The Megyn Kelly Show - 20210609_exposing-the-embarrassing-elites-with-sohrab-ahmar

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June 9, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show

02:02:58

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Branching Out With Guests 00:03:37
	And now, what's up from Kix?
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	We are going to the beauty store at the Nurstres.
	And you can also have a kit kit.
	So, welcome to the beauty store in your kit.
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	Fiken presentes here at Super Enkele Trends Class Program.
	For your ascend-facture and for your drifting.
	That's it.
	Fiken at Super Enkele Trends Class Program.
	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.
	Today, the embarrassment of the elites.
	Whether it's Hunter Biden, the COVID lab theory, or the influence and importance of the mainstream media, our elites have gotten it wrong.
	Time and time again, as they've tried to stifle us, shut us up, embarrass us, it's wound up coming back to haunt them.
	And they're being exposed now in a really important, profound way.
	That's sort of the theme of where we're going with today's show and with today's guests.
	So we're going to kick it off with a guy named Sarab Amari.
	He writes for the New York Post and he's a deep thinker.
	This is a guy who's got a new book out, but he's been thinking about the conservative movement and where we are in society for a while now and was really at.
	Behind a lot of the Hunter Biden pushing and arguing and standing up for his paper, saying they should not have been silenced on that.
	And it turns out he was 100% right.
	Where's his apology?
	Not forthcoming.
	We'll get into his new book and what he thinks about the latest pushback on critical race theory by a Carmel mom, the latest racist invited to speak on the campus of Yale about how she has fantasies of killing white people, and the media yawn in response, and so on.
	And then we're going to bring on.
	Crystal and Saga are back.
	Crystal Ball, Saga and Jetty, who have a new adventure.
	They've decided to branch out.
	They're leaving the Hill.
	They're going independent because they wanted to live their values.
	You know, they've been talking about the collapse of mainstream media and they didn't want corporate backers.
	They wanted to be on their own.
	So what do they think about where we are today in terms of media coverage and just the messaging, the control of these mighty messengers over the rest of us?
	And then my pal, Dan Abrams, is back.
	He runs Abrams Media and the website Mediaite, which I recommend to everybody.
	And he's here for a couple of reasons.
	Number one, we're going to talk about the horrific performance by the media when it comes to these issues, in particular the COVID lab leak theory.
	But number two, he's written a very cool new book on Jack Ruby, on the assassination by Jack Ruby.
	He's the guy who killed Oswald after Oswald killed JFK.
	Remember?
	And so he's taken a deep dive into that case to figure out what really happened.
	Was Jack Ruby working for the mob or Castro or somebody else?
	And this is kind of his thing.
	He's got a series on interesting legal cases that have been I don't know, ignored or forgotten.
	The latest is called Kennedy's Avenger.
	And I think you'll find the discussion really interesting.
	So, packed show for you today.
	So, we're going to kick things off with Sarab Amari in one second.
	He's the one who has just authored this book, which is tearing it up.
	He was talking about it with Tucker, a really good discussion.
	It's called The Unbroken Thread Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
	He's up in 60 seconds.
The Kennedy Avenger Case 00:09:07
	Don't go away.
	Sarab, thank you so much for being here.
	Megan, thank you for having me.
	I'm excited.
	This conversation.
	I'm a big fan of your writings and the way you think and your boldness in expressing opinions that you know, even quote, your side won't like.
	So I I admire you as a disruptor.
	And let me start with the thing.
	I don't really have huge interest any longer in the fight with David French, but I did at the time.
	And let me tell you something.
	You changed my mind because I had always liked David French, National Review.
	He's sort of, you know, I don't know.
	He says people accuse me of being a squish, but he's, you know, I don't know.
	People can make up their own minds.
	But you were making really important points about how his future of conservatism is not the future of conservatism and that every battle is going to be lost if we follow, sort of, if the right follows the.
	The David French approach.
	And I was like, oh, so mean.
	So, Rob, so mean.
	And the more I read what you wrote, the more I was like, you know what?
	He's right.
	He's right.
	Can you just encapsulate what the difference was there and why you felt so strongly about how the right needs to be fighting these cultural battles?
	I guess the main difference is whether or not your commitment as a political movement is to mere procedure.
	Rights, norms, and so on and so forth, or whether you have a substantive vision of what society should look like, and whether you recognize that whether you like it or not, the other side has a substantive vision that they plan to enshrine.
	It's a very destructive one, as we've seen with things like critical race theory or the aggressions of gender ideology, where we're asked to affirm things that we just know are not true, not only going against the teachings of the Of the Bible, but also the teachings of genetics and what we know about the immutability of sex and so on.
	They're intent on enshrining that vision in the public square.
	And that will always happen.
	Some orthodoxy or other will always dominate our public square.
	So the question is is the right prepared also to, not just the right, even I want to say, but sane Americans are prepared to defend certain.
	Truths in the public square and stand for them, not just saying, Well, I want to have my view and you have yours, because that just doesn't work.
	It has never worked in history.
	Always there's some orthodoxy that reigns.
	And the one we face is particularly not only out of tune with reality, but incredibly vicious and kind of quasi totalitarian.
	And so you have to meet their quote unquote creed with your own creed, which You know, I argue that is kind of like our Judeo Christian heritage, the classical heritage, the Greco Roman teachings of philosophy, that's what we have.
	And by the way, you know, in doing so, we don't do away with rights or procedures, those are important.
	But our approach to the things that David French cares about has to be ordered to some higher purpose or some vision of what do we want as a conservative movement for American society?
	What's important to us?
	Family.
	Faith, what do we want our communities to look like?
	And to stand for those and not just say, well, we'll just agree to disagree.
	I mean, that's just not working.
	Is the battle still on, or has the other side won?
	Oh, I mean, there's no definitive victory in all of these things.
	I would say that we have to begin from the point of view that our worldview, and when I say our, I mean, again, I hesitate to use conservative because it doesn't quite capture.
	What I'm getting at, but the side of sanity has been swept out of nearly all the major institutions of American life.
	This has become especially clear over the past few years, where a lot of, again, like National Review type conservatives.
	Became complacent because they thought, well, at least we have businesses on our side and that's economic reality.
	And so that won't go crazy woke.
	When in fact, we see that now corporate America is one of the major drivers, it's the tip of the sphere of the wokefication of American society.
	And so we used to think of it, oh, that's just the crazy stuff in academe, it's among a fringe of professors.
	No, it's swept far beyond that.
	And so I think that recognition that we don't have anyone on our side, except I would hope the good sense of the majority of American people who don't want critical race theory, that doesn't mean that they're racist.
	They just don't want this perverse ideology masquerading as anti racism to be imposed on their children.
	They don't want the insanity of having their daughters compete in sports against biological males, and so on and so forth.
	We have to recognize that, except for the good sense of the American people, we don't have any institutional power.
	And that's kind of liberating in some ways.
	Then you think, okay, well, here we are.
	But at least that means you're not laboring under any illusion that the right has any kind of cultural purchase anymore.
	We really don't.
	That's exactly right.
	I've said this many times, but it's just better to know what reality is, right?
	The reality yesterday is the same as it is today, but perhaps you've received new information about where people really stand.
	We know the media has been unmasked in a way that was really important, corporate America too, sports and so on.
	I don't think even just four years ago, They were understood in that way.
	And that's one great gift of the Trump administration.
	You know, the four years under Trump was yes, he was a destroyer of many things that needed to be destroyed, like the mask that was on the media on a place like CNN, for example.
	That's just, I mean, you can go so much bigger.
	It's so much bigger than cable news now.
	And so that's good.
	We know where we stand.
	And it's not just conservatives.
	You know, I talk to you're in New York like I am.
	I talk to my liberal friends all the time.
	Friends who I have who on their texts will describe themselves to me with a little fire.
	Emoji liberal, right?
	Like that's how they describe themselves who are on the side of you and of me when it comes to these issues, because they also want to fight back against the insanity.
	They don't want drag queen story hour.
	They don't want bullying of trans people.
	They want kindness and equal rights and understanding, but they do not want a drag queen, whatever, showing up at their kindergartens, you know, day of learning his colors and prancing around in a tutu.
	If you've seen footage from Drag Queen Story Hour, and I really don't want to be forever to the end of my days be associated with my opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour, but it's typically like latex, you know, high heels.
	It's not tutus, you know, it's this bizarre kind of fetishistic vision, which, you know, I should say I live in Midtown Manhattan and I literally live right above a drag bar, which like, you know, women use.
	I do.
	And it just, it's Midtown East and it's a place where people like typically go for their bridal.
	Uh, kind of, uh, oh, right, you know, parties or whatever.
	And, and I don't mind it at all because I recognize that's a place it's always kind of been part of New York culture.
	It doesn't have this element of, but let's normative, you know, make this normative for children and encourage this as a worldview or a way of being in the world.
	It's, you know, it's a subculture in a way, it has all its charm in being a subculture.
	It becomes so true, you know, oppressive when it's, you know, there's this attempt to make it, uh, Impose it on kids, which is just obviously perverse.
	No, you're so right.
	There was, I used to go to this again.
	Is the term transvest?
	Yes, it's just drag queen.
	And we transvest, it's okay.
	It's okay.
	I mean, men who dress up, they're often straight men who just like to dress up as women.
	It's not quite the same as transgender yet.
	It's not to be confused with transgender, which is, you know, you actually identify as a different gender.
	But like RuPaul, that's not RuPaul.
	RuPaul is a man who likes to dress up as a woman.
	But they had like a drag bar there that was so fun.
	We used to go to it all the time and you'd be very confused.
	I mean, it was all the men who would go, be very confused.
	These were amazingly attractive, you know, people who appeared as women but weren't.
	And you knew that at some level.
	And yet your eyes belied what your brain knew.
	Anyway, fine for adults and fun.
	And like you say, subculture, and it's fun to sort of stick a toe into that world, even as, you know, mainstream people.
Elite Schools and Woke Rules 00:03:29
	But yeah, I don't want it in front of my six year old.
	And I do think, you tell me what you think, but I do think more and more this year.
	So even when I launched the podcast, it was like the last week of September.
	And now here we are in June.
	I've seen a massive shift in people getting ready to push back against these cultural insanities.
	I see, I mean, especially again, not to make it this a New York podcast, but like you, I know lots of.
	Liberal parents who are, believe it or not, friends with notorious reactionary Sarah Pomari.
	And they come up to me and say, you know, I'm really worried about the race stuff at my kids' private school.
	And they're paying, you know, $50,000, $60,000 a year for these Ivy feeder schools like Brearley and Dalton.
	And they have to attend, for example, these Zoom meetings where the parents and their children have to unpack their biases and privileges.
	As white people or as Asians, because the Asians are often lumped in.
	And they have to keep their cameras on.
	So to show that they're kind of really plugged in.
	And, you know, you're not allowed to turn the camera off?
	No, you're not allowed.
	At least as some of this couple we know who they have older children and their older children attend a couple of these different schools, they tell me that you have to keep your Zoom on to show that you're into the conversation.
	But at any rate, they come up to me and privately kind of whisper that.
	I don't like this.
	I want my kid to learn.
	I don't want my kid to just endlessly solipsistically meditate on his or her own identity and sexuality and race and so forth.
	I want him to learn about the Napoleonic Wars and poetry and Homer or whatever.
	And so that's good.
	I mean, I just worry that a lot of elite parents will just say that privately to me, the one kind of out conservative that they know.
	At the end of the day, they want their kids to go to Columbia or whatever.
	So they'll bite the bullet.
	And so we have to have a discussion.
	I saw you had a piece in the New York Post.
	And I was like, this is another good point, talking about how your liberal friends pour out their anguish to you on fears of these woke radicals and that you're wearying of the job because they're kind of part of the problem.
	As much as we appreciate them being on the side of sanity, if it's just secret, it does us no good.
	That you wrote, they are prepared to tolerate woke rule.
	If it means passing on their elite status to their progeny.
	And I do think one of the reasons why, you know, we pulled our kids from these schools pretty quickly once I realized what was going on was I do not have any elite academic status that I need to pass on.
	And I don't care if they go to Harvard at all.
	In fact, I'm really starting to think that's the last place I want them to go.
	I don't need, I have no idea where they should go, but someplace that won't indoctrinate them is my hope, or, you know, at least someplace. where the push isn't so strong, it's going to overcome the K through 12 years that my husband and I have spent trying to counter program against that.
	But you're right.
	Most people here in New York, they have beautiful academic pedigrees and not just in New York, in all the big cities.
	And so, yeah, if they don't like it, they go along with it.
	And some of them like it.
	And some of them, like my husband just had lunch with a friend who was like, eh, it'll pass.
	It's not that big a thing.
	And, you know, Doug and I are like, no, no, no, it's a big thing.
Fighting School Board Poison 00:04:51
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, these types of movements, you know, look at any kind of historical perspective, they don't pass.
	Or they pass after having left in their wake just the massive ruin.
	Right.
	Ruination and despair.
	Right, exactly.
	So, one good thing, and it always comes out of places where you have more salt to the earth people that I saw over the weekend was this woman out of Carmel, New York.
	I don't know if you saw this.
	Now, please forgive me because we cut like a three minute clip of this woman because I'm in love with her.
	I'm not in love with this woman.
	And she, here's the scene, okay?
	She showed up at her school board meeting, and this woman had a few words to share with the school board, which was, Pushing an agenda that was totally anti cop, pro BLM, pro socialism and communism, according to her.
	She kept saying she had proof.
	They kept trying to shut her up.
	She wouldn't shut up.
	She actually said, I'm going to be your worst nightmare.
	And I just, ladies and gentlemen, this is how it's done.
	All right, listen to her.
	My message to this district and the members of the Board of Ed stop indoctrinating our children.
	Stop teaching our children to hate the police.
	Stop teaching our children that if they don't agree with the LGBT community, they're homophobic.
	You have no idea each child's life.
	Why am I not allowed when they purposely themselves expose themselves on social media, talking about calling for the death of a former president, or saying that any child that doesn't believe in Black Lives Matter should be canceled out?
	Is this what my tax dollars is paying for?
	You're teaching my children and other children that if they believe in God Almighty, they're part of a cult.
	Why can't we let the public know that you're teaching our children to go out and murder our police officers?
	Do you want the proof?
	I have the proof.
	Is that what scares you?
	The proof that a parent actually is standing up against all of you?
	Is that what scares you to call out the names of these people?
	You work for me.
	I don't work for you.
	We are entrusting our children to you.
	We teach our children morals, values when they grow up to commit crimes and end up in prison and kill a police officer.
	It's our fault?
	No, it's your fault.
	You're emotionally abusing our children and mentally abusing them.
	You're demoralizing them by teaching them communist values.
	This is still America, ma'am.
	And as long as I'm standing here on this good ground earth of God, I will fight.
	And this is not the last of me you will see.
	I'm retired.
	I have nothing else better to do.
	We can do it peacefully or we can take it to the highest courts because you know and I know I'm not the only parent fighting is all across America right now schools are trying to poison our children's minds Do you know who makes up the majority of this district?
	Children from police officers families blues back the blue children Do you know what these children feel like when they come home?
	Have you spoken to them?
	No, you're silencing them this whole cancel culture You're silencing the children.
	Where are their rights?
	They have no rights.
	Because if they don't believe in the indoctrination, the demonic, twisted, sneaky, vile.
	Acts and education, if you call it that, that you're teaching our children, they don't agree with that.
	They're either homophobic, they're part of a cult, they're racist.
	What's racist?
	Who defines racist?
	Why?
	Because I'm, do you know what race I am?
	Do you?
	You don't.
	You don't even have an idea.
	I could be black, I could be white, I could be Asian.
	You don't know.
	Who are you to determine that?
	Who is anyone to determine that?
	You know what?
	Children in the school system, Children, like other children, they don't look at color.
	Black and white children, Hispanic children, you know why they get along?
	Because they don't look at each other's color.
	So you're the racist, not them, not us.
	You're judging and dividing, you're causing segregation.
	I have a problem when teachers are passing out flyers, recruiting children to go to the courthouse to protest Black Lives Matter when you have people sitting with signs that say all cops are bastards.
	Really?
	All cops are bastards?
	No, I think you people are.
Grassroots Power on Boards 00:04:14
	The chair you're sitting on, we pay for it.
	The lights that are on, we pay for it.
	We pay for everything.
	You want to silence me because I spoke the truth.
	I spoke the truth.
	This indoctrination and hatred towards our police officers, this systematic racism and cancel culture is going to end.
	You came to the wrong school district to do this, okay?
	Yes!
	Her name is Tatiana Ibrahim.
	Carmel, New York is just north of New York City.
	It's in Putnam County, which is more blue collar, more working class.
	And as she says, a lot of cops as the parent.
	In those families, there.
	And she stood up for a reason.
	There was a little clip of it in there, Sora, but there was the one moment where she's like, I pay your salary.
	And somebody on the board is like, Actually, this is a volunteer position.
	We don't get paid.
	She goes, You heard, who's paying for that chair?
	Who do you think's paying for the electricity?
	Who's paying for this room?
	I'm in love with her.
	That's how it's done.
	You don't have to.
	We pulled our kids.
	You don't have to.
	You can go to the Board of Ed meeting and unleash, like Tatiana, and stand up against this indoctrination, like she did.
	That was so rousing, Megan.
	And as you played that, I was kind of pumping my fist in my own room alone.
	It was terrific.
	And, you know, it just goes to show where the future lies if there's a political movement that wants to be successful.
	I think where it lies is a combination, basically, something that speaks to Tatiana.
	What does someone like Tatiana want?
	She wants her kids to attend school and be not indoctrinated, but to be taught actual knowledge that may be useful to him or her in life.
	They want law and order because we know what happens when law and order breaks down.
	We saw the riots over the summer and the fact that so many politicians cheered it.
	And they want a kind of decent economic order.
	That doesn't mean they want socialism, that doesn't mean they want ultra capitalism, but a decent economic order, the way that President Trump However, incoherently spoke to these kind of economic anxieties, where, you know, taken all together, this combination of cultural wokeism and an economy that works really, really well for elites and leaves a lot of people in the working middle behind, that's not worked out well.
	And so, if any movement of whether it's a Democrat or a Republican, although increasingly I think it's likely to come from on the Republican side of things, that can just address that.
	Will capture the middle.
	What's very insidious about our kind of blob of corporate, academic, and media power that rules us.
	Is they present really, really extreme positions, really, really kind of positions that are unpalatable to the vast, vast majority of people of all races, like defunding the police, like teaching gender ideology to little kids, like, you know, kind of pursuing climate change policies that make gas really expensive and can drive up consumer prices and so forth.
	But they present it all as the mainstream.
	And then the The fringe becomes the far right or the far left, whoever doesn't quite fit into that, even though it's where the majority of Americans are on these issues.
	So, if you could just capture that and say, no, no, no, you're the extremist, Mr. Board Member, Education Board Member in Carmel, New York, you're the extremist, you know, whoever, blue check type, who says that there's, you know, 157 genders, that's insane.
	You can easily win.
	So, we just need politicians to now, people who are willing to use power responsibly to give a voice to Tatiana's.
	And then hopefully, people like her.
	Actually, going in to take seats on school boards, to take seats on local district kind of governing bodies and so forth.
	That's part of the answer grassroots.
	Get on the boards.
	You can't just yell at the boards.
	You've got to get on the boards.
Politicians Must Use Power 00:08:31
	We have to run the boards.
	We have to make sure that this is stopped when it's a seedling as opposed to when it's already spread in the schools.
	And I will say, I mean, I will confess to you my brother is a police officer, he's a lieutenant.
	And I wrote letters to all of my schools when this whole thing started breaking saying, Just so you know, my children have an uncle who is a decorated police officer, and I do not want him or his brethren to be demonized in any classroom in which my child sits.
	You owe a responsibility.
	You have a responsibility.
	You owe a duty to my child to make sure that you are not condemning wide swaths of people based on the actions of this one man who we're covering, Derek Chauvin.
	And so you do have to get involved.
	I don't like giving a hard time to the head of school or to the teachers.
	I like them.
	You know, in my schools, I care about them.
	But it's about more than just your personal relationships.
	It's about principle.
	But to your point about they're the extremists, I've been thinking about Amy Chua, you know, her tiger mom, Yale law school professor, totally beloved on Yale on the campus.
	The students are lining up to get into her class every year.
	And they've been coming after her this year, of course.
	And they're pretending it's because she had students at her house and they had drinks.
	They basically slapped her husband with some BS.
	It was sort of a Me Too situation, but it wasn't.
	He didn't do anything.
	It was basically he complimented some girl on her outfit.
	And suddenly they treated him like he was Harvey Weinstein.
	We've lost our minds.
	Anyway, as a result, I guess they agreed not to have students to the house drinking.
	The school was like, Oh, you did?
	She said, Actually, no.
	I had young Asian women over who were scared about the trend of violence against young Asian people.
	The point is, Yale's coming for her.
	And the real reason is she supported Brett Kavanaugh.
	And I don't know whether she's a Democrat or Republican.
	I have no idea.
	But she knew Brett Kavanaugh and she respected his legal work, and she did not see the case that was being made against him.
	She had a lot of experience with sending clerks to him who had very positive experiences, blah, blah, blah.
	She's never been forgiven for that.
	Okay, so that's Yale.
	The same Yale.
	Okay, now it's not the law school, but over at the med school, the Yale School of Medicine's Child Study Center, Child Study Center.
	Invited a lunatic two months ago, not even, this is April 2021, to speak to the young doctors there.
	And the woman's name, as it turns out, the woman who spoke is a doctor.
	She's a psychiatrist, Dr. Aruna Kilanani.
	She previously taught at Cornell, Columbia, and NYU.
	Yet another reason not to send your kids there.
	And this doctor got up in front of her audience for almost an hour and gave a lecture entitled The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.
	We know about this because Katie Herzog, again writing for Barry Weiss's Substack, which has turned out to be a treasure trove, was sent a copy of the audio recording.
	And listen to what?
	So, Amy Chua.
	Beloved, brilliant.
	She's a problem.
	But this lunatic can get up in front of the young doctors of America, the future doctors, and say as follows.
	Listen.
	This is the cost of talking to wet people at all.
	The cost of your own life as they suck you dry.
	There are no good apples, don't you?
	White people make my blood boil.
	I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any wet person that got in my way, garing their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless.
	with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a fucking favor.
	We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste at our breath.
	We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero to accept responsibility.
	It ain't going to happen.
	We need to remember that directly talking about race to white people is useless because we're at the wrong level of conversation.
	Addressing racism assumes that white people can see and process what we are talking about.
	They can't.
	That's why they sound demented.
	They don't even know they have a mask on.
	White people think it's their actual face.
	You might forget to know them now.
	Okay, so just because that was a little garbled, just the highlights were the cost of talking to white people is your own life.
	There are no good apples.
	White people make my blood boil.
	Fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, wiping my bloody hands as I walked away, relatively guiltless, with a bounce in my step like I did the world an effing favor.
	White people are out of their minds, they've been for a long time.
	Talking about race is a waste of time.
	We're asking a demented, violent predator.
	Who thinks they're a saint or a superhero to accept responsibility?
	Because it came out, Yale ultimately had to apologize and say, oh, it's not really consistent with our values.
	But this is where we are.
	This person was allowed to come on campus and say all of this.
	And had it not been leaked, a couple of people complained.
	I don't know.
	I think we'd probably get a lot more like her.
	And she's still in private practice therapizing people right now with those messages.
	I shudder to think.
	What her patients will, for example, if they have caucasian patients, she has Caucasian patients.
	Right.
	You might want to pat her down before your therapy session.
	Look, I'm trying to understand what this ideology is coming from.
	And the best account that I've been able to muster, and I think a few others have wised up to this as well, is it's an ideology that tries to account for the fact that in this country, kind of our quote unquote meritocratic elites.
	Have done really well.
	As I understand, this woman is an immigrant or a child of immigrants.
	And so obviously, and now, you know, within a short span of immigrating, either her or her parents immigrating, you know, she's in the has she's one entree into the highest circles of her profession.
	And that's, you know, and so people like her and people in her class have done very well for themselves.
	But they've sort of, they have to kind of convince themselves that it's not.
	That it's just their pure ability to do this.
	And it's their own kind of ability to take tests very well and get to the places that they have.
	And they don't owe anything to a larger society that made it possible for them to rise.
	And maybe there are others who haven't done well out of our current economic and political arrangements.
	That our nation is very good at kind of tapping elites and siphoning them off into coastal areas, and they cluster together and they're very diverse.
	There's lots of people who don't get to participate in that.
	So, how do you deal with that, including the fact that these people feel left behind?
	Do you kind of create a more economically just society?
	Do you help them out?
	Do you whatever?
	Or you can kind of frame all of them.
	The great middle of this country as this horde of horrible racists and deplorables and so forth.
	And if you frame them that way, then you have, as an elite, no responsibility to everyone else.
	Normally, in the kind of great tradition of the West, there was always elites and there will always be elites.
	That's fine, just because human beings have different abilities.
	But the idea of being an elite was, especially even in this country, with its kind of Protestant establishment, was that you became an elite and you then.
	Had a responsibility to everyone else.
	The whole point of you being an elite was for you to serve others.
	But we now have an elite that kind of feels completely disconnected from the rest of society, believes itself to be just a pure product of meritocracy, and can't explain its own rise.
	So it has to frame everyone else as I don't have any responsibility to them because they're horrible racists and they should just shut up.
	Or in the case of this doctor, they should literally be shot dead.
	And so that's the best explanation I can come up with for this kind of woke ideology.
	And again, I have it in my social circle of people who are very, very wealthy.
	They're immigrants, like let's say from Korea or wherever, and they've embraced Black Lives Matter and defund the police.
Russian Disinformation Lies 00:03:25
	Of course, they have these apartments, they live in parts of the country, whether it's in LA or New York, where they would have private security if law and order broke down.
	They have every kind of private defense.
	It's working class people, including working class people of color, who'll pay.
	For their preferred policies, like defunding the police.
	But I just think it's a way to explain their own elite status and why they don't care about most of the country.
	And they've got buy in from big tech.
	This has been something you've been jumping up and down about because you were part of the Hunter Biden reporting and that story at the Post that was suppressed, that we were told couldn't air.
	Facebook.
	No, it can't air.
	Twitter.
	No, it can't be circulated at all.
	This is the same Facebook that banned any discussion of whether COVID originated in a Wuhan lab.
	Which it very much, I mean, honestly, like, how can you reach any other conclusion now?
	They told you guys you couldn't report on Hunter.
	They told all of us we couldn't speak of the Wuhan lab leak theory.
	And they're not learning any lessons.
	There's no introspection there, there's no apologies.
	Yeah.
	I mean, we were bit by both of those stories.
	We were censored with our Hunter Biden reporting, which remains undisputed.
	Neither Hunter nor his father actually disputes the authenticity of the emails.
	You know, the thrust of our reporting.
	Remains unchallenged.
	That's right.
	All they can say is this Russian disinformation and so forth.
	It could be.
	Remember, Hunter said to CBS, it could be.
	Could be Russian injury.
	Could be.
	You don't know if you left a laptop there.
	You don't know if you made a laptop or made those videos and did all those drugs and with the hookers and all those.
	Do you know whether those are yours?
	Because there's thousands of them.
	So one might look familiar.
	Yeah.
	And you had 50 intelligence officials.
	And again, this is so discrediting to the so called intelligence community.
	They released a letter at the height of this.
	Saying this bears all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, again, with zero evidence.
	So, yeah, we were suppressed on that count.
	And we had a column, an opinion column by Steve Mosher, who's a great China scholar.
	In February 2020, so kind of at the beginning of the crisis, saying, Look, it's possible.
	He didn't say definitively, but he said, It's possible that this was a lab leak.
	And his reasoning was quite simple.
	And in retrospect, it seemed so obvious.
	He said, Is it crazy that the epicenter of the virus happens to be also where this lab is located, where it's the only lab and virus capable of handling coronaviruses?
	But Facebook censored that as well.
	And so, and again, keep in mind, we're talking about the New York Post, it's America's oldest.
	Continuously published daily newspaper.
	It was founded by one of the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton.
	So, you know, these tech firms have become a kind of the private enforcement arm of, again, of this elite that doesn't want to hear contrary theories.
	Because if you talk about what happened with China there, it calls into question their own comfortable relationship with China over decades.
	They made possible China's rise.
	Our kind of bipartisan establishment elite opened the doors to China's rise.
	So, the Wuhan Labli theory is uncomfortable because it reminds them that China is a very irresponsible actor.
	So, how do they deal with that?
	Well, they don't.
	They just censor views that might come into conflict.
Confucian Filiality Today 00:12:07
	And I think we have to be very careful now and think about the possibility that there's such a thing as private tyranny.
	Americans are very good and alert to the possibility of public tyranny, meaning government doing this or that.
	But we're a little bit less equipped for dealing with the prospect of large agglomerations of private power used in this way.
	Kind of monopolistically, oligopolistically, to make our freedoms kind of hollow, render our true freedoms hollow.
	Well, it kind of goes back to what you were talking about before, which is yes, process is important.
	Due process is really important.
	That too was written in there by one of those founders you mentioned.
	But toward what end?
	We have to keep asking that question.
	I'm just thinking about myself.
	Sometimes I focus too much on process as a lawyer, but I'm also a Catholic, you know, which sort of gets me to the other end.
	And I know you're, I would say, pretty devout because you came to it as a convert, right?
	The converts are always the most devout, like my nana.
	But that answers, I mean, religion for people, even if you're not particularly religious like me, I mean, I consider myself a Catholic and I was raised in the Catholic Church and still believe in its tenets, but I wouldn't call myself devout.
	But anyway, that helps you answer the other questions of, okay, once we get the process set, what are we shooting for?
	It can't just be let the ships fall where they may.
	You do actually need to have a dog in the hunt.
	And this is, I think, why you wrote your book.
	I mean, I think this is sort of one of the goals, right?
	So the book is called The Unbroken Thread, Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
	You're a very deep thinker.
	I really appreciated how deep you went because it brought me there too.
	But that was one of your points that faith in God has been gradually displaced in our country by faith in man and materialism.
	And process, while important, doesn't get us to the end of the questions we need to be asking ourselves.
	Yeah.
	So I wrote this book for my son, Max.
	He's four years old now.
	He was two when I started writing it.
	And so I started writing it pre corona.
	And in some ways, it became a prescient book of the moment as circumstances beyond.
	The book itself, namely the pandemic.
	But my fear for my son is as much as I'm an immigrant and I'm a grateful immigrant, I'm worried about the kind of man that our Western civilization will chisel out of my max.
	And I don't think, again, I don't mean that he'll become, I don't know, an opioid addict or have.
	Be utterly kind of dissolute, although God forbid that's a possibility too, and one should be alert to it.
	But that he'll just be one of our kind of purposeless elites with no sense of moral purpose in his life.
	Whereas he's named after this great Catholic saint, Maximilian Kolbe, who became canonized, who was canonized as a saint because he famously laid down his life for a stranger at Auschwitz.
	Someone else had been condemned to execution.
	That man cried out, Oh, but my wife and children.
	And Saint Maximilian said, Well, I'll step into his place.
	I'll take his punishment.
	And so that's how he was murdered by the Nazis.
	And so I'm trying to tether my Max to that Max.
	And how did that Max's great act of sacrifice come about?
	It was because of this deeper spiritual formation, this traditional formation that said that freedom isn't just process or isn't just having maximum choice or keeping your options open.
	Really, freedom is freedom to do what you ought to do.
	If it's freedom to do what you ought to do, you can do it even under the kind of most extreme conditions, which again, I hope never come about for my own son, but you can be free even in a Nazi death camp if you rest on this more solid ground of tradition and faith.
	And so that was my impetus for writing the book.
	And I frame it around unasked questions, questions that our age assumes have been answered because we have science or because we have technology, questions like, is God reasonable or how should you serve your parents?
	When in fact these questions are still pertinent to full and happy life.
	Because I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a theologian, I'm just a journalist and storyteller.
	I do it through the stories of great thinkers.
	So I think, I hope my son and potentially the reader will come to this and they'll just encounter not being hit over the head heavily with philosophy, but ideas blended in with the lives of great thinkers like St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, and some surprising ones like the feminist Andrea Dworkin or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
	Well, how about the part in the question seven how must you serve your parents?
	You just referenced it.
	Answered by Confucius, which is, I mean, congrats on getting that interview because that's big.
	And you say this, quoting his philosophy here, that the parent child relationship is the foundation of all relationships.
	We must put our parents' needs above all else and do so with love and joy.
	A child should spend three years mourning a parent's death and should not enjoy food, music, sex for that period.
	Now, I mean, I love my parents.
	I did lose my dad, but I certainly don't want to lose my mom anytime soon.
	But I have a feeling she would not want me to mourn her in that particular way.
	Right, yeah.
	I mean, so, and I don't suggest that we should pick up literally Confucian filiality norms.
	Thank goodness.
	Because it's for a completely different civilization.
	We're talking about 2,500 years ago in ancient China.
	But there's something in the spirit of Confucian filiality which I think can still be useful and illuminating for us today.
	And that's why Confucius asked, why do you owe these things to your parents?
	Why are you expected under Chinese ritual to refrain from basically being happy for three years after your parents die.
	And the reason is why is it three years?
	It's because during the first three years of your life, you were incredibly helpless.
	And for most of us, I mean, some people are blessed, some people are cursed with bad parents, and we have to acknowledge that.
	But for most of us, during those three years, it was our parents who just completely took care of us.
	You didn't have to ask your mom to feed you, you didn't have to ask your dad to take you to the doctor when you were sick.
	And in taking care of you that way, they kind of nurtured your moral imagination so that when you grow up, you begin to extend.
	Your sense of duty or loyalty to an ever larger share of people, your community, your larger family, and so forth.
	And it makes you feel they made you humane in that way by taking care of you.
	So, therefore, when they die, it should be an event for you because, and that hence the three years, you're recalling your own first three years of life when you were completely helpless.
	Now, again, as I go on in the chapter and make it clear that Confucian filiality norms are extreme.
	By our standards.
	And most modern Chinese, although they have some element of it in their own daily life, they no longer practice the three years of mourning.
	But it's useful to have some sense of this mysterious relationship between parents and child.
	The way you look like Megan, or the way I look like, the shape of our nose, the shape of our face, our hair is literally wouldn't be possible but for the union of these two people.
	So we owe them something.
	Yeah.
	I do think we forget that too much.
	Too much of the familial relationship in the West forgets that and is something to be admired about the Chinese parent child relationship, the more Eastern parent child relationship.
	And immigrants, too, a lot of immigrants who just willingly take care of their parents and would never offload the responsibilities.
	We have a filiality norm in the West, it comes from the Ten Commandments.
	So the Mosaic Law does say, honor your mother and father.
	And notably, it doesn't say, Only if they, you know, parentheses, only if they met your expectations as a parent.
	Just like with Confucian filiality norm, it neither has a kind of proviso for getting out if your parents were lousy.
	And that's very difficult for modern minds to wrap their head around because we're used to everything being transactional.
	If, you know, if so and so took care of me, then I'll take care of them in later life.
	If so and so was good to me, then I'll be good to them.
	But filiality norms, both in the Judeo Christian version and the Confucian version, Are kind of striking in that they say, look, no, you got to honor your mother and father.
	Well, I also appreciated your chapter on death.
	What's good about death?
	I realize this is a deeper discussion for a longer other time, but you hit on something that I've believed and I've lived my own life by, and it's what's allowed me to take big risks and achieve relative happiness as a human.
	And that is that death gives life a purpose.
	That life has meaning and value because there's an ending and we know there's an ending.
	Right.
	It's like a story.
	And the figure in the chapter is Seneca.
	And he says, as with a good story, what matters is that it has to have a beginning, middle, and an end.
	Whereas if we achieve this dream of a deathless world, which our scientists want to, and in some ways we saw in the COVID crisis, the attempt to defer death as long as possible.
	In doing so, we lose a lot else in the sense that heroism, for example, the heroism that we saw of first responders at the height of the pandemic, or the heroism of firefighters and policemen, so forth, those things only make sense in relation to the possibility of death.
	And so, if there's no end point, life kind of meanders.
	And the more you try to hang on to the sort of lifeline once it's reached its end point, the more you kind of degrade yourself.
	So, Seneca.
	Famously taught that you should begin each day thinking that you might die.
	And then you don't live actually fearfully, like you said, Megan.
	You actually, that gives you courage because you're like, okay, well, this could be the end today.
	That doesn't mean you take risks like a jackass, but you can go through life.
	Without this kind of constant anxiety and without a kind of life destroying anxiety about death, which we definitely saw with COVID over restrictions, like what we're doing to children now is criminal and it's born of an irrational, completely irrational, now proven unscientific fear of death.
	Right.
	It cannot be prevented, it cannot be avoided.
	What can be avoided is living poorly, making mundane life choices that lead to a dull existence.
	That's just, that's the deal.
	That was the deal when we came into this world.
	We have to accept it.
	There's no renegotiating that deal.
	There's only making the best of it and understanding there's a chance to make different choices, to help yourself along, just knowing that.
	I mean, I've said many times if there was one good thing about losing my parent at an early age, it was that realization.
	When you know it on a gut level as opposed to just an intellectual level, how short life is, how fleeting, how quickly it can be gone. it does lead you to make different and I would say better choices.
	And so while the instinct usually is to push thoughts of death out of one's mind, as it may not be entirely pleasant, you shouldn't.
	You should spend some time thinking about it, realizing it's coming.
	We don't know when.
	And I don't just put challenging yourself to live better.
Owning Your News Platform 00:15:17
	Absolutely.
	Well, Saurabh, I'm excited for you taking on these battles, whether it's Hunter Biden, COVID, or the crazy wokesters who are trying to change not just our city, but our Country.
	Big fan.
	And I wish you all the best with.
	I know the book is already kicking butt, but I hope this helps even more and that everybody should go out and buy a copy.
	Again, The Unbroken Thread Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
	All the best to you.
	Thank you, Megan.
	Really appreciate it.
	Up next, our pals Crystal and Sagar are back on why they broke away from their very successful show on thehill.com.
	Their show Rising was doing great, but.
	They wanted to be independent and it's a risk, right?
	So it's happening.
	How's it going?
	How's it going to differ from what they were doing before?
	And why did they think it was so important?
	That's next.
	Crystal Ball and Sagar and Jetty.
	Yay!
	Congratulations.
	Thank you.
	I'm thrilled you've decided to just go independent and do your thing because you're both stars and you should be working for yourselves.
	It's the new medium.
	And why wouldn't you?
	I mean, we talk all the time about how much we believe in independent media.
	And of course, as you know, it's like, it's scary to step out from under the corporate umbrella where, you know, you've got a certain amount coming in and you got health insurance and all that good stuff.
	But so far, it's gone really well.
	I mean, honestly, we've been blown away by the response.
	So we're just excited and grateful.
	Explain what it is.
	My understanding, Sagar, is that it's going to be on YouTube and it's going to be a podcast.
	That's right.
	So, we intentionally made it more difficult for ourselves.
	And we said for premium subscribers that they get to watch the full show uncut.
	So, we email that link to everybody an hour early before it goes live on YouTube, which is at 12 p.m. EST.
	And we give the full audio uncut as well.
	So, no odd breaks or anything, which is in their podcast player.
	That's through the awesome company that we partnered with, who's powering our premium subscribers.
	And then, everything else, it's just normal for people who can't afford it or just want to watch for free.
	It's available as clips, like it was for Rising, all on YouTube on our Breaking Points YouTube channel.
	Same thing on any podcast player.
	And is it like a sliding scale?
	Are you able to tell me how much it costs?
	Oh, so we have it at $10 a month.
	That's currently just how much it costs, or $100 a year for people who want to sign up.
	And that's all they have to do.
	That's cheap.
	That's cheap.
	That works for me.
	I'll do it.
	You've got me.
	Thank you.
	So, talk to me about why.
	Because I would say it looked to me like you did have a fair amount of editorial freedom while on the Hill.
	It's not exactly like working for Fox or MS or CNN.
	But what more did you want that you couldn't get unless you went independent, Crystal?
	Well, you're right.
	I certainly had way more editorial freedom at the Hill than I ever had at MSNBC.
	And, you know, we took a lot of risks there that I think were uncomfortable at times.
	For folks at the Hill.
	But, you know, there were a couple of things.
	I mean, number one, you know how these large organizations work.
	There are always going to be sort of pressure or incentive structures in place that make it more uncomfortable to cover certain topics.
	And so, you know, I would be lying if I said that, you know, I'm not a normal human being who would be influenced by those pressure and incentive structures.
	And there was also just an appearance that I really didn't like.
	So I'll give you an example.
	I don't know if you followed or covered this, Stephen Donziger, who One multi billion dollar settlement against Chevron in defense of indigenous people whose land had been polluted.
	And Chevron has come aggressively after him.
	He's been under trial under basically BS circumstances in New York.
	And I started seeing tweets that were like, why isn't Crystal covering this?
	Is it because The Hill is taking money from the American Petroleum Institute, which they do?
	They're in corporate enterprise.
	They get money from them, they get money from Coke Industries, they get money from pharma, they get all kinds of different.
	Sponsorships and money.
	And I hated even the idea that that was influencing our coverage.
	So, you know, we thought we were in a position to be able to make this work and truly live the values that we espouse.
	And so we stepped down and, you know, took the plunge.
	So, in the podcast, will there be ads or are we avoiding ads altogether?
	So, right now, we're just doing ads for ourselves.
	We're just saying, hey guys, if you don't want to listen to our annoying voice, just come and subscribe.
	I think I said that verbatim.
	Yet.
	It's a model.
	It's a model.
	You must really like hearing my voice a lot.
	So you should go ahead and subscribe.
	It's funny.
	You know, I think about it in myself now because I take ad money to, we're not subscription based, we're free.
	And if a news story were to come up involving one of my advertisers, I'd have to be very transparent with the audience that, you know, this is an advertisement, somebody who pays me.
	So, you know, I'm on dicey ground right now.
	That's one of the weirdnesses of being in media, but it's not totally distinct from having been on Fox News and You know, running gold ads all day.
	If there were bad news in the gold market, I suppose I would have had some Paz Men 2 or mesothelioma.
	What if I got mesothelioma?
	I think the main thing, Megan, is it's not that you can be opposed to advertising in principle.
	It's that if it's your only source of revenue, your primary source of revenue, then it could introduce factors like what you're talking about.
	So our goal here was to actually build like an anti fragile business, which is such that, look, like I'm not opposed to taking advertising, but let's say we do.
	And like you said, there's a news story or somebody conflicts with our values.
	We don't even have to have a question in our minds.
	In that primary source of revenue is always going to be the people who support us.
	So, like now, we can officially say the only people who own us are our fans, which I love.
	I mean, they're our boss.
	And so, in that way, they give us the freedom to produce a product where there is just nothing in my mind whatsoever.
	And you'll also know this from your time in Fox.
	This is the same thing at The Hill.
	This is no knock on the hill.
	They're a media company.
	But when you're working there, there are interlocking interests.
	So, And I've told this story now publicly, but like, for example, I did a segment.
	This is all I said.
	All I said was Maxine Waters will be the chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee until the day she dies.
	Now, what did I mean by that?
	I was talking about the The Democrats in the House hanging on to the seniority system.
	And her staff calls up the Hill and claims, like, I'm threatening her life.
	Oh, come on.
	Yeah, I know.
	Exactly.
	And this is true.
	We all know it's BS, it's all intimidation.
	But here's the thing she's the chairwoman of financial services.
	Hill reporters need to be able to talk to her.
	Now, to their credit, they didn't tell me to shut up or anything like that.
	I was just aware that it was happening.
	But the thing is, it's like, I would be lying if I said that I didn't have to at least think.
	Once or twice about saying something or doing something and not thinking about the adverse impact that that might have on.
	That is so true.
	Access.
	Access.
	When you're with a big organization that has a lot of tentacles, they need access and you can't be the one effing up the access all day long, no matter how fearless you would like to be in your own reporting.
	That is a true joy of being an independent.
	Yes, absolutely.
	And one other thing that I'll say about this, because being audience supported in and of itself is an incredible thing and gives you tremendous.
	Freedom, but there's also a risk to that model as well, which is if your audience is all of one ideological stripe or partisan team, then you can be beholden to that audience too, in terms of always looking to tell them what fits their narrative or what they want to hear.
	So, the other piece that we've been really proud of that we hope we're able to bring over to Breaking Points as well is we truly have people across the entire ideological spectrum who have been watching our content and really appreciate it.
	And so that means Look, number one, on any given day, we're going to be pissing off some part of our audience and making another part of our audience happy.
	So it's another way that you sort of, you know, you have to be aware of your own incentive structures, like the things that may be influencing your reporting and your behavior, even if you're not aware of them.
	And so knowing that we've got an audience that's across the spectrum that's going to back us up is something that I'm just incredibly grateful for.
	Well, it's worked out.
	Perfectly, because your time at the Hill helped you build an audience.
	Now you're ready to, you know, you're all grown up and you're ready to launch on your own with that loyal following.
	I have zero doubt that this will be a success and that you guys will be so happy.
	And a couple of years from now, we'll all be, you know, hopefully fat, drunk, and stupid, celebrating how wonderful our new independent lives are away from these large corporate media organizations that, you know, when you work as an employee for one of these groups, you're necessarily A little too cozy with power.
	You just are just necessarily a little too tied into the very elites.
	That's sort of the theme of today's episode that you guys regularly rail against.
	You know, you can get sucked into it and you can, you certainly are working for people who are out in Davos and out in Aspen and may not share the agenda of your audience.
	Yeah, you're exactly right.
	And that's part of the issue, which is that, and we were actually talking about this recently with Matt Taibbi, and he was relaying a story to us about he wrote this great piece on Goldman Sachs after the financial crisis.
	And he was like, Yeah, I heard that the owner of Conde Nast or whatever was at a party, and somebody at Goldman made it known that they didn't like my piece.
	And again, it's not that there was an editorial change to his piece or to his writing or to his behavior, but how can you not think about that?
	You have to think about ownership.
	A key part of our show has always been follow the money, understand how elite corruption works, understand influence peddling.
	Understand how exactly colossal media screw ups like that you've pointed to with Jeffrey Epstein and ABC News and so much of that.
	You need to understand how this stuff works.
	And in order to truly be able to reveal, I think that stuff for all of our audience.
	It was important that we become independent eventually.
	Well, but the other thing you said in announcing the show, which I want to talk to you about, was CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC are ripping us apart and making millions of dollars doing it.
	Billions, really, in the case of certainly Fox and CNN, if you add in their online property.
	They are.
	And I do feel, having grown up in the cable news industry, that it is worse than ever, that they're less tethered to fact and You know, providing a public service than ever.
	Sectarian conflict sells.
	And, you know, this is the, this is also, we just mentioned Matt Taibbius' whole thesis of his book is basically, you know, you had a long era, the Cold War era, where there was a clear sort of external boogeyman.
	Then you had the war on terror era, where there was also a clear sort of external boogeyman that could be used to gin up ratings and numbers for 24 hour cable news networks.
	And now the enemy is each other.
	And so, you know, whether it's Fox News convincing their audience that liberals are out to like destroy their lives and their kids, et cetera, et cetera, and their way of life, or whether it's MSNBC and CNN convincing you that not, and I'm not talking about elites here, I'm just talking about regular rank and file Republicans that they're the biggest threat to the nation, the biggest threat to your lives.
	Those things reverberate throughout our society and have massive consequences that we all live with.
	I just actually, On today's inaugural episode of Breaking Points, talked about a new study that showed look, for people like me who believe in economic populist solutions and believe in having basic dignity for the American working class,
	these sectarian divides make that type of politics impossible because everybody just fixates on these sort of cultural conflicts rather than any of the policies that could really change things for people across the political spectrum and make life better.
	Because, look, bottom line is if you hate, The person down the street who has a different political ideology than you do, why do you want to have a policy in place that's going to help that person?
	So, the more that that division festers and people profit off of exploiting these divides, and I think Trump was chief among those who profited off of it, and then the liberals who love to oppose him also got rich and famous profiting off of those divides too.
	But it all has massive consequences.
	So, we're just planting our flag in the ground of trying to be a little A little island of doing things a slightly different way and trying to really point at where the problems actually come from, which is from a corrupt system and a completely failed political class.
	You guys see problems, not parties.
	That's sort of been your thing from the beginning.
	No one on your set is wearing a jersey.
	You're open about where you stand on certain issues, but you surprise people.
	Both of you can come at an issue that wouldn't necessarily be from the traditional left or the traditional right.
	It's one of the reasons you've been so successful.
	But I will say this as that happens, as the country gets more divided, as the cable news game sort of gets exposed a little bit more, I really feel like with the birth of digital media and the explosion of it, I should say, they're being exposed, you know, and what they're sort of their game is becoming more obvious.
	People are tuning out.
	And it's not just because Trump's gone.
	That is the number one reason.
	But it's not just about Trump.
	I just looked at the latest numbers and I love sort of following the cable news numbers because I lived it for so long.
	CNN year over year right now is down 45% in the overall numbers and 53% in the key advertising demo of 25 to 54.
	They lost more than half of their audience.
	And frankly, it's again, the only audience they care about is the younger demo because that's how they sell ads.
	That's how they stay afloat.
	Fox.
	Down 37% in the overall, 38% in the demo.
	MSNBC is actually down the least, 22 in the overall, 32 in the demo.
	The daytime averages and the demos for these networks, listen to these.
	Listen to what these numbers are.
	Fox News is number one, averaging in daytime between the younger demo, 203,000 per show.
	147,000 people, CNN.
	108,000 is the average for the MSNBC daytime show.
	That means Nicole Wallace, those people.
	She's getting 100,000 people.
	That's nothing.
	I guarantee you guys are going to beat that on your very first day with ease.
	That's nothing.
	It's embarrassing.
Stunned By Viewership Numbers 00:02:32
	I'm telling you, I've said it before.
	My ass would have been fired if I had anything near these numbers.
	Well, and how many of those numbers are like on the background in an airport where you have no choice but to watch, you know, or it's just like permanently gone in a restaurant or whatever.
	No, I mean, listen, I don't want to brag, but I will.
	Before we even launched, we posted a couple of little, like, hey guys, here's our new set and we're really excited type of videos.
	To our channel, and they're already getting higher numbers than that.
	To our YouTube channel that had zero subscribers when we started.
	So that just gives you a sense of how pathetically minuscule it is.
	And look, I'm not just cheering for their decline as, you know, because I used to work in industry or whatever.
	Like they are really bad for the country.
	And so the fewer people that watch that crap, the better.
	No, I've got to challenge you on crap.
	I do.
	I give you Jim Acosta.
	With a segment about Trump's speech this past weekend that is absolutely in line for an Emmy.
	And you decide for yourselves whether this is crap.
	Listen.
	It's as if much of the Republican Party is trapped in a Jimmy Buffett tune, wasting away again in Mar-a-Lagoville, looking for that next election to assault.
	Some people claim that there is an orange man to blame, but I know it's my own damn fault.
	Oh my God.
	I just can't believe it.
	This is where I'm like, this is where I am stunned because Megan, I mean, we track the same trends, right?
	As you were saying, oh, by the way, Rising or not Rising, Breaking Points, our new show's entire audience is in the demo, literally, all, you know, however millions of people that they are.
	There's so much cognitive dissonance around this.
	And I've come to the conclusion that they must actually believe some of the stuff that they're doing because it is so unbelievably bad for business.
	I mean, something they just Are some there's a phenomenon where they seem to be reporting more for themselves and for you know accolades from their colleagues than from actual people, and that doesn't, I don't want to just you know, I don't want to discount there are still millions of people who watch cable news, and there are millions who, at the very least, have imprinted a way of thinking about politics into millions that I think we're going to be dealing with for a really long time.
	So, their decline is something that I welcome because I think it's actively bad for the country.
Zoonotic Origin Evidence 00:14:18
	The real effort is trying to get these new mediums, the new media, and everything into the same powerful position.
	And that's still a decades long project, in my opinion.
	Yeah, but it's well underway.
	And you think about the media embarrassments and just total dereliction of duty this past year when it comes to COVID.
	The Wall Street Journal, there's this article about it.
	The headline is it's a column, it's an opinion piece, the commentary.
	The science suggests.
	A Wuhan lab leak.
	I mean, well, duh.
	Now we do know this, but these guys actually know what they're talking about.
	Two doctors.
	One is author of Stay Safe, a physician's guide to.
	Survive coronavirus.
	And the other guy, Muller, is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, a former senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
	And let me just tell the audience what it says because it's the best article I've seen yet or piece yet on how we know this came from a lab.
	I mean, we all but know, I guess is the way to put it.
	They say, This virus has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus ever.
	Number two, a scientist follow along can increase the lethality. of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome.
	It leaves no trace of manipulation, but it makes the virus very effective at injecting genetic material into the victim's cells.
	They say the insertion sequence of choice is called the double CGG.
	It is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a lot of experience with inserting it.
	It also allows the scientists the added bonus of tracking its insertion, like it has a beacon that allows the scientists who inserted it to follow it.
	Again, double CGG combo has never been found naturally in a virus.
	And now I'm quoting, now the damning fact, these guys say.
	It was this exact sequence that appears in COVID 19.
	Proponents of zoonotic origin, meaning, you know, some pangolin, I still, pangolin still confuses me.
	Anyway, some animal wound up in a wet market, that's zoonotic origin, and gave it directly to a human.
	That's what appears to be BS.
	They say proponents of that theory have to explain why this novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, just happened to pick the virus' very least combination, the double CGG.
	Why did it replicate the choice that the lab's gain of function researchers would have made?
	Yes, it could have happened randomly through mutations, but do you believe that?
	This is quoting still.
	At the minimum, they write, this fact that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare An unnatural combination used by human researchers implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.
	Boom.
	And nobody covered it, you guys.
	People and those who tried were shamed out of it or silenced.
	And not just silenced, people were taken off Twitter for months, actually, as a result of this.
	I think it's, I said this today on our show.
	I believe this might actually be as big of a screw up as a rack WMD.
	And if you think about what the global impact of this is, we're talking about a multi trillion dollar shutdown of our economy.
	We're talking about an entire different course of the pandemic.
	I mean, remember that the Lab League theory is, in fact, true in all current evidence.
	He makes it, I would say, the leading theory as to how exactly coronavirus came in the first place.
	Then Dr. Fauci is directly involved.
	I mean, this completely changes the entire course of the pandemic about how we regard public health guidelines from the same people who have been funding and pushing gain of function research.
	And I think the biggest problem around the Lab League theory and more is that all of the people braying about trust the science and everyone forgot to realize that scientists are just like everybody else.
	And they have a lot of money at stake if the Lab League theory comes out to be true.
	And the media basically did the bidding of the public health establishment for over a year and gaslit a huge portion of the public into thinking that the truth, or at least, Potential likelihood was completely debunked when it was actually the opposite.
	That was the opposite.
	That's right.
	Those are the words they use, Crystal.
	Debunked, conspiratorial, they said, fringe.
	And here's one other piece from the journal article.
	They're pointing out that other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS, MERSA, whatever, however you say that.
	That they were both confirmed to have a natural origin.
	Okay, so those did not start in a lab.
	They evolved rapidly at those two actual natural origin coronaviruses.
	They evolved rapidly as they spread through humans until the most contagious forms dominated.
	That's what a natural coronavirus is expected to do.
	COVID 19 did not work that way.
	Quote, it appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version.
	No serious viral, quote, improvement.
	Took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England.
	Such early optimization is unprecedented, and it suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread, i.e., in a lab in Wuhan, China, where a woman who worked with bat coronaviruses, trying to make them more dangerous in so called gain of function research, was working on these very things.
	And three of her lab workers got very, very sick in November of 19, and the Chinese Put a stifle on it so that that news couldn't get out and then shut down visits to the lab.
	The proof is there, it's right in front of your very eyes.
	And normally, reporters, when they smell a story like that, you can't stop them.
	That's what's normal.
	That's what should be normal, anyway.
	But I mean, look, I'm not a bat coronavirus expert, but all I'm asking is that we just look at the facts and see where they lead.
	And as you're pointing out, it increasingly seems like the weight of the evidence is on the side of.
	The lab leak.
	Now, is it definitive yet?
	No.
	And it may never be.
	It may always be a game of probabilities.
	But as you're pointing out, these previous coronavirus cases, they actually found the animals from where it had evolved.
	So they were able to point directly to, okay, this is where it came from and this is how it evolved and here's how we ended up here.
	They haven't been able to do any of that with COVID-19.
	So I think it's such an important story about the media because it really exposed the blind spots that are only getting worse.
	And which were really exacerbated by the Trump era.
	You had on one side people like Trump and Senator Tom Cotton and others who were largely on the right who were talking about the lab leak theory.
	And some of them were irresponsible and insinuating that like the Chinese released it on purpose.
	And there's zero evidence of that.
	And that seems completely insane.
	But you had that was the group on the one side.
	And then on the other side, you had a group of scientists who jumped out very quickly to say, no, no, no, it's 100% not that.
	And we're very confident it's zoonotic in origin.
	And so, what a lot of journalists did, and some have even admitted to this, is because they trusted and they had a long relationship with some of the scientists who were involved, they erred on the side of believing them versus because they thought, you know, these are partisan actors who are motivated to just smear China.
	They didn't do their own investigating or their own questioning of what incentives the scientific community that was feeding them this line might have.
	Then, when you layer down on that, it's dangerous.
	Yeah, and then when you layered on top of that, the fact that some were saying, oh, well, the lab leak hypothesis is racist.
	That's when it really became completely off the table.
	And now, personally, I think it was a lot more racist when people were saying, like, oh, it's so gross what Chinese people eat.
	And they got this from bat soup and were sharing all those weird pictures at the beginning.
	That seems to me more problematic.
	But either way, you should be just looking at what actually happened so that we can avoid another pandemic again in the future.
	Okay, but eating a live bat is disgusting.
	And I don't care if you call me a racist for saying it.
	It's disgusting.
	Again, hot dogs are also disgusting, though, in fairness.
	They are totally gross.
	I agree with that.
	And so are clams.
	But no, it is an example of how identity politics infects our media in a way that is totally antithetical to what journalism ought to be.
	There's the old adage in journalism that, like, you know, you check it out.
	Your mother tells you she loves you, but you check it out.
	Like, you don't take anything at face value.
	And this has got all of the indicators of kick the tires, please, because the scientific community, yes, you could see that they might be compromised on a big story like this.
	The racial sort of identity politics strain being called a racist if you say this other thing, that would normally make most reporters say, I'm going to try harder to figure out whether I'm being silenced by somebody using.
	A line like that on me.
	But what's happened here is all of the attempts to shame people out of real reporting based on identity policy or what have you worked.
	And then you had the assist by big tech.
	And on something that's killed over 3 million people, it depends, right?
	Because now they're rolling back some of the numbers because people are admitting they overstated them.
	People died with Corona as opposed to from Corona.
	But in any event, a lot of people died.
	We still don't have real answers as to what started it.
	And so we're no better off in some ways.
	Than we were in November of 19 when those three lab workers got sick.
	No, you're absolutely right.
	And I think that the biggest problem of all of this is that not only are we not better off, is that we actually have worse information because people have been gaslit otherwise.
	I mean, there are millions of people who will forever believe that the lab leak hypothesis is itself racist.
	There's actually almost nothing you can do at this point.
	After what, a year of MSNBC segments and CNN segments as well to the contrary?
	So, in that way, I think that the failure on the media level is just so catastrophic.
	And at the end of the day, this was my same point on Russiagate, which is there are real consequences to this stuff.
	Like the number amongst Democratic voters, the Democratic base, they believe Russia is a much bigger threat than China.
	I mean, if you know, that's ludicrous if you look at any metric whatsoever in terms of geopolitical competition, military, etc.
	And if you were to look at what the consequences of this are, which is that the scientific community by and large is going full forward with gain of function research, the global virome project of $1.2 billion towards preventing the next pandemic.
	That's their response, possibly the very same thing that unleashed this terrible event in the first place.
	So it's just such a horrific failure.
	Meanwhile, do you see a future in which we do get more divided into normal people and these so called elites?
	I mean, it's obviously that's what's happening in big tech right now.
	I had a guest recently who was saying it's the controlled and the controllers.
	But do you think there's any hope that society is going to start redefining itself less with partisan jerseys and more with shared interests in problem solving?
	I have to have that hope because otherwise, it's, you know, why engage in politics?
	Why do what we do?
	And in fact, it sounds really hokey to say, but it's true.
	Like, our audience gives me that hope every single day because we truly do have people who come at this from all walks of life, all different political perspectives, all different parts of the country, all of that.
	And they're able to come together and watch the show.
	We've had so many people say, like, I couldn't even talk to my, brother, my dad, my uncle, my friend about politics.
	And now we have this language and we actually see these certain commonalities where we can have a discussion.
	We may not come to, you know, agree on everything, but you can kind of then see the game that's being played, this game of division that's very profitable for people who are already, you know, already have a lot of power and status and money.
	So I am hopeful that that game is being exposed.
	And the more that it's exposed, the more that people will ultimately opt out of it, as we're seeing in real time, as you, you know, as you demonstrated, Very effectively with those cable news numbers falling off of the cliff.
	Oh, by the way, the good news is apparently Jim Costa, I mean, who the hell knows when he airs, but my crack team informs me he has a 3 p.m. show on Saturday that averages around 80,000 in the demo.
	That's you're next to a slashy.
	Now, that's they give you a slashy when you're under 50.
	Slashy is total oblivion.
	Bye, Jim.
	Bye, Jim.
	All right.
	So, wait.
	So, let's just make sure we know how people can find you and support you.
	So, again, it's say the name of the show again.
	Easy breaking points on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
	So easy.
	You can get it free or you can get sort of the streamlined version without them talking about the Their own show, I guess, their ads.
	That's right.
	For just $10 a month, which is well worth it.
	I'm so excited for you guys.
	All the best of luck.
	Come back anytime you want and give them hell.
	Thank you, Megan.
	Thank you, Megan.
	Up next, Dan Abrams is in the business of media, in addition to being the chief legal analyst for ABC News.
	And he was the host of the big, big show, Live PD, the AE canceled just because they can't have shows on television anymore that reflect cops in any way other than awfully.
	Anyway, it was a huge show.
	Sadly, it's no longer, but maybe it'll come back someday.
	And Dan runs his own media company.
	So he knows a thing or two about our media and where it stands right now.
	What does he think about the horrific performance it's delivered when it comes to things like the COVID lab theory being suppressed?
	Plus, he's got a very cool new book out called Kennedy's Avenger, Assassination, Conspiracy, and The Forgotten Trial of Jack Ruby.
	This is going to help you flip the pages and pass the time on the beach this summer and educate you a bit on a really interesting legal and political case.
Live PD Cancellation Story 00:05:35
	In our country's history.
	So don't miss Dan.
	But first, I'm going to bring you a feature we have here on the MK show called Real Talk, where we talk about something going on in my life, life in general, our country, et cetera.
	And today, I want to spend one minute on what happened this past weekend with my daughter's soccer game.
	I sent out this tweet, it got a lot of response.
	And so I figured it might be worth kicking around.
	As we build up to the end of the soccer season, this for her was her last game because we're going to be away for the very last one.
	And it's the end of her time with this team because we're moving.
	And so it was a big one, right?
	She's been on this team since she was, I don't know, four?
	She started in this league and then she made this travel team when she was six and now she's 10.
	So she's been with these girls a long time and was really looking forward to this game.
	It's the travel team.
	So we were leaving New York.
	We were going up to Westchester, you know, an area right north of New York City for the game.
	And we got a notification, I don't know, five days earlier saying the girls were going to have to wear masks.
	while playing outdoors.
	And the forecast was that it was going to be plus 90 degree heat.
	By the way, we watched the temperature as we were out there.
	It hit 100 at one point.
	So you've got 100 degree heat, a bunch of 10 year olds who pose almost zero threat when it comes to COVID, running around in a field, not close to anyone, right?
	Not even close to each other.
	They're running away from each other, being told initially that they have to wear their masks.
	In the New York area, the COVID death count, the COVID case count, they're down to record lows.
	It's a miracle how well New York is doing.
	And yet still, because this was a school district that had its policy, the girls were being told masks.
	And of course, parents on the sidelines were going to have to have masks, everybody.
	And I sent out a tweet saying, I don't want to pull her from this, but this isn't safe.
	And you guys have heard me say before, our pediatrician told me that early on.
	He said, letting your kid run around in 90 degree heat.
	With a mask on is dangerous.
	It is.
	Don't let her do that.
	And he said, grownups too shouldn't be running with masks on.
	It's dangerous.
	It's not safe.
	So that we weren't not going to let her play.
	And it was painful.
	You know, I didn't want to say no to her.
	And I don't feel that I or any other parent should be placed in this stupid position.
	It's just stupid.
	I've got to assuage somebody else's unbased fear, right?
	Fear that's not based in reality.
	You're not going to get it from 10 year olds playing soccer on an open field in the great outdoors.
	So I've got to endanger my child to assuage your unrealistic fear?
	No.
	And it just pisses me off for anybody who would impose such a policy to begin with.
	Well, thankfully, it turns out our sort of parent mom, our mom, who like does all the managing and scheduling and all that fun stuff for our team, who's amazing, pushed back on the school and went back and said, this can't possibly be.
	They had said it was a school mandate.
	It wasn't really an opposing team mandate.
	And the place it landed ultimately was the girls have to wear the masks on the sidelines and to and fro, you know, across the field, but not while they're actually on the field, but all the parents have to wear the masks.
	And we had to accept that, you know, it's like that, that at least was something that would let her play in a way that wasn't dangerous.
	So, so we did go.
	Well, the story had a happy ending.
	They tied.
	That wasn't the happy ending.
	The happy ending was no one had a mask.
	I mean, no one.
	The parents didn't wear masks.
	The girls didn't wear masks.
	The refs didn't wear masks.
	Nobody even had the stupid mask hanging underneath their chin.
	Maybe two people.
	Everybody else was mask free, which was a collective rhetorical middle finger to these stupid ass rules.
	That people still have on the books and are somewhat enforcing.
	And I think, you know, a little pushback can go a long way.
	I'm really relieved that our team did it and got a better answer.
	And that when people showed up, they behaved like responsible adults who don't need a piece of fabric over their face in 100 degree heat to protect one another.
	And by the way, I don't know if it's relevant, but this was a more working class area.
	And I think just back to the discussions we've been having with Dennis Prager and others, I just think people who really have to work for a living have their priorities straight.
	They don't obsess over stupid nonsense like virtue signaling now with the masks, which is what it is.
	It is not anything more than that.
	You don't need them.
	Outdoors?
	Are you kidding me?
	So reason prevailed, though the Red Bulls did not.
	They tied.
	They were down 3 0, which was scary.
	And then they came back to tie it up.
	If they had two more minutes, they probably would have won.
	But it was a great season.
	It's been a great run.
	I can't say enough about childhood athletics and getting your kids involved in organized teams because.
	All the things she does, this is the most important.
	You know, we're leaving New York.
	She's leaving her school.
	She's leaving her friends.
	And I think the hardest thing for her to leave is going to be this soccer team, right?
	The kind of bonds you form when you play organized athletics and are part of a team that got the blood, sweat, and tears on the field every week, even at her young age.
	There's no substitute for it.
	It's been a great ride.
	I've bonded with the moms and the dads on this team in a really great way.
Banning Controversial Stories 00:15:37
	And I don't know.
	It's just feeling a little nostalgic about it.
	Change is good.
	Not always easy, but it's good.
	So, happy ending.
	And the lesson here is like Tatiana in Carmel, New York, if you're told to do something unreasonable or someone tries to manipulate your child into a situation you know is not safe for him or her, fight.
	That is today's edition of Real Talk.
	Dan Abrams is next.
	Dan Abrams, how are you?
	Hi, Megan.
	How's everything?
	Good, good.
	Thanks for having me on.
	I'm excited to talk about this legal case.
	I love that you're doing this.
	You find these old legal cases that, I mean, in this case, weirdly.
	hasn't gotten enough attention and write about them.
	We did an event right before the COVID shutdown on your book about John Adams, his first big trial.
	But this one, people know about.
	Obviously, they know about the Kennedy assassination and Jack Ruby, who stepped in and killed Oswald.
	So we're going to get to that in one second.
	But first, let's just spend a little time on the media.
	Okay.
	Because I've been going off about something that I think we agree on, which is how did our industry so drop the ball on the COVID lab leak theory?
	How did we allow No one to seriously look into that, pursue investigative reporting on it, to accept the Facebook ban on it.
	How?
	So, I will tell you that a few months ago, I actually was asking the same question, which was how is the media?
	I mean, because as you know, I own mediaite.com.
	And I love that website.
	Everybody should check it out.
	It's great for like even news summaries.
	You catch up on news on that site, not just on news anchors.
	And your producer, Steve Krakow, was one of the The founding members of the media team.
	So, you know, I don't get involved much in the editorial on the site, but I will occasionally pitch them stories, right?
	I'll say, you know, why isn't anyone doing this or that?
	And this is one of the stories that I pitched in March.
	And I said, why is it okay that people are calling this debunked and a conspiracy theory, et cetera?
	And so Caleb Howe actually wrote a story that was published a few months ago.
	Asking the same question and citing some very good articles that were saying that there did appear to be fear in the media about, you know, about the possibility.
	And again, we don't know for sure, but the possibility that Donald Trump was right, right?
	The possibility.
	And I think that, look, I do.
	I think there's a hesitancy in the mainstream media to have supported something that was controversial.
	And which didn't fit with what the mainstream, let's call it the liberal media, would have liked, right?
	The outcome, which is the easiest, right?
	This idea that it came from animals is such an easier, sort of no blame sort of explanation.
	Rainbows, unicorns, humans are still good.
	You don't have to point your fingers at anyone.
	And that may still be the case.
	But the fact that there was an unwillingness, To even seriously evaluate this is a serious failure on the part of the media.
	And I don't think there's any other way to say it.
	I mean, again, I would just say there were pockets of even the mainstream media that were like Sanjay Gupta, even at CNN, was questioning it, was saying that it's not just a question.
	Josh Rogan of the Washington Post.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So it's not that everyone, right?
	But there were way too many, way too many.
	Who were unwilling to question the orthodoxy.
	And how do you, the thing that I can't get past is how we allowed the Facebook ban.
	I realize we don't run Facebook.
	We plebe journalists or pleb.
	I'm told it's pleb.
	I prefer plebe.
	Anyway, the point is we're minions.
	How do we allow Mark Zuckerberg to say, you may not speak about that?
	You may not write about that on Facebook for a year?
	How is there not a rising up of the industry to say, but this is how we solve problems.
	We converse and we kick around theories and we get different scientists who know more than we do and we interview them and we do investigative reporting like Vanity Fair just did and we get State Department officials to go on record with their names.
	on meetings that are being held like, holy shit, this seems like we probably shouldn't open this can of worms because we're the ones who funded this gain of function research.
	Great reporting, but it came too late.
	And we as an industry seem to have just rolled our big bellies over and taken the abuse.
	And so far, Dan, I feel like we're setting ourselves up to take more abuse because I don't think Zuckerberg's learned lessons and I'm not sure we have either.
	Well, look, I'd look.
	I'm hesitating to say whether I think the media has learned any lessons from it.
	The media has done the usual self flagellation that occurs, right?
	How could this have occurred and what happened here, et cetera?
	But there's no sort of willingness to be most direct and honest about it, which is to say that there was just a general unwillingness to pursue this theory.
	Like, it just so many people didn't want it to be true.
	And I think that I think that was that was part of the problem.
	But but on the issue of Facebook, you know, look, Facebook is enormously powerful.
	And I will say that that even if their quote unquote heart is in the right place, because I don't think that it was about on this particular issue, I don't think it was about liberal and conservative and this and that.
	It was about the fact that they were following the lead incorrectly of the you know the mainstream.
	Sentiment that was that would be an inaccurate statement.
	The problem is, I can see why Facebook wants to be in the business of saying if you're going to sort of post stuff about vaccines being dangerous and this and that and stuff that really there's no support for and it's dangerous to society, I can understand that.
	This is different.
	This is not about how you might be in danger, right?
	Or something that you, this is about.
	Just figuring out how this happened, what led to it.
	It's an important investigation, right?
	But it's not the same as them getting involved and saying, you know, look, and that's a separate question, right, about how involved they should be at all.
	But it's not the same question as evaluating whether Facebook can say, you know, we're not going to allow total disinformation to be spread on our platform.
	Of course, it's a slippery slope, though, because, you know, they're.
	pronouncements on what is disinformation don't match up with the facts, right?
	You shouldn't be banning stories on Hunter Biden and you shouldn't be banning stories on the lab leak.
	And there was a fair amount of politics involved in this early on because, as you accurately point out, Trump was saying it.
	What if Trump's right?
	This guy we all hate and we think he's racist.
	You had the New York Times reporter explicitly saying even last week, it's racist.
	This is a racist theory, which we heard early on too.
	Manda Villey, who just last week tweeted, Someday we will stop talking about the Lab League theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.
	But alas, that day is not yet here.
	No, it isn't, Aporva.
	It's not, because it's not racist.
	It turns out to be, we believe, fact.
	Well, a legitimate theory.
	It's not a, I mean, it's a legitimate theory.
	It is the prevailing theory.
	There is no theory that is more likely than the Lab League right now.
	Well, I'm not sure that's true, but I think that it's based on what?
	Based on the fact that when you talk to, and again, I'm not an expert in this area, right?
	I don't know exactly how this stuff transfers from a bat to a human, right?
	I just don't.
	But I can tell you that when I read, even now from looking, not talking about the mainstream media, but you actually read what the, you know, People who study this stuff are saying it is still considered just as likely that it occurred in another.
	Oh, okay.
	Absolutely.
	Did you see the Wall Street Journal reporting?
	The virus has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.
	That it's got this thing called a double CGG combo.
	It's never been found naturally, but it is a favorite of those like the Bat Lady in the Wuhan lab who manipulate coronaviruses.
	It makes it super easy for the virus to infect a human in a very efficient way.
	And this woman excluded that gene combo from her write up of the coronavirus of this of COVID 19 in February of 2020.
	This woman, who is the expert and who was doing this research, and it was gain of function research to make it more dangerous.
	She excluded that particular double CGG section, even though it was obvious to any scientist who would, who would check it out in the data that accompanied her paper.
	Why'd she do that?
	Why?
	Because she was covering it up.
	Dan, there is look, I don't, I'm not stating as a matter, no, no, no, I'm not stating as a matter of fact.
	That it came out of the Wuhan lab.
	But I am saying there is no question now that that appears to be the most likely source of this virus.
	And anybody who's now treating that as second tier or even to something else isn't paying attention.
	Well, look, all I can tell you is that, you know, I'm not seeing the same level of certainty that you are.
	And again, I didn't read this article this morning.
	So I plead ignorance on that article.
	So if that, you know, if that becomes the definitive article, look, I can be convinced.
	It's not that I, You know, I don't have a stake in this, right?
	I'm perfectly happy to be convinced.
	As I said to you, I'm the one who was pitching the story to media, saying, Why are people calling this debunked?
	It doesn't look debunked at all to me as to whether it is the only theory that can be taken seriously or is the, you know, that I just, you know, I'm maybe I'm not enough of an expert.
	Now you're creating a straw man.
	I didn't say only theory that can be taken seriously.
	I said is the predominant.
	The lead theory.
	It absolutely is the lead theory.
	And I believe most likely.
	And I think that's emerging now by the day.
	And then, you know, there's the other strain of just, The amount to which we tried to cover it up.
	That Vanity Fair report was just gangbusters on the amount to which our most respected scientists worked behind the scenes to stop people from talking about this because we had been funding this so called gain of function research, which made the viruses more dangerous, ostensibly in order to research it and be able to fight it.
	But there was something bad happened and a lot of people died.
	And we need an honest look at how.
	All right, wait, let me just share.
	Yeah, well, look, and part of the problem is, you know, And again, this is, and I'm not claiming to be an expert, the World Health Organization quote unquote study on this was a real problem, right?
	Was the.
	Faith in institutions, right?
	It's like another one drops.
	But that's what made it the extremely unlikely, right?
	They were the ones who came out and said it's extremely unlikely.
	And, you know, I remember, again, this is just, you know, as I was following this, looking at sort of the organizations involved in the conflict.
	Associated with that, I was like, hmm, this doesn't seem like a particularly credible conclusion based on the fact that, you know, it was already clear before they even reached their conclusion, this was the conclusion they were going to reach.
	That's right.
	The Chinese were like, this is a beautiful report you have here.
	I would love the chance to edit it before you release it.
	Oh, we can have it.
	Great.
	Oh, we handpicked all the doctors who went over, scientists who came to the Wuhan lab to do it in the first place.
	What could possibly go wrong?
	Yeah.
	So, all right.
	So, let me shift gears with you on conspiracy theories because.
	It's not that all of your books are about conspiracy theories, but your latest book involves a case that is replete with them.
	And I remember talking to Arlen Specter back in my days of.
	Yeah.
	I've covered the Supreme Court.
	And he was one of those Where's Waldo guys who had been on everything, on every case.
	He was on the Warren Commission.
	He was on the Warren Commission.
	And he was saying it wasn't the single bullet theory, it was the single bullet conclusion.
	And he was not conspiratorial and believed that Oswald had shot Kennedy.
	That was the end of that.
	You've taken a look at sort of the immediate next chapter in your latest book to that whole story.
	And it is the story of Jack Ruby.
	And, like, who was this guy?
	And what happened to this guy?
	And why don't we know more about that trial?
	The book is called Kennedy's Avenger Assassination, Conspiracy, and the Forgotten Trial of Jack Ruby.
	So, what is the answer to that?
	I mean, who was he?
	Why was it so interesting?
	And why have people sort of forgotten Jack Ruby in the story of JFK's assassination?
	You know, you and I cover trials, right?
	And we cover legal stories, et cetera.
	I was embarrassed that I didn't even know about the trial of Jack Ruby.
	I mean, my co author and I were sitting there.
	We'd written three books about presidents and great trials that they'd been involved in.
	Great trial that Lincoln argued, Teddy Roosevelt is the defendant in a case, John Adams representing the British soldiers.
	And we're like, is there another one?
	Started talking about JFK, or like, obviously Oswald is dead.
	And we sort of looked at each other and we're like, whatever happened with the Jack Ruby trial?
	And then we dug in and we couldn't believe how interesting.
	It was, and what a big deal the trial was, and how controversial it was, and how many of the conspiracy theories emerged from the trial of Jack Ruby.
	And so, you know, we use the transcript of the trial and coverage from the time to try and bring the story to life of the trial of the forgotten trial, really is of Jack Ruby and the fact that, you know, he was convicted and then his conviction was overturned.
	You know, I think that he and he died in prison.
	But if he hadn't died, I think he was prepared to present a strategy that would have gotten him out in time with time served.
	And it's kind of amazing to think about that.
	Right.
	So just to take people back, it was November 22nd, 1963, that JFK was shot in Dallas.
	Around an hour later, Oswald was arrested in a movie theater, Lee Harvey Oswald.
	And then two days later, November 24th, 1963, Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby.
The Ruby Oswald Mystery 00:15:18
	And it was on camera, and the news reporters had it, and we've teed up a little clip.
	Listen.
	There is Lee Oswald.
	He's been shot.
	He's been shot.
	Lee Oswald has been shot.
	There's the man with a gun.
	It's absolute panic.
	Absolute panic here in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters.
	Detectives have their guns drawn.
	Oswald had been shot.
	It's hard to imagine the hugeness of this.
	You know, a president's assassinated, right?
	And then the guy who the police say did it gets assassinated himself two days later on camera.
	Like, I don't know.
	It's got some parallels to what we watched with Derek Chauvin in that, not in terms of the scale, but somebody gets killed on camera.
	You watch it with your very eyes.
	Then this sort of trial of the century happens.
	And everyone's got very strong opinions.
	Megan, it's a very good comparison for this reason.
	And not many people have made it, but the reason that there's a real comparison is because in picking a jury, you are now trying to find jurors.
	Who can be fair, but who have all seen the crime occur, the incident.
	And during the Ruby trial, the lawyers for Jack Ruby insisted that they wanted to find jurors, none of whom had seen the video.
	They said they cannot be eyewitnesses to the crime.
	And, you know, there was a similar question in the Chauvin case about whether these jurors could be fair, having seen the video.
	And the answer, in my view, in both cases, is that.
	You know, yes, you can find jurors who have not taken a position on exactly what the video means.
	And Jack Ruby was a little more straightforward in terms of, you know, he literally steps forward and shoots Oswald.
	And yet he presents a pretty complicated defense.
	Initially, his defense was going to be what would be effectively viewed as manslaughter today murder without malice, meaning he just lost it.
	He didn't want Jackie to have to come testify.
	He loved JFK and he just had sort of saw Oswald walking, saw this quote smirk on his face, and he just lost it because he carried a gun with him at all times, Ruby.
	And that's not the defense they pursued.
	Instead, they pursued a sort of a kind of insanity defense, which was to say that he literally did not remember the incident, that he had a rare form of epilepsy, and that he had an epileptic.
	Event and that during that time he doesn't recall anything.
	And the reason I think that they went for this defense is because he had this sort of high profile lawyer who was probably the most famous lawyer in the country at the time, Melvin Belli, who wanted to go for everything, right?
	The boring defense was to go for the murder without malice.
	And you know what?
	In Texas at the time, no more than five years in prison for murder without malice.
	But that was a boring defense.
	Why pursue that when you can pursue, when you can be the lawyer who got Jack Ruby off completely, gets not found not guilty?
	And I think that's, I think it was totally self motivated by Belli to try to sort of, you know, go for the gusto.
	And it was a ridiculous, it was a ridiculous defense in my view.
	It's interesting because my co author and I disagreed about the quality of the defense.
	And we kept going back and forth on language as to how we would characterize the defense because.
	I thought it was just absurd.
	And David thought that he had actually presented a pretty compelling case.
	I'm with you.
	I agree.
	It should have been manslaughter and he would have had a much better result.
	But he was found guilty.
	So ultimately, you can't argue with the court.
	And sentenced to death.
	And sentenced to death.
	Yeah, he was sentenced to death, which is, I mean, it's kind of interesting because you wouldn't, I'm not sure if I would have expected a Texas jury to sentence Jack Ruby to death for killing the man who killed.
	Right.
	You know what?
	You're exactly that.
	That is what the vast majority of journalists who are covering the trial thought.
	No one thought that they would sentence him to death.
	And the only thing I think that can explain that is that they were just, the defense was so ridiculous that they were just like, you know, that's it.
	This is, you know, this is effectively, you know, one person said it felt like they had sentenced the attorney rather than Jack Ruby.
	But, you know, yeah, there was a lot of sympathy for Jack Ruby.
	Immediately after this happened, you know, people saying, Yeah, you know, I can understand it.
	And even for some of the mental health issues, et cetera.
	But by the time this trial was over, this jury was just done with this defense and done with Jack Ruby.
	And as you point out, yeah, the case got overturned on appeal.
	So, Jack Ruby, yeah, he got a new trial.
	But there's a reason Jack Ruby did not live to tell us all about, you know, to have his name cleared or go for the manslaughter defense and try to get an acquittal or at least a lesser sentence.
	He died like really soon thereafter.
	Yeah, it was two months after he won the appeal that he died of cancer.
	And that led to more conspiracy theories, right?
	I was going to say, is it legit cancer?
	Are we sure it's cancer?
	Yeah, it was no, it's legit cancer.
	But think about it this way, right?
	Which is this idea that someone, Let's say poisons Ruby in prison.
	You do it three years after the fact?
	I mean, you know, it's sort of, by the way, it's the same problem with the conspiracy theories about Ruby killing Oswald, which is that the night that Oswald was arrested, the day Oswald was arrested, Ruby was at the police station that night.
	He was there right next to Oswald at one point and doesn't kill him that night.
	The supposed hired assassin decides he's going to take a pass.
	On killing him at the first opportunity he gets, and instead allows him to spend two more days with the police talking to the police.
	And Ruby was at the press conference that night with the DA, chiming up, correcting the DA on things about what Cuban association Oswald had been affiliated with.
	That's the kind of guy Ruby was.
	He was like an attention seeker.
	He's not the guy you hire to be your assassin.
	Up next, we continue with Dan.
	But before we get to that, I just want to take this moment and give a special Shout out to one of our listeners.
	His name, I believe, is Dave Sluzacek.
	It's S K L U Z A C E K.
	And Dave took the time to send us a note asking if I would give him a personal phone call on his 50th birthday.
	So that's not going to happen, Dave.
	However, you meant enough to me to give you this shout out in front of all of our many, many listeners, which I think is even better.
	He says he's not some crazy guy that sends a bunch of these notes out.
	He says he's a bit outside of his comfort zone writing this at all.
	This is how Dave describes himself.
	Normal guy, lovely wife, two kids, 13 and 15.
	I sell lumber for a living.
	And this September will be 20 years of marriage.
	Dave's facing the big 5-0, which I faced down this year as well.
	It's going to go fine.
	You're starting it off wisely by informing yourself with good info and spending your days with good people.
	And I just want to tell you, I appreciate you listening to the show.
	And I am happy, happy to wish you the happiest of birthdays.
	Lots of love.
	Who did they think hired him?
	The mob?
	Like, under the theories that Ruby was involved in all this and Ruby's hit on Oswald was orchestrated by a bigger organization, is it the mob or is it, you know, there's so many theories about who is really behind the JFK assassination?
	There are so many theories.
	The most prevalent one with regard to Ruby is the mob, right?
	Because he had mob ties, but they were like low level ties.
	He was kind of a joke, Ruby.
	And he had talked to a mobster, you know, a few days before the assassination.
	Having nothing to do with anything apart from the fact that Ruby was getting very upset that there were other strip clubs, he owned a strip club, and there were other strip clubs around him who were being allowed to forego some of the licensing requirements.
	And as a result, they were doing better business than him.
	So he wanted to see if this mobster could help him with these issues with regard to the licensing on his clubs.
	Ah, the fact that Ruby made a call and that Ruby had been in Cuba in 1959.
	I mean, one of the things that I think is so interesting is that Ruby went to Cuba in 1959.
	And so there are questions about, well, could the Cubans have been behind it, et cetera?
	The problem is when Ruby was in Cuba, like John F. Kennedy wasn't even the most, the leading candidate, I mean, to be president.
	That the idea that the conspiracy is going to begin before it even looks like John Kennedy's going to be president.
	You know, the most compelling conspiracy theory to me, just based on motivation, was this idea that the not the pro Castro Cubans, but the anti Castro Cubans who were furious at the Bay of Pigs, right, at JFK abandoning them in the Bay of Pigs, that they were so angry that they tried to do this.
	Now, There's no proof that that's what happened.
	And Oswald was actually a pro Castro.
	He spent enormous amounts of time trying to support Castro to go back to Cuba, et cetera.
	But the problem is that motivation does not make an assassination.
	People will cite the CIA.
	They'll say, the CIA was angry at JFK about this or that.
	Okay.
	But they're going to take the leap now to they killed him?
	And they orchestrated it, and no one was able to figure it out and have definitive proof of it, etc.
	So, you know, the problem with the JFK assassination is that, and you know, and for me, in terms of some of the media I've been doing around this, is that there are so many different theories, right?
	That someone will say to me, Well, what about this person who said something, something, something?
	And I'll be like, Wow, okay, well, you know, did that person testify in front of the House Select Committee in 1978?
	And they'll be like, You know, and it's like, You know, it's there's so much stuff out there, but to me, it's really simple is that the timing, specifically with Ruby, putting aside Oswald for a moment, in addition to what I said to you about Friday and Sunday, was that on the day that Oswald is killed, there'd been an announcement that Oswald would be moved at 10 a.m. from the police station to the jail.
	All the media is there, everyone's so crazy, right?
	Imagine them making that kind of specific.
	I mean, that's talk about endangering the guy.
	Yeah, well, you know, they wanted to show, you know, it's interesting.
	They wanted to show because Oswald was sort of suggesting he was getting beaten up.
	Um, and they wanted to show that Oswald was not, you know, in physical uh danger by sort of parading him.
	But you're right, the biggest mistake they made was parading him.
	Obviously, I mean, that's when the movie shot, right?
	But that video we played, he walked right up to him, and it's not like you know he had to leap over turnstiles and pull an OJ.
	Well, bad comparison.
	But he was rather easy execution.
	Right, right.
	And no metal detectors when they're getting, you know, Ruby had kind of, Ruby was always this guy who was kind of hanging out with the media, hanging out with the police, et cetera.
	But 10 a.m., the announcements there, everyone's waiting for the move.
	Ruby's still like getting ready that morning.
	Ruby doesn't come to this area until an hour and 15 minutes later when there's a Western Union, which happens to be basically, you know, within a block.
	Of the police station, 100 yards.
	And he's going there because a woman who worked at his club was begging him to send her $25 because she's like, I need it for rent.
	I need it for rent.
	So he goes to the Western Union at 11 17.
	It's now an hour and 17 minutes after Oswald is supposed to be moved.
	He gets the receipt for the Western Union.
	He saunters over to the police station, walks in, a police car is driving out.
	He walks into the garage.
	It's literally a minute to 30 seconds before Oswald ends up being brought out.
	If Oswald had not asked to put on a sweater, Ruby probably would have missed him.
	And the other thing is that Ruby was obsessed in a sort of odd way with his dogs, meaning he would refer to them as his children and one of his dogs as his wife because he didn't have a wife, he didn't have kids, et cetera.
	I heard she was a real bitch.
	Yeah.
	Sorry.
	Did you prepare that one?
	I know.
	That was off the cuff.
	They just come to me, Dan.
	That was good.
	That was good off the cuff.
	Megan Kelly, ladies and gentlemen.
	So the dog's name was Sheba, and he had left the dog in the car when he went to the Western Union.
	He never would have left.
	Anyone who knows Ruby says he never would have left the dog in the car if he'd been planning to go shoot Oswald and knowing he'd be arrested.
	It's just, it's another like, The timing issues are the big ones, right?
	Which is that if he wanted to kill him.
	It does seem like it was an uncontrollable impulse, right?
	What movie was that from where he just killed him on an impulse, on a whim?
	Yep.
	Yep.
	It was a whim.
	It was.
	And he thought he would be kind of a hero.
	I mean, you know, Ruby was a kind of, you know, was like a wannabe tough guy.
	He was the guy, he served as a bouncer at his own club.
	He'd get in fights a lot.
	He would always be a hero.
	I didn't, I don't know what the media coverage of him was like because people, some were mad that he, Killed the main piece of evidence on what was behind the JFK assassination, which was the man who did it, Oswald.
	But was he your hero?
	How did the press treat Jack Ruby?
	So he was not treated as a hero, but there was definitely a lot of sympathy for him in Dallas, which is why, if, you know, and they would do studies, et cetera, too, about, you know, what the polling was of people in Dallas at the time.
	And, you know, he definitely had people not who, Because I think people were angry that now the questions about exactly what happened and how it happened went to the grave with Oswald.
	But there was, again, this idea that he could have easily gotten this manslaughter conviction, this murder without malice, because there was generally, I don't want to say it was an understanding, but the country, it's interesting.
Finding Common Ground 00:04:50
	We cite this in the book.
	There's another case that happened.
	On the same day that Ruby shot Oswald, where a guy comes into his house and I think it's his stepfather starts mocking Kennedy watching the funeral proceeding.
	The son goes and stabs him and kills him.
	And two months later, the judge lets him off with no jail time because the country was mourning.
	So, my point is just that there was an understanding.
	Of it, which is why people were not in their right place emotionally.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, I love what you're doing.
	There's so many juicy trials, like to get your arms around and to get into.
	And they do tell us, I mean, I loved the Adams one because it really told a lot about one of our founding fathers and it was a juicy legal case as well.
	But you do a great job of it because you spin a mystery.
	I think this one's actually perfectly timed for the beach and the summer where you want something, I don't know, a little sexy.
	Forgive me.
	But also that you could learn a little bit about history through.
	And so you guys, you nailed it.
	I think this is a fascinating story.
	And I will forgive you for our argument about the Wuhan lab because I really like that.
	Well, I don't even know that we're arguing about the Wuhan lab.
	No, we're not arguing.
	We argued and I won.
	Well, because you have determined the definitive, what do we call the most likely theory?
	Yes, the most likely.
	Yes.
	Right.
	And I am saying that.
	We are both critical of the media for not taking this seriously.
	And I'm saying that based on what I have seen, it is not as definitive as that.
	That it is the leading theory, but again, I also didn't see this article this morning.
	Um, you guys should have sent that to me.
	Said we're going to be asking you about this Wall Street Journal.
	Sorry about that.
	Yeah, I just assumed you read the journal and the Times.
	Yeah, no, you know, every I wish I could read everything, you know, every morning, but um, you're busy being writing about Kennedy's Avenger and and being Ruby's Avenger.
	Not really, you're not on his side, but you do tell a fascinating tale.
	Dan Abrams, it's always a pleasure, Megan Kelly.
	Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.
	And don't forget to tune into the show on Friday because we're going to go neck deep into COVID.
	Again, those shows that we've been doing have been very well received and we've been trying to keep the information straight and real for you.
	Had a lot of follow-up questions actually in our Apple reviews where you can post a comment with people asking more questions.
	So I'm going to try to get after some of those, in particular on the vaccines.
	But we want to get into this genetic footprint and the CGG, the double CGG and how it's never before been seen naturally.
	Come on.
	The jig is up.
	You know, it's we know what happened.
	Now what's going to happen next?
	That's the real question.
	Where's the accountability?
	What are we going to do about it?
	Anyway, we'll get into all that.
	You can be reminded of that show without having to worry about it if you just go subscribe to the show now on Apple and give me five stars if you would be so kind.
	A nice review would be lovely.
	I am still reading all of them, notwithstanding your doubts.
	People doubt me, but I do.
	I read them.
	And can I tell you something?
	This is the nicest review I've seen in so long.
	It was the sweetest.
	thing.
	I don't normally just sit here and read nice reviews about myself on this show, but I got to tell you, this one struck a chord.
	It was from somebody, I have it here, named Modern?
	No, Moderate-ish.
	Moderate-ish.
	And the header was Truth.
	And he or she wrote, Megan has opened my eyes to a whole room of truth tellers.
	Okay, love that.
	She is the North Star on a moonless night.
	So grateful I found her show.
	Oh, thank you so much.
	Because can I tell you, that's how I see my guests.
	you know, that they're all stars on a moonless night.
	That's what the media landscape is right now.
	And I am honored that you are feeling that way about the program.
	I feel like we're all in this together and we will shine a light and screw those others who are trying to keep us mad and in the darkness.
	Lots of love.
	See you Friday.
	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 Branching Out With Guests
00:03:37 The Kennedy Avenger Case
00:12:44 Elite Schools and Woke Rules
00:16:14 Fighting School Board Poison
00:21:06 Grassroots Power on Boards
00:25:20 Politicians Must Use Power
00:33:52 Russian Disinformation Lies
00:37:18 Confucian Filiality Today
00:49:25 Owning Your News Platform
01:04:43 Stunned By Viewership Numbers
01:07:16 Zoonotic Origin Evidence
01:21:35 Live PD Cancellation Story
01:27:11 Banning Controversial Stories
01:42:48 The Ruby Oswald Mystery
01:58:07 Finding Common Ground