The Megyn Kelly Show - 20210818_chaos-and-violence-in-afghanistan-and-chicago-with
Aired: 2021-08-18
Duration: 01:22:08


=== Chaos Abroad and Lawlessness at Home (14:14) ===

[00:00:15]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:27]  Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:28]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:30]  Today, chaos.
[00:00:32]  Chaos abroad.
[00:00:34]  lawlessness here at home in cities like Chicago.
[00:00:37]  And we're going to take a look at all of it.
[00:00:39]  We're going to start the show with Ayan Hirsi Ali, who is going to speak to the ridiculous notion that the Biden administration has now placed human rights at the center of its foreign policy, taking assurances from the Taliban about how they're going to protect human rights and women's rights and so on, as though the Taliban is somehow different from ISIS.
[00:01:06]  Ayan's got some insights on that.
[00:01:08]  This, as what we see in Afghanistan today, is street protests breaking out against the takeover by the Taliban, demonstrations in at least two cities now, as the Taliban moves to form a new government, as the people object, as the people we left behind try to salvage something resembling a normal life.
[00:01:29]  They're not getting out.
[00:01:31]  Our attempt to help those who helped us get out of the country, and even the Americans who are left there now, and the Europeans.
[00:01:37]  I have been thwarted, continue to be thwarted as the efforts are underway.
[00:01:42]  And there is a real question about what kind of a void America has left behind, not just in Afghanistan, but in the world as a leader.
[00:01:52]  After Aion, we're going to be joined by John Cass, because I don't know if you've been paying attention to what's happening here domestically with our crime rate, our shootings, our murders.
[00:02:01]  There was a guy in New York City who was attacked with a hatchet as he was at the ATM at 5 30 in the evening in the middle of Manhattan.
[00:02:09]  Two days ago, there are two little girls shot in Chicago, a baby shot in the head, a police officer, 29 years old, shot to death 10 days ago in Chicago.
[00:02:17]  And on and on it goes.
[00:02:19]  And the mayor, her lieutenants, don't seem to give a damn.
[00:02:26]  There's no Black Lives Matter protest there.
[00:02:28]  As we talk about human rights, what about the human rights of those little babies?
[00:02:31]  What about the human rights of those little girls in our cities?
[00:02:35]  You know, it's they're two different things, but the violence is jarring.
[00:02:41]  And needs attention by all of us.
[00:02:44]  John Cass, who is a longtime reporter, he was born in Chicago.
[00:02:49]  He was a columnist for the Chicago Tribune for, oh, I don't know, I think it's 30 plus years covering politics and so on.
[00:02:56]  He just left out of a desire to be independent, not have his voice stifled and sort of speak the truth, write the truth.
[00:03:03]  He was a liberal no longer.
[00:03:06]  And he is telling the truth about Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the crime right there and what happened with the shooting death.
[00:03:12]  of Officer Ella French and the cops who turned their backs on her.
[00:03:16]  And he's going to tell that truth to us.
[00:03:18]  Stay tuned for a powerful show with two really smart, insightful people.
[00:03:23]  That's in one minute.
[00:03:29]  I've been thinking about you all week, dying to talk to you about this and get your take.
[00:03:33]  And in particular, let's kick it off with Biden's explanation for the way this was handled, for the decisions that he's made.
[00:03:42]  And what he really wants us to know is that human rights are now at the center of America's foreign policy, and that human rights will not be protected by endless military deployments, but with our diplomacy.
[00:03:59]  Our diplomacy is going to To protect, let's say, the women in Afghanistan and others who are suffering there.
[00:04:06]  And we should trust Biden to handle this well, I guess, because he's handled the departure so well out of Afghanistan.
[00:04:15]  Your thoughts on that?
[00:04:15]  Human rights, now the center of his foreign policy.
[00:04:19]  Well, first of all, I think just to stand right in front of the American people and the world and lie as he did, as bold faced, you know, the statements he made about the Withdrawal was going to be all orderly.
[00:04:35]  I haven't seen anything more chaotic, I think, in my lifetime.
[00:04:38]  And then you look at the promises he makes about human rights and how that is just the opposite of exactly what's happening.
[00:04:47]  People in Afghanistan are dying.
[00:04:49]  The Taliban are back now, more empowered than they were before.
[00:04:53]  They are going to strip women of all of their rights.
[00:04:56]  You're going to have one of the most extreme forms of Sharia back again in Afghanistan to haunt the women of Afghanistan.
[00:05:04]  Where we spent 20 years trying to send them to school, get them to participate in public life, they're going to be removed from the streets now.
[00:05:13]  They're going to be subjected to those draconian punishments.
[00:05:16]  Most people don't remember, but you'll get the floggings back.
[00:05:19]  You'll get the amputations and the stonings back.
[00:05:24]  Women won't be allowed to be on the streets.
[00:05:26]  And any woman who dares to defy the Taliban is going to be subjected to some of the stuff.
[00:05:31]  I don't know if you remember the Time Magazine photograph of.
[00:05:36]  Asia Bibi, the woman whose nose and ears were cut off because she disobeyed her husband.
[00:05:41]  You're going to get that type of thing again.
[00:05:44]  And this time, the Taliban have way more power than they did before.
[00:05:48]  Wouldn't you have respected him more if he would have come out and said, I understand human rights are about to go off a cliff in Afghanistan.
[00:05:56]  The Taliban cannot be trusted for anything when it comes to human rights.
[00:06:00]  However, we're now going to treat Afghanistan the way we treat North Korea, the way we treat China and what it's doing to the Uyghurs.
[00:06:06]  We're sorry, we're sad.
[00:06:09]  But we're basically now going to treat it like it's not our problem.
[00:06:12]  That at least would have been honest.
[00:06:14]  But to pull everyone so haphazardly, to leave our allies who helped us behind, he doesn't care about what's happening to the women.
[00:06:23]  Obviously, he would have handled this differently, would have left it maybe a residual force.
[00:06:28]  But now, so he wants credit for being a protector of human rights as he completely disregards them.
[00:06:33]  No, he's very comical.
[00:06:34]  I've never had any kind of respect for Joe Biden.
[00:06:38]  And I think the kind of ideology that he's reintroducing, this is going to be.
[00:06:43]  Obama 2.0.
[00:06:44]  It is going to be to take pride in surrender and in retreats and in American weakness, but then all along present it as morally superior.
[00:06:52]  That is where we're back at.
[00:06:54]  Biden doesn't have the presence of mind and the intellectual capacity to at least say it like it is.
[00:07:02]  Yeah, I think a lot of people may have thought, okay, it's a terrible decision, but you own that decision.
[00:07:09]  But don't lie to us, don't tell the world a lie.
[00:07:12]  And so, for him to present, first of all, the whole thing as this black and white thing where it was only withdrawal, one option, or stay there forever in the forever war, to present it that way, I think that is the first and most important lie.
[00:07:27]  Because it wasn't like that.
[00:07:29]  We were there for 20 years, but we had a small military footprint that is to prop up the Afghani government, which we all understood was weak and corrupt.
[00:07:39]  But that option was cheaper and better for human rights.
[00:07:45]  Americans.
[00:07:45]  And remember, we went 20 years ago to Afghanistan to pretend to prevent that country from being a safe haven for terrorists.
[00:07:54]  Now we've brought those terrorists back, handed Afghanistan to them on.
[00:08:00]  A tray and said, You can even have all the assets that we had given the Afghan government because the Afghan government that we were propping up is gone.
[00:08:08]  So the Taliban is stronger today more than ever.
[00:08:11]  That is going to embolden not only the jihadis in Afghanistan, but the jihadis everywhere.
[00:08:17]  That's exactly right.
[00:08:19]  Let's talk about that.
[00:08:20]  I want to talk about how they're emboldened, but just on the way of news, Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, was questioned yesterday just how much of our US weaponry has fallen into Taliban hands because we had been arming the Afghan National Army.
[00:08:34]  And they're no longer in existence.
[00:08:37]  So the Taliban has everything we gave to them.
[00:08:39]  And it's to the tune of billions, billions of dollars of equipment, including guns, ammunition, helicopters, and more that we've given over the course of two decades.
[00:08:48]  And the answer was, and I quote, we don't have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense material has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban.
[00:08:58]  Right, it has.
[00:09:00]  And not only that, but we don't have control of the cities.
[00:09:05]  We don't know exactly where all the Americans are right now who we've left behind.
[00:09:09]  We don't know where the.
[00:09:10]  I've heard the numbers anywhere between 30 and 80,000 allies who helped us, who we can't get out, 15,000 Americans.
[00:09:16]  So you've got the Taliban, the bad guys who are still in touch with Al Qaeda.
[00:09:20]  We're told they're in at least 15 provinces in Afghanistan now with access to our weapons and emboldened.
[00:09:28]  So let's get to that point they're feeling stronger than ever.
[00:09:32]  Yes, they're feeling stronger than ever.
[00:09:34]  For them, the narrative is renewed that America is weak.
[00:09:39]  It's cowardly, it's dishonorable.
[00:09:41]  America is a traitor.
[00:09:43]  They'll talk to you about human rights and civilization and progress, but then at the very last moment, they just let you fall like that.
[00:09:51]  So I think it's not just what's going to happen to the weapons and the money that we left behind, it's also what's going to happen to the people that we train.
[00:09:59]  Members of the Afghan military, those who don't get killed, they'll be forced to teach the Taliban members how to operate those weapons.
[00:10:09]  They'll be forced to tell them American secrets.
[00:10:14]  They'll be told, they'll be made to do all sorts of things.
[00:10:17]  And in some ways, they may even be persuaded to switch sides.
[00:10:20]  Why would they not?
[00:10:21]  These people are incompetent.
[00:10:24]  They're incompetent.
[00:10:25]  They have absolutely no moral compass.
[00:10:29]  And they haven't only betrayed our allies in Afghanistan, but they've also, I mean, what does the government of India now think of us?
[00:10:38]  What kind of alliance would they want with the United States of America?
[00:10:41]  What about our European allies?
[00:10:42]  What kind of alliance do you think?
[00:10:43]  We didn't even give them any kind of warning that we were leaving.
[00:10:46]  And then what kind of message does this send to China, to Iran, to Russia?
[00:10:52]  Right.
[00:10:53]  It's just a display of weakness.
[00:10:54]  And are they more or less likely to get aggressive with their neighbors now, you know, when it comes to, let's say, Taiwan or the Russians with respect to their cyber attacks?
[00:11:04]  I mean, what have we opened ourselves up to by behaving so ineptly and demonstrating such weakness?
[00:11:11]  Yeah.
[00:11:12]  We are now living in this fantasy land that we.
[00:11:14]  We're being invited to by the Biden administration that we are going to display weakness, but we'll just present it as strength.
[00:11:22]  They talk about human rights.
[00:11:23]  I've been looking at some of the materials that this State Department has been distributing to other countries, and it's all woke.
[00:11:31]  It's all about identity politics that we are exporting from here to the rest of the world.
[00:11:37]  And so now we are not only seen as weak and as cowardly and as corrupt, but we're also seen as just mad.
[00:11:45]  It's a joke.
[00:11:47]  We're talking about here, we're talking about changing the language to birthing people from women.
[00:11:54]  We now need to refer to it as chest feeding instead of breast feeding out of respect for minority rights.
[00:12:00]  And yet, we are essentially handing power over to the Taliban in Afghanistan, where you tell me what they're going to start doing to women flogging, yes, all that.
[00:12:09]  The Taliban's now talking a good game.
[00:12:12]  They've gotten some press training, but Joe Biden knows very well what they're about to do to the women there.
[00:12:17]  And they've never made a secret of it.
[00:12:19]  They will, first of all, pretend, and I don't know even for how long they'll continue this pretense, but they want to get a grip in the country.
[00:12:29]  And then from there, they will move into telling the people of Afghanistan they are in charge.
[00:12:34]  And the norms have changed.
[00:12:36]  They control those norms and laws and values.
[00:12:39]  And then they're going to implement it, and you're going to get, they've said it over and over again, the Emirate of Afghanistan.
[00:12:45]  That is like the caliphate of ISIS.
[00:12:48]  So, in terms of what will then happen, we're going to see all that gruesome stuff from a few years ago that ISIS was doing the beheadings, selling women into slaves, the mass murders.
[00:13:02]  Remember all those people who were lined up and then who were shot because they weren't Muslim enough for ISIS?
[00:13:08]  For the ISIS leadership, we're going to see all of that.
[00:13:11]  We're going to see the mass graves.
[00:13:12]  We're going to see the destabilization of the countries around.
[00:13:16]  We're going to see the worst elements within the Pakistani military regroup and feel again emboldened that they are in control.
[00:13:26]  And that has implications for Pakistan, that then in turn has implications for that very fragile relationship between Pakistan and India.
[00:13:37]  It emboldens the mullahs in Iran.
[00:13:40]  I mean, this is just.
[00:13:41]  It's so bad, so myopic.
[00:13:44]  And then for the administration to come out and just tell these childish lies.
[00:13:50]  They think we're fools.
[00:13:51]  I think they think we are fools.
[00:13:53]  I think that this is going to help them in the election for next year's Congress and 2024's presidential election.
[00:14:01]  That is the calculation.
[00:14:02]  When I listened to Biden's speech on Monday, I thought he was talking as if he was on the campaign trail.
[00:14:09]  Not a commander in chief, but as if a campaigner in chief.
[00:14:12]  And that's what.
[00:14:15]  Six, seven months into his government.
[00:14:18]  And the way this is all being presented is it's the American people who want it.
[00:14:23]  It's the American people who are tired of these forever wars.
[00:14:27]  It's the American people who wanted the troops back.

=== Embarrassing the Country with Lies (16:01) ===

[00:14:30]  We didn't have that many troops in there.
[00:14:32]  And it's all very, very, I mean, taking the American people and thinking that they're such fools, that they're so dumb.
[00:14:42]  Remember, that's to begin with.
[00:14:44]  Obama 1.0 is.
[00:14:45]  What gave us Trump?
[00:14:47]  And now it's Biden, and I don't know what that's going to give us.
[00:14:50]  Well, that's the thing.
[00:14:51]  So I think he was solving a problem that almost didn't exist.
[00:14:54]  You know, yes, when Trump was in and we have 15,000 troops still there, that was a lot.
[00:14:59]  And Trump drew it way down.
[00:15:01]  But where were the protests in the streets here about the 2,500 troops we had left after Trump, you know, Trump drew it down to 2,500 in January when he left office, right before he left office?
[00:15:11]  I don't remember people protesting in the streets saying, get those men and women out of there.
[00:15:16]  What I remember was we had a relatively stable period of peace where we weren't that worried about Al Qaeda launching attacks against us from Afghanistan, thanks to the blood and treasure we'd spent over there or the prior 20 years and the maintenance, imperfect though it was, thanks to the guys we still kept there.
[00:15:34]  And now it seems like we've created this problem for ourselves.
[00:15:38]  For what?
[00:15:38]  I bet you if you asked those 2,500 men and women and their families, would you have stayed?
[00:15:43]  They would have said, gladly, in service of my country.
[00:15:45]  Yes, I would have done it.
[00:15:46]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:15:47]  Yeah, there was no pressure.
[00:15:49]  To withdraw from Afghanistan.
[00:15:50]  There was no domestic pressure.
[00:15:52]  There was no external pressure.
[00:15:53]  I don't understand why it's a priority.
[00:15:56]  People here in America are talking about the pandemic, they're talking about the economy.
[00:15:59]  That's the things that affect us right now.
[00:16:02]  And that's the things that they promised.
[00:16:03]  They got elected on that basis that they were going to do something about these big problems, domestic problems, but also international problems.
[00:16:12]  And then they choose, they pick something that, okay, wasn't perfect.
[00:16:16]  The Afghani government is corrupt, that we installed there.
[00:16:21]  Afghanistan was non Switzerland.
[00:16:23]  But why pick a problem that, yeah, as you say, was almost non existent and then make it into a mountain?
[00:16:32]  It's incomprehensible.
[00:16:33]  And I think the whole world is looking at the Biden administration and thinking, What is this now?
[00:16:38]  The previous administration, we had a man who was erratic at the helm, but the individuals who served were responsible.
[00:16:46]  Most of them were sane people.
[00:16:48]  You know, the John Boltons and the Pompeos, McMaster, all of these people, they probably disagreed on many things, but they agreed on the most fundamental things.
[00:16:57]  And that's why people were able to talk Trump out of doing something as stupid as this.
[00:17:02]  Here, we have a senile man at the helm, and we have an administration who live in fantasy land.
[00:17:07]  They've lied to themselves, they're ideological, and they have absolutely no moral compass.
[00:17:15]  And now the finger pointing has already begun because Biden got up there on Monday and said, I didn't know.
[00:17:21]  The Intel community didn't tell me that I should expect this.
[00:17:26]  And that was the one thing he sort of admitted.
[00:17:27]  Like, yeah, it happened faster than anybody could have anticipated.
[00:17:31]  And now already today, the leak war has begun.
[00:17:34]  The Intel agencies and the military brass are out in the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal today, saying, We told him, we did warn him.
[00:17:41]  Again, the White House continues to deny that, but the New York Times headline today is contradicting Biden, reports warned of rapid collapse.
[00:17:50]  And then in the Wall Street Journal, it's Biden knew risks of a hasty withdrawal.
[00:17:55]  They're coming out and saying, by July, many intel reports had grown more pessimistic, questioning whether any Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government would hold on.
[00:18:06]  This is from the journal talking about how they had been warned and Biden pushing back, saying, No one had said it was inevitable and that there was not a high degree of confidence placed on any of the warnings he was given.
[00:18:19]  So we've got our leaders pointing at each other, Ayan, no one taking responsibility for what actually went down there.
[00:18:25]  Meantime, our entire counterterrorism intelligence has been essentially wiped out in Afghanistan.
[00:18:31]  We don't have a military base.
[00:18:33]  We don't have an airport.
[00:18:34]  We've got no way of going back in there, really, as of the time we get out in a couple of days.
[00:18:39]  And the American people are going to be left holding the bag.
[00:18:41]  The American people are left holding the bag.
[00:18:43]  And then the international world, the allies we created.
[00:18:47]  Remember, I think most people forget this, but in the wider Middle East, we had brought people in, we educated them in our universities, and then we installed them in those governments.
[00:18:57]  These people are now working with us, andor at least have been working with us until last week.
[00:19:05]  And if you try and look at this from their perspective, where they see jihadis everywhere emboldened, and the terrorist attacks will start.
[00:19:14]  All over again, first in Muslim countries and will affect Muslim majority countries.
[00:19:19]  Terrorists, jihadis are already active in Africa, they're active in South Asia, and then they'll continue their activities in Europe or their attempts at destabilizing Europe through immigration, through terrorist attacks, through all that sort of thing.
[00:19:33]  And then we're going to see terrorism back on our soil again.
[00:19:37]  And when we do that, whether it's this administration or the next administration, and we go out and we ask for allies to help us, What kind of response do you expect to get?
[00:19:49]  What kind of response do you expect to get if we try and assemble allies to help us with the China equation against China?
[00:19:57]  What kind of response do you think we're going to get?
[00:20:00]  This is similar to what.
[00:20:01]  Trump was saying, Trump gave an interview to Sean Hannity last night and was warning of, in particular, what China's going to do next.
[00:20:09]  Listen here.
[00:20:10]  It will affect our relationships for years to come and decades to come.
[00:20:14]  I will say, when China watches this, they're so happy and they're laughing at us.
[00:20:20]  This is the greatest embarrassment in the history of our country.
[00:20:24]  There's never been, and let me tell you, we haven't stopped.
[00:20:27]  This is not ending.
[00:20:28]  We have all of those thousands of Americans over there and others.
[00:20:32]  And you're saying, how are they going to get?
[00:20:34]  They have a Taliban ring around the airport.
[00:20:37]  He should have gotten the civilians out first.
[00:20:39]  Then he should have taken the military equipment.
[00:20:41]  We have billions of dollars of brand new, beautiful equipment.
[00:20:45]  Take the equipment out.
[00:20:47]  Biden put us in this position.
[00:20:49]  I mean, he's got a point.
[00:20:51]  He's got a point.
[00:20:52]  But now the former administration is blaming the new administration.
[00:20:55]  And then within the administration, as you say, all this leaking has started.
[00:21:00]  All this, this is going again to feed into the, there was always a great amount of anti Americanism.
[00:21:09]  In the world, Trump was hated by our adversaries, and sometimes he was also hated on a domestic level.
[00:21:15]  Now you have the hatred against America, but an America that is also seen as weak.
[00:21:21]  And he's absolutely right.
[00:21:22]  This is going to affect us for decades to come in a negative way.
[00:21:26]  Maybe one good thing that may come out of this is that our national press corps is going to take this seriously.
[00:21:33]  And when I say seriously, I mean not just scrutinizing the administration they don't like and cheering on.
[00:21:40]  One they fantasize about, but actually scrutinizing all administrations.
[00:21:46]  The people who hold key positions in foreign policy in this administration were not properly scrutinized.
[00:21:56]  Yeah.
[00:21:57]  I mean, clearly they've embarrassed the country.
[00:22:00]  Who's going to get fired?
[00:22:02]  Who's going to be held accountable?
[00:22:04]  We have abandoned our allies.
[00:22:06]  And I think about there was a woman, she escaped.
[00:22:10]  She got to Delhi, an Afghan woman who was.
[00:22:14]  She put the fine point on it, saying her experience and what was likely to happen to other women.
[00:22:19]  Thinking about women like her, listen here.
[00:22:23]  I can't believe the world abandoned Afghanistan.
[00:22:27]  Our friends are going to get killed.
[00:22:29]  They're going to kill us.
[00:22:30]  Our women are not going to have any more rights.
[00:22:33]  And women like her, Ayan, who are trying to get out right now from Afghanistan, they can't.
[00:22:38]  We needed to do it before.
[00:22:39]  They can't get out, even though we now have 4,000 troops there.
[00:22:43]  And there are some flights being conducted by us, by Germany, by others.
[00:22:48]  But there was a German airport transport that left near empty.
[00:22:53]  A German military A400M Airbus has a capacity of over 100.
[00:22:57]  It took off with just seven people on board on Tuesday because the Taliban has now set up checkpoints on the way, like all around the airport.
[00:23:05]  And you can't get through the checkpoint unless you show them your phone.
[00:23:08]  And then they check your phone for any communications in English.
[00:23:11]  And that's how they're identifying people who helped.
[00:23:14]  Us and those people are not getting on airplanes out to Germany, the United States, or anyplace else.
[00:23:20]  And that's also because we gave up that Bagram Air Force and we did it before we removed Americans, our allies, and friends, and the people in Afghanistan who helped us, and some of the women.
[00:23:33]  Because you can't remove all of the women of Afghanistan out of Afghanistan, and all of the women in Afghanistan will be stripped of their rights.
[00:23:41]  And what about homosexuals?
[00:23:43]  We're going to see again scenes of them being thrown away, thrown down.
[00:23:47]  Tall buildings.
[00:23:48]  And so while this is just too crazy, this is completely, this administration was so absorbed with microaggressions, what you can and can't say.
[00:24:02]  And this whole narrative that America is systemically racist, we are the bad guys, that they forgot how to deal with the real world and macro aggressions.
[00:24:12]  And we're going to pay the price for that.
[00:24:14]  You have a piece out today, Unheard, and it's amazing.
[00:24:19]  It hits all the right points.
[00:24:20]  And you point out to that point you just made we've reached a point where we proudly flew the LGBT flag from our embassy in Kabul when the going was good, but now we've abandoned Afghanistan's gay population to the Taliban.
[00:24:33]  Oh, great.
[00:24:33]  So we flew the flag.
[00:24:34]  So, you know, good for us.
[00:24:36]  We can feel good about ourselves.
[00:24:37]  Yeah, that is Biden's understanding of human rights.
[00:24:42]  We go, we do all the virtue signaling we can.
[00:24:45]  And then when the coin gets tough, we just go.
[00:24:49]  We just tell them to go to hell.
[00:24:51]  That's what we did.
[00:24:52]  And Afghanistan is going to be hell under the Taliban.
[00:24:56]  And I don't know, this is one of the things that I find fascinating.
[00:25:00]  All of these fantasies about the Taliban coming to the table and negotiating in good faith and that they're going, they're a changed people.
[00:25:08]  When we've seen just a few years ago what ISIS did in Iraq, jihadis, these radical Islamists, they are committed to their convictions.
[00:25:20]  It's what they want, it's what gives them the will to fight.
[00:25:24]  They're not going to negotiate with America in good faith because they preach in the mosque and at home and everywhere that America and what America stands for is evil and that it's their job to finish that off, to make sure that never happens, that those values of Liberty and equality and women's rights and gay rights, those values are never adopted because they preach every day on a religious basis that all that is evil.
[00:25:50]  So, when they come to power, what makes you think that they're going to act any differently?
[00:25:54]  And how many times do you want that to happen before you wake up and realize it's just not true?
[00:26:00]  Take the world as it is, not as you fantasize it's to be.
[00:26:03]  They're saying all the right things.
[00:26:05]  Let's talk about that for a minute because it's people are going with these assurances as though we have some reason to believe.
[00:26:12]  Them.
[00:26:13]  The Taliban comes out and says, This is also from your piece, Taliban governor of the Andar district.
[00:26:19]  This is quoting you, quoting the guy.
[00:26:22]  We assure this to people all over the world, especially the people of Afghanistan.
[00:26:25]  Islam has given rights to everyone equally.
[00:26:28]  Women have their own rights.
[00:26:29]  How much Islam has given rights to women, we will give them that much.
[00:26:33]  A different Taliban spokesperson says, Women should be in the government structure according to Sharia law.
[00:26:43]  And there were other Similar statements by other Taliban representatives trying to make us feel like it's a whole new Taliban, Ayan.
[00:26:52]  You know, it's a new day.
[00:26:53]  Women are going to be in the government.
[00:26:54]  Women are going to go to school.
[00:26:55]  Girls are going to go to school.
[00:26:56]  That's another thing they said.
[00:26:58]  And they're going to be treated equally under Sharia law.
[00:27:01]  Yeah.
[00:27:02]  They're telling the Americans, they think of us as infidels.
[00:27:05]  They're telling the infidels what they want to hear.
[00:27:08]  But in between the lines, they're actually being honest.
[00:27:11]  They're saying the rights that they're going to accord to women are Islamic rights, Sharia.
[00:27:17]  And the way that they're going to have a relationship with the rest of the world will be dictated by Sharia or Islamic law.
[00:27:26]  So, in many ways, they're just being honest.
[00:27:28]  It's we who are the fools because we never, I mean, and I'm talking about this administration and the people who serve it, they have never taken the trouble to actually understand what Sharia is, what Islamic law entails.
[00:27:40]  They've always bought into those assurances, whether it's from the Saudis or whether it's from the Taliban or even as well.
[00:27:47]  I remember I sat in one meeting where one guy said, maybe we could.
[00:27:51]  Negotiate with ISIS.
[00:27:53]  And this was at the height of ISIS's cruelty.
[00:27:57]  And I was thinking, what makes you think that?
[00:28:00]  Because they all think that Sharia is misunderstood.
[00:28:03]  And that maybe the Taliban have now come to their senses and that they're going to implement a different kind of Sharia than the one they implemented in the 1990s.
[00:28:12]  That's the kind of fantasy land these people live in.
[00:28:15]  Meanwhile, the Taliban's already going door to door, according to the reports out there now, claiming child brides, raping young women.
[00:28:23]  And then the principle over there is once a girl's been raped, she's expected to marry her rapist.
[00:28:28]  Otherwise, the family will be disgraced.
[00:28:32]  Reports of women being forced to cook for the Taliban.
[00:28:35]  And when they come back for the third time and the women don't have enough food to, To serve 18 Taliban members.
[00:28:41]  She's brutally murdered.
[00:28:43]  And I hesitate to get too detailed on this, but we had Sean Parnell on recently, and I had read his book talking about his service in Afghanistan.
[00:28:49]  And I never like to get too dark because there's only so much our souls can take in.
[00:28:54]  But suffice it to say, the Taliban and his accounts of dealing with them while fighting for the U.S. in Afghanistan, the Taliban engaged in the systematic torture and rape of young children, boys and girls.
[00:29:10]  I'm not going to get too detailed again on the torture.
[00:29:13]  But they tortured them while they were raping them.
[00:29:15]  You tell me whether anyone over here is so stupid as to take the word of these same barbarians now just because it makes us feel better about having cut and run.
[00:29:28]  And also, then to present it as we are now going to achieve human rights through diplomacy.
[00:29:34]  So you're going to have diplomatic ties with an outfit that is raping and torturing children, boys and girls systematically.
[00:29:43]  And I think they haven't, we haven't, talking of darkness, we haven't even started talking about what the minorities are going to face in Afghanistan.
[00:29:51]  So think about the Hazaras who are Shia and their women.
[00:29:55]  And it's some of these minorities that, when America went into Afghanistan, who thought, it now appears wrongly, that America was going to give them a lifeline out of that kind of barbarian, barbarity and brutal powers of the Taliban.
[00:30:17]  And when you think about the Taliban, I think we think about them only in terms of how fanatical they are and how they're married to this 8th century idea of radical Islam.

=== A Watershed Moment of Decline (04:00) ===

[00:30:32]  But they're also a tribe, they're the Pashtun.
[00:30:34]  And people in America don't understand how these tribal ties operate.
[00:30:41]  The Hazaras and the other minorities who worked with the Americans are seen by the Pashtun as traitors.
[00:30:48]  So even those who are not radical, Radical Islamists will still have to apply the tribal code of revenge.
[00:30:58]  And revenge then comes in these ways of massacring, of torturing, of raping, of taking the women as slaves.
[00:31:09]  This is to communicate to all within that context and in that country we are now in charge, and this is going to be your plight for betraying us.
[00:31:23]  These people are seen as traitors.
[00:31:25]  Well, so that's the difference, Ayan, between the North Korea situation, right?
[00:31:30]  That's the difference.
[00:31:31]  And, you know, we weren't in China setting up the Uyghurs.
[00:31:36]  You know, we were in Afghanistan.
[00:31:38]  We lured people into the fold saying, help us, help you, and we'll have your backs on the back end.
[00:31:45]  And now we've left without fulfilling our promise.
[00:31:49]  That's what makes this different and not a situation where we can just as easily say, well, you know, human rights violations are committed by a lot of bad countries all over the world.
[00:31:56]  We have to decide whether it makes sense for Americans.
[00:31:58]  To fight those fights.
[00:31:59]  We helped stir this up.
[00:32:00]  We made promises we're not keeping.
[00:32:03]  Absolutely.
[00:32:03]  And those of us who are outraged about the ramifications for human beings in Afghanistan, for women, for gays, for minorities, religious minorities, and others, we are being dismissed as we can't do that all over the world.
[00:32:20]  It's not America's job to be the policeman of the world.
[00:32:24]  And that's the kind of ridiculous dismissals we are being given.
[00:32:28]  But remember, we went into Afghanistan to make sure that we're not hit again on American soil, that we don't leave them.
[00:32:37]  A safe haven to recoup and to organize these terrorist attacks from.
[00:32:42]  And they're going to do that.
[00:32:43]  And it's going to embolden all the jihadis in the world, whom we, a few years ago, because we destroyed ISIS and because ISIS destroyed their narrative, their ideology through the kind of gruesome attacks that they were inflicting on people, we've now empowered all of those people back again.
[00:33:04]  Al Qaeda is going to regroup, ISIS is going to regroup, they're all going to work together again.
[00:33:10]  Even in our own country, we have members of the Muslim Brotherhood, as there are members of the Muslim Brotherhood everywhere.
[00:33:16]  All of those, those who put on a nice face of civility and they put their suits and they shave their beards, those, yeah, maybe those are the ones that they think of as diplomats.
[00:33:28]  Those guys and the ones who are actually carrying out the executions and the torture and the rapes, those people are now going to sit together and say, this is how to deal with America and the West in general.
[00:33:43]  You call it a watershed moment in Western decline.
[00:33:47]  Can you expand on that?
[00:33:49]  Well, it's again, it's scenarios where now the whole world is looking at us.
[00:33:54]  You said China's laughing at us.
[00:33:55]  It is true, China's laughing at us.
[00:33:58]  We, I think, European countries are thinking, my goodness, if this is the America that we have now.
[00:34:04]  So I think what we're going to see is, and I hope it doesn't happen, this is exactly what we don't want.
[00:34:12]  When it comes to decline, what you see is a disintegration within the civilization where we are at each other's throats and we don't trust one another and we're engaged in infighting.
[00:34:23]  And that emboldens our adversaries like China, like Iran, like Russia, like the international jihadi community.

=== Scarecrow Policing in Chicago (15:07) ===

[00:34:33]  And they just see their moment now that they could seize.
[00:34:38]  And I hope that we don't descend into that kind of internocene and into that kind of decline.
[00:34:47]  This decision by the Biden administration, it's the Biden administration that owns this.
[00:34:53]  They have forced us into this decline.
[00:34:55]  This is that watershed moment.
[00:34:58]  Ayan, thank you so much for coming on, for your expertise, and for, as always, shining a light on a dark situation.
[00:35:05]  Thank you, Megan.
[00:35:06]  And thank you so much for doing what you can do, what we can all do to help.
[00:35:12]  Up next, we're going to be joined by John Cass, who's going to talk about the violence here at home, and in particular, the city of Chicago.
[00:35:19]  Today at 3 p.m. Chicago time, there will be a memorial service for Officer Ella French, a 29 year old cop in Chicago who was shot in the head, point blank range on duty about 10 days ago by a criminal who she pulled over for an expired registration.
[00:35:37]  Her partner was also shot twice in the head and a third time in the shoulder.
[00:35:41]  This in a city in which Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who, by the way, our guest, John Cass, supported, that's changed.
[00:35:49]  She ran and said, you know, as she ran for mayor, she said she was going to clean up the city.
[00:35:53]  That she was going to cut back on city crime, always an issue there.
[00:35:57]  She took office in 2019, wanted to reduce gun violence.
[00:36:00]  Well, let me give you the stats.
[00:36:01]  In 2016, 4,300 some odd people were shot in Chicago.
[00:36:06]  2019, when she took office, number went down to 2,600 or so.
[00:36:11]  And in 2020, the number back up, 4,135 people.
[00:36:17]  That's a 36% increase from 2019.
[00:36:20]  And through July 2021, they're already up over that record-setting year to 2,528 people shot in Chicago.
[00:36:31]  Think about that.
[00:36:33]  Think about that.
[00:36:34]  Hundreds of them, children.
[00:36:38]  This woman, in the wake of those numbers, decides to turn her back on cops.
[00:36:44]  Cops are the ones getting thrown under the bus by her, and now they're turning their backs on her.
[00:36:49]  John Cass with the latest in the numbers in Chicago and nationwide in a minute.
[00:36:58]  John Cass, how are you?
[00:37:00]  Hey, Megan, how are you?
[00:37:02]  I'm a big fan of yours.
[00:37:03]  Thank you so much for doing this.
[00:37:04]  I can't tell you, I really appreciate it, especially when I'm starting this new thing.
[00:37:10]  Yeah, no.
[00:37:11]  Well, I think it's going to be great, you being out on your own.
[00:37:13]  I really do.
[00:37:14]  You know, as somebody who's doing that herself, it's nice not to have a corporate overlord.
[00:37:18]  I feel like I can see it in your writing, by the way, which has just been, I mean, it's always been amazing, but I just feel like you're unleashed and it's amazing.
[00:37:25]  All right, so let's get to it.
[00:37:27]  So this weekend alone in your city and the city I love as well, Chicago, where I lived for five years, violence, At least 52 people were shot, nine people dead, including a seven year old girl named Serenity, whose six year old sister was also shot in the chest and the right armpit, but she remains alive.
[00:37:45]  No arrest made.
[00:37:49]  In 2020, 4,135 people were shot in Chicago.
[00:37:55]  It's crazy, that number.
[00:37:56]  Think about that 4,135 people were shot in Chicago, and the numbers are on the rise.
[00:38:05]  Under this mayor.
[00:38:07]  In Chicago, more than 230 children have been shot this year, meaning kids under 17.
[00:38:15]  230.
[00:38:16]  And you say about all this what?
[00:38:18]  What is to blame and what is in this mayor's head as she's blaming rhetoric on social media for being damaging?
[00:38:26]  She's a disaster.
[00:38:27]  I supported her.
[00:38:30]  I liked her.
[00:38:31]  I thought she would be a breath of fresh air to a city that has basically destroyed itself through corruption.
[00:38:40]  But she's a disaster.
[00:38:43]  The Cook County State's attorney, Kim Fox, is a disaster right now.
[00:38:50]  We have 100, about 100 accused murderers out on the street, arrested, but out on electronic home monitoring.
[00:39:03]  And every day there's a story about, or almost every day, a story about someone on electronic home monitoring or someone that has.
[00:39:14]  Been released on bail or low bail that goes out and shoots someone else.
[00:39:20]  And those little children, those two little sisters, were found hugging each other.
[00:39:26]  Oh, God.
[00:39:29]  It's beyond belief.
[00:39:31]  And today, Wednesday, the city prepares to say goodbye to Officer Ella French, who was shot.
[00:39:44]  Just recently murdered in a police stop of an automobile.
[00:39:53]  Two brothers have been charged.
[00:39:56]  And the cops at the hospital turned their back on Lori Lightfoot when she approached.
[00:40:02]  It's never been so bad, Megan.
[00:40:05]  You were here.
[00:40:06]  You know that there were always problems in any big city.
[00:40:10]  You had problems.
[00:40:12]  And in many big cities like New York and Chicago, the relationship between the police and the political authority is sometimes not good.
[00:40:23]  But right now, we're in a city of chaos.
[00:40:28]  It's a city of anarchy.
[00:40:30]  And politicians just talk and talk about.
[00:40:35]  You know, their rhetoric is social justice warrior rhetoric.
[00:40:39]  They talk about equity.
[00:40:41]  I don't know what's the equity in shooting little children and people of color being gunned down in street gang wars.
[00:40:50]  And they don't even have the guts to say street gangs.
[00:40:54]  They talk about gun violence.
[00:40:57]  But as you know, every suburb of major metropolitan areas has a lot of guns.
[00:41:05]  The people have guns in the suburbs of New York, in the suburbs of Chicago, and Los Angeles, and Detroit.
[00:41:13]  And they're not shooting each other, they're not slaughtering each other.
[00:41:17]  So there's something else.
[00:41:20]  And you've been talking about it for years, Megan.
[00:41:25]  You understand the social decay, the lack of the father in the home, lack of a good education.
[00:41:33]  The education systems are broken.
[00:41:38]  It's bad.
[00:41:39]  And right now, Chicago is unmoored.
[00:41:44]  And you have, let's talk about Ella French, because you have her out there at 29 years old, along with her two partners, just trying to effect a traffic stop for expired registration.
[00:41:55]  She'd been on the force for three years.
[00:41:56]  She's already been decorated.
[00:41:58]  Speaking of shooting young kids, she was one of the officers who took a one month old baby and mother to the hospital on July 2nd.
[00:42:06]  The baby had been shot in the head.
[00:42:08]  During a mass shooting.
[00:42:09]  I mean, it's, you know, we can get into where the hell's Black Lives Matter?
[00:42:15]  Not there.
[00:42:15]  You're never going to know the name of that baby.
[00:42:17]  We're not going to know what Serenity's last name on a placard by any signs or protests in the streets with them.
[00:42:24]  It's all about whatever cop did one bad thing here or there.
[00:42:28]  It's not about this.
[00:42:28]  They don't, this group of people's been forgotten.
[00:42:31]  These kids don't matter to them.
[00:42:33]  So Ella French is out there.
[00:42:35]  Yeah, I'll give you the floor one second, but Ella French is out there at age 29.
[00:42:39]  And Trying to affect this traffic stop.
[00:42:43]  Some sort of a scuffle, I guess, takes place toward the back of the car, towards the trunk.
[00:42:48]  And she was shot point blank in the head.
[00:42:52]  And her partner was shot three times as well, twice in the head.
[00:42:55]  He's now paralyzed and blind in one eye.
[00:42:59]  And the third cop managed to grab his gun.
[00:43:01]  The other two had their guns holstered.
[00:43:03]  She had her gun holstered, so it's not like she was shooting at these guys.
[00:43:06]  The third cop finally got his gun out and managed to shoot the suspects who ran, and thankfully, some citizens.
[00:43:12]  Detained them.
[00:43:14]  And the officers in Chicago, John, are livid at what this mayor and those in charge have done to them and said about them.
[00:43:24]  Yes, Megan.
[00:43:26]  When she got in, Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor, made a point out of starting a rhetorical war with the Chicago police.
[00:43:40]  A union representative was coming to the podium to speak at a city council meeting.
[00:43:47]  And she said something in a hot mic, like, Who is this bleeping clown? or something like that.
[00:43:55]  I remember I was there.
[00:43:57]  I don't have the exact quote.
[00:43:58]  I wrote a column about it.
[00:44:00]  She sided with the Chicago Teachers Union.
[00:44:04]  Which is generally hard left, maybe not all the members, but the leadership is hard left, and castigated the police again and again.
[00:44:18]  There are people that told her you can't fight a two front war.
[00:44:22]  You can't fight crime by fighting the police, and you can't help education by caving to the teachers' union.
[00:44:33]  But she just marched along on her own drum.
[00:44:37]  She was getting a lot of love from MSNBC and the progressive far left liberal stations.
[00:44:45]  And she just loved it.
[00:44:47]  The New York Times would take down what she said as if it was wisdom.
[00:44:52]  And those police officers approached the car without their guns drawn in West Englewood.
[00:45:03]  I was born there years ago.
[00:45:08]  They want these cops to make police stops, stop cars if they see something wrong.
[00:45:15]  And this one was, I think, the probable cause of something like, don't hold me to it, but bad license plate or something like that.
[00:45:25]  And they cannot have their guns drawn.
[00:45:28]  I'm not talking about, Megan, going up to the car with your pointing your gun at the people in the car.
[00:45:39]  No, but.
[00:45:40]  Maybe at your side.
[00:45:43]  And the other thing is, with all this political correct nonsense and Black Lives Matter and all this stuff that social justice warriors that dominate urban American politics, because it's not just in Chicago, but all over the country, you get a sense that not only cops are on the defensive and in a fetal position, but politically, but also, Megan, tactically.
[00:46:11]  So they show up, there's a confrontation.
[00:46:14]  They don't want to put their hands on people.
[00:46:17]  They're afraid to do that because they don't want to be on someone's video, lose their jobs, not be backed up by their police command, by the mayor's office.
[00:46:27]  And so they're on the back foot.
[00:46:30]  They're hesitant.
[00:46:31]  And in that, I'm not saying that happened in this case, but in many cases, they're hesitant.
[00:46:38]  And so that hesitancy can be deadly.
[00:46:43]  They know that the mayor and the press is not going to, they're not going to have these cops' backs at all.
[00:46:51]  They don't.
[00:46:52]  I mean, there's some reporters that I guess do.
[00:46:55]  I mean, I've criticized police officers when they, I think they did wrong.
[00:47:02]  There was a 96 year old man in a walker shot by police with beanbag rounds.
[00:47:12]  He was killed.
[00:47:14]  Beanbag rounds, 12 gauge beanbag rounds at maybe six feet, eight feet.
[00:47:20]  He was killed.
[00:47:21]  But his name was John Reyna.
[00:47:25]  He was an old white guy.
[00:47:26]  The cop was black in it.
[00:47:28]  And I guess it didn't make a big national story.
[00:47:32]  But if you switch, I mean, I don't look at people like, you know, I don't think people are defined by their race.
[00:47:40]  But if you look, if you just switch races, instead of a.
[00:47:46]  Instead of an old man surviving Burma in World War II, make him a Tuskegee Airman and make the officer named like Kelly or O'Reilly or Cass or Pappas.
[00:48:04]  It's a different story.
[00:48:06]  And all this stuff contributes to.
[00:48:10]  You've done these stories.
[00:48:12]  The families, I mean, you've done these stories.
[00:48:15]  The families of the police are just, they don't know what to do.
[00:48:20]  They're under siege 24 7.
[00:48:22]  All they're doing is waiting for their, you know, the spouse to come home, dad to come home, mom to come home.
[00:48:30]  And we see that they don't sometimes.
[00:48:33]  Well, you've been writing about how.
[00:48:35]  The mayor doesn't have their back.
[00:48:36]  Kim Fox, she's the one who dropped the charges on Jussie Smollett, among others.
[00:48:42]  She's a catch and release prosecutor.
[00:48:44]  This is not a law and order type woman.
[00:48:48]  The criminal justice system is letting these defendants out with slaps on the wrist.
[00:48:54]  This guy who shot Ella Imante, his name was Imante Morgan, 21 years old, he was on probation for robbery.
[00:49:07]  Then committed allegedly a hit and run against an old man who flew from the windshield of the van.
[00:49:13]  This guy Morgan was driving and still was not behind bars.
[00:49:18]  He was out there on the streets of Chicago.
[00:49:20]  This is the guy who shot her in the head.
[00:49:23]  So the cops are really like the only line of defense right now because the system isn't really going after the bad guys.
[00:49:31]  And the cops are demoralized, they're understaffed.
[00:49:35]  Some are questioning why there was a 29 year old woman who's only three years on the force.

=== Why Cops Are Our Only Defense (16:17) ===

[00:49:40]  Doing traffic stops in that area, you know, which does she really have the experience?
[00:49:43]  But who else is coming, right?
[00:49:45]  Who they don't have that many people to put out there?
[00:49:48]  So the cops, no wonder the wives and the spouses are worried that they have no backup.
[00:49:54]  And they're upset that young officers, like, you know, I mean, there was an older officer on the scene, but you've seen these rookies walking up and down Michigan Avenue.
[00:50:06]  You know, they just get out of the academy and they're released, you know, to walk up and down Michigan Avenue and play the role of scarecrow.
[00:50:15]  Which is what we do a lot.
[00:50:16]  We have a lot of scarecrow policing.
[00:50:19]  And they look at themselves, check themselves out, you know, in the windows of the shops.
[00:50:26]  The young guys, young women, they're proud.
[00:50:30]  They have no clue.
[00:50:33]  It takes a while.
[00:50:34]  They don't have cop eyes yet.
[00:50:36]  Some of them wear sunglasses, you know.
[00:50:41]  They're not ready.
[00:50:42]  They're not ready to, to, To look at someone who's a violent threat and back them down with their eyes.
[00:50:51]  And all this is because of, there was, you know, there was over cops overdid it years ago.
[00:51:02]  We had John Burge and police cases like this.
[00:51:07]  I'm not saying it didn't happen, but the majority of police officers are just trying to help, like Elva French.
[00:51:14]  She joined the force.
[00:51:16]  To make a difference to help the people who needed it.
[00:51:20]  And you mentioned George Soros.
[00:51:25]  He spent $2 million to elect Kim Fox, and Lori Lightfoot endorsed her for reelection.
[00:51:35]  And I got in a big controversy with my own newsroom that was upset that I would dare write about George Soros.
[00:51:46]  So, I left, but I'm still writing, and you're independent now, free of corporate.
[00:51:57]  Can others do this story that you are doing and that I'm doing?
[00:52:02]  I mean, I'm just sick because.
[00:52:05]  It's happening not only in Chicago, in Philadelphia, in Los Angeles, all across the country.
[00:52:11]  We have catch and release prosecutors.
[00:52:15]  In Philadelphia, this past weekend, another five people were killed.
[00:52:21]  By the end of this past Friday, the city had recorded 329 homicides, which is a 26% increase from the same period last year, which was already setting records in the COVID pandemic as crime rose.
[00:52:33]  So we're going up from the record years.
[00:52:35]  329 homicides so far this year in Philly.
[00:52:39]  New York, just this past weekend, 15 people shot, three dead, no arrests.
[00:52:43]  This year so far, 1,100 shot in New York.
[00:52:47]  Again, 11% up over last year, which set records too.
[00:52:51]  Yeah, it's not just Chicago, but Chicago is awful.
[00:52:55]  And I wonder because I, you know, when I lived there, John, I was there in 1995 to like early 2000s.
[00:53:02]  And it was, that was back when we still had the housing projects, Cabrini Green.
[00:53:07]  And everyone knew to stay away from that area.
[00:53:09]  That's where the gangs were.
[00:53:11]  You know, if you stayed on Michigan Avenue, what they call Magnificent Mile with all the shops and Neiman Marcus, you know, you didn't have to worry about your safety.
[00:53:19]  You know, you've seen it now.
[00:53:21]  Right.
[00:53:22]  No, but I'm reading bad reports.
[00:53:24]  So what's happening now?
[00:53:27]  What's happening now is that people, there's a new poll out, and WGN Television did a new poll.
[00:53:35]  65% of the people in Chicago are considering leaving.
[00:53:40]  If crime doesn't stop or isn't reduced, Lori Lightfoot is underwater.
[00:53:48]  Kim Fox, the state's attorney, the Soros state's attorney, is underwater.
[00:53:55]  I think 35% give her, she's got an approval rating of 35%.
[00:54:00]  And when they asked about the poll, she came out with a, she played the race card.
[00:54:07]  Oh, boy.
[00:54:08]  You know, she said basically that, Crime is more complicated, and media shouldn't examine only two actors in the broad issue that are black women.
[00:54:25]  Really, I don't, Kim Foxx, Lori Lightfoot, Joe Biden, anybody, I don't care.
[00:54:31]  And the people of Chicago don't care what your race is.
[00:54:35]  They just want to be safe.
[00:54:37]  They want to feel that they put their kids in the car, in the back of the car, they won't be shot.
[00:54:44]  And in the loop now, you know, when you were here as a lawyer, the loop is part of the Chicago downtown sort of business district.
[00:54:51]  Go ahead.
[00:54:51]  Yeah.
[00:54:52]  When you were here as a lawyer and I believe an intern for a news station, the loop was in the period you're talking about, the loop was safe.
[00:55:05]  Now there are gangs of kids and young men and women robbing.
[00:55:14]  Slapping, beating people up, and they are arrested and then they're released.
[00:55:20]  So the whole thing is a city of anarchy.
[00:55:27]  Some people call it now Shirak.
[00:55:32]  And you know why?
[00:55:32]  And I know some have said that's an insult now to Iraq.
[00:55:36]  Yeah.
[00:55:37]  It's hard to believe.
[00:55:38]  When I was there, Mayor Daly was the mayor.
[00:55:40]  You could eat off the sidewalks in Chicago.
[00:55:44]  You know, very well run.
[00:55:45]  It may have been somewhat corrupt, but boy, oh boy, it was very well run.
[00:55:49]  It was not somewhat corrupt.
[00:55:50]  It was a lot corrupt.
[00:55:52]  Well, and not just Chicago, right?
[00:55:53]  Illinois, too.
[00:55:55]  It's got governors almost as great as our governors in the great state of New York.
[00:55:59]  We've had serial problems in this department.
[00:56:02]  But you never had to worry about.
[00:56:04]  That kind of crime in the loop.
[00:56:05]  That's where people, that's where the lawyers went to work.
[00:56:07]  That's where the business guys went to work, right on the side of the Chicago River that winds through so beautifully with the bridges.
[00:56:13]  And the people take the architecture tours on the boats and the tourists come through.
[00:56:18]  And the L goes around and you can see sort of the downtown pumping Chicago at work.
[00:56:22]  It was always isolated, the crime in one area.
[00:56:26]  And now it's different.
[00:56:28]  Can I ask you about the race card though?
[00:56:30]  Because one of the most stunning things of the Ella French awful controversy was.
[00:56:36]  First, we'll get to the cops turning their back on the mayor and what the mayor's office did to stop the cops from honoring her body as it came from the morgue.
[00:56:47]  But I want to ask you about the mother of the defendant, again, Imante Morgan and his brother, Eric Morgan.
[00:56:54]  They were taken to the hospital, they were shot, and the mother, she comes out.
[00:57:00]  Okay, one was shot.
[00:57:02]  She comes out and she plays the victim.
[00:57:05]  She plays the victim.
[00:57:06]  She speaks with the reporters before she goes into the hospital.
[00:57:08]  Where she then caused a scuffle.
[00:57:11]  And now she's under arrest for her assaulting a police officer.
[00:57:15]  But listen to how she frames this issue.
[00:57:18]  My boys are not monsters, what people are trying to paint them to be at all.
[00:57:27]  At all.
[00:57:28]  There is another side.
[00:57:30]  I don't believe a damn thing, CPD says.
[00:57:33]  And I can guarantee you this my boys was afraid.
[00:57:39]  I'm afraid.
[00:57:40]  Our young black women, not only young black women and young black men, like I just said, I'm afraid.
[00:57:45]  Adults are afraid of the CPD.
[00:57:47]  Amante Morgan, my son.
[00:57:51]  I want to see my son.
[00:57:53]  Monty!
[00:57:54]  Monty!
[00:57:56]  Don't touch me!
[00:57:57]  Get away from me!
[00:57:58]  Stop!
[00:58:01]  Stop!
[00:58:16]  Okay, so I guess she was doing a live stream from her phone.
[00:58:20]  I'm sorry, John.
[00:58:21]  I have no sympathy for her.
[00:58:22]  None.
[00:58:23]  Zero.
[00:58:24]  Performance art.
[00:58:25]  She was having performance art.
[00:58:27]  She did a live stream while she was going to see her child.
[00:58:30]  She wanted a confrontation.
[00:58:32]  She got a confrontation.
[00:58:35]  That's part of the deal now, you know, in policing.
[00:58:39]  Everything is on video.
[00:58:41]  And young cops like Ella French.
[00:58:45]  I can't get into her state of mind.
[00:58:49]  She's now passed, but there are many and older ones.
[00:58:53]  Every time they make an arrest, they're thinking, Am I going to lose my pension?
[00:58:59]  Am I going to lose my job?
[00:59:01]  Will the mayor or the police chief not have my back?
[00:59:06]  It's debilitating.
[00:59:08]  And who looks for, as you know, Megan, who looks for weakness?
[00:59:13]  Criminals.
[00:59:15]  And I don't want to, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I used to be liberal.
[00:59:20]  I'm not a, although I grew up, you know, I woke up, but I'm not always in support of police.
[00:59:27]  But these criminals, street violent people, gangbaggers that we don't even call them gangbaggers, look for weakness, they look for hesitancy.
[00:59:42]  And part of it is the social media thing.
[00:59:46]  I mean, it's like you, if we believe the charges against her son, and that'll play out in the criminal justice system, we hope.
[00:59:53]  You know, he committed a robbery, he hit an old man with his car, and then he shot two cops in the head.
[00:59:59]  One, two bullets in his brain, another, Ella French, 29, who's now dead.
[01:00:03]  I don't care.
[01:00:05]  About this woman's tears or protestations or performance art at all.
[01:00:09]  So, what is at the heart of these crime rates?
[01:00:12]  What is it?
[01:00:12]  Is it, do we blame the guns or might we blame the schools?
[01:00:17]  Might we blame homes that have no dads in them?
[01:00:20]  What are the cultural causes behind the crime rate?
[01:00:23]  Because the mayor's not admitting the truth, but John will.
[01:00:26]  Next.
[01:00:30]  The cops are too undermanned to actually run around and get all these guys as they're busy committing more crimes.
[01:00:36]  Not only the police, Megan, what about the witnesses?
[01:00:40]  Let's say a crime happens and you get witnesses to, you know, point the finger, at least in lineups, at somebody that committed something terribly violent.
[01:00:54]  And that person ends up walking around on a home monitoring bracelet, or the bracelet is plugged in, you know, into the cigarette lighter of their car, which has happened on occasion.
[01:01:10]  And you see that person and that person sees you.
[01:01:13]  You're a witness.
[01:01:15]  What do you do?
[01:01:16]  That's a good point.
[01:01:17]  So, and how does that corrode?
[01:01:21]  See, look, the corrosion of urban culture is largely due to lack of fathers and terrible racist public schools that treat black kids and brown kids like afterthoughts.
[01:01:43]  All the kids are there just to provide money.
[01:01:47]  For the teachers' unions and the vendors and the political administrators.
[01:01:56]  They're just the cash cow.
[01:01:58]  And they've been treated like this for generations.
[01:02:01]  And you'd think that the urban politicians of today, when they talk about let's go into the root causes, you'd think they'd ever go there?
[01:02:11]  You think they'd ever talk about the welfare state or the abysmal public education?
[01:02:20]  That requires, in my view, immediate school choice to save some of these kids?
[01:02:27]  No, they don't because they're locked in.
[01:02:30]  They're locked into the rhetoric and the party talk.
[01:02:33]  And this is a.
[01:02:34]  Well, John, you tell me, but I spent some time interviewing moms in the past few years while I was at NBC in Chicago.
[01:02:41]  We took a trip out there and it was very eye opening.
[01:02:44]  And these are all inner city moms, mostly black women whose sons were in jail or sons had committed murder or sons had been murdered.
[01:02:55]  And they were talking about how the lines are drawn in these communities where you can't go past a certain street because that area is controlled by a different gang and whatever the Hispanic area and the Black area and this area and that area.
[01:03:08]  And so they're prisoners in their own homes in some situations, communities.
[01:03:13]  So they can't get out.
[01:03:14]  There's no such thing as school choice, of course.
[01:03:17]  But they talk about how their kids don't leave the house all day because they're worried they're going to get shot.
[01:03:23]  They have to stay inside.
[01:03:25]  It's not, I mean, think about how.
[01:03:26]  you live and how I live.
[01:03:28]  It's like they don't have, they can't go out on a lawn and play.
[01:03:31]  There's no, there's no opportunity.
[01:03:33]  It's like living in a war zone.
[01:03:34]  I said, why don't you leave?
[01:03:36]  Why don't you try to get out?
[01:03:37]  Why don't you take one trip to get, just to get the family out, get in the car and go, you know, which is a sort of a, well, maybe that's a white suburban woman question, right?
[01:03:45]  But I asked it.
[01:03:46]  And they said, we don't want to leave.
[01:03:48]  All our friends are here.
[01:03:50]  All our families are here.
[01:03:51]  We want our communities to improve.
[01:03:54]  Poverty's a state of mind.
[01:03:57]  Megan, when the Greeks and the Irish came over here, our lives would have been different.
[01:04:05]  You know, in those days.
[01:04:08]  But poverty is a state of mind, and the only way to get out of it is through education.
[01:04:13]  And public education in urban areas is run by political organizations that don't respect the minority kids that are locked into them.
[01:04:25]  Look, if I were to go to a school in those areas, if I were to go to a public school in those areas, what would I see?
[01:04:33]  Listlessness.
[01:04:37]  Lack of reading.
[01:04:41]  You know, some of these kids, and the teachers have it tough too.
[01:04:46]  If a kid shows up at school, a little boy, and doesn't even know his own name, doesn't know the colors, can't count to 10, this is difficult for a teacher.
[01:04:59]  But there are committed parents who are locked into these communities, and I think school choice is their only way out.
[01:05:08]  It's the only way for them, true school choice, to find something that will help their children.
[01:05:16]  As far as the neighborhoods that you're talking about, people, you can't send your kid across the street to a park in Chicago in some neighborhoods.
[01:05:25]  In some neighborhoods, the kids are.
[01:05:28]  I just had a paramedic, a friend of mine, and the paramedics are the ones who keep the murders down because urban paramedics save lives every day in those ambulances.
[01:05:42]  And I remember he was talking to a.
[01:05:45]  He had little children in the living room with mom and dad both bludgeoned.
[01:05:52]  They bludgeoned each other, and the children saw it.

=== Kids Cannot Play Safely Outside (09:26) ===

[01:05:57]  And Pat Fitzmaurice says to one of the children, You guys can go play in the park.
[01:06:04]  And the father looked at him and gave him a dirty look.
[01:06:09]  And he said, My kids can't go play in the park.
[01:06:12]  What are you, crazy?
[01:06:14]  That's where we are.
[01:06:18]  So, I mean, the difference, the potential difference between life and death in too many circumstances are the cops.
[01:06:26]  And the cops aren't respected.
[01:06:29]  They've been demonized for the better course of a year, including by those in charge, like Mayor Lightfoot.
[01:06:35]  And now, in the wake of the Ala French death, this is just so telling.
[01:06:40]  The cops are angry and they're expressing it in ways we haven't seen that often.
[01:06:46]  She showed up at, was it at the hospital, John, when they turned their backs on her?
[01:06:51]  Yeah, she showed up at the hospital.
[01:06:53]  She wanted, she was told by the family, not Ella French's family, but the family of the officer who lost his eye and they were trying to save him, that they didn't want to talk to her.
[01:07:09]  The family didn't want to talk to her.
[01:07:11]  I mean, she's been demonizing the police since she got in.
[01:07:16]  They didn't want to talk to her, and she shows up anyway, knowing this, and they turned their backs on her.
[01:07:23]  And now, and no one seemed, no one was upset.
[01:07:28]  And then she lied about a ritual that has been going on since the beginning of Chicago when a police officer is shot, the, when the bot, when, and killed, when the police officer is killed in the line of duty, and the body is brought to the county morgue, or we call it the, Cook County Medical Examiner now.
[01:07:52]  Police officers line up and they slow roll the ambulance through the cops' salute, and they're usually a bagpipe.
[01:08:06]  And a drum.
[01:08:09]  And she lied about it.
[01:08:10]  She said there were some groups that wanted to hijack the proceeding.
[01:08:17]  And she said, and Ella French's parents had to get to the morgue.
[01:08:22]  And we just couldn't.
[01:08:23]  And she supports her first deputy who said basically, we don't, quote, we don't have time for this shit.
[01:08:32]  Cops cannot, it's not hate, they loathe her.
[01:08:37]  They loathe her.
[01:08:39]  They loathe them all.
[01:08:41]  And it's not a good thing.
[01:08:44]  And now there's a funeral coming up Thursday for Ella French.
[01:08:49]  And I think it'll be the first time in my memory.
[01:08:52]  And I've only been covering Chicago politics here from the belly of the beast for what, 600, 700 years, like Methuselah?
[01:09:01]  And I've always seen mayors offer something in the eulogy.
[01:09:09]  And I believe that she's not going to do it.
[01:09:12]  So she tried to say, Oh, well, the coroner put in place new rules thanks to COVID.
[01:09:20]  And that's why my first deputy said, We're not doing this shit.
[01:09:25]  And referred to the passage of the body as an it.
[01:09:29]  Get it in there.
[01:09:31]  So that's she's.
[01:09:33]  And then that turned out that was a lie.
[01:09:35]  That was a blatant lie.
[01:09:36]  She was caught in that.
[01:09:37]  She was caught in it, Megan.
[01:09:41]  Here's a little bit of inside baseball, but the coroner's office is controlled by her political rival, the boss of the party in Cook County, Cook County Board President, Tony Preckwinkle.
[01:09:54]  And to think that Tony Preckwinkle would give her cover for anything is so naive.
[01:10:03]  So, on another level, on the inside baseball level in Chicago, she's proven herself incompetent again and again and again.
[01:10:12]  And I regret.
[01:10:13]  She's not that smart.
[01:10:16]  So here's another piece of it, John.
[01:10:18]  The press, when they get in front of her, this is what they're concerned about with the cops turning their backs and an officer dead and another one paralyzed the disrespect of the office that was shown by those officers.
[01:10:34]  And this is how she spun it.
[01:10:38]  Take a listen.
[01:10:39]  What about respect for the office, not just respect for you personally?
[01:10:44]  Look, I think that's a bigger question.
[01:10:47]  And I appreciate your point.
[01:10:50]  It's not about me.
[01:10:52]  We are living in a time where people don't respect each other.
[01:10:56]  So, this is a larger question than what may have happened with 10 or 15 officers on Saturday night.
[01:11:03]  It's why do we think it is okay for people to engage in such nasty, vicious talk orally or worse on social media?
[01:11:16]  So, the larger issue is.
[01:11:19]  People have to be better humans, better human beings.
[01:11:22]  And it doesn't matter if they're police, it doesn't matter if they're an elected official or a reporter.
[01:11:29]  We need to be better humans to each other.
[01:11:31]  I'm inspired.
[01:11:33]  Yeah, I'm inspired by her.
[01:11:37]  She showed her example, right?
[01:11:39]  When she told the last president, I have two words, two letters for you, an F and a U, publicly.
[01:11:48]  She attacked the police.
[01:11:50]  In the great Bobby Rush popcorn scandal, because cops who had been working 18 hour days during the riots and the looting that she didn't stop and didn't, I guess, wasn't able to, as far as her command abilities.
[01:12:08]  They crashed out in Bobby Rush's office because they were protecting it.
[01:12:12]  And a couple of them had popcorn, you know, from the office, popcorn.
[01:12:18]  And she had a news conference on it condemning them.
[01:12:23]  The Bobby Rush, and Bobby Rush, you know, you know Bobby, the congressman from Chicago, he said he was screaming, What happened to my popcorn?
[01:12:32]  My popcorn.
[01:12:34]  And we just, the loop was destroyed.
[01:12:39]  Right?
[01:12:40]  The streets, the businesses were torn down, burned in those mostly peaceful protests.
[01:12:50]  And she's worried about the popcorn.
[01:12:53]  So basically, coppers, I'm surprised it took this long for them to turn their backs on her.
[01:13:00]  And now, as we go into the year leading up to the midterm elections nationally, there's a real question about whether this, Type of policy.
[01:13:10]  I mean, Biden and his allies can deny it all they want, but the squad, these far left progressives in the House, they're on tape defund the police.
[01:13:20]  You can't deny it.
[01:13:21]  It's fine.
[01:13:21]  The Senate had a vote recently where one of the Republicans said, I want to add an amendment saying, we're against defund the police.
[01:13:29]  And Cory Booker stood up there, a new senator from New Jersey, said, Great.
[01:13:33]  Thank you.
[01:13:33]  This is a gift to the Democrats because they all voted in favor, saying, We also are against defund the police.
[01:13:40]  And you gave us a chance to prove it.
[01:13:42]  But that some paper vote saying what in theory are you for or against is meaningless.
[01:13:50]  All these Democrats are on record.
[01:13:51]  It's one of the reasons why in the postmortem and why the Democrats lost so many House seats in the last election, you had the more moderate Dem saying, what are we doing?
[01:14:00]  We have to stop doing this and saying this.
[01:14:02]  The American public is not for it.
[01:14:04]  And you tell me whether there is a level of disrespect for what the American people know in their guts about who's doing what to the cops and who's responsible for these rising crime rates.
[01:14:18]  Yeah, these are the same personalities.
[01:14:21]  You know, they're political, right?
[01:14:23]  They told us that we'd win in Afghanistan, too.
[01:14:26]  I mean, they'd say anything.
[01:14:28]  They'll say anything.
[01:14:30]  And in this case, it helps them to play the race card because they fortify their own base by being anti cop and sort of a leftist, Marxist attack on authority.
[01:14:46]  And then they get upset when they're called on the anarchy that they helped.
[01:14:52]  Grow and the people see through it.
[01:14:57]  The problem is, Megan, that once people are so afraid with chaos and anarchy in cities like Chicago, unmoored, history tells us that they tend to react harshly in other ways, seek some sort of Strong man to protect them.

=== Fear Drives Us to Seek Strong Men (03:35) ===

[01:15:24]  Or we see now that Joe Biden, who authored the crime bill in the 90s, is now apologizing for it to Black Lives Matter.
[01:15:38]  And then Democrats are now expecting people to stand up for them and protect their homes and their lives.
[01:15:47]  Because what do you want?
[01:15:49]  What do people want?
[01:15:50]  They want to be able to be safe.
[01:15:52]  They want their garbage picked up.
[01:15:54]  They don't want their kids shot at school.
[01:15:57]  They want to be able to have a beer in their backyard without getting shot.
[01:16:03]  And there are people in Chicago right now.
[01:16:06]  Who are watching television in their own closets?
[01:16:12]  There's you've you may have done stories like this.
[01:16:16]  They put old ladies put the plywood and other wood in closets to protect them from being shot as they watch their soaps or their programs on TV.
[01:16:32]  Don't leave me now, we got more coming up in 60 seconds.
[01:16:41]  Just this week, a 70 year old woman was shot in Chicago.
[01:16:45]  She was out, she was driving her car, and two suspects came up.
[01:16:50]  She was on her way to work, and they ambushed her.
[01:16:53]  They shot her through the driver's side window.
[01:16:55]  She was able to drive off a bit, but they chased her and shot her again multiple times.
[01:16:59]  70 year old woman.
[01:17:00]  Car was riddled with bullets.
[01:17:01]  She's dead.
[01:17:02]  The six and seven year old girls hugging each other one dead, one shot.
[01:17:07]  The one year old baby shot.
[01:17:10]  In New York, by the way, just yesterday, a crazy video broke out of the financial district, John.
[01:17:17]  Again, this is not a high crime area.
[01:17:19]  The financial district is about Wall Street.
[01:17:21]  A guy, 51 years old, in there taking his money out of a vestibule at 5 30 in the afternoon.
[01:17:26]  It's not like, you know, we went 3 a.m. And there was a suspect who came in who had an axe, a hatchet, and started chopping up this man who fought for his life, thank God, lived.
[01:17:42]  And then as soon as the guy, Sort of went down, the guy who'd been attacked.
[01:17:46]  The guy started smashing all the ATMs.
[01:17:49]  I don't know his story.
[01:17:51]  He hasn't, I guess, been caught yet, but the homeless problem grows.
[01:17:56]  People who have serious mental illnesses who are just let out in the street in the name of kindness, right?
[01:18:01]  But no plan has been made for them.
[01:18:02]  And then the citizenry has to deal with deranged criminals who the system won't take care of who break into the ATM vestibule in the middle of the night and chop you up, or in the middle of the day and chop you up.
[01:18:14]  There's a name.
[01:18:16]  I know you probably remember, but or may, but I don't know if all the audience will.
[01:18:22]  Bernard gets.
[01:18:24]  Yeah, the vigilantes.
[01:18:26]  That's what's right.
[01:18:27]  That's going to happen.
[01:18:28]  I mean, there'll be some scared little white guy, you know, with a stick in his pocket, and he'll be so terrified by all this stuff that he'll pull it, and we're going to have another.
[01:18:46]  I can, you know, it's a ritual.
[01:18:49]  We have the phones and the same suspects and the usual suspects come out and make the speeches.

=== The Ritual of Vigilante Justice (03:08) ===

[01:19:00]  And it's just bad.
[01:19:02]  And people always vote with their feet.
[01:19:11]  New York has seen this, Chicago's seeing it, Los Angeles, all the big cities are seeing it.
[01:19:18]  People vote with their feet, Megan.
[01:19:21]  Well, I hope that people show the same respect of those in charge in places like Chicago as Mayor Lightfoot and her deputies have shown Ella French and others like her, calling her Ella Fitzgerald, one of the mayor's top deputies, not even bothering to know her name, refusing the cops' attempt to honor her, one of their brethren, with the bagpipes and that salute.
[01:19:43]  It's disgusting.
[01:19:44]  It's the least, it's literally the least that they can do for these guys and gals, and they won't.
[01:19:50]  John, I.
[01:19:52]  I love your writings.
[01:19:53]  I think you're a treasure.
[01:19:54]  And I really, really appreciate everything you've done.
[01:19:57]  And I'm so glad you're independent and totally unleashed.
[01:20:00]  We'll continue to promote thejohncastnews.com as well and have you on just whenever you want to come back.
[01:20:05]  We'd love to talk to you.
[01:20:06]  I'm going to buy some ads on Megan on your podcast.
[01:20:11]  Sold.
[01:20:13]  All the best.
[01:20:13]  All right.
[01:20:14]  Thank you.
[01:20:20]  Whatever you do, do not miss this show on Friday.
[01:20:22]  Marcus Luttrell is here, along with his brother Morgan.
[01:20:27]  We postponed this interview.
[01:20:28]  You may remember he was going to be our guest over the July 4th weekend.
[01:20:32]  And then we had the chance to get him together with his twin brother.
[01:20:35]  And we thought, oh, we'll wait for that.
[01:20:36]  That'd be great.
[01:20:37]  And it just so happens that we have him now this week of all weeks.
[01:20:42]  Think of how good this interview is going to be.
[01:20:43]  I haven't yet done it.
[01:20:44]  We're taping it on Thursday.
[01:20:45]  It's going to air on Friday.
[01:20:48]  I'm already kind of emotional about it.
[01:20:50]  What this guy sacrificed, what his brother sacrificed.
[01:20:56]  You've seen it in the movie and read it in his book, Lone Survivor.
[01:21:00]  What does he think about the dereliction of duty we've seen by our commander-in-chief, by generals around him?
[01:21:09]  When it comes to honoring the legacy and the sacrifice made by our guys over there, couldn't think of a better time to have him on.
[01:21:15]  Really, really looking forward to talking with him and bringing it to you.
[01:21:19]  You can make sure you don't miss it by subscribing to the show.
[01:21:22]  That way it'll pop up on your phone and it'll remind you that we have that.
[01:21:26]  And go ahead and hit download.
[01:21:28]  And also, please, while you're there, give us a five-star rating.
[01:21:31]  That helps out the show get more circulation.
[01:21:34]  And a review would be lovely, too.
[01:21:35]  Let us know what you thought of today's interview of Ayan, of John Cass, and the violence abroad and at home, right?
[01:21:42]  Love to hear from you all.
[01:21:43]  And in the meantime, we'll talk on Friday.
[01:21:47]  Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
[01:21:49]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
[01:21:53]  The Megyn Kelly Show is a devil-may-care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.