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May 20, 2020 - Louder with Crowder
39:22
Megyn Kelly Weighs in on #BelieveWomen | #17 Good Morning #MugClub
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Time Text
Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Okay. Good morning. I gotta yeah, clean yourself.
I gotta clean myself up because our next guest is, uh, it's, um, it's like looking into the sun.
A little bit, yeah.
She's nowhere near as attractive as my wife.
This is a horrible way to start, because I can either insult my wife or my next guest.
I love my wife!
You just painted yourself into a corner.
I just mean she's a very fetching woman.
And she's really made some waves here, of course, online.
And a lot of you know her from all sorts of different platforms.
You can follow her now on the YouTubes.
I have no idea if she is monetized.
If she is, soon to not be.
As all of us.
All of us.
YouTube.com slash Megyn Kelly.
Senorita Kelly, thank you for being here.
Appreciate it.
Hi, my pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
I don't know if I would say my pleasure.
I know we're talking a little bit off-air here, but you're a very friendly person.
That's real, right?
That's what's real.
People think I'm, like, this raging bitch because, you know, they see me doing a cable news primetime show talking to politicians, and that's not, like, a rosy walk in the park, but my normal personality is totally charming.
Yes, it is.
If I had to do that, I would be swallowing a knife at the end of every episode.
They'd be like, hey, we're coming back with The Great American and Stephen's dead.
What happened?
That was so fast.
You're out there every day.
You're talking about ISIS.
You're talking about torture.
You're talking about, you know, like shootings.
It's like, and people think you're going to just be like all roses and unicorns.
It's like, okay.
So that, but that doesn't mean that I'm not a happy, kind person.
It's just not an appropriate really demeanor for primetime cable news.
Well, I asked because, obviously, we've had interactions before, because we both worked at other networks, and you were always pleasant when I would see you, and the cameras would stop rolling, and you'd go, oh, okay, that was fun.
Whereas I had had other people who the cameras stopped rolling, and I was like, get the hell out of here, kid.
So I just want to make sure that there isn't a slow burn.
You see all the news coming out now about Ellen, right?
It's like all these stories about how she's really nasty behind the scenes or, you know, she just wasn't nice to guests or she wasn't nice to her crew, whatever.
And I feel like I'm exactly the opposite.
People say that I'm like this sort of ice queen, but you'll never find any crew member I work with who would ever say anything bad about me.
Like, I treat the people I work with really well.
Yeah.
But people think I've heard that term ice queen a lot just because it's like, well, you know, you're talking to politicians.
What are you going to do?
Like, most of them tend to be jerks and a lot of them tend to be liars.
And it's like, What are you going to do?
I'm not going to buddy up to those guys.
They're not my friends.
No, you're hanging out with the worst people among humanity.
They're the modern day Pharisees and Sadducees.
They crucify Jesus, is how we want to introduce this.
So I want to move on to, you had this exclusive interview with Tara Reid.
I have to be clear with people.
The Joe Biden terror read.
Allegedly, I think that covers my, I'm not a journalist see Megan, but allegedly, right,
I have to cover my bases, potential sniffing.
So I want to roll a clip for people who haven't seen this yet and then ask you a couple of
questions about it because it was fascinating.
And I'm curious as to, I mean, obviously this is an exclusive, it's a huge scoop, a huge
story right now.
Let's see a clip for people who haven't watched yet.
When he went inside the skirt, he was talking to me at the same time and he was leaning
into me and I pulled this way away from his head.
I remember.
And so he was kissing my neck area and he whispered, did I want to go somewhere else in a low voice?
But he said, um, something vulgar.
And I asked what he, he said, I want to **** you.
And he said it low and I was pushing away.
And then he pulled back immediately when he could see I wasn't complying.
I was obviously just tensed up and frozen and not kissing him back and I'm not going with him.
And he pulled back and he looked at me and he said, come on man, I heard you liked me.
Now I want to be clear, again it's allegedly, and Joe Biden has claimed that he doesn't remember having lunch, so we don't know what's what right now.
How did this come about?
Because obviously this is a huge story, and you had this scoop.
Did she just feel like you were going to be fair-minded?
Like, I later found out that she'd been trying to reach me for a couple of weeks and had asked a number of journalists who had reached out to her, do you have a contact for Megyn Kelly?
And surprisingly was told, no, never heard of her.
We don't have any way of reaching her.
It's a competitive industry.
Yeah.
They sent some homing pigeons and that's, that's what happened.
Yeah, because, like, I know the names that she reached out to, and they do have my number, but we can give it to Tara Reade.
Yeah.
Anyway, after, like, a month of watching people ignore this story, it was just such bullshit, because you cannot believe Tara Reade.
I have no stake in whether people believe her or don't believe her, but the coverage of her story versus the Trump accusers versus Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh, I mean, like, the difference is just so glaring.
Yeah.
I was starting to get kind of irritated I was going to say, you don't have to work a day in your life.
I don't know if I'm revealing the folks, but you're obviously well off.
Just to see, like, how are you handling this and are you okay?
Like, just human to human.
Sure.
Not really wanting to interview.
I mean, I'm perfectly happy to sit on my couch here in Montana with my kids.
I was going to say, you don't have to work a day in your life.
I don't know if that's, if I'm revealing the folks, but you're obviously well off.
You don't need to do this.
No, I don't need to.
But like, I'm also like, you know, ladies out there, you can appreciate like, I gained the corona, you know, the COVID-19.
My roots are like five inches long.
My face is unspooling like a like a bad sweater from no Botox.
So I wasn't dying to get off the couch and go in front of the camera.
Yeah.
But I felt for her because she she seemed really like on her heels.
You know, she seemed really Overwhelmed.
Like, her bankruptcy had been posted and her daughter, who's 25, her picture and home address had just been posted.
The New York Times inadvertently posted her social security number.
This is a woman who had to change her social security number.
How does that happen?
How does the New York Times accidentally dox a social security number?
It's not like they left one portion of her address there and someone, you know, like, with, he will not divide a Shia LaBeouf, they tracked the smoke signals.
Like, you just, you just released your social security number.
In their defense, it was like a picture of an ID card that they took a picture that happened to have the social security number on it.
I'm sorry.
They can't be bothered to check an ID card for personal information.
I know.
And Tara Reid has no money.
This woman has no money.
She just got this lawyer, Doug Wigdor, who helps a lot of sexual harassment victims.
I think he's helping her pro bono.
And she just got a PR person who I think is in a similar boat.
Tara has no money for anything.
Anyway, so I called her and she said, you know, I've been trying to reach you.
I'd love for you to talk to me.
And I was like, you know, Tara, I was involved in a Me Too situation, but I wouldn't go easy on you.
And I have a lot of tough questions for you.
Like I myself have questions about your story.
And she was like, I wouldn't expect anything less.
I got on a plane, I left Montana for the first time in a couple of months, and I flew out to California and we did it.
Well, I have so many things that I want to get to.
First off, you are correct.
The first thing I was noticing was your roots.
I was ignoring the rest.
There might be firm debate over whether you're a 9.9 or a 10.
I don't know if that sucks, but the guys are like, those roots just ruin it for me.
Ugh!
That's such a woman.
Women are so much more harsh on women.
There's not a man in the world who watches this right now being like, oh, fucking roots.
No one's harder on women than we are on ourselves.
There's nothing anybody could say to me that is any harder.
Right.
I see myself, trust me.
I know I think, like, you're supposed to look at yourself in the mirror and be like, I love you, I love you, right?
That's not what most of us do.
We're like, I can do better, I need to.
Well, that's just because you need to love yourself more.
And in my case, it's inaccurate.
Like, I thought that I asked for a mirror that makes me look slimmer, and I punched the mirror when I found out it was just a normal mirror.
So, let me ask you this, though, about Tara Reade.
Before we move into her specifics, and by the way, please do tell me if I ask any specifics, because I'm not a lawyer, what I can ask, what I can't on that front.
But as someone who's obviously been in the media, and you've covered this type of story with the Me Too movement for a long time, and I think you've been pretty fair-minded about it, and like you just said, you've been a victim of it yourself, how do you balance No, I think that's baloney.
You pick who you believe.
is plausible versus sort of what had become a Twitter trend because there are
two camps believe all women always and then people who believe in due process
and unfortunately if sometimes you believe somebody and another instant you
don't people think that you're on the other team. No I think that's baloney.
You pick who you believe like you you listen you use your brain use your
common sense seems a juror would in a courtroom and you'll figure out who you
And that's the way it should be.
Right.
All we should be doing as journalists and people who control the process is making sure it's fair.
I said from the beginning, these women like Alyssa Milano with the Believe All Women t-shirt on at Christine Blasey Ford, that's absurd.
I don't get a presumption of truth-telling because I have ovaries.
Women have an inability to lie because they're women?
Since when?
Well, to be clear, to be medically accurate, ovaries do produce a trace amount of sodium pentothal.
So I do want to be clear, be medically accurate here.
Yeah, I think that's a tough position to take as a woman, especially, like you said, who's been in the middle of that.
How hard is that?
It's not a tough position to take if you're not looking for love from the woke crowd.
Which I'm not.
I don't need their love.
And I don't have it.
That's because of your roots, yeah.
At heart, I am a lawyer.
I was a litigator for 10 years.
And I covered the Duke La Crosse case.
That was one of my first big stories.
And that woman there was lying.
She was lying.
And if you paid attention to the facts of that case, as opposed to just going with the woke line of the woman must be telling the truth, the three privileged white guys at Duke must be lying.
She was a person of Yeah.
color, they were white, she was a person of lower socioeconomic status, they were privileged,
they were at Duke, she was a stripper, it was like I had all the ingredients that made
the media root for her, not for them.
And if you just went in with an open mind and didn't root for anybody but facts, you
wound up in the right place.
And my general feeling is that in most stories, that's the case.
Well, I think it's the case for people like you, but you are an anomaly in the sense that the rest of the media basically crucified these people in the court of public opinion.
It took a while for that to come out, like Mattress Girl, UVA, right?
A lot of these high-profile cases.
That guy at Columbia with Mattress Girl, for people who don't remember, he doesn't get graduation back.
And I know that you've covered it fairly.
I just wonder why that is an exception.
That case infuriates me.
To this day, people think that she's some sort of feminist hero.
Do you know the facts?
I'll tell you, on the Kelly file, I put on a couple of cases in terms of what's happening on college campuses right now to young men.
And thank God it's being rectified by Betsy DeVos.
I think what he did under President Obama was wrong.
It was a letter to colleges saying, these are the standards you must impose.
You don't have to impose them, but you're going to lose all federal funding.
But look, it's up to you, right?
Of course they did it.
And guys who get accused on college campuses, they can't cross-examine up until now,
can't cross-examine, have no right to discovery, can't even be in the room with their lawyer,
and if they lose, they're expelled and labeled a sex offender.
And I'll just give you one example.
I had one guy, his lawyer came on my show, because he was remaining anonymous.
He was accused by a woman who said it was rape.
He said it was consensual.
He got expelled.
They said, you did it, because they always say you did it.
The standard is so low for conviction for guys.
So they kicked him out of college.
He's kicked out.
And then the roommate of his alleged victim came forward and said, I feel really bad.
I have these text messages from her that really helped him.
And his lawyer was like, let's see.
And the text messages were like from the alleged victim.
I'm no angel.
I'm not innocent.
I had him come over.
Oh, we did it.
And then moments after her alleged rape, what did she do?
She invited another guy over and slept with him.
None of which he knew.
He couldn't raise any of it in this tribunal.
So they went back to the school and said, this is such bullshit, right?
You got to let him back in.
You got to get rid of this label of sex offender.
And they wouldn't do it.
Right.
So my point is simply, it's so unfair to just choose a side and say women always tell the truth and guys are the liars and the perpetrators.
It isn't always true.
It isn't.
And so you have to go to these situations with an open mind.
Well, and I do appreciate you keeping the source anonymous when describing my wife and I, our elaborate role-playing.
Let me, it's very bizarre.
For some reason, legal turmoil gets her.
Let me ask you, so I think that answers the question.
Why Tara Reade went to you?
Because if Tara Reade went to, you know, let's say Gloria Allred, people would go, okay, all right, well, we get it, and immediately would be questioned, and then, of course, people who would question it would be accused of being sexist.
In your case, I think she said, okay, I need to go someone who has been calling balls and strikes.
I wanted to ask you this because you mentioned Christine Blasey Ford.
We caught a lot of fleck because nothing really matched up.
You say this is different.
The difference is night and day.
What do you see as the primary differences?
Because some people will say, well, you're just politicking at this point between Ford and Reed, if there are them.
What I say is night and day is the way the media is approaching the stories.
They put Christine Blasey Ford on the cover of Time Magazine as a heroine.
Tara Reade couldn't get anybody to even put her on television after months of trying to come out with this story.
When I was at NBC, my limited stint at NBC, Not only did they put Julie Swetnick, that liar, in my opinion, in the Brett Kavanaugh case on TV.
Everyone else is too, but yes.
With their bogus gang rape.
I saw them gang raping people, allegations.
But they put on a report.
They put on a report on NBC.
It had two links up here.
It was like at least two or three links up here saying one anonymous person said to another anonymous person who spoke to NBC that Brett Kavanaugh, like 20 years ago, might have pushed a woman up against a wall.
Somehow, somebody figured out who the person was who started this chain link and tracked down the alleged girlfriend you threw against the wall, who's now a federal judge.
She was like, this is total bullsh**.
It never happened.
What is this?
Right.
But NBC ran with the story, right?
They ran with that story.
With Anonymous to Anonymous.
Tareed Bubkis.
Has she been on NBC?
No, she has not.
So it's like, To me, just the media double standard and the double standard of the women who were like these feminist crusaders when it was Brett Kavanaugh on the hot seat.
And now we're like, there's plenty of reasons to disbelieve Tara Reade.
And that's fine.
But there were plenty of reasons to disbelieve Blasey Ford.
You just chose not to because it was a different guy who was being accused.
Well, I think the primary difference, and then I would like to get your take, because you sat down with her, the primary difference is, not that there are reasons to disbelieve Tara Reade and Christine Blasey Ford, there are no reasons, as far as verifiable evidence, to believe Christine Blasey Ford's story.
Every time she came out and said this happened, someone came out and said, well, no, we actually can't corroborate that, and quite a bit could be proven the opposite.
And also, right now, when you have Christine, sorry, not Christine Blasey Ford, when you have Reade saying, well, I think you should search through these files, and they're being sealed, and Joe Biden says, I won't release them, whereas Cavanaugh came in with his journal that could be corroborated with.
It was generally accurate.
Now, of course, that's not 100%, but what grown-ass man keeps a journal?
Like, oh, I went to Steak and Shake today.
The windows were dirty.
Like, oh my god, but then there's a receipt from Steak and Shake.
And I'm exaggerating to make a point, but we get to the point where they're asking Brett Cavanaugh if he drinks beer on Tuesdays.
And we're not covering Reed at all.
And, by the way, there's no footage of Cavanaugh sniffing children repeatedly.
Well, I mean, the thing is, with Blasey Ford, people found it so persuasive that she told the therapist about it all these years later.
It's like, well, you know what, Christy?
Tara Reade has a very credible, professional woman who was at Ted Kennedy's office when they met, who she told about contemporaneously with the alleged event.
And that woman says, Tara's been telling the same story for 27 years.
She's got another woman who she told the story to two years later, who's a Democrat, who's going to vote for Joe Biden, who says Tara's been telling the same story for 27 years.
Now, does that mean the story is true?
It doesn't.
Maybe Tara lied to these people.
Some women make stuff up.
I mean, you know, not everybody's perfectly together.
So I'm not opining on that.
But in terms of supporting evidence, she's definitely got more witnesses than Blasey Ford ever did.
Right.
And it also matters when you're talking about motive, because she was talking about it back then, where she had really nothing to gain other than speaking the truth with friends, and not saying that's why Christine Blasey came forward, but, you know... Let me speak that one out, okay?
So there's a couple possibilities.
I mean, there is a possibility with respect to Tara, and she knows I'm not trying to diagnose her on television or on podcasting, but...
There's a possibility that Tara, there's something wrong with Tara, right?
And she needed attention or she just, she made up this story.
She was ticked off at Biden.
Who knows?
Like women do sometimes make things up for whatever reason.
That is possible.
The other possibility is like, she wanted to get him, right?
Like she was getting pushed out of the office.
She's pissed off.
I'm going to get Joe Biden.
Okay.
So let's, let's see that one through.
So she makes up the story, she plants the seed with a corroborating witness back in 1993.
Okay, she's got the witness on board, she's got the story straight.
Why didn't she ever drop the hammer?
All this time, Joe Biden, he ran for president about 200 times.
He got on the ticket with Barack Obama as the vice president.
Never.
Nothing.
And then even in this race, when he first started running and the Democratic field was vast, nothing.
Nothing.
So like, if she's been lying in wait for the guy for three decades, she stinks at her killing operations, right?
She waited a long time and wait.
Late and wait a long time.
I don't know if that would make sense.
I think the thing that would make sense more is if she's lying, there's something wrong.
Right, or there's a possibility... Something's wrong with her.
At least she told the friends not a long time ago.
Yes, and there is also the possibility that something happened that isn't as severe as she's saying now.
In other words, she could have been listing a complaint because he just, you know, sniffed her, rubbed her shoulders, or said, uh, nice breasts like he said with other women, which, you know, are on the record.
Or, can I get a minute alone with her for a minute?
Which, listen, I don't know, that's not rape, I need to be clear, but I do have women who work in this office, and if I were to say, can I have a minute alone with you for a minute, and sniff, for example, too cute Maddie, you would all kick my ass promptly.
It would be like a pig pen, just a pile of dust.
So, to me, that's bad enough, and maybe that's what happened with Terry.
Can you say- Well, and to your point earlier, though, the sexual harassment stuff, when she said, find the complaint, And there was recently a news report about the fact that her now ex-husband, he had said in a filing in 1996, my wife was sexually harassed in the office of Joe Biden.
But there is a distinction between harassment and assault.
I think she's got plenty of documentation that she accused him of harassment at the time.
But that's different from the assault she's now claiming.
But her two corroborating witnesses, the two best ones she has, they say she told them about the alleged assault, the penetration, the whole thing, right from the time it happened with the one woman's case and two years later in the other woman's case.
Where do you, since you're closer to this obviously, where do you think this goes?
What do you think the next step is?
Do you think he's going to have to unseal?
Nowhere.
No?
No, because who drives the story?
The media.
They have zero interest in this.
I think they're checking a box.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they've got genuine doubts about Tara Reade and they don't want to go too far out on the limb in case she turns out not to be a truth teller.
But whatever the motivation is, it dies without media interest.
And the only other way it would stay alive, I think, is if other women with similarly severe allegations came forward.
But why isn't that enough?
For example, when you look at Aziz Ansari, what effectively amounted to a bad date, right?
We're not talking about something that wasn't consensual.
And I think it's creepy.
Or even if you look at Louis C.K., creepy, it's an abuse of power, but he's not Bill Cosby.
I do think that it's important.
That's where I agree with Matt Damon.
We don't lump them into the same category.
That being said, when you compare Aziz Ansari to Sniffing underage people to making people uncomfortable and inappropriate touching and invading space after being told about it.
Isn't that enough with Joe Biden?
It would seem like the media would say it's a different standard is what is what I don't think the seven women who came forward with the sniffing and the touching of the neck, those reports a year ago, April of 19, that's not going to be enough.
He effectively handled that with a tweet that was like, you know, I'm sort of a politician, I'm handsy, I get it, that was yesteryear, I'm over it.
They're not!
He kind of got a pass on that.
Part of it is they look at the other guy, right?
Trump's been accused by over 12 women of far worse than just a little touching of the neck.
And so people are kind of like, I'm not going to make a federal case out of Joe Biden's rubbing somebody's hair.
Sexual assault, like Tara Reade's alleging, is a different story.
But on the other hand, you know, Trump's been accused of that, too.
So people are like, ah!
Yeah.
What an election!
They're stuck between a rock and a hard place, I think, a lot of people, people who aren't consistent here, you know, on this.
And I do think it comes down to burden of proof.
And certainly when it relates to Tara Reade, I think it's more comparable to, let's say, Christine Blasey Ford.
As a non-lawyer, it seems like there's a lot more to go on and there's different treatment of that.
I don't know if you've been following recently, you know, we ran into this.
I'm not a journalist and unfortunately, unfortunately as a commentary in the state of modern journalism, I've broken some stories that you would think these folks wanted.
Remember the lady who drank the fish tank cleaner, chloroquine, that little thing?
So we actually had some exclusive info.
Yes, the husband.
I want to get your opinion on that, but we actually had the exclusive documents that we released on this show.
What we didn't have that wasn't exclusive, but was available to the public, but hadn't been reported, was that she was a longtime Democratic donor.
We had an exclusive social media post of her saying, I can't believe you would believe Trump.
What an idiot.
She hated Donald Trump.
And then, what we had the exclusive to was, there was a John Deere court case, I think, where she sued John Deere, and using some information in that file, we found one where she was charged with domestic abuse against her husband, and we had exclusive documents that we revealed.
I feel like he found it.
That was big.
Yeah, I have a brilliant researcher.
We call him Reg, and it's crazy that we were able to find this.
We released it, and no one covered it on the left, and then I called the reporter who broke it at NBC, and I said, listen, You reported a story where she drank fish tank cleaner with her husband.
Her husband died, and you guys must have known that she was a Democratic donor.
You said she drank it because of Donald Trump.
She said, well, I don't know that.
I said, well, did you look at her political donation records?
That's the first thing.
Did you look at her criminal record?
Because she also hated her husband.
So I'm saying...
She hated Donald Trump and she hated her husband.
He died, she didn't.
Do you think that changes?
She goes, well, I think you have a message that you want to push and you should go with that.
I said, no, doesn't that change the story?
If she said she drank it because Trump told her to and she clearly hates Trump.
And now we know the husband was a civil engineer.
Ah, just drink some koi pond cleaner.
No one caught it?
How does that happen?
And you're in an exclusive position as someone who's been a journalist and now is doing it on your own.
How does that happen?
How does no one check that?
No, you know exactly how, right?
There's a bias against the information.
You think she wouldn't have reported it if it had been the opposite way around?
If the woman had been pro-Trump and Biden had said the controversial thing that she'd done?
You know, it's like, we talked about this a couple months ago when NBC, all the stuff came out with Ronan Farrow, right?
About them, like why they spiked the Weinstein story.
And their defense was it just didn't meet the journalistic standards we have.
It was just, just couldn't get it over the line.
Even though they had Rose McGowan on the record saying Harvey raped her.
NBC had her on the record saying that doesn't meet our journalistic standards.
Like what?
But anonymous to anonymous with the principal girlfriend saying it didn't happen.
That was enough to put the allegations on about against Brett Kavanaugh.
Right.
Why?
Because of bias.
That's why.
Yeah.
But how can people trust?
So I think a lot of people blame President Trump for the distrust in the media, but this has been going on for so long now.
Do you think it's accelerated recently or do you think it's been the case for a long time?
I think, honestly, like the old school objective trustworthy journalism is dead.
That's what I think.
And it wasn't a murder by President Trump.
It was more like an assisted suicide.
He was like the Kevorkian, but they're the ones who killed themselves.
Because they've abandoned all objectivity.
I mean, it's gone.
And Trump exposed it.
He exposed it better than anybody.
He helps, and his rhetoric about enemy of the people, whatever, that's too much.
But the ones who weren't what he said they were, like CNN, became.
What he said.
CNN used to be objective.
I used to watch CNN every night when I got ready for the Kelly file because it was like, okay, objective news.
I can get the straight skinny and I'll go on and I'll do my thing.
No more.
And they're worse than MSNBC because they're parading out there masquerading as objective news people.
At least MSNBC owns it and says, this is who we are.
That's our tagline, right?
CNN, like the Apple and the, I don't even know what the hell they're saying anymore, but they're not objective.
And now it's just a picture of Chris Cuomo's biceps with synthol injected into them.
Yeah, that's a good analogy.
He's like the Kevorkian.
He just strapped a casa to a chair and said, I'm gonna leave this file here.
Don't do anything I wouldn't do.
Bye.
And you know, you walk back in and you can draw your own conclusions.
Yeah, we've we've had this.
I was I had a rude awakening.
No, go ahead, go ahead.
Your words are more important than mine.
I was just going to say, like, why?
Like, why does CNN have to do it, right?
Like, I have a lot of friends over there who I really like and respect, but I feel like the decision came from the top that they were going to get Trump, that they were going to be part of the resistance media, and maybe that their objective approach wasn't working financially.
But to me, like, that's been a real loss in journalism, because I, for me, actually...
I no longer have a place I can go where I believe I'm just going to get facts and not spin.
So I just read the news now.
I don't really do a lot on television.
Well, I think what you have to do is assume there's spin.
And so for me, I just read spin.
So I set up my own favorites, my bookmarks.
And if I read Fox News, I read MSNBC right afterward.
If I read anything at Daily Caller, I read Slate right afterward.
I want to make sure that I know exactly what both sides are saying.
CNN is almost superfluous at that point.
There's no value, because they don't tell you the lies by omission.
And in my experience, I'm glad that you have friends that you know and respect.
I have nobody I know and respect over there.
But I can say that about myself.
But here's the thing that upsets me more.
Yeah, okay, it doesn't work.
And like I said, they're a dying medium.
Okay, that would be enough.
But now when you look at, I mean, we've had lawsuits with NBC, ABC, Viacom, MTV, Comcast, so many just for these
false copyright claims.
We had it for streaming the Oscars when we didn't even show the Oscars.
It was in a little window.
You know, and you don't get those live viewers back.
Now, and of course Vox obviously is part of a conglomerate, now they're actually trying
to silence people who are trying to deliver facts online in independent outlets.
And my question, what is that like for you?
Because you're one of the few people who's been doing this in both a big media company and now by yourself.
How would you say your experience is different?
What concerns you most?
Well, I mean, the one thing I don't want to do in whatever I do next, and I haven't figured that out yet, I'm kind of enjoying myself at the moment, but I'll get back out there in some capacity, is I don't want to work for some corporate overlord.
You know, I don't want to be told how to cover the news or feel like I must cover it in a certain way.
And I can see sort of as more people pop up with power, you know, online, digitally, whatever.
They're threatened, right?
If you get a big exclusive, if Joe Rogan does, if Ben Shapiro does, they don't pick that up and run that on television.
Even though you have a video feed, they could very easily steal a clip and run it.
So why don't they?
Because they don't want to promote you, right?
Because you're a big threat to what they have and they can sort of see the future.
But I will say, to me, it feels like two different worlds.
I feel like there's a different audience watching cable than there is Getting their news online and I don't like the news online.
The digital audience seems younger than the cable news audience.
Yeah, I don't know how much.
Yes, right?
Because one could easily feed the other, but I don't think they understand this medium, and I think it's only recently that they're even taking it seriously.
That is a problem, obviously, because now they're a little bit late to the party.
And unfortunately, they have far more dollars, and so they're trying to change the landscape.
I think something that's changed, and if I'm not mistaken, maybe Anthony Cumia talked about this, I don't know that it's original, is we always had to deal with the FCC, right?
It was a bit of a game, cat and mouse, like, oh, you can say, oh, that guy's a – I don't
know if you could say that guy's a shithead, but you can't use it scatologically.
We knew the rules and you try and dance up to the line.
But we knew who we were engaging with.
Now we thought there would be no gatekeepers online.
There would be no censors.
Unfortunately, there has become a louder and even more strict voice and that's the voice
of the mob.
The censorship doesn't come from the FCC.
It comes from the people who want to ruin someone's livelihood and then they exert
pressure for example, let's say with YouTube, to change their policy based on what is determined
to be offensive.
Is that a change that you foresaw coming?
I know I didn't.
I thought this was going to be the Wild West for a lot longer.
I guess not.
I always thought that sort of the loud sort of thumb warriors, President Obama, I thought was right on.
That was something smart he said about it.
He's like, that's not activism.
You would give thumbs to call for somebody to be canceled.
I thought that they would be sort of put in the right category for what they are.
You know what I mean?
Just like small people who really don't have enough to worry about and really just want to tear down others who don't have the same opinions as they do.
On controversial issues.
You're in the business of discussing controversial issues.
That's the business I have been in as well.
It's not like being David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston.
We're controversial.
We take on tough topics.
It's going to result in some people feeling ruffled.
If we have advertisers caught and run every time that happens, they're not going to have anything left to advertise on.
You know, so I do think prescription, you know, options are going to become bigger and bigger.
I like what Dave Rubin is doing where it's like, you'd sort of go and just do your own thing.
You don't have to worry about the advertisers.
Yeah.
But it's tough for the consumers because they don't have to pay for every single personality that they like.
That's true.
And that is what we do.
You know, we have a licensing agreement with Blaze and Mug Club, and so people get Reuben and they get our show.
And what we do is we always make sure that we're providing more free content than ever, as opposed to pulling it away.
And I see it a lot with, well, we've talked about CNN, but a lot of networks where they put up a teaser and it doesn't work, right?
People don't want to engage with their content.
A, people don't want to engage with corporations.
They want to engage with people.
That's something they want to have a personal connection to the people that they watch.
And they don't want to have one pulled over on them.
They don't want to go, well, hold on a second.
It's a 20-second teaser.
I got to go to CNN.
But if you respect the medium and you say, you know what?
I'm going to provide something here that is YouTube appropriate, that has a beginning, middle, and end in context.
And if you want to support what we're doing, we have a subscription service.
I think that's changed a little bit.
Because early on, the only thing that worked with subscription services, and they thought that would work continually, was pornography.
And then no subscription services worked.
But now you have a generation of people who kind of are used to paying on the Patreon generation.
We didn't really have that.
So it's amazing how quickly it's changing.
And don't think it's lost on me that you were kind enough to put us in the same category.
I don't believe that you ever dressed up as a woman and interviewed Wendy Davis ending her career.
That's what I do.
So if I want to get onto YouTube and really be a success, I need to show a boob?
It's preferable.
But it's most important is that you make sure it's directly in the center of the video so that it is picked as the thumbnail.
Otherwise, you know, if a boob is revealed in a forest... I'm gonna have to get a zoom lens!
I don't know if I... It's funny, I actually, I used that quote that you made one time, Killer Bees, with my wife.
Oh yeah, that's right.
Except for when I was pregnant, and then they turned into swimming seas.
That's sexist.
We don't tolerate that on this program.
Let me ask you this.
Listen, I know how these things work, and we've all worked with companies.
We have NDAs, and you're doing your own thing.
So just tell me.
Piss off.
You can't.
By the way, oh, piss off, YouTube.
We're going to go exclusive to Mug Club.
You got a free half hour.
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