The Megyn Kelly Show - 20210927_missing-migrants-mask-mutiny-and-the-hunter-biden-
Aired: 2021-09-27
Duration: 01:34:29


=== Border Patrol Policy Backlash (14:59) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:12]  Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
[00:00:14]  Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show on a Monday, and I am fired up.
[00:00:17]  There's a lot to go over today.
[00:00:18]  I got a lot of thoughts about today's news.
[00:00:21]  Starting with this Over the weekend, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas openly admitted without a care in the world that some 12,000 Haitian migrants are now freely roaming in the United States.
[00:00:32]  Don't worry.
[00:00:33]  I'm sure they're going to show up at their asylum hearings.
[00:00:35]  Sure they are.
[00:00:36]  It comes as we are learning just how ticked off Border Patrol is with President Biden.
[00:00:40]  Plus, we're going to get to the latest on Hunter Biden now.
[00:00:44]  Left leaning Politico appears to have confirmed some of the emails Hunter sent on his laptop.
[00:00:51]  But the White House, even in response to one of its favorite publications confirming large portions of the New York Post reporting that was suppressed during the presidential campaign, still insists it's all just Russian disinformation.
[00:01:04]  We're going to speak with Sorab Omari, op ed ed editor for the New York Post.
[00:01:09]  They were the ones who broke this story a year plus ago during the campaign.
[00:01:14]  And we'll hear what he has to say about that.
[00:01:16]  He's fired up about the lack of coverage and outrage over this story, right?
[00:01:20]  And then they want to look at us and say, you will accept that the election was fair.
[00:01:24]  You will.
[00:01:24]  Well, I mean, we can talk about the vote, but the election itself, the media coverage, and so on, really?
[00:01:31]  Anyway, first, we're going to get into the border and all the developments with COVID this morning, because there are a lot with my guest, Robbie Suave.
[00:01:39]  I like it.
[00:01:40]  Suave.
[00:01:40]  He's a senior editor at Reason Magazine, which I also like a lot, and the author of the new book, Tech Panic Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future, out tomorrow.
[00:01:51]  Robbie, great to have you here.
[00:01:53]  Thanks for having me.
[00:01:53]  It's so nice to talk with you.
[00:01:55]  Okay, I love Reason.
[00:01:57]  And I think the title of your book is interesting, too, because as angry as we get with Facebook and social media, it will be nice.
[00:02:05]  I was reading sort of just like a long summary of the book, and I was At first, I was like, this is bullshit.
[00:02:12]  This is wrong, too.
[00:02:13]  No, they're terrible.
[00:02:14]  And then when I got done reading, I was like, I feel better.
[00:02:18]  I feel better based on what Robbie is telling me.
[00:02:21]  So we'll get into that in a minute.
[00:02:22]  But let's start with the news headlines.
[00:02:24]  Okay, the border.
[00:02:25]  So you've got DHS Secretary Mayorkas on Fox News Sunday being pretty explicit about how many of those, now the number's 30,000 Haitians, had crossed into Del Rio.
[00:02:38]  Some of them were sent back, some of them were sent to other places.
[00:02:42]  And Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday asked Secretary Mayorkas how many were released into the United States.
[00:02:48]  Here's what he said.
[00:02:49]  To answer my question directly, of the 17,400 that weren't deported back or didn't return on their own to Mexico, how many of them either, well, first, how many have been released into the U.S.?
[00:03:02]  They're released on conditions.
[00:03:03]  And approximately, I think it's about 10,000 or so, 12,000 have been released.
[00:03:09]  Yes.
[00:03:09]  And of the 5,000 that are still in process, we will make determinations whether they will be returned.
[00:03:18]  To Haiti, based on our public health and public interest authorities.
[00:03:25]  So, are we talking about a total of 12,000, or could it be even higher?
[00:03:30]  It could be even higher.
[00:03:32]  This is they look at us and say, the border's closed.
[00:03:35]  The border is closed.
[00:03:36]  It doesn't feel closed.
[00:03:37]  And even if they've closed it now, which they haven't, what are we going to do about 12,000 plus Haitian migrants in the country who absolutely will not be showing up for those?
[00:03:47]  Asylum hearings.
[00:03:48]  And even if they do, only 15% get it, and the rest are just released into the United States thereafter.
[00:03:53]  It's ridiculous to pretend that we even have any sort of immigration policy.
[00:03:58]  And I mean, the administration is.
[00:04:00]  It is a shameful deception to say that they're planning for this, they're organized.
[00:04:07]  I mean, the reality is we have thousands of people coming through illegally in unsafe conditions on both sides of this journey that are overwhelming the border that we're not prepared to handle.
[00:04:21]  We have no plan to deal with this.
[00:04:23]  And it ends up making a case against immigrants and against immigration when you do it like this, because the citizens. Of this country, rightly hate this happening.
[00:04:35]  And we're annoyed by the unfairness of people jumping lines and people not following our laws.
[00:04:42]  I'm an advocate for increased immigration in general, but I think it has to be legal immigration.
[00:04:48]  I think we should have a policy to make it easier to vet people and then we know who they are and bring them here.
[00:04:54]  But this way of doing it undermines the entire idea of having immigration.
[00:04:59]  It's really like it's such a big setback for that cause.
[00:05:02]  And the administration is just totally unconcerned by it.
[00:05:04]  They're acting like they don't even care.
[00:05:06]  They absolutely are acting that way.
[00:05:08]  And there was a follow up about the wall, right?
[00:05:11]  And I realize the wall is not the be all end all, and it's not going to solve all immigration problems, even if we were to build it, which, you know, we haven't, even under Trump.
[00:05:19]  But listen to the speaking of the cavalier attitude, listen to Majorcas, Mr. Majorcas, when it comes to the wall.
[00:05:26]  It is the policy of this administration.
[00:05:29]  We do not agree with the building of the wall.
[00:05:32]  The law provides that individuals can make a claim for humanitarian relief.
[00:05:37]  That is actually one of our proudest traditions.
[00:05:41]  Okay.
[00:05:42]  So maybe in general, if we just hadn't dealt with 30,000 Haitians suffering down there making these decisions based on Biden's very laissez faire attitude toward the border, you could say that.
[00:05:54]  But right now, we've had a lot of people suffering unnecessarily because of Biden's projections about our southern border.
[00:06:01]  We've had a lot of border agents now in trouble for doing absolutely nothing wrong.
[00:06:06]  And now he's up there sort of bragging about how wonderful we are.
[00:06:09]  You know, we're so proud not to have a wall and to welcome immigrants like this.
[00:06:13]  And we're getting rid of the horses.
[00:06:15]  Remember that whole nonsense that whips were being used?
[00:06:18]  I mean, that's a media distortion.
[00:06:21]  And then, and for the Obama administration, the White House, that's all they care about is positive coverage from the media.
[00:06:28]  So they'll do whatever the media wants to get it and not speak to the concerns that many Americans have about.
[00:06:34]  And I think we were concerned about the housing of these immigrants, the detention facilities.
[00:06:42]  Nobody wants that.
[00:06:43]  People want a humane and sane immigration policy.
[00:06:47]  Plan to come here, apply to come here.
[00:06:49]  There's some kind of process, and then they can do it.
[00:06:51]  Not rushing across stream beds in really unsafe conditions.
[00:06:56]  That's just not the way to do it.
[00:06:58]  And the Biden approach has all but guaranteed that that's what we're going to have.
[00:07:02]  Yeah, it's such a lie because it would be one thing if disaster had struck in Haiti, which of course it has repeatedly, and these folks somehow made it immediately up here.
[00:07:12]  But what we're told is that these folks have been in Mexico for some 10 years.
[00:07:16]  And they've just come across the border now because they sense an opportunity under this president.
[00:07:22]  That's not what asylum is for.
[00:07:25]  Asylum is to get you out of an immediately dangerous situation in your country, get you out to another country where that situation doesn't exist.
[00:07:33]  You don't cross all the way from Haiti all the way up to the United States 10 years later and say, I'm ready for my asylum.
[00:07:40]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:41]  And there's no, you know, it's so interesting too that this is happening, you know, during the pandemic where Americans have been forced to live with just wild new restrictions in terms of so much of what they're doing.
[00:07:55]  There's, No end to what the government can do to prohibit you from.
[00:07:59]  Socializing from working, et cetera.
[00:08:01]  But we're not going to, they wouldn't consider having a stricter immigration policy, even though that would actually, that's probably something if we'd done it right from the get go, would have been good to prevent the spread of COVID 19.
[00:08:14]  And like, that's unthinkable.
[00:08:16]  But, you know, masking two year old children indefinitely, that makes normal sense.
[00:08:21]  It's so true.
[00:08:22]  That's one of the reasons this really burns.
[00:08:24]  And one of the reasons I love Reason, by the way, one of the reasons I love Reason is because you guys are sort of libertarian.
[00:08:30]  Like, get your hands off of me.
[00:08:31]  You know, that's sort of how I read reason.
[00:08:33]  It's just like, government, get the hell off of me.
[00:08:36]  And I feel like I, too, have a strong libertarian streak in me, especially these days.
[00:08:40]  But the other thing about what's happening on the southern border is this crazy crackdown on these couple of border agents.
[00:08:46]  Now, the horses are gone, as you mentioned, because of the alleged whipping incident, which didn't happen.
[00:08:50]  They continue to be maligned, right?
[00:08:52]  They continue to be maligned, including by the president, who has said this is a quote.
[00:08:58]  We played it on Friday.
[00:09:01]  I promise you, those people, meaning the Border Patrol agents, will.
[00:09:05]  Pay.
[00:09:06]  There is an investigation underway right now, and there will be consequences.
[00:09:10]  So I'm sure the Border Patrol agents are feeling really secure about a free and fair investigation into their actions.
[00:09:18]  Yeah.
[00:09:19]  You know, one of the smartest things that, to give him credit, that Biden did when he was running for president, the reason he kind of had an easy time of it in the primary is he knew, or his team knew, to ignore to a much greater degree than the other candidates, the very woke, progressive, liberal Twitter.
[00:09:37]  Bubble that so much of the Democratic Party is always catering to that audience, even though it's a tiny audience.
[00:09:43]  It's a very loud and active on social media audience, but it doesn't represent a lot of voters.
[00:09:48]  So the best thing you can do is ignore those people, speak to the actual American people.
[00:09:52]  Biden was better at doing that than many of the other candidates.
[00:09:55]  But now, in terms of his actual governing, I think he is often, or maybe I don't know what's going on in his own head, but his staff gets distracted by these things.
[00:10:05]  This is a quintessential example of, oh no, we're getting yelled at by the most woke of the woke people.
[00:10:12]  Scolding people.
[00:10:14]  How can we satisfy them?
[00:10:15]  Okay, let's get rid of these horses.
[00:10:16]  They're really concerned about this, even though no one else thought that was any kind of issue or believes that's any kind of issue, but they want to mollify them.
[00:10:25]  Right.
[00:10:25]  I mean, it's like they were shocked to see the border patrol patrolling the border.
[00:10:30]  They're trying to make sure that no more people get in, that the people who are there stay away from the horses, keep the situation safe.
[00:10:37]  There is absolutely nothing to show us whipping of anybody with the horse reins or otherwise.
[00:10:42]  And they continue to show us this one.
[00:10:44]  Picture of a Border Patrol agent on a horse using the reins and trying to get a man away from him without whipping the man at all as evidence of whipping.
[00:10:53]  And it isn't.
[00:10:53]  And just use your eyes.
[00:10:54]  I've said all along, I'm open minded.
[00:10:56]  Show me the pictures.
[00:10:57]  I'll look at them.
[00:10:58]  Haven't seen them yet, but I continue to see media headlines telling me not to believe my lying eyes.
[00:11:02]  Instead, I choose not to believe them.
[00:11:04]  By the way, Governor Abbott of Texas has come out and said to those Border Patrol agents who are absolutely going to get fired, they've been put on death duty.
[00:11:10]  There's no question because the investigation is already fixed.
[00:11:13]  You heard it right from the president that they can have jobs with him, with the Texas Border Patrol.
[00:11:17]  So good for him.
[00:11:18]  As Abbott's been put in a pickle and trying to deal with this himself since the feds are not helping.
[00:11:22]  All right, so picking up on your point about the juxtaposition between come on in, welcome to America, land of the free to the Haitian migrants, but to actual Americans, it's F you, put your mask on, keep your kid masked all day long.
[00:11:38]  The hand of big governments, not only over your face, it's in your arm, it's everywhere.
[00:11:42]  And by the way, none of those Haitian migrants has to have a vaccine, and not one has been tested for COVID.
[00:11:48]  That we have no idea whether they have COVID, these 12,000 plus folks in the country right now going God knows where.
[00:11:55]  We have no idea whether they have active COVID, and that was not a cleanly place down in Del Rio.
[00:12:00]  Who's under a bridge, for God's sake, with no running water.
[00:12:05]  And they won't, nobody was given the vaccine.
[00:12:07]  Meanwhile, Robbie, today, New York City schools could lose up to 100 teachers and more, plenty of other agents who help the teachers, you know, like janitors and so on, because not everybody wants to get the vaccine.
[00:12:23]  And Mayor de Blasio is saying, F you, get it or you're fired.
[00:12:27]  And we're ready, even to the tune of thousands, he says, we have thousands of backup.
[00:12:31]  You'll get it or you'll get fired.
[00:12:34]  It's going up now.
[00:12:35]  His mandate is going up to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees New York.
[00:12:40]  That'll be heard on Wednesday.
[00:12:41]  But it's not just New York City teachers.
[00:12:43]  New York State now saying it may call in the National Guard to replace unvaccinated health care workers.
[00:12:51]  The governor here, our new governor who replaced Andrew Cuomo, says she's considering employing National Guard and out of state medical workers to fill hospital staffing shortages, with tens of thousands of workers possibly about to lose their jobs for not meeting today's deadline.
[00:13:04]  For mandated vaccination.
[00:13:07]  I mean, and it's not just them.
[00:13:08]  In Connecticut, where I am now, bus drivers threatening to walk off as some 230 of them are refusing to get vaccinated.
[00:13:17]  There's already a shortage of bus drivers here.
[00:13:19]  They don't want to be forced to say it.
[00:13:21]  They say, look, we keep the windows open.
[00:13:23]  The kids walk by us for a total of one and a half seconds.
[00:13:26]  And we're allowed to drive unvaccinated for a year.
[00:13:30]  So why do we have to do this?
[00:13:31]  The buses are already too few.
[00:13:32]  They're already too crowded.
[00:13:34]  And here too, the governor's considering using the National Guard.
[00:13:37]  So we're going to fire.
[00:13:38]  All these people, bus drivers, teachers, janitors, healthcare workers who got us through the pandemic, even the ones with natural immunity, because they won't get this mandated vaccine.
[00:13:48]  Your thoughts?
[00:13:49]  Yeah.
[00:13:49]  Yeah.
[00:13:49]  And that's very key.
[00:13:50]  That last thing that you just said, these mandates are, for the most part, the Biden mandate, the one being forced on 80 million private sector workers.
[00:13:58]  I mean, you were talking about public sector workers.
[00:14:00]  And I think we can certainly debate the merits of forcing these people.
[00:14:04]  But I would at least accept that it can be done to for it's legal if we're talking about public employees.
[00:14:11]  Private and the private employee mandate is additionally insane because this is just straight up compelling private citizens, and they're not exempting natural immunity.
[00:14:20]  Which we know from the data from looking at it that you're you're you have very robust protection if you know if you've had a co if you recovered from a covet infection.
[00:14:29]  I just don't see you know more philosophically, I don't really see the value of compelling people at this level to do something that they don't want to do.
[00:14:39]  I you know, I'm obviously and I've been vaccinated, I think everyone should get vaccinated, I want them to approve vaccines.
[00:14:45]  For young people, and then families can make that choice.
[00:14:47]  But it ought to be a choice.
[00:14:48]  And I don't think it persuades more people when the big government has the needle in its fist and is looming over people.
[00:14:57]  Is that really what's persuasive?
[00:14:58]  I don't think that's what's persuasive at this point.

=== Mandatory Vaccine Mandates End (07:29) ===

[00:15:00]  They don't care.
[00:15:00]  Make it easier for people, reward them.
[00:15:02]  They're not trying to persuade.
[00:15:03]  And also, right, they're not trying to persuade.
[00:15:06]  Because if they were, you know what they would do?
[00:15:07]  They should pair pushes for vaccination with easing up of other restrictions.
[00:15:13]  They should say, please get vaccinated, and then you can throw away the mask.
[00:15:17]  You don't have to social distance.
[00:15:18]  Back to normal.
[00:15:18]  That's what they said initially.
[00:15:20]  And then they took that back.
[00:15:21]  They have gone wildly in the other direction.
[00:15:23]  No, get vaccinated.
[00:15:23]  We're going to make you.
[00:15:24]  And then you should mask up just as intensely.
[00:15:27]  In fact, double mask now.
[00:15:28]  That's what they're saying.
[00:15:29]  It's crazy.
[00:15:30]  And the explanation is well, Delta, Delta is very contagious.
[00:15:33]  Delta can be spread even by vaccinated people.
[00:15:35]  So we have to have the mask back on.
[00:15:37]  Okay.
[00:15:37]  Okay.
[00:15:37]  I'll accept that.
[00:15:39]  But then stop pushing me to get vaccinated.
[00:15:42]  Because if I can get it from a vaccinated person, just the same as I can get it from an unvaccinated person, Why are you mandating these masks everywhere?
[00:15:52]  Right, it's like I can get it from anybody.
[00:15:54]  Why are you mandating the vaccines?
[00:15:55]  I should say, right?
[00:15:56]  So it's like if I'm standing next to one guy who's vaccinated and one guy who's not vaccinated, I can get it from either one.
[00:16:01]  Why are you telling me the vaccine is absolutely the solution to me getting it?
[00:16:04]  It's the solution to them winding up in the hospital.
[00:16:07]  I get that argument, right?
[00:16:08]  You have a way less chance of winding up in the hospital or dead.
[00:16:11]  But something's got to give.
[00:16:13]  You can't just keep everybody masked and under a mandatory vaccine forevermore.
[00:16:17]  And I don't know, Robbie, you tell me, because you're like I am.
[00:16:20]  You don't like the big thumb of government on you.
[00:16:23]  I'm starting to feel like the water is rising and it's starting to cover my mouth and then it's going to cover my nose.
[00:16:31]  I'm starting to have that feeling of like, Oh my God, like they're everywhere.
[00:16:34]  They're never going to get off of me.
[00:16:36]  Well, and I'll tell you the scariest thing is I've been looking just in the last like week or two, I've been looking at college campus COVID policies.
[00:16:43]  You know, these are at the more liberal and elite and prestigious the institution, your Harvard's, your Yale's, your Columbia's, your Stanford's, et cetera.
[00:16:51]  Their COVID mitigation policies are insane, even by the standards of COVID mitigation.
[00:16:58]  Now, for populations that are almost entirely vaccinated and disproportionately young.
[00:17:02]  So these are the people at the least risk.
[00:17:04]  Of a negative COVID outcome.
[00:17:06]  And they are telling people the cafeterias are being shut down, eat alone by yourself in your dorm room, see no one, socialize with no one, wear a mask even when you're outside, wear a mask when you're like jogging by yourself.
[00:17:20]  It's a dystopia.
[00:17:22]  It's so crazy.
[00:17:24]  And then, of course, what we've seen is that a lot of norms on college campuses, and we've seen this over the last 10 years with norms with respect to free speech and wokeism, that kind of stuff, have spread to all our other institutions.
[00:17:36]  So I'm very worried that.
[00:17:39]  As repressive as it is right now, it might even get worse and having no bearing on what the state of the pandemic is.
[00:17:45]  We have to talk about it.
[00:17:46]  The pandemic is likely to get less bad.
[00:17:47]  Can we talk about that?
[00:17:48]  The Oberlin College, you posted a story on this is where I got it from you about what's happening at Oberlin College.
[00:17:54]  Very nice college in Ohio.
[00:17:56]  Lena Dunham went there, but so did my mother in law.
[00:17:58]  A lot of great people went there, where she's now 85.
[00:18:01]  So it was a long time ago.
[00:18:02]  My point is they seem to have lost their ever loving minds.
[00:18:05]  And reading your article about the actual warning, I don't know if you have it in front of you.
[00:18:10]  I've got it in front of me.
[00:18:11]  This is from you.
[00:18:13]  Students should eat outside or alone in their rooms.
[00:18:17]  And only under those two circumstances should they even think about demasking.
[00:18:21]  They say the only time you may take off your mask is when you are in your room alone or with your roommate.
[00:18:27]  Masks may be removed while eating outdoors or alone in your room with your roommate.
[00:18:32]  Like you don't even think about taking off that mask unless you're sitting by yourself.
[00:18:38]  I have a theory that the mask has become sort of like the MAGA hat.
[00:18:44]  For Trump people, the mask is like an identifying, it's a piece of equipment or it's a piece of clothing that identifies you as a member of Team Blue.
[00:18:54]  You are a Biden voter.
[00:18:55]  You are a good liberal.
[00:18:57]  You're on the side of Dr. Fauci and the science.
[00:19:00]  You didn't vote for Trump.
[00:19:01]  This is how you signify who you are to other people.
[00:19:05]  If you see someone driving and they're in the car by themselves, they're wearing a mask, you know that person voted for Biden, right?
[00:19:11]  That's exactly it.
[00:19:13]  It's a bumper sticker.
[00:19:14]  That's all it is.
[00:19:15]  And it really is that.
[00:19:17]  It's so sad when I see that.
[00:19:18]  Like, I give a pass to anybody with gray hair.
[00:19:22]  I really do.
[00:19:22]  Like, anybody who is old and really genuinely very vulnerable to this disease, you mask it up, sister.
[00:19:29]  You do three masks if you want.
[00:19:31]  I get it.
[00:19:32]  It is very deadly for that age group.
[00:19:34]  You see a young, obviously healthy woman alone in her car and she's got her mask on.
[00:19:39]  I think, oh, sister.
[00:19:41]  Oh, like, come back.
[00:19:43]  It's okay.
[00:19:44]  You're going to be fine.
[00:19:45]  Come back.
[00:19:46]  I'm here in Washington, DC, and I still see, I don't know, 25, 30.
[00:19:51]  I did a count the other day.
[00:19:52]  It was about 35% of people that I encounter on the street, just kind of walking to work, are wearing masks outdoors by themselves.
[00:20:00]  This is something even the CDC doesn't say is necessary.
[00:20:03]  This is caution beyond what our, to my mind, very overly cautious government health officials have recommended.
[00:20:09]  And in our nation's capital, a lot of people are going a step beyond that.
[00:20:14]  And I mean, I feel sorry for them, but you can make what, you know, as a libertarian, I think you should make whatever choice that you want to make is in your best interest.
[00:20:23]  That's fine.
[00:20:23]  That's fine by me, but don't tell me what to do.
[00:20:26]  And the COVID mitigation policies still operate at the level of nope, everyone is going to do what the most risk averse, Health official or government official is prescribing for everyone.
[00:20:36]  And that is just, there's no reason for it.
[00:20:40]  You can get the vaccine to protect yourself and take whatever additional precautions you want to take, but please leave me alone at this point.
[00:20:46]  And the infuriating part, which you've been writing a lot about too, and we've been talking about a lot here too, is just the exceptions for the elites, right?
[00:20:52]  It's like, so the bus drivers who brought their asses into work and brought kids to the schools that were willing to stay open all last year when we didn't know what was what, they did it.
[00:21:04]  Or the health, like the nurse who exposed herself to COVID patients before we had a vaccine, before we had any meaningful treatments, she got it and she took the risk to take care of people.
[00:21:15]  Those people are about to get fired for not getting this mandatory vaccine.
[00:21:20]  But we can see elite after elite, whether it's Obama at his birthday party or AOC at the Met Gala or all the Emmy stars at the Emmys, they do not have to wear their masks.
[00:21:32]  They can parade around while the serfs on their knees around them wear all of theirs.
[00:21:38]  The migrants coming across the southern border, they don't have to get the mandatory.
[00:21:41]  It's like people are starting to notice the absurd hypocrisy that we are being witnessed and the lies that we are being fed.
[00:21:50]  It looks like the optics of the Hunger Games when you have like the Met Gala, you have all these unmasked celebrities and AOC, et cetera, and then all the staff behind them is masked up.
[00:22:02]  It's gone.
[00:22:02]  It's so appallingly one rule for the elites and another for everyone else.
[00:22:06]  The elites are not following these policies.
[00:22:09]  Our mayors have been caught time, our Democratic mayors caught time and time again, not following their policies.
[00:22:14]  In DC, the mayor, Mariel Bowser, has thrice, thrice been caught massless at a social event, a wedding, a birthday party.
[00:22:23]  The mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, was massless at a concert, dancing, partying.
[00:22:28]  And then she's asked about it.
[00:22:29]  And she's like, What are you?

=== Treating Unvaccinated Like Lepers (04:52) ===

[00:22:30]  I'm vaccinated.
[00:22:31]  It's ridiculous.
[00:22:31]  I'm not going to put on a mask in between sips of water.
[00:22:34]  That's insane.
[00:22:35]  And you know what?
[00:22:36]  She's right.
[00:22:36]  Right.
[00:22:37]  We're like, Welcome to our team.
[00:22:38]  That's our law.
[00:22:39]  Right.
[00:22:40]  Exactly.
[00:22:40]  We're like, Mayor, welcome.
[00:22:42]  Welcome to the dark side.
[00:22:43]  That's where we all are.
[00:22:45]  But she's the one who, you know, in her day job is spooning these mandates down our throats, which is why, obviously, it's infuriating.
[00:22:51]  Okay, we're going to talk about a couple of new things after this break how Mayor de Blasio got booed at this muckety muck event with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
[00:23:00]  And we're going to talk about Robbie's take on booster shots in a minute and his new book, joined today by Robbie Suave.
[00:23:08]  Don't miss him.
[00:23:09]  We're picking back up with him in two minutes.
[00:23:17]  Welcome back, everyone, to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:23:19]  I'm joined today by Robbie Suave.
[00:23:21]  He's senior editor of Reason Magazine and author of the brand new book, Tech Panic Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future Out Tomorrow.
[00:23:30]  Okay, so before I get to how I think the tide is turning a bit, I do think people are feeling like I am, with the water up to here and they've had it.
[00:23:38]  I missed this because we were building up to September 11th and people were focused on more important messages.
[00:23:44]  Lena Wen, who used to run Planned Parenthood, was on CNN, and you wrote a response to this.
[00:23:49]  And this is her attitude.
[00:23:51]  She's a far left person.
[00:23:53]  It is so indicative of everything we have seen from these sort of elites and their noses turned up against the unvaccinated, whether they've had COVID before or not.
[00:24:04]  This is what she has to say is the solution to those who remain unvaccinated.
[00:24:08]  That there are privileges associated with being an American, that if you wish to have these privileges, you need to get vaccinated.
[00:24:16]  Travel and having the right to travel in our state, it's not a constitutional right, as far as I know, to board a plane.
[00:24:26]  And so saying that if you want to stay unvaccinated, that's your choice.
[00:24:30]  But if you want to travel, you better go get that vaccine.
[00:24:33]  Okay.
[00:24:35]  People need to stay in their homes.
[00:24:36]  That's it.
[00:24:36]  Forget Olbermann's policy of stay in your home when you're eating, right?
[00:24:40]  By yourself.
[00:24:40]  That's when you can take off your mask.
[00:24:42]  She's like, if you're unvaccinated, don't leave.
[00:24:43]  That's it.
[00:24:44]  You don't get to go outside anymore.
[00:24:45]  I mean, she's all but suggesting that the unvaccinated should have numbers tattooed to their faces, right?
[00:24:51]  I mean, it's nakedly tyrannical.
[00:24:54]  By the way, she's wrong.
[00:24:55]  It is a constitutional right to be able to travel from state to state.
[00:25:00]  The very first purpose of having a federal government was to.
[00:25:05]  Like resolve squabbles between the states.
[00:25:08]  So maybe there's no specific right to take a plane or a train, but yes, the government cannot prohibit people from traveling broadly.
[00:25:16]  I mean, she is speaking from this perspective that is treating the unvaccinated like they're lepers or something, like they're an other, like they're subhuman.
[00:25:26]  And I think that's morally wrong.
[00:25:28]  I think that's practically wrong.
[00:25:30]  Again, I am all about trying to encourage more people to get vaccinated.
[00:25:34]  I don't think treating them this way is useful, is going to.
[00:25:39]  I think that will make some people even more defiant about not wanting to get vaccinated because you're deplorabilizing them.
[00:25:48]  And it speaks to her.
[00:25:49]  She has such a rather cruel mindset for how we should behave to our fellow Americans.
[00:25:57]  She said, we should look at the choice to remain unvaccinated the same as we look at driving while intoxicated.
[00:26:05]  That basically is the same thing.
[00:26:08]  My not getting vaccinated, which by the way, I did get vaccinated, and I believe in the vaccines too.
[00:26:12]  I'd love to see everybody get them.
[00:26:14]  You know, if your doctor says it's good for you, but that that's the same as getting completely hammered and getting behind the wheel of a dangerous instrumentality.
[00:26:24]  Yeah, which is wrong.
[00:26:26]  It's not driving while intoxicated does put other people at risk.
[00:26:30]  You shouldn't do that, it should be illegal.
[00:26:32]  But not the people who are the unvaccinated are mostly putting their own lives at risk and the risks of other unvaccinated people.
[00:26:40]  If you want to be protected, you can get vaccinated.
[00:26:44]  You can look at the data.
[00:26:45]  Our hospitals are filled up.
[00:26:48]  Overwhelmingly, with people who are unvaccinated, the people who are dying are overwhelmingly the unvaccinated.
[00:26:53]  So, you can address this concern by being vaccinated.
[00:26:56]  If someone else is going to make a different choice, maybe that choice is wrong.
[00:27:00]  Maybe it's wrong for their own personal health interest, but it's really not affecting you so much anymore.
[00:27:06]  It would be more like deciding not to wear a seatbelt or not a helmet when you're biking, something like that.
[00:27:12]  Maybe not the most cautious decision for you, but it's not actually really undermining anyone else's safety.
[00:27:19]  And at which point, we need to kind of Live and let live, for goodness sake.

=== Data Shows Unvaccinated Dying (05:08) ===

[00:27:22]  Well, that's the thing.
[00:27:23]  So it's like now that with Delta, you can get it.
[00:27:27]  I mean, the earlier versions, variants of this virus were not as transmissible by people who had the vaccine.
[00:27:35]  That was one of the early selling points of the vaccine.
[00:27:38]  But it is still transmissible if you've had the vaccine, especially Delta, that they find it in your nose.
[00:27:44]  They found it.
[00:27:45]  That's why you can still get it from a vaccinated person.
[00:27:47]  So I got it.
[00:27:48]  I was vaccinated and I got it.
[00:27:49]  I had a breakthrough case.
[00:27:50]  Yeah, so it happens now.
[00:27:52]  But what that means is that you should get the vaccine to prevent yourself from getting hospitalized or from dying from COVID, which is a real risk, especially if you are older.
[00:28:04]  But the point is, It's not like driving while intoxicated.
[00:28:07]  I can get COVID from a vaccinated person or an unvaccinated person, right?
[00:28:13]  It's like it is nowhere near as reckless not to get the vaccine toward other people as getting behind the wheel of a car while driving.
[00:28:20]  But this is how this group of people is being treated, even back to our other point, if they've had COVID and they have natural immunity, which by the way, the studies are showing makes you more, more immune than with a vaccine.
[00:28:33]  Okay, so I think people are about it, they've had it.
[00:28:37]  And more and more we're seeing.
[00:28:39]  Pockets of folks sort of rise up, push back.
[00:28:43]  And there are two examples of that, of all places, in New York City over the weekend.
[00:28:47]  All right, so first, Mayor de Blasio went to this concert.
[00:28:50]  Meghan Markle, Harry were there lecturing everybody about the environment before they got on their private jet to fly home.
[00:28:57]  Of course.
[00:28:58]  People suck.
[00:29:01]  And Mayor de Blasio was there.
[00:29:03]  And look at the reception he got.
[00:29:06]  To protect our planet and every person on it.
[00:29:10]  Especially the young people in the world, we will not let them down.
[00:29:13]  It will take global change.
[00:29:15]  It will take things that are not a sacrifice, they are necessary.
[00:29:18]  This is our greatest opportunity to create a better and more just world for all, but we've got to do it now.
[00:29:25]  To those who are listening and not watching on YouTube, you see a lot of middle fingers going up too.
[00:29:31]  They're not accepting his message.
[00:29:33]  And then I'll just partner that with my next soundbite, which is protesters in New York City, it's Staten Island, which is more red, but still New York City.
[00:29:43]  Going to the flute court of a mall, which is only open to the vaccinated, basically with another middle finger for that policy.
[00:29:52]  Watch and listen.
[00:30:04]  USA!
[00:30:05]  USA!
[00:30:13]  You are safe!
[00:30:19]  Feed our state!
[00:30:28]  Go eat!
[00:30:28]  That is what we're here to do!
[00:30:30]  Everybody, don't get food and eat!
[00:30:33]  That is what we're here to do!
[00:30:35]  Then we're gonna meet back over there and go into the food court area and sit our butts down!
[00:30:42]  That's it.
[00:30:42]  We're gonna go sit our butts down and we're gonna eat.
[00:30:45]  And you see people waving the American flag.
[00:30:47]  People on Twitter, leftists on Twitter, were stunned.
[00:30:51]  That this took place in New York City, in any one of the boroughs of New York City.
[00:30:54]  You're only allowed, remember, they think you're only allowed an exemption from COVID mitigation restrictions if you're attending a Black Lives Matter protest.
[00:31:03]  Or a Ruth Bader Ginsburg morning.
[00:31:05]  If you're a morning.
[00:31:07]  Very important.
[00:31:08]  It's not dangerous.
[00:31:09]  Very important health exception because there isn't racism, the real pandemic.
[00:31:12]  I mean, we're making fun of this, but these are actual things that the health officials came out and said two summers ago.
[00:31:21]  I think people have to be over it because the goalposts have shifted so many times.
[00:31:25]  First, we were told two weeks, this is going to be a two week thing, and then we'll go back to normal.
[00:31:29]  And then it was actually, we're going to hold on.
[00:31:30]  We're going to do this until we have the vaccine.
[00:31:33]  And then it was, okay, we're going to do this until everyone is able to get a vaccine who wants one.
[00:31:37]  And then it's like, no, we're just going to do this stuff in depth forever, forever.
[00:31:42]  What will be like, I'm so afraid that officials, that these things will remain in place, the masking, the, I mean, we've seen this with terrorism, actually, right?
[00:31:50]  The TSA.
[00:31:51]  You still take off your belt and your shoes to get on a plane, even though we now know those things do not make anyone safer, like whatsoever, that they're, you know, the TSA routinely misses your items when you're going through the knives and things like that.
[00:32:06]  It's all like for show, it's all theater.
[00:32:09]  And that could, I could easily see that still being the case for many of our COVID strategies.
[00:32:15]  We'll still be, you know, when you're in line in DC at a restaurant, if you're going to like grab a sandwich or something, you know, you're supposed to wear your mask when you're in line.
[00:32:24]  But then if you actually sit down to eat it, well, then you can take it off.
[00:32:27]  It makes no sense whatsoever.
[00:32:29]  But everybody, we're just doing it.

=== Media Stranglehold on Speech (09:37) ===

[00:32:31]  It's crazy.
[00:32:32]  No, it's absurd.
[00:32:33]  At our school, at the end of October, the end of October, okay, so it's more than a month away, there's an outdoor.
[00:32:39]  Sort of fair that they have at the end of the month.
[00:32:42]  And they've already issued an outdoor mask mandate for all the children.
[00:32:45]  It's like, okay, that's a month away still.
[00:32:49]  We're actually getting Delta under control, according to most of the media reports in terms of its number of cases and so on.
[00:32:55]  And it's outside.
[00:32:57]  What are you doing?
[00:32:59]  To your point, it's just more of the comfort check, more of the taking the shoes off.
[00:33:02]  That will do absolutely nothing other than tick people off.
[00:33:06]  Okay, so I want to move on because I really want to talk to you about your book.
[00:33:09]  I find this fascinating.
[00:33:10]  By the way, I'm joined by Robbie Suave.
[00:33:12]  He's author of the new book, Tech Panic Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future.
[00:33:17]  You're here.
[00:33:18]  Yeah.
[00:33:18]  Oh, he's got it right there.
[00:33:19]  Okay.
[00:33:19]  And you know what?
[00:33:20]  We'll pick it up.
[00:33:20]  We'll squeeze in a quick break and then I want to pick it up because the book is really interesting.
[00:33:25]  It talks about bias and censorship at these organizations.
[00:33:30]  And that's very timely because you got people like Nicki Minaj claiming that she was thrown in Twitter jail just for sharing her views on the COVID vaccine.
[00:33:37]  Are you next?
[00:33:38]  What does Robbie think?
[00:33:39]  And why does his message make me feel better about big tech?
[00:33:42]  Stay tuned.
[00:33:49]  Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:33:50]  I am joined today by Robbie Suave.
[00:33:52]  It's a fun last name because it's spelled S O A V E.
[00:33:56]  So you're like Soave, Suave, but it's Suave.
[00:33:59]  And he's senior editor of Reason Magazine and author of the brand new book, Tech Panic Why We Should Not Fear Facebook and the Future Out Tomorrow.
[00:34:08]  Robbie, okay, so let's talk about this.
[00:34:12]  Give me the overall theory of the book because you're going to be able to say it better than I can.
[00:34:16]  Absolutely.
[00:34:17]  So, I have covered a lot of the big tech issues and I share a lot of the concerns that people, particularly on the right, have about censorship and bias and that kind of thing.
[00:34:25]  So, I am by no means making the claim that it doesn't exist or that's not happening.
[00:34:29]  It is a problem.
[00:34:30]  But I think a lot of people, and again, especially on the right, miss the tremendous benefit of social media.
[00:34:36]  Social media has actually made it much easier to share opinions that depart from mainstream media orthodoxy or progressive viewpoints to get your message out there.
[00:34:46]  And as evidence of that, I see a lot of people.
[00:34:49]  Alternative voices and conservative voices are doing really well on Facebook, on YouTube, on other places.
[00:34:55]  So, because so many of the solutions to the issue of censorship involve actually harming big tech or breaking up Facebook, taking away its liability protection, all those kinds of things, I'm just saying, okay, hold on.
[00:35:07]  I see why you're upset.
[00:35:08]  But if you did any of those things, I think it would actually advantage the left, it would advantage the mainstream media.
[00:35:14]  And as evidence of that, I can point to the fact that Elizabeth Warren and the New York Times support all these exact same policies, probably because they realize.
[00:35:23]  It would actually hurt conservatives if you implemented them.
[00:35:26]  Okay.
[00:35:26]  What about?
[00:35:27]  I love Vivek Ramaswamy, who made it big in the tech industry, in the medical tech industry.
[00:35:33]  And now he's out there.
[00:35:35]  He wrote the book Woke Inc., and he's out there sort of fighting against this woke nonsense.
[00:35:39]  He's using his powers and his monies for good.
[00:35:43]  And he has a theory, he has a legal theory, along with Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School.
[00:35:49]  He was married to Tiger Mom, Amy Chua, that we should be.
[00:35:54]  We should recognize big tech as essentially government actors for purposes of the First Amendment.
[00:35:58]  That they're so large, they're so ubiquitous, they're in control of so much of our society.
[00:36:03]  We should treat them as they are government entities.
[00:36:05]  And therefore, if they were subject to the First Amendment, which only state actors are, That would prevent viewpoint censorship.
[00:36:14]  They would not be allowed to censor your view just because it's conservative on their forums.
[00:36:20]  What do you make of that?
[00:36:22]  I don't think the Supreme Court would be likely to agree with this theory.
[00:36:25]  It's an interesting idea.
[00:36:27]  It's been tested out.
[00:36:28]  There was a preliminary court case a while back, and I respect Jed Rubenfeld immensely, but that position didn't win.
[00:36:35]  So I don't think at the end of the day that that's going to be the case.
[00:36:38]  I would also, now I don't want them to be considered, they should not be considered state actors.
[00:36:42]  The White House.
[00:36:43]  Considers social media to be an extension of its own decrees, of its pandemic misinformation.
[00:36:49]  Yeah, but they're doing the White House's bidding without doing what would really be required of them, which is fairness to the other side.
[00:36:56]  But they're doing it because they're afraid of the government coming after them if they don't.
[00:37:00]  So I talk for this book, I talk to people at Facebook.
[00:37:03]  What goes into some of these really bad calls you made, like with the Hunter Biden story, for example?
[00:37:08]  Really egregious, biased stuff.
[00:37:10]  Why do you do these things?
[00:37:12]  And what I learn is that they do it because.
[00:37:15]  They're being ordered to do it by the mainstream media and by our own government.
[00:37:19]  These people are saying we're going to hunt you down and destroy you or shame you, drag you through public lynch mob for not doing more of this kind of thing.
[00:37:30]  We're demanding more of this.
[00:37:32]  So I'm here thinking well, maybe the problem isn't really social media.
[00:37:36]  Maybe the problem is that our mainstream media is actually so censorship inclined and our government wants this kind of censorship.
[00:37:44]  We need to be fighting those people, we need to be calling them out.
[00:37:49]  Actually, harming social media is doing too much of what they want, I agree.
[00:37:53]  But our only way of fighting back is actually on social media.
[00:37:57]  So we would limit our own outlet if we would give actually the mainstream media exactly what it wants because Facebook is a competitor.
[00:38:04]  It's an upstart competitor.
[00:38:06]  Twitter is a competitor.
[00:38:07]  YouTube is a competitor to the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN, et cetera.
[00:38:12]  They want to have a stranglehold over what you get to say.
[00:38:15]  And social media has made that impossible, which is actually a good thing.
[00:38:18]  Well, they do seem very interested in serving those masters.
[00:38:22]  I mean, they're.
[00:38:23]  They certainly kowtow to what the mainstream wants them to do and to what the government wants them to do a lot.
[00:38:28]  But I think it's no accident that it coincides with their own ideology, is it?
[00:38:32]  And I mean, why do we have to choose between fighting YouTube and fighting the mainstream media?
[00:38:36]  Why do we have to choose between the infantry and the cavalry?
[00:38:39]  Like all hands on deck, let's fight them all.
[00:38:42]  Yeah.
[00:38:42]  But at any, if you tune, if you look at the top articles on Facebook at any given minute, they are from Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Fox News, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the White House.
[00:38:55]  For sure.
[00:38:56]  It's there.
[00:38:56]  It's it's a really it's probably it is arguably the most important to modern communication tool for getting out views that dissent from liberal orthodoxy.
[00:39:07]  It has four times the reach of Twitter.
[00:39:09]  Yeah.
[00:39:09]  Yeah.
[00:39:10]  So it's so important.
[00:39:12]  I'm very worried we would shoot ourselves in the foot by doing something to disrupt it.
[00:39:17]  You know, I do not want to go back to the era where I mean, because the New York Times is never going to run an op ed by a Republican ever again.
[00:39:24]  That was the message they took from the whole Tom Cotton debacle.
[00:39:27]  So, we cannot have these people have more control over the conversation, and we cannot let them have it.
[00:39:34]  And I'm worried that a lot of the proposals to deal with so called big tech and also the censorship problem is coming from within.
[00:39:41]  It's the employees at these tech companies, it's the woke employees.
[00:39:46]  The people who run the companies don't necessarily want to do these things.
[00:39:48]  They feel pressured internally because their employees are so far left.
[00:39:52]  They were educated in the first place.
[00:39:53]  Yeah, they got to grow a pair.
[00:39:56]  My favorite story the whole woke two years that we've had.
[00:39:59]  At a minimum, I mean, like the explosion of woke was the Wall Street Journal when they had some 80 employees say, Oh, you printed something by Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute, who's amazing, by the way.
[00:40:10]  And you printed somebody else we didn't like, and we're going to walk out.
[00:40:12]  And the Wall Street Journal responded by saying, I totally get it.
[00:40:16]  Understand your position.
[00:40:17]  Bye.
[00:40:18]  You don't have to work here.
[00:40:20]  No problem.
[00:40:21]  That's the right way to handle those employees.
[00:40:23]  They don't run the joint until their name is under the masthead, they can get out or shut up.
[00:40:28]  I mean, those are your two positions.
[00:40:30]  Okay, options.
[00:40:31]  Yeah.
[00:40:32]  I want to ask you about you say you have a position that the radicalized right does not essentially need to be feared in these formats.
[00:40:37]  You say we should be doubtful that a precipitous increase in political violence.
[00:40:42]  Is likely to follow insufficient online moderation.
[00:40:46]  Boy, oh boy, is that the opposite of what we've heard from everybody in the wake of January 6th.
[00:40:52]  And I thought your point about the Southern Poverty Law Center was a very good one because they and the ADL, who just went after Tucker, he was on Friday saying, if I quote, fuck them.
[00:41:03]  I didn't know we could say that on your show.
[00:41:05]  Yeah, you could go for it.
[00:41:06]  That they've become these sort of partisan radical organizations, not these independent civility watchdogs.
[00:41:15]  Yeah, these organizations are always trying to convince you that extremism and hate are getting worse because they get more donations when these things are getting worse.
[00:41:24]  So, the way the Southern Poverty Law Center counts hate groups is kind of ridiculous.
[00:41:29]  If you look at their map, like this group could be eight people, and it could even be like a black nationalist group.
[00:41:35]  And then maybe they have a falling out, so it splits into two groups of four people.
[00:41:39]  And then they, oh, the hate has doubled last year and has something to do with Trump.
[00:41:44]  And Ben Carson was on their list.
[00:41:46]  They labeled Ben Carson, his own hate group or a terrorist, I can't remember what the exact label was, but they ultimately.
[00:41:52]  As far as I can tell, social media actually de radicalizes some people.
[00:41:56]  The media is so obsessed with the idea that your poor innocent little child is just innocently Googling, I don't know, whatever the Disney movie is, and then they'll suddenly come across Nazi content.

=== Social Media and Teen Anxiety (04:34) ===

[00:42:08]  That doesn't really happen.
[00:42:09]  It doesn't work like that.
[00:42:11]  It's more likely that Nazis will come across centrist content that will steer them away from radicalization.
[00:42:19]  There are many papers showing that now.
[00:42:20]  So the fear does not care.
[00:42:22]  All right.
[00:42:23]  So, what about this position that FaceTime, the whole like addiction, anxiety, and depression?
[00:42:29]  Because your position on that, and we've done stories on this, of course.
[00:42:33]  As the mother of three kids, I worry about this.
[00:42:35]  You know, we saw the social network, which showed us how Facebook is designed to be addictive and to keep you on there forever and to call information about you so that they know what will make you come on and they tap you on the shoulder digitally to get you to log on.
[00:42:48]  And before you know it, you've lost eight hours of your day or your kid has blah, blah, blah.
[00:42:52]  You say, Correlation in terms of rising anxiety, depression rates, especially among teens, does not, it's not the same thing as causation.
[00:43:03]  What do you mean?
[00:43:04]  Yeah, I certainly think there are some addictiveness concerns with social media, and parents are well advised to tell their kids to get off their phones every now and then.
[00:43:15]  But we don't need any government intervention to do this, right?
[00:43:18]  I don't, when I was a kid, I was limited to, I was only allowed to play like one hour of video games a day.
[00:43:23]  So, you might that was I would have been addicted to video games if not for that.
[00:43:27]  We can use that, we can do that same thing.
[00:43:29]  We can empower parents to limit the amount of time kids spend on their phone, no phones in the bedroom because then they stay up all night.
[00:43:36]  They're tired.
[00:43:37]  And that's what I think the increase in anxiety is they're not sleeping.
[00:43:41]  But if you look at the research, it seems to me like some kids do have negative mental health outcomes because of social media, but also kids who are not on social media at all, they also have bad.
[00:43:54]  Mental health outcomes because they're kind of like loners who are not interacting with friends.
[00:43:58]  They don't have friends.
[00:43:59]  It looks to me like there's a good chunk of kids who are responsibly using social media or are using it in positive ways to connect with their friends.
[00:44:08]  Think of the pandemic.
[00:44:09]  I mean, the last two years.
[00:44:11]  I think our young people are depressed because it was horrible.
[00:44:15]  They were forced to stay inside.
[00:44:16]  School was shut down, extracurriculars.
[00:44:18]  And I think social media was probably a net positive given that this was going on.
[00:44:24]  It was something that, like, without that, they probably would have been even more depressed because of what we went through.
[00:44:29]  What about that, though?
[00:44:31]  I don't really necessarily want the government to solve it for me, but what about Facebook?
[00:44:36]  What about Instagram?
[00:44:38]  We just saw that terrible story about how that's led to increased suicidality.
[00:44:44]  Amongst girls in particular who are all over Instagram seeing these perfect images.
[00:44:48]  And as much as the moms and the dads say, sweetheart, that's not real.
[00:44:52]  That is like Kim Kardashian's got as much cellulite on her ass as the average woman.
[00:44:56]  That's been filtered.
[00:44:59]  It doesn't, you know, dealing with like a 13 or 14 year old girl and trying to like really make her understand that on a gut level is tough.
[00:45:07]  And so I look at, I'm afraid to even say this.
[00:45:09]  So, number one, shouldn't we just be pressuring the companies themselves to make a change to make it less addictive and sort of less, I don't like crack?
[00:45:16]  And number two, What if we did bring in the government?
[00:45:19]  Because I hate to say it, but the Chinese, I hate to cite the Chinese who are engaged in ethnic genocide for anything moral, but they are actually cracking down.
[00:45:28]  They added a time limit for kids under 14 on their version of TikTok.
[00:45:32]  They've banned nighttime use for teenagers.
[00:45:34]  I'm like, should we be following the Chinese?
[00:45:37]  The First Amendment will, I think, prohibit us ultimately from doing that.
[00:45:41]  The video games, I think, is a pretty good comparison because there were a lot of concerns that violent video games were making kids more violent.
[00:45:49]  And we now know that that research is totally bunk.
[00:45:51]  If anything, violent video games probably deter the minority of kids who are violent because it gives them an outlet other than causing real violence.
[00:46:00]  But anyway, the very important Supreme Court case authored by Scalia, the arch conservative, saying violent video games are speech.
[00:46:10]  The governor of San Francisco can't prohibit vendors from selling these games directly to kids because it's a First Amendment issue.
[00:46:20]  So I think that's a pretty direct comparison here.
[00:46:25]  I don't think in a constitutional sense you can necessarily bring in the government.
[00:46:28]  But I do, again, I do absolutely think parents should talk to their kids about their social media use.
[00:46:34]  If it's having a, and also we can absolutely put pressure on the companies to make different changes.
[00:46:39]  Yes, the problem here is really Instagram.
[00:46:41]  Kids aren't even on Facebook, frankly.

=== Ignoring Intelligence Files (15:19) ===

[00:46:43]  Facebook is becoming boomer book.
[00:46:45]  But there will be a new technology right now.
[00:46:47]  There's TikTok, there's always something new.
[00:46:50]  So this concern that, oh, we have to fix this is the thing we have to fix.
[00:46:53]  Well, kids will eventually not be interested in that and there'll be something else.
[00:46:57]  You know, glossy magazines probably had some of the same body image issues, which is not to say it was correct to bring up those things and to talk about them.
[00:47:05]  It just doesn't feel like a new problem or one the government is any more likely to solve than these past ones.
[00:47:11]  Robbie, so interesting.
[00:47:12]  The book is Tech Panic.
[00:47:14]  It's out tomorrow.
[00:47:15]  I recommend it.
[00:47:15]  You'll feel better as I did.
[00:47:17]  Great to see you.
[00:47:18]  Speaking of censorship, up next, the latest on Hunter Biden and the New York Post writer who's behind those stories, Sorab Romani, is here next.
[00:47:29]  Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show, everyone.
[00:47:31]  So much to go over today.
[00:47:32]  I'm so excited about today's show.
[00:47:34]  I am joined now by Sarab Amari.
[00:47:36]  He is the op ed ed editor at the New York Post and author of The Unbroken Thread Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
[00:47:45]  And of course, you know, the New York Post was behind the Hunter Biden story that was suppressed by all of social media right before last year's presidential election.
[00:47:54]  Well, new emails from Hunter Biden suggest.
[00:47:58]  The first son has always tried to sell access to his famous father.
[00:48:02]  And by the way, you know, other people now, Sarab, are late to the party.
[00:48:08]  I will say, had.
[00:48:10]  Hats off to Politico and Ben Schreckinger, who's written a book called The Bidens Inside the First Family's 50 Year Rise to Power, confirming some of your reporting.
[00:48:20]  And that now, I guess, has given some in the mainstream media permission to finally admit that you had it right all along.
[00:48:28]  But they're not exactly falling on their swords, are they?
[00:48:31]  Yeah, no, Megan, thanks for having me on.
[00:48:34]  I should just at the outset clarify that I helped run the opinion pages.
[00:48:39]  So I was not responsible for the reporting, the amazing reporting.
[00:48:42]  Into the Hunter files that my colleague brought forward.
[00:48:46]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:48:48]  But look, I mean, it's the Johnny come lately attitude about this is frankly enraging from the point of view of people in our newsroom because at the moment when it really mattered, when you had the kind of the entire big tech intelligence community, the whole establishment coming against us, not just coming against us in words, but in genuine, using Coercive power, censoring us,
[00:49:17]  reducing circulation on our articles on Facebook, banning our Twitter account, even banning our readers from sharing our Hunter Biden reporting in their direct private messages, let alone posting them to their public feeds.
[00:49:32]  When all of that was happening, this whole, you know, with a few honorable exceptions, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, a few others, the rest of the big media cheered the censorship.
[00:49:46]  Cheered calling it misinformation without doing any reporting.
[00:49:50]  And so, and you know, the election had its outcome, and we don't know how it would have been affected had our reporting been brought in front of more of the American people, which they were barred from seeing it.
[00:50:05]  So, to say it now is so typical, I think, of our elites and our establishment, where once the danger of some piece of reporting to the regime as a whole has been diffused and it's no longer a threat.
[00:50:19]  Then they'll come around and say, Oh, yeah, maybe the New York Post had a point.
[00:50:23]  Maybe we shouldn't have called it misinformation without actually looking into this report.
[00:50:28]  No, there's no apology.
[00:50:30]  There's no soul searching.
[00:50:31]  They're not sorry.
[00:50:32]  So, I mean, maybe to their credit, they're not being disingenuous now.
[00:50:36]  Let's talk about what specifically Politico and Ben in particular have managed to uncover that dovetails confirms your own reporting.
[00:50:45]  Because I can read it to the audience, but I think you can make it more clear.
[00:50:48]  As I understand it, there's.
[00:50:51]  Okay, number one, a person who had independent access to Hunter Biden's emails confirmed he did receive a 2015 email from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden.
[00:51:02]  That's one.
[00:51:03]  And the second is the same goes for a 2017 email in which a proposed equity breakdown of a venture with the Chinese energy executives includes the line 10 held by H for the big guy.
[00:51:19]  This person that they spoke with recalled seeing both emails.
[00:51:23]  Was not in a position to compare the leaked emails word for word to the originals.
[00:51:27]  But the 10 held for H for the big guy was a big story out of your story because it seemed to allude to Hunter striking this deal with Chinese energy executives and would reserve 10% for the man who is now president of the United States.
[00:51:44]  Yep.
[00:51:44]  So we didn't need this confirmation.
[00:51:47]  We're grateful for it, obviously.
[00:51:50]  But anyone who actually looked at our reporting instead of falling for the Russian disinformation hysteria, That was promoted by critics of the post.
[00:51:59]  Anyone who paid attention to our story and then the aftermath, including reporting at Fox News, would know that those emails were what we claimed they were.
[00:52:11]  So, just to rewind just a little bit, what we originally published and had banned by Twitter was emails that showed, as you said, that Hunter Biden seemingly arranged meetings between his father,
[00:52:27]  then vice president of the United States, the second most powerful man in the world, and the Obama administration's point man on Ukraine on the one hand, and executives from a shady energy firm called, Ukrainian energy firm called.
[00:52:42]  That was paying Hunter upwards of $83,000 a month.
[00:52:47]  And just a few points about this is that even at the time and still today, neither Hunter nor his father have flatly denied the authenticity of the emails that we put forward.
[00:53:00]  Ever.
[00:53:01]  Yep, that would have been the easiest way to challenge it.
[00:53:04]  It's all fake.
[00:53:05]  There you go.
[00:53:06]  Then the ball would have been in the post court.
[00:53:11]  And Hunter didn't even challenge the ownership.
[00:53:15]  Of the laptop when he was pressed on it later by a television interview, he said it cleaned coy.
[00:53:21]  And then we brought further confirmation of the Chinese transaction, which you alluded to with a 10% health for the big guy, through a business associate of Hunter's, this guy Babalinsky, who went on the record and said, You know, I'm a Democrat.
[00:53:39]  He's a former intelligence officer, credible guy, and said that those Chinese emails.
[00:53:46]  Were authentic because he was in on those communications.
[00:53:50]  So, you know, like I said, it wasn't that our reporting was unsubstantiated before until political came around.
[00:53:59]  It was as substantiated as a story could get.
[00:54:02]  And yet, the New York Times, even as recently as a week ago, called it unsubstantiated.
[00:54:07]  And then they ninja edited their story without even correcting or anything.
[00:54:11]  This is big.
[00:54:13]  Can you explain that?
[00:54:14]  Because this is outrageous.
[00:54:15]  And they have a pattern of doing this.
[00:54:17]  Yeah, I mean, there's just no basis for doing that.
[00:54:20]  The Federal Elections Commission, we'll get to that later, but the Federal Election Commission basically said Twitter did not commit election law wrongdoing by suppressing our Hunter Biden story.
[00:54:34]  And in reporting that decision, the New York Times appended the adjective unsubstantiated to our reporting.
[00:54:42]  What part is unsubstantiated?
[00:54:44]  Right, what has fallen apart?
[00:54:46]  Not even the small details, right?
[00:54:49]  It's not like we published the salacious content from the laptop, like Hunter with crack pipes and so forth.
[00:54:56]  We didn't do that to humiliate Hunter Biden, but to show that we had what we claimed to have.
[00:55:02]  We had the laptop, it was real.
[00:55:05]  And none of that came under any real scrutiny.
[00:55:07]  And insofar as it did, it's withstood all scrutiny.
[00:55:10]  So, what's unsubstantiated?
[00:55:12]  And then, Megan, you'll remember, compare that to reams of stories of the past four years published by.
[00:55:20]  Left of center kind of prestige outlets, the likes of BuzzFeed and McClatchy and many others, that did collapse under factual scrutiny.
[00:55:28]  Supposedly, for example, President Trump suborning perjury for Michael Cohen collapsed within a matter of hours.
[00:55:35]  That story wasn't censored.
[00:55:37]  And the New York Times doesn't refer to these types of reports as unsubstantiated without even claiming how it was unsubstantiated.
[00:55:44]  It's all so underhanded, so base, that it raises your blood pressure.
[00:55:51]  Well, you can see, you know, the White House, the top Democrats, they dismiss anything from the New York Post, the Daily Caller, Fox News as having a partisan agenda and therefore must be, you know, immediately dismissed.
[00:56:05]  And so it was interesting to me to see, okay.
[00:56:09]  Now, what are they going to say?
[00:56:10]  Because they can't say that about Politico.
[00:56:12]  They certainly can't say that Politico is a right wing organization.
[00:56:14]  So, now what are they going to say?
[00:56:16]  And here was Jen Psaki at the White House being asked about this by Peter Ducey just this past Friday.
[00:56:22]  And here's what she said.
[00:56:24]  Thank you, Jen.
[00:56:25]  Two topics really quick.
[00:56:25]  First, the president has said, and you have tweeted, that allegations of wrongdoing based on files pulled from Hunter Biden's laptop are Russian disinformation.
[00:56:34]  There is a new book by a Politico reporter that finds some of the files on there are genuine.
[00:56:38]  Is the White House still going with it?
[00:56:40]  Russian disinformation.
[00:56:42]  I think it's broadly known and widely known, Peter, that there was a broad range of Russian disinformation back in 2020.
[00:56:48]  That's it.
[00:56:49]  That's as much as she's willing to say.
[00:56:51]  We went back and checked the full context just to make sure she hadn't, you know, then fallen on the sword.
[00:56:55]  She didn't.
[00:56:55]  They're still going with disinformation.
[00:56:57]  They will never acknowledge it, even though the truth is as plain as the nose on your face.
[00:57:02]  You know what's really disturbing about all this?
[00:57:05]  I've talked about this before, but I can't get over it.
[00:57:08]  The Russian disinformation charge, which has been an An obsession of the liberal elite for the past four or five years.
[00:57:17]  But with respect to the Hunter Files, the Russian disinformation charge really got its wings after 50 intelligence officials, including General Hayden and others, wrote that letter in which they said, if you'll remember, we don't have any evidence that the Post's Hunter Files reporting is Russian disinformation.
[00:57:42]  Nevertheless, it bears all the indicia.
[00:57:45]  Where it bears all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
[00:57:49]  So, you know, and then you'll see the names, right?
[00:57:53]  Director of CIA, former deputy director of operations at the NSA, and so on and so forth.
[00:57:58]  And it lends it this sort of official credibility.
[00:58:02]  But what is the role of the press when 50 top spooks claim something about one of two major party presidential candidates?
[00:58:13]  Is it to serve as stenographers and just parrot whatever the intelligence officials said?
[00:58:20]  Or is it to investigate and see, okay, is it true or not?
[00:58:24]  That's not, they did not investigate.
[00:58:26]  They did not question.
[00:58:28]  They acted like stenographers for General Hayden and the like.
[00:58:31]  Oh, yes, sir, it is Russian disinformation.
[00:58:34]  And see, the 50 intelligence officials say it's Russian disinformation.
[00:58:38]  Megan, you know that the news business has to be in a somewhat adversarial position with unaccountable power.
[00:58:47]  And there's no more unaccountable power, I would argue, in this country.
[00:58:50]  Than these intelligence agencies, right?
[00:58:52]  They can drone people out of the sky without really anyone having much oversight over what they do.
[00:58:58]  So when they come out and tip the scales on a major news story and lend their names to a campaign to suppress a major news story by America's oldest continuously published newspaper, the Daily Post, you would expect other reporters to say, hey, wait a second, is that true?
[00:59:15]  Let's check in, let's question.
[00:59:18]  No.
[00:59:19]  They all just say, it looks like.
[00:59:22]  It looks like disinformation.
[00:59:23]  It's like, it reminds me of there's this weird meme online that, and people actually write me and ask me this question that says, I look a lot like Nicole Brown Simpson.
[00:59:35]  And people actually write me notes saying, Are you Nicole Brown Simpson?
[00:59:38]  I'm like, Nicole Brown Simpson was OJ Simpson's ex wife when she was murdered by him back in the early 1990s.
[00:59:45]  So said a civil court jury at the time.
[00:59:48]  She sadly is no longer with us.
[00:59:49]  And I am not Nicole Brown Simpson, even though I admit I do look a little bit like her.
[00:59:55]  That is, That is not the end of the query.
[00:59:57]  You have to go look for ascertainable, verifiable facts to figure out whether your theory might be correct.
[01:00:03]  And they didn't.
[01:00:04]  And the reason they didn't is because.
[01:00:06]  They wanted it to be disinformation.
[01:00:08]  They wanted the Hunter Biden story to go away.
[01:00:10]  They wanted anything that could hurt Biden to go away because they had Trump derangement syndrome.
[01:00:15]  And when you look back, Sarab, on what the media said, okay, so Facebook, Twitter, they did their part to suppress it immediately, saying, oh, it doesn't comply with our policies.
[01:00:25]  It's got hacked materials.
[01:00:27]  That's what Twitter said.
[01:00:28]  But my team pulled some of the examples.
[01:00:32]  Okay, let's see.
[01:00:35]  See, the mainstream media completely ignored the story.
[01:00:37]  They completely ignored the story when it broke.
[01:00:39]  CNN did not address it at all.
[01:00:42]  ABC, CBS, and NBC all censored the bombshell from their evening newscasts.
[01:00:46]  NBC finally mentioned it on October 15th, days after it was broken, for the purpose of questioning the dubious story's legitimacy.
[01:00:55]  That's how they get on record that they covered it, just to say it's dubious and we question its legitimacy.
[01:01:00]  And they refer to you guys as a tabloid, right?
[01:01:02]  So this is like basically the star.
[01:01:04]  This is the National Enquirer.
[01:01:06]  You know, this is the sun, whatever.
[01:01:08]  ABC, Good Morning America skipped it altogether.
[01:01:11]  CBS, they discussed it for less than two minutes on October 15th.
[01:01:15]  MSNBC largely ignored it, except to have Joe Scarborough come on, dismiss it as false on the October 15th broadcast, and say, It's much better for Twitter to let people read the New York Post article and sit there and laugh at the hokey story.
[01:01:29]  So this is one of the stupidest October surprises in recent memory.
[01:01:32]  MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin on Twitter, no one should link or share that New York Post report.
[01:01:38]  Report is in quotes.
[01:01:39]  You can discuss the obvious flaws and Unanswerable questions in the report without amplifying what appears to be everyone together disinformation.
[01:01:48]  New York Times, highly suspicious and covering it.
[01:01:51]  NPR talked about it as unsubstantiated.
[01:01:54]  Washington Post published an explainer detailing all the many flaws in the story.
[01:01:59]  They ignored Tony Bobolinsky when he spoke to Tucker.

=== Tabloid Journalism History (02:07) ===

[01:02:02]  I could go on.
[01:02:04]  It's important to go back and remember what they were saying because they were all wrong and they didn't care.
[01:02:12]  They just wanted to take you guys down.
[01:02:14]  Because you published a story that wasn't good for H, H's dad.
[01:02:18]  Well, look, I want to defend the honor of tabloids.
[01:02:22]  I've worked at both broadsheet newspapers.
[01:02:25]  I was at the Wall Street Journal for five years and then three years now at the New York Post.
[01:02:31]  And I have to say that actually, what we really need is the spirited kind of journalism that tabloids do and have done, which actually has much deeper roots in American journalism.
[01:02:45]  American journalism, in the 18th and 19th century was a lot more like tabloid journalism.
[01:02:53]  It's a relatively recent phenomenon of the 20th century, of the age of kind of the rise of managerial class capitalism, that you have these newspapers that have this sort of objective voice where they claim to stand above various parties and not to have that spirit, that spunk of a tabloid.
[01:03:15]  And it worked insofar as these outlets still had a degree, the Kind of mainstream, polite, quote unquote, objectives, when they were actually curious, when they were willing to call it as they saw it and to go after both sides.
[01:03:32]  But now, when you have these outlets that are so nakedly and obviously partisan, so obviously reflecting a kind of elite consensus that dominates not just media, but big tech and academia and corporations and so forth, when they When they do that, when they're so partisan, it actually reveals how hollow their claims to objectivity are.
[01:03:59]  A curious outlet would be like, hey, let me actually just look into this, right?
[01:04:04]  Let me put two editors and three reporters.
[01:04:06]  And see, I'm sure the New York Post is full of crap.

=== Erosion of Public Trust (09:27) ===

[01:04:09]  So let me debunk it with none of them.
[01:04:12]  It'll be easy.
[01:04:13]  Right.
[01:04:13]  Well, and plus, I mean, let's be real.
[01:04:15]  The New York Post tabloid is one thing, but it is not the magazine that's telling me in the supermarket checkout aisle every week that Jennifer Anderson is pregnant again, that some aliens came down and have like taken over Chicago, whatever.
[01:04:30]  The New York Post has broken a lot of big stories.
[01:04:32]  So that term gets, I think, bandied about a little bit too loosely.
[01:04:37]  And, you know, even the true tabloids like the National Enquirer broke stories like the John Edwards affair that had massive national implications.
[01:04:45]  I want to ask you about where all this takes us, right?
[01:04:50]  Because I feel like there will be no acknowledgement.
[01:04:54]  And the next big story and the next big election cycle that comes down that's bad for the Democrats is likely to be treated the same because they've gotten away with it scot free from the FEC to the press just acting in uniform to not be apologetic for their mistakes, to make the mistakes and then not be apologetic for them.
[01:05:09]  So, what does that mean?
[01:05:10]  I mean, what do we have as a fact checker, as a truth meter?
[01:05:16]  What do we have?
[01:05:17]  So I'm relatively pessimistic about this.
[01:05:20]  I think that our elite, beginning in 2015 16, really freaked out at two things.
[01:05:28]  One was Brexit, and then followed a few months later by the election of Donald Trump, two movements that challenged the whole post Cold War consensus because they reflected the frustrations of vast swaths of the West.
[01:05:41]  The United States and Europe, who just feel like this new order hasn't served them well, hasn't served their families well, their jobs have been offshore, they're not happy with open borders and labor arbitrage, leaving them at a disadvantage.
[01:05:58]  So they turn to populist movements.
[01:06:01]  Really freaked out our elites.
[01:06:03]  And so they are now, I think, more unified than ever before.
[01:06:09]  And some of, when I say elites, it's not just the left, it also includes.
[01:06:13]  Lots of kind of traditional GOP establishment types.
[01:06:18]  They're all sort of this one uniparty that is now aware of itself in this way and is prepared to deploy ever harder power against any challenge to their power.
[01:06:31]  So they will deploy big tech.
[01:06:34]  It's not like big tech censorship has been chastened since the Hunter affair.
[01:06:39]  It's happening just as much as before.
[01:06:42]  By the way, just Hunter, we also published a story on the origins of COVID where an opinion writer for us just speculated.
[01:06:49]  He didn't say that the coronavirus originated in a lab.
[01:06:54]  He just said it could have because Wuhan just happens to be the site of China's main virology lab where they can do this kind of work.
[01:07:03]  This was in the early parts of the pandemic.
[01:07:05]  And again, he didn't say it definitively.
[01:07:07]  He just speculated.
[01:07:08]  And Facebook censored that story.
[01:07:11]  So any challenge that comes, I think they've They've created this mechanism to silence it.
[01:07:16]  And unfortunately, the way it works is, as we've said, after the fact, when it becomes overwhelming, they all shift and say, huh, yeah, maybe the Post had a point, maybe Megyn Kelly had a point.
[01:07:26]  But it doesn't matter because, in the moment when there is a real contest, they've suppressed one side and they're very successful at it.
[01:07:33]  So I think this needs a political solution.
[01:07:35]  It's not a matter of what you and I can individually do beyond calling it out.
[01:07:41]  Congress, lawmakers who don't want us to go in this direction, if there's any left, need to act politically.
[01:07:48]  Especially against big tech.
[01:07:49]  I think it's so much bigger than just, oh, the Post got screwed or Trump got screwed, you know, because this story that wasn't so great about his opponent didn't get wider circulation or wasn't allowed to be circulated by some forms.
[01:08:02]  It's, you know, when I saw those people on the Capitol on January 6th.
[01:08:07]  Having lost total trust in the system, capital T, capital S, and had gone down YouTube rabbit holes on all sorts of dominion voting machines.
[01:08:17]  And so, right?
[01:08:18]  How did that happen?
[01:08:19]  How did these guys get to the point where they would believe anything, like as outrageous as you could spin it, like our election was being controlled from some foreign country on that?
[01:08:29]  How did it happen?
[01:08:31]  They don't trust the media anymore.
[01:08:32]  They believe that conservative viewpoints or anything that was helpful for Trump are being stifled, manipulated, suppressed.
[01:08:39]  And they're not wrong about that.
[01:08:41]  And this is a piece of evidence on their side.
[01:08:45]  This is what I've been trying to say all along.
[01:08:47]  When people do this navel gazing, the mainstream media, they look at those folks in horror.
[01:08:52]  It's not to excuse anything they did, it's to try to have a genuine understanding of how they get there.
[01:08:58]  Yes, of course, yes, Trump's rhetoric and Trump's statements and Sidney Powell, yes, that's obvious.
[01:09:03]  But it's more complex than that.
[01:09:06]  And until we get honest about how all the suppression, only one sided, mostly one sided, and so on, Has factored into the distrust, we're not going to solve it.
[01:09:16]  Yeah, you know, I like you, I work in mainstream media and I've gotten to the point where if I see a New York Times story, if I see a Washington Post story, I used to just look at it and say, yeah, that's probably true.
[01:09:29]  Now I'm like, unless I see, you know, 15 other outlets reporting it and more sources, I'm just going to assume it's false and be, oh, I'm going to ask, what are they pushing here?
[01:09:42]  What's the agenda behind this?
[01:09:44]  Again, I've become that kind of mistrustful.
[01:09:47]  You know what?
[01:09:47]  One crazy moment for me, and this isn't really the media, but it's the establishment as a whole.
[01:09:52]  The thing I can never get out of my head was when, in the early months of the pandemic, any gathering was unlawful, and we have to crack down on Orthodox Jews holding funerals for the rabbis in New York, any kind of small business protests against lockdown.
[01:10:10]  It's just terrible.
[01:10:11]  It's going to create a COVID holocaust.
[01:10:13]  And then the George Floyd riots happen.
[01:10:16]  And a thousand public health officials say, well, actually, you know, racism is the bigger virus, and it's almost mandatory for people to participate in these other Black Lives Matter protests.
[01:10:27]  If you go through the experience like that, and there were a number of them, like that episode that I just recounted, I think at some point, as a sort of your sense of knowledge about the world becomes so unstable because you realize, okay, everything is political with these people.
[01:10:44]  You shouldn't trust anything.
[01:10:46]  So it's no surprise to me, as you said, that.
[01:10:49]  You know, yes, conspiracy theorists make a killing in the marketplace of ideas because of what elites do.
[01:10:56]  It's these kinds of things.
[01:10:57]  No protest, except if it's Black Lives Matter, then the virus knows not to attack you because don't make it so easy for them.
[01:11:05]  Don't make the ground so fertile for those conspiracy theories.
[01:11:08]  Maybe that would help fight it.
[01:11:10]  This is a great point on which to leave it for our two minute advertisement.
[01:11:15]  Maybe it's only one minute.
[01:11:16]  I actually have never timed it out.
[01:11:17]  But anyway, the reason I want to leave it there is because.
[01:11:22]  There's a great piece out.
[01:11:23]  Now, Saurabh Amari is my guest today.
[01:11:25]  He's the opinion editor at the New York Post.
[01:11:27]  And up next, I want to talk to you about The Lancet.
[01:11:29]  That's a leading medical journal that's found a new way to describe and basically erase women.
[01:11:35]  And we're going to get Saurabh's reaction to that, right?
[01:11:37]  This is what the medical community has gone woke.
[01:11:40]  And it's one of the reasons that we don't trust them either.
[01:11:43]  Many of us don't have the same trust in them as we used to.
[01:11:46]  It's deeply problematic.
[01:11:49]  How do you feel about all of this?
[01:11:50]  We'd love to hear about.
[01:11:51]  Your thoughts on Facebook's influence, on the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, and on the 12,000 Haitian migrants now roaming the United States without COVID tests and without the vaccines, as you may lose your job if you don't have one.
[01:12:03]  Call us at 833 44 Megan, M E G Y N. That's 833 446 3496.
[01:12:08]  We'd love to hear from you.
[01:12:14]  Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show, everyone.
[01:12:16]  I'm joined today by Surab Amari.
[01:12:18]  He's the op ed editor at the New York Post and also author of the great book, The Unbroken Thread Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
[01:12:28]  We're going to be taking your calls here shortly.
[01:12:30]  What are your thoughts on the Hunter Biden suppression story and the White House continuing to say it's disinformation?
[01:12:35]  And what did you think of Robbie Suave saying that social media is not as bad as we've been led to believe?
[01:12:40]  Call me.
[01:12:41]  833 44 M E G Y N. That's 833 446 3496.
[01:12:48]  All right, so, Rev, so let's talk about some cultural stories in the news right now because my stomach was turning as I read some of these things this morning.
[01:12:54]  The Lancet, right?
[01:12:56]  Very well respected medical magazine.
[01:12:58]  This is picking up on our last discussion of the breakdown in trust of these medical experts, like the thousand who told people they had to protest during BLM, notwithstanding COVID, because the virus could distinguish why you were out there.
[01:13:08]  That's my ad.
[01:13:10]  Now, the Lancet, Has come out.
[01:13:12]  There's a leading medical journal, and it's got an article titled Periods on Display.
[01:13:18]  The article examines an exhibition exploring the taboos and history of periods, menstrual cycles, at the Vagina Museum in London.
[01:13:27]  So as soon as you're done with your trip on the eye, you can swing by, you can go see Shakespeare, and then you can go to the Vagina Museum.
[01:13:35]  Because, you know, I mean, it is awesome.
[01:13:36]  It deserves its own museum.

=== Biological Sex vs Gender Ideology (07:14) ===

[01:13:37]  But anyway, the writer there, uses the word women in passing, but also refers to women as, and I quote, bodies with vaginas, in quote, an attempt to be inclusive to trans people.
[01:13:53]  So the quote on the front of the page, of the journal's front page, reads, historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.
[01:14:06]  Your thoughts on this?
[01:14:07]  Well, it's amazing.
[01:14:09]  It's the end point of a certain kind of liberation seeking Liberalism, frankly, and its endpoint is paradoxically the erasure of actual women, right?
[01:14:24]  I mean, what lies behind, let's make it clear, the reason they say bodies with vaginas instead of women is that the ludicrous notion that there are men with vaginas, right?
[01:14:37]  That there are really men, trans men, but they happen to have vaginas, therefore you shouldn't say women.
[01:14:42]  That's the immediate ideological axe that that sentence is grinding.
[01:14:48]  But looking Looking beyond that, what you're getting is the whole idea embedded in liberalism, but especially in its post war sex liberationist variety, which is that we should not be defined by the bodies that we receive from nature, that the concept of man and woman as such is somehow oppressive.
[01:15:14]  And we should try to overcome that.
[01:15:16]  And we can overcome that with the help of medical technology.
[01:15:19]  And if enough people culturally just use the right language, we can erase men and women as these oppressive categories.
[01:15:27]  We can transcend them.
[01:15:28]  But how does it work out?
[01:15:30]  It works out to the erasure of women.
[01:15:34]  Not only is it the deprivation of any sense of, for example, private space, which is a result of gender ideology that women cannot have their own spaces, whether that's in prisons or in spas or what have you, by getting rid of the category of biological sex as a meaningful category, you ultimately erase women.
[01:15:54]  And it wasn't the only one.
[01:15:55]  You saw also, I bet, Megan, the tweet from the American Civil Liberties Union mourning Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing a year later, where they edited the quote to get rid of women.
[01:16:09]  They added in brackets, People, people, and got rid of references to she, her, and women.
[01:16:18]  Because in the context of abortion.
[01:16:20]  In the context of celebrating abortion rights.
[01:16:22]  Obviously, I vehemently oppose it altogether.
[01:16:25]  But at least Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for all her pro abortion advocacy, recognized that there are men and women, that our species has two sexes, and that these two sexes are ultimately immutable, that it's impossible to go from one to the other.
[01:16:42]  That doesn't mean we should.
[01:16:45]  Not show compassion to people who suffer from gender dysphoria and think they were born into the wrong body, but to actually say, no, no, no, there really are, you know, possibility of men with cervixes and vaginas and women with penises is absurd, right?
[01:17:02]  And yet, that's the way they don't really do it the other way.
[01:17:05]  It's not nearly as much done the other way.
[01:17:07]  I don't read like an article in The Lancet about how men with vaginas have a higher risk of heart attack.
[01:17:16]  You know, it's always like, it's always the other way around.
[01:17:18]  Like, the trans women have got to erase biological women, otherwise, we're all bigots.
[01:17:25]  And it's so frustrating for somebody like me.
[01:17:27]  I know trans people.
[01:17:28]  I want to be respectful of trans people.
[01:17:30]  I think most trans people think this is insane and don't want to see this and don't think this is inclusive.
[01:17:35]  They would like to just be referred to just as women and not to change anything and not for everybody to have to say their pronouns.
[01:17:41]  This is activism having an effect on people who are just way too willing.
[01:17:47]  To kowtow to this small percentage that considers themselves woke.
[01:17:51]  But since they run our medical journals, and even in some situations, our medical schools, we need to worry about it.
[01:17:58]  Remember the Barry Weiss Substack article?
[01:17:59]  I think it was Katie Halper doing the reporting saying that now in medical schools, you're not allowed to distinguish between women and men.
[01:18:06]  And it's causing real problems because women have different medical risks than men do.
[01:18:13]  And one needs to actually be able to make a determinant about the biology.
[01:18:17]  Of the patient in front of them.
[01:18:19]  Yeah, I think though that the one phenomenon that we agree is bad, right, the woke imposition, is ultimately an outgrowth of gender ideology as such, of the idea that men and women can really be interchangeable.
[01:18:40]  Because for the ideology that lies behind all this, it's not enough for me to be allowed to change my.
[01:18:50]  Sex to mutilate myself and cut off my penis and carve a kind of pseudo vagina and change my name to Sabrina.
[01:18:59]  It's not enough for me to be allowed to do those things.
[01:19:02]  I won't feel like I'm really a quote unquote woman unless you, Megan, say so.
[01:19:07]  You have to actively affirm that I'm a woman.
[01:19:10]  Otherwise, the experiment doesn't quite work.
[01:19:13]  And I have to lose my label of a woman.
[01:19:16]  I have to lose something that's important to me, my identity as a woman, as a person.
[01:19:22]  Who actually does menstruate, a woman who menstruates, who has babies, who breastfeeds from my breasts because I'm a woman.
[01:19:31]  I hate that, like chip by chip, they cut away at womanhood in an effort to be supportive with no thought whatsoever to how that makes biological women feel.
[01:19:44]  Yep.
[01:19:46]  I mean, we're getting to a point where the top female athletes in any given field will soon be.
[01:19:54]  Will soon be biological males.
[01:19:56]  Again, I think that the key is, and here's an area where I think social conservatives and traditional feminists can set aside their core disagreements, let's say on abortion, and insist on biological reality.
[01:20:09]  Because it's not just the And I'm not saying that's not important, that the loss of femininity as a biological reality is really important.
[01:20:18]  But there's some deeper thing going on, which is the loss of our sanity, right?
[01:20:23]  To be forced to affirm things that are patently absurd, you keep saying it, you keep doing it, and elites force you to do it.
[01:20:32]  And they're setting up disciplinary mechanisms at many universities and corporations where you have to list your own pronoun and respect these absurd kind of plural.
[01:20:44]  Pronouns for singular people and so forth.
[01:20:47]  Do that enough, and you accustom people to tolerate totalitarianism.

=== Polyamory Ads Everywhere (06:37) ===

[01:20:52]  The core of totalitarianism is to force you in a humiliating way to say what you know is not true.
[01:21:02]  So it puts us all in the position of Vaclav Havel's greengrocer, the famous parable he says about he's a greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia, and he's forced to put up a A sign outside that says, You know, workers of the world unite, go to the communist party.
[01:21:19]  And what's humiliating about it is that he doesn't believe in that, and the communist authorities themselves don't believe in it, and they know that he doesn't believe in it.
[01:21:28]  But you're forced if they force you enough to just do this, they kind of debase you.
[01:21:33]  And so, we have to be willing to individually at least to say the truth and not fall into the language.
[01:21:44]  You have to say bodies with vaginas, you have to say.
[01:21:47]  Your pronouns.
[01:21:48]  You have to accept that systemic racism justifies the protests during George Floyd, the wake of his death, versus anybody else going out there, that that's not okay.
[01:22:01]  You have to have the mask over your face, even if you've been vaccinated.
[01:22:04]  You have to get the jab, even if you've got natural immunity.
[01:22:07]  I started the show by saying, like, I am feeling like the water's rising.
[01:22:11]  It's rising up above my mouth and it's heading for my nose.
[01:22:15]  And I see it on the streets.
[01:22:17]  Just last night, we were riding around and, um, I saw signs up like free speech now while you still can.
[01:22:23]  And Rihanna, of all people, had some t shirt that was making the rounds online saying something about free speech and touting the ability to still express your opinion.
[01:22:31]  I just think something's happening.
[01:22:34]  We're going to be getting to a critical mass or to a breaking point.
[01:22:38]  There was an incident on the New York City subway system, back to New York, because when this stuff happens in New York, you know better than anybody, Sarabit, it says something.
[01:22:45]  This is not Portland.
[01:22:46]  New York City's not Portland.
[01:22:48]  And there was a woman, I'll play the sound, but I want to tell the audience who's listening what they're listening to.
[01:22:53]  It's a woman.
[01:22:54]  She's, I would say, I don't know, late 30s, early 40s, an Asian woman.
[01:22:58]  She's got black hair.
[01:22:59]  It's pulled back in a bun.
[01:23:00]  She's wearing a black shirt.
[01:23:01]  And she's pulling down the ads that you see in the New York City subways that are sort of above where you sit because they're ridiculous.
[01:23:10]  They're from OK Cupid.
[01:23:11]  They're celebrating, quote, every single non monogamist and other like pansexuals and bears and fetishists and submissives and all these other different groups.
[01:23:24]  Like pictures of women in a threesome getting it on.
[01:23:27]  I mean, they're dicey pictures.
[01:23:30]  She's had enough, and so have the people around her.
[01:23:32]  She's the main talker.
[01:23:34]  Listen here.
[01:23:42]  It's gross, she's saying.
[01:23:50]  Normalizing, normalizing.
[01:23:51]  It's affecting the next generation.
[01:23:54]  Yeah, this is why no one sees this.
[01:23:57]  No, this is expensive because TV told them not to get upset and wear the mask.
[01:24:04]  So, see, let's go to the bath.
[01:24:07]  These are New Yorkers, all shapes, sizes, colors, creeds you name it.
[01:24:10]  A typical New York subway where you get everybody, right?
[01:24:13]  No, nobody's saying don't do that, nobody's saying leave those ads up.
[01:24:17]  The people on that subway are pissed too.
[01:24:19]  They don't want to look at this as they're taking their kids from A to B.
[01:24:22]  It's everywhere.
[01:24:25]  So, Megan, I can't help but the book you see behind me, my book, The Unbroken Thread, in the introduction, I open up by saying that I wrote this book for my son, trying to transmit the basics of the Western Christian and classical moral tradition to him.
[01:24:42]  Maximilian.
[01:24:44]  Why did I write the book for him?
[01:24:46]  It's because when he was one year old, We live in New York City.
[01:24:49]  We got on the subway and we saw a different set of OK Cupid ads basically promoting polyamory and also behaviors that are sexually deviant.
[01:25:01]  And my thought was, what if my son were a little older at that point and he asked me, you know, Baba, as he calls me, you know, what's polyamory?
[01:25:10]  You know, what's sadomasochism?
[01:25:14]  Why am I, as a parent, put in a situation in which the culture is so debased?
[01:25:20]  So vulgar.
[01:25:21]  So I say, God bless that woman.
[01:25:24]  May God bless her and keep her.
[01:25:27]  And in a way, I will say this this just goes to show that one orthodoxy or other will dominate our societies.
[01:25:36]  There'll never be a situation in which we have total neutrality.
[01:25:39]  The promise of liberalism, especially post war, was that we can't agree on anything, so let's kind of allow everything.
[01:25:48]  And what we see now, 50, 60, 70 years later, is that good things have been.
[01:25:54]  Banished from the public square, and this conglomeration of woke government activist types and large corporations that profit off of our debaseness combining to send create a civilization that's really ugly.
[01:26:10]  It's really ugly, and it's a civilization that's overtly anti family, overtly anti child, right?
[01:26:18]  So it surrounds you with pro polyamory messages.
[01:26:22]  Meanwhile, kids have to wear masks.
[01:26:25]  Playing outdoors.
[01:26:27]  It's, as you said, the water is rising.
[01:26:29]  And I look forward to the reaction.
[01:26:32]  Let me say it that way.
[01:26:34]  If they don't manage to suppress it and it's organizing, the regime that we live under is becoming unbearable.
[01:26:42]  The water is really rising.
[01:26:45]  Stand up, fight these battles.
[01:26:48]  You are not alone.
[01:26:51]  Don't let them shame you.
[01:26:53]  You're not alone.
[01:26:54]  There are millions, tens of millions of Americans who have had it.
[01:26:58]  With this BS.
[01:26:59]  And unless we all speak up, hard though it may be, shame that may come from the press, Twitter, whatever, we're going to lose.
[01:27:09]  We're going to lose our right to free speech.
[01:27:11]  We're going to lose our general commitment to morality in a civilized life where we respect one another.
[01:27:19]  We recognize differences between men and women.
[01:27:23]  We respect our children's right to their innocence for as long as we can possibly give it to them.
[01:27:28]  Bullshit.

=== Fighting for Free Speech (06:59) ===

[01:27:30]  That stuff infuriates me as a mother, and I am with that woman, just like the other people on the subway were.
[01:27:35]  Sarab, the book is so good.
[01:27:37]  I read it before our last interview, and I recommend it to everybody because, man, did he see this coming?
[01:27:41]  And we could go back.
[01:27:42]  I mean, you should go listen to that full podcast because we talked about the David French thing.
[01:27:46]  Boy, oh boy, are you proven right every day on that dispute.
[01:27:50]  And if you don't know what I'm talking about, just go listen to my last podcast with Sarab.
[01:27:54]  Great to see you.
[01:27:54]  Thanks for being here.
[01:27:56]  Thanks, Megan.
[01:27:57]  I feel so passionately about it.
[01:27:59]  I really do.
[01:27:59]  And we're lucky to have guys like that.
[01:28:01]  Who can frame it for us in the right way, who write about it, who think about it, who can see the war coming and sort of help us understand the tools to fight it.
[01:28:08]  But you are not alone if you think that bodies that have vaginas are the bodies of women, that those are women's bodies.
[01:28:17]  And that we don't need some medical journal renaming us, right?
[01:28:21]  To take away something that happens to be important to us.
[01:28:24]  And frankly, that most trans people would not want taken away from us anyway.
[01:28:29]  Call me.
[01:28:30]  Taking your calls now, 833 44 M E G Y N. Let me know what you think about the nonstop pushing of sex and gender on our children everywhere in public.
[01:28:40]  833 446 3496.
[01:28:42]  That's next.
[01:28:45]  Welcome back, everybody.
[01:28:46]  The phone lines are open.
[01:28:48]  Give us a call at 833 44 M E G Y N. M E G Y N. That's 833 446 3496.
[01:28:55]  I'm going to start with our first caller who is Julie in California.
[01:29:00]  Julie, what's on your mind today?
[01:29:01]  So I really appreciate your passion and the passion of your last guest.
[01:29:06]  And it's really a weird time.
[01:29:09]  So this is the year I hit 50 and it kind of was a, I wouldn't say depressing birthday, but not what I expected my 50th birthday to be.
[01:29:19]  And I think with age, we are seeing, like you're seeing, that so many of these things that are happening.
[01:29:26]  Are so devastating for us as a community, as family members, as citizens.
[01:29:33]  And my real struggle in the last two years has been what am I supposed to do here?
[01:29:40]  How can I make a change?
[01:29:44]  And everything you say is so relevant and so on topic.
[01:29:49]  But what I think people miss is that all this stuff has such dire consequences.
[01:29:58]  And they have to be looking at it.
[01:30:00]  They're fighting the war, the fight between us and you and your guests.
[01:30:04]  We're all fighting it, but it's really the target is not us.
[01:30:10]  The target is our children, and they're the ones they're coming for.
[01:30:16]  And so I feel as though we have to look really seriously at consequences, not just the free speech and gender, you know, words that we use and how we refer to people.
[01:30:32]  But I really look at this as child abuse.
[01:30:35]  And I think we legally, because I don't know what else to do, need to fight this with attorneys against abuse of our children.
[01:30:46]  And I don't know how to do that.
[01:30:49]  I hear you.
[01:30:50]  What a good comment.
[01:30:51]  When I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about this interview I gave to Gad Sad for his podcast.
[01:30:56]  And I love him.
[01:30:56]  If you don't know Gad, you got to Google him.
[01:30:58]  He's amazing.
[01:30:59]  He's a professor at the University of Canada.
[01:31:02]  He was talking about how he had a panic attack recently and wasn't sure why.
[01:31:06]  And we talked about it.
[01:31:07]  And I was saying, I have been finding I am especially angry right now.
[01:31:14]  I've been noticing myself just quicker to anger.
[01:31:17]  And it's the stuff you're talking about.
[01:31:19]  It's what you just said, Julie.
[01:31:20]  It's like this feeling of powerlessness over my kids, over my country, over my society, over things that should be no brainers.
[01:31:27]  Like my kids should not have to be looking at pictures of a threesome on the New York City subway.
[01:31:32]  My kids should not have to have a mask on while outside celebrating homecoming a month from now.
[01:31:38]  You know, my kid, if they're at Oberlin College, should not be told that they have to sit in their room alone while they eat.
[01:31:44]  They should not be told by some CNN analyst that they should never be able to leave their house if they're unvaccinated.
[01:31:49]  It's all of this stuff is just corrosive.
[01:31:53]  And the stuff about gender, you know, you try to counter program that at home.
[01:31:57]  You don't want to sound like a bigot.
[01:31:59]  You don't want to create a bias against people who are trans.
[01:32:02]  Point out the difference between the group and their activists.
[01:32:06]  But I hate that I'm being forced to even go there.
[01:32:08]  You know, why can't the message just be so much more reasonable?
[01:32:11]  So I don't have the answer.
[01:32:13]  I mean, I do think it's important to fight the rhetorical battles, right?
[01:32:17]  I think it's important.
[01:32:18]  When critical race theory finds its way into your school, to fight if you can't leave, leave if you can.
[01:32:23]  You vote with your feet by walking away.
[01:32:25]  Ultimately, they need people, they need money.
[01:32:29]  And on gender, I think we do have to stand up no matter what they call you.
[01:32:32]  Look at J.K. Rowling.
[01:32:33]  Yes, she's got billions, so it's a little easier, but she had skin in the game there.
[01:32:38]  And so, whatever your pocket of the world is, you stand up and you say what you know is reasonable, loving, but reasonable.
[01:32:46]  I guess that's a start.
[01:32:49]  You know, that's a start.
[01:32:50]  Thank you so much for the call.
[01:32:51]  Such a thoughtful take on the matter.
[01:32:57]  Matt from Ohio, what's your thought?
[01:32:59]  Hi.
[01:33:01]  Hi.
[01:33:02]  I just want to know how should someone combat the whole diversity, equity, inclusion thing that's being introduced into their workplace?
[01:33:11]  I actually just started a committee or started in the committee.
[01:33:16]  I volunteered and I'm sitting here listening to him talk about it.
[01:33:21]  And I hear diversity, I hear equity, but that inclusion word they don't use.
[01:33:28]  And it's, to me, it's not a balance.
[01:33:33]  And so I feel like people aren't going to feel included because they're so focused on diversity and equity.
[01:33:38]  So, how do you do that?
[01:33:40]  You got to jump in there and you've got to say the hard thing, which is no, anti racism is racism.
[01:33:46]  We all have the same goal.
[01:33:48]  None of us wants racism, but your policies are racist.
[01:33:51]  What you're asking us to do is racist.
[01:33:54]  Cause more racism.
[01:33:56]  I recommend going to the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism's website.
[01:33:59]  I'm on the board.
[01:34:00]  They've got great tools for parents in fighting this stuff.
[01:34:03]  That's a start.
[01:34:04]  All right, we'll leave it there for today, but we've got a lot more to go over tomorrow when Tulsi Gabbard joins us.
[01:34:09]  In the meantime, you can download episodes of The Megan Kelly Show on Apple Pandora Stitcher, also YouTube.comslash Megan Kelly. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.