The Megyn Kelly Show - 20210521_lara-logan-on-overcoming-trauma-political-operativ

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May 21, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show

02:21:06

20210521_lara-logan-on-overcoming-trauma-political-operativ

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Escaping the Escort Service Trap 00:15:09
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	Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
	Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
	This is going to be one of the best ones we've ever had.
	I think you're going to agree with me that it was Lara Logan.
	I have always admired her and have wanted to talk to her.
	Since we launched this podcast and we finally managed to make it happen, and it did not disappoint.
	I think that might have been the longest one we've done.
	Maybe tie with Steven Crowder.
	And I have a feeling it's going to do just as well because that episode did really well.
	An incredible conversation we just had.
	You know what's good when Steve, who's like, he's slow to give praise.
	Steve Crowder.
	I feel like I do a lot.
	No, no, I could use more.
	Okay.
	You know what's good when he.
	Instant messages you instant classic episode in the middle.
	This is our 105th excellent show.
	There we go.
	It doesn't work like it has to feel more organic.
	All right, sorry.
	Okay.
	Anyway, she was amazing.
	We talked about everything.
	This is a woman who has been through it all, came up, spent her career at CBS for, I think she said 16 or 18 years, and was put through the ringer between what she's disclosed very publicly.
	And it was a major news event when it happened being gang raped.
	In Egypt during the Arab Spring, right after a live report or during the middle of her reporting, to being completely smeared unfairly by CBS and others in the media for a report she did on Benghazi.
	We'll get into that in detail.
	I have never heard her talk about it in this much detail with anybody who at 60 Minutes sold her up the river and who didn't, what she thinks about where we are in terms of the media today.
	We're going to get into Fauci.
	We're going to get into what's happening at the border.
	We're going to get into masks and all the nonsense.
	We're going to get into everything.
	And somebody who I affectionately refer to on this podcast is Joe Effenhagen, who you're going to need to know more about and not in a good way.
	Anyway, you're going to hear from her in one minute.
	And I promise this doesn't disappoint.
	But first this.
	I am so excited to talk to you.
	I have been your fan for so long and followed your career.
	We're, I think, almost exactly, if not exactly the same age and have had similar career trajectories.
	Um, and not the same problems, but in some way the same problems, yes, right?
	Yes, absolutely.
	I feel the same way.
	I've watched from a distance and You know, really felt for you.
	It's almost like, it seemed to me almost like, you know, they set you up to fail.
	I know that sounds conspiratorial, but when you've seen the tactics in play, you know, it's, I mean, look at it, even happened to Christiane, right?
	I mean, come into the network, you know, and then get cut down at the knees.
	Yep.
	Yeah, I know.
	Well, that's, and I have a lot of thoughts on what's been done to you.
	And I'm going to make a confession to you up front.
	So I've been, Reading your reports, I always try to prepare well for these interviews so that they're more thoughtful than the average exchange, right?
	That's my goal.
	Yeah.
	And I've been neck deep in Lara Logan reporting articles about you and so on.
	And last night, I said to my husband, It's weighing on my heart.
	Like, I hate this word, but I'm going to use it.
	I was a bit triggered by what's happened to you.
	It was so familiar.
	Yeah.
	And it was so upsetting and it felt so unfair.
	It made me angry.
	And I just feel like you were this shining star and you are an amazing journalist.
	And they took out their knives and cut you down totally unfairly.
	And it's like this situation where there's very little you can actually do to reverse this when the mob comes for you.
	And I mean the internal mob, not even the outside mob.
	There's very little you can do.
	People don't realize how powerful these machines are.
	And taking you down once they've decided that's what they want to do.
	They really don't.
	And they also don't understand how much infrastructure goes into it.
	I mean, look at David Brock and Media Matters.
	I listen to all these execs say, oh, Media Matters doesn't matter.
	And it's not true.
	It's a complete lie because they do matter and they're very effective and they get paid millions.
	And this is all they do.
	And then they get allowed, they're allowed to get away with saying that they support honesty and accuracy in journalism.
	But they're assassins and they're paid assassins, you know, and it's okay because honestly, Megan, I'm really shocked at how insulated I was in that bubble.
	You know, I grew up sort of not that it was easy.
	I mean, they always made it hard, but it really was a charmed existence in a sense because I had no idea what it was like to be on the outside.
	And I don't think I would have been a very effective voice if I'd never experienced that.
	It's actually taken a very long time, but I'm I'm actually at the point where I can see that I truly am better off.
	And it doesn't mean, you know, I miss my team so much.
	And of course, I miss everything that went with being at 60 and doing these, you know, what we really work that we were really proud of and everything.
	But I really understand.
	And when I saw the DeSantos hit piece and I saw the profile on Bill Gates and I saw the piece on the head of the Ford Foundation, I mean, I can honestly tell you without any.
	Of anything but sincerity, that I am truly glad not to be associated with that broadcast anymore.
	Because they've, I mean, you can't do stories like that.
	I couldn't be who I am and stand up for what is really and honestly the truth.
	If I was part of that, I'd be a hypocrite.
	Let me ask you this because when I watched you, and you're this amazing war reporter who has been, you lived in Iraq, you lived in Afghanistan for a number of years, you've seen it all.
	And this was the only time I've ever seen you get emotional on camera.
	Maybe I missed it in the other times, but you really, you felt when.
	For these young women you were interviewing who were being trafficked at that time, who gave you an interview along with their pimp, their trafficker, was an extraordinary piece of journalism.
	It's on the internet right now if people want to Google it.
	But what was it?
	Because sometimes these things catch you by surprise, right?
	And your emotions get the better of you and you're not expecting it.
	But what was it about that interview that took you there?
	The hardest part of that interview was knowing that those girls were going to stand up and they were going to walk out of there and they were going to be raped that night.
	And I could do nothing.
	I had never, I realized in that moment that I had literally never been in a situation like that.
	You know, you go to a refugee camp and women have come out of hell.
	You go into any situation, you deal with any person who's, you know, been through some traumatic event or you're in a war and, you know, people have made it.
	By the time you get to them, they have, they're normally out of that situation.
	And this was different because these girls were not.
	They, um, they, I just, it was just the worst, most helpless feeling that I've ever had.
	And I felt at the same time ashamed and guilty and horrified and helpless.
	And I wanted, you know, I really think that I was drawn to journalism in the very beginning because I really like to, I do everything I can to help people.
	And that's really the driving.
	Force behind the stories that I choose and the way that I do them.
	And I know that sounds kind of cliched and trite, but for me, not being able to do anything for those girls was a truly terrible feeling.
	And when I asked them about what happened, and they told me both said their mothers had been the ones who had sold them, had been the ones who explained to them what was happening, the ones who'd asked them to do this and played on that love and lied to them.
	And then, when I asked them, you know, what is the one thing you would do if you had your freedom?
	And they both said, you know, find my mother.
	And when I asked them, what's the thing that, you know, causes you the most pain?
	What do you miss the most?
	And they both said, my mother.
	That was just unbearable.
	I know.
	And it's like they didn't know if they could get out, they didn't know if they would be accepted by their families and their mothers if they did get out.
	And they didn't see getting out as any viable option because they recognized if they even complained about it, they said to you that they would be punished by having to be with more men on any given night.
	Like the number of rapes would just increase for any girl who complains.
	And these are young girls.
	The one was 17 and had been taken into this business at 12 or 13.
	I mean, it's happening in America.
	I think people think this is not happening in America, it's happening in America.
	And a lot of them, one girl I spoke with, she was lured into it by her college professor.
	Some girls see ads on, you know, Backpage, thankfully, was shut down by Trump, but on these sort of websites where they say, oh, do you want to be a model?
	You know, it's an easy way to make money.
	Or maybe they'll say escort service.
	And some girls are too naive to realize what that means.
	But the next thing you know, you have a pimp and you're going to get hurt or your kid's going to get hurt unless you do what they say.
	And bam, you're off to the races.
	And it's really hard to extricate yourself once it happens.
	It's really true.
	And people are not paying attention to this in the US because they do sort of think it's a foreign thing and it doesn't affect them.
	And, you know, I was shocked to discover this weekend that.
	A parent in my town had just been at the police station with his daughter.
	They had noticed someone who had come to their school who seemed a little bit too old for the grade and had befriended their daughter and some other girls.
	And they really believed that this individual was there to recruit kids into sex trafficking, to lure them in.
	And for this latest season of my show, which is about privacy in the digital age, one of the people I interviewed was this hacker who's worked on sex trafficking.
	In the dark web and beneath the surface of the society around us.
	And I really grilled him on this and was horrified to find out that one of the biggest places that sex traffickers recruit kids is online in these video chat rooms or in some of these apps where you can watch a movie with a bunch of kids together and that they groom these children over months and months and months.
	So people think data is just about advertising and just about selling you something that maybe you want, maybe you don't want.
	So what, who cares?
	And I'm not doing anything wrong.
	So it doesn't matter if they collect my information and spy on me and so on.
	But what they don't realize is all the different ways that information can be exploited.
	And one of the ways is for people who are sex trafficking who study your data.
	They know what kind of relationships that you have with your parents and they figure out the ways to earn your trust and earn your favor and to groom you and to lure you out to a party.
	You know, there's an example of a A young girl that we use who was 16, I think, when she was lured out of her home, thinking she was going to a Christmas party and ending up not able to leave.
	And you know, that poor girl was raped and beaten to death, and her throat slit in the end by someone she was sold to.
	So, this is really a threat that's right with us in our homes today.
	And it's very, you know, what I find frightening, Megan, I think you can really relate to this.
	That when you look online, you know, it doesn't take much to see on Twitter that there's an ideological movement to separate children from their parents and to say that your children, you know, your children are not your children and all forms of parental power are a form of parental abuse and the traditional family is bad, traditional family is evil, traditional roles of mother and father and stereotypes of male and female are evil.
	And it's really not hard to see how closely related this is to the grooming that these sex traffickers use.
	Where they try to separate you from your family and sow the seeds of distrust and mistrust and alienation.
	It's exactly how kids get recruited into cults, into satanic cults or the Moonies, these cults of old.
	It's really no different.
	And it's very troubling because as technology advances and social media takes our kids at lightning speed into the future, we get further and further from them.
Digital Control and Grooming Tactics 00:13:02
	And then politics comes in and we get more divided.
	And I keep hearing parents say, That my children don't want to talk to me anymore.
	Or my daughter in college now thinks that I'm some crazy right winger because I don't understand everything or agree with everything that they're learning in college and being taught in school.
	And you start to see some very troubling ideas being pushed that should really alarm every parent.
	I mean, honestly, I try very hard with my kids to say there aren't 153,000 genders, and I'm not judging you on just the way you look.
	But keeping those doors open, you know, so that when my 11 year old or my 12 year old is talking about pansexuality and, you know, transgenderism and everything, that That you don't let them be taken away from you by somebody else, filling their heads with other ideas.
	I completely agree with you.
	I mean, same thing.
	We counter program at home all the time.
	They were taught that there are over 100 genders, that some people consider there to be over 100.
	And I said to my kids, no, there aren't.
	There are only two genders.
	And people who don't identify with those genders are to be supported and loved and not bullied.
	But there are only two genders male and female.
	That's the truth.
	That is, there are two biological sexes male, female, period.
	And we can go from there.
	But I do think you're right.
	The strain of alienation and control, you can see it in abused women, 100% women who are abused.
	The first thing the abuser will do is try to wrest control of the woman's life away from herself and get her away from her family so she doesn't have any of these lifelines of support.
	And you see it in sex trafficking and beyond.
	So it is by design.
	And when they're trying to transfer that tactic to your children, and they are, the internet in various ways is trying to do that between you and your children.
	The solution is multi-folded, but one is fight back, counter-program with your child, make sure that they're aware.
	But also you've got to get the monitoring software.
	You've got to make sure that you are spying on your children and what they're doing online.
	It's for their own good or not letting them do it.
	I mean, there's secret option number three, which is they're not allowed to go onto these websites.
	They can Google.
	They can go on while they're in your house.
	They can have a phone that's a flip phone.
	We don't actually necessarily need to surrender.
	To all of these lures that are currently out there.
	No, it's a very good point.
	And, you know, unfortunately for a lot of people, they've already done it, right?
	The door has been opened and we've all walked through because we were lied to and we were deceived.
	Nobody told us that we were really the product.
	Nobody said, this isn't a phone.
	Hey, I've got a great idea.
	We're going to get you to carry a surveillance device with you everywhere you go.
	And we're going to document every bit of your life and we're going to sell it to whoever we want.
	We're going to let the government use it whenever they like.
	And any company, anyone who's got anything that they want to get over you can have access to it.
	And oh, by the way, criminals might get access to it as well.
	And guess what?
	It can make some phone calls.
	Coming up next, we're going to talk about social media and its pernicious effect on our society, ourselves, and our children, and some reporting that Lara's doing on it right now that you're going to want to hear about.
	First, this, though.
	It's like the people in Europe who are now learning not to give their kids alcohol at age 13.
	in social drinking because they used to think that's fine.
	That'll teach them not to abuse it.
	And now even the Europeans have learned from all the data, that's actually not true.
	The younger you introduce alcohol to a child, the more his or her odds, the higher they go of becoming an alcoholic and becoming an addict or becoming an abuser.
	And it's the same with this.
	Like Abigail Schreier, who wrote Irreversible Damage, which every parent in the universe should read, as far as I'm concerned.
	She made the point of if someone came to us as moms, and I know you're a mom of three kids too.
	If someone came to us and said, here's a device that you could give to your young child, your tween or early teen, and it will increase stress, anxiety, depression, pretty much guarantee bullying, and could drive suicidal thoughts and alienation, enjoy.
	Would you say, yeah, I'm going to pay $1,200 for that and make them carry it at all times and make them addicted to it and let outside bad guys have access to my young child so that they can influence his or her mind and they can spend hours and hours going down rabbit holes on YouTube and elsewhere.
	That are completely damaging for them, way worse than toking up on a jewel, right?
	That we spend so much energy fighting.
	Would you, what sane parent would ever say yes to that?
	Not one.
	That's it.
	I mean, it's, I cannot, as a parent, I cannot think of anything.
	That is more important than this right now.
	Because for us, we at least have the benefit of having, what, 20, 30 years on the earth before we had anything like this tracking us and following us.
	Imagine our children, they've been mapped and tracked from the day they were born.
	And the other part that people really don't understand is that when you look at the patterns of behavior and you take these little pieces of information, it reveals so much about a person.
	I know from intelligence people that.
	The art of intelligence collection was really about creating a human terrain map that gave you the information you needed to target someone accurately.
	And that is exactly what all these digital companies have been doing from the beginning creating a detailed human terrain map that tells them, even when we change our patterns of behavior, it's an indicator of something.
	And if you think about all the ways that we're being forced now at an accelerated speed into the digital age, How long is it going to be before we don't have a choice?
	I mean, I bought, you know, I know it sounds stupid, but I got a dishwasher recently and it's a smart dishwasher.
	And smart, I now understand, is a euphemism for making me dumber and having less control.
	Anything that's got the word smart on it gives, yes, that's exactly it.
	Because it gives somebody else control.
	Spying and control.
	And what is the spying really about?
	It's about controlling us, controlling our behavior.
	I mean, how far away are we from a social justice score?
	A credit system like China is implementing has already implemented.
	I mean, look at the vaccines.
	You know, if you don't have a vaccine and a vaccine digital health passport, will you be allowed to travel into certain countries?
	Will you be allowed to go into public places?
	Will you be allowed to work at certain companies?
	You know, I mean, it's it's it seems so far fetched in one respect, and yet it's right here already.
	We're living with it right now.
	And one hacker I spoke to, Megan, who really was an extraordinarily interesting guy.
	I mean, I think everybody should talk to Jacob Applebaum, I got to say, because he's got an interesting past with WikiLeaks and Assange.
	And, you know, while a lot of people may react to that in the political sense, I try really hard to transcend the politics.
	I think you do as well, right?
	Get past the politics so you can really get to the substance of who people are and what are these things that they're talking about.
	And he's an extraordinary mind when it comes to digital security and online privacy.
	And he said to me, we're really becoming.
	Two classes, in a sense, the monitored class and those who are monitoring us.
	And if you want to know who the future rulers are of this global world that we're in, right?
	Because in the digital world, there is already one world.
	It's not a conspiracy, it actually exists.
	One world, no borders, and where a small group of people have an extraordinary amount of power.
	So you're either part of the monitored class or you are the part of the class that's monitoring people.
	And really, these are social.
	Control systems that, for the first time in our history, are able to impact people all across the planet in exactly one moment.
	So, don't you find it crazy that you can go to Africa or you can go to Europe or you can go to Latin America and you're having the same conversations about wokeism and cancel culture as you're having right here in the United States?
	That's an indication for you of the power and reach of these companies.
	Twitter made Black Lives Matter trend.
	They made that trend.
	And then, what did we see after George Floyd?
	We saw protests.
	In Europe, in response to that death.
	And of course, the media is handmade to steal a term, right?
	In doing the bidding of big tech, their ideological goals are completely aligned.
	So they're in favor of this.
	That's not why you don't see enough.
	Pushback from these mainstream outlets is they're fine with it because it's their agenda too.
	It's their agenda.
	Before I get you to comment on that, can I just make one point?
	We just bought a new house because we're moving, we're leaving New York, and we're making our home a dumb home.
	I'm like, I want no smart home technology.
	I'm going back to dumb home living, and I can't wait.
	I hate my damn dishwasher right now.
	I always say to it, you are not in charge of me.
	You are not the boss of me.
	I am not getting a big network that Anybody could potentially tap into.
	I don't want a TV that has one remote control that has an on and an off and a channel up and a channel down that even my seven year old can do without having access to my iPhone to turn it on.
	I can't wait to move in.
	I know, but you can still find those things.
	Imagine how many years from now will those appliances not exist?
	That's the terrifying part.
	Our children are moving into a future where they won't have those choices.
	And that's the responsibility that.
	I carry with me day and night.
	Honestly, since I started looking into this and really understanding what we've done, I have not slept one single peaceful minute because I feel so betrayed in a sense.
	We tell our children, yeah, do online school, right?
	It's fine.
	But is it fine?
	Who owns their records now of their academic years?
	When they're sitting there waiting to come online or in between breaks in the classroom and they're talking to their friends, who owns that?
	I'll tell you who owns that.
	Whoever owns the software and the hardware own a perpetual worldwide royalty free copy of everything that you do.
	And they can do whatever they want with it.
	And who's going to stop them?
	Even if they're breaking the law, who's going to stop them?
	I mean, can any politician get elected today without Facebook and Twitter?
	No.
	Well, right, exactly.
	And when we talk about a rigged election in Trump, that's where I usually go.
	I saw no Kraken, but I definitely saw suppression by Twitter and Facebook and other.
	Outlets that was unwarranted and unfair to Team Trump.
	But here's my question for you, since you're studying it right now Can we ever go back?
	Because I sometimes wonder whether, if you flash forward 25 years or 30 years, there isn't a smartphone.
	There's only at best a flip phone.
	You know, my mom's almost 80.
	She uses the jitterbug, it's like a flip phone with really big numbers.
	That's basically all.
	And her texts reflect that.
	But I wonder if by that point, you know, you and I at that point are 80.
	We're looking back and we're like, remember that crazy period where we surrendered our lives to Mark Zuckerberg and he was monitoring everything?
	And so is Google and so are all these other companies.
	And we damaged our kids.
	And we actually thought that would be a good idea.
	Like, is there any chance we come out going back to being relative Luddites?
	You know, it's really the $64 million question.
	And, you know, everybody needs something to work towards, right?
	And so, what I cling to is, I know that.
	That I know nothing, relatively speaking, on this subject.
	And so I'm not a good person to offer practical solutions.
	I've talked to lots of people, they've advised about digital hygiene.
	You've got to clean out all your cookies, you've got to change the laws.
	Other people say the laws can't keep up, you need real time monitoring systems.
	And I think all of those things are true and all of them are valid.
	I come back to the principles because principles never change.
	That's why Shakespeare is still relevant today, in spite of what the world crowds say.
	It's why the Spartans fought for freedom and we're still fighting for freedom today.
	The principles are the only things that survive organizations and politics and parties and all of that.
	And so, what are the principles here?
	Is that if you fight to protect those things that are God given rights, not the human rights that we're trying to substitute for God given rights today, like the right to migrate?
The Principle of Personal Responsibility 00:06:19
	No, these are our human rights, our rights to be treated equally, our rights to freedom.
	And we try and we realize that if we don't address the changes and the advances in technology effectively, then all of that is lost.
	Then we are truly heading into a very dark time.
	I tend to believe ultimately in the good in all of us.
	And I do believe that good is more powerful than evil.
	I just don't know the cost.
	And I really don't know if I'll be around to see the other side of this.
	Well, to me, it plays in right into what we're seeing in response to the pandemic the surrender of control, the shoulder shrug.
	Big government taking over one's life.
	I mean, in the most intimate ways, mandating that you keep a piece of fabric over your face in any public space, indoors and outdoors.
	I mean, not just you either, your child.
	And frankly, it's reminding me of we had Andrew Gutman on this parent who sort of blew the whistle at Brearley School in Manhattan as a Tony private school.
	I printed his letter that he wrote.
	It was amazing.
	One extraordinary man.
	I have to say, thank you, Andrew.
	I don't know if you listened to this, but But on behalf of parents everywhere, I literally do want to just say from the bottom of my heart, thank you for articulating that.
	I think anyone who wants to stand against this can just add their school's name to your letter.
	Yes.
	And say, besides a few details, we support you.
	He was incredibly brave.
	I love talking to him, and it was a great episode.
	But one of the things he revealed, in addition to all the critical race theory nonsense, was really he thinks is about to make not only COVID vaccines mandatory.
	But they are requiring double masking of the children.
	And then on the critical race theory stuff, not only do you have to sign a pledge that you're on board with critical race theory and you're going to take a class, an anti racism quote unquote class, which is a total BS term, but that you are going to teach it at home.
	So it's just more and more that big government or these far left organizations like academia want to get between the parent and the child.
	And on the COVID stuff, let me just ask you about this because you're a newswoman and I am too, and we both have children.
	Only you got smart and moved to Texas, and I'm still stuck in New York City.
	And I am going insane.
	Well, I got screwed and moved to Texas.
	Well, however, it landed.
	It landed well.
	I'm going insane here in New York with the school situation because now they're saying our school, and we just moved to this school, our boys.
	And I like this school.
	It's actually not in New York.
	I haven't revealed this, but we're moving to Connecticut.
	And they're now saying that they are likely to require masks.
	In the fall, for all unvaccinated children, whether they're vaccine eligible or not.
	So, children like my little guy who's seven, who is not vaccine eligible, nor would I give it to him, even if he were, have to wear masks.
	So, beyond their control, right?
	Even if you were somebody who wanted to vax your children, your child would have to be in a mask because he's too young.
	For how long?
	Till he's 12?
	For five years?
	Is he going to have to wear a mask on his face while he's running around?
	It's insane.
	Wow.
	And down in Florida, even, there are some schools, which is closer to Texas and its approach to this.
	They're still requiring masks in school, even though the transmission rate is nil.
	It's nil in schools, which leads me to a 10 year old boy named John.
	From the Felix A. Williams Elementary School in Martin County, speaking before his school board just this week, saying, I realize there's only two weeks left of school, but I'm going to take a stand.
	The masks should come off.
	Here's a sound bite.
	Listen to this kid.
	I know my teacher has asthma and everything, but I understand why it's hard for her to wear a mask.
	I think she should have that choice.
	But I should too.
	I have allergies, and I feel really anxious with my face covered, but I'm not allowed a mask rake like her.
	It seems unfair.
	All this seems unfair, and it doesn't make sense.
	I miss seeing people's faces.
	I miss the way things used to be.
	I'm scared they'll never go back to normal.
	Breathing freely doesn't seem like something we should have to ask any other people for permission for.
	Please make math optional today.
	It would be so awesome to end the school year on a really happy note like that.
	Thank you for your time.
	And the school board voted, and he was rejected 4 1.
	Amazing.
	That's amazing.
	You know, I heard two things there that were the key to me.
	One, breathing freely.
	So if you think about your freedom, breathe freely, right?
	This is part of our freedom as human beings free to breathe and free to interact and all the rest of it.
	But the other part is that he said optional.
	He's not saying ban masks.
	You know, no one is allowed to wear them.
	And I think what this really comes down to is the principle that they've tried to, it's not a principle, it's a policy that they have of control that they have tried to instill, where now you're no longer.
	Personally responsible for your own actions.
	You are now responsible for the actions of everybody else and the well being of everybody else.
	And what is that tied to?
	That is a Marxist concept where, you know, we must have equity in outcomes.
	So your personal responsibility is to the all, to the crowd, to the masses.
	And it's no longer defined by, you know, your needs and what is expected of you in society.
	So that goes to the core.
	To me, of what we're looking at here is that we're being indoctrinated into a system of control over which we can never, ever effect any outcome, right?
	It's not decided by us.
	And on top of that, we're being given one problem after another that cannot ever be solved.
Indoctrination in the McCarthy Era 00:03:10
	So, you know, it's one minute it's the COVID 19 virus, then it's a variant, then it's other variants and other viral threats, you know.
	There's one thing after, and then if this doesn't work, it's the climate.
	You know, now we have to save the planet.
	And now, for the benefit of everyone, we have to stop eating beef.
	And for the benefit of everyone, we have to stop driving, you know, gas cars.
	And, you know, to save the planet, we have to accept that a third of the population will starve to death from attacks on meat.
	But it's for the benefit of everybody.
	So we all have to accept it.
	And, you know, it's just like critical race theory we can't change the color of our skin, but the color of our skin is a problem that we can't fix.
	We can never change the past.
	You can't be less white.
	You can't change the past.
	You can't make people gravitate towards their own.
	That's why there's a Chinatown in New York.
	That's why there's, you know, the Irish, right?
	All used to live together.
	That's why the Italians, you know, like to be in Little Italy.
	That's it, it's a human instinct.
	And whether it's across cultures or whether it's across religions or class or whatever, people gravitate towards those who understand them.
	It can be a shared understanding from coming from the same neighborhood or maybe going to the same school or whatever it is.
	So, we have those natural human instincts.
	That's not an endorsement of racism or white supremacy or prejudice of any kind.
	I cannot stand those things.
	I have lived my entire life in opposition to them.
	That's my only red line.
	Is racism.
	But I'm not going to be manipulated and forced into a false position that is a political construct.
	And the Marxists, going back to the early 1900s, recognized race as a way in to exploit the division and create divisions in American society.
	And this is well documented.
	The guy even wrote a book about his tasking to do this.
	So this is not stuff I'm making up.
	And anybody who really wants to look at this, History is a very interesting look.
	It's a TV series that you can get on Amazon Prime called Hidden Agenda, the real conspiracies, sort of, and the way they've affected our lives.
	It was made in the 1970s.
	That's what I love about it.
	It's not infected by the 80s and the 90s and the politics of today.
	This is a look back at history from the point of view of those in the 70s.
	And I learned so many things from that, Megan.
	I learned that, you know, for example, the National Lawyers Guild was defending those accused of being Marxists.
	During the McCarthy era.
	Well, the National Lawyers Guild, coincidentally, is also the people that's paying for the legal bills of Antifa and other groups who were arrested during the Summer of Love and Peace, right?
	Burning cities in this country to the ground.
	And that's fascinating for me.
	The ACLU went after the Congressional Committee that was tasked with oversight of internal security threats.
	In the wake of the McCarthy era, they went after them and had that dismantled.
	And then the subcommittee.
	And look at what the ACLU is doing today.
	Do you see, you know, overlap there?
	I mean, history is so important to us in understanding how we got here.
Doctors, Masks, and Controversial Drugs 00:08:20
	And when you look at the science and you look at what has happened with the pandemic, you know, what we were told was the danger in the beginning.
	And I'll never forget Bill Barr, when he was Attorney General, citing the Constitution and showing that all of these restrictions to people's freedoms and rights and liberties were justified.
	On two conditions, under two conditions.
	One was that they had to be temporary.
	And two was that you had to show that there was a real basis for them.
	Well, the real basis has evaporated now, it is gone.
	And it's not temporary anymore.
	People are trying to make this never ending and indefinite.
	And that's not constitutional.
	And they won't look at facts.
	You're in Texas.
	Texas, which Joe Biden said, Oh, your plan to reopen and drop the mandates for masks and so on.
	That's Neanderthal thinking.
	Neanderthal.
	Texas is reporting zero deaths, zero deaths, lowest seven day positivity rate ever, lowest COVID hospitalizations in 11 months.
	They have put the lie to Joe Biden's smear of them.
	And then, even on the kid front, the reason our kids are still going to have to wear masks when they go back to school in the fall is ostensibly for their own safety, right?
	Because the teachers, they can get vaccines.
	There's a piece out.
	It was actually a New York magazine citing, reporting to two big studies now that the number of COVID hospitalizations for children has been, quote, grossly inflated, according to these studies, by at least 40%.
	And it's going to be much more.
	They were counting kids who got to the hospital who just happened to have COVID, but were there for other things as they're because of COVID, which is, of course, a lie and unsound.
	And now the doctors, they quoted a Johns Hopkins physician who wrote in the British Medical Journal saying, When it comes to vaccinating children, the risk benefit calculus of vaccinating children against a disease that poses a very low likelihood of severe outcomes does not meet the definition of an emergency, which is the only way they got approval for this vaccine for us and for our children by declaring it an emergency.
	It's not one, it's not one for them in particular.
	They shouldn't need to be mandatorily vaccinated and they shouldn't be forced to wear these damn masks.
	Interminably for parents who choose not to vaccinate them or for kids who are too young for it.
	And that brings me, Laura, to Dr. Fauci.
	The biggest, I feel like he's the biggest loser of this whole thing after Andrew Cuomo.
	Dr. Fauci, who came into this with no political profile, much to speak of, has now been exposed as a fool.
	He not only has he gotten so much wrong, but he has lied to us repeatedly about you don't need a mask.
	You know what I mean?
	Only to reverse himself and say, actually, you do need a mask.
	And I was lying before.
	And now he's been exposed.
	Yet again, he got into a.
	He was cross examined by Rand Paul in March about why the hell he was wearing a mask after being vaccinated and whether wearing a mask after vaccination is just theater.
	So we've teed it up.
	Here's Fauci with Rand Paul in March, butted to Fauci this week in May.
	Listen.
	If we're not spreading the infection, isn't it just theater?
	No, it's not.
	You're not vaccinating, you're wearing two masks.
	Isn't that theater?
	No, it's not.
	Here we go again with the theater.
	Let's get down to the facts.
	Let me just state for the record that masks are not theater.
	Masks are protective.
	And we have immunity there, theater.
	If you already have immunity, you're wearing a mask to give comfort to others.
	You're not wearing a mask because of any sign.
	I totally disagree with you.
	Before the CDC made the recommendation change, I didn't want to look like I was giving mixed signals.
	But being a fully vaccinated person, the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low.
	That was him in point two with the mask off, explaining why he doesn't need to wear it.
	I mean, Laura, it's infuriating that these people are in charge of us.
	Because they are.
	I'd like to say they're not, but they are.
	It's having a real effect.
	My kid cannot go to school without that damn mask on because of him.
	You know, I mean, to me, you're being charitable when you describe Fauci as a fool.
	I would call him Dr. Evil because Fauci has known all of this from the beginning.
	I mean, does anyone really believe he just made one blunder after another?
	Give me a break.
	Look at, if you really look, At the gain of function research and Fauci's role in that.
	You know, just I try to tell people, remember that Fauci knew this from the beginning, right?
	And they kept passing their words by saying, oh no, this came, you know, this did not come from a lab.
	It came from a bat.
	Well, that was another thing that Fauci knew was a total lie because the way these viruses are cultivated in the lab is inside a bat.
	That's how they actually do it.
	There is no way.
	They get the bat from the cave and then they do research on the bat in the lab.
	That's how it works.
	And inside that virus is cultivated inside the bat, so the only place it can come from is from the bat.
	So they know perfectly well that when they say, Oh, it came from a bat for sure, that they're deceiving people because it came from a bat in the lab, so it's the same thing.
	And then on top of that, you know, the thing that Fauci has also known from the beginning is that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and all of these drugs are very effective in treating. COVID and have been available to people all over the world from the beginning.
	And they're very, very cheap.
	And there is a protocol for how you use hydroxychloroquine.
	It is effective when used together with a Z pack, with an antibiotic, and also when used early.
	And there's a few other things that go along with that.
	But what they did was isolate it and cite studies that tested it on patients.
	For example, one study tested it on patients.
	Who were already on ventilators and already dying.
	And I don't say this to you as a doctor.
	I say it to you as a person who had COVID and was treated with hydroxychloroquine and took hydroxychloroquine and recovered very quickly and effectively.
	And that's how I learned that there is an ambulatory protocol.
	That is being used all over the world.
	When you combine something like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin with other things like steroids, and you use it very early on, you take vitamin D3 and you take coleated zinc.
	These are ambulatory protocols that have been extraordinarily successful.
	And no one has asked Fauci or the CDC or the administration why they're not talking about the effective treatments of COVID.
	Why does everybody have to take it?
	This is what's upsetting to me, right?
	Because it's like you're not allowed to have that opinion.
	You may not.
	And honestly, if you put out a piece trying to raise questions about it, I don't know.
	I don't know what hydroxychloroquine does or doesn't do.
	I do know that my one doctor who treated me during the peak of the pandemic told me he had 40,000 layers on him.
	And he told me that he and every doctor he knew was taking it.
	He and every doctor he knew.
	Okay.
	So that's my, this is one of my doctors.
	There have been many doctors who've done that.
	My husband took it.
	My children took it.
	I mean, and people, lots of people that I know took it.
	My uncle in law took ivermectin.
	I mean, we take ivermectin every couple of weeks because my father in law is a veteran.
	He's a vet and a very well renowned wildlife veterinarian.
	And most farm animals, domestic animals in America, are treated with ivermectin to prevent parasites and viruses.
	I mean, it is one of the oldest, cheapest drugs around.
	And I'm not advocating for anyone to take a drug.
	I say again, I'm not a doctor.
	But I know from speaking to doctors and speaking to scientists that these drugs actually do work.
	I know from taking it myself that it worked for me.
	And I also know that doctors will tell you this is not a vaccine.
	This has RNA, which directly targets your DNA.
	And there are a number of medical professionals who are urging people to stop calling this a vaccine.
Border Policies and Cartel Connections 00:15:25
	They're not saying don't take it, they're not saying it cannot be effective.
	They're not saying for people who look into it and decide they want to take it that it shouldn't be an option.
	What they're saying is we need to understand what it actually is.
	There have been no studies of what it can do to children.
	There have been no studies of what, well, there have been very few studies of what masks actually do to people, what it does to deprive your brain of oxygen, even if it's small amounts of oxygen.
	What is the impact of that long term?
	What is the impact of that for people who, like me, I'm always late for everything.
	So when I'm running, I actually get dizzy with a mask on and wear a mask on.
	You're not supposed to do that.
	You're not supposed to do that.
	I mean, my own doctor said, do not do that.
	Do not run or let your children run with a mask on.
	That's far more dangerous to you and in particular to your children than COVID would be.
	But this is what's so insane.
	You cannot tweet that.
	This conversation we're having cannot be repeated in a tweet and remain on Twitter, nor can even just the phrase, stop this deal, that you can't have that.
	What you can have is hashtag HitlerTheGreat.
	What you can have is a CNN freelance contributor tweeting out, The world needs a Hitler.
	Hail Hitler!
	And others like him in the wake of this Israeli Palestinian conflict, tweeting out, it's apparently a fake Hitler quote, but who the hell could tell the difference?
	And I quote, this is from Veena Malik, who's a popular Pakistani actress from Tuesday, May 11th.
	I would have killed all the Jews of the world, but I kept some to show the world why I killed them.
	Adolf Hitler.
	Again, apparently made up, but again, who could tell?
	Tweeting out, she tweeted out, hashtag Iron Dome is doomed with a laughing emoji.
	So she gets in trouble and she takes him down.
	So Twitter is allowing Hitler the Great to trend, but you cannot say any of the stuff we just said because that violates the rules.
	Lara?
	I know it's like I'm getting myself worked up now.
	I try intentionally not to do this because the news business really can work you up.
	But I don't feel it's getting any better.
	I feel it's getting worse.
	It is getting worse.
	And I tell you why.
	What is actually happening is that these companies are doubling down on the censorship.
	In the wake of people's reaction and criticism, in that after they suspended President Donald Trump's account and others, Twitter didn't say, oh, you're right.
	Yeah, we care about the First Amendment and we're worried about our Section 230 protection.
	That protects us from liability and gives us extraordinary protections that normal companies don't get and normal media companies don't get.
	No, they're not saying that.
	They're actually saying, and this was, there's a leaked video that Project Veritas put out with Jack Dorsey where he says, We're going to be doing more of this.
	This is just the beginning.
	Those are Jack Dorsey's words.
	And to my knowledge, he hasn't denied them or refuted them.
	Yeah, the head of Twitter.
	And you're seeing that all over, right?
	It's not just Twitter, it's Facebook as well.
	And so, what that tells you.
	What that tells me as a journalist and an observer of society is that these people have no intention of going back to a world where your opinion or my opinion matters, right?
	And they don't fear anything from people like you or I who don't agree with them or think that their policies are wrong.
	And so then I ask the question well, why don't they fear it?
	And that to me is the really troubling part of this.
	They don't fear it because we don't matter in their world.
	Literally, the people that say they're worried about hate speech are amplifying.
	The views of people who think that people like you and I should be exterminated, right?
	We should be eradicated.
	We don't have a right to exist.
	And, you know, these things can be traced right back to the basket of deplorables because anyone who fits in that basket, right?
	Anyone who fits in that basket.
	That's a big basket.
	Big basket if you ask big tech or media.
	Yeah.
	And what they don't, you know, and while we're having these arguments about censorship, you know, what we really are not doing is having any substantive conversations.
	About things like the fact that there are a number of Americans sitting in solitary confinement in Washington, D.C. today because of the charges against them for what happened at the Capitol on January 6th.
	But these are people who haven't been convicted of any crime.
	And they're being subjected to a form of punishment that even Democratic senators like Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin have said is the most extreme form of psychological torture.
	And should only be used in very rare and isolated cases.
	American, I just have to say that again, because after being in the Middle East, I lived in Iraq for five years, living in Afghanistan and all over, right?
	In the United States of America today, there are several dozen American citizens sitting in prison, in solitary confinement, in the nation's capital.
	And no one is talking about it.
	And they haven't actually been convicted of any crime.
	Does anybody remember?
	Innocent until proven guilty.
	You know, I mean, it is just extraordinary to me that while.
	Meanwhile, to your point earlier, you've got people like the ACLU defending the rioters who burned government buildings and police stations and hurt a lot of people over the summer, right?
	Because they were affiliated with Black Lives Matter or Antifa.
	And you've got people like Justin Timberlake bailing those people.
	Like, they get bailed out by celebrities, right?
	They get.
	Kamala Harris calls for that.
	She supports that to bail these people out.
	But But you're at the Capitol Hill riot, you're in solitary, right?
	You're sort of thrown out without the key, and no one gives a damn to the double standard you were talking about.
	Because are you a deplorable?
	And that term is as wide as it could possibly be.
	It encompasses about 80 million Americans, or aren't you?
	At least.
	At least 80 million Americans.
	And, you know, this is on all of us, I have to say, because on the one hand, I mean, you can see people who've sold their souls and think, you know, the principles don't really matter here because my side is winning.
	And we're the only ones that matter because on Twitter, you know, the voices that we don't like have been suppressed and sidelined.
	And in the media space, you know, if we don't agree with you or you don't, you know, follow the narratives, then you get pushed to the confines of media that doesn't matter, like, right into the space that's defined as a threat.
	To democracy, which is so ironic because, you know, the very essence of democracy is supposed to be freedom and liberty and, you know, different points of view.
	And yet the existence of Fox News is supposed to be a threat to democracy.
	To me, it's not a left right divide.
	It's being presented as that, you know, but I see Marxism and these other things used as a tool to recruit people and to bring them along because, you know, Marxism is the ideology for the good idea fairy, right?
	Free education, great idea.
	No one starved to death ever again.
	Great idea, right?
	And yet we know how that works out because the history is littered with examples of what that really ends up as.
	And so for me, it's about people who are in favor of tyranny and people who are against it.
	And I know it's hard because none of us want to be derided and pushed out as outliers and our credibility attacked.
	And I mean, you've been through it, I've been through it, and they'll come for both of us again, I have no doubt.
	They come for me all the time.
	But at the end of the day, what I know is I don't have a choice.
	I don't have a choice.
	These are uncharted waters.
	We have never been in a situation where the law, the rule of law in this country has been totally obliterated and no one is saying a word, where the border has been completely opened.
	And regardless of how you feel about immigration and who's good and who's bad and whether it's good for the economy or bad for the economy, the one thing that nobody Can actually deny is that when you open the border like that, along with the good people come the bad.
	And so you've opened the doors to the most powerful criminal cartels anywhere on the planet.
	You have more narcotics, illegal narcotics, flooding this country than any time in human existence.
	And we have no idea what the impact of those is going to be.
	And these are manufactured in laboratories where they can be produced in quantities that we've never ever seen, so much that they're giving them away free.
	And nobody is, you know, we talked about opioid deaths, opioid deaths, the opioid crisis, poor parents, blah, blah, blah.
	And no one is talking about it.
	I mean, it's over 300 Americans dying every week, and no one is saying a word.
	We're not talking about the strategic alliance that these cartels have made with the Chinese and all the ways in which the Chinese is already at war with the U.S. in a silent war.
	It's described by two Chinese colonels who wrote the book on unrestricted warfare in 1999 and have published an update to that.
	You know, the Chinese were buying up agricultural land all across America.
	We're not talking about any of these things.
	And at the same time, you have the power of big tech and the power of media working hand in hand with governments to silence and suppress and turn millions of Americans into criminals.
	Up next, we're going to get into CBS and Benghazi and the smears of Lara Logan and the destruction, the attempted destruction of her, of her career, how it happened, how it works, and how it.
	how it reflects what's happening in the larger media to people outside of media, right?
	It's not just Lara.
	It's not just me.
	It's not just people who work in this industry.
	The media is trying to destroy half the country.
	They're trying to destroy anybody who doesn't buy into their pre-existing narrative, their approved worldview.
	And you'll hear about how it works from an insider's perspective.
	That's coming up in one second.
	I've got to throw this stat out there because you've done a lot of reporting on what's happening at the border, and this is how it works, right?
	Everybody was reporting, oh, this looks bad.
	It looks bad.
	It looks like a crisis at the southern border.
	Then suddenly it goes radio silent, the media, nothing.
	In April, there were a record, there was a record number of border crossings in April.
	Record number.
	It's not the kind of record we want to be setting.
	And yet ICE had the lowest number ever of deportations.
	So these are not good figures for the Biden administration.
	The Media Research Center, which does a great job, they go by Newsbusters.
	They had a report out just today saying ABC, CBS, and NBC from May 1st to May 14th, zero coverage of the border and these numbers.
	Despite the fact that these April border numbers were the worst ever, zero.
	How much of their time did they devote to Liz Cheney losing her leadership post?
	A combined 33 minutes because, quote, Republican Party's Civil War, as your old place, CBS Evening News, put it, is so much more interesting and juicy and fun for them than issues like inflation or issues like our border and how high the numbers are.
	And this, while the media is celebrating, That, oh, you know, the Border Patrol facilities and the number of teens and kids in custody, it's dropped.
	It's dropped from 5,700 to less than 500 because they just moved them to something called an emergency shelter site.
	They're not, it hasn't been resolved.
	They've moved them from point A to point B.
	And the media helps the Biden administration try to spin this as a win, as progress.
	And if it's actually not spinnable, they just don't report on it.
	Liz Cheney, Liz Cheney.
	Well, you know, the problem for the Biden administration is that they don't have truth.
	On their side.
	And it's the same problem that all of these organizations have because they can try to make it that Liz Cheney is more important to Americans than the border.
	And it's still not true.
	And what I can tell you, I live right here in Texas and we are dealing with higher levels of theft.
	The sheriff and local groups keep putting out these warnings.
	We've had all kinds of crime that's going up.
	In Houston, it's bad.
	A lady, my housekeeper here, her nephew was just murdered.
	In the last couple of days in Houston, one of four kids murdered in an apartment.
	You know, all the cartel, all the indicators of cartel activity and presence are climbing, every single one in every single town.
	And this is replicated across America, even if it's not felt as acutely in other places just yet.
	And, you know, so no amount of reporting on Liz Cheney is going to change that.
	And I knew this was going to be the Biden administration's strategy.
	The moment They said that Kamala Harris was the person that they had appointed for the border, and she showed zero indication of coming down here.
	And then her office came out and said, no, no, no, not that kind of border person.
	She's going to be dealing with the root causes and go to Latin America.
	And we've seen none of that.
	And I saw that they were doing absolutely nothing to change what was happening.
	And I knew that the media would follow dutifully along with their instructions and that they would let the whole thing die and disappear.
	So, this was the strategy.
	You know, they had Jake Sullivan and Susan Rice out in December before the inauguration, telling people on the biggest Latin American news channel, EFFEFA.
	That they were going to reverse all of Trump's policies.
	So that was the invitation, right?
	That was the dog whistle to all the cartels and anyone to come to America.
	And they knew, you know, I find it very hard to believe that they didn't know precisely what they were doing.
	Why?
	Because when I talk to the cartels, they tell me they knew.
	And then what happened is they opened the border up the moment they came into office.
	Biden already said before he came in that it was going to be 100 days of no deportations, et cetera, et cetera.
	They actually put policies in place to back that up.
	And then they let it happen.
	And they rode out the media storm with a bunch of lies and hogwash.
	And they kept it from view.
	They created all these temporary facilities that, by the way, they started building.
	They had the border agencies start rebuilding these temporary facilities back in December when I was down on the border.
	Agents were telling me about it and I saw one of them.
	So this is what I mean by planned.
	They knew exactly what they were going to do.
	There's a number of people in this administration that are, you know, vehement and strong voices.
	In favor of open borders.
	And that's really the policy that is being implemented.
	So while you see the bureaucracy being overwhelmed, the policymakers planned on this.
	They wanted it to happen.
	So that comes to the very disturbing question of why?
	How does it benefit the Biden administration to have these cartels proliferate narcotics, lethal narcotics, all over America?
Open Borders and Welfare State Lies 00:02:11
	Well, you just go to San Francisco and take a look.
	Less than two miles from Nancy Pelosi's house, as we documented in one of my shows on Fox Nation.
	You have the streets are full of people whose brains have been obliterated by narcotics.
	I went into the homeless camps.
	You know, I had to go to three different camps before I could find someone who could string a sentence together cohesively enough to actually put on television.
	But how does that help Nancy Pelosi?
	What person would vote for her if they weren't on drugs?
	Well, no, I'll tell you what they're creating is people who don't write letters to their congressmen and complain about anything.
	People who don't want to.
	That's a bridge too far for me.
	I can't buy it.
	I totally believe they want open borders, but I don't believe it's part of some massive conspiracy to allow drugs to come in and infect the population.
	Well, I'm not saying it's a conspiracy.
	I'm not saying that at all.
	I'm just saying you're not seeing these people take any action on illegal narcotics.
	And when you're in San Francisco and when you're in the homeless camps and you're talking to these people, you see they've abolished the prison in Oakland.
	They just let people out because they say they don't have money to even keep the prison open anymore.
	And you have people who just exist on welfare.
	They don't care about that.
	I don't think they're trying to hook them on drugs, but they just don't give a shit.
	They want us to believe that they're this beneficial, they're looking out for everybody.
	They're part of the welfare state.
	They're going to reinstate it and take care of all that you're poor, you're downtrodden.
	And it's a lie.
	Their policies from the mandatory minimum wage to when it comes to ignoring the massive problem that we have with the homeless and opening up all of these facilities, like get them out of the prisons and get them out of the mental hospitals.
	Where are they going to go?
	Oh, how about the street?
	Okay, sure, that seems more humane.
	When you sort of put their policies to the test, so often this is the result you see.
	So their rhetoric doesn't match up with their results.
	Completely.
	And I want to get to the compliant media because I do think you and I have both seen it ourselves.
	We've lived it, we've been inside the industries.
	You've been at CBS for a number of years.
Planned Border Facilities Exposed 00:15:54
	How many years were you there?
	Oh, 16 years.
	Okay, and I was at NBC for just two, but I was at ABC for a time before that.
	I don't think Fox is this way.
	Fox has got its problems, don't get me wrong.
	They're not perfect, but they're not trying to push these narratives on you.
	They're trying to counterbalance, they're the only one on television trying to counterbalance all the nonsense that the mainstream tries to shove down your.
	Throat.
	So, yes, they're partisan.
	You got to know that when you watch them.
	But if you only take in ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC, you're going to have one point of view that's very misleading, as we're trying to show you right now, that they get manipulated depending on who's in office.
	And if it's a Democrat, it's all about running cover, and vice versa.
	If it's somebody, God forbid, like Trump, who really drove them nuts.
	So, that takes me to you.
	That takes me to you as a journalist.
	Okay, now let me just start here because I want to talk about you personallyslash professionally.
	Before I did this interview last night, I'm talking to my husband, Doug, and he said, he reminded me of this.
	He said, I remember when you were up and coming in your career, he said, I think it was around 2010.
	I asked you, who are the female journalists that you really respect?
	And I looked around, I said, I can only think of one.
	And it was you.
	And he reminded me of that, and it was true.
	I really admired and have always admired you.
	And back then, I had no idea what your politics were.
	I knew nothing about you.
	I just knew you electrified the screen, you penetrated that lens, and you were substantive and smart.
	And it was gold.
	It was TV gold.
	And it was an exciting time in my career.
	I think it was an exciting time in your career.
	And I was thinking about coming into this interview.
	Here we are 10 years later, if it was 2010, 2011.
	And I feel like both of us, hopefully, are a little older and a little wiser.
	But also, let's be honest, a bit chewed up and spat out too by what I think is a largely disgusting, toxic industry that has a habit of building up, in particular, strong women and then killing them when they get just a little too strong and a little too threatening.
	You know, for me, I think, I mean, I definitely experienced every step along the way.
	You know, I had to fight.
	I had to fight my ground to be taken seriously and just to be allowed to do my job.
	And I always did it, you know.
	I am not an unkind person.
	I'm a very kind person.
	And one of the easiest labels for anyone to slap on a woman in this industry is diva, right?
	That's the first thing you get is diva.
	And it really doesn't matter what the truth is.
	I mean, I have always treated people with respect, both in my personal life and my professional life and as a journalist.
	And I think if you talk to anyone I've ever interviewed and been around, they'll always tell you that.
	And it's been consistent because it's part of who I am.
	And so for me, you know, Putting that aside, what I found just really disappointing about the industry, it wasn't so much the feeding frenzy, you know, of people who just want to feed on each other's bodies and are so glad to see somebody brought down.
	It was really the dishonesty of people who could stand on the moral high ground and claim, you know, this authority over you while not ever doing their jobs themselves.
	I don't know about you, but it was sort of like nobody who had, Wrote about me or attacked me, appeared to have even watched the piece that I did on Benghazi, because if they had, they wouldn't have written things that were blatantly false.
	And you have this sense that you have no power.
	You know, I was left in a situation where I couldn't defend someone who wasn't around to defend themselves.
	And you had all these anonymous sources, you know, going to the New York Times and others and saying what we were told in our story wasn't true.
	And so I did what I thought was the right thing to do.
	And I did it for the team and I did it for the show.
	And I put my personal needs aside.
	And I'm really proud of myself for having done that.
	I don't regret it for one single second.
	And in a way, I feel After the Gazi report.
	Yes, because even though we didn't actually know the truth, we still don't know the truth.
	We don't know whether this guy lied or not.
	Can I just stop you there just to get the audience up to speed?
	Because they may not remember what we're talking about.
	You were a correspondent for 60 Minutes, and I think chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News at the time.
	You did a report on Benghazi.
	It's a couple of years after Benghazi went down.
	And as I understand it, you tell me, but I understand it, you're reporting on the strength of Al Qaeda in this region.
	And how the Obama administration wasn't paying enough attention to it stands up.
	The part of it that was controversial was you cited as one piece of this.
	It wasn't the whole thing.
	As one piece of this, one man's account that it came from a book that was being published by Simon Schuster.
	That's your sister company at CBS News, right?
	You have the same owner and presumably vetted.
	You were told it was too.
	You guys tried to run down whether his story was true and had indications that it was.
	And his story, we don't know whether it was true or not, but we have reason to believe perhaps not.
	And that was pinned around you.
	Like, even though the point of your story stood, this guy's one account perhaps did not match up with what he told the FBI that he had seen the body of the dead ambassador, that he had scaled the wall.
	It's possible he was just sitting in his hotel room when it all happened, although I don't think he would say that today.
	Anyway, my point is you tell me whether, because after that, All hell broke loose.
	It was like Laura Logan can't be trusted.
	And you know, God forbid, you're a mainstream reporter doing a story like that that doesn't reflect well on Obama or Hillary, their soon to be nominee, on Benghazi, which is already a hot rod.
	And you give them any reason to kill you and they will kill you.
	And man, they did.
	Everyone came for you, knives out in sort of the mainstream and even within CBS.
	Yeah, that's a pretty, that is actually a great summary, probably the best that I've heard.
	And the only thing that I would say is, Um, that his story, this guy in particular, everything about his story checked out.
	The only two pieces that they cast doubt on were his actions that night.
	So people tried to say afterwards that he wasn't who he said he was and he wasn't there and you know, all these other things, and none of that was true.
	We even confirmed his job title and his contract and everything with the State Department, you know, that he was at the special mission compound in Benghazi when he said he was.
	We had you know, Photocopied the stamps in his passport so we knew he was there in that time.
	I mean, we went, we had copies of his, you know, we'd gone and confirmed his military record with his unit in the UK.
	We did everything we possibly could outside of contacting the two Libyan guards he said he was with that night.
	And, you know, they didn't want to speak to us because it was really dangerous in Benghazi and Al Qaeda had pretty much taken over.
	And look where Libya is today, right?
	I mean, the government of Libya is still, you know, on a boat offshore and the US embassy.
	Is closed and has been operating from a neighboring country, you know, almost since a short time after our story aired.
	So, you know, those were not unreasonable conditions.
	Plus, the big thing that everybody left out, that CBS left out of their own investigation, was that we signed an NDA, a non disclosure agreement with the publisher that said that we would not disclose his actions, the details of what he did that night with anybody prior to the story going to air.
	And we You know, stupidly, naively, if you like, actually took that NDA to the letter.
	We actually thought this is a legal document.
	It was written by CBS.
	It wasn't written by us.
	It was approved by the CBS lawyer.
	He signed off on it.
	The CBS division that dealt with these things, they signed off on it.
	And so we respected that.
	And afterwards, everybody hammered us for, oh, you didn't confirm this detail with the FBI.
	Well, because it fell under the NDA.
	And so we were really mugged by anyone with a political agenda who conveniently had been briefed.
	The New York Times was supposedly briefed by the FBI on what this guy had really said, what really happened that he'd supposedly told them.
	But of course, the New York Times said that they were briefed by two.
	Officials from the State Department who were in turn briefed by two anonymous officials from the FBI.
	And that's the basis on which everything comes crashing down around you.
	So it was extremely frustrating for me because I knew that to this day, I still don't know whether this guy lied.
	He might have lied, that's very possible.
	But when he disappeared, there was nothing that we could do.
	You've got anonymous reporting from the New York Times and you've got this guy not defending himself.
	So it's over.
	And I put my personal instinct as always to fight and to fight for the truth.
	But I've lived with that injustice.
	And then I saw that really opened my eyes, though, to the injustices that were coming to Carter Page, to Mike Flynn, you know, and to all the others who've been persecuted and targeted by this very organized and orchestrated machine that comes after people.
	They take bits and pieces of things, you know, that they can knit together.
	Yes, I'm like, I'm cheering you in my head as you're talking.
	Persecuted is the right word.
	Keep going.
	Yes, and really what it's about is silencing people and intimidating them.
	So there's been almost no reporting on Benghazi.
	I know a former diplomat who's been trying to get a book published about Benghazi and the failures that really happened in policy because he doesn't want those to be repeated.
	He said, he's a hardcore Democrat.
	He's not a Republican at all.
	He cannot get his book published.
	And the more concerning part to me is how everything that I realized was in place already at that time.
	Has only consolidated and strengthened its hold on journalism and information and the workplace of ideas.
	There's been more people that have been targeted since me.
	And what I take from it, though, that gives me strength is that people have seen it happen too often and they recognize the tactics.
	People saw it happen with you.
	And I really want to say that I respect you so much for the way that you put yourself back out there and rebuilt your career after they tried to take you down.
	I told my husband, strangely enough, we had conversations about you.
	And I said, Watch how long it takes for them to destroy her at NBC because I knew it was coming.
	I absolutely knew it was coming.
	You were a voice at Fox that stood out from the others.
	And because you had so many people that were drawn to you from both sides of the aisle, you were not the lightning rod, for example, that say maybe Hannity is or Bill O'Reilly was.
	And they went after you for that.
	And they were going to make sure.
	That they took that what they're after is people that they can't control.
	So it doesn't matter if you're young or old or established or not, they want the journalists, the voices out there that do as they're told, that follow these narratives without questioning.
	And what people, I think, underestimate is the degree of organization and funding behind all of this, that there are real political operatives out there who are planting these false narratives.
	No journalist made up the Russia collusion narrative on their own.
	They didn't hire Fusion GPS to write the steel dossier and to come up with misinformation.
	And they weren't the ones that were paying Glenn Simpson from Fusion GPS to go out and brief reporters.
	On all this disinformation.
	But these are organized campaigns that take real funding and that take powerful people to keep them alive and to sustain them.
	You know, without Adam Schiff and John Brennan and Clapper, would they have been able to keep those stories alive?
	Would they have been able to keep the lie going?
	They wouldn't have.
	Without people within the FBI, who, you know, case agents, who I'm told from one source that there are the reason people haven't been charged in the Capitol.
	Event on January 6th with insurrection, yet is that there are case agents who are having real issues with what they're trying to do, who don't see the evidence there.
	And that's one reason that this is being held up.
	Now, that's a very difficult thing to verify and confirm.
	My source is solid on that.
	However, going to the FBI, can you imagine?
	They're not going to confirm that.
	And the stranglehold, what they're trying to do is to create such fear and intimidation and make it so costly for anyone to speak up.
	That all of us self censor, that journalists self censor, that scientists who know that what they're pushing on the climate, where it's nonsense and where it's valid, that they just stay quiet, that no scientist ever asks for a grant to challenge some of these assumptions on global warming, that no scientist ever asks for a grant to challenge the studies on COVID or mask wearing or the vaccine, that everything.
	The self censorship is really the ultimate goal and they're achieving it.
	It's funny because after I had my.
	Terrible end at NBC, a very well known person whose name I will keep silent for now, but she's awesome and I love her.
	And she texted me the following Your only problem is that you're a little too honest.
	And that is not allowed or rewarded if what you're going to be honest about doesn't align with the Democrat causes or their new narratives, whatever the narratives are.
	And I think that's really, you had committed the sin of honest reporting on Benghazi when it comes to Al Qaeda.
	That was really what they're upset about.
	It wasn't that guy's story.
	It was about the substance, of course, of the piece.
	Thank you for understanding that.
	Oh, I could see it the same way you could see what was happening to me.
	I could see it clear as day.
	And your CBS colleagues, it wasn't just the rest of the mainstream media, CBS colleagues internally took the knives out and plunged when you were down.
	Now, I wouldn't know what that is like.
	Not at all.
	But I was thinking about it and I thought, hmm, I think they may have seized the opportunity to achieve a pre existing goal.
	I would imagine that that would make a person, a journalist, a female journalist in your position feel incredibly rageful and betrayed.
	I would imagine you had numerous negative stories that you could have unleashed on your colleagues, but had the dignity not to do it, right?
	I would imagine that the network does its level best to portray all of these stars that you worked with as squeaky clean, beloved journalists, you know, tough but likable.
	But perhaps behind the scene, they were backstabbing, petty, fragile middle schoolers.
	And I would imagine all of that because I did read some reporting saying, People like Steve Croft came in there and officially stuck a knife in you, morally safer, demanded that you get fired.
Media Bias and False Narratives 00:08:43
	By the way, Steve Croft went in there as the moral arbiter of 60 Minutes, same guy who was having an affair with a woman 20 years younger than he was, exchanging filthy sex messages about jerking off and wanting to 69 with her and all of his favorite tastes on her body.
	He thought you were inappropriate.
	I just, well, I mean, Steve Croft, the list of producers that had, you know, begged not to ever have to work with him again was long.
	He was notorious for The way he treated people.
	You can ask anyone there who's honest.
	And I will say that, you know, I had, there were some truly great people that I worked with there.
	I really loved my team and I loved my bosses.
	And even though it was brutally hard, you know, we just kept our heads down and the work itself was so demanding and so all consuming to get it right and to do it right that I never really paid much attention to any of that.
	I spent most of my time out in the field.
	And most of my.
	That's what winners do.
	That's what winners do.
	They focus on their own game.
	Well, and also because I just wanted to get it right.
	I wanted to live up to the legacy of that show, you know, and of Mike and Morley and all these like great journalists.
	And then to find, you know, that they were some of them, Bob Simon, you left out of that list of people who really stuck their knives in.
	You know, the thing is, Megan, honestly, it took me a long time to get here, but I can tell you they did me a favor.
	They really and truly did me a favor because I was in a bubble.
	I had no idea what it was like to be outside of that.
	You know, we all had shared the same worldview, which is you can call it Democrat if you want.
	It's really a kind of leftist worldview.
	And I didn't realize that.
	My boss said to me afterwards when, you know, when I spoke up and when I was asked about bias and I spoke up honestly on Mike Ridland's podcast, Mike Drop, and said, you know, most journalists are liberal.
	I didn't think that that was.
	A headline.
	I mean, to me, that wasn't even a blip, right?
	I wasn't even answering the question at that point.
	And yet that went viral all over the world.
	And my boss wrote to me after that and he said, You know, my single greatest achievement running that show was making us aware of our own bias.
	And it was underappreciated by everyone except the audience.
	And that was Fager.
	Yes, that was Fager who said that.
	And, you know, I know he got forced out, you know, in another dramatic way, but I can tell you for me, from my point of view, This is not because I was vague as darling as they tried to make out.
	I mean, he was brutally hard on me.
	And after the hit pieces that painted him that way, he was even harder because he wanted to prove to everyone it wasn't true.
	So I'm not saying that because I'm some sort of sycophant.
	I'm saying it because think about it if you can bring down 60 Minutes and you can make them self censor and kowtow to you, you've taken out one of the most powerful voices in real journalism.
	And they've succeeded.
	I have nothing but gratitude for my years at that show.
	It's some of the best work that I've done, and I'm so proud of it.
	And I really do appreciate the extraordinary talented people that I worked with there, many of whom are like family to me.
	But I have to say now, I really couldn't hold my head high and say that I honestly am doing and standing up for the principles that I believe in and for the truth.
	When you're putting out things of that caliber, and people will say, Oh my gosh, well, you're on Fox.
	Looks what they're putting out.
	And, you know, I don't control everybody else.
	I don't.
	But I have a show where I just do the same thing.
	I keep my head down and I do my very best to do the show.
	The show is called Laura Logan Has No Agenda, which I love.
	And by the way, just in terms of Fox, yes, they do have some partisan hosts who have their own worldview.
	But I will say, Fox will put on.
	Both sides.
	Fox, some shows are better at it than others.
	You know, some shows will put up sort of a Democratic, you know, I don't know, straw man, but a lot of them will put up a real, a smart, left leaning person to have meaningful arguments.
	I certainly did that when I was there.
	And I just don't see that.
	I mean, you look at the post debate coverage on the other networks, CNN, MSNBC, they don't even bother putting a Republican on.
	They don't want you to hear the other worldview.
	So the Fox is that they do the best of anybody when it comes to that.
	And you're right.
	60 Minutes Today is an embarrassment of its former self.
	The Leslie Stahl interview with Trump, the hit piece on DeSantis, those are just a couple of examples.
	Did she, by the way, did she stand by?
	Did anybody stand by you or stand up for you?
	Not publicly.
	No, they really didn't.
	You know, they all ran like rats off the ship.
	And, you know, I stayed at 60 Minutes for years after that because, believe me, you know, if they could have found if one single thing they reported was actually true and I had been, you know, biased and had manipulated things knowingly or, you know, all the other things that they wrote, they would have fired me.
	If CBS had had cause, I have no doubt.
	With David Rhodes at the helm there, that they would have fired me on the spot.
	But it really wasn't true.
	We really didn't have a political agenda.
	If anything, our biggest crime was being completely naive about the politics of the moment.
	I had just never been a political reporter and I don't look at the world in political terms.
	I really don't have a political bone in my body.
	So that was the part that I underestimated completely because I was so focused on the Al Qaeda reporting and on getting that right.
	You know, and I would say about Fox, I just, I do want to say that, you know, I have been under pressure and questioned and criticized for, for example, being a guest on Hannity's show.
	And my response to them is, you know, if what Hannity was reporting was a lie, if it was factually incorrect, if he was saying that Trump was a Russian spy and a traitor and, you know, and working for Putin and he was putting people on his show saying that kind of thing, then I wouldn't be on his show.
	The reason that I go on his show or Tucker's show or Laura's show, you know, all these shows that drive the left crazy, is that I don't hear them reporting things that they know are completely untrue the way they do on CNN and MSNBC and others.
	And that's my real issue is that if you're reporting stuff that you know is not true, then you are being fundamentally dishonest.
	Just because you report things, your opinion, people don't like or they don't agree with it, that's, you know, that's your opinion.
	And what people forget about Fox.
	Is that Roger Ailes created it because there was no conservative opinion on any of these other programs?
	Not once, not one channel.
	Right.
	And so the left had total information dominance.
	And without Fox in the television realm, until you had OAN and Newsmax come up, they really still do, right?
	Because now what they've successfully done is okay, now there's a Fox, but they say, well, it's not credible.
	So before there was no Fox, there was nowhere in television.
	Now there is somewhere in television, but if you go on it, you're a threat to democracy.
	So you see how the strategy has evolved.
	So, you know, in a sense, you could say, why should Fox have to, you know, put people on and give both sides?
	Because really the idea behind Fox that Roger Ailes had was to create a place where you could hear these opinions because you weren't hearing them anywhere else.
	And I'm not advocating for or against that.
	I'm just saying there is a reason that Fox came to being in that form.
	Oh, I mean, some of his closest friends were Democrats.
	And it was Roger who made sure that.
	Bob Beckel got on the air because they went way back to their campaign running days.
	And Susan Estrich, who is a lawyer and ultimately his lawyer before his downfall, got on the air.
	Alan Combs, who we picked out of nowhere to go across from Hannity.
	And he was on the air and worked there until the day he died.
	You know, Roger was deeply committed to having that.
	Now, he did not lean left in his politics, but he did not think that the audience would benefit by only presenting one point of view.
Leaked Records and Professional Betrayal 00:05:26
	Now, wait, I'm going to take it back to you for a second.
	Here's what I wanted to ask you about.
	Like, this is really something I wanted to ask you.
	Because I, again, going back to sort of being triggered and what was happening to you at CBS, was there a moment when this was happening?
	And I just, we don't have time to get into all of it, but just you had.
	built your career so diligently.
	You had just blood, sweat, and tears in the field, war zones at great risk to yourself.
	You had, by this point, been, forgive me, I know I've heard you say it this way, so I'm going to say it this way, but been gang raped during the Arab Spring.
	You had breast cancer the year before.
	I mean, you had been through a lot, fucking stressful time.
	And then this happens with the Benghazi and the pylon, it's like a different kind of pylon, you know, a different kind of assault.
	And I was just thinking about you and your husband when it was going down.
	And whether I confess, I had this experience of just sleepless nights and not totally understanding what was happening as you feel this thing that you've worked so hard to build starting to crumble and no allies there to stand up for what's real and who you really are.
	You know, this is the thing that got me through.
	I had the certainty of knowing that we hadn't done any of the things that they accused us of.
	And it's not true that there was no one, in a sense, because my producer, Max McClellan, was at my side.
	And we had the certainty of knowing that no matter who spoke to us, you know, during the investigation and all the rest of it, that we never had to worry about what we were going to say or what the other person was going to say, because we had the Absolute, absolute certainty that both of us would tell the truth.
	And we knew the truth would align.
	And that's the benefit, right?
	I mean, my mother used to say, a lie has no legs.
	And the problem with people who tell lies, you see it happening all around you, see it with Russia, you see it with Ukraine impeachment.
	They have to keep telling more lies to keep those lies afloat.
	But how extraordinary that Max and I never had one single argument or one single bad word to us or anything else.
	And when my boss at the time, Told me that I had to take a leave of absence.
	He said, It's not a suspension.
	You're not being punished.
	He said, But if I don't do something, they're going to, you know, they're never going to stop coming after us.
	So I need to ask you to take a leave of absence.
	And my first thought was, and I said this to him, Please can it just be me, not Max, because I didn't want him to go through that.
	And that was a very difficult moment.
	For my boss, he just took him a while before he could speak, and then he said, You know, I knew you were going to say that.
	Um, and uh, and that's you know, that really is the spirit of it, and and that's really what got me through.
	It's the injustice of the fact that you have to live with this lie out there, and that you have all these journalists saying you didn't do your job, and not one of them has done their job, right?
	Because they're all printing things that are complete and utter nonsense, and not one of them has confirmed anything with the FBI, because the FBI to this day still hasn't confirmed what they leaked.
	Leaked off the record to the State Department, who leaked off the record, you know, to not off the record, but to the New York Times.
	And yes, it is very hard on me personally.
	You know, I ended up in hospital six times in eight months.
	I mean, there I was, I had been this, you know, After I was attacked and sodomized and raped over and over and beaten and all of that, living through that, where I had such tremendous support, both from CBS and from our whole industry, so many people that I'm grateful to still for all the support that they gave me.
	And then to find you're completely and utterly on your own.
	It's the day before I'm flying to Liberia at the height of the Ebola epidemic, and I am at the doctor's office finding out if.
	If my surgery is still intact, because I was having such trouble healing that the hysterectomy I had to have after Egypt couldn't heal, and my organs ended up all joining together, and my bowel was halfway up my body, and they had to be surgically separated.
	So I'm going through all of this, and I'm flying into Ebola at the height of the, into Liberia at the height of this terribly, absolutely terrifying epidemic, and nobody cares, right?
	You just now, for the first time, have this feeling that.
	It literally doesn't matter if you live or die, leaving two small children at home, you know, and Max again at my side, you know, this really extraordinary man and producer.
	And the people on my team, the people, my true friends, you know, some of them at 60 Minutes, those outside, they all stood by me.
	And fortunately, I've always been a person that has been very grounded, you know, and that got me through too.
	I know who I am as a person, I know what I stand for, I know what I believe in.
	And it was torture.
Surviving Accusations with Dignity 00:15:23
	I mean, really, you know, it was torture.
	But it was one worth fighting for me because I wasn't going to go quietly into the dark night.
	Well, I wondered how you were able to talk about all this.
	Did CBS not make you sign a non disclosure, a confidentiality, or an NDA before you left?
	I did.
	Yes, they did make me sign that.
	Oh, whoops.
	Uh oh.
	Well, I mean, to me, that doesn't prevent me from talking about what I, you know, what I, Went through, right?
	I'm not talking about the minutiae of what, you know, CBS, the decisions and things that were made.
	I mean, the NDA stuff, you know, I've talked about that.
	I mean, that's just a fact of what happened without going into the details of, you know, all the decisions that were made.
	Oh, I'm sure you could say a lot more.
	I'm sure you could say a lot more.
	Let me talk about this.
	So, part of what is so irritating about the people sticking the knife in is how sanctimonious they are.
	It applies in your case, in my case, and in general, as we've been discussing, right?
	It's like Joy Reid's going to.
	Lecture all of us on racism.
	Meanwhile, her racism is on display every night.
	I'll just give you a couple just because I wrote it down earlier Republicans would trade all the tax cuts in the world just to be able to say the N word.
	Sure.
	Okay.
	That red states only care about black people and minorities if they make their stakes.
	Otherwise, they can die.
	That she calls Clarence Thomas Uncle Clarence.
	She called Tim Scott a token, who's just offered for the patina of diversity.
	And at NBC, what's clear is that it's fine to say racist things, even about black people, certainly about white people.
	But even about black people, just as long as they're Republicans.
	So, anyway, so, but part of what the overall problem here and the irritation is how awful these sanctimonious judging people are.
	And that brings me to Joe Effing Hagen.
	I listened to your interview with Glenn Beck, and it was a great interview, by the way.
	Classic Glenn.
	I love the way he asks questions.
	I love the way he asks every question from Glenn, it sounds like it's the most profound question ever asked, isn't it?
	He loves his style, and I love him.
	So it was a great hour and a half.
	If people have time after this, three hours, but he mentioned it.
	But I really want to ask you about it because I was like, okay, I know this was a thing.
	He wrote this when you were down but not out at CBS.
	You had issued the report, but they had not really turfed you out.
	And you wound up filing a lawsuit over this.
	And it went on, and I was like 30 pages.
	It was the longest, most in depth, infuriating hit piece I think I've read.
	And that says a lot because I've read a lot of them.
	So this guy came after you.
	I think he's, my opinion is this man is secretly in love with you because no one could work up this much animosity over somebody unless there's something underlying.
	And I'm just going to give people a cup.
	So this guy who's clearly trying to get you fired.
	I'm just going to give a couple of samples so the audience understands.
	The piece is titled Benghazi and the Bombshell.
	I'm just going to pull some randoms.
	For 60 minutes, Logan delivered the kind of muscular reports that inoculated CBS against charges of a leftist agenda.
	That's your real sin.
	He says it right up front.
	She also happened to have a telegenic sexual charisma, a highly useful attribute for a woman who wants to succeed in TV journalism.
	Her father cheated on her mother.
	He treated his daughter, Lara, like a princess.
	She told a friend, I'll always be a princess.
	I call bullshit.
	She got her college degree.
	Of course, it's not so obviously a fucking lie.
	Her father, she got her college degree in South Africa while working part time as a newspaper reporter and also earning money as a swimsuit model.
	Thanks for telling us that.
	I appreciate that, Hagen.
	That was important to my understanding of who she is.
	She was eclipsed by Amon Pur covering the Balkans, who Logan believed purposefully stifled her chances.
	From the start, she had two qualities that seemed.
	Right.
	Just goes on to pitting the women against each other.
	That's part of it, too.
	From the start, she had two qualities that seemed to mix profitably, if uneasily exceptional courage and, of course, her looks.
	While in London, she had become a local sensation when the tabloids published swimsuit pictures of her and dubbed her 34D Lara.
	Okay.
	I'm ready to punch you in your fat face, Joe Hagen.
	Okay.
	Here we go.
	There would be a time in Logan's career when her beauty cut both ways.
	She deployed it to charm and persuade colleagues and sources.
	To great effect.
	You're going to have to walk me through how that is done, how one's beauty is deployed.
	Okay, there was eventually a bidding war for her.
	Here she was, a captivating beauty with a smoldering presence in the war zone.
	Joe, put it back in your pants.
	I understand you're a married man.
	You're creeping me out now.
	Now you're just getting creepy.
	When she first got to 60 Minutes, this is classic.
	She was, quote, considered difficult by some producers.
	Oh my God.
	I don't know how many times they say this about women in our industry.
	Then here's another piece.
	She was not shy about letting people know.
	She had a direct line to the boss.
	She was fond of saying, I could end your career with a phone call.
	That is an obvious lie.
	This shit is printed about strong feelings.
	I know it's a lie.
	You don't have to say it.
	I know it's a lie.
	I know.
	It's so painful.
	That's so annoying.
	I know.
	It's so annoying, right?
	You're a diva to your point earlier.
	You're difficult.
	I never made a single phone call.
	Of course you didn't.
	Like, I know it.
	And I can see the lies.
	The problem is not everybody can see it.
	And a lot of people want to believe it.
	And then the ultimate taking action.
	The gang rape that happened to you in the midst of your Arab Spring reporting and describing it as follows.
	This guy is a misogynistic prick.
	Quote, Logan said she was separated from her handlers and then assaulted by a mob of men who ripped off her clothes and groped her.
	Groped.
	So I'd love to get your reaction.
	Of course not.
	You were, as you've, you had already revealed, you had been gang raped, you'd been sodomized.
	And this guy, after saying all that other shit, Has the nerve to describe it like that.
	And he is still out there right now.
	He's reporting for Vanity Fair and has never apologized for this nonsense.
	You know, I'm so glad that you asked me about this because I will tell you that I, you know, I don't, the other stuff is one thing.
	But the part that was really hard for me to live with was him deliberately reducing what happened to me in Egypt to being groped.
	A, it's inaccurate, right?
	It's not true, it's factually incorrect.
	And there's plenty of evidence and reporting out there, including my own words on 60 Minutes.
	To show that that was not true.
	So that was a deliberate, conscious, intentional choice, right?
	Because there's no way that you were reported that way if you did your homework.
	And this is a very detailed piece and it's very long.
	So there's no way that that was a mistake.
	And secondly, you know, this is something that happens to victims of rape and sexual assault all the time, right?
	Where people deny what has happened to them.
	And you realize that, you know, when your leg is blown off or, you know, you get shot and, You know, like Dan Crenshaw's got a missing eye, right?
	You can see that wound, it's there, no one disputes it.
	But with sexual violence and rape and sodomy, these things, you know, the wounds and the scars are invisible to the outside world.
	And so to take that away from someone is about the epitome of evil.
	It doesn't get more evil than that.
	And, you know, what it speaks to me about the way that this article was constructed, it has always struck me that this was the second tier.
	If you You'll notice this as a pattern in people who've been attacked, right?
	There's the flurry of reporting, you know, all the sharks at the feeding frenzy with the knives, etu brute, right?
	I mean, it's like Caesar being stabbed.
	And then comes the second tier follow up hit piece to make sure that they finish you off.
	If the first flurry, if you weren't, you know, gone then, if they didn't succeed in getting you fired and destroyed and canceled and never breathing, then they come with the second tier.
	And, you know, CBS and my boss had indicated that I would be coming back.
	And I was only on leave.
	I was still being paid.
	And, you know, I wasn't suspended in spite of the reporting.
	And so they made sure that they were going to end my career.
	And I know this because one of the CBS producers who was a source for this actually told somebody that I know that I would never work again after this piece came out.
	And it would be the end of my CBS career.
	Those were the two things that I heard.
	So I knew before the piece came out that that's what was the objective.
	And I heard from other reporters, they're doing a hit piece on you.
	And this is, you know, this is people who some of them weren't even my friends.
	I didn't even know some of them, but they were telling other friends of mine, hey, I was contacted by this guy.
	Let, you know, let your friend know that this is coming out and this is the objective.
	And what that speaks to really is if you look at New York Magazine as a whole, I mean, Joe Hagan loves to do hit pieces.
	He's done, he had done a lot of them before the piece on me.
	But the only piece he had done that wasn't a hit piece that was a forum on Hillary Clinton.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Exactly.
	I mean, that's why, you know, that's why I have so much respect for you, Megan.
	You know, you do, you really are thorough and you do your homework and you are, you know, you have that legal mind, those skills that you bring to it.
	And that's very impressive because nobody, you know, puts those pieces together.
	And it is absolutely true.
	He had done a glowing piece about her that it was her destiny to be president of the United States, right?
	And so we were all supposed to just accept it and go along with it because it was destiny.
	And, um, And people like Joe Hagan, they operate as political operatives, not as journalists, and as assassins, right?
	They're going out there to destroy you.
	And what he did so slyly in that piece was to bring in Les Munvez, who had had no part in any of this.
	Who I didn't have any relationship with other than having said hello to him for a few awkward seconds at the occasional Christmas party.
	He ran all of CBS, just for the audience.
	Fager ran 60 Minutes and Moonbez ran all of CBS.
	Right.
	And this article, completely and utterly 100% false, made up things and made up a relationship between me and Moonbez, made up quotes and things that I never said, made up things about my past.
	My father never called me a princess or what he's talking about.
	In fact, my father was the opposite.
	I'm such a tomboy because my father.
	Raised us that way.
	He wanted us out in the crowd.
	Can I just interject here?
	Here's what they do.
	They find any loser who's got an axe to grind with you and they will put their allegations in print because the whole article is complete with blind quotes, right?
	Blind quotes.
	He won't attribute it to anybody.
	And you can see what he's doing with his poison pen, trying to, you're a diva, you're a prince.
	I mean, no woman would ever talk about it.
	And of course, to your point, the only person he loves more than you is Hillary and now maybe Beto because he also wrote the glowing profile on him.
	But yeah, so the blind quotes are used in a way that is journalistically unfair and deeply unsound.
	Precisely.
	And of course, they're anonymous to hide the motivation, right?
	And because people saying these things that aren't true, they don't want their name attached to it.
	And so, you know, that's when you get to a real misuse of anonymity, right?
	I always tell people that we source things so that people can assess motive, you know, because you want to give them that information.
	So that they can listen to your reporting, they can watch it, and they can make up their own minds.
	That was sort of the guiding principle and standard, I thought, for the whole industry.
	Obviously, not talking about tabloids and other kinds of journalism and reporting.
	But these people like Hagen, they wield anonymity as a weapon for a propaganda piece that is designed to destroy you and to make you unemployable.
	And that's why your standing up after what happened to you and having your own show is so important.
	And that's why it's a real source of strength to people like me.
	And, you know, for all those young reporters out there, you know, who look at this and think, well, you know, it's never going to happen to them, or I'm so glad that's not me.
	One day you'll find that you'll be turning to us if we allow these tactics to continue.
	If people, you know, look at politics and they don't look at principle, that's what you're really sanctioning truly evil people who get paid a lot of money and have a lot of resources.
	To take us down one by one with negative things.
	You know, look, now they're going after these young reporters that were reporting on Antifa over the summer.
	The Daily Caller.
	You know, great people.
	Totally unfair.
	Yes, like Richie McGuinness and Drew Hernandez and Shelby Talcott.
	Yes, and I mean, there's Kyle.
	There's a bunch of them, right, who did really amazing work.
	They don't get paid a whole lot.
	They risk their lives and they get tortured for it.
	You know, Twitter is fine with people saying murder Andy No, you know, all over their accounts.
	And Andy knows another one.
	He'll never be anointed by the journalist establishment because, you know, he started out with the wrong narrative, right?
	And so, you know, we are an example to people that these tactics don't work.
	Because I can go and get, you know, to a speaking venue and fill a venue with 2,000 people in a heartbeat.
	Why?
	Because people see through the tactics, they see through these patterns, they know what the truth is.
	They, you know, and when Joe Hagan did that in New York Magazine, when he tried to reduce rape.
	To being groped.
	What he was trying to do was to take away the one thing that made me sympathetic to both Democrats and Republicans.
	That one moment.
	Where, yeah, it was a political decision.
	It was intentional.
	It wasn't a mistake.
	It was designed to make me a less sympathetic figure.
	Because in that one moment, Americans got to see who I was and what I was made of.
	And nobody can take that away, right?
	You can't make that, you can't unmake that.
	And that's why I'm still breathing and I'm still going.
	And that's why people, you know, still want to watch my work and want to talk to me.
	And it's the same thing with you.
	They can say what they like about you, but you're not racist.
	You know, and that's just a fact.
	And all these fake constructs that they put in here, in the end, they're building, you know, a house of cards that is going to come crashing down, you know.
	But a lot of people are paying the price in the meantime.
	And so I urge people, you know, whatever it is that you can do, stand up to it.
	Don't let them take everything from you.
	And when it's happening to you, you don't know that there could be life on the other side, you know, professional life on the other side, you know.
Resilience Against Racist Labels 00:03:48
	This industry, In particular, it is very good at taking, and I will say, in particular, a strong woman's mistakes or even alleged mistakes and gleefully using them to ruin her.
	And I've said before, it is a very thin reed upon which powerful women dance, in particular in media.
	And if you add in a perceived or real right leaning bias, you are totally effed.
	And that can be true in virtually any industry right now because it is considered.
	Deplorable, right?
	To be anything other than hard left.
	And it's part of what is appealing about seeing the mass come down so hardily on media, right?
	The part of what is appealing about figuring out why somebody like Joy Reid is allowed on an NBC property.
	But I am not.
	I have not said anything racist.
	I have not said anything racist.
	And yet I don't have my job there anymore.
	You know, Rachel Maddow, who completely botched the Russia reporting on Trump, lied to our audience night after night, she's still there.
	Don Lemon, for that matter, who is credibly accused of shoving his hands down his own pants, fondling his balls and his genitalia, and rubbing them all over some poor guy's face in a bar.
	And there's an independent eyewitness to talk about it.
	He still got his job, right?
	I have no idea.
	How is that possible?
	Yes.
	No, I mean, I could go on, right?
	But it does, I think, in the end, land in a good place because Don Lemon's exactly where he belongs.
	He's going to have a long and successful career at CNN, and that's exactly where he belongs.
	Same for Joy Reid, same for Rachel Maddow.
	And same for you and for me.
	I mean, we've gotten out.
	Lara Logan has no agenda.
	I love it.
	Neither do I.
	And now we've gotten to a place where Fox Nation doesn't control you.
	You've got your own thing going on and they'll air it.
	But you do your producing, your reporting.
	Same here.
	So it lands if you're at all resilient.
	And that opens up a whole other lane, right?
	Like, how do you get resilient?
	Take punches in the face, get back up, repeat, lather, rinse, repeat over and over.
	But if you're resilient and you make it through, You can land in a better place.
	You shouldn't be at CBS.
	You shouldn't be at the 60 Minutes doing the hit pieces on DeSantis.
	And I certainly shouldn't be at NBC News doing fluff in the mornings, right?
	It took these steps in life to realize that and wind up in a place where hopefully you wind up a bit healthier, or at least, if not healthier, I think I'm healthier than I've been in years, but certainly wiser.
	I'm definitely older and fatter.
	But, you know, for me, I think what it's given me is the ability.
	To step back and look at the bigger picture.
	Because if you've only been on one side of the argument, if you haven't lived on both sides, it's really hard.
	To understand it enough to figure it out and to share that in a way that means something.
	And we're in a fight for our lives right now.
	I mean, we have never been in such a bad place, you know, not just in terms of the media, but in terms of so many other things that are happening all around us.
	I mean, our children are being taught that being born white is an evil, evil sin and a crime for which they have to atone for the rest of their existence.
	I mean, that is, you know, I.
	I just, when I think of the Nelson Mandela that I grew up lucky enough to grow up in his time and lucky enough to know and lucky enough to have lived through that transition in South Africa, where really what Mandela was all about was forgiveness and unity of people, right?
Redefining Identity Beyond Trauma 00:10:52
	You don't hear Mandela's name in the critical race theory conversation because the man who did, you know, things that no one else had ever done, I mean, brought a country from one political system to another through a peaceful revolution without burning down.
	You know, the entire nation.
	I mean, it's just extraordinary.
	There was no one like Mandela.
	I mean, he's one of the greats of all time.
	And yet his name is left out because he was about unity.
	He was about not being racist.
	And what is happening today isn't about not being racist, it's not about justice or anything else.
	And so, you know, I see what is happening with the media in this bigger sense of what is happening all across our society.
	And I realize that, you know, the ones that are going to be left standing are.
	The voices that stayed true to principle, because in the end, it's only the principles that are left standing, right?
	And so, you know, I don't think I would have ever really been able to understand that if I hadn't lived through it.
	And that's why I feel I'm getting to that point where I'm actually grateful that it happened to me.
	Yeah.
	That's, I mean, that's an extraordinary statement.
	I guess I am too.
	I certainly am glad to be out of there.
	You know, I've said before when you're dying death by a thousand cuts, the machete is a, is a mercy.
	And that's don't get me wrong, it took a long time.
	And I plotted many deaths in the dark hours of the night.
	Well, so this is a weird question.
	Will you forgive me this question?
	This is such a weird question, but I have to ask it.
	It's fine.
	Ask me anything.
	Which would you say had a deeper effect on you?
	Which was more traumatic?
	What happened to you in Tahrir Square or what happened to you back here, you know, with your career and your job in CBS and the knives?
	It's a very good question because in Tahrir Square, without a doubt, those were the worst moments that anyone can live through.
	You know, I mean, being sodomized by a mob is on my top three, right?
	And the terrible fear that I lived through, being raped with flagpoles and Sticks and the indignity of that, and the sheer terror of realizing that you're dying, and then having a moment where maybe you can live, but you're still within the grasp of the mob.
	That was the worst fear I've ever experienced.
	I don't want to, for one single moment, give people the impression that it hasn't been a searing.
	Wound that I had to heal and figure out how to live with.
	But I was, you know, truly.
	Lucky enough to have been raised by an extraordinary woman and my father, too, extraordinary, but my mother just was such a powerful force for what is real and what is not in a person's life.
	And I was lucky enough to know from the first moment that this was never about me and these people were truly evil and evil exists everywhere.
	And I never had even a single moment of anger.
	Or an expectation of justice.
	I really didn't care about them.
	I care about it not happening to other people, but I really didn't care about them.
	And I made a decision from the very first moment that this was never going to be my dirty little secret to carry in shame.
	This was not my burden.
	I had absolute clarity in that.
	And I made a very easy decision that I wasn't going to give them more.
	Than they'd taken from me.
	I learned this from a rape victim in South Africa years before who said, at her trial of the men who raped her and disemboweled her and slit her throat, she said, when the judge asked her how she could be so strong, she said, they took so much from me that night.
	Why would I give them the rest of my life as well?
	And that was, you know, such a powerful force for me that I held on to that.
	And I realized that, you know, with that, you're not a victim because you decide what you give them.
	And sometimes they, you know, sometimes they've taken more from me than I would like.
	In my memories and my ability to deal with this.
	But you don't have to erase it to heal.
	For me, I didn't have to get rid of it.
	I didn't have to pretend it didn't happen.
	I just had to find a way to live with it.
	And I did because I have children.
	And for me, life is for living.
	And I had so much to live for.
	So, whereas with what happened to me with Benghazi, I mean, I am a person who was literally born to stand against injustice.
	That has been my defining DNA for my first.
	Breaths.
	That's just how I'm built.
	And so to live with all these lies about Benghazi, to have reporters like Nancy Youssef from McClatchy write a whole hit piece to say that at the very end of our piece, where we had a page from Chris Stevens's schedule that day that was still lying in the rubble, and she said that the building had been renovated and everything had been cleaned up and we'd planted this and it was a total lie.
	I mean, you know, this moron, right, hadn't even been there herself.
	There were three buildings and only one was renovated.
	And it wasn't the one where Chris Stevens lived.
	She didn't even know that.
	And everything she printed was a lie.
	That was another hit piece, you know, that came out.
	And one after another after another, these reporters just printed stuff.
	People standing in judgment of you who haven't even done four and a half seconds of journalism, you know, and knowing that these political operatives that did this hit piece, David Brock got to do a glowing profile in the New York Times celebrating how he'd taken me down.
	And I was a disgusting man who headed Media Matters.
	Disgusting man.
	Disgusting man to know that they get this victory and that.
	I couldn't fight for myself and that I couldn't, you know, I mean, I had to fight all those natural instincts.
	And that was extremely frustrating.
	And if you look at all the things that happened since and all the things that have happened because of it, it has had, you know, in many respects, a much more profound impact on my life because I have been, people have tried to define me by that and falsely define me by that and push me into a political box that I don't belong in.
	And, you know, there's, you know, I used to get asked to go to speak at colleges all the time.
	There was, you know, colleges all over America.
	It was constant.
	I couldn't even do all the requests, you know, and now colleges, because they're so indoctrinated and infiltrated and completely taken over.
	Almost by this very radical progressive ideology, they don't want to hear from me anymore.
	And so there are many different ways in which it's impacted me and had a much more damaging effect on many aspects of my life because, in a sense, I have to live with a lie.
	I have to live with a lie that I didn't do my job.
	I have to live with a lie that I'm some kind of right wing person.
	I have to live with a lie that I allowed.
	Politics to interfere with a story.
	And people like you and I were held to a completely different standard to these people who can come out and say all kinds of things.
	I mean, how do they get to say that Donald Trump is a Russian spy?
	How does Brian Williams still have a job?
	Like, we're not talking about a lie.
	I know.
	I have no idea.
	It's insane.
	It's really insane.
	It's infuriating.
	But I love that line.
	I wrote it down and I'm going to.
	I have a little piece of paper next to my desk from when I interviewed the guys from the fifth column who are amazing and have a great podcast.
	And the line is be brave, call bullshit.
	It's just, I like pithy inspirations.
	And I wrote down what you just said.
	I wasn't going to give them more than they'd taken from me.
	Man, that's easier said than done.
	I love that.
	That is an ongoing struggle.
	I mean, I will confess to you, right after I left NBC, I was so unhappy.
	I was so depressed.
	It was, and I'm not a depressed person.
	You know, I'm not one of those like, I say like, Hoda and Savannah, they tell you like, I'm a 10 out of 10 happy.
	No, that's not me.
	I'm fine, but I'm a serious person and I'm not running around like, yay.
	One of the reasons why my stint there didn't work out, but I was depressed.
	There's no question.
	And my therapist at the time said, Do you want to consider an antidepressant?
	And I was like, I can't do it.
	I won't let Andy Lack put me on antidepressants.
	I won't do it.
	And I understand this is not to stigmatize antidepressants, which brought a lot of people I know a lot of relief.
	And by the way, my mom is a lifelong therapist and would 100% say if you need it and your doctor thinks you should have it, go for it.
	But for me, it was the setup.
	It was NBC's not driving me to antidepressants.
	And it was under the heading you just gave me of I wasn't going to give them more than they'd taken from me.
	Felt like I had to pull myself out of that pit.
	I had to prove to myself that I could do it, you know?
	And I ultimately did do it.
	And for me, it's just like a small moral victory.
	And I'll just give you one other.
	I was at yoga one night.
	I got into exercise for once in my life, my adult life, actually, when I was younger, I was into it.
	But I never waked up.
	I was.
	Yeah.
	Exactly.
	So I was at yoga and it was the night that.
	The story broke about Justin Trudeau and his innumerable instances with blackface.
	And those pictures came out of him wearing it.
	And I knew, of course, that people had worn this in the past and it hadn't created a big deal, which is what I said on NBC and then was excoriated for.
	But like, there it was, like somebody who's so well known in black and white, so to speak.
	And I went to yoga.
	And for the first time ever at an exercise class, I started crying.
	Like, tears just started rolling down my face.
Pushing Back Against the Bullshit 00:03:58
	And I was like, I'm getting upset to just think about it.
	Like, this has been a lie.
	You know, this has been a lie.
	I have been gaslit.
	And I try not to admire myself in unfairness, is unfair.
	It's a bad thinking, you know, leads to more bad things in your life.
	But for me, it was like the first moment of a real breakthrough in like, this wasn't okay, what happened.
	And I am not the villain they are portraying me as.
	You know, I didn't know that right from the beginning, the way you did.
	And it's taken years, like literally now, we're years past it for me to finally get to the place of like, I understand who the villains are and aren't.
	And I'm on the good list.
	I understand.
	I know.
	And, you know, the good news is you just will care less and less with time.
	Because they're being exposed.
	People are seeing it now.
	There's a real political machine behind it.
	And that unless we stand up and do something about it, it's going to eat us all alive and everything that we love and care about.
	I mean, it's eating America alive.
	I mean, look at the 1619 Project.
	That was a hit on the founding fathers and the Constitution, right?
	I mean, that's what all of these things are.
	They're meant to suck the life out of us.
	And what you cannot believe is the degree of Vindictiveness in it.
	You know, their ultimate goal is to make you completely and utterly unemployable, right?
	They don't want you to have the ability to feed your children.
	They want you to lose your house.
	They want you to lose everything that's dear to you.
	There were people in, I think it was that horrible magazine.
	I don't know, it was like salon.com or Slate or something like that.
	One of those.
	The same, basically the same.
	No, it was Jezebel, I think.
	Jezebel saying that they hope I get divorced from my husband, right?
	I mean, this is the kind of people that we're talking about.
	Dancing on other people's graves, you know, hoping for blood, right?
	They don't just want you to lose.
	It wasn't good enough for you to lose your show.
	You have to lose not just your job, you have to lose your whole career for the crime of what?
	For the crime of having an independent mind and reporting independently, for not being controlled and seduced by these false narratives and not being a moral coward, you know, and getting mugged by reality along the way, right?
	I love that.
	Dave Rubin's quote, another liberal mugged by reality.
	And that's kind of what we're talking about.
	And look at that.
	There's someone like Dave Rubin, you know, who was hosting a gay radio show, right?
	And now he's passed this great traitor.
	Look at Glenn Greenwald.
	I mean, that's what, you know, now it's not just people like you and I, where people didn't know my politics.
	And quite frankly, I don't know my politics.
	You know, I'm not a party person.
	And I don't define it that way.
	And now you've got people like Glenn Greenwald, who actually, you know, couldn't be further left.
	Jacob Applebaum, he couldn't be further left.
	Look how these people are standing up and saying, You know, wait a minute.
	Hold on.
	I'm on the left, but I'm not blind.
	Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss.
	It goes on.
	I feel like that.
	If I have a media tribe, that's the tribe.
	It's people who have just pushed back against the bullshit.
	And she gets completely demonized, but she's totally fearless.
	I mean, Candace is like a quintessential example of fearlessness, right?
	She doesn't care what you say.
	I love that woman.
	She is, I love her courage.
	And they want to paint her as a white supremacist, right?
	And that just shows you the lie of all of this.
	When you say that you don't like white cops, but you're standing in front of a black cop and you're screaming in his face about being a pig and you hope he dies and raping his wife and wanting his children to die and everything else, that's what these paid, trained agitators do, right?
Finding Humor in Immunity 00:04:07
	That's what they actually do.
	And then it's not about being black or white, it's about the abolition of the police force, you see that happen.
	Over and over again, there's, you know, honestly, the battlefield of hypocrisy is just littered with examples that show you how these things are not real.
	Principles and they're not real policies.
	They're just euphemisms hiding a real agenda.
	The way Antifa uses masks, the way Antifa uses black clothing and hoods, the black block is what it's called, the way they encourage all of their followers and all the different units who have different tasks in these riots, the way they use that to hide their identities and hide their real agenda, that's exactly what all of these organizations are doing.
	I mean, people might not realize it within them because there are different levels.
	Some of them really, you know, they know what they're doing, and some of them have a little bit of knowledge, and some of them actually believe completely.
	You know, they've been completely seduced and conned themselves.
	But what they're all doing is hiding their real agenda, what they're really looking for.
	And, you know, if people in this country really don't wake up and stand up to that, they're going to have lost so much by the time that they do wake up that the options left are already narrowing by the day.
	And, you know, there's almost no good options left at this point.
	You can't lament your circumstances unless you fight.
	It's like when your children, this happens all the time with mine, like they'll complain about something.
	I'll say, Well, here's a solution.
	Here's three to choose from.
	Then they'll complain again, having done nothing.
	And I say, Here are the three solutions again.
	Or you can come up with one in your own.
	And then they'll complain again.
	And I say, You lost your right to complain.
	That's it.
	You're not going to do anything about it.
	You're on your own, kid.
	And that's us right now.
	You're not going to do anything about it.
	You're on your own.
	We're going to lose, and you can't complain about it.
	You submit.
	By being silent, you submit.
	Well, and you know, I really worry about this with a With my children and social media, because a few years ago, I noticed that in a lot of these memes and games and things that my children were, they didn't really play video games when they were little, but they liked the memes that go along with the games.
	And one of the recurring themes is suicide.
	It's over and over and over again.
	You just see these characters andor characters who have been killed, but who are still in the game or still in the story from the afterlife, right?
	Or who return.
	I mean, it's all over.
	And You know, my son asked me the one day, Why does this bother you so much?
	I know that suicide isn't good and it's not a solution and blah, blah, blah.
	You know, he repeated all the things back to me that I would say.
	And I said to him, Because it's making you think that it's totally normal.
	It's instilling this in your psyche and in your thought.
	In the game, you keep coming back from suicide or there's life after suicide because these characters still keep playing.
	But in real life, you don't come back from it.
	And, you know, lo and behold, It's not a few years later.
	And look at what the studies are out now about the higher incidences of anxiety and depression and suicide in young kids since the rise of social media.
	I mean, those things are tied, there are links to them.
	And you really have to wonder about what kind of society we've become when children are not learning about these things in a context that really makes them understand them.
	In fact, if anything, they're being misled.
	And it's the same thing when it comes to You know, pedophiles and all these subjects that really used to be very black and white that now on the internet, you know, are not black and white at all.
	And kids make jokes about them all the time.
	And it's sort of like, you know, through this process of humor and memes and things like that, we really are becoming sort of immune.
	I just interviewed a Facebook insider.
	And one of the things he said to me was, I really became kind of desensitized to pedophilia because I saw so much of it as a content moderator.
Living an Extraordinary Life 00:09:12
	Oh, my goodness.
	Facebook.
	Yeah, think about that for a moment, right?
	Can I ask you, how old are your kids now?
	11, 12, and 16.
	Oh, yeah.
	So we're basically in the same spot.
	Mine are.
	11, 10, and 7.
	So we're fighting the same battles.
	I have a different question on that for you because one of the things I've always admired about you and one of the things I said to Doug last night was, I got to get out of the house more.
	This woman's life has been so extraordinary.
	Like, I have never even been in the Middle East, never mind living in Afghanistan and Iraq for five years.
	Plus, just all the war zone coverage you've done.
	You've lived an extraordinary life and you're my age.
	I have done none of that.
	I've been in a different arena, a weird political arena, which is Also, awful political news in its own way.
	Terrifying.
	Terrifying.
	But yours is exciting and adventurous.
	And you clearly have a Jones for, I don't know, excitement and travel and being on the story.
	And I wondered if now that you're the mother of three children and you're living down in Texas and you're not necessarily in Afghanistan, these places, you know, because motherhood in general requires a different lifestyle.
	It does, right?
	So how are you handling that?
	You know, I'm so mad about my children.
	Honestly, it's that, you know, you know from being a mom, right?
	You think, how could you ever come back from a trip, a work trip, and walk into the house and not collapse, you know?
	But you do.
	When you're a mom, you walk into the house and you pick up that baby and you don't sleep for the next two weeks, right?
	You don't catch up on that sleep.
	And what is that thing when you've got a new baby and, you know, you can barely stand, but you somehow find a way to get up and get there and do all the things that your child needs?
	It's that love that drives you.
	And I am just so consumed with all the things that I'm trying to do better every day and seem to fail at constantly as a mom that I don't ever get a lot of time to dwell on it.
	I mean, I'll be honest, it's, you know, when I see things happening in the news, I have to fight every instinct in my body.
	I was born to rush to the fire, not.
	Away from it, right?
	That's how I'm designed.
	And I don't mean that in a sense of adventure.
	I mean it in a sense of that urgency to get to the heart of something that matters and see it for yourself and to understand it and learn about it and then share that.
	I mean, as much as I do interviews and I am sort of out there, it really for me is about the stories that I get to tell.
	That's the thing that I love more than anything else.
	The reason I don't have a podcast is really that I've just never been able to come up with a way that I can still do the storytelling.
	And that's what I do in my show, you know, is to be that traditional old reporter where I think that all these things that I've been given, all these experiences, the ability to survive in Egypt and live through, you know, going over a landmine and my vehicle blowing up and all the firefights that I've been in where, you know, I could have been killed.
	All of those things were given to me because I was meant to be this vehicle where I can tell the stories of people who maybe sometimes otherwise their stories wouldn't be known.
	And that's what I love to do.
	That's really and truly what I love to do.
	So it has been hard without any shadow of a doubt.
	I mean, Syria was torture for me because I, I mean, although I went there once or twice, I really wasn't in the heart of the war.
	You know, now I have a child who looks at me when I'm walking out the door going to Mexico and says, Mom, is it safe?
	Can I come with you if it's safe then?
	You know, and that's so hard.
	So, I think it's just that overwhelming love for my children that, and the difficulty of being a working mom and, you know, still trying to do everything.
	Those things combined don't really give me enough time to lament my, you know, I have a suspicion.
	I have a suspicion about you.
	I feel like when I was just picturing Lara Logan, mom, right?
	And still reporter, but not the chief foreign affairs correspondent all over the world.
	I'm like, I bet she takes out the butcher knife and does all the chopping the vegetables.
	I bet she is like the first to say she'll jump, she'll bungee jump when they go on a vacation.
	She drives in the fast lane.
	You know, like you're probably working out this need for excitement and adrenaline in ways you're not even conscious of.
	And then I thought, listen, not to dump on myself too much, but you get back to me, sister, when you walked around the Upper West Side with the Fox News hat on, okay?
	Because that takes real courage.
	You know who my heroes are?
	Like those mothers that.
	You know, the ones that doctor and her kids eat sushi every day at school and they're never late and they do all their work and they do 19 after school events.
	I hate those people.
	They're your heroes.
	I can't stand them.
	I know because I'm like, oh my gosh.
	If my underwear isn't safety pinned together, you know, I'm having a good day, right?
	Seriously.
	That could end badly.
	I don't think that should be your go to.
	I mean, because that's my thing is, I mean, I hear you, you know, and then they work out.
	On top of everything else, right?
	Oh, God, those bitches.
	And they always look perfect and they wear accessories.
	How do they have time for accessories?
	That's so true.
	Seriously, I'm still in my pajamas.
	Thank goodness this isn't on camera.
	I honestly, I'm going to reveal that I am in the same outfit I've been in three days in a row.
	I am, Abby's like, oh, you are.
	I am.
	And it's black sweatpants and a white t shirt.
	That's as much effort as I decided to.
	Let me tell you, when you're the one doing the laundry, you know, that's what happens, right?
	Well, I'm not the one doing the laundry for full disclosure.
	I'm just living like this.
	I live in the countryside and I am very often doing the laundry and cleaning the toilets and taking out the trash and trying to fix the dishwasher and all that stuff.
	Yeah.
	That's yelling at you that you're doing it wrong.
	Yes.
	Listen, I'm so happy for you.
	I'm so, this is what I love about Fox.
	I mean, obviously, I have some issues with my time there, but overall, I have gratitude in my heart for my time at Fox News and the people who work there and the mission that they.
	Are pursuing.
	And Fox Nation gave you a great platform and you're doing important work, which I saw firsthand as I went back through your reporting on so many good issues that get ignored.
	So I recommend everybody check it out.
	And I really hope this is the first of many.
	Please come back.
	Oh, Megan, thank you so much.
	You know, I'm grateful too.
	And honestly, I don't care anymore about sort of the detractors and all of that.
	I really don't care.
	They don't have the power to upset me.
	I care about injustice, but we're.
	There's something much bigger ahead of us.
	And, you know, I have no doubt that when the dust settles, we'll be the ones still standing.
	Amen.
	See you soon, I hope.
	Thank you.
	Oh, don't miss the show on Monday.
	Daryl Davis is coming on.
	Do you remember when Barry Weiss came on the show and we were talking about FAIR, that organization that she and I are both connected to Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism?
	And she was saying, look at the people who are on this show, like people like Daryl Davis.
	And Darryl Davis, there's a documentary about his life, which is really good.
	We'll get into it.
	But he has basically spent part of his life trying to convince Klan members to leave the Klan.
	He's collected.
	Like dozens, I think he said, of Klansmen's robes.
	They leave the Klan and then they give Darryl Davis, a black man, their Klan robes.
	The stuff he has done and how he's gone about it are so fascinating.
	I may make kids watch it because it's actually kid-friendly for my older ones.
	And his story is totally inspirational.
	And he is a big proponent right now that we are focusing on race the wrong way.
	What we need to be focusing on is the human race.
	and not black race or white race or skin color in general.
	And he's a guy who's lived it.
	You're going to love him.
	It's Monday.
	Have a great weekend.
	Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
	The Megyn Kelly Show is a devil-may-care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

Chapters

00:00:00 Escaping the Escort Service Trap
00:15:10 Digital Control and Grooming Tactics
00:28:12 The Principle of Personal Responsibility
00:34:32 Indoctrination in the McCarthy Era
00:37:42 Doctors, Masks, and Controversial Drugs
00:46:03 Border Policies and Cartel Connections
01:01:29 Open Borders and Welfare State Lies
01:03:40 Planned Border Facilities Exposed
01:19:35 Media Bias and False Narratives
01:28:18 Leaked Records and Professional Betrayal
01:33:44 Surviving Accusations with Dignity
01:49:08 Resilience Against Racist Labels
01:52:56 Redefining Identity Beyond Trauma
02:03:48 Pushing Back Against the Bullshit
02:07:46 Finding Humor in Immunity
02:11:54 Living an Extraordinary Life