel officials.
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that you'd see deep in the rabbit hole on Reddit, Camille.
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Like this is what the Democrats will use to say,
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Like it's, it's, it's incredibly cynical and wrong.
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I, and this is, I've made a very difficult bed for myself
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and attribute the best possible motivation to them
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And as I heard you say, Megan, I like him as a person.
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I think that he is generally like quite bright.
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In a lot of the cases where we're having interactions,
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If you spoke inelegantly and you said it in a way
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that you didn't mean to say it, intimating certain things,
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You don't try to act as though you've been misrepresented.
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And you most certainly don't call for them to release audio
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which is why I think him being as bright as I know him to be
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in general, it's at least possible for me to think
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that this isn't some sort of well-calibrated strategy
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that he is perhaps speaking without having much actual knowledge
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And that the 2021 release of additional classified information
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giving us a better picture of what, if any role,
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I would guess that Vivek didn't know anything about that
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He only looked into it after he started getting hit.
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That's why he admitted he has no evidence that they lied
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He did a Google search after he started to get hit
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an appetite for conspiracism on the left and the right.
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And I don't need to draw any sort of equivalence there.
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knows that since Donald Trump was running for office,
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The things that people in the different parties
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for the benefit of their own kind of partisan interests.
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of the highest office in the land are operating
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of being respectable and above board while hitting hard.
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no more of this nonsense trying to blame the media.
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When you've made a mistake, own it and move on.
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that it is plotted because Megan, you're right,
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that conspiracism was kind of the domain of the left.
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And they proved themselves again with the Russian nonsense
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and repeating that in breathless Rachel Maddow episodes
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you know, Trump was working for the Comintern or something.
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But there is that bit that's happened on the right more recently.
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when Matt says it's plotted out or he knows what he's doing,
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but there's been so much purchase there on the left.
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He is a member of the sort of internet only generation.
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And he understands that when what I called along,
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you know, probably a couple of months ago on the fifth column,
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and the veification of politics was they are doing this.
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I mean, there were some people in the military hierarchy
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the Iraq war was the biggest foreign policy disaster