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June 21, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:09:08
20210621_clay-travis-and-buck-sexton-on-political-double-st
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CNN Double Standards Explained 00:14:02
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Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show.
Excited to be back with you after I'm hot off of a trip to Disney with my family and my kids.
And I had a super great time and I've got thoughts.
But first, I want to bring you the name of today's guests.
We're excited.
You know these guys, but you may not know them exactly as we're about to introduce them to you.
Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show.
And these guys are taking over most, virtually all, I think it's fair to say, of Rush Limbaugh's old stations.
So it seems like Premiere Radio has basically found the bet they want to make.
And I totally support their choice because these two are funny and they're interesting and they have clever takes on things.
And I love listening to them individually.
So I think you're going to enjoy this show and I think you're going to enjoy their new show.
as they continue building their respective media empires.
Anyways, lots to go over today.
I haven't yet had the chance to talk about Jeffrey Tubin at CNN.
I got thoughts on that.
We're going to kick it off there in one minute.
First this.
Let's get right into it.
I have so much on my mind.
So I was off for the latter part of last week.
We had shows, but I had pre-taped them because I was at Disney with my family, which was awesome.
So I did not get the chance yet to weigh in on Jeffrey Tubin.
We need to talk about this.
Yes.
I am so grossed out by this guy.
I cannot believe that they are still using him on CNN.
Could they find no other legal analysts, Clay?
I mean, you're a lawyer.
And as I understand it, you've been banned from CNN.
You were banned because you said you like boobs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Boobs in the First Amendment.
And it's not like they were paying me.
I'm banned as a guest.
It's not as if, you know, like they're making the conscious decision to give me money.
I mean, it's crazy.
I mean, I don't know what Allison Camerata did that she had to pay the sin of being his. cleanser.
How did she get that assignment?
I mean, it had to be a woman, probably.
They were afraid, probably, of having a guy do it.
So it's a fun discussion.
I wouldn't say no to interviewing a guy accused of Me Too stuff.
I really wouldn't.
But this is not exactly that.
This isn't a Me Too situation.
This is a gross, disgusting pervert who couldn't keep it in his pants long enough to complete a work call.
Look, I mean, I think that for me, Megan, when you break this down, first of all, like three or four years ago, I went on CNN and I said that I was a believer in two things.
The First Amendment and boobs, right?
It's a funny line.
It's a sarcastic line.
Because if you say that you're a First Amendment absolutist, it kind of goes over people's heads.
So on my radio show a long time ago, I started saying, hey, the only two things that have never let me down are the First Amendment and boobs, right?
And so it's sort of an irreverent, zany line to drop.
It isn't very serious.
CNN lost its mind when I went on and said that.
And on top of that, like a week later, Hugh Hefner died, probably the original First Amendment and boobs spokesperson, right?
And they treated it like he was a head of state who had died.
So the disconnect there.
But then they bring on Jeffrey Tubin.
And they make the decision that they're going to continue to pay this guy despite the fact that he got caught masturbating during a Zoom call that had just ended.
He thought, whatever the reason might be, it's ridiculous.
No pun intended.
His initial defense was, I thought the camera was off.
It wasn't even like, I thought it was over.
He just thought he had muted.
I think he said, I thought I had hit mute.
He just thought it was ongoing, but they couldn't.
What kind of a person thinks the Zoom is ongoing, whips it out, and pleasures himself?
There's something wrong with him.
Look, he's an incredibly talented writer.
But the idea that CNN can't find someone else to be their legal analyst and that they're willing to trot this guy out to talk about masturbating.
And I love, by the way, that he said, I've been working at food banks since then.
Okay, well, that's fine.
You know, you can go jerk off wherever you want.
If you go to a food bank afterwards, we all know that takes care of it.
I hope you use a lot of hand sanitizer because those homeless people do not deserve that.
Yeah, look, the idea that CNN would be so desperate to bring this guy back.
That they need to have, and you could speak to this better than me, but a female CNN employee sitting there basically whitewashing his behavior and that he needs to address it on CNN.
I thought the whole thing was strange.
Look, if he wants to write an apology and they want to post it on CNN.com and it even has one of those hostage video looks, you know, where he's sitting by himself and he's like, I apologize to anybody that I'm like, whatever.
If they want to do that, that's their right.
But I just think the hypocrisy in saying, Clay Travis, you can't ever be on as a guest on CNN.
And by the way, I'm doing Fox News hits now, so I'd be rather be in front of their audience, which is much bigger.
But the idea that I could never be on CNN again because of the First Amendment boobs line, and they bring a guy who got publicly caught masturbating on to talk about that in the middle of the day during their programming look, you just need to have precedence.
And the hypocrisy here to me is mind blowing.
It's so cringy.
Let's play the Camerata tube and sound bite.
What the hell?
Were you thinking?
Well, obviously, I wasn't thinking very well or very much, and it was something that was inexplicable to me.
I didn't think I was on the call.
I didn't think other people could see me.
You thought that you had turned off your camera?
Correct.
I thought that I had turned off the Zoom call.
Now, that's not a defense.
This was deeply moronic and indefensible.
I'm trying now to say how sorry I am.
Sincerely, in All seriousness.
Above all, I am sorry to my wife and to my family, but I'm also sorry to the people on the Zoom call.
Buck, you worked at CNN.
You know these people.
This is a guy who's got a history.
It was well documented in the news.
He had an affair with a CNN contributor's daughter who was in her 20s when Tubin was married with kids of his own.
He got her pregnant.
He offered her money to have an abortion.
She didn't want to.
He denied paternity.
Then it was proven he was the dad.
She had the baby.
He tried to get out of paying support for the baby.
She had to say, I'm going to publicly humiliate you with all your colleagues at CNN by telling them you won't acknowledge your responsibility to this child.
And then finally, when he knew he was going to be professionally embarrassed, according to I think it was the New York Daily News who reported on this, he started, he finally paid up.
Then there were other reports of women talking about his creepy behavior coming on to them at work events.
This guy has got an issue.
I don't know what the hell his issue is.
I don't really want to know, but I do not want to see him talking about the Supreme Court or anything else.
And I couldn't give Two shits about his time at the food bank.
Buck?
Yes, that is all true.
CNN is a bad place run by bad people.
And I can speak to that from some personal experience.
Everyone's known that Tubin's a sleazeball for a long time.
And everyone knows there's a double standard.
I mean, I don't know.
I just, yeah, the guy is a mockery.
He's a punchline.
I also have a really hard time caring one way or the other about his future and profession and what he's doing, just because this is how it goes on the left.
I mean, you basically can get away with misconduct.
I mean, if you're friends with Jeff Zucker, you better commit a serious felony or else you're going to be able to continue to work there.
So it doesn't really matter.
It's not surprising.
Look, that's right.
That's a really good point.
I was having some argument with a woman on Twitter the other day about, I personally believe.
There isn't a woman alive who could get her job back after doing this.
Not that any woman would.
No woman would do this.
No, I'm not saying women don't masturbate.
I'm just saying no one has, no woman has this kind of compunction that she couldn't keep it together for a work soon.
But I don't believe any woman would have been, would have had her job saved after this.
And, but, but the thing is, there, and this, there was a woman, her name's Kathy Young, who was saying, oh, come on, there's not really a pattern of, you know, in 2021, men being able to keep their jobs after, after, you know, hurting women or behaving this way publicly.
I'm like, bullshit.
Don Lemon, first of all, was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a guy in a bar.
There was an independent eyewitness.
Jeff Zucker, no problem.
Chris Cuomo doesn't even deny advising his brother on how to conspire against all of his many, many accusers on sexual harassment.
CNN, no problem.
Now you've got Jeffrey Tubin, who whips it out on a work Zoom call while over at The New Yorker, but he was a CNN contributor at the time, comes back having exposed and pleasured himself in front of these people.
Welcome back.
What is it?
What's going on at CNN?
What's going on with Jeff Zucker that he doesn't have a problem with any of this?
Well, I mean, my theory on all this, anytime situations like this emerge, Megan, is somebody's got major dirt somewhere, and that's how they end up keeping their job, right?
Your position is a good one.
Imagine that this were Fox News right now, right?
And all of those things that you just ran through were occurring with Fox News anchors as opposed to CNN anchors.
It would be a front page New York Times story for multiple days.
I looked because I was kind of curious.
I'm still old school.
Buck makes fun of me some about this.
I still read the actual physical newspaper.
This thing was like a couple of paragraphs on a sidebar in the New York Times.
They barely covered it at all.
And I was just thinking, you know, how much more of a story it would be if it was somebody who was a prominent Fox News contributor that had done the exact same thing.
Oh, I mean, people over at Fox have gotten pushed out for sending, you know, the so called D pics to people at work, right?
And I understand that.
But believe me, this is more than a picture, this is a movie picture.
And it actually, at Work, right?
I mean, there's a difference, like whether you could be on your phone booing stupid stuff outside of work, right?
You go to a bar, you think you have a relationship with somebody.
Those are fraught, difficult angles to analyze from a labor and employment lawyer perspective.
Getting caught masturbating while at a work event, typically not a difficult analysis for most labor and employment lawyers, which is why the New Yorker fired him immediately.
Of course, they had to.
I'm sorry, but there are certain jobs you cannot hold after you've publicly humiliated yourself in that way.
And his role happens to be one of them.
Now, but Buck, you mentioned the hypocrisy of the of sort of the social justice warriors.
So it turns out Hunter Biden is a racist and no one cares, right?
Hunter Biden, it's come out over the past few days, uses the N word all the time.
And Joe Biden's out there saying that he's going to end the hate and discrimination against Asians.
Meanwhile, it turns out Hunter Biden is talking about what kind of a woman he wants to have sex with and says, and I quote, no yellow.
Okay.
So it's unbelievable.
A collective yawn by the media.
No one cares.
And I'm sorry to stay on the double standard, but can you imagine, Buck, if that had been Donald Trump Jr., right?
Like they don't care because his last name is Biden.
I think we have to think differently on the right a little bit about double standards.
We still have to point them out.
But the double standard is the point.
They do this because they can.
The hypocrisy isn't some ugly little thing that they want to hide.
They basically look you in the eyes and say, that's right.
We take care of our side.
We bury that story.
What are you going to do about it?
I think this is a major mentality change that people on the right need to have.
We point at them and say, look at this.
If this were, and by the way, it's true.
And I agree.
I'm not saying we shouldn't say it, but it also just goes to the power dynamic as it plays out.
In the media.
That's one point on this, and that they actually get some joy.
I mean, there's some glee, I think the media takes in.
Yeah, of course, we're going to protect Joe Biden's son and not make a big deal of this because we can.
And the other part of it is that I think Hunter Biden, at some level, and this is a remarkable reality, is inoculated by his awfulness.
I mean, he's so terrible that it's hard to even get.
And when I say so terrible, such a mess, such a disaster.
In and on so many levels, the guy got kicked out of the military for basically being a crackhead.
He snorted Parmesan cheese off.
I mean, you go down the list of things, it almost is like we become immune.
We become, it's hard to sensationalize him at this point or to get attention because everyone's like, oh, he's such a screw up that how can we really care?
So I think those two things come together.
And I was a big proponent of don't focus as much on Hunter Biden in the run up to the election.
There are other reasons why the other things that Trump should have, the Pro Trump media should have been looking at.
But it's become a thing where we all point to, we say, look at Hunter Biden.
CNN doesn't care, right?
I mean, like MSNBC does, they're not going to change their ways.
So I just think there's a new context we have to put this in.
You know what, though?
But I don't disagree with anything you said.
I actually think those are two very good points, but it's still infuriating.
I agreed with Clay's tweet the other day about the New York Times trying to ruin a 15 year old girl's life.
Selling Perceptions and Dreams 00:12:05
She's a little older now, but she had said she had sung the N word.
In a song, she was quoting a song.
She said, N word, I can drive, right after she got her permit or something.
I think that was the basic story.
It was a four second clip.
She sent it to one person.
She didn't post it publicly.
That person, of course, showed it to somebody else who recorded it and then laid in wait for four years before the girl got a scholarship to be a cheerleader, I think, at the University of Alabama.
The New York Times does this story on this.
Winds up, I believe the woman, the girl was trying to sort of do a mea culpa, reset her life because her scholarship.
Got pulled and she basically got forced out of the university.
She has no college career thanks to that stupid ass story.
And the New York Times, instead of helping her by allowing her to sort of explain, you know, that's a dumb ass song, whatever.
It is a song, though.
They buried her and they celebrated her tormentor who had laid in wait and held the tape and waited until she got something good going in her life.
And actually, the thing that pissed off her tormentor was the fact that she had tweeted something that was pro BLM.
And he was like, oh no.
So he decided to ruin her life.
That clay they thought was really worthy of the pages of the New York Times.
But Hunter Biden, yawn.
Yeah, the way that I, though, I went back and looked, Megan, because I'm big and I understand Buck's point.
There is no doubt that there's a double standard.
I'm big on just continuing to analyze what the double standard is.
And I use three examples, okay?
The one you're mentioning is a 15 year old high school girl in Ludent County, Virginia.
She got her driver's license and she was celebrating, she was happy, and she just used the N word.
With an ending of A as opposed to ER, like a rapper would, right?
Like, I'm so excited.
But she's quoting a song.
There's a song apparently on a Snapchat, by the way, on a Snapchat to one friend, as you pointed out.
Classmate holds that video for three years until she actually gets admitted to the University of Tennessee.
And makes the cheerleading squad, Megan.
And makes the cheerleading squad.
As soon as that video goes out, Tennessee basically pulls her admission.
They kick her off of the cheerleading squad.
She has to go to community college because no one will admit her to college.
All right.
Front page New York Times story.
Same thing that Hunter Biden did.
Two other examples, Megan.
Morgan Wallen, who a lot of people know, country music singer, does the same thing as Hunter Biden.
What I think is key here is it's a non derogatory, non intentionally racist.
Use of the n word, right?
It's not like it's being used as a racial slur intended, right?
Is on a video, Trump coming home from the bar.
Somebody gets that video off of like a porch camera somehow or other, and he basically gets canceled.
All country music pulls his songs.
He can't go out and perform.
It's been basically a year for him now of enforced silence.
Another one, Kyle Larson, who is a NASCAR driver, while playing a video game, again, iRacing.
Not in a negative manner, just uses the N word like it would be used in rap songs all the time as kind of just a common use word, which again, not smart to do, but I think the intent matters.
He is banned from NASCAR racing for a year.
New York Times does 14 stories on Morgan Wallen, eight stories, Megan, on Kyle Larson and their use of the N word.
We just mentioned the 15 year old girl who's on the front page of the New York Times.
They have not done a single story.
About Hunter Biden's N word usage.
And by the way, I also did a database search on CNN and on the Washington Post, similar numbers on the Kyle Larson and Morgan Wallen stories as the New York Times, zero on Hunter Biden.
All right.
MSNBC, same story.
Again, regardless of what you think of what is and is not a story, my perspective is I think about this like a judge, like you do, Megan, when you're making an argument, if you're not going to call balls and strikes the same way, How can I possibly trust you?
CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post threw Morgan Wallen and Kyle Larson and this 15 year old girl, now 18, 19 year old girl, Mimi Groves, cheerleader, under the bus for the exact same thing Hunter Biden did.
They don't cover him at all.
And if you are analyzing newsworthiness, what is more newsworthy?
The president's son in a time of supposed systemic racism and racial healing.
Being racially insensitive, or these three people, which really, in the grand scheme of things, don't matter in the political universe.
If you were ranking the newsworthiness of them, I think Hunter Biden would be far in excess of the other three people.
And yet they're making the choice not to cover him while they're covering far less significant individuals far more severely.
To your point, Buck, I think the New York Times would tell you Donald Trump Jr. is a far worse person than Hunter Biden.
That's what they think.
And yet they covered his every move like it was apocalyptic.
I don't think they'd be saying, eh, he's just so bad.
We're not going to cover it.
He's done so many bad things.
We're not going to talk about him using the N word over and over and over or referring to Asian people as yellow, no yellow in terms of his sexual preferences.
You know, they're pretty quick to overlook the Tubans and the Hunter Bidens of the world and of course sling their arrows against anybody who's considered more of the right whenever they can.
Up next, Victoria's Secret somehow thinks they'll be more empowering if they get rid of the angels and use Megan Rapinoe.
Is that true?
That's next.
Since I have the two of you, I've got the dream team here.
I've got to ask you about the most important news of the day.
I don't know why I'm dying to discuss this with you, but I am.
Victoria's Secret is rebranding.
People don't understand what it is to be an empowered woman.
They don't understand it.
Even these so called feminists don't understand it.
And let me start with this story because this is up your alley too, Clay.
You know the Naomi Osaka story.
At Disney, somebody, my kids like tennis.
They were talking about, I guess, the French Open.
And somebody mentioned Naomi Osaka.
And my daughter said, Oh, they talked about her at school.
And of course, I was like, Oh, God, what'd they say?
Because you know that at this girl's school, which is very far left, and we just pulled her from it, is going to be celebrating Naomi Osaka's bailing on.
You know, the French Open as a moment of empowerment, which of course was the messaging.
And I pulled her aside.
I'm like, honey, I got to tell you, I see it a different way.
I'm like, I think we're in a place right now where anybody, but especially women who start to feel uncomfortable about something or have a weakness that they'd like to shore up are being encouraged to lean into their weakness.
That instead of meeting the challenge and saying, I feel uncomfortable, but I'm going to do it.
I'm going to prove to myself I can do it.
I'm going to master it.
They're celebrating people running from those challenges and saying, never mind, I'm going to cower.
Never mind, I don't want to do it because any discomfort is unacceptable.
I'm not okay with that.
I said, let me tell you about what I think an empowered woman looks like.
And then we started talking about the CIA analyst who found bin Laden because I had just interviewed Rob O'Neill.
We were talking about her and what a badass she is.
Okay, so that's a bridge of saying, that's what I think is empowering.
A badass woman who's actually changed the world unapologetically.
She seeks no accolades for it.
She hasn't come out publicly.
She's amazing.
Buck, you worked at the CIA.
I mean, this is like this woman's a national heroine, not Naomi Osaka.
No.
She leaned into her weakness as I see it.
So, Victoria's Secret folds into this because they believe they've been disempowering women because they sell sexy lingerie, because they have the angels doing whatever they do down the runway every year.
And men and women seem to like it.
Now, instead, they're going to use Megan Rapino.
Megan Rapino.
And they've got a trans model, they've got a biracial model who's an inclusivity advocate, size 14, right?
They're going totally a different way.
This is from a company whose founder has been seriously linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
So my head's going to explode because none of this empowers anybody.
And we're not at a point yet, you tell me, where if you want to wear sexy lingerie and flaunt your tone abs, that's somehow not empowering the women.
I think that's very empowering.
If you got them, show them.
Great.
What do you guys think, Buck?
I think that it's just doomed to fail as so many of the other times when they go against what the market really shows on this stuff.
And what people like, why is Victoria's Secret so successful?
And what is it really selling?
I mean, you know, it's kind of from what I understand.
I mean, my girlfriend and I actually talked about this recently.
She's like, look, it's just a lot of the clothing is cheaply made.
It's not very good.
It's not a very good product.
So, what is the marketing?
The marketing is that it's sexy.
And what is sexy built on?
Generally speaking, when we're talking about, you know, in a heterosexual context and what most of the, you know, majority of the market is, it's men being attracted to women.
And there's a certain impulse and there's certain things that come along with that.
You know, they can try this like bigger, beautiful thing and they can try this.
To sell to those groups individually.
I understand that.
But the brand was built upon fantasy and desirability of women, right?
That's what Victoria's Secret is all about and the male view of all those things.
So they can try to change this.
They can try to make a major shift in people's thinking about it.
But I think ultimately it has to be, it will be doomed to fail, other than we are talking about it now, right?
In a sense, they get a big publicity push here that, if nothing else, Creates more focus on the brand so that I think when they go back, I'll make a prediction right now.
They're going to have Adriana Lima or whoever in campaigns for Victoria Sukert within six months or 12 months or whatever, but they're going to go back to what works.
Because this is true all across the fashion industry.
And when you're trying to sell stuff, if I open a Brooks Brothers catalog, am I seeing like really, you know, slumpy, out of shape, 65 year old guys?
I mean, even the 50, you know, the 65 and 55 year old dudes you see in these catalogs, they've all got washboard abs and like these square jaws.
Like, this is how you sell things.
You're selling a perception and a dream.
Look, it makes the corporate board feel good about themselves when they do this stuff.
It gets them some attention.
But whether this will actually help the brand, No, no way.
I could speak to this, Megan.
I watched the Victoria's Secret.
You know, they like to do a Christmas fashion special a couple of years ago.
And look, whenever I'm flipping around, I'm not going to turn that thing off.
Innocently, way by it.
So for some reason, the remote paused.
In case people are wondering, I like attractive women wearing limited amounts of clothes.
I watched their advertisement, you know, the Victoria's Secret Christmas fashion show.
And I immediately, this was pre COVID, obviously, when everything was still open.
I think this was a couple of years ago.
I immediately went out and bought like, $200 in lingerie for my wife and just brought it back.
She was like, What are you doing?
And I was like, You know what?
You're going to look amazing in this.
And it's what's funny about this.
And I do think from a marketing perspective, it's interesting.
My wife's perspective on lingerie is you're just going to take it off.
I'm not that interested in putting it on for that, like getting dressed up, right?
Which I think is a funny line from her.
I'm also confused because I don't understand the comfy bras and nightgowns and flannel.
They've been available.
It's not like we have to have those from Victoria's Secret.
Victoria's Secret's trying to paint a different brand.
They're more like Agent Provocateur, although a lot cheaper and not as sort of saucy.
They just chose a different link, right?
Like they're there.
As I see it, the smart man, here's a tip for you guys.
The smart man buys his wife the comfy stuff, the flannel, you know, pajama bottoms and the cute top, something she actually wants to sleep in.
And the smart woman buys herself the lingerie.
So it's like a gift both ways, right?
Like I put on the, it's true, I put on the lingerie, not for me, but for Doug.
Politics of Envy in Beauty 00:03:16
Right.
But like he sort of, you know, if he wanted to make a gesture that would make me happy, right?
The lingerie is what makes you happy.
But the comfy stuff is what makes us happy.
Anyway, there's a room for all of it.
But somehow feminism now is being, it's like how they got rid of the bikini, the bathing suit contest in the Miss America pageant, which, and people say even the pageant is sexist.
All right.
I still think there's a place if women want to work out and play the violin and walk up and down the stage.
Fine, you do, you sister.
I think it's awesome.
I don't know why we have to be so holier than thou about everything, right?
Like, only Megan Rapino, she doesn't represent me.
She hates America and has purple hair.
One thing I'd say you know, we talk about cultural Marxism on the right, and people are now looking at critical race theory as essentially a racial Marxist construct, right?
And critical race theory, Megan, you know all about this.
I know you do play.
You guys actually have kids.
It's being taught in schools everywhere.
What is really the essence of these beliefs?
I mean, it's not actually Marxist, right?
It's not Marxist doctrine.
But it takes the idea that any inequality in society of any kind is a cause for concern, for agitation, and for transfer of power.
That's what it's really all about.
Now, in the classical Marxist context, it's obviously between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, it's just class warfare, effectively.
Now we see this in the context of racial differences and strife that's being played upon by activists and BLM and all the rest of it.
And they say there's inequality, and they'll pick different ethnic categorizations and say, because this is The case, and there is an unequal, and this is why they talk about equity, an unequal situation, it must be addressed with force.
And I'm just pointing this out because once you believe in a kind of radical equality for everything always, then you believe that men and women should play on the same sports team and use the same bathrooms.
Then you believe that even elevating people because they happen to be particularly beautiful or particularly intelligent or whatever it may be, that's something that has to be remedied instead of celebrated.
And this is unfortunately what you see there's a lot of politics of envy that are very, very powerful.
When you tell people who feel like they're not validated in the way they may be, well, there's something wrong with this systemically, whatever it's about class or race or gender or beauty or whatever it is.
There's always this impulse to set that right and to make everybody, everyone has to be on the same plane and you pull people down.
Now, this is dizzying and it's contradictory and it makes no sense.
But when you understand that basic impulse, you see how it plays out all throughout society, certainly in the gender context, but also now.
I mean, you know, they got rid of the bikini thing in Miss America.
It's a beauty contest, folks.
Like you start to look at this and say, you know, don't have a beauty contest then, but don't call a beauty contest something that it's not.
Exactly.
I love what you said the politics of envy.
That's exactly right.
It's like, why can't we focus on being more inclusive?
That's fine.
I mean, I think it's awesome.
I don't know whether Victoria's Secret sold bras in the size 14.
And if they didn't, then screw them.
They ought to.
Jon Stewart on Lab Leaks 00:15:54
Right?
Every size can be sexy, and every woman should be entitled to sort of bring it in and, you know, do what she wants to do.
But like the rejection of a sexy line of clothing in favor of whatever they're about to do seems unnecessary.
That's not feminist, that's not empowering.
But you're right.
The politics of envy, it lines up perfectly with this perfect equality utopia that we will never achieve, but that we hear the left lecture us on out of respect.
We need to respect one another.
Back to my trip to Disney.
This brings up something that I wanted to ask you guys about, which was me on the plane.
I went to Disney.
Florida is amazing.
Nobody wears the masks.
I go to Disney.
Day one and two, I had to wear the mask.
And then by day three, it just happened to be the day that Disney dropped the mask mandate.
So we were running around Disney without masks.
It was wonderful.
Then I get on the plane.
Delta to fly home.
And we got to wear the masks everywhere in the airport.
We got to wear the masks on the airplane.
And not only that, but you know how you get some people who are more like strict about enforcing the mask over the nose than others?
I mean, the flight attendant was like, over the nose, over the nose.
You know, even my kids, it was like, oh, good God.
And it was because why?
Because Pete Buttigieg came out.
He's now, I mean, like he's running transportation for the Biden administration.
That makes a lot of sense because he was mayor of Indiana or Indianapolis, wherever he was.
South Bend, not even a big city in Indiana.
And not a well managed one of that, by the way.
I can't keep up and I don't actually really care.
But it's showing.
And he comes out and says the reason we have to wear them still in the airports and the planes is because, quote, the workers there, the flight attendants, don't have a choice.
And, quote, it's a matter of respect.
And now, thanks to him, the mask mandate says you have to wear your mask in between bites and sips.
Of your food in here.
We've lost our minds.
Nothing makes my head explode more than the mask religion, but I don't want to.
I, I, Clay and I have been on this since the very beginning.
Oh, I mean, I'm so thankful that I live in Tennessee, where basically masks have been, you know, other than the cosmetic theater of having the most absurd of all of the mask requirements to me.
And we still had to do this little kabuki theater in New York last week when Buck and I were out to dinner in Manhattan.
Like, you have to put on a mask.
To walk into a restaurant to sit at your table.
As soon as you sit down at the table, you can take it off.
Like, that is, of all the rules that have existed, it is like, The dumbest rule that has ever existed.
I was like, oh, well, thank God I protected everyone for my 10 foot walk to my table the minute that I sit down.
Like, this is not real.
Like, this is so stupid.
And the same thing is true to your point, Megan.
Like, the two states that I've spent the most time in for the last year are Tennessee and Florida.
And so the idea that you have to wear in Tennessee, there are no masks anywhere.
And then you go into the Nashville airport where I live and you have to put your mask on and you get lectured if you put it down and you have.
To keep it on.
And if you're eating peanuts and having a drink of water, you have to put your mask back up in between your bites.
I mean, that's so stupid.
This is not how sane people make decisions, right?
The thing about the mask up and down in between the bites and the sips like, I got a glass of red wine.
I just kept it.
I just held it nearby.
I'm sipping.
I'm about to do it.
And then I'm like, what am I doing?
And I'm like, well, what if I just don't listen?
Then I'm going to be one of those people who winds up in a violent situation.
They're going to arrest you when you land and you won't be able to fly whatever airline that is again.
I've been saying, Megan, for nine months now, maybe, that it's a mass anxiety disorder.
And I will say, Clay and I were talking about masks.
Clay, when were you on my radio show?
I think we were both like, what's with the mask thing?
Maybe in April of 2020.
So some of us.
As soon as it started, I was like, this is nonsensical.
I mean, and look, to Megan's point, I didn't ever want to be the guy who got arrested because I threw a fit because I didn't want to put a mask on to go into Costco or whatever, right?
Like, I would do it, I would put it in my pocket.
I would put it on if I had to go into a store or whatever.
I'd drive around, like a lot of people, I imagine, with a mask on my dashboard so I could grab it and put it on if I needed to.
It never made any sense and it was totally illogical.
And Buck and I have been saying this from the get go, long before it was even acceptable almost to be saying.
This was the most damaging thing, I think, early on for Fauci's credibility.
I mean, I've been like the anti Fauci for over a year now.
And everyone who knows me or listens to my show, even when people were like, give him a chance, it's tough, I'm like, no, you can't trust this guy.
I know this mentality.
I worked in the federal government.
Anybody who has the job that he's had as long as he's had it is the ultimate product of the system and is a bureaucrat in a lab code.
And that's what you got with Fauci.
There's no way, Megan, that you would have a guy basically mock the idea, and he did this on national TV, is, you know, of mask wearing.
And then a month later, it's this is the most important thing we can do to control the pandemic.
If you look at the predictions that they were making about how effective masks would be, and anyone with, you know, a search engine can do this.
In June of 2020 and July of 2020, 70% reduction in cases, 80% reduction in cases and deaths.
It was completely out of control.
So much so that I knew that when we went through the winter wave, there was going to be a whole change in the narrative.
So I actually, and people can check this, I have tweets months before Fauci declared double masking.
If you were serious about the virus, you had a double mask.
I was tweeting out, just give it time.
They're going to say you have to wear two masks.
I remember that.
Yeah.
They're going to say you have to wear N95 masks, which, by the way, If you actually look at CDC studies, N95 masks perfectly worn.
Like, I'm not an anti science lunatic.
I actually read this stuff.
N95 masks perfectly worn in a clinical setting probably do considerably reduce respiratory droplets and spread of a virus.
A bandana loosely draped around your face in between sips of Chardonnay is completely and utterly absurd.
And anyone kind of knows it, but we've been running a Milgram experiment here.
I mean, we've been, we basically had Fauci.
In a lab coat, telling us to electrocute these people and it'll protect you from COVID.
And they do it, except instead of electrocuting people, Megan, they're lecturing you on how you have to mask up your eight year old or your 10 year old or whatever.
Yep.
And he doesn't acknowledge, really.
You know, it's like he's starting to pay some lip service to the lab leak.
I don't even know if we call it a theory anymore.
It's definitely the most likely way we got this virus in the world.
But he doesn't acknowledge that, you know, the failings of the scientific community and allowing any discussion of that.
And the thing that made all the news late last week was Jon Stewart going on Colbert.
Now, listen, I know people are praising Jon Stewart, and I'm glad he did his little bit with Colbert, who looked like an idiot, just trying to deny it and, you know, sort of reassure his audience.
No, wait, wait, wait.
I'm with you.
I don't know what John's saying.
I don't give him that much credit.
Jon Stewart, I believe, has been a force for evil in this country.
He's never seen a Republican he likes.
This guy is a dishonest broker.
Every once in a while, he stumbles upon an acorn, right?
And says something that's fair to the other side.
He hates everyone on the right half of this country.
I mean, I've been delighted he's been off the air personally.
And trust me, because I have been the victim of his dishonesty many times, and I can't stand him.
So, yeah, I appreciate him going on Colbert's show and saying, It's obviously a lab leak, is basically what he said.
But even the press turned on him.
Washington Post, Paul Waldman, who's a moron.
This guy worked for Media Matters for five years, and now he's this major columnist at the Washington Post.
He said that Stewart's rant, his rant was a reminder don't rely on celebrities for information on COVID 19.
Tell it to your own side, Paul, right?
You guys are the ones who are putting out these PSAs on vaccines, starring Hollywood celebrities, and doing all these primetime specials with.
Celebrities telling us that we need to get the vaccine and so on.
He goes on to say they're not experts.
And the reason we listen to experts is that they know more than we do.
Really?
Like Dr. Fauci, right?
How about this, Paul?
How about the former director of the CDC, Redfield, who came out and criticized the scientific community for shutting down the Lab Leak theory, something the Washington Post ignored?
Should we listen to that expert?
Or should it just be somebody from Media Matters who wants to reject the science when it's staring us in our faces?
I think the thing that stands out to me twofold here one, Jon Stewart's take.
Was interesting.
The laughter was the most interesting to me because that huge Stephen Colbert audience, it was as if they were having to recognize the absurdity of the arguments that they've been making against the lab leak theory.
And they're basically laughing at themselves because I will say about Jon Stewart, if he had said that a year ago, they would have labeled him all right.
They would have labeled him, they wouldn't have aired it on CBS.
Facebook wouldn't have allowed it to be distributed.
That would have taken exactly real courage.
To me, what Jon Stewart represents is now it's safe to kind of stick your head out and make this joke a year ago, even though the data hasn't changed.
You wouldn't have been able to.
The second part of what you're talking about that I think is very significant here is we're in such a polarized universe.
I wish we could go back in time when Dr. Fauci, as Buck is talking about, came out and said, Masks don't work, basically.
There's no reason you should be wearing them.
The Surgeon General said all that.
What if Trump had been a huge mask?
Guy at that point in time.
Now, it would have gone against everything Trump represents, but what if he had been like, I know the experts are saying no on masks, but I just think masks make a ton of sense and I'm going to encourage everyone to wear them.
Would the left wing in this country have ever embraced the mask if Trump had rejected Fauci back in March and his own surgeon general and said, masks to me make sense?
I would love to see the way that that would have exploded.
On the world, if Trump had been a huge mask guy, right?
Just because would they then have ever become the symbol of the resistance or the symbol of science like they have?
Because Trump was right about schools needing to reopen.
Right.
But as soon as he said schools need to reopen, we can do it safely, which all the data has supported he was right on, all the teachers' unions and everybody on the left wing was like, well, there's no way we could come back, even though the pediatricians all came out and said back in June of last year, it's like nobody wants to remember it.
Science actually said kids need to be in school.
Trump was on the side of science there, and the story just disappeared.
I love the hypocrisy of don't listen to celebrity.
They're not experts.
Why don't you tell it?
To Stephen Colbert, who you lionize, to Jimmy Kimmel, to Sarah Silverman, to Jane Fonda.
The left loves to lionize these celebrities, not normal left people, but the capital L left.
And now, when one goes off the rails and says something true about the Lab League theory, it's we don't listen to celebrities, we listen to scientists.
But again, even Redfield is out there saying, yeah, Fauci seems to be a little enamored with his old hypothesis.
I think that the soundbite was he's holding on to his old hypothesis tightly, meaning he doesn't want to accept the Lab League.
Bleak theory.
But I, it's just to me, it's funny, but it's also just stomach turning to see.
And by the way, I do want to say Jon Stewart's done good things for the vets.
That I appreciate, but I just net, net his career.
The guy's a jerk.
And they get away with it, right?
Because like Fauci, he can give a little lip service to like, that deep theory, I've never shot anything down.
And the left is like, yeah, us either.
You know, no, we get it.
We're open minded.
Problem that they have with what he said isn't really about the status of the facts right now because Anybody who reads the news at all, I mean, even a passing familiarity knows that the preponderance of the evidence right now is clearly in favor of a lab league theory.
I mean, anyone who actually.
So then, why would that schmuck from Media Matters or now the Washington Post you brought up feel the need to immediately jump in and be like, well, don't listen to John Stewart?
It was because John Stewart was mocking this idea.
And there's a real sensitivity on the left and among Democrats.
To mockery in general.
I mean, I would argue they've largely destroyed comedy.
I mean, they've made it so that you really can't make jokes.
Only they can ridicule the other side.
They're hypersensitive about these things because they became so emotionally and personally invested in their COVID approach.
I mean, I live in a building in New York, Megan, where there were people, and I mean, I still wish I would sort of take photos, but I didn't want to be accused of COVID shaming or anything.
There were people who were wearing hazmat suits, like head to toe plastic with the face mask.
In my building to go outside for the first six months of the pandemic.
Probably also buck people who were young doing that, right?
Like who had zero statistical risk.
They were in their 30s.
I mean, I know who they are.
Zero risk.
So, yeah.
I mean, like the chance of them, legitimately, the chance of them dying from this is substantially less than every time they're like getting into a car.
So, you see this though, that there's the left wants to, there are two big concerns that I have here.
And I'm somebody who, if anything, I've been yelled at by people on my own side for talking about masks and lockdowns too much.
Any traces of Fauciism, kind of like a virus that hasn't really exited your system, might be able to make a comeback.
I think it actually will make a comeback.
I think they're getting ready to use the same mass mobilization against the virus for other social issues.
We've people have talked to this a little bit, whether it's climate change as the emergency or gun violence or whatever.
They like this mass mobilization and ability to tell people when they can leave their homes.
I mean, that they have to wear a stifling piece of cloth over their face all the time, and which, as we all know, got really absurd.
But they don't like the mockery component of this because so much of what they did was really stupid.
And they were yelling the science the whole time to the point where now, when you yell the science, it's like a joke, right?
Everyone understands that.
And I just want to throw into all this too the blue check medical community has ruined the public's perception of medical expertise for a long time to come.
And the real moment of transition in this perception was when, and I still screenshotted some of these tweets.
I'm Clay, I'm sure you remember this one too.
When the original BLM riots start, still early in the pandemic, and they're saying, you can't protest lockdowns, but people protesting against police violence, they're saving lives.
We're okay.
Okay with that.
Big groups, go for it.
Spit on each other, scream in public, whatever you got to do.
I loved that because it just illuminated the hypocrisy to such a large extent as if the virus makes a decision whether to spread or not based on the intent of the people who are gathering in groups, right?
So I used to go on my radio show.
Yeah.
I would go on my radio show and say, hey, why can't we have full football stadiums then and just say, instead of, you know, instead of going to a football game, we're just attending a protest against the visiting team, right?
We're all there to root against them, right?
Oh, I go out on the street without my mask on.
People would look at me.
I'd be like, BLM.
Up next, Abigail Schreier, you know her.
She has written an in-depth piece called When the State Comes for Your Kids.
Debating Transgender Childhood 00:08:43
And it is downright chilling about what's happening to parents now who seek help from the medical community when it comes to a transgender child.
You need to hear this.
I'm going to run it by the guys, and we're going to go from there.
And also, we're going to talk about their new adventure right after this.
Abigail Schreier has a great and disturbing piece out.
And she wrote Irreversible Damage and has been jumping up and down about the transgender craze that's been happening in some pockets, not to diminish it as an actual thing for some people, but it's become a craze for others.
And her article is pointing out how now more and more in the medical community, these therapists will call social services on a parent who refuses to affirm the child's new stated gender.
So in one case, there was a mother who was complaining to her own therapist Oh my God, my kid.
You know, they're saying that they're trans.
I don't believe it.
And that therapist called the authorities on her for alleged abuse.
It's unbelievable.
It's insane.
But to your point, the medical community is self destructing.
They're doing this to themselves.
My wife gets so fired up about this.
You remember when Mario Lopez came out and said, hey, you know, and he had to apologize.
But he was like, hey, you know, I don't think six year olds should really be picking their gender.
And then he had to apologize.
And my wife lost her mind over that.
She's like, We don't let our six year old choose what to eat, right?
He would eat ice cream for every meal.
He would never eat candy for every.
And yet we're going to let our six year old tell us what gender he or she is.
And we're going to adjust the entire way that we raise them.
Like, hey, when you become an adult, if it makes you happy, right?
To quote Sheryl Crow a little bit and you're a consenting adult, go ahead and do it, right?
You can't be that wrong.
I don't think most people are of that opinion.
The idea is.
That a six year old or a kindergartner is going to be picking their gender, and that if you disagree with that as a parent, that you're going to be reported to child services.
I mean, this is madness.
Somebody was saying at the time on my show, they said something like, How about we wait until they stop needing the choo choo train sound to get the spoon in their mouth before letting them make decisions like that?
There's a peer reviewed study, I think it was out of Brown University, that looked at the contagion effect.
I don't know if you guys remember this the contagion effect.
Of transgenderism among children under the age of, I think it was 12, but might have been 14.
And guess what?
It turns out when one person in a community, one person in a school, comes out at eight or nine as transgender.
The effect is there's like a thousands of a percentage chance more that other kids in the class will suddenly decide that they too are transgender.
And this created some problems for the movements, so to speak, because you're supposed to believe this is an innate, deeply held characteristic.
What do we do?
Because it's non physical, as we know.
I keep people, I love when people write to me, they go, you don't understand anything.
And they'll talk about what used to be called, I don't know if we're allowed to use the, The H word anymore.
Intersex, I believe, is the term.
It used to be called something else, where you have some of the parts of both.
That's actually not what transgenderism is.
It's entirely a psychological condition.
So, or psychological affirmation, we're supposed to say now.
So, they went after what they found is that kids are far more likely to decide they're transgender when another kid nearby that they know is transgender.
They pulled that study off the internet entirely, erased it.
It's like it never existed, not allowed to look at the data and the numbers, not even allowed to compile them.
And I think this just goes to how.
There's a recognition that unless we can get people to believe that eight year olds are already transgender, they're afraid that there'll be a consideration of this as just essentially an adult lifestyle choice thing instead of something that should be treated as an immutable characteristic as a matter of law.
And then, of course, celebrated, which I mean, now I just had breakfast recently with alumni, well, a father and a son from my old high school.
And they were telling me about the kind of indoctrination stuff that goes on there.
It's not about tolerance.
They use the T word tolerance a lot when I was in the school.
Now it's celebration.
It's about pushing.
It's not even celebration, it's about pushing.
At our old school, from which we pulled our boys, it was, according to our son, it was every other week they're asking them, Do you think you're a boy?
Do you guys still think you're boys?
Are you like just introducing it?
Like it's something they need to consider.
Why don't you shut up and let him learn math?
You don't have to talk to him.
Like, what's next?
Right?
Like, it's not for you to start putting that into his head.
You teach non bullying and love and support and non judgment of others.
Great.
I'm with you.
Stop introducing it to him like it's a change he can select if he wants, especially since most of the experts are saying that if your kid is transgender, nine times out of 10, they know when they're two, right?
And I know transgender people.
I've said this before.
We got them in my family.
They knew from the earliest age they can remember.
They've lived a tortured life.
Most of them who are our age now grew up in a time when this was not okay.
So they had to keep it a secret.
They remember being three and trying to, you know, Wear only the other side's clothes and so on and so forth, and then realizing how unacceptable this was.
You don't stumble upon it at age 16.
What we're seeing, thanks to people like Deborah Seau and Abigail Schreier, is that social awkwardness, looking for a target, right?
Looking for some out that's better than I'm awkward, or in some cases, even I'm on the spectrum, something that's been sort of judged to be worse, I guess, than being trans.
So you can upgrade to having this.
Sort of sexy, popular thing in some of these cases.
I'm not saying in all of these cases, but in a lot of these cases, the bottom line is we need to figure it out.
We need to have honest therapists and medical community assistants who will help us and our kids work through it.
God forbid it happens because I don't want this to happen to my kid because it's not an easy lifestyle.
I would support and love, but I don't wish for it.
The study, by the way, was almost called rapid onset gender dysphoria among children, as in one 10 year old says, I think I'm a girl.
And then there's an enormously increased chance that a week later, after all the adults make a big deal of it and the whole thing, another 10 year old says, I think I'm a girl.
They had to pull it in.
I just checked to make sure they pulled it off a Brown University website and then they put it back up with corrections.
Yeah, Lisa Lippman was the Brown doctor.
Who put that together?
And then she was forced to resubmit it after an additional peer review where she did not wind up changing her conclusions.
She just came under a lot of fire for having made them.
And there's only been more evidence to support it since then.
And you can look around, you can see for yourself.
It's like in our school from which our daughter just left a few years ago in the 10th grade, there was like an outbreak of trance, like what happened to one girl and having another girl, having another girl.
And Abigail Schreier's got some good chapters in her book talking about what you should do if that happens.
And it's, It's complex because basically, it's trying to get your child away from that, right?
Like, rescue her from this being surrounded by this sort of trans ideology, whether she thinks this is an option available to her to solve her problems.
You know, it's hard.
I think the challenge in general has to go with just the idea that there are acceptable opinions and unacceptable opinions to have as we debate really difficult choices in society.
And when we circumscribe, and I'm not talking about just transgender issues or anything else, I'm talking about.
The way that we respond to COVID, right?
If you circumscribe immediately what the acceptable range of opinions is to have, you end up not allowing the full fruition of the debate to occur.
And it drives so much of it underground that there is no ability to make sense.
Like, if you were going to debate whether or not masks make sense or whether or not lockdowns make sense or whether or not shutting down schools makes sense on the left wing in our country right now, There is a very circumscribed level of debate that you are allowed to have.
And that isn't what science represents.
Science, much like our national debate, should be robust, uninhibited, and at times provocative because that's how we lead to results that make sense.
Circumscribing Acceptable Opinions 00:11:19
That's how we reach hypotheses and theories.
Science should be messy.
And trying to clean it up in the same way it seems like we're trying to clean up our debates in general is not overall in a helpful direction.
That the country is moving.
And that's one of the reasons I think Buck and I are so excited about Megan having the audience that we're going to have in the Rush Limbaugh time slot to be able to talk, I think, in an intelligent way in a sort of like oasis in the desert for many people who are a variety of different persuasions who just feel like there's a tremendous amount of dishonesty in the country today.
Yeah.
I want to talk to you about that.
Can you help me understand?
I love the partnership.
I think this is so fun because you're two of my favorite people.
But I don't understand because I, let me start with this.
I've seen a number of people be like, and I'm the new Rush Limbaugh.
Like, I am the one who's in Rush Limbaugh's spot.
And then, no, I am.
And I'm like, I don't, this seems like the closest thing to actual that we've seen.
Like, you guys have, I think, most of his markets.
But can you help me understand what is the partnership and how big is it?
Because it feels like a big one.
I don't like the R word.
There's no replacing Rush Limbaugh.
No one thinks they're actually replacing Rush Limbaugh because you can't, right?
I mean, this is, you know, when you have a figure like Pitcairn.
Who replaced Winston Churchill?
Like, ask somebody that is the prime minister of the UK.
Some people might say Anthony Eden, but very few people are actually going to know who, you know what I'm saying?
Like, you don't replace just because you come after.
We are following Rush into this slot.
There are other hosts who are, by the way, friends of mine and great people.
I mean, I'm a big damn Bongino fan.
I work closely with and I've known Dana for many years.
You know, there are other hosts and God bless them.
And I, they're going to look, I know they're going to do good shows and they're good people.
We are the premier radio, which is what was Rush's syndicator.
We're the premier radio offering now going forward in this time slot.
And yes, we'll be, Rush had, and the numbers, Change so much on these things because there are so many radio stations.
Rush had, let's say, over 550 stations, I think, close to 600 of the stations Rush was on, we'll be on close to 400 of them.
So, yes, we're basically on, you know, four sixths of the Rush stations, I'd say.
I guess also known as two thirds.
It's been a while since I've done math.
So, that's why this is, I think, a little bit confusing for folks.
But like I said, I mean, the great thing about Rush is I think of him as like a special forces guy in the media and radio world.
He's like a Titan.
That gave a lot of us, he created this industry and created the space for Clay and me and the other hosts who are going to be doing shows at noon.
We need more conservative media.
I hate infighting among conservatives over our tiny little slice of the pie.
And I mean, Megan, like I always appreciate that when I first poked my head out from the CIA, you know, you were the first person who ever put me in primetime at Fox.
Not only did you put me in primetime, you would put me sometimes during terrorism stories in your A block.
And I always appreciated that.
You know why?
I knew more about terrorism than 95% of the people that were going on TV as experts to talk about it.
And you recognize that because I had just come out of that world like months before I was on air with you.
I finally gotten old enough, Buck, that I can claim credit for some people.
Like I put on Ben Shapiro a lot when people weren't using him.
I put on Ben Dominic a lot.
I put on you.
I'm noticing a pattern.
Megan liked really, really smart guys.
Well, that's exactly right.
And gals too.
Crystal Ball was another person whose career I helped build.
I love Crystal Ball.
If you want a really smart leftist, she's top of the list.
You know, but that's the thing.
If you look for smart people, it's not that hard.
Just open your mind, listen to what you're hearing, and you can find the honest brokers.
Then you can find the ones who are just bomb throwers.
And that's never really been that appealing to me.
Just the, if you're both bomb throwy and smart, I'll take you.
But if you're just a bomb thrower, it's not my thing.
And you've always been so smart.
And Clay, I've only stumbled onto in the last two years, but I am a huge Clay Travis fan.
Huge.
I think I love the way your mind works on so many levels, Clay.
And I'm just like, Thrilled that I am not alone and that you're getting a bigger platform and that more people are going to be exposed to your ideas.
So, can you explain to me?
Because I saw something from you, Clay, saying that you guys have been doing like test shows and you've been so, how long has it been in the works?
Yeah.
So, I'm super excited about this.
I mean, we have been, Buck and I have, and he may know dates better than me, but we were very excited that the news broke through the way that we wanted the news to break because for several weeks in advance of the news coming out, I think it came out.
Mid May was the official, maybe early May was when the news officially came out.
And we started doing sort of, I wouldn't say full shows, but sort of mock ups of what the show would sound like privately for an audience of just a few of the premier executives that were putting us together.
And with the first show that we did, I was like, yeah, we're ready to go.
And so there's been so much prep, and you can imagine behind the scenes work and everything else.
I'm just ready to sit down in front of the mic and start talking.
And I think that what we will have, some people hearing this on Monday will hear us later this week because we'll be officially underway.
I think what we're going to have is the smartest show in radio.
And that doesn't mean you're always going to agree with us.
That doesn't mean that you're not sometimes going to hear our opinions and be like, oh, these guys are idiots.
These guys are imbeciles.
I disagree with them completely.
I think what we're going to have is a real interesting discussion about the major issues that are confronting this country every day.
And they can be in the world of politics, current events.
Sometimes sports will overlap, pop culture, because everything is political in some way right now.
And what I found, Megan, with my show, I did sports talk radio for six years.
And I just couldn't pass up the opportunity when Julie Talbot, who does an incredible job running everything at Premier, came to us and said, Hey, we want you guys to take over the time slot of Rush that Premier has been distributing for so long.
And we did sports on my radio show without sports for months.
And Megan, our audience skyrocketed.
And it was because we were talking about how to get back, analyzing COVID and everything else.
I just feel like there is a desperate demand.
And I talked about this with Buck, and I'll say it a lot on our radio show, too.
I don't even focus so much on Democrat, Republican anymore, or independent, whatever people's politics are.
There's sane and there's insane.
And I'm not sure that there's ever been a time when there has been more insane beliefs.
We're talking about the mask.
I mean, in many ways, mask policy is all insane.
Defunding the police is legitimately insane.
Much of the bona fides of the Far left wing in this country right now are legitimately insane.
And I think we need to be punching back.
Big finish next.
Don't go away.
On television, all there really is is Fox.
I mean, you've got other sort of smaller players, but really that's all there is.
And so, if you want something else, some other voice, you should have more than one option.
That's one of the reasons why I think radio, podcasting, the digital media world, Has exploded with more right leaning commentators because people are desperate for it.
And while they may be locked out from getting in on linear television or cable television for the most part, they're not locked out of this world.
And there's a huge, huge audience.
My husband's an author.
He was just telling me that there's going to be another conservative publishing house coming out.
They came out at Regnery right now.
And there's another one coming out and saying, we're going to do it too.
Good for them.
There's a market.
Half the country wants that.
So I'm sure it's going to be a huge success.
I think it's even more than half the country, Megan.
And what I would say is one of the things that's so attractive about radio is.
In this big tech universe where they can decide, hey, we're going to throttle down your tweets.
We're not going to allow your videos to be shared on Facebook.
We're not going to allow your articles.
I see this all the time happen at Outkick.
To know that you're able to directly talk to the public through the radio, arguably in our big tech era, in our social media space, radio and podcasting, to your point, audio is so much more important than it ever has been before because you can go direct to your audience without the ability to be curtailed or canceled.
Julie Talbot is awesome and I know her a bit and has stuck by Rush all these years, even when he got himself in some hot water.
So, you've got a strong, steely spined person behind you, and that's everything.
I got to ask you, Clay, about Fox and what's happening with Outkick.
Did you, did you, now you know I'm not a sports person, but I do go to Outkick.
I do because I want to hear you and I like Bobby.
So, what's happening now?
Have you sold Outkick to Murdoch or like what's happening?
Yeah, the Fox people.
So we had a lot of people trying to buy Outkick.
I think I talked about that with you maybe a little while ago, the last time I was on.
Yeah, it wasn't a deal yet, though.
Yeah, it wasn't a deal yet.
There were a lot of people that were making inquiries.
And ultimately, the pitch that Fox put in front of us was just so substantial in terms of being able to put jet fuel on Outkick.
And this kind of goes to the point earlier with so much of our audience is reliant on Facebook or Twitter.
Or YouTube being able to distribute our content.
And the more and more I looked at it, we needed a big partner to ensure that we didn't get silenced and we didn't get canceled.
And so I thought about this a lot, but ultimately it made the most sense.
And look, I'm still going to be running Outkick the same way for the next five years or more.
I'm the president of Outkick, driving all the editorial decision making, doing things that we ordinarily would be doing.
But Fox basically said, hey, we think what you're doing at Outkick sort of links the sports world with the Fox News universe.
You are a bridge between those two parts of Fox.
And what they sold us on was something that made a lot of sense, not just in sports and not just in politics.
We focus a lot on sports gambling.
And for people who haven't checked it out, check out outoutkick.com.
It's a fun place to hang out.
And I think that the perfect Partner.
So I couldn't say no.
They kept coming back to me.
And finally, I said, you know, this is just too good of an opportunity.
Well, to the same point, right?
It's like, I really think the world of Lachlan Murdoch and I think he's been fantastic.
He would never cut and run.
Never.
And we need more bosses like that out there.
You know, not that he's your boss, but I'm just saying, like, we need more partners like that.
He got on and said that.
He said, look, I love what you're doing at Outkick.
You know how difficult it can be sometimes to fight these battles with advertisers and with the big tech companies and everybody else.
And he basically said, Hey, I want to have your back for years and years to come and grow out into a massive thing.
Yeah.
Now, let's see if he means it the way Jeff, let's see if he loves you the way Jeff Zucker loves Jeffrey Tubin.
We'll see if you can get that kind of love for him.
Fighting Battles with Moms 00:02:53
Yeah, no kidding.
Really?
Fuck.
Don't ever let Clay do that on a Zoom or in studio.
Don't worry.
I'm like the chaperone of this duo, making sure that Clay doesn't get too out of hand.
Listen, I think it's so great.
It's brilliant because you guys are smart, you're insightful, you're fun.
And I'm looking forward to listening.
And as you know, All the best.
Come on anytime.
Please don't abandon me because I love having you both on and I'll be listening.
No, we need to get you on the show too.
It'll be fun.
We'll have you on.
Yeah, Megan, wait, wait, yeah.
This is the two way street.
When's Megan coming on the biggest radio show in America?
Anytime.
And I'm going to wear the old Victoria's Secret stuff and everyone's going to say, oh, for the love of God, cover up, woman.
It'll be fantastic.
Megan, appreciate it.
Well, that was fun.
Those guys are going to do great.
I want to mention to you that one of the reasons I went down to Florida wasn't all pleasure.
although what I did professionally was a pleasure too, is I spoke to a group called Moms for Liberty.
You guys need to check out this group.
Go ahead and Google them if you're not familiar with them already, because I'm already seeing them pop up in different signatures and different movements around the country.
And it's a growing group started by two moms down in Florida who had had about enough of the indoctrination that we've been seeing in schools and got on the school board and tried to push for change that way and ran into brick walls, even in a Florida's more red.
It's more purple, really.
to be honest.
Even in a state like that, you can run into pushback when it comes to things like pushing back against critical race theory and indoctrination on gender issues, yada, yada.
Anyway, so they were gracious enough to host me down in Orlando, Florida, just outside of Orlando for a bit on last Friday.
And I had such a great time.
It is so nice to get around people who are fighting the same battles you are and who aren't always on the other side.
Right?
It's like, that's what I'm used to, being around people who don't agree with me.
That's okay too.
There's merit to it.
But it's wonderful to see such an active, engaged group fighting for the things that I happen to believe in too.
And so if you don't already know who they are, check it out because this is something that you could actually join.
They have a mission and they have chapters all over the country now.
And they will help you figure out how to effect change in your town.
These women have been marginalized.
They've been called names.
They've had actually horrible stuff done to them.
They just will not give up.
Two moms, Tiffany Justice and Tina Deskovich.
I apologize to Tina if that's not how you pronounce the last name.
I could have screwed that up.
But it's Tiffany and Tina, and they are forces with which to be reckoned.
Anyway, they've got chapters all over the country.
And if you are somebody, it doesn't have to be mom, it could be a dad too, but if you are somebody who's struggling with what to do in your child's school district, check them out.
It's momsforliberty.org.
Great place to start in fighting back.
Marginalized Moms Fight Back 00:00:52
All right, coming up next show, do not forget to tune in because we have got Gad Sad.
I love that name, right?
It's fun, Gad Sad.
Now, he is an evolutionary behavioral scientist, but I first got to know him when he published The Parasitic Mind How Infectious Ideas Are killing common sense.
You need to read this book, but start by listening to Gad, and then you can decide for yourself whether you want more of this brilliant man's thinking in your life, because I know the answer is going to be yes.
Not only is he full of common sense and wisdom and insightful ways of looking at things, but he's funny.
Anyway, he's next.
Don't miss it.
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.
Thank you.
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