The Megyn Kelly Show - 20210430_kmele-foster-michael-moynihan-and-matt-welch-on-wo
Aired: 2021-04-30
Duration: 02:10:41


=== Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show (05:05) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:11]  Hey, everyone.
[00:00:12]  I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:13]  Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:14]  You're going to love today's episode.
[00:00:16]  We just taped it, and I am smiling ear to ear.
[00:00:18]  I love these guys.
[00:00:20]  Love these guys.
[00:00:22]  These are the hosts of the very popular podcast called The Fifth Column, which if you're not downloading, you should.
[00:00:27]  Camille Foster, Matt Welch, and Michael Moynihan.
[00:00:30]  You may know some of these guys because they had a short-lived show on Fox Business for a couple of years.
[00:00:36]  I don't mean that to sound insulting short-lived.
[00:00:39]  But you're going to understand the publications that they're for and Reason, which is something that was started by Matt, which I absolutely love.
[00:00:46]  They're more libertarian in their approach to life, which I also like.
[00:00:49]  And I think you'll find their views interesting and provocative.
[00:00:53]  But we just had fun.
[00:00:54]  We talked about everything, everything from Biden's remarks the other night, the attacks on Tim Scott, the crazy race stuff, the attempt to give qualified immunity or take it away from the cops, where we had an interesting and fun disagreement.
[00:01:05]  Drawing Muhammad, which one of these guys did.
[00:01:08]  They did a contest on it.
[00:01:09]  It goes on.
[00:01:10]  It was awesome.
[00:01:11]  We went two hours.
[00:01:12]  It could have been five.
[00:01:14]  All I'm going to say is listen to this ad and then enjoy.
[00:01:23]  Hey, guys.
[00:01:24]  Hi, Megan.
[00:01:25]  Megan, how are you?
[00:01:26]  How's it going?
[00:01:28]  Spectacular.
[00:01:29]  Great.
[00:01:29]  Yeah.
[00:01:30]  Never been better.
[00:01:30]  Delighted to be with you.
[00:01:32]  Delighted.
[00:01:33]  Same.
[00:01:33]  We've never done an interview with three people at once like this.
[00:01:35]  So this could be a hot shitstorm, but let's try it.
[00:01:39]  This is going to be the hottest mess in the history of the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:01:43]  No, we know sort of generally not to talk over each other.
[00:01:47]  We try to do that.
[00:01:48]  Yeah.
[00:01:48]  But oftentimes when we record the podcast, we're about eight drinks in.
[00:01:52]  So it was very good to do it at 11 in the morning.
[00:01:54]  Yeah.
[00:01:55]  Dang, we could have prepared that way.
[00:01:57]  That would have been fine.
[00:01:58]  I'm totally up for a mimosa.
[00:02:00]  You know, with the Irish last name of Moynihan, you'd probably expect that I would be about three drinks in now.
[00:02:07]  You know what?
[00:02:08]  Stereotypes do exist for a reason.
[00:02:09]  And I embrace that and support it.
[00:02:11]  Yes.
[00:02:12]  A little bit of truth.
[00:02:13]  Yes, brought a lot of joy.
[00:02:14]  I even tell you Irish stereotypes all the time.
[00:02:17]  All right.
[00:02:17]  So let's first of all, can I before we get started, Matt Welsh, did I have dinner with you at John Stossel's house one night?
[00:02:23]  Absolutely.
[00:02:24]  Yes.
[00:02:24]  With the spectacular Peggy Noonan, who won that dinner.
[00:02:28]  She's great.
[00:02:28]  Yes.
[00:02:29]  I knew it.
[00:02:30]  Okay.
[00:02:31]  It was years ago, but we recently had Stossel on the program, who I know you love and I love too.
[00:02:36]  And I was joking with him about the Stossel that Doug and I call it just the Stossel, where he just gets up and leaves with a nice over at 10 o'clock.
[00:02:44]  He's like, He'll let you know beforehand, like, look, I'm going to leave at 10.
[00:02:49]  I want to go upstairs.
[00:02:50]  You can do what you want.
[00:02:51]  I'm leaving.
[00:02:53]  My Stossel impression is always the fake, like, the fake incredulity.
[00:02:57]  He's like, so you're saying that higher taxes are bad?
[00:03:01]  And it's like, John, you know what's crazy is like, I love him and I like his little online spleeners that he does.
[00:03:08]  You know, he puts out these little videos now on Stossel TV and he's killing it.
[00:03:13]  I think Stossel might be 72 now.
[00:03:15]  He's killing it.
[00:03:16]  Like, the younger.
[00:03:18]  Viewers are watching those things in droves.
[00:03:21]  Even our podcast with him did so well.
[00:03:24]  And I love it because it's like he's super smart and he's very relevant.
[00:03:28]  And, you know, the ageists out there who think there's no life past 70 and media are wrong.
[00:03:33]  It's all that beach volley polyplas.
[00:03:35]  Stossel TV, by the way.
[00:03:36]  And there is ageism, I think, because John has to do Stossel TV on YouTube.
[00:03:40]  But it has a half a million subscribers, which is a very good success.
[00:03:45]  That makes sense.
[00:03:45]  That's enormous.
[00:03:46]  Interesting.
[00:03:47]  Even I will go there just, you know, as a media person for, Explainers because he'll do it quickly.
[00:03:52]  He doesn't waste your time.
[00:03:54]  He has a lifetime of being like super to the point and.
[00:04:00]  User friendly, right?
[00:04:01]  Like he's, you got to get up and down on a story when you're in media.
[00:04:04]  You don't have it like in podcasting, it's a different story.
[00:04:06]  But when you work for ABC News, they're not going to give you 60 minutes to go through your story and why the consumers are getting screwed, which was his original beat.
[00:04:15]  So he's come around to this place where he's really good at explaining stuff.
[00:04:18]  And unlike most people, he doesn't have a left wing bias.
[00:04:21]  He doesn't have a right wing bias.
[00:04:23]  He's more like you guys, he's libertarian.
[00:04:25]  Yeah.
[00:04:25]  Yeah.
[00:04:26]  He also does this thing for those of us who've been in the chair being interviewed by him on this show.
[00:04:32]  I have been on here.
[00:04:33]  He does the eye glaze.
[00:04:34]  If you're boring him, or if you're using numbers or whatever.
[00:04:39]  He trained so many dorky libertarians to speak English by the eye glaze.
[00:04:44]  I can't remember who, and I know I won't keep as long as I know I have to start, but there was somebody, and you might remember this, Matt, in the green room at Fox, was waiting to go on.
[00:04:52]  And John comes in and says, What are you going to talk about?
[00:04:55]  Here are the things we're going to talk about.
[00:04:56]  What is your answer to X, Y, or Z question?
[00:04:58]  And the guy was responding, and he turned to his producer and he's like, Who invited this guy on?
[00:05:03]  Literally on in the green room.

=== John Stossel's Libertarian Perspective (08:52) ===

[00:05:06]  And he just shrunk.
[00:05:07]  Savage.
[00:05:08]  Savage.
[00:05:08]  Yeah.
[00:05:08]  Yeah.
[00:05:09]  You know, my husband reminded me that Stossel, because he and Stossel are actually good friends.
[00:05:14]  And unlike Stossel and I, who are just mediocre, and, you know, he irritates me.
[00:05:19]  No, I love him, but I love his wife even more.
[00:05:22]  So Stossel came up to me one time at Fox, and I forgot to bring this up when he was on the show.
[00:05:29]  And we didn't know each other very well.
[00:05:30]  And Stossel says to me in the makeup room, out of the blue, right?
[00:05:33]  We don't know each other.
[00:05:34]  He goes, I owe you an apology.
[00:05:37]  Like, oh, go on.
[00:05:39]  Like, what for?
[00:05:40]  What'd you do?
[00:05:41]  And he said, I can't remember exactly how you put it, but he basically said, I used to think that you were an airhead, that you were an empty headed bimbo, basically.
[00:05:53]  And he goes, But that's before I listened to you.
[00:05:56]  And he said, Now that I've actually listened to you, I'm sorry because you're actually really smart.
[00:06:03]  And I was like, He apologized for something that you would have no way of ever knowing.
[00:06:10]  No, it was just in his head.
[00:06:13]  Yeah, that's amazing.
[00:06:14]  Well, God bless them.
[00:06:15]  I took it.
[00:06:15]  I don't get it.
[00:06:16]  Like, I'm very, very hard to offend.
[00:06:18]  Very hard to offend.
[00:06:19]  So I decided to just wrap myself in the compliment that ended it.
[00:06:23]  And a beautiful friendship was born that day.
[00:06:26]  There you go.
[00:06:27]  And by the way, challenge accepted.
[00:06:28]  Yeah.
[00:06:29]  Okay.
[00:06:31]  So let's talk about because we're now taping right after Biden's fake State of the Union address.
[00:06:38]  Yes.
[00:06:38]  And let's just start.
[00:06:40]  We just start with how awkward it was.
[00:06:41]  It reminded me of the Biden campaign rallies, right?
[00:06:44]  Where like four people show up.
[00:06:45]  And they have like 20 feet between each one of them.
[00:06:47]  They can't get out of their cars.
[00:06:49]  Everybody's quadruple masked.
[00:06:51]  It's like everyone in the room had been vaccinated.
[00:06:54]  Everybody, even just look at who was up on the dais, right?
[00:06:57]  It's like Biden and Harris and Pelosi.
[00:07:01]  They've all been vaccinated.
[00:07:02]  Even they, like just they, can't they take off their masks?
[00:07:05]  It just to me was emblematic of where we are, especially the Democrats, though, as a country right now, when it comes to we're never taking these things off.
[00:07:16]  Yeah.
[00:07:17]  I liked Chuck Schumer in the front row.
[00:07:19]  Like no one sitting next to him whenever he stood up, he was just, he was visibly confused.
[00:07:23]  Yeah.
[00:07:24]  Where did the noise go?
[00:07:25]  Why are my glasses not on my nose?
[00:07:27]  Usually on my nose.
[00:07:28]  Yeah.
[00:07:29]  No, it's amazing because the whole thing is so condescending to the American people.
[00:07:34]  Because the idea, of course, is that if we take these things off and we're on television, first of all, no one's watching.
[00:07:40]  The people who you think are watching aren't watching, that they're going to see this and just fling the masks off and go out and create, you know, Round eight of the pandemic.
[00:07:50]  And that is, I mean, most people would presume that not only being elderly, but being the president.
[00:07:56]  Vice president, speaker, that maybe they've been vaccinated, but they can't do that.
[00:08:00]  The dynamic is incredibly strange.
[00:08:01]  You're telling a story about every American having access to this vaccine.
[00:08:05]  Imaginably, all of you have it, but you're not sure if you should be projecting confidence about how the future is going to go, about where we are as a country or not.
[00:08:14]  The place is half empty, not even half empty.
[00:08:17]  It's barely a third full, right?
[00:08:19]  And most of the people in the room, except for Joe Biden, who is stumbling through this speech, are masked.
[00:08:25]  Completely bizarre situation.
[00:08:26]  Doug and I were sitting there, and I was every time he paused or appeared to go off script, I was like, Oh, I did, right?
[00:08:35]  Did you have that feeling?
[00:08:36]  I'm like, He's not gonna be able to do it.
[00:08:38]  Well, we watched it together, and Camille very helpfully was following on with the prepared remarks and would periodically tell us, although we didn't need to be told because it was the meandering bits about how we found vaccines on Mars.
[00:08:50]  And I was like, What the is going on here?
[00:08:53]  And it was just this bizarre.
[00:08:55]  I mean, look, we made fun.
[00:08:57]  And I think appropriately so of, you know, George W. Bush's gaffes.
[00:09:01]  I mean, Trump's, you know, gaffes too, which were a little, there were less gaffes.
[00:09:05]  It was just kind of who he was.
[00:09:06]  They weren't like malapropisms.
[00:09:08]  And nobody did that about Joe Biden in the aftermath on Twitter anyway.
[00:09:13]  And of course, Twitter is not the real world.
[00:09:15]  But I didn't see people making fun of these bizarro tangents that I was just spent the time trying to figure out.
[00:09:22]  Why does he keep saying that he flew 17,000 miles with Xi?
[00:09:27]  Like nobody understands why it's not true.
[00:09:29]  And he keeps saying it over and over.
[00:09:30]  It's what he just makes stuff up.
[00:09:32]  And then you're not sure if that's his, you know, senility seeping in or he's just an old fashioned politician who lies.
[00:09:40]  I'm not sure, but it was like watching a guy on the high wire with no net.
[00:09:44]  And I'm thinking, just stick to the prompter.
[00:09:48]  You know, I may not support all the things you're saying, but I really don't want you to fall down and drool.
[00:09:53]  Those of us who have parents of a certain age can recognize it, you know, like, My dad, who's just a couple years older, he will grab onto a number, just like it's a life raft.
[00:10:05]  And whether or not that number has anything to do with the conversation, it likely does not, but just grabs onto it.
[00:10:10]  And Biden's the same way.
[00:10:13]  And he's been a politician for longer than Camille and perhaps Michael have been alive, almost as long as I've been alive.
[00:10:21]  And they just say the same stories.
[00:10:23]  And Neil Kinnock's stories are around.
[00:10:28]  That's what he's holding on to at age 78 as president.
[00:10:32]  It's awful.
[00:10:33]  There are the Trumpian moments and the Trumpian little punctuations to the speech.
[00:10:38]  And my favorite one was there was one bit, and again, you have to correct me if I'm wrong because it was very difficult to follow.
[00:10:45]  There's one bit where he says, I talk to leaders, I talk to all these world leaders, and they're like, you know what, America, come back to the world.
[00:10:51]  And that is the most Trumpian thing.
[00:10:54]  Trump says, I talk to people, I'm talking to the doctors, I'm talking to world leaders.
[00:10:57]  The best people.
[00:10:57]  I was like, no, you're not.
[00:10:59]  You've not talked to anyone.
[00:11:00]  You just woke up this morning, had a hamster, and you're like, I'm just going to go.
[00:11:03]  No, yes, I talked to the best people in my family.
[00:11:09]  It reminds me of, you know, so Biden's, he's 77 now.
[00:11:12]  My mom's 79.
[00:11:13]  With all due respect to my mom, who I adore, you know, she's not that much older than he is.
[00:11:18]  And she says stuff like, you know, at one point we were talking about the pandemic, and she was like, oh, you know, I was in Montana and I was telling her the bears were starting to come out during the shutdown.
[00:11:28]  And she goes, oh, I'd be more worried about those bears than Covert 12.
[00:11:38]  What if your mom's an epidemiologist and she actually discovered covert 12 and you had no idea?
[00:11:44]  And she's like, Oh, I'm sick and tired of Dr. Fawcett.
[00:11:48]  Me too.
[00:11:50]  Me too, Mom.
[00:11:53]  I have similar feelings.
[00:11:54]  Feeling listening to him.
[00:11:56]  She do fine with a prompter too, but you know, the biggest problem was and, by the way, just one other point, if I may I found like the most annoying, the most annoying part of the evening was Nancy Pelosi.
[00:12:11]  It's like, sit down if everything is a standing ovation.
[00:12:17]  Nothing is a standing ovation.
[00:12:19]  This is so false, it's so manufactured and artificial.
[00:12:24]  You, I I hate your performance here tonight.
[00:12:27]  I hate your performance.
[00:12:28]  She was trying to do the opposite of when she ripped up Trump's speech.
[00:12:31]  Every line was a standing O.
[00:12:33]  And it was like, the speech was long enough.
[00:12:36]  You know, John Podoritz had a piece in the poster.
[00:12:37]  He was like, I felt it like at the end, like, let my people go.
[00:12:40]  It went on forever.
[00:12:42]  She made it longer and longer.
[00:12:44]  And it was just so false and artificial, like so much about her.
[00:12:47]  Yeah.
[00:12:48]  I try not to be too cynical about politics, really, genuinely, because it matters.
[00:12:53]  There are things that happen here that affect all of our lives.
[00:12:56]  But I'm Always cynical about performances like this.
[00:12:59]  And it's very odd at a moment where America has gone through so much over the course of the past 12 months or so.
[00:13:05]  We genuinely do need some things.
[00:13:07]  We need some coming together.
[00:13:09]  There needs to be some healing.
[00:13:10]  One would hope that at a moment like this, you get some of that from the president of the United States, some confidence, some certainty.
[00:13:18]  And it just felt like a totally missed opportunity.
[00:13:22]  Keep the speech short, talk about what's important and what's good, talk about getting kids back into school, the kind of things that are.
[00:13:29]  Having an impact on people's lives.
[00:13:31]  Don't tell me, you know, we could totally spend $50 trillion and I've got a plan to do it.
[00:13:37]  Well, just raise taxes.
[00:13:38]  Just raise taxes a little bit.
[00:13:39]  It's going to be fine.
[00:13:39]  Nobody's going to feel it.
[00:13:41]  Now, just to set the record straight, Camille, you have kids.
[00:13:44]  All three of you have kids, yes?
[00:13:45]  But I'll start with Camille.
[00:13:46]  I've got one child, as so far as I know.
[00:13:49]  Yes.
[00:13:49]  Yeah.
[00:13:50]  Jamaican.
[00:13:50]  This is a challenge.
[00:13:51]  You can't be sure.
[00:13:52]  Yeah.
[00:13:54]  We got all dogs.
[00:13:55]  That's just for me.
[00:13:56]  I think I have three.
[00:13:57]  Yeah.
[00:13:57]  Yeah.
[00:13:57]  Okay.

=== Texas School Board Ideology Clash (04:16) ===

[00:13:58]  And Matt, how many kids do you have?
[00:14:00]  I've got two, a 12 year old and a six year old.
[00:14:03]  And we've been enjoying the New York City public school system this year.
[00:14:08]  And it's opening some sarcasm things.
[00:14:10]  That's a lot of sarcasm.
[00:14:12]  It has provided an enormous amount of fodder for our podcast because Matt is a terrible father.
[00:14:19]  And the reason he's a terrible father, I mean, there's a number, but the one main reason is that he comes onto the podcast and talks about his daughter and talks about the things that his daughter is learning at the sugar plantation outside of Havana where they're cutting cane for the revolution.
[00:14:35]  It is totally bananas.
[00:14:37]  And I'm like, no, that stuff's not real.
[00:14:39]  My daughter is a little bit younger.
[00:14:40]  They are friends.
[00:14:41]  My daughter's just turned 10 years old and at a private school.
[00:14:45]  And usually those are worse in New York City.
[00:14:47]  Yeah, in Brooklyn.
[00:14:49]  And it is, you know, it has some problems, shall we say.
[00:14:54]  But she's been in school for a while.
[00:14:56]  And that's, I don't care.
[00:14:58]  They honestly could give her a Che Guevara tattoo on her shoulder blade.
[00:15:02]  It's great.
[00:15:03]  She's in school.
[00:15:04]  And everybody else I know in public schools are absolutely suffering from this.
[00:15:08]  So that's the positive thing.
[00:15:10]  The only drawback is they're showing up at home calling you guys racist.
[00:15:16]  100%.
[00:15:16]  Right.
[00:15:16]  Like that's, I mean, hopefully everybody's counter programming against the lunacy.
[00:15:20]  And as I've made public, I'm pulling my kids from my schools.
[00:15:23]  But on and on it goes.
[00:15:25]  And it's, I hate it because I actually love the schools from which, in my boy's case, we've left.
[00:15:30]  And my daughter's case, we're leaving.
[00:15:32]  I love them.
[00:15:33]  I love the teachers.
[00:15:34]  I love the administrators.
[00:15:35]  I love the parents, the student body.
[00:15:37]  It's the ideology they're thrusting on the kids that I can't stand.
[00:15:40]  Right.
[00:15:41]  So it's like, I feel very conflicted.
[00:15:43]  It's like, you know, it's like when you find out your parent is a serial killer.
[00:15:47]  Like, but I love you, but I just, I hate the stuff you're doing.
[00:15:51]  The thing is, there's no escaping of it really.
[00:15:53]  Like the.
[00:15:54]  You know, I started writing about this maybe in the fall of 2019, and it was in the context of the middle school changing all of its admissions requirements, the district changing its admissions requirements, which they're now aping all throughout New York City.
[00:16:10]  And the language that they use to talk about the desegregation of the schools and all this, I found it to be super odd.
[00:16:17]  And they're, you know, the sales pitches to parents involved like fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama.
[00:16:22]  It's like, we're in Park Slope.
[00:16:25]  This is not the same.
[00:16:27]  And when I was writing about it, Initially, I was like, I know this all sounds crazy to you people reading this, but I fear that this might be happening around the country.
[00:16:36]  I had no idea how fast it would happen everywhere around the country.
[00:16:40]  We get emails from listeners all the time about not just schools, but like their human resource departments at wherever they work and all this diversity, equity, and inclusion training stuff.
[00:16:51]  And it sounds insane and it's in a lot of places.
[00:16:55]  Yeah, I mean, it's really overwhelmed the culture.
[00:16:58]  And to Matt's point, it is outside the schools, it is in corporate culture and the emails that we get.
[00:17:03]  Journalism, yeah, journalism, of course, would expect that.
[00:17:06]  But you know, somebody at a bank in Tulsa is like, I just had to do an eight hour course on, you know, Franz Fanon's books.
[00:17:13]  And it's just like, wait, what?
[00:17:14]  You're a bank teller.
[00:17:16]  And this is so, so this is everywhere.
[00:17:17]  And I know, Megan, you had Paul Rossi on your podcast.
[00:17:20]  He was on, we let you take the lead on that.
[00:17:22]  We did it a day later.
[00:17:24]  We didn't want to step on your toes, but that the response to that was incredible.
[00:17:30]  I had people emailing me that listen to the podcast that aren't expressly political people saying, Oh my God, is that stuff real?
[00:17:38]  And it reminded me of something the way the culture reacts to this.
[00:17:42]  Because in 2010, some people might remember the brouhaha in Texas over the Texas school board's curriculum changes.
[00:17:50]  And when you go back and look at them, it was like this right wing takeover, et cetera.
[00:17:55]  And now I don't like this in any ideological direction if someone's trying to rewrite what kids are learning from some ideological perspective.
[00:18:02]  But theirs was not as bad when I looked back.
[00:18:05]  There was some stuff I was like, that's kind of crazy, but they were trying to bring some.
[00:18:08]  Uh, balance to it and redress some of the weird kind of you know left leaning stuff.
[00:18:13]  So I get it.

=== Uncle Tom Verdict and Racism (15:17) ===

[00:18:14]  There were pieces on the Colbert Report, John Stewart did a long thing on it.
[00:18:20]  Every late night show mocking these people every day, and it was just in the state of Texas.
[00:18:25]  And of course, it was watered down considerably.
[00:18:27]  We're now living in an era where you know nine year olds are getting like Ibram X. Kendi kids' books in no one bats an eye.
[00:18:37]  My hope, my aspiration would be that.
[00:18:39]  Schools are interested in helping to cultivate critical thinking skills, the ability to deal with complex ideas, to find ways to navigate complicated issues.
[00:18:48]  For the most part, it definitely seems like a circumstance where you just have to arrive at the right answer.
[00:18:54]  We know what the right answer is, kind of like a jury that brings back a verdict in 10 hours without asking any questions to the judge, as if all of them are lawyers.
[00:19:03]  They completely understand the instructions, all of this is fine.
[00:19:06]  And it's a very strange situation to be in to have seen the video, the footage of George Floyd.
[00:19:13]  And Derek Chauvin and the rest of the officers who are taking him into custody, like everyone has seen it.
[00:19:18]  And virtually everyone in America has some problem with what happened there.
[00:19:22]  It's difficult not to acknowledge that had things been done differently, it's possible this guy wouldn't have died, in which case you want there to be some repercussions.
[00:19:31]  And you also hope that you're instituting some changes that might ensure that this doesn't happen again.
[00:19:37]  And I don't know that making certain that you convict on all three of these things right away, put him in jail for 40 years, give people an opportunity to say, yeah, we got the guy.
[00:19:47]  I don't know that that actually gets you that outcome.
[00:19:50]  It doesn't, it doesn't, there's something about it that doesn't feel like.
[00:19:54]  It feels insufficient.
[00:19:55]  It feels inadequate.
[00:19:56]  And I think that's because it is.
[00:19:58]  Because the obsession with race in a case where there is no concrete evidence at all that makes it clear to me that if all of the circumstances were the same, but George Floyd had been a white man, he wouldn't have died in precisely the same way.
[00:20:12]  Didn't Keith Ellison say something similar?
[00:20:15]  He said there was no evidence of race.
[00:20:17]  Yeah, that there was no evidence of racism on Derek Chauvin's.
[00:20:19]  And you guys know, and I've heard you talk about this in the fifth column.
[00:20:23]  If they had it, we would have heard it.
[00:20:24]  I mean, there's zero chance they would have held that back.
[00:20:27]  Come up.
[00:20:27]  Yeah.
[00:20:28]  And I made the Mark Furman analogy, I believe, in the podcast, where, you know, obviously that was explicit on tape and it was played ad infinitum in the courtroom.
[00:20:37]  And that had an effect.
[00:20:39]  And that, you know, had an effect on the jury.
[00:20:41]  Nothing at all.
[00:20:42]  And to Camille's point about this feeling very political.
[00:20:45]  And this is the thing I can separate this from what I believe about Derek Chauvin and his, in what he did.
[00:20:54]  And I don't think that was okay.
[00:20:56]  And that's an understatement, right?
[00:20:58]  But, you know, I see this morning in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that the feds were planning on, if the jury came back with a not guilty verdict, to arrest him in the courtroom on federal civil rights charges in Frog March.
[00:21:12]  That strikes me that this has become exceptionally political, being directed from the White House.
[00:21:18]  Obviously, there's a task force coming to Minneapolis to investigate the police force there.
[00:21:22]  I mean, the president is making comments on this, the vice president's making comments.
[00:21:27]  This is, I mean, there's a, you know, Award being given to the Floyd family from the city of Minneapolis, and jurors are being sent away because they knew about it.
[00:21:37]  And they're saying, This prejudices my opinion of the case.
[00:21:39]  I mean, to say that this is something that was just done by the book and everything happened the way it should have been is absolute nonsense.
[00:21:46]  It's not normal.
[00:21:47]  The one thing that, or the two things that I appreciated from Tim Scott last night in his rebuttal of the State of the Union Tim Scott is the leader in the Senate on the Republican side of criminal justice reform.
[00:21:58]  He's the one who's advancing the ball on that.
[00:22:00]  He's good and smart.
[00:22:01]  About it, and he made the needling point, but there's some truth behind it that sometimes it seems as though Democrats want the issue rather than the solution to the problem.
[00:22:12]  And the way that we talk about it, in fact, by emphasizing race so much, that means you're actually not going to do it because you can't just solve racism by passing a law, right?
[00:22:21]  It's going to be very difficult to do that.
[00:22:22]  But if you talk about power relations, if you talk about qualified immunity, if you talk about mandatory minimum sentences and the drug war, that's a bunch of policy you could do actionable.
[00:22:31]  Maxine Waters could be doing that, as opposed to.
[00:22:34]  Telling you know black lives matter, that they need to be more confrontational.
[00:22:38]  Um, if we don't get the right verdict, if we don't get the right verdict, we ought to get confrontational.
[00:22:43]  Her rhetoric is utterly useless almost all of the time.
[00:22:46]  You know, people like Maxine Waters are not the ones we should be listening to.
[00:22:49]  There are honest brokers on the left who want police reform, who can make a good case for the elimination of you know some elimination of qualified immunity or so on, but she's not one of them.
[00:22:59]  She's just an instigator.
[00:23:00]  You know she's somebody who just goes out there for clicks and to appease her base and you know she's always gets reelected with something like 77 of the vote.
[00:23:08]  So she She doesn't really have to be accountable to a more general base of the population, but she's constantly saying stuff like that.
[00:23:14]  That's really utterly unhelpful.
[00:23:16]  I hate to give her too much attention.
[00:23:17]  Um, but wait, Tim Scott is actually, I think he's amazing.
[00:23:21]  He's sort of there's a lot of talk about him possibly winding up on the GOP ticket next time around.
[00:23:26]  You know, the hardcore MAGA crowd doesn't tend to love him, they don't tend to love Nikki Haley, they think they might be too milquetoasty.
[00:23:34]  Um, but I don't know if I'm milquetoasty too, but I like those guys.
[00:23:37]  I think moderation is a good thing.
[00:23:40]  Um, here is just a bit of what He said last night in rebuttal to Biden.
[00:23:44]  I've also experienced a different kind of intolerance.
[00:23:48]  I get called Uncle Tom and the N word by progressives, by liberals.
[00:23:53]  Just last week, a national newspaper suggested my family's poverty was actually privilege because a relative owned land generations before my time.
[00:24:06]  Believe me, I know firsthand our healing is not finished.
[00:24:13]  In 2015, after the shooting of Walter Scott, I wrote a bill to fund body cameras.
[00:24:17]  Last year, after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, I built an even bigger police reform proposal.
[00:24:25]  But my Democratic colleagues blocked it.
[00:24:28]  I extended an olive branch.
[00:24:30]  I offered amendments.
[00:24:31]  But Democrats used a filibuster to block the debate from even happening.
[00:24:37]  My friends across the aisle seemed to want the issue more than they wanted a solution.
[00:24:43]  But I'm still working.
[00:24:45]  I'm hopeful that this will be different.
[00:24:48]  When America comes together, we've made tremendous progress, but powerful forces want to pull us apart.
[00:24:55]  A hundred years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic.
[00:25:02]  And if they looked a certain way, they were inferior.
[00:25:07]  Today, kids are being taught that the color of their skin defines them again.
[00:25:12]  And if they look a certain way, they're an oppressor.
[00:25:16]  From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we've worked so hard to heal.
[00:25:30]  You know, this stuff is wrong.
[00:25:32]  Hear me clearly.
[00:25:34]  America is not a racist country.
[00:25:38]  Oh, boy.
[00:25:40]  He said it.
[00:25:41]  He said the stuff you're not supposed to say, especially if you're a black man in America.
[00:25:47]  And, of course, to disprove that America is racist, we saw a shit ton of racist stuff said about Tim Scott.
[00:25:54]  And Uncle Tim was trending on Twitter for hours.
[00:26:01]  For hours.
[00:26:02]  Finally, Twitter shut it down.
[00:26:03]  But I mean, Please.
[00:26:05]  If that had been trending about Barack Obama, you know, saying something that people didn't like, they would have had it done immediately.
[00:26:11]  Oliver Willis, oh, I hate Media Matters, the most dishonest organization out there, and that's saying something.
[00:26:18]  Tweets as follows As Tim Scott shows, telling racist white people what they want to hear is a very lucrative path, dishonest, but lucrative.
[00:26:26]  And then there's Ture, the guy who got fired from MSNBC, saying Tim Scott gets called Uncle Tom by progressives, but he's an Uncle Tim.
[00:26:34]  And then there's some lunatic who is tweeting a lot about Uncle. Tom, who in response to Tim Scott, and he was like, okay, I shouldn't have done that.
[00:26:41]  And then Yashar Ali tweeted out like five other instances in which said guy had called other black conservatives like Ben Carson Uncle Tom's.
[00:26:49]  Somebody else tweeted out a picture of, forgive me, a raccoon.
[00:26:54]  The play on words was obvious.
[00:26:56]  It was, this is the left, right?
[00:26:58]  This is the left media pundits going after him with ferocity because of the clip we just played.
[00:27:06]  It surprises you, Camille, doesn't it?
[00:27:09]  Nothing like this has ever happened to you.
[00:27:10]  All of the same treatment.
[00:27:12]  And it's interesting because Tim Scott and I, we agree on some things.
[00:27:16]  We probably disagree on more things.
[00:27:18]  But I would never think that the appropriate response to something Tim Scott says that I don't like is to denigrate him because he fails to meet the standards for what someone who's supposed to look like him is supposed to think.
[00:27:32]  That is the most objectionable nonsense in the world.
[00:27:35]  And people who call themselves anti racist, who imagine themselves crusading against white supremacy, find it Completely fine to indulge in objectively racial slurs and to hurl them at a man who says things they don't like.
[00:27:51]  And the things that apparently are appeasing racists.
[00:27:54]  Are to say things like, you know what?
[00:27:56]  Your race doesn't define you.
[00:27:58]  And we used to believe that in this country.
[00:28:00]  And now we're telling kids and classrooms across America that your race is all important.
[00:28:05]  And to the extent you look a particular way, you should either feel intense pride or intense shame on account of your race.
[00:28:12]  It's deplorable.
[00:28:14]  I believe this to my core.
[00:28:15]  And I think lots of Americans do.
[00:28:17]  And to the extent Tim Scott is able to get Klansmen to endorse a sentiment like that, he's a hero, a goddamn hero.
[00:28:26]  And I can't appreciate the way, I mean, someone like Torre, I saw that tweet as well, and I remember Torre's book about post blackness.
[00:28:34]  And in that same book, he has a moment where he's talking to Henry Louis Gates, who apparently was one of his professors at some point.
[00:28:40]  And he himself recalls Henry Louis Gates saying to him, you know, if there are 40 million black people, then there are 40 million ways to be black, which tells you something pretty extraordinary that this notion of blackness, this notion of racial identity, is pretty superfluous.
[00:28:56]  It doesn't actually matter in a tangible way.
[00:28:59]  And there's no way that Tim Scott, by holding positions that Torre disagrees with or anyone else, can become a traitor to his race or a coon or a Tom simply by being honest and transparent about what he believes.
[00:29:16]  And again, I heard his speech yesterday.
[00:29:18]  There were things that he said that I liked and things that he said that I cringed a little bit at.
[00:29:22]  And that's fine.
[00:29:23]  And it ought to be fine.
[00:29:24]  And it ought to be appropriate for us to judge it.
[00:29:27]  On the basis of the quality of what he says and not based on the color of his skin, which again, if that's what you people are doing, what are your values actually?
[00:29:37]  It's racist.
[00:29:38]  It's racist.
[00:29:40]  It's not just the name calling.
[00:29:41]  Name calling is horrible and awful.
[00:29:43]  Sure.
[00:29:43]  And you shouldn't do it.
[00:29:44]  But I do.
[00:29:44]  But a little bit of it.
[00:29:45]  It's funny sometimes.
[00:29:46]  As long as you're not being racist.
[00:29:48]  Yeah.
[00:29:48]  Have you listened to our podcast?
[00:29:51]  But even if all the words were fine, the mental act of saying this person, Because of the way that he looks, he is not supposed to express certain things.
[00:30:05]  That you are assigned a belief system based on how you look.
[00:30:10]  That is never applied to me based on the way that I look.
[00:30:13]  It is applied to Tim Scott, it's applied to Camille.
[00:30:17]  That is racist.
[00:30:19]  That is absolutely racist.
[00:30:20]  It's 100% racist.
[00:30:21]  It is racism against Tim Scott and Black people, but there is racism against white people in the same way right now.
[00:30:28]  Because, of course, in an effort to be, quote, anti-racist, you've got to believe that people born with white pigmentation are white supremacists.
[00:30:37]  Up next, we're going to talk to the guys about Biden's remark the other night that the riot on January 6th on Capitol Hill was the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.
[00:30:50]  Really?
[00:30:50]  Really?
[00:30:52]  Don't go away.
[00:30:52]  That's next.
[00:30:53]  First, this.
[00:30:57]  The assumption that we feel we have this inner superiority, even hatred. because we happen to have white skin is also racist.
[00:31:08]  That's what's so infuriating, right?
[00:31:10]  It's like, what do you think that's doing?
[00:31:11]  Think that's opening up ears?
[00:31:13]  Think that's making people want to listen to any actual concerns that are legit out there instead of these sweeping condemnations?
[00:31:20]  No, right?
[00:31:21]  Nobody's going to listen once you're like, you can piss off.
[00:31:23]  You're a white supremacist.
[00:31:25]  You need to work harder.
[00:31:26]  Go to Thanksgiving.
[00:31:26]  Go to 4th of July.
[00:31:28]  Tell all your old relatives that they're racist too.
[00:31:30]  Tell your husband.
[00:31:30]  Tell them all they're racists.
[00:31:31]  Or you're even more racist than I thought.
[00:31:33]  Meanwhile, I'll tell your kids in school that they're racists.
[00:31:35]  And if you disagree with any of this, you're even, you know, you're a terrible person, right?
[00:31:39]  So it's like none of that opens up debate, opens up ears, makes people willing to listen.
[00:31:43]  And yet, this is the tactic that's being employed almost universally on the left right now.
[00:31:48]  In a time in which we're constantly admonished for having cable news channels, you know, podcasts.
[00:31:56]  Talk radio that is divisive.
[00:31:58]  The rhetoric is divisive.
[00:31:59]  The Trump years brought us a new level of divisiveness.
[00:32:03]  And I think there's some truth to that.
[00:32:05]  But then again, in our schools, amongst very young kids, in our corporate boardrooms, in media, this type of racial talk is never considered to be divisive when it is the most reductionist talk you can imagine.
[00:32:21]  We're reducing people to their skin color only.
[00:32:25]  And it's amazing at the end of that clip, Megan, you.
[00:32:30]  You chuckled and said something that I completely understand.
[00:32:33]  You said, Oh, he said it.
[00:32:36]  Imagine that it is controversial in 2021 when the man standing behind the president, who was the vice president of a black president, and his vice president is a black woman, that it is controversial to say that we have made progress.
[00:32:55]  We have made enormous amounts of progress.
[00:32:58]  That doesn't say, and one shouldn't even have to do the throw clearing.
[00:33:01]  And say, well, that doesn't mean we're done.
[00:33:03]  Well, of course, it doesn't mean we're done.
[00:33:04]  No one said we're done, but we can acknowledge that there's been an enormous amount of progress that has been made and maybe some that is to be made.
[00:33:13]  And to say so is not reactionary, it's not white supremacist, it's not burying your head in the sand.
[00:33:19]  It's absolutely true.
[00:33:21]  I mean, you see the Joe Biden speech last night.
[00:33:24]  There is this total bastardization of recent history where Joe Biden gets up there and says, and then, you know, affirmed by the historian.

=== Defining Our Political Tribes (14:53) ===

[00:33:31]  Historian Michael Beschlaus, that the January 6th MAGA riot was the worst domestic attack on our democracy since the Civil War.
[00:33:44]  2,300, 2,400 people died at Pearl Harbor.
[00:33:46]  3,000 people died on 9 11.
[00:33:47]  You know, one person died as a direct result of this.
[00:33:51]  Well, two, someone was trampled of this thing.
[00:33:54]  But this is how we treat history.
[00:33:57]  This is ultra Jim Crow, the voting law changes in.
[00:34:01]  It's Jim Eagle.
[00:34:02]  It's the biggest thing.
[00:34:03]  I don't even know what that means, but it's possibly worse than Jim Crow, right?
[00:34:07]  All of this stuff allows, but our ignorance of history allows people to draw these utterly insane ideological points masquerading as historical truths.
[00:34:19]  To your point, I think we have that persuasion.
[00:34:21]  Hold that thought for just one second, because I think we have that soundbite from Biden.
[00:34:24]  Listen.
[00:34:25]  100 days since I took the oath of office and lifted my hand off our family Bible and inherited a nation, we all did, that was in crisis.
[00:34:35]  The worst pandemic in a century.
[00:34:38]  The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
[00:34:41]  The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.
[00:34:46]  It really is.
[00:34:47]  What are you talking about?
[00:34:48]  Yeah.
[00:34:50]  That is insane.
[00:34:52]  It's something we've talked about a few times because it becomes difficult for people to parse this.
[00:34:57]  It is completely possible to find what happened on January 6th objectionable.
[00:35:03]  The people who participated in it, deplorable.
[00:35:05]  To think that this is bad.
[00:35:06]  And it is embarrassing for the country, for the entire polity.
[00:35:11]  And to also think that it is hardly the worst thing that has ever happened to this country.
[00:35:15]  In fact, I'm not even sure it's the worst thing that's happened in the past like 20 months.
[00:35:19]  Like bad things have happened.
[00:35:22]  And it's possible to believe two things.
[00:35:24]  And I just don't think that the kind of hysteria that's been emanating from various corners, but certainly from the White House most recently on issues of race and identity, which even January 6th has become primarily about.
[00:35:37]  Despite the fact that there were minorities represented there with MAGA hats, proudly stomping through the Capitol or waving flags or doing other foolishness, maybe even bear spraying police officers, they call it an act of white supremacist violence in much the same way that Donald Trump's election was white lashed.
[00:35:55]  And I don't think all of this.
[00:35:57]  Inaccurate condemnation on the basis of race, rather than dealing with specific issues, rather than dealing with the genuine deficiency of people, is actually helpful.
[00:36:07]  And I think we have an opportunity.
[00:36:10]  I think we all want to be compassionate to one another, and we could address ourselves to the genuine concern of particular people in need.
[00:36:17]  And instead, we found ourselves presuming that an entire race of people are in the most destitute state imaginable, and that these are the people who we have to give all of our concern to.
[00:36:29]  And we're ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of these people, Black people I'm talking about now, are not impoverished.
[00:36:37]  Is that possible to say?
[00:36:38]  Most of them aren't criminals.
[00:36:39]  Most of them will never commit any sort of violent crime.
[00:36:42]  Most of them will not be shot or murdered by police.
[00:36:44]  In fact, an extraordinary percentage of them are thriving.
[00:36:48]  They're incredibly wealthy.
[00:36:50]  I don't need your help.
[00:36:52]  I don't need to be saved by anyone.
[00:36:54]  In fact, I will say this this is dangerous.
[00:36:57]  I'm privileged.
[00:36:58]  I live a privileged life.
[00:36:59]  My life is extraordinary.
[00:37:01]  I've borrowed money most of the years.
[00:37:03]  I've borrowed a little bit of money from you.
[00:37:05]  When we go out to eat, the Irish guy is always like, Camille, can I get a little money?
[00:37:10]  I'm starving here.
[00:37:11]  I just don't know.
[00:37:12]  So, wait.
[00:37:12]  So, what you're saying is that when you guys sit down together in the morning, you, Matt, and Michael, don't look at Camille and say, first, let me start with an apology.
[00:37:21]  I apologize on behalf of myself, my race.
[00:37:25]  I just started giving that because it's fun.
[00:37:28]  Yeah.
[00:37:28]  I only apologize for stepping on his $8,000 sneakers.
[00:37:32]  I mean, how crazy is that, Megan?
[00:37:34]  Like the notion that you would be.
[00:37:36]  Like ancestral guilt, perpetual ancestral guilt that never goes away, that you're always forced to apologize for by dint of your birth.
[00:37:45]  What does that sound like?
[00:37:46]  That's original sin.
[00:37:48]  I'm going to give you religious fervor.
[00:37:51]  This is a kind of divisive, fundamentalist ideology that is permeating throughout the country and, quite frankly, has become indistinguishable from the core tenets of a particular political party.
[00:38:04]  And I know we're spending a lot of time beating up on the left, and there are people who are going to be annoyed by that.
[00:38:10]  But I'm telling the truth about things here.
[00:38:13]  And it's not because I have some allegiance to conservatives or Republicans in general.
[00:38:18]  This is just the way it is.
[00:38:19]  No, we spent four years beating the hell out of those people, too.
[00:38:22]  So, but I'll give you the floor.
[00:38:25]  But just to offer a point, because I have actually a fair amount of Democrats listening to this show.
[00:38:31]  I hear from them all the time.
[00:38:33]  And I have to say, in their defense, the Democrats as a group are not with that rhetoric.
[00:38:38]  They're not.
[00:38:39]  Some portion are.
[00:38:40]  Certainly Joe Biden offers it a lot.
[00:38:41]  The leaders of the Democratic Party, sure, they say those things.
[00:38:44]  But I really, truly believe that many, many liberals are on our side on this, that they are not on board with this sweeping, untrue, racist rhetoric.
[00:38:57]  Go ahead.
[00:38:58]  Well, I would say that I would urge listeners to look up a study that I think was at the University of Pennsylvania.
[00:39:04]  We've talked about it a few times.
[00:39:06]  Yasha Monk from The Atlantic wrote wonderfully about it called the Hidden Tribes Study.
[00:39:10]  And basically, it breaks down the difference between people of all tribes.
[00:39:16]  But I think that.
[00:39:17]  The stuff on the left was the most interesting.
[00:39:19]  And even the New York Times did a great infographic on this when the report came out, showing that people on the left on Twitter were about seven clicks further to the left than the average Democratic voter.
[00:39:30]  And they put it down to the number of people who actually agreed with the woke stuff, I think at 8%.
[00:39:36]  Now, that's 92% of Americans that are either alienated, don't care about, or actively turned off by that kind of rhetoric, particularly.
[00:39:45]  And this was done, I'm probably.
[00:39:48]  Two, three years ago, something like that.
[00:39:50]  Yeah.
[00:39:50]  In where the rhetoric has gotten so crazy that I had friends come to me, and this was actually the most fascinating thing was after.
[00:39:58]  George Floyd was killed.
[00:40:00]  There was, you know, the way that young people do this stuff is they campaign on Instagram, right?
[00:40:07]  And everyone was posting a black square.
[00:40:10]  And I had two people say to me within a day, and they come to me because they're like, oh, you're like a political guy.
[00:40:16]  Is this normal that they were accused of, you know, harboring subterranean white supremacist instincts because of something they didn't do, which was post a black square?
[00:40:27]  And it's like, oh, God, this is getting a bit Maoist at this point when you're saying you are not.
[00:40:32]  Actually, doing the thing, you have to be saluting the deer leader, et cetera, or following the tenants of the deer.
[00:40:39]  It has gotten so crazy that I believe that 8% identified in the Hidden Tribes study is probably shrunk a little bit.
[00:40:47]  I'm not so sure.
[00:40:48]  I'm not so sure.
[00:40:49]  I've seen some polling recently.
[00:40:50]  We just interact with different people.
[00:40:51]  We just interact with different people.
[00:40:52]  That there's at least some degree to which a lot of these identitarian ideas have caught on, that there is a genuine strengthening of racial fealty in certain circles.
[00:41:04]  The thing that I'm most concerned about is, I think a moment ago, Megan, you used the word us, that there are lots of people, Democrats, who are with us here, is the us is somewhat undefined.
[00:41:16]  Like we did such a good job.
[00:41:18]  You raise a good point because this is something I wanted to yell at Matt Welsh for.
[00:41:23]  Oh, great.
[00:41:25]  Because I wanted to call my company Reason and he stole it.
[00:41:30]  And it was a brilliant, brilliant, Matt Welsh.
[00:41:33]  I love it because it was.
[00:41:35]  It was a really smart name, and it's where I think we, when I say us, that's where we are.
[00:41:40]  I don't think any of this shit is black, white, left, right.
[00:41:42]  It's reason versus unreason.
[00:41:45]  And there are some fundamental values there, like a belief in this crazy idea of equality under the law, as opposed to equity being the basis of things.
[00:41:54]  Equity, as defined by the president of the United States and vice president and various other people, as starting from precisely the same place, a literal impossibility.
[00:42:03]  Like, this isn't a thing that you can actually do.
[00:42:05]  And the one way you could do it is.
[00:42:07]  Essentially, by smashing everyone down to the same level, there's no limiting principle on this.
[00:42:12]  So, if we say that black people on average generally aren't doing so well and they don't start from the same place as white people, why not start with the number of parents in your household or the number of books that you're allowed to own and read to your children?
[00:42:24]  There are so many ways that we are.
[00:42:27]  You could get rid of a parent in all the two parent households, we have to get rid of one.
[00:42:33]  To your point of squishing it down.
[00:42:34]  That's not fairness.
[00:42:35]  And to the point, I think there's actually, and to the point about whether people still believe this stuff or it's alienating.
[00:42:41]  There is a bit of data that both shows that Americans are generically good people and that this stuff is alienating.
[00:42:49]  If you look at the numbers, the approval ratings for Black Lives Matter right after the George Floyd killing, and then look at those numbers about three or four months later, they cratered.
[00:42:59]  It was something like 70%.
[00:43:01]  And the other 30% are people who are probably unaware of it, actually remember it and didn't like it from Ferguson, or maybe just racist.
[00:43:10]  It's still high among Black people, though.
[00:43:12]  Still very high, very high in the 90s among black people.
[00:43:15]  Yes.
[00:43:15]  And, you know, but it goes down to something like 30 odd percent.
[00:43:21]  That is a collapse in that short of a period of time.
[00:43:25]  And when you see people who say, you know, in this, by the way, it's not some sort of Glenn Beck conspiracy point to say, this is a woman who goes on, you know, live stream and says, I'm a trained Marxist.
[00:43:37]  Another one of the BLM leaders shows up in Venezuela holding hands with Nicolas Maduro.
[00:43:41]  You think that I'm joking?
[00:43:42]  I am not.
[00:43:43]  These people are so Marxist.
[00:43:44]  They're so Marxist.
[00:43:44]  They're ideological.
[00:43:46]  So Marxist sitting in Malibu getting $26,000 per conference and owning four homes.
[00:43:52]  You know what?
[00:43:52]  I'm reevaluating Marxism.
[00:43:55]  I might do it.
[00:43:56]  It's the best advertisement she could have had for me joining what I was joking about the other night on Twitter is it boatloads of money?
[00:44:03]  Is that what BLM stands for?
[00:44:05]  I don't.
[00:44:06]  I think it's instructive.
[00:44:07]  That doesn't seem Marxist.
[00:44:09]  To remember that Joe Biden won the Democratic primary and he's the least woke candidate.
[00:44:14]  Yes.
[00:44:14]  There's a lot of different candidates who were fighting for the woke vote and they all collapsed.
[00:44:19]  Beto O'Rourke collapsed.
[00:44:20]  Elizabeth Warren collapsed.
[00:44:21]  Kamala Harris.
[00:44:22]  They all went.
[00:44:23]  Kirsten Gillibrand tried to do that.
[00:44:25]  They all, nobody wanted that.
[00:44:27]  And Biden.
[00:44:27]  I'm sorry, who?
[00:44:28]  Exactly.
[00:44:30]  And yet, Biden literally on the first day in office signed a very sweeping executive order embracing equity, which he made sure to say was equity, not equality, right?
[00:44:40]  Like he corrected himself in a press conference talking about it.
[00:44:44]  So, I think it leads to an interesting thing, which is how did this thing that he didn't campaign on, which he has not lived his life that way, that's not how he's been legislating.
[00:44:53]  It's not even how he's governing.
[00:44:54]  We're going to outlaw menthol cigarettes.
[00:44:57]  What part about equity does that have to do anything?
[00:44:59]  But, like, yet it has captured institutions.
[00:45:01]  Megan, you asked a question earlier.
[00:45:03]  About, or you made a comment about how it's as if these people don't want to persuade in their rhetoric.
[00:45:09]  I think that's exactly right.
[00:45:10]  They don't.
[00:45:11]  I get, and we all have kids in schools, at some point, all of the incessant emails about systemic racism, all the reactions, including to the Moggerite on the Capitol, the anguished chancellor of the schools and the district superintendent sending emails about white supremacy.
[00:45:29]  You just tune it out at some point.
[00:45:32]  So if there is a smaller field, It's white supremacy noise.
[00:45:37]  If there are fewer people in any kind of like field or in the decision making body, then there's more people to elbow out the room and to set the rules.
[00:45:45]  I think there's a real kind of minority in terms of numbers, groups that are nonetheless taking over institutions because people are like, okay, screw this.
[00:45:57]  It's like the Oscars, right?
[00:45:58]  Like, screw it.
[00:45:58]  I don't want to watch it.
[00:45:59]  I know what they're doing.
[00:46:00]  I'm out.
[00:46:01]  I'm out.
[00:46:02]  I'm just going to tune it out.
[00:46:05]  So Biden, correct.
[00:46:06]  He did not campaign like this, but he's certainly governing just like an AOC would.
[00:46:10]  And I was, you know, you're like, he wasn't supposed to be woke.
[00:46:15]  And I'm thinking, you know, we got a pig in a poke, right?
[00:46:18]  Which, by the way, means a bag.
[00:46:19]  I never understood that.
[00:46:21]  It's buying a pig in a bag without seeing the pig.
[00:46:23]  And, you know, I guess you want like the big, fat, juicy pig.
[00:46:26]  Sorry.
[00:46:27]  Sorry, vegans.
[00:46:29]  Anyway, you're not supposed to, you don't want to buy a pig in a poke.
[00:46:31]  And I think we got a woke in a poke.
[00:46:33]  We should have checked inside the bag because he is, he's way more woke than we were assured he would be.
[00:46:40]  And you're right.
[00:46:42]  The rhetoric is.
[00:46:43]  Sweeping and it's dishonest.
[00:46:45]  And it comes from him.
[00:46:47]  It comes from the news media.
[00:46:48]  I mean, just this morning, I was reading in Newsweek, right?
[00:46:51]  Which is actually, they've gotten a little better, I have to say, in terms of their variety of opinion.
[00:46:56]  There's some no name, to be honest.
[00:46:59]  Although her name is Meggie.
[00:47:00]  Maybe I should have chosen Meggie.
[00:47:02]  Meggie, Megan, anyway.
[00:47:06]  Meggie Abenshine, founder of, quote, Moxie Mouth.
[00:47:12]  That seems aptly.
[00:47:14]  chosen.
[00:47:15]  She goes on about how racist violence is on the rise in our country.
[00:47:18]  She's lamenting the fact that 181 black people have been killed by police just since George Floyd's murder last year.
[00:47:25]  Okay, zero context.
[00:47:27]  Did they shoot?
[00:47:28]  Did they fire on the police officer?
[00:47:30]  Did they kill a cop?
[00:47:32]  Did they kill somebody else?
[00:47:33]  Was it like a Michaela Bryant case where they were out to kill somebody and were killed by a police?
[00:47:37]  No context.
[00:47:37]  It's just that the sheer numbers are meant to shock.
[00:47:41]  And she mentions Michaela Bryant saying, Dante Wright and Michaela Bryant should be alive today.
[00:47:46]  Just like countless black people before them.
[00:47:48]  And to not do anything as a white person is to perpetuate and remain complicit in violence against black people.
[00:47:55]  She makes the the additional point.
[00:47:57]  Why are white people singled out to do this work?
[00:48:00]  Because black people, indigenous people, and people of color are often thrust into the work without a choice as a means of survival.
[00:48:09]  So it's the LeBron James point, right?
[00:48:12]  That black people are being hunted in the street and being killed with impunity by police officers who don't care with no regard to facts of actual cases, right?
[00:48:21]  The Micaiah Bryan case is one I know I've heard you guys talk about that.

=== Dangerous Totalitarian Ideas Explained (09:56) ===

[00:48:25]  And with no regard to the dangers.
[00:48:28]  That police themselves face on the streets.
[00:48:30]  You know I something that caught my my eye this morning was a cop in um, outside of Baltimore.
[00:48:37]  His name is corporal Keith hecook, 54 years old, died after being brutally assaulted sunday morning um he had to go to the hospital.
[00:48:45]  He was on the force for 22 years.
[00:48:47]  He was brain dead and they they had to disconnect um him and he died.
[00:48:52]  He had a kid, I think a 12-year-old daughter.
[00:48:55]  Some guy had assaulted an old couple like 70, 73 and 76, respectively, and then assaulted this cop and killed him.
[00:49:05]  That's, look, it's just one case, but this is going to get no attention.
[00:49:10]  Zero.
[00:49:10]  No one's going to talk about a dead cop.
[00:49:12]  This is what they face, and they have to make split second decisions.
[00:49:15]  And this is why the McKay O'Brien case should never have been made a thing, and why this woman should not be citing that in an article talking about how, you know, black people are endangered every day of their life and that it's an existential question for them, and that white people have to run around lecturing everybody.
[00:49:30]  Otherwise, you're not doing your duty to protect your fellow man.
[00:49:34]  There are so many dangers layered on top of each other when it comes to this kind of hysteria.
[00:49:39]  The first problem is you make the problem seem intractable.
[00:49:41]  There's nothing you can do to fix this impossible, inevitable thing.
[00:49:45]  It's thousands of Black people a year being murdered by the police in the streets.
[00:49:50]  It's just absurd.
[00:49:51]  And it's not true, but we make ourselves believe that it's true and that it can't be fixed.
[00:49:55]  But then there's the kids, a generation of young people who are being inculcated with this knee jerk paranoia.
[00:50:03]  Every story that they see, or any story that they see, there's a lurch to conclude that race is what's motivating this, that race is going to prevent them from succeeding in life and getting ahead, or that their race makes them perpetually guilty and gives them this obligation to apologize for something that they have, or perhaps to feel insecure about talking about genuine needs that they have because of a difficult circumstance that they come out of personally, but they're told that they're privileged despite that circumstance.
[00:50:33]  The entire thing is incredibly poisoning.
[00:50:36]  So, I being told they're white supremacists because they have white skin and sins of the father and they're oppressors and all that stuff.
[00:50:45]  And you've got a black child being told she's the oppressed, right?
[00:50:48]  I mean, like, how do you counter program?
[00:50:51]  Well, the first thing is I've opted out of the race game altogether.
[00:50:55]  I don't have a black daughter.
[00:50:56]  I have a daughter, and her name is Leah, and she is her own person, and she owns herself, and she will be able to forge whatever identity she likes for herself in precisely the same way.
[00:51:05]  Her father and her mother have.
[00:51:07]  And the color that I happen to be, the way I happen to appear says literally nothing about who I am and what I believe, and any presupposition associated with ideas of race, which is something that we've inherited.
[00:51:21]  Race is an ideology, it isn't a biological or genetic reality.
[00:51:25]  And as much as we imagine we see these differences when we see people who kind of look like us or kind of don't, it is something that we've practiced.
[00:51:33]  We ignore all of the ways that these concepts simply do not work in reality.
[00:51:38]  And we A fix for ourselves this sort of definite prop, these definite properties to race.
[00:51:44]  So, speaking honestly about that is one thing, but also not letting anyone get away with being hysterical.
[00:51:50]  Matt, I think you're right when you talk about this just kind of onslaught of.
[00:51:55]  Ideological propaganda around these issues and the degree to which people either A, shut up because they're afraid to stick out like a sore thumb and say, I don't like that and they don't want to get called racist, or B, they shut up because they're just overwhelmed by it and they hope that it goes away.
[00:52:08]  You can't do either of those things.
[00:52:10]  These are ideals that matter.
[00:52:13]  Equal protection under the law, that matters.
[00:52:15]  That basic idea matters.
[00:52:17]  The notion of the individual being sacrosanct and you demanding the dignity of your individuality above any notion of racial identity, that is sacrosanct.
[00:52:27]  And you have to be able to say so, say it confidently, and say it everywhere you go.
[00:52:32]  You cannot allow someone like Ibram Kendi, a low rent faux intellectual, to be able to make tautological arguments about how it's not enough to be not racist, you must be anti racist.
[00:52:45]  Says who?
[00:52:46]  What is an anti racist?
[00:52:48]  It is a contentless idea, totally baseless.
[00:52:52]  And to the extent there is any ideal there, the actual idea is not neo racism, it's racism.
[00:52:57]  It's racism and explicit discrimination.
[00:53:00]  A man who has Publicly advocated for establishing a constitutionally unbounded new bureaucracy that would be responsible for striking down any law this unelected board saw fit if they deemed it quote unquote racist.
[00:53:16]  It is a dangerous, totalitarian idea.
[00:53:19]  And people like him have incredibly too much power.
[00:53:22]  And when the President of the United States and the Department of Education are talking about grant programs, wherein they cite people like Ibram Kendi, That is a dangerous threshold to be crossing, and for you to not say anything, dear American, is a real problem.
[00:53:39]  So, just before we go on, there's a little like gif is it gif or jif on Twitter?
[00:53:44]  It's jif, but both work because you know what you're doing, and it's got a little girl, it's one of the first ones that comes up, and she's holding her little fists up by her face.
[00:53:52]  She's got this big smile, and she's like, Yes, yes, that's me right now.
[00:53:58]  That's what everything you just said, yes.
[00:54:01]  I couldn't agree with that more.
[00:54:03]  I love what you said about your daughter.
[00:54:04]  It's one of the things that's so objectionable about what they're doing right now.
[00:54:07]  You know, I've said before that I've got three kids, and two out of my three, their best friends are black children, and between whom there was absolutely no division and no one telling them that they were different or one was sort of bad and one was sort of victimized.
[00:54:24]  And then these schools stuck their noses in it and changed the entire messaging.
[00:54:28]  And I'm angry about it.
[00:54:31]  I'm really angry.
[00:54:32]  And you should be, and more people should be, and more people should be willing to take the fight to your school.
[00:54:39]  You didn't ask for this battle.
[00:54:40]  You did not ask for teachers' unions and other pushy politicians to turn your schools into ideological battlegrounds, but here you are.
[00:54:49]  And your responsibility is to say, you know what?
[00:54:52]  No.
[00:54:52]  Like my values are in line with the values of Martin Luther King.
[00:54:55]  And I do believe that, you know, it's the color, it's the content of your character and not the color of your skin that ought to matter.
[00:55:00]  And I believe in helping people who really need it.
[00:55:03]  And I'm not going to pretend.
[00:55:05]  That every black person needs something from every white person.
[00:55:08]  It is obscene.
[00:55:10]  It is dishonest.
[00:55:11]  It is objectively false.
[00:55:13]  And saying so is never a problem.
[00:55:16]  I will the thing that we now in gift Jif again gift Jif.
[00:55:20]  Yeah, gift Jif.
[00:55:21]  Matt and I heard it a couple of times.
[00:55:22]  So we actually were just out having a cigarette outside.
[00:55:27]  He's done the thing, right?
[00:55:30]  Is that the part where he pounds the table?
[00:55:31]  Yeah, he's doing the potato pounding stuff.
[00:55:33]  The thing that bugs me, I mean, there's so many things that bug me, but it's the fundamental dishonesty of it, right?
[00:55:38]  If you look back, At the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and you can cite King or Ralph Abernathy or any of these people, Bayard Rustin in particular.
[00:55:49]  There's no one's lying about anything, no one's trying actively to deceive you because there's so much actual discrimination around you, and it's codified into law.
[00:55:58]  Particularly in the South, I mean, there is an elected official standing in the way of James Meredith going to school.
[00:56:04]  That is an abomination and it had to be stopped, right?
[00:56:08]  Now, when you mention Ibrahim X. Kendi, it is this abuse of language when you say things like anti racist.
[00:56:15]  Well, who's not anti racist?
[00:56:17]  I hate racism.
[00:56:18]  I'm not somebody who likes racism at all.
[00:56:21]  But that's not what they're talking about.
[00:56:23]  Anti racism is a specific ideology.
[00:56:25]  Black Lives Matter, who could disagree with that?
[00:56:28]  I think Black Lives Matter.
[00:56:29]  I think that's a proposition no one disagrees with.
[00:56:31]  No one does.
[00:56:32]  Yeah.
[00:56:32]  And if you do, you're a very small percentage of the population and you're not going to, you're a piece of garbage, right?
[00:56:37]  That stuff.
[00:56:38]  Not helpful.
[00:56:39]  Yeah.
[00:56:41]  And then you go on to, you talked about Michaela Bryan.
[00:56:45]  That one is amazing when you look at the headlines.
[00:56:49]  Because if this is happening everywhere at all times, you should be able to talk about the actual facts of the case without having these misleading headlines.
[00:56:58]  And, you know, Huge credit to Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, who actually said, Guys, this is kind of crazy.
[00:57:06]  She was about an inch from Sty.
[00:57:09]  Megan, this is hard for me to say too.
[00:57:11]  Come on.
[00:57:11]  Oh, come on.
[00:57:12]  It was like a teeny tiny little one of those red berries you see on the tree.
[00:57:17]  It wasn't even a fig leaf.
[00:57:18]  It was one of the teeny tiny red berries that go on the fig leaf.
[00:57:21]  Yeah.
[00:57:22]  They have been such forces for evil in this whole discussion.
[00:57:25]  I give them no credit.
[00:57:27]  Zero.
[00:57:28]  They covered, they tried to cover their asses by on the one.
[00:57:32]  Most obvious case throwing the police a bone.
[00:57:34]  I need to win people to my side.
[00:57:36]  I need to win them to my side.
[00:57:37]  That's Camille Tuck.
[00:57:39]  Also, they should probably invite me on and stop canceling the invite.
[00:57:43]  Yeah, you're not going to get on.
[00:57:44]  Are they?
[00:57:45]  I'm just saying.
[00:57:46]  Oh, yeah, that's not going to happen.
[00:57:47]  I didn't say that.
[00:57:47]  Oh, I'm not surprised.
[00:57:48]  Honest.
[00:57:49]  It's disgusting.
[00:57:50]  We've had so many guests on here from Glenn Greenwald and others talking about how they've gotten banned from places like MS or CNN because they're not saying the right stuff.
[00:58:00]  And honestly, like, I'll tell you, I was invited on CNN many times during my post NBC time on the couch to go talk about Trump.
[00:58:10]  And it was always a woman issue because they are assuming she's going to bash on Trump.
[00:58:13]  Trump's a sexist.
[00:58:14]  Trump's a misogynist.
[00:58:15]  Trump said another bad misogynistic thing.
[00:58:17]  And I just kept declining.
[00:58:19]  I'm like, first of all, I am not going to say what you think I'm going to say.

=== Adam Toledo Shooting Narrative (03:04) ===

[00:58:22]  I am not an ideologue.
[00:58:23]  I evaluate cases on a case by case basis.
[00:58:26]  It's up to the viewers and the voters to decide whether he's a sexist or not.
[00:58:30]  I'm not your resident bash Trump.
[00:58:33]  Strong, empowered woman.
[00:58:34]  And probably from you, Camille, they're looking for you to say the stuff they think most black men would say about Trump or about this whole thing.
[00:58:40]  And it's like once you realize they just want you to be their puppet, it's really fucking insulting.
[00:58:47]  Not wrong.
[00:58:48]  I feel I feel they need to say one thing briefly, just based on what we were talking about before, because I'm imagining a critic listening to the conversation and hearing me get passionate and excited about things and saying, you know, he's always denying the significance of racism, the consequences of history in America.
[00:59:05]  And I deny no such thing.
[00:59:07]  I recognize that there has been a distinct and unique history of racial oppression in this country, that it almost certainly has profound consequences today.
[00:59:17]  I also go further and say societal outcomes are complicated because they are, and they're driven by a number of important and complex factors.
[00:59:26]  And recognizing those factors and recognizing that complexity puts you in a better position to address meaningful problems.
[00:59:33]  And it is possible to have a car accident.
[00:59:36]  To break your femur and to know that that femur needs help, and that talking about the car accident and who was driving and who was at fault is not going to help you learn to walk again.
[00:59:46]  The actual remedy is distinct from the process and the circumstances of the injury, and even conversations about culpability.
[00:59:56]  Like the only thing to address if you actually want to help people where they are is the specific need that they have and the ways in which that need can be directly remedied by circumstances, by people who can help.
[01:00:11]  And most of the time, for all of the talk about government getting in there and helping and leveling the playing field, that stuff hasn't worked.
[01:00:18]  And there are places where it has actually been a net harm.
[01:00:21]  So, having honest conversations about that and acknowledging that these things are complicated, as opposed to imagining you can flatten history and that.
[01:00:29]  All injustice in the world stems from whiteness.
[01:00:33]  It is, it's not just wrong, it's obscene.
[01:00:37]  And it's a complete distraction from having good, serious, tangible conversations about how we fix hugely complicated and really important problems.
[01:00:45]  But who's trying to solve this?
[01:00:46]  I mean, that's the thing that when I know that Twitter's not the world, and I've said that today already, but it is journalists and are people that are disproportionately in positions of power.
[01:00:58]  And we don't see a lot of remedies here.
[01:01:01]  And it's considered kind of gauche to point out.
[01:01:04]  After Adam Toledo, the 13 year old kid who was shot and killed in Chicago, who had a gun on him about a nanosecond before he was shot, which is then, of course, framed as the kid didn't have a gun or was not armed at the time he was shot.
[01:01:20]  No one steps back and says, okay, a thousand people have been shot in Chicago this year.

=== Vision Loss After Police Incident (05:13) ===

[01:01:26]  Crazy.
[01:01:27]  So, talking endlessly in doing the kind of Kremlinology and going through with a magnifying glass on how many nanoseconds have between Adam Toledo throwing a gun at three in the morning.
[01:01:38]  After him and his cousin were just shooting at a car.
[01:01:41]  What is that doing beyond trying to further a narrative that people of color, he wasn't black, being shot by the police is a thing that is endemic.
[01:01:55]  It never stops, it is the forward motion of the police bureaucracy and hate machine.
[01:02:00]  We must put a stop to that.
[01:02:02]  Whereas a thousand people are being, I mean, Spike Lee made a movie called Chirac, a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq, what, four or five years ago?
[01:02:10]  It is, you know, it's not gotten better.
[01:02:12]  It's gotten worse.
[01:02:13]  And what has anyone done, including a series of Democratic mayors, to do something about that?
[01:02:19]  Up next, are the feds about to take away qualified immunity from the cops who are out there?
[01:02:26]  There's a reason that they have been given this sort of special privilege.
[01:02:30]  And is it about to go away?
[01:02:31]  And is that a good thing?
[01:02:32]  The guys and I have a bit of a disagreement, but it's a fun one.
[01:02:35]  And you know what?
[01:02:36]  It's okay.
[01:02:37]  It's okay to disagree.
[01:02:38]  You can talk all about it, at least here on this show.
[01:02:41]  And in America, We'll get to that in one second.
[01:02:43]  But first, we're going to bring you a feature that we call From the Archives.
[01:02:48]  This is a feature where we look back at a previous episode we think you should check out from the Megyn Kelly Show Library.
[01:02:53]  Like maybe you missed it.
[01:02:55]  You're busy people.
[01:02:56]  Today, we're going back to episode 35, which is from December of 2020 when we interviewed Representative Dan Crenshaw.
[01:03:04]  He's a Texas congressman from Houston.
[01:03:06]  He spoke about some of the challenges that he has faced with the injuries he sustained as a Navy SEAL, the ramifications of which, by the way, he's dealing with to this day.
[01:03:16]  Today, he's dealing with a new challenge to his eyesight, which we're going to get to that in one second, actually.
[01:03:20]  But first, here's just a look back at our episode with him from last year.
[01:03:24]  Are you kind of over that?
[01:03:26]  Do you feel like you're over the trauma of that event?
[01:03:29]  Yeah.
[01:03:30]  Yeah, I do.
[01:03:32]  Yeah, I think I'm blessed in that respect.
[01:03:37]  Well, my wife would probably have a different answer for that.
[01:03:40]  But I don't feel like I have any kind of remnants of PTSD from it.
[01:03:47]  I think I did for a while.
[01:03:49]  But no, I don't dwell on it very much.
[01:03:55]  I'm just.
[01:03:56]  I'm extremely grateful, frankly, for what I can see.
[01:04:01]  It's an absolute miracle that I can see it all out of my left eye.
[01:04:05]  You know, there's a lot of adaptation that occurs.
[01:04:08]  People just see me as I am right now.
[01:04:10]  So they wrongfully assume that there's not serious vision issues.
[01:04:15]  And it always strikes me as how willing people are in politics to always make fun of the eye.
[01:04:24]  It's like you don't make fun of anybody else's missing body parts.
[01:04:27]  Like if somebody loses a leg or an arm, You notice that's like off limits, but for some reason, the eye thing, and this is, by the way, more again, this is this happens more with conservatives, right?
[01:04:38]  Again, that that crazy right wing that that crazy wing that we talked about that pretends to be MAGA supporters, but they're not.
[01:04:46]  This happens a lot more with them than it does the left.
[01:04:48]  I would just I would just point out.
[01:04:51]  They're mocking.
[01:04:52]  I mean, I remember the Pete Davidson thing on SNL, but that, of course, he was he's no Republican.
[01:04:57]  But what do you mean?
[01:04:58]  People are mocking your missing an eye.
[01:05:01]  They're vicious and disgusting about it.
[01:05:03]  You know, so it's just kind of odd.
[01:05:05]  I guess I'm noting it because what's interesting is that they'll never do it to somebody without a leg or an arm.
[01:05:11]  There's something about, like, oh, it's fine.
[01:05:14]  It's an eye.
[01:05:15]  But anyway, it's just.
[01:05:16]  Well, I don't know.
[01:05:16]  Maybe the other thing is, I will say the eye patch is kind of cool.
[01:05:20]  It could be a form of envy, you know, like there's something that it kind of takes you to the next level of badass when you have an eye patch.
[01:05:27]  Well, well, I think I would say that a lot of these Groypers are probably incels.
[01:05:32]  So yeah, they might be envious.
[01:05:34]  Well, to your original question, no, I, which was a serious one.
[01:05:39]  Yeah, I'm blessed to feel like I've gotten over it, but, you know, I'm still constantly getting fitted for different glasses so I can see this computer that I'm looking at right now properly because I have a cataract in my eye that can't be fixed.
[01:05:55]  I have an iris that cannot open and close.
[01:05:57]  So, like, I can't be outside in the sun without sunglasses.
[01:06:01]  When I take out my contact, which only one company makes properly in the world, you know, I've got to wear The lenses that are a quarter inch thick to see anything at all.
[01:06:11]  So, and then, you know, I've got like no field of view or depth perception.
[01:06:16]  So it's, it just takes adaptation.
[01:06:19]  But, but I've never, I've always felt a real strong community support.
[01:06:25]  The SEAL teams are very tightly knit and like that.
[01:06:28]  And, you know, so it's, I don't dwell on it.
[01:06:33]  Well, Crenshaw recently had retinal surgery and is facing an uphill battle as he fights to regain his vision.

=== Women in Law Enforcement Reform (15:11) ===

[01:06:40]  Following the surgery, he had to lay face down for two weeks.
[01:06:44]  Think about that.
[01:06:45]  But now he has been able to lift up his head, which is a step in the right direction.
[01:06:49]  He said on Friday that he can only see light and shadows, but he has retained his positive attitude that he displayed when we talked to him.
[01:06:57]  I'm so sad to hear that though, aren't you?
[01:07:00]  Shit.
[01:07:01]  Like, hopefully this gets turned around.
[01:07:03]  I mean, he obviously has the best attitude to handle any sort of a challenge, but just say a prayer for him, right?
[01:07:11]  You tweet it out.
[01:07:12]  I'm not sure how my vision will be in a few weeks, but I am hopeful and confident it will return to normal.
[01:07:18]  We've been through harder times before, and we are going to get through this.
[01:07:22]  We are definitely praying for Dan Crenshaw, and we'll keep you posted on his condition as we get more.
[01:07:28]  And we will keep bringing you episodes from the archives.
[01:07:32]  And now back to our guest right after this.
[01:07:40]  We have George Floyd Square, right?
[01:07:42]  Do we have Jaslyn Adams Square now coming?
[01:07:44]  In Chicago, I know you guys have talked about her, the seven-year-old who was shot in the McDonald's drive-thru in Chicago.
[01:07:50]  45 shell pieces.
[01:07:51]  Found outside of the car, at least six bullets hit the little girl.
[01:07:55]  Where's the protest?
[01:07:56]  When is BLM swinging by that street and creating Jaslyn Adams Square?
[01:08:02]  Not the crime rate in Chicago and other inner cities.
[01:08:05]  We've gone through the increase in the murder rate in several major cities, not mentioned by Joe Biden last night.
[01:08:10]  Where's the commission on that?
[01:08:11]  Instead, we're going to get a commission talking about how to crack down on the police, how we got to start looking at the number of people police pull over and make sure that there's gender and racial parity.
[01:08:24]  So if we're going to start looking at the number of arrests.
[01:08:26]  Yeah, yeah, genders.
[01:08:27]  You're kidding me.
[01:08:28]  No, no, no.
[01:08:29]  So, like, now, I mean, like, all the ladies in the world, like, all of our shitty driving, it's really going to come under the microscope now, ladies.
[01:08:37]  Prepare.
[01:08:37]  I hope they get after the parallel parking.
[01:08:39]  Enough is enough.
[01:08:40]  95% of murders are committed by men.
[01:08:42]  Are we going to start looking for parody there?
[01:08:43]  We're going to start arresting women.
[01:08:45]  We want 50 50 murder?
[01:08:46]  The thing to keep in mind is that there are multiple ways to achieve parody.
[01:08:49]  We just get more women to commit murders, and then we'll be fine.
[01:08:52]  This is.
[01:08:52]  What you did was murdery.
[01:08:53]  You don't have to be murdered anymore.
[01:08:55]  It's fine.
[01:08:55]  There are more dead people.
[01:08:58]  All of this is pretty perverse.
[01:09:00]  I will say, because we talk about this as well.
[01:09:02]  We've been advocating for criminal justice reform and for scrutiny of law enforcement way before it was cool, way before anyone else showed up to the party.
[01:09:12]  And I continue to think that these are important issues.
[01:09:15]  When any civilian is dead after an interaction with a law enforcement officer, that is a serious thing that needs to be looked at and investigated thoroughly, like impartially, transparently.
[01:09:28]  We need to know what happened because it is absolutely imperative that citizens.
[01:09:32]  Can trust the people who have the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, that is the government, right?
[01:09:38]  Full stop.
[01:09:39]  It's just true.
[01:09:40]  When we flatten them all and pretend that they're all indistinguishable from one another, that there is only one problem and that it's police killing Black people because they're super duper racist, it's harder to actually achieve that goal.
[01:09:54]  In fact, it becomes a lot easier to avoid achieving that goal, to avoid doing the difficult work of trying to fix that problem when you've shifted gears and you're just talking about racism.
[01:10:03]  It's what they're doing with public schools.
[01:10:06]  That have been failing kids that I could talk specifically about the demographics of the kids that they're failing, but I'll just leave it at that.
[01:10:13]  They're failing kids in New York, San Francisco, all across the country, they're doing that.
[01:10:17]  Let's talk about that because I think maybe we have a disagreement on that and that'd be fun.
[01:10:23]  I don't totally have it figured out.
[01:10:24]  I'm not going to claim that I can't really debate you because I don't have a very strong feeling on it, but I lean toward leaving qualified immunity in place.
[01:10:33]  And the reason is I think more people are going to get killed if we take it away because qualified immunity.
[01:10:38]  It's a judicial created doctrine that basically says unless you can prove the police officer in question did exactly the thing that's already been deemed problematic by another court, he's going to have immunity to your lawsuit and you can't sue him for what he did to you.
[01:10:55]  And the Democrats want to get rid of qualified immunity altogether.
[01:11:00]  And Tim Scott's compromise is, well, why don't we just make it super clear that you can sue.
[01:11:06]  You're not going to be able to get your hands into the pocket of the police officer who hurt you.
[01:11:11]  Or did something wrong to you.
[01:11:13]  But you are going to get their department to pay if a court finds in your favor.
[01:11:19]  So that's his compromise.
[01:11:20]  Well, I will say what he's proposing is basically what we have now.
[01:11:23]  It's kind of what we have.
[01:11:26]  If you can prove that the police officer did the thing that's already been deemed illegal in another case, you can sue and you would get the department to pay.
[01:11:34]  And even here in New York City in the past year, I looked it up, or 2019, the most recent data, the city paid out $175 million in those claims.
[01:11:42]  So people are suing the cops for misdeeds, just like. the cop himself is not paying it.
[01:11:47]  And most cops themselves couldn't pay anyway, if you got a big judgment.
[01:11:51]  They don't make a lot of money.
[01:11:52]  Anyway, so my feeling is, well, I like accountability and I realize cops do bad shit.
[01:11:56]  It's not like they're human.
[01:11:57]  They're like us.
[01:11:58]  They can do bad stuff.
[01:12:00]  They can do it negligently.
[01:12:01]  They can do it recklessly.
[01:12:01]  They can do it intentionally.
[01:12:05]  If we add yet another layer of danger for them out there, because they're already overseen by the media, by remnants of Eric Holder's Department of Justice, now Biden's Department of Justice is going to put a bunch of layers in there where they seize control over all these municipalities and their police forces, they're going to hold back.
[01:12:24]  I feel like that Micaiah Bryant would have been allowed to stab the girl in the pink jumpsuit if qualified immunity were removed.
[01:12:34]  Because cops, they don't get paid enough to take those risks, to put their family at risk, to put their job at risk.
[01:12:42]  The George Floyd Justice Act also wants to make it a lot easier to put cops in jail for misjudgments on the scene.
[01:12:51]  Basically, they want to lower the standard of culpability for criminality against cops.
[01:12:55]  That too, if I'm a cop, I'm like, go ahead.
[01:12:58]  Kill each other.
[01:12:59]  I'm going to be over here.
[01:13:00]  I'll make a showing of trying to protect you and let the chips fall where they may.
[01:13:05]  That's what worries me.
[01:13:06]  I'll let you guys take it.
[01:13:08]  I don't think that, like, it's very easy to have an instrumental, sort of consequentialist look at any given police reform, right?
[01:13:20]  If you, for instance, empty the prison of people serving drug sentences for stuff that would now be legal, that they wouldn't be arrested for, like, if you emptied all of the prisons.
[01:13:31]  With those people who are currently in jail.
[01:13:33]  Some of them are going to commit crimes.
[01:13:35]  So, do we not do it because some of them are going to commit crimes tomorrow?
[01:13:38]  No, I think we do it because that is the just thing to do.
[01:13:41]  Similarly, in this case, I don't think that police or anybody should have a special, you know, judicially created carve out preventing them from being sued as another person in that situation would be sued.
[01:13:57]  So, it just doesn't make sense.
[01:13:59]  Let me challenge you on that and then I'll be quiet.
[01:14:01]  But even Even given the nature of what a police officer does, because that's why it came about.
[01:14:05]  Like they're looking at cops like the guy in Micaiah Bryant, who in one split second has got to make a judgment call and can't be worried about qualified immunity.
[01:14:13]  They're going to take it away.
[01:14:14]  I'm going to get sued and lose money.
[01:14:15]  He can't.
[01:14:16]  He's just got to make a split second judgment call, life or death.
[01:14:19]  Yeah, I don't think that anybody, I don't think you're going to, qualified immunity is not going to affect that case.
[01:14:25]  Nobody's going to look at that case and say, oh, that was a bad shot.
[01:14:28]  Really?
[01:14:28]  That's not going to, I don't know.
[01:14:30]  Take it up with Meggie.
[01:14:31]  Take it up with old Meggie, what's her name from Moxie Mouth.
[01:14:34]  She's well, Meggy for Moxie, like a lot of people, she's always screwing things up.
[01:14:39]  Meggy for Moxie has a lot of ideas that don't really play out in the real world, just as Camille was mentioning before in the uh Derek Chauvin trial.
[01:14:48]  Every you know, the media has portrayed this as a like a race thing, the trial didn't at all.
[01:14:53]  So, like, where the real stuff happens, uh, it's not like that.
[01:14:57]  Megan, you points out the um, the kind of you know, we're already getting the federal government too involved in these things that might be true, might not be true.
[01:15:04]  Let's table that for a second, but the most the majority of all this.
[01:15:07]  Activity, just as it is with schools, happens in the local level.
[01:15:11]  These are decisions made.
[01:15:12]  These are local police forces.
[01:15:14]  The Albuquerque, New Mexico police force, you know, actually, New Mexico just abolished qualified immunity, which I think will be a positive based on how bad the Albuquerque police force has been historically over the years.
[01:15:27]  Really, it's been involved in a horrific number of killings.
[01:15:30]  But I don't think that the federal government is going to suddenly go everywhere marauding into.
[01:15:37]  Into local police forces.
[01:15:40]  Most of the stuff happens locally.
[01:15:42]  And they're doing it.
[01:15:43]  They're starting, you know, they're starting big.
[01:15:45]  They are starting.
[01:15:46]  They are starting.
[01:15:47]  Like this is Camel's Nose under the tent.
[01:15:50]  Here they go.
[01:15:50]  They're already going to do pattern practice.
[01:15:53]  They're going to do it.
[01:15:54]  They're going to do it in Minneapolis.
[01:15:55]  I mean, which will come as a surprise to Madaria Arredondo, right?
[01:16:00]  That was his name.
[01:16:01]  That's the city's first black police chief.
[01:16:03]  The guy was a star witness in the Chauvin trial for the prosecution.
[01:16:07]  He was a guy who he was an Obama style progressive police officer who came onto that stand and said, Chauvin did wrong.
[01:16:16]  Chauvin wasn't taught to do that stuff.
[01:16:18]  We're against Chauvin.
[01:16:19]  And now he's going to have the feds breathing down his neck saying, pattern and practice, you're going to have to answer.
[01:16:23]  This guy's probably like, what?
[01:16:26]  As you guys put it on your podcast, if they had the evidence of that, we would have.
[01:16:29]  Heard it already.
[01:16:29]  They don't.
[01:16:30]  But this is what the Obama Biden administration and now Biden Harris administration wants to do.
[01:16:35]  They want to go in there.
[01:16:36]  They want to take policing out of the local control and give it a more federalized feel, which does not work.
[01:16:44]  That is not going to end well.
[01:16:46]  You can't police that way.
[01:16:47]  Sorry, go ahead.
[01:16:48]  Yeah, I don't think nationalizing policing is the answer.
[01:16:52]  And I will say that there does seem to be, at least from a cultural standpoint, a bit of a pendulum that has swung in the other direction in terms of public opinion about encounters like this.
[01:17:02]  I'm surprised to see.
[01:17:03]  So many people publicly effectively advocating for kids getting into knife fights and occasionally murdering one another, and the police just not getting involved in firing their guns.
[01:17:12]  And look, we are seeing places locally where qualified immunity has been done away with, and we will very soon see whether or not that leads to good or bad outcomes.
[01:17:21]  My suspicion is that it's going to depend on the circumstances because all of these things are complex.
[01:17:28]  And that is the reason not to try to take this broad brush approach to trying to fix all of these things.
[01:17:35]  But it does seem to me that before the pendulum swung, That the pendulum was probably too far in the other direction.
[01:17:41]  There were too many circumstances where law enforcement was effectively involved in making determinations about the legitimacy of its own actions.
[01:17:51]  And no person in America can agree that when the police shoot someone and kill them, that they should be sort of the actual ones making determinations about whether or not that's okay.
[01:18:01]  But more than that, to bring us back to this same conversation we were having before, the conversation around qualified immunity is mostly about retribution, it's about punishment.
[01:18:11]  And it's not.
[01:18:12]  Reform oriented, except to say, well, we're aligning incentives.
[01:18:16]  We're trying to get it so that cops are a little more judicious and careful when they're out doing their jobs.
[01:18:20]  Well, let's talk about the specific job they're being asked to do.
[01:18:24]  Maybe there are ways that we can keep our society safe without getting armed agents of the state involved in everything.
[01:18:32]  And those practical conversations, which I think require some deliberateness and some thoughtfulness, and again, a lot of involvement at the local level based on circumstance and need to try to figure out what those things are.
[01:18:45]  And again, we're not having those conversations because we're too busy screaming at one another, chasing after imaginary white supremacists who are likely to take over the country and kill everyone if we apparently stop talking about them.
[01:18:59]  So I think there are lots of opportunities for reform here and probably lots of opportunities for actual compromise and progress on a lot of important issues.
[01:19:10]  And I think it's fair to have some concerns about the possibility that qualified immunity, like across the board, might be too much.
[01:19:20]  It's also a circumstance where we're saying, well, the problem here, the danger that we're talking about is maybe there would be too much accountability.
[01:19:28]  And I mean, I'd probably rather make that error than the error in the other direction.
[01:19:33]  If I have a chance.
[01:19:34]  Let me just ask you this.
[01:19:35]  Let me ask you this.
[01:19:35]  So let's say we're not going to get the sweeping qualified immunity that the Democrats want, I think.
[01:19:41]  There's not enough.
[01:19:42]  I don't think they've got the votes in the Senate for that.
[01:19:45]  Tim Scott's version, I think that could happen.
[01:19:48]  He actually said in the news the other day that he thinks that they may have a deal on this between one and two weeks.
[01:19:55]  The other stuff that's being layered on here by the Democrats and what they want to do to reform police, to your point, they're already looking at a lot.
[01:20:03]  It's not just qualified immunity removal.
[01:20:05]  It's the thing I was saying, like getting rid of any disparities based on your ethnicity, based on your gender, right?
[01:20:12]  Based on your sexual orientation.
[01:20:13]  Like, we need as many gay people pulled over as straight people.
[01:20:16]  I don't know.
[01:20:17]  Straight, whatever.
[01:20:19]  That stuff disturbs me, right?
[01:20:21]  Because 92% of the U.S. prison population is male.
[01:20:24]  There's a reason for that.
[01:20:25]  Men are the ones committing most of the crime.
[01:20:27]  Sorry, guys.
[01:20:28]  That's just the truth.
[01:20:30]  It doesn't mean that all cops are sexist.
[01:20:33]  It's just, I don't know.
[01:20:34]  There's probably a long, long reason for it.
[01:20:35]  And if you watch as much as Dateline as I do, you know women are the victims.
[01:20:39]  Women are the victims.
[01:20:40]  And it's always the husbands.
[01:20:41]  Okay, I've taken a diversion.
[01:20:43]  But this is the point I was trying to make that this bill being proposed by Biden touted last night would also, I'm now quoting from National Review, funnel federal dollars to progressive organizations like the NAACP, the ACLU, and the National Urban League, among others.
[01:20:59]  And what for? quote, to study management and operations standards for law enforcement agencies, including use of force, racial profiling, and much more.
[01:21:10]  Then they're supposed to use these studies, which we can safely assume will not be disinterested, so quoting, to create pilot programs for law enforcement that can be used to fulfill their accreditation standards.
[01:21:21]  Cops seeking federal grants must pledge to spend at least 5% of the funds that they get on studying and implementing programs like those the NAACP, the ACLU, and et cetera are charged with coming up with.
[01:21:31]  Can you imagine?
[01:21:32]  They got to to get their money, they've got to pledge 5% of what they're given on implementing plans they get from the NAACP and the ACLU.
[01:21:43]  Who, if you look at some of the police reform positions they push, I mean, it's like not that far afield from what we see from BLM.

=== Black Crime Neighborhood Stereotypes (12:18) ===

[01:21:52]  Like, who the hell is going to know how to police after this other than, excuse me, ma'am, did you not want that knife pledged into you?
[01:21:58]  How about you?
[01:21:59]  Could I get you to stop?
[01:22:00]  Oh, wait, the knife's already in.
[01:22:01]  It's already in.
[01:22:03]  You know, that's how it's going to go.
[01:22:05]  Yeah.
[01:22:05]  I mean, the risk of getting these people involved in this particular way is that you just end up with a circumstance where this is a rich opportunity for highly paid consultants.
[01:22:17]  They're going to make a tremendous amount of money, whether or not there's any material progress made on these issues.
[01:22:22]  In fact, it's in their interest that there isn't material progress made on these issues, that they perpetuate it forever to maintain their stream of income.
[01:22:31]  And again, that's not the way we get to progress, which is the reason why.
[01:22:35]  Probably isn't even a good thing for Black Lives Matter to necessarily be up in arms about what's happening in Chicago.
[01:22:40]  What really needs to happen is all of us need to be collectively a little less inured to the carnage that's taking place in various parts of America and a bit more compassionate and a bit more thoughtful about the ways that we can get to solutions and stop thinking about this in terms of black and white.
[01:22:56]  Conversations about black on black crime always make my skin crawl.
[01:22:59]  Most black people aren't committing crime.
[01:23:01]  People aren't committing crime on account of their blackness.
[01:23:04]  They're not committing it on behalf of black people.
[01:23:06]  The fact that it's black on black.
[01:23:08]  Don't interest me at all because I don't wish it were black on white.
[01:23:11]  The only issue I'm interested in is it's crime, it's criminality.
[01:23:14]  And maybe there are commonalities amongst criminals of any background.
[01:23:18]  And perhaps some of those commonalities might lead us to practical solutions, which talking about those things narrowly is probably the best path forward.
[01:23:27]  It's too rare that people think about the federal government of what it can and should do, of like, well, let's create a thing and let's do a money.
[01:23:35]  And what it can and should do, especially in the area of criminal justice.
[01:23:39]  Reform is undo the bad things it already has.
[01:23:41]  Right.
[01:23:41]  Right.
[01:23:42]  Like it's the federal government that, you know, basically created civil asset forfeiture, for example, legalized theft by local police or whatever police of goods that they presume are stolen and they can keep it.
[01:23:54]  They don't have to charge anybody with the crime.
[01:23:56]  This is a federal government created thing.
[01:23:58]  They could remove the thing.
[01:23:59]  That would be helpful.
[01:24:00]  The federal government created the drug war, essentially, right?
[01:24:05]  There were state and local marijuana laws and other things, but the federal government got in there.
[01:24:10]  So let's get rid of those things that are there.
[01:24:14]  That will do so much more good than hiring a bunch of consultants.
[01:24:18]  Well, yes.
[01:24:18]  And why do we have to, like, they arrest so many people?
[01:24:21]  Like, that's the thing about the George Floyd trial that always sort of stuck out at me.
[01:24:24]  Like, I realized he resisted arrest once they decided to arrest him, but like, it was a counterfeit $20 bill.
[01:24:30]  Like, okay, he was sitting behind the wheel of a car and there were drugs in the car.
[01:24:34]  I get all of that.
[01:24:34]  But like, could there be some, some other version of handling that that wouldn't have resulted in handcuffs resisting knee on the neck?
[01:24:45]  You know what I mean?
[01:24:45]  Like it does seem when you have somebody who's in the course of committing what you believe is a nonviolent offense, that there, there should, we should be able to come up with other options because cops, hands on black suspects is risky.
[01:24:59]  It just doesn't.
[01:25:00]  It goes wrong too often.
[01:25:02]  And if you can decrease the number of times that happens, both by looking at the cops' options and, yes, the black crime rate, then you should.
[01:25:10]  You should.
[01:25:11]  Yeah.
[01:25:12]  Although I just warn again about making it about race in the context of these things, just only because we're not comfortable with doing it.
[01:25:22]  Here's where I want, here's why I raise that.
[01:25:24]  Okay.
[01:25:25]  And I'll give you the floor with this.
[01:25:26]  So, and my audience knows like I am somebody who I don't tweet out random videos of black crime, I feel like there's something wrong about it.
[01:25:33]  I just don't do it.
[01:25:34]  I see people do it all the time.
[01:25:37]  I'm not trying to make a point about blacks, you know, committing black on black crime more than police do, although that is an issue.
[01:25:45]  But I went to Chicago and I did some really tough interviews in inner city Chicago a couple of years ago and tried to get to the bottom of, I met with a bunch of moms who had lost sons to gun violence or to, you know, prison sentences.
[01:26:01]  And there was such a sense of hopelessness.
[01:26:04]  They didn't want to leave.
[01:26:05]  They did not want to leave the inner city.
[01:26:07]  This is their home.
[01:26:08]  It's where all their friends are, their families.
[01:26:11]  But they wanted things to be better.
[01:26:13]  There weren't fathers in the homes most of the time.
[01:26:16]  There were drive-by shootings all the time.
[01:26:18]  These kids were spending their entire days inside because it wasn't safe to go outside.
[01:26:22]  They couldn't go across certain streets in the town because of the gang violence.
[01:26:30]  And they understood where they were supposed to stay or if they crossed over to this other area, that that was the most dangerous part because they weren't affiliated with the right gang.
[01:26:36]  And these are moms.
[01:26:37]  They're not in the gangs at all, but they just understand sort of.
[01:26:39]  Territories have been carved out.
[01:26:42]  The schools are nothing.
[01:26:44]  The schools suck.
[01:26:45]  The schools do nothing for these kids.
[01:26:47]  And they've been given a lot of federal money.
[01:26:49]  I don't know where it goes, why it doesn't work, but it doesn't.
[01:26:51]  The schools themselves are dilapidated, not far from inspirational.
[01:26:55]  They're depressing.
[01:26:56]  And the kids see no examples of a good future for them, right?
[01:27:00]  It's like we have to get to these communities so much earlier than the point at which they meet the police.
[01:27:05]  Charlie Cook was making this point the other day.
[01:27:07]  And there just doesn't seem any appetite to do it.
[01:27:10]  So it's not just like, oh, the black people are killing the black.
[01:27:12]  It's like these communities are ignored.
[01:27:15]  Or there's something happening inside of them that needs to be addressed much, much earlier.
[01:27:20]  And I feel like we don't hear that highlighted enough as something we need to dig into.
[01:27:27]  I think you're, yeah.
[01:27:27]  So, first, I'll begin by saying I mean, I appreciate the genuine compassion on your part towards a community that you do not reside in, right?
[01:27:36]  Not that you're not a part of because you're too white, but because you don't live there.
[01:27:40]  You know, this is something that you see from afar.
[01:27:41]  Your kids aren't exposed to it, neither are mine.
[01:27:45]  The principal issue that I have with our descriptions of these things being rooted in our descriptions of things along like racial lines is the universe.
[01:27:56]  Of really complicated, interconnected problems that you just described.
[01:27:59]  Most of the things that you talked about, race is just not consequential there.
[01:28:04]  And it might be a common characteristic amongst the people who live in that particular region.
[01:28:09]  But the actual sort of patterns of dysfunction, the institutions that are failing people, the ways in which they're failing them, have nothing to do with race.
[01:28:17]  And there is a universe of people who kind of look like them, who don't have their life experience, who don't share those particular risks.
[01:28:24]  And there is literally no advantage in us.
[01:28:28]  Of classifying and codifying things in a way that effectively takes what is the characteristic of the victims in these communities.
[01:28:37]  People who live in high crime communities are the victims of the criminals who are operating around them, who are committing theft, who are committing vandalism, who are killing people.
[01:28:46]  And the difficulty with black on black crime or even white on white crime in regions of the country where that is the particular problem.
[01:28:54]  It is a weird way of kind of characterizing or Categorizing the horrible circumstances they're dealing with with respect to the physical attributes of the people who live in those neighborhoods doesn't actually give me anything actionable.
[01:29:09]  There's nothing about it that helps me wrap my hands around the circumstances.
[01:29:13]  It gives us this veneer of understanding.
[01:29:15]  I think it's a dangerous veneer of understanding.
[01:29:17]  Have you seen Shelby and Eli Steele's What Killed Michael Brown?
[01:29:20]  I have, yeah.
[01:29:22]  So they came on the show and they posited that in a city like Ferguson, Missouri, what created sort of an area that's got a lot of crime is the federal government.
[01:29:34]  That the black community, they were focused on the race of the dominant population in that city, saying they were on the rise.
[01:29:39]  Like the marriage rate, the homeownership rate, the job rate was on the rise.
[01:29:45]  The homelessness comes up a lot, sure.
[01:29:46]  Yeah.
[01:29:47]  And then the feds got involved, the Great Society and so on.
[01:29:50]  And they created what Eli said was a permanent black underclass there with federal housing that was awful, that fell apart and so on, and sort of went back to look at the root causes in a city like Ferguson of why there's so much poverty, which is directly linked to crime, right?
[01:30:10]  I don't know.
[01:30:10]  Maybe you're right.
[01:30:11]  Maybe it's not relevant at all.
[01:30:12]  What I took away from that conversation in that film was the federal government's effort to, quote, help very often has the opposite effect.
[01:30:22]  And then when things go wrong, now in today's day and age, people scream racism.
[01:30:29]  But that's not necessarily an honest assessment of how we got to where we got.
[01:30:35]  I mean, I think that race so often.
[01:30:38]  Distorts rather than illuminates.
[01:30:40]  And one kind of tangential point here and a related point is that when you tell people, I mean, the police are in certain neighborhoods because they're getting calls from those neighborhoods, by the way.
[01:30:50]  They want the police to come because most, as Camille says, most Black people are not committing crime.
[01:30:54]  Most Black people are not X, Y, and Z that you would stereotypically racist people would suggest.
[01:31:00]  So they don't want that in their neighborhood.
[01:31:02]  And if you go back historically, and this is a major blind spot, and people become baffled by this when you say, so it was mentioned today that Joe Biden.
[01:31:12]  You know, talks about mass incarceration and has some responsibility there, right?
[01:31:16]  And he's been criticized for this too.
[01:31:18]  And that is presumed to be well, you know, the old racist Joe Biden is now become the new woke Joe Biden.
[01:31:24]  Well, no, because if you look back, particularly like the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, there's a fantastic book on this called The Black Silent Majority about how those were pushed by Black people in those neighborhoods because they thought the liberal policies of, you know, John Lindsay in New York City in the 1960s failed them.
[01:31:41]  And so we needed these laws because it's tearing apart our community.
[01:31:45]  And the presumption of a racial motive that you guys don't care.
[01:31:48]  The second version of that is the crack cocaine disparity in sentencing.
[01:31:52]  And that was pushed very heavily by people that were part of the Congressional Black Caucus.
[01:31:56]  Because they said there is the crack, what was the word always used afterward?
[01:31:59]  Epidemic.
[01:32:00]  It was the crack epidemic, and you don't care.
[01:32:03]  We need to get tough on people who are selling drugs in our neighborhood, taking drugs brazenly and openly in the street, and to do something about it.
[01:32:11]  And when we talk about over incarceration, mass incarceration, sentencing disparities, et cetera, and we talk about it through an explicitly racial lens, we miss the actual truth of what happened.
[01:32:23]  And this is always obscuring things rather than enlightening.
[01:32:27]  Charlie Rangel was advocating for the death penalty.
[01:32:29]  I got it.
[01:32:29]  You got to kill them all.
[01:32:31]  In New York, because they were destroying black communities.
[01:32:34]  So, talk about tough on crime.
[01:32:36]  Again, it's just that there are, I think I've seen Shelby's documentary.
[01:32:41]  I can appreciate some of the arguments that are made there, a lot of the arguments that are made there.
[01:32:45]  I think it's fair to have conversations about cultural defects, cultural proclivities that might lead to bad outcomes.
[01:32:54]  This is fair.
[01:32:55]  I think it's fair to have conversations about the unintended consequences of government policy.
[01:32:59]  What I think is unhelpful generally is to categorize it as, well, it's Black culture that's deficient, or even to call it a poverty of culture.
[01:33:08]  I just think these concepts are too imprecise.
[01:33:11]  And quite frankly, because of our experience with them, they kind of overload our circuitry.
[01:33:16]  We just get distracted by race in these contexts.
[01:33:20]  And I think all it helps to do is compound error.
[01:33:23]  When people presume that the bad things are only happening because of race, or that the bad thing that's happening here is being perpetrated by people of a particular race, and I'm not saying that anyone here is involved in that sort of thinking, just in general, That binary exists in the world, like that's we're on the we're having the conversation on the wrong plane, and we need to be about two or three levels deeper than that if we want to get part of the problem.
[01:33:48]  I get that, and I like that.
[01:33:49]  I mean, it's sort of falling into the same trap of seeing everything through that racial lens.
[01:33:55]  I'm going back to sort of the um, like the Thomas Chatterton Williams unlearning race, like unlearn it, unlearn it.
[01:34:05]  Let me shift gears with you guys for a minute because something that when I was studying up on you, I really wanted to ask Michael about this.

=== Free Speech vs. Muhammad Cartoons (12:11) ===

[01:34:11]  One of the things that you get ready.
[01:34:14]  That's a bad preamble.
[01:34:18]  One of the things that's been really bothering me lately is the erosions of free speech and how these young whippersnappers on college campuses don't seem to care about it at all.
[01:34:28]  I recently spoke with some young college students and made very clear that I don't think words are violence at all.
[01:34:35]  They can be offensive.
[01:34:36]  And if you hear them, you can teach yourself that you'll be fine.
[01:34:40]  You may not have enjoyed the experience, but You'll be just fine hearing them.
[01:34:44]  They're not violence.
[01:34:45]  They're all, what about bullying?
[01:34:46]  You know, people can get a cyber bullied.
[01:34:48]  I understand it's not pleasant.
[01:34:49]  I'm not saying it's pleasant, but I think the answer to all that stuff is to shore up your own resilience and strength.
[01:34:55]  That's me.
[01:34:56]  Okay.
[01:34:56]  But I am a nothing when it comes to free speech advocacy, when it comes to you, Michael, because I saw you actually participated in the quote, everybody draws, everybody draw Muhammad Day protest.
[01:35:12]  You guys remember this?
[01:35:13]  The audience remember this?
[01:35:14]  2010.
[01:35:15]  And it was a response to when South Park, the censorship of South Park for depicting Muhammad.
[01:35:23]  And this was so dicey.
[01:35:25]  It was like, I will confess to you, it's scary even to talk about it now, right?
[01:35:31]  After what happened at Charlie Hebdo, it's like you draw Muhammad, you could draw the ire of ISIS, you could get beheaded, you could do, it's like crazy stuff can happen to you if you do anything that depicts Muhammad at all, never mind in a way that's unflattering.
[01:35:46]  So, what made you participate in that, and how did you find the spine to do it?
[01:35:54]  I found it really depressing that this stuff was coming up again.
[01:35:58]  So many years after what happened to Salman Rushdie, which was 1989, which is obviously not drawing Muhammad, which is a depiction of Muhammad in his book, The Satanic Verses.
[01:36:06]  And, you know, I was living in Sweden for a while where this became an actual issue of debate.
[01:36:14]  There was a far right newspaper in Sweden associated with the far right party, legitimate far right people.
[01:36:19]  I mean, they were, you know, not people that I enjoyed, but they published the cartoons that the Danish newspaper had initially published in, I think, either 2005 or 2006.
[01:36:29]  And the government, Intervened and I think shut down their server or took it offline, basically.
[01:36:36]  And I said, This is kind of crazy.
[01:36:38]  And in Denmark, at the same time, they were reanimating a blasphemy law, a blasphemy law in Denmark because of the power of particular lobbies saying this stuff shouldn't happen.
[01:36:47]  And so when it happened in the US in a way that I found really disconcerting, which was initially a woman named Molly Norris, who has disappeared from the face of the earth.
[01:36:56]  That's right.
[01:36:57]  Disappeared.
[01:36:57]  What do you mean?
[01:36:59]  Her crime, she disappeared.
[01:37:01]  I believe she changed her name and raised it.
[01:37:03]  She was doing kind of cartooning or something.
[01:37:05]  She's an alt weekly cartoonist.
[01:37:07]  For Seattle Strangers.
[01:37:08]  Pacific Northwest.
[01:37:09]  So Pacific Northwest.
[01:37:10]  And she does an everyone draw Muhammad thing.
[01:37:12]  This is actually where the real Genesis came from.
[01:37:14]  And she did this kind of wry, silly thing.
[01:37:17]  And this woman's not political at all and is a picture of a teacup.
[01:37:22]  And the teacup says, I'm Muhammad.
[01:37:23]  And it's like an I am Spartacus thing with like everyday household items saying, I'm Muhammad.
[01:37:28]  The response was so brutal that she had to go into hiding.
[01:37:33]  And She never came out of hiding.
[01:37:36]  And I understand that.
[01:37:37]  I understand being that terrified of people who don't, you know, I mean, not even kids say words are violence.
[01:37:46]  These are people that, you know, create violence because of words, right?
[01:37:51]  And if you think of the Salman Rushdie thing, Salman survives.
[01:37:53]  And I know Salman reasonably well.
[01:37:56]  And I've talked to him about it a number of times.
[01:37:58]  And it was a difficult thing in his life.
[01:38:00]  But it was even more difficult for people tangentially involved.
[01:38:03]  His Norwegian translator was shot.
[01:38:05]  His Japanese translator, I believe, was shot or stabbed.
[01:38:09]  One of them died.
[01:38:10]  So, I mean, this was there.
[01:38:11]  You know, the Danish cartoons were published in thousands of people died because there were embassies burned all across the world.
[01:38:18]  And it was, and I took a step back and I was like, these are cartoons.
[01:38:23]  What the hell is going on?
[01:38:25]  And what really worried me about it was the kind of jello spined response from people in the West, in particular, like, you know, all of these people from Penn America, who, when Charlie Hebdo was going to be celebrated by Penn, A free speech organization, which actually did something today I didn't like, we're going to honor the surviving members of a massacre.
[01:38:46]  They were massacred during an editorial meeting by two Islamists with AK 47s, one of the most brutal things.
[01:38:53]  They killed a Muslim cop outside, shot him in the head.
[01:38:55]  I mean, there are photographs and videos of this.
[01:38:58]  The most brutal attack on freedom and democracy that France has seen in a very long time.
[01:39:02]  And Penn was going to honor them.
[01:39:04]  Hundreds of people from Penn objected because what is worse than murder?
[01:39:11]  Well, Charlie Hebdo had done some racist things.
[01:39:14]  None of these people spoke French, of course, and they didn't understand the cartoons that they were criticizing.
[01:39:19]  And Charlie Hebdo offends everybody, right?
[01:39:21]  So there was all of this stuff that was swirling around.
[01:39:24]  And it was like, no, no, no, this is kind of basically who we are and what we're about.
[01:39:30]  And for us to sort of back away from this, that we can't draw a silly cartoon.
[01:39:34]  Well, no, it's blasphemous.
[01:39:35]  Well, I'm not a Muslim.
[01:39:36]  It's not blasphemous for me.
[01:39:37]  I can do whatever the hell I want.
[01:39:38]  And Muhammad lived, he was a person.
[01:39:42]  He's been depicted.
[01:39:43]  It's been depicted thousands of times in various, you know, Shia Islam, et cetera.
[01:39:48]  But, you know, this is some new thing that has been created.
[01:39:51]  And everyone was saying, well, yeah, it's very bad to offend people.
[01:39:55]  And I found that to be.
[01:39:57]  A very puzzling and then worrying precedent that had been set.
[01:40:03]  So the logical thing was if Molly Norris was going to go underground, you know, screw it.
[01:40:09]  But why don't we do it?
[01:40:10]  And this, so this is the, we did the Reason Magazine, it was the Everybody Draw Muhammad contest or the reader contest to do it.
[01:40:16]  And this was before the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
[01:40:19]  Our idea was that, and I worked at the LA Times when the Danish cartoon thing happened, no newspaper, In the country, with maybe like one exception, the New York Sun, New York Sun.
[01:40:32]  Um, uh, wait a minute, Matt, are you telling me you started?
[01:40:35]  I don't, I didn't know that you at Reason started the Everybody Draw Muhammad Day contest.
[01:40:39]  It was Moynihan's stupid idea.
[01:40:41]  Don't blame me, they'll come and get me.
[01:40:43]  And Michael C. Moynihan, uh, and Megan Kelly's podcast is huge amongst Islamists.
[01:40:49]  Do you know that?
[01:40:50]  We got visited.
[01:40:51]  I mean, as a matter of fact, I have many Muslim friends who listen to this podcast.
[01:40:56]  Are there?
[01:40:56]  I'm very sorry, it wasn't comfortable.
[01:41:00]  It wasn't a comfortable.
[01:41:01]  We were visited by the FBI.
[01:41:03]  We were visited by the FBI and everything like that.
[01:41:05]  But when I was working in the LA Times and the cartoon thing happened, I argued, I was working in the opinion section.
[01:41:11]  The then executive editor, a guy named Dean Bakke, refused to, just like all the other newspapers in America, refused to publish the cartoons, even as an illustration of what is this furor about.
[01:41:23]  And so I tried to argue, let's do it on the opinion side.
[01:41:25]  And now it's vetoed.
[01:41:27]  And the idea then in 2006 was if we create the taboo in Western journalism that we can't depict this, Then, what happens when you, you know, behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated?
[01:41:40]  You are now creating a taboo.
[01:41:41]  You're making it so that if anyone breaks it, whoever's going to be lonely out there is going to have a target on their back.
[01:41:48]  And that's exactly what happened.
[01:41:49]  Do you remember what happened when Charlie Hebdo, after the massacre, they did a first cover after that?
[01:41:55]  And people said, oh, they put Muhammad on the cover.
[01:41:57]  They actually didn't.
[01:41:58]  There was just a Muslim guy on the cover in this cartoon.
[01:42:01]  And I can't remember.
[01:42:01]  The Think Bubble was like, you know, they did this for me or some kind of thing.
[01:42:05]  It was, you know, criticizing from a Muslim perspective.
[01:42:07]  Like, we don't, we don't.
[01:42:09]  Buy this stuff.
[01:42:09]  And so there was a wire service, and I can't remember which one, and I don't want to defame a wire service.
[01:42:15]  And they said, We will not run that image.
[01:42:19]  So you usually buy these images from a wire service, put them in your magazine, in your publication.
[01:42:23]  And so what did I do?
[01:42:25]  Because I'm a shit disturber.
[01:42:26]  I went and logged into the wire service and I looked for Piss Christ, the Andra Serrano thing that caused all this.
[01:42:32]  And there it was, a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine that was offensive to some people, not to me, but it's offensive to some people.
[01:42:39]  So I tweeted it.
[01:42:40]  And what did they do?
[01:42:42]  They had the exact wrong response.
[01:42:44]  They took that off the wire.
[01:42:46]  It's like, no, no, no, guys.
[01:42:47]  No, That's not what I'm saying.
[01:42:49]  We don't have to take more things off.
[01:42:51]  We have to include more things.
[01:42:52]  And that precedent was very, very bad.
[01:42:55]  And it was starting to retroactively affect, you know, you see this in television, right?
[01:42:59]  How many, you know, episodes, like, you know, Joe Rogan's podcast is bought by Spotify.
[01:43:03]  They purge 40 episodes.
[01:43:04]  There's Gavin McGuinness on it.
[01:43:06]  There's this person on this.
[01:43:07]  We don't want that stuff.
[01:43:08]  Old episodes.
[01:43:09]  I believe South Park, they do not air that episode on HBO Max, who has the rights, I think, to keep our minds.
[01:43:14]  South Park was putting Muhammad in a bear suit.
[01:43:16]  A bear suit.
[01:43:17]  It was a joke, the whole joke.
[01:43:19]  Muhammad's not a bear.
[01:43:20]  What is wrong with these people?
[01:43:21]  I know you're not an Islamic scholar, but the man wasn't a bear.
[01:43:25]  But isn't he, though?
[01:43:26]  I mean, in some way, there's a bearishness to it.
[01:43:29]  But this has happened all over.
[01:43:31]  And now, the new version of this, and that's the reason we have to be on our toes with this all the time.
[01:43:37]  And I don't want to speak too much about this because I read it this morning while I was walking.
[01:43:41]  And there were a number of groups, such as PEN America, Common Cause, Center for American Progress, et cetera.
[01:43:48]  We're petitioning the government of Joe Biden saying, hey, you know, we worry about free speech and everything, but we really need to do something about disinformation.
[01:43:57]  Oh no.
[01:43:58]  This is the new version of this, or let's say it's an adjunct version of this, because disinformation, of course, is often in the eye of the beholder.
[01:44:05]  Because I can give you a lot of disinformation that exists every day in newspapers.
[01:44:10]  I mean, particularly stuff on the Russia investigation, which was about disinformation, and so much of it was disinformation, whether it was deliberate or whether they fell for it or whether they were just like, you know, letting ideology overwhelm their good sense, it did happen.
[01:44:24]  So we are now at a point, and Megan, you pointed out talking to people and saying speech is violence, it is not violence.
[01:44:31]  It came to me at one point when I was talking to a student for a piece that I was doing for the HBO show, the Vice Show on HBO.
[01:44:38]  And I realized where it all came from in just the flash, and it should have been obvious to me, is that nobody likes and nobody wants to be the person that says, I don't agree with free speech.
[01:44:50]  It's a fundamentally kind of un American thing to do.
[01:44:52]  This is what we love free speech and we attack McCarthyism because of free speech, et cetera.
[01:44:57]  And that's a bad position to take.
[01:45:00]  It's not a bad position to oppose violence.
[01:45:03]  Violence hurts people.
[01:45:05]  We don't want to hurt people.
[01:45:06]  It's actually a big hearted motivation to oppose free speech because speech can be violence.
[01:45:12]  And this is the disinformation, it undermines our democracy to have people out there believing things because these people don't have any historical perspective and they believe the conspiracy theories started with Donald Trump and that there was no Clinton death list and all this stuff.
[01:45:28]  And there weren't Holocaust deniers before the internet.
[01:45:31]  This stuff is a part of human nature.
[01:45:32]  And there's a number of fantastic sociological books, historical books about.
[01:45:37]  The sort of conspiratorial instinct in American politics and global politics.
[01:45:41]  And we think that by suppressing speech, we can eliminate it and eliminate bad thoughts.
[01:45:47]  And unfortunately, some people use violence and they say, well, we don't want that anymore.
[01:45:52]  So we're going to submit to their demands.
[01:45:54]  And it even happens with dopey people like Milo Yiannopoulos who are going to speak at a university and they say, well, there's the potential of violence.
[01:46:00]  We're going to cancel it.
[01:46:01]  That's not why we're canceling it.
[01:46:02]  Come on.
[01:46:03]  You know that.
[01:46:04]  But at the same time, we have submitted to threats of violence for so long.
[01:46:09]  Under the guise of protecting people in speech, it's deeply alarming and become just sort of normal these days.
[01:46:16]  Just imagine, like, I don't like disinformation, so I'm going to appeal to Joe Biden.

=== Platforming Controversial Speakers (09:57) ===

[01:46:22]  Yes.
[01:46:23]  How would that, if you would have told that to teenage Matt, I would have, no, that's not possible.
[01:46:28]  Joe Biden, the guy with the scratchy joke, who had to drop out of the presidential race because of serial fabrication and plagiarism.
[01:46:37]  That's plagiarism.
[01:46:38]  Okay.
[01:46:38]  Yeah, you plagiarize.
[01:46:39]  Okay.
[01:46:40]  Yeah.
[01:46:41]  It's spreading.
[01:46:42]  You know, I mean, obviously now we're in such a much bigger free speech crisis.
[01:46:46]  I mean, the Charlie Hebdo thing and the drama Hamid Khanda, all that, like that is very charged, very charged.
[01:46:53]  Now, far less charged things are being treated like that.
[01:46:59]  Like they're being given the same reaction.
[01:47:00]  And the most recent one, it was just last week, I think it was.
[01:47:04]  The cop who shot Breonna Taylor's boyfriend when, you know, the no-knock warrant.
[01:47:11]  They went in.
[01:47:14]  They wound up shooting her boyfriend, Ann Brianna Taylor, sadly, to death.
[01:47:18]  But they weren't indicted.
[01:47:20]  The cop who got shot in the femoral artery, who fired the shot in return, he wasn't indicted because he got shot in the femoral artery.
[01:47:27]  So he shot back.
[01:47:28]  He was going to write a book.
[01:47:30]  And he wasn't charged with anything.
[01:47:31]  I mean, the law has said he is not a criminal.
[01:47:34]  He's a police officer who was told to go in there and execute this warrant.
[01:47:37]  He did it.
[01:47:37]  And he didn't break the law.
[01:47:40]  Simon & Schuster was going to publish the book, like an offshoot of Simon & Schuster, but under that.
[01:47:44]  Top, you know, masthead.
[01:47:46]  Nope, not going to do it because, you know, the snowflakes over in the ranks are very upset that Simon Schuster would publish this Louisville police officer's.
[01:47:57]  Book.
[01:47:58]  And then somebody was pointing out that this is the same organization that published, remember Henry Hill?
[01:48:04]  Henry!
[01:48:05]  That was my tweet.
[01:48:06]  Yeah.
[01:48:06]  Oh, was it you?
[01:48:07]  Okay.
[01:48:07]  Yeah.
[01:48:07]  Maybe that's my memory.
[01:48:09]  And not only that, that's so brilliant.
[01:48:11]  They actually, Henry Hill, who is a psychopathic killer that gave us Goodfellas, that's the book that it's based on.
[01:48:16]  But not only that, it's actually worse that in 1991, Simon Schuster sued the state of New York, who was trying to seize the profits from the book under the Son of Sam law, which made it illegal to profit from your crimes.
[01:48:28]  And I think they took it to the Supreme Court and they ruled nine to nothing.
[01:48:32]  In the favor of Simon Schuster, they were willing to go to sue on behalf of a murderer so he could profit off of his crimes in the mafia.
[01:48:39]  And now it's like, oh, MGM.
[01:48:40]  We're not going to do that anymore.
[01:48:42]  But the thing about it is that you say, and it's right to point that out, it's people in the ranks, and this happens in every company.
[01:48:49]  I've heard about internally at Spotify all of the objections and meetings they've had to have about Joe Rogan existing on their platform.
[01:48:57]  And when these kids in university who believe this stuff graduate, They get jobs and they bring some of this stuff to their jobs.
[01:49:06]  A lot of them go to work at NBC, just FYI, in case you were wondering.
[01:49:11]  Good work.
[01:49:11]  I'm not saying anything more than that.
[01:49:14]  I didn't realize that.
[01:49:14]  So that's hilarious.
[01:49:16]  First of all, Goodfellas is an amazing movie.
[01:49:17]  And Henry, Henry, right?
[01:49:20]  Joe Pashi.
[01:49:23]  But it's the same double standard.
[01:49:24]  I've talked about this before.
[01:49:25]  I think one of you guys may have, did you raise this on your podcast?
[01:49:28]  But I felt the same wrath when it came to Alex Jones, right?
[01:49:32]  Like I interviewed Alex Jones and it was like, all hell broke loose.
[01:49:36]  But like, Many other people have interviewed Alex Jones, who's fine, but like the youngins are like, no, no one's ever interviewed Alex Jones.
[01:49:42]  Platforming, platforming, you know, piss off.
[01:49:44]  I'm like, by like two years, somebody sent me an email and they said, thank God you're not Megyn Kelly.
[01:49:50]  And I was like, what?
[01:49:50]  And they're like, she's getting brutalized.
[01:49:52]  And we have a piece that had, you know, a couple million views of me, you know, arguing with Alex Jones.
[01:49:58]  And I was like, oh, we platformed him because you know what we used to call that?
[01:50:02]  Reporting.
[01:50:02]  Yeah.
[01:50:03]  Platforming has become a report.
[01:50:04]  It used to be the job.
[01:50:05]  Yeah, it's the job.
[01:50:06]  I have to talk to the people who are influential.
[01:50:08]  Yeah.
[01:50:09]  Oh my god, the job now.
[01:50:10]  It's so true.
[01:50:11]  The analogy is the people in media want to work like bouncers.
[01:50:15]  They want to like patrol the velvet rope.
[01:50:17]  Who gets in?
[01:50:18]  Who gets out?
[01:50:20]  What can they look like if they come in?
[01:50:21]  Sure.
[01:50:22]  And then you better report on that.
[01:50:24]  You get the Pantone chart.
[01:50:26]  And you better behave a certain way in the club or else you're going to be bounced.
[01:50:29]  I mean, that's what platforming is.
[01:50:31]  It's like we're, it's not an expansion of the public square, it's a contraction of it.
[01:50:36]  And it's a policing of the boundaries, which change on a whim depending on, you know, Uh, you know, some kind of tweet storm or whatever social media thing and panic, and it's the panic of the 50 year olds that uh that I'm most disgusted with.
[01:50:51]  The 60 year olds, you know, who are terrified of their 26 year old younglings, yeah.
[01:50:54]  Um, no, fire them, the teachers, the teachers, fire them, exactly.
[01:50:59]  That's what you should do, and that's 100.
[01:51:02]  I'm going to state right now if anybody does this at my company, you're fired, you're fired if you don't, honestly.
[01:51:07]  And I've told everybody who works here, somebody like if you're easily offended, you know, by tough discussions on third rail issues.
[01:51:15]  My team is texting me right now.
[01:51:16]  We know.
[01:51:17]  We know.
[01:51:20]  I'm sorry, Miss Kelly.
[01:51:22]  Discussions on third rail issues.
[01:51:24]  You shouldn't work here.
[01:51:26]  If you don't like the free form discussion of ideas in print form, you shouldn't work at Simon Schuster.
[01:51:34]  And the Alex Jones thing, I laughed, you guys.
[01:51:36]  I was like, I think it was Diane Sawyer who interviewed Jeffrey Dahmer.
[01:51:40]  Alex Jones hasn't eaten anyone.
[01:51:45]  He's accused Hillary Clinton of depression.
[01:51:47]  You know, Michael, there's spirit cooking.
[01:51:49]  He said that to me.
[01:51:50]  There was less blowback when I interviewed Putin, right?
[01:51:53]  Like, okay.
[01:51:55]  I mean, I think he's probably done a lot more stuff that's controversial than Alex. Jones, but that's how soft people are now.
[01:52:02]  And of course, it's our business.
[01:52:04]  It's the right business.
[01:52:05]  Get out of news, get out of publishing.
[01:52:07]  It's like someone working at a strip club and being like, you know, I'm really opposed to all this nudity.
[01:52:11]  I do find it slightly offensive.
[01:52:13]  You know, that's what the club is about, right?
[01:52:15]  That's what we do.
[01:52:16]  Maybe it shouldn't be.
[01:52:17]  Yeah, maybe it should be.
[01:52:18]  Maybe it's just a knitting circle.
[01:52:22]  A knitting circle.
[01:52:24]  Well, it's funny because I always used to say to my teams at Fox and NBC too, because sometimes you get sort of the young snowflakes who are like, I had to work a weekend.
[01:52:32]  I had to work after five.
[01:52:34]  I will say that happened far less often at Fox News.
[01:52:37]  It's just cultural.
[01:52:38]  But I used to say, listen, you know, you work in news.
[01:52:41]  People work in news.
[01:52:41]  You don't work here to make a fortune.
[01:52:43]  You work because it's exciting.
[01:52:44]  You get a say on the biggest issues of the day.
[01:52:46]  You can drive the public narrative.
[01:52:47]  You get instant feedback.
[01:52:48]  You're on breaking stories, which is an adrenaline rush.
[01:52:52]  In some form, it's a public service, though most news organizations are not.
[01:52:57]  If you want nice set hours where you can bank on being there from nine to four, You got Key Bank.
[01:53:03]  Go to Key Bank.
[01:53:04]  It's wonderful.
[01:53:05]  You stand in front of the teller machine.
[01:53:07]  You give out the money.
[01:53:08]  You take in the money.
[01:53:09]  You make the receipts.
[01:53:11]  Nobody ever wants you to stay late.
[01:53:12]  You don't have to work all-nighters.
[01:53:14]  Bye.
[01:53:14]  Don't let the door hit you.
[01:53:15]  Where the good Lord splits you.
[01:53:18]  Is Key Bank a Megyn Kelly show advertiser?
[01:53:20]  It's wonderful to work there.
[01:53:21]  It's one of the best places.
[01:53:24]  It was my local bank growing up in Little Del Mar, New York, and I loved it.
[01:53:28]  But you know what I'm saying?
[01:53:30]  The sort of softness of the next generation, they can't work too hard and they can't hear anything that upsets them.
[01:53:35]  And words are violence.
[01:53:36]  It's like, Oh my god, shut up!
[01:53:39]  Yeah, yeah, and by the way, I made a joke about knitting.
[01:53:41]  And if people doubt that this lunacy has taken over the entire world, go to Google right now and Google knitting community controversy.
[01:53:51]  I'm not joking, there is a woke controversy massive, more than one.
[01:53:56]  Stop it!
[01:53:56]  Yes, knitting the knitting community is up in arms about many things, but there's accusations of white supremacy, all this stuff, and it's in knitting.
[01:54:07]  There's been multiple pieces about this, in fact, in Expand the Google search and include the term purity spiral.
[01:54:15]  It was an outstanding essay written about a year or a year and change ago from someone talking about what using the knitting community scandal.
[01:54:22]  Oh, is that really?
[01:54:23]  Yeah, because it started, the ultimate victim of it was someone who launched it, like the person who started the wokeness thing, then became the target of it.
[01:54:33]  It's a spiral.
[01:54:35]  Like you just set the thing in motion and now everyone's looking around.
[01:54:37]  Okay, who's next?
[01:54:38]  You know, my God.
[01:54:40]  When the purity spiral comes to the fifth column, That's going to, it will never, it'll never come.
[01:54:44]  But I can't come here.
[01:54:45]  It's actually what makes it's what makes this an enjoyable, this is actually Megyn Kelly's show.
[01:54:50]  Is that, but we're participating as well.
[01:54:52]  So, but she seems very nice.
[01:54:54]  It's what makes programs like this rich and interesting.
[01:54:57]  Notwithstanding what you've heard, diversity of perspective.
[01:54:59]  It's somewhat, it's occasionally somewhat dangerous.
[01:55:02]  Someone could get their feelings hurt.
[01:55:04]  You say things to one another.
[01:55:05]  You're not out to necessarily offend someone, but perhaps you may express an opinion openly and honestly in a society where everyone becomes completely terrified.
[01:55:15]  That the next thing they say might get them destroyed because the rules keep changing so quickly.
[01:55:21]  Van Jones actually used a phrase once that has always stuck in my mind, and maybe it originated with him, but maybe it didn't.
[01:55:27]  That there was something about young people who want the jungle paved over for them and just turning the entirety of the world into just this horrible parking lot of ubiquitousness where we're all able to avoid ever being offended or shocked or surprised or inspired.
[01:55:46]  Or falling in love or laughing at something.
[01:55:49]  Like it's all part of the same thing.
[01:55:51]  We absolutely have to preserve that, which is the reason why all of these conversations around wokeness and PC.
[01:55:58]  Culture, et cetera, et cetera, whatever you want to call it, it's the reason that they happen because the very basis of our process for discovering truth, and you know who I'm quoting there, John Rush.
[01:56:08]  Jonathan Rush.
[01:56:09]  Yeah, the most important free speech.
[01:56:12]  It is rooted in these ideas.
[01:56:14]  It is rooted in our ability to offend one another, to occasionally be, to traffic and risque things.

=== Knitting Community and White Supremacy (02:36) ===

[01:56:20]  I don't want to see books canceled.
[01:56:22]  I may not think it's a good book.
[01:56:23]  I want to have an opportunity to tell you all the reasons why.
[01:56:25]  I hope you'll listen to me and not the asshole who wrote the book.
[01:56:28]  But I don't want to see books get canceled.
[01:56:30]  I don't want to live in a world where that's what we do.
[01:56:32]  Yeah, we do live in the world.
[01:56:33]  Jif Gif.
[01:56:34]  Yeah, Jif Gif.
[01:56:36]  I looked it up and this is amazing.
[01:56:40]  First of all, very pretty knitting options, yarn options, and that the headline.
[01:56:44]  Can I make a sexist comment?
[01:56:46]  Yeah, please.
[01:56:49]  Such a female response.
[01:56:51]  Also a bad driver and a cruel boss.
[01:56:54]  The knitting.
[01:56:54]  I mean, I think people know me well enough to know I have never knitted in my life, though I would.
[01:56:58]  I would if somebody would take the time to show me why.
[01:57:01]  Why?
[01:57:02]  And then.
[01:57:03]  So, the headline is the knitting needle at one time.
[01:57:06]  The knitting community is reckoning with racism.
[01:57:10]  The fact that there is a knitting community.
[01:57:12]  Right.
[01:57:13]  Yes.
[01:57:13]  Finally.
[01:57:13]  And then the subheading fiber artists.
[01:57:18]  Fiber artists.
[01:57:19]  I don't even know what that is, but continue.
[01:57:21]  Fiber artists of color.
[01:57:23]  Oh, my God.
[01:57:23]  How many subgroups can we get to?
[01:57:26]  Are taking to Instagram stories to call out instances of prejudice and to try to shape a more inclusive feature.
[01:57:31]  Then they talk about Karen Templar's Fringe Association Co.
[01:57:34]  Oh, get it?
[01:57:34]  Cute.
[01:57:34]  Fringe Association.
[01:57:36]  Little did you know, Karen.
[01:57:37]  Is kind of like goop for knitting.
[01:57:39]  There are tips and how to's for navigating knitting's trickier maneuvers.
[01:57:46]  There are knit alongs for chunky cowls and cute fingerless gloves.
[01:57:51]  What?
[01:57:52]  Knit alongs?
[01:57:52]  I'm sorry.
[01:57:53]  Okay.
[01:57:54]  There's an online store that sells the fringe bag, which has come to be known in some circles as the Birkin of knitting bags.
[01:58:06]  Oh.
[01:58:07]  And then there's the blog where Karen Templar puts her personal thoughts, wrapping up soon.
[01:58:11]  On January 7th, she blogged excitedly about her upcoming trip to India.
[01:58:15]  She wrote that 2019 would be her year of color.
[01:58:19]  Karen.
[01:58:20]  Okay, Karen.
[01:58:21]  She said that as a child, India had fascinated her and that when an Indian friend's parents offered to take her with them on a trip, it was, quote, like being offered a seat on a flight to Mars.
[01:58:30]  She spoke of her trip as if it were the biggest hurdle anyone could jump.
[01:58:34]  If I can go to India, I can do anything, I'm pretty sure.
[01:58:37]  Templar, it should be noted, is, hello, white.
[01:58:41]  Yes.
[01:58:41]  And that's the problem.
[01:58:43]  Now this Karen, this literal Karen, has apologized umpteen times.
[01:58:49]  It's not like going to another planet.
[01:58:51]  How do you think that makes people from India feel?
[01:58:54]  She says, There's a billion people there.

=== Karen Templar Apology Backlash (07:35) ===

[01:58:57]  They do not care.
[01:58:59]  They don't give a shit about Karen Templar's knitting temple.
[01:59:01]  Oh, man.
[01:59:03]  I won't do an accent right now, by the way.
[01:59:06]  Please.
[01:59:06]  I want to so bad.
[01:59:07]  No, but we did a game at like one time on the fifth column, and you guys should be listening if you haven't.
[01:59:12]  I can't believe you haven't heard it, in which I think it was Matt said this that we would take an activity.
[01:59:17]  And it could be knitting or anything, and then follow it on Google with white supremacy.
[01:59:21]  And invariably, there will be multiple articles about it.
[01:59:25]  You could do like mini golf and white supremacy.
[01:59:27]  That's really it.
[01:59:28]  Like everything comes up.
[01:59:29]  It's mad libs for white supremacy.
[01:59:31]  And the knitting one was my favorite because it was so earnest and no one fights back.
[01:59:37]  So it's never a controversy.
[01:59:38]  It's usually an inquisition, to quote Jonathan Rajagin.
[01:59:42]  But they go after it and people just apologize.
[01:59:45]  And what we've always said, and this is the thing that I think that if you take away anything from the podcast, is never.
[01:59:51]  Apologize.
[01:59:53]  They don't want your apology.
[01:59:54]  They want you to give it, but they don't forgive you.
[01:59:56]  No one's ever been forgiven and be like, you know what?
[01:59:59]  I actually believe that apology.
[02:00:00]  You're back on the force.
[02:00:02]  You're back in our club.
[02:00:04]  It never happened.
[02:00:05]  So don't apologize.
[02:00:06]  It's worthless.
[02:00:07]  It's just debasing yourself for their pleasure.
[02:00:09]  And this is what happens in all these communities.
[02:00:11]  Well, this is actually, that point is true.
[02:00:14]  And it's one good thing of the year of woke or whatever we've been through this past year and sadly are still in.
[02:00:23]  Because I will say this when I apologized at NBC, that knowledge was not well known.
[02:00:29]  That was not a widespread belief that the apology.
[02:00:34]  Shouldn't be offered that, you know, I still thought there were honest brokers out there and I had genuinely been convinced that I had hurt people and said something awful.
[02:00:42]  Sure.
[02:00:42]  And that, you know, when you do that, you should apologize.
[02:00:44]  You know, I was in that headspace 100%.
[02:00:47]  And if that all happened to me today, I would see it much differently.
[02:00:53]  And I do think that's one benefit of what we've been through.
[02:00:55]  You know, when everyone's getting canceled for everything they've done and everyone's claiming, and I would say, indeed, feigning in many cases offense.
[02:01:03]  Then you have a better perspective on it as the person who's being targeted.
[02:01:08]  And I think Douglas Murray's advice on this is very good.
[02:01:11]  If you are genuinely sorry, if you genuinely have good reason to believe and do believe you have done something wrong, then you should.
[02:01:22]  But I would add an asterisk to that, which is make sure your belief is well founded.
[02:01:29]  Because in my case, I was talked into it by people who did not have my best interests at heart.
[02:01:34]  You know what I mean?
[02:01:36]  People who were already on the woke train.
[02:01:39]  Did anyone respond positively to that?
[02:01:41]  So if you said, you know, I apologize for my phrasing, I think it's acceptable to say, I'm sorry that you took offense, which people think is a weaselly apology.
[02:01:50]  I actually don't think it is.
[02:01:51]  I think it's like, I don't want you to be upset by this, but you know, what I said, I meant, or I was, you know, a question I was actually curious by.
[02:01:58]  But when you actually apologize, did anyone come to you and say, you know what?
[02:02:03]  I knew that this wasn't your attention, or I appreciate the apology, or did it just land with a thud?
[02:02:08]  I will tell you a story without naming names.
[02:02:11]  So the answer overall is no.
[02:02:13]  But there was one person who is connected to, but not working at NBC.
[02:02:22]  And that person texted Doug, my husband, saying she nailed it, that, you know, that was a great apology and that'll be the end of it.
[02:02:31]  And, you know, Doug was like, well, that's nice.
[02:02:35]  You know, it would be great if the person you're connected to could say something along that, along those lines publicly.
[02:02:41]  The answer was no.
[02:02:42]  Okay.
[02:02:42]  All right.
[02:02:43]  Fine.
[02:02:44]  And then we later found out that that person was pushing the negative stories about me everywhere in the press.
[02:02:50]  Oh, wow.
[02:02:51]  Oh, wow.
[02:02:52]  Yeah.
[02:02:52]  The call is coming from inside the house.
[02:02:54]  Jeez.
[02:02:54]  Yeah.
[02:02:55]  Media is a disgusting, toxic business.
[02:02:58]  It's a disgusting, toxic business, which honestly is one of the reasons why I didn't enjoy it and why I decided to get out because it was killing my soul.
[02:03:06]  It was people like, you made all the money and you had all the.
[02:03:08]  And like, I look at people like Tucker now who I know well.
[02:03:12]  And I think, oh my God, I don't know how he's doing that.
[02:03:15]  I don't know how people stay in it.
[02:03:16]  It is, it truly is like taking a bath in a vat of acid night after night.
[02:03:23]  Over time, it's going to kill you.
[02:03:25]  So I'm glad I got out.
[02:03:27]  And by the way, broadcast is no better than cable.
[02:03:29]  No better than cable.
[02:03:30]  Arguably a lot worse, except they put a pretty smile on it.
[02:03:34]  In cable, they'll stab you in the front.
[02:03:36]  In broadcast, it's all in the back while they're smiling in the camera.
[02:03:39]  I'm so sweet.
[02:03:40]  Anyway, I don't think the apology does help.
[02:03:42]  It didn't help me.
[02:03:43]  And it hasn't really helped anybody since then.
[02:03:45]  The most we've seen is a begrudging, like, Fuck off.
[02:03:48]  I kind of apologize because they're making me do this, but I'm not really sorry.
[02:03:52]  Like Jimmy Kimmel, who wore a black face so many times, we can't even count the number.
[02:03:55]  It's awesome.
[02:03:56]  I've never dressed up.
[02:03:57]  I've never dressed up.
[02:03:58]  Torrey, who was mentioned earlier, who got like some hot water.
[02:04:02]  Stephen Colbert.
[02:04:03]  Totally fine.
[02:04:04]  Stephen Colbert.
[02:04:05]  Asian accent.
[02:04:06]  Yeah.
[02:04:06]  And the cancel Colbert thing.
[02:04:08]  Yeah.
[02:04:08]  Then now.
[02:04:09]  Well, you only have a running chance if you're on the left.
[02:04:11]  I mean, if you're on the right, forget it.
[02:04:13]  If you're on the right at an organization that is not of the right, forget it.
[02:04:18]  Yeah.
[02:04:19]  Yeah.
[02:04:21]  There's obviously something incredibly opportunistic about it.
[02:04:24]  It isn't about justice.
[02:04:25]  It isn't about perpetuating a world where no one's feelings are ever hurt.
[02:04:28]  It is a demonstration of power.
[02:04:30]  It is for the people who are doing the canceling.
[02:04:33]  And they will do it again.
[02:04:34]  And being loyal, being a part of that mob, it's only a matter of time before it's your turn.
[02:04:40]  Worth keeping in mind when you're participating in the savagery, especially when you know, when you just know.
[02:04:46]  Asking a question in a context like this, probably totally fine.
[02:04:50]  It don't mean any offense.
[02:04:51]  And even if it came out in an elegant way, the one thing that we probably need a hell of a lot more of is just a little grace.
[02:04:57]  Well, a little grace and one other thing.
[02:04:59]  And I'm going to promote Camille here on, we do a Patreon episode every week for people that.
[02:05:05]  That pay us and keep selling our wares.
[02:05:07]  Yeah.
[02:05:08]  And during one of those Patreons, a very grumpy Camille let something just fly out.
[02:05:14]  I want to see that version.
[02:05:15]  Oh, it's really unsightly.
[02:05:18]  You don't want to be around it.
[02:05:19]  He was a grumpy Camille.
[02:05:20]  And he.
[02:05:21]  So many speeds.
[02:05:21]  Yeah.
[02:05:21]  So many speeds.
[02:05:22]  Sometimes I'm crooning.
[02:05:23]  Come back for those.
[02:05:25]  Very good.
[02:05:25]  And he said something one time that will be, I think, adorning t shirts that we're printing.
[02:05:30]  And my headstone.
[02:05:31]  Yeah.
[02:05:32]  And your headstone.
[02:05:33]  That in the middle of a rant, when somebody said, hey, I'm getting this education that I don't want, At a bank or at a military facility or something, they were doing this anti racist training and they had to read Ibram X. Kennedy or something.
[02:05:44]  And he was saying, I don't know how to deal with this, Camille.
[02:05:47]  What should I do?
[02:05:48]  And Camille went on this thing and it was great.
[02:05:50]  And then at the end, he paused and said, You know, be brave, call bullshit.
[02:05:54]  Amen.
[02:05:55]  And that was kind of had become our mantra since then is that, you know, the sort of submitting to it or trying to work within it or apologizing for it doesn't work.
[02:06:05]  So just be brave, call bullshit.
[02:06:07]  And it's the I am Spartacus moment.
[02:06:09]  If everyone's saying it, then maybe things will change.
[02:06:12]  Only the real one, not like the Cory Booker.
[02:06:15]  But the odds are they probably won't cancel you.
[02:06:18]  They literally can't cancel everyone.
[02:06:20]  And once you do that, sometimes there's even a domino effect.
[02:06:24]  Other people say, you know what?
[02:06:25]  He's right.
[02:06:26]  He's right.
[02:06:27]  $105 million to Joe Rogan from Spotify because people were like, we got to cancel.
[02:06:30]  And they're like, man, there's too much money being left on the table.

=== Adam Grant Advice on Vulnerability (03:28) ===

[02:06:33]  People like this stuff.
[02:06:34]  So they won't cancel everybody.
[02:06:37]  I'll add to that.
[02:06:38]  A friend of mine, he works at Ben Shapiro's operation.
[02:06:43]  Jeremy Boring is his business partner, Ben's business partner, and he's a pal of mine, and I love the guy.
[02:06:48]  And he put it to me once very well.
[02:06:50]  And that is when you find yourself in the crosshairs, you know, they're coming for you, don't show them your belly.
[02:06:57]  So good.
[02:06:58]  It really brings it home, right?
[02:06:59]  Because, like, that's what people do.
[02:07:01]  They get in that position, like, show them the belly, show them the belly.
[02:07:03]  They're going to take it easy on me.
[02:07:04]  They're not going to stick a knife in the belly.
[02:07:06]  Like, do not show the belly.
[02:07:07]  Do not put your most vulnerable part up front because it's not going to end well for you.
[02:07:13]  This, however, has ended very well for the three of you.
[02:07:15]  I think it went very well.
[02:07:16]  What do you guys think?
[02:07:17]  It's great.
[02:07:18]  Thank you.
[02:07:18]  It's great.
[02:07:18]  I loved it.
[02:07:19]  Yeah.
[02:07:19]  We're doing this every week now, right?
[02:07:22]  100%.
[02:07:22]  You're booked.
[02:07:23]  I want to thank all of you.
[02:07:24]  And I really, I really want to, I want to, I want to thank, I mean, all of you have been very honest and I appreciate it.
[02:07:30]  But Michael, I never understood how Beshlosh was pronounced or malapropisms.
[02:07:35]  So thank you for that, too.
[02:07:37]  So every week we'll do two hours and I'll say two words sprinkled in there that you don't know how to pronounce.
[02:07:43]  I really appreciated it.
[02:07:44]  We will be your pips.
[02:07:45]  We're willing to do that for you.
[02:07:47]  It's like those are words you read all the time, but you never say.
[02:07:49]  It's like, oh, yeah, somebody smarter than me.
[02:07:51]  By the way, you're doing something wrong if you're reading Beschloss all the time.
[02:07:56]  Okay, I'll go back to Jonathan Rouch.
[02:07:59]  You guys, it's been a pleasure.
[02:08:01]  Thank you.
[02:08:02]  Thank you so much.
[02:08:08]  So, don't miss the show on Monday because we have author Adam Grant.
[02:08:12]  He's what we call an organizational psychologist.
[02:08:15]  He teaches at Wharton.
[02:08:16]  He's in the belly of the beast when it comes to sort of liberal indoctrination, but he's not somebody who does that and actually somebody who pushes back against it, as you'll hear when we talk to him.
[02:08:25]  He's got blurbs on his book from Bill Gates.
[02:08:29]  He's tight with Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook.
[02:08:31]  He's very well connected to sort of the glitterati of the tech world, but for good reason.
[02:08:37]  He's brilliant.
[02:08:38]  He's really thoughtful and he's not biased.
[02:08:41]  I think it's fair to say he leans left, but he's totally fair to the right.
[02:08:45]  And we had a really good conversation on personality, intelligence, how you figure out what you actually are good at and whether the things you think you're good at right now are actually the things you may be worst at.
[02:08:59]  what to believe about myself after this conversation.
[02:09:01]  But the name of his most recent book is Think Again.
[02:09:04]  And that's what he wants you to do.
[02:09:06]  He's got great stories.
[02:09:07]  This is actually not one that we got to with him, but it's worth reading his book just to find it.
[02:09:11]  It's about the guy who invented the Blackberry and how his inability to think again, to sort of understand that his little keyboard wasn't going to be the be all and the end all, and that the iPhone might actually have a fighting chance to take down his business was the reason his business failed, right?
[02:09:30]  That like he needed to think again to like reevaluate the thing that made him a star and made him all that money Anyway, that's who Adam Grant is.
[02:09:38]  That's how he views the world.
[02:09:40]  I think you're gonna learn from him learn about yourself We had sort of a profound exchange on systemic racism at the end, which I've been thinking about ever since Anyway, I hope you love him and I hope you give him the time he deserves because he's somebody you're gonna want in your head He's like an earworm whose thoughts are good for you and that you're gonna want in your head.
[02:10:00]  That's Monday Adam Grant.

=== Profound Exchange on Systemic Racism (00:39) ===

[02:10:01]  Have a great weekend Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
[02:10:05]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
[02:10:10]  The Megyn Kelly Show is a devil-may-care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.
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