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Nov. 1, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
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Loudoun Parents Draw a Line 00:15:01
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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
We've got a jam packed show for you today.
Right now, the justices at the U.S. Supreme Court are hearing arguments on the controversial Texas abortion law.
How the court rules could shape legal battles for years to come on this issue.
Alan Dershowitz is here to analyze that.
Plus, the new lawsuits piling up against President Biden's.
Vaccine mandate, the forcible touching charge against now former New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, and whether Alan thinks Alec Baldwin will be held criminally responsible for the Rust movie shooting.
Alan's actually been involved in these kinds of cases before.
He was involved in that Brandon Lee shooting years ago, in that case, I should say, and has got some thoughts on all of that as Alec Baldwin finally takes to the microphones and speaks out on it.
But we're going to begin today with Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review.
Who joins me to discuss the Biden administration possibly paying millions of dollars to families who illegally crossed our southern border, protesters shouting down a bride because Senator Kirsten Sinema was at her wedding?
It's so rude.
And the new polls ahead of Election Day tomorrow, tomorrow now in Virginia and elsewhere, but all eyes around the Commonwealth, the VA, that have Democrats very worried.
So we're going to start there.
Welcome, Rich.
Good to have you.
Hey, thanks for having me.
The latest polls on the Virginia race, which I know you guys have been watching carefully, the Fox News outlier, I think it's fair to say, had him up, Youngkin, the Republican, up 0.8, up 0.8 percentage points.
That's outside the poll's margin of error, however.
And people should know, I've heard you say this too, but I know these guys all on the Fox News polling unit very well, worked with them for years.
These are legit nonpartisan pollsters.
This isn't like, you know, Hannity's polling unit.
This is like a very good, very well respected polling unit.
And they've got him up, the Republican up eight.
Washington Post, which was done a week earlier, had McAuliffe up by one.
But one month earlier, it had McAuliffe up by five.
In August, McAuliffe was up 6.6.
And most of these polls up five, six, seven, eight.
So it's been a big swing.
And virtually all these polls show the same thing, which is education has made all the difference.
So you tell me whether the DOJ's little stunt backfired, among other things.
Oh, it definitely backfired.
So the Fox poll is interesting.
I think prior to this one, they had McAuliffe up seven, which was an outlier the other way.
Now they have Youngkin up eight, which is an outlier pro Youngkin.
My guess is well, the Youngkin internal polling has him up three or four.
And I wouldn't be surprised if Youngkin wins by about three tomorrow night.
And what crystallized things for him, he spent months and months just laying the groundwork to play defense on the idea that he's a new Trump, he's some sort of hateful figure, a white nationalist, just with these.
Bio ads.
But if you've been around politics, you look at one of these things, you kind of roll your eyes, right?
Like, you know, my dad got fired, which is terrible.
Then I worked as a teenager, you know, cracking eggs at a diner.
And then I practiced basketball, got a scholarship, built a business, raised four kids.
And I'm nothing like a politician, you know, when this is obviously the best work of the political consultancy hired, but it, it, Defined him as kind of a suburban dad, this kind of unthreatening figure.
So when they come in at the end here and say he's Trump, he's white nationalist, have guys holding tiki torches outside his campaign bus in Charlottesville and a white nationalist reference, just none of that works.
And he's hit education since the beginning of the campaign.
But two things have really supercharged that issue for him.
One, McAuliffe's gaffe, I'm not sure it was real gaffs, what he believes, that parents shouldn't have, shouldn't determine what is taught in schools.
McAuliffe doubled down on this for a while until they realized it was a desperate mistake.
Now he's playing defense on it.
As you mentioned, this Merrick Garland memo, which is completely indefensible.
The school board association, National School Board Association, that kicked it off with a letter, has apologized and retracted the letter, incredibly enough.
But this has just made parental involvement, the legitimacy of parents protesting, all that made it a live political issue, and Youngkin's taken advantage of it.
Merrick Garland has not backed down, notably, even though the school board association withdrew the letter and apologized.
Merrick Garland stands by his intention.
To investigate and potentially prosecute threats, threats, violence and threats of violence, violence and threats of violence, of which there have been basically none, none.
I mean, if you look at the addendum, and I know you guys took a close look at it, so did we, on that school board association letter.
We went through it in great detail on Friday for people who want to hear it.
But there are no threats or violence or violence that were brought to the DOJ's attention.
The only thing they had was that one case in Virginia with Scott Smith, the dad upset that his daughter had been raped.
He's the only one facing criminal prosecution, which he should not be.
So we'll see.
But clearly, what we're talking about now is voter.
Backlash.
And just to put a point on it, parents backed McAuliffe by 10 points two weeks ago, according to the Fox News poll.
So parents were behind Terry McAuliffe by 10 points two weeks ago when it came to education.
Now they're going for Youngkin by 14, a 24 point swing.
I mean, very clearly something big is happening in Virginia when it comes to education.
And this is not a bright blue state, it's no longer red.
But this is one of the reasons why I know you've been saying this would be huge.
It would point to a viable path ahead for the Republican Party in swing states like Virginia if Youngkin manages to pull this off.
Yeah.
So, what Youngkin has done, he's shown there's a model where you can win the Trump base.
And Youngkin, you know, he's a smart guy.
He ran a really serious business, CEO of the Carlisle Group.
So, he's been deft about this.
He's kind of played along with some of Trump stuff, said, you know, Trump.
Trump is the reason he's running in some respects.
So he's kept the Trump voters.
At the same time, he's kept some distance from Trump himself.
He hasn't had Trump in to campaign for him.
He doesn't talk about, go out of his way to talk about Trump on the campaign trail.
And as I said, he's defined himself kind of as a nice suburban, fleece wearing suburban dad.
So you need both in a state like Virginia.
You're not going to win if the Trump voters hate you.
They don't hate Young and they're supporting him.
But you're not going to win if you're a 2020 obsessive MAGA hat.
Wearing true blue Trumpist because you're not going to win the suburbs.
And he's not that.
So he's made huge gains in the suburbs.
And you don't need to win Loudoun County.
Loudoun County, astonishingly enough, he was ground zero for this education fight.
Biden won Loudoun County by 62% of the vote.
This is an outer suburb.
This isn't like an inner suburb that's been blue forever.
So Young is talking about winning Loudoun County, which would speak to kind of a landslide for him, I think.
But if he just takes the edge off, Loudoun County and other places, that should be enough to get them over the top.
Now, deep red states, this is not what you're going to do, right?
You're never going to get through a primary unless you're a real Trump fan.
But in swing states, it shows that this is possible.
And for me, it's just, it's an obvious and common sense path that just requires a little adeptness and a little acuity as a campaigner.
And Youngkin's had that.
So, what's been really interesting because of the dynamic you're just outlining is that, yeah, Youngkin has not been mentioning Trump.
Trump now is going to have a tele, I really want to say tele tubby.
It's not right.
He wants to have a tele rally, tele town hall for Youngkin, and Youngkin's not going to participate.
Again, smart.
Political move.
It's irrespective of his feelings about Trump, one way or the other.
We don't really care.
He's just politically trying to keep that arm between the two of them.
But McAuliffe, I mean, so somebody put together a mashup of McAuliffe talking about, well, it seems like he's talking about Trump, but he's trying to attack Youngkin.
Listen to this Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump,
Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Have you made this race too much about Trump?
No.
So that was from the Young King camp.
That's pretty effective.
Yeah, so, and I would almost date, you can almost hear in McCall's voice when he knows he's losing that kind of hoarser version of the Donald Trump, that's McCall, who knows he's losing.
And Terry McCall, you wouldn't know it over the last two months or so ago, or so, is an incredibly irrepressible personality.
Everyone likes being around him.
There's a reason Bill Clinton spent hours and hours playing cards with Terry McCall.
He's a hugely entertaining guy, but you can just tell, even if you weren't looking at any polls, he sounds exhausted, he sounds desperate.
And he sounds angry.
And this thing from over the weekend, where all of a sudden you're saying, No, this race isn't about Trump.
I don't think I've taught that much about Trump.
He's kicking away what has been his main line of attack against Youngkin for months, clearly because they know it's not working.
And they're desperate to have a guy on the ballot who's just not.
And maybe he will be in 2024, but Trump's not on the ballot in Virginia.
He's not going to be on the ballot anywhere in 2022 either.
Well, and Youngkin's whole approach to this just sort of like, Maybe I'm a little avuncular.
Maybe I'm a little boring.
I'm a little milquetoast.
Is working, which is why I know you wrote, Fear the Fleece.
You do need to fear the Fleece, his little fleece sweater vest that he's been wearing, that, you know, Obama came out after and McCullough came in, like, you know, to try and paint him as some sort of crazy extremist, white supremacist in a fleece vest.
There's zero evidence for this.
Biden came out and said that.
And it's not working, but they do need to fear the fleece a little because it's sort of that softer, gentler, more Commonwealth of Virginia like, gentlemanly approach that's working.
Yeah, and it's not, to your point, this kind of a Commonwealth of Virginia sort of style.
This is the model that, give or take, has always worked for Republicans in state level races.
Going back to George Allen, when it was basically a red state, but George Allen, Bob McDonald, Jim Gilmore, they all made themselves acceptable to the center and then ran on kind of practical cost of living type issues.
And Youngkin has done that with a greater emphasis on education, as we talked about.
And what he's managed to do is one, avoiding seeming like Donald Trump.
And two, avoiding seeming like Mitt Romney, because this would be the other line of attack on him.
He's a vulture capitalist, he's just a soulless business guy.
And he has a profile that, if you just read the bio, is very similar.
To Mitt Romney.
But he's made himself softer.
He's defined himself not as a jobs creator and a businessman, an entrepreneur, but instead as a suburban dad.
And that's just been just right for this race, just right for the state.
Especially because it's really parents' rights that are now going to join this.
And I know it's so crazy, Rich, to be talking about a race this tight where education seems to be what's going to turn it for the Republican.
For the Republican.
I mean, I would say, as a parent who's been very outspoken on the lunacy being unfolded in our schools from the Mask and vaccine mandates to the critical race theory to the trans stuff.
I'm so delighted to see parents standing up and actually having an impact.
You know, it's not so much about Youngkin for me, it's that parents in a purple state have had enough and are trying night and day in the context of this race to draw a line on how far they will let crazy far left agendas permeate their schools.
Yeah.
And with Youngkin, he's talked about it from the beginning, and it hasn't just been critical race theory.
He's obviously hit that hard, justifiably so.
But it's been excellence in standards.
There's a school down there called Thomas Jefferson High School, which has been a big focus because there's been an effort to undermine the merit based emissions there because it supposedly has the wrong, quote unquote, composition of the student body because it's heavily Asian American.
He's hit that from the beginning.
He's hit school safety.
He's hit this kind of explicit content that parents are worried about and obviously hit CRT.
But if you talk to the Youngkin people, what they will say is it used to be all this was kind of too death.
And you have a bunch of people in the room, and only some of them would be into the academic standards, and some of them would be into the safety, and some of them be the CRT.
But McCall really helped them tie a bow around it and the legitimacy, the question of the legitimacy of parent involvement, parent protest.
And when you say that, they say everyone in the room applauds, whereas maybe only a quarter of the room is into defending Thomas Jefferson University and high school and the standards, but they all support parental involvement and just getting on the wrong side of.
Parents.
That's a cardinal rule of American politics.
Whatever the issue is, don't do it.
And Terry McCall passed.
Yeah.
And they're doing it at the state level and at the federal level, as we discussed.
So, meantime, the Lincoln Project guys always on admission to double down on their just terrible behavior from their previous attack ads or complaints or whatever it is.
Why is this group still out there for?
I mean, I don't understand how the Lincoln Project even still has a platform with its, you know, Support of this pedophile who they covered up for, and this attack of a woman who tried to go public with them, and Steve Schmidt admitting what he did with this woman.
I mean, like the number of attacks on this pedophile supporting organization should have really rendered them irrelevant long ago.
And yet, Democrats seem to love so much all their attacks on Trump and any Trump supporter, and Ivanka Trump still, and Jared.
It's like, okay, move on.
They can't.
Fake Rally Jibe at Biden 00:15:11
And so I was surprised.
I mean, Stuart Stevens is part of the Lincoln Project.
And I used to say I used to have him on the Kelly file all the time before he went like.
I mean, he's just gone so hard into Trump derangement syndrome.
You can't listen to the guy anymore, like all those guys at the Lincoln Project.
And they staged this, I don't know, it was like a fake rally.
It was like a fake little rally trying to imitate the tiki torches and the white supremacists that happened in Virginia in 2017.
And they now they're like, oh, it was all, you know, it was sort of intentionally fake, and we knew sort of we'd be outed.
That's not how it unfolded.
They wanted this to look like an actual Youngkin rally of white supremacists.
And only when they got caught did Stuart Stevens come out and say, okay, yeah, it was us.
And, you know, we own it and we think it's great.
But they tried to pull a fast one on Virginia voters.
Yes.
First of all, the purpose of the Lincoln Project and the purpose of it was.
You had a bunch of Republicans that hated Trump, and the mainstream media loved it.
I mean, they're on Morning Joe all the time.
They're on CNN all the time, kind of pumping up what they were doing.
And I sort of thought after the 2020 presidential election, they'd kind of go away.
But they're still going.
I mean, they raised money hand over fist.
Some of it went to ill purposes, apparently, in 2020.
And they're still going.
It's basically indistinguishable from any Democratic campaign group now.
But yet they had these four or five people one black guy, one woman.
I mean, they weren't very plausible white nationalists.
I'm not sure they meant it to be taken seriously or not, but the fact is, people did.
And if it was just a joke, they punked their own side because you had Democratic operatives, including McCall of staff and left-wing journalists promoting this as a real thing.
You know, Joe Lockhart, former Clinton press secretary.
How can Glenn Young can tolerate this?
It shows how hateful he is.
Now, a lot of these tweets were deleted without explanation, but it was a thing among people who were either.
Too cynical to take five seconds to try to understand what was going on there, or too credulous.
And they promoted it.
But this backfired massively.
The McAuliffe campaign says they had nothing to do with it.
Who knows?
They jumped on it really quickly for having nothing to do with it, but it was clearly an embarrassment for the general press.
Yes.
So, yeah, several members of the McAuliffe team had retweeted the original item as though it were real.
This is from the Wall Street Journal editorial.
Campaign communications staffer Jen Goodman.
Calling the Tiki Torch photo disgusting and disqualifying.
McAuliffe spokesperson Christina Frelich said, This is who Glenn Youngkin's supporters are.
So far, no apology for that smear.
And the press, as the journal goes on to say, seems content to pretend it's all an intra GOP squabble.
The Washington Post calling the Lincoln Project an anti Trump Republican group.
That's a joke.
I mean, even Stewart has long ago renounced his role as a Republican operative and all the Republicans that he worked to get elected.
This is not a Republican group.
This is, I don't even know what it is.
It's hard left Democrat now.
And they're not only not Republican, but they've been supported by the left leaning press at every turn.
And before I get you to comment on that, just want to give you here's a, this is from Grabian.
They do a great job of butting together soundbites to give you the flavor.
And this is the media and how the media feels about the Lincoln Project behind this stunt.
Not since this stunt was pulled, but this is sort of the cozy relationship they have.
Listen.
The Lincoln Project is like watching a Jay Z and Nas rap battle.
I mean, they don't let up on this president.
The Lincoln Project, founded by members of the GOP, dedicated to seeing Donald Trump defeated.
Their ads are terrific.
They're smart.
They're super fast, which is great.
They troll Donald Trump.
The Lincoln Project has just been hammering Donald Trump.
I think he's starting to feel for the first time, you know, what it likes to be losing.
Take a look at this new ad taunting Trump from the Lincoln Project.
Well, they're out with a devastating new TV ad.
Here's the Lincoln Project's latest ad.
Let's take a look at part of a new ad.
I want to play an ad.
Here is the latest ad.
And when I say new, this one's new.
They're not Republicans, nor are the media who support them.
Yeah.
And a lot of those ads, they just ran in the Washington, D.C. media market as a way to troll Trump, one, but two, make sure the journalists saw it and would talk about it.
And it got played on Twitter so they could raise more money.
But I think it was someone, one of these former Obama guys, Dan Pfeiffer, pointed this out at some point.
This is not helping winning an election.
You know, you're not running any of this stuff in battleground states, and that kind of shamed them into at least making a show of running some of these ads elsewhere.
But this is always a Twitter and cable TV.
Phenomenon.
They're not Republicans anymore.
And just the test of that, if you're supporting Terry McCall over Glenn Youngkin, who is not Donald Trump in any single way, you're just, you're not a Republican anymore.
Full stop.
And most of the leadership has come out and said that themselves.
It's just the media now that insists on still branding them as Republicans as though this is an inter party squabble and it's anything but.
I mean, look at the numbers.
As I say, 24 point swing on the issue of education.
That is not something that's not some Republican intra squabble over it.
This is like actual politics.
Playing out in the polls and the Lincoln Project desperate for relevance after its pedophilia scandal, still pushing out ads trying to act like they're some impartial arbiter.
All right, we've got much more with Rich Laurie Go.
The Let's Go Brandon media cycle.
Did you hear about this thing on Southwest?
Did it actually happen with this pilot?
The media's reaction to it.
And now protesters going after not just Senator Sinema, but a wedding she's attending, the bride and mother of the bride, most unhappy.
And then the big, big payouts our government's considering making to the families of Children who entered this country unlawfully with their parents' approval.
And now we're getting ready to pay millions of dollars to them.
Stand by for that.
So, Rich, there's been a bit of a dust up on the Let's Go Brandon front, which is now sort of a euphemism for FU Biden based on this race car.
It was a NASCAR event where the NBC reporter hearing all the crowd chant FU in the actual explicit terms.
Biden said to the race car driver, Brandon, somebody, Oh, they're chanting, let's go, let's go, let's go, Brandon.
Anyway, yeah, they weren't.
So now it's become a thing.
And according to one, as far as I can tell, it's only one AP reporter named Colleen Long who's reporting this.
So we haven't actually confirmed whether this happened.
An important note to this story.
But she says she's that there was a Southwest Airlines pilot who allegedly said over the mic to everybody on the plane, Let's go, Brandon.
So he, He said it and that it was explicit, and now people are losing their minds.
There's one person, for example, Matt Taibbi has a great post at his Substack, which everybody should subscribe to, pointing out how, for example, Juliet Kayam, she's a former Homeland Security official at CNN and now at CNN, and says if Southwest Air doesn't do anything, every passenger on that flight has standing to file a complaint with the FAA, and they should do so.
Southwest will then be compelled to investigate or defend him.
Have fun with that.
No messing around in the air.
Bright line rule.
And then he goes on to point out this is kind of funny to relive.
You remember the number of reporters and civilians in front of microphones who said the nastiest things about Trump, right?
Don't remember Juliette Kayam's outrage or anyone else's.
I mean, so Robert De Niro, Taibbi points out, drops the F bomb at the Tony Awards.
I mean, he really went after Trump.
He said, F Trump.
And they loved it.
USA Today celebrated the moment.
Vox, De Niro told the Tony's audience, F Trump.
He got a standing ovation.
Points out when Samantha B went on TBS and called Ivanka Trump a feckless C word, though she said it, the actual word, she was forced to apologize.
But you immediately saw a New Yorker column saying she should not have apologized.
Sally Field, the actress, said she was wrong to use the word because the C words are beautiful, nurturing, and honest.
The Daily Beast headline was a visual high five, complete with a damn about that word on Ivanka.
Jim Gaffigan, the least potty mouthed comedian on the planet, Taibbi writes, went off on Trump not long prior, well into his presidency.
And Forbes came out and said, Oh, it was a fourth wall experience, revealing a man who simply wants things to go back to normal.
The Washington Post called that De Niro speech one of the hits of the Tony Awards.
I could go on.
So, if you want to say F Trump or Trump's an effer or Ivanka's a C word, go for it.
But if some pilot may or may not have said, let's go, Brandon, the G rated version of all of that, we need investigations, complaints ought to be written to the FAA, and so on.
Yeah.
So, first of all, saying F the president, it's vulgar, but it's also been the norm throughout all of American political life.
They didn't have exactly that vulgarity, but ask Martin Van Buren or John Quincy Adams or Andrew Jackson whether he was subjected to derision and abuse.
And the answer is yes, in all cases.
And they all hated it, but it's part of living in a free country.
And the thing about Let's Go, Brandon, it's a joke version of Joe Biden.
And it's not just the jibe at Biden, it's making fun of this whitewashing or misunderstanding, whatever it was, of the phrase.
It's funny.
It's meant in a relatively lighthearted way.
And as you say, we're not sure whether the pilot actually said this.
There's been some people saying maybe he said, Let's Go, Braves, but then.
There's an audio out there kind of suggesting that, but then the audio actually might have been from another flight.
So who knows?
But the idea that this guy, Juliet Kayam, was suggesting, could have been experiencing a mental health crisis and was seething with anger such that he couldn't be trusted to fly a plane is absurd.
And you had this other analyst at CNN, I can't say her name, I don't want to mispronounce it.
She's a Yale professor, compared it to saying, Long live ISIS, right?
When someone, if a pilot said that, Everyone would freak out because ISIS is a terrorist group.
And if someone loyal to ISIS might be subject to committing a suicide attack.
So, saying clearly, in what must have been a jokey way, let's go, Brandon, is nothing like that.
So, this is just what drives people so crazy.
What's good for the goose is never good for the gander.
And in this case, it was, you know, F your guy for me, but not F our guy for thee.
Yeah, that's right.
This reminds me of back when I was practicing law, one of my fellow lawyers in my firm.
We were up against just the nastiest woman.
God, she was so nasty.
And she was just a bottom feeder.
I mean, on everything, she'd stab you in the back and she wouldn't give you an extension and she'd swear at you and call you names.
And she'd always do it outside of the presence of the judge.
But anyway, none of us liked her.
And her name was Doris.
And one of my partners went into court and she won a motion.
It was a small motion, but she won.
And she looked at him and she said, It's not so fun now, is it?
And he looked at her and said, Fuck you, Doris.
No, he said, No, no, no, wait, wait, wait.
Let me identify.
He goes, Blow me, Doris.
That's what he said, Blow me.
And she was like, Enjoy your complaint before the ethics board.
So he came back to the office.
He's like, She's going to report me to the ethics board.
And I'm like, Are you sure it was blow me?
Maybe it was, You're below me, Doris.
Let's go through it again.
Let's make sure.
That's classic.
And I'm sure, you know, I haven't gone and done the forensics on this, Megan, but I imagine if you look at every TikTok video and Instagram video and Twitter video, People saying, let's go, Brandon.
They're smiling, right?
They're not seething with anger and hatred.
It's something they think is lighthearted.
Yeah, exactly.
It's an inside joke.
It's kind of like a funny, you know, you're in the in crowd, you know what it means.
People are something like, my mom has no idea what that means.
She'd be asking me, what is that?
So it's kind of the people are still enjoying knowing and using it.
And who knows whether the guy actually said that or not.
Okay, Kristen Sinema back in the news, harassed again.
The DOJ 100% is going to go after you if they think you've threatened a school board member by overstaying your time at the mic.
But they most definitely are not going to go after you if you harass Kristen Sinema in a bathroom or if you show up at a wedding she's been asked to officiate.
Keep in mind, this is the Democrat from Arizona who is holding up this.
It was a $3.5 trillion spending bill that was going to pay for all of Joe Biden's domestic wish list items.
Now it's down to maybe, I don't know, half that.
We have no idea where it's going to go, but it's going somewhere.
Anyway, they're still mad.
The Democrats are mad that she's not getting behind the full $3.5 trillion in addition to the $1.5 trillion.
$1.2 trillion infrastructure.
I mean, the numbers are just mind boggling.
So, just to put her terrible behavior in perspective, it's okay.
So, she goes out to officiate a wedding of a friend's daughter.
And the tearful mother of the bride has to come out and beg these protesters to be quiet and not ruin the wedding.
Here's a little bit of that.
Hi, thanks for ironing my wedding.
I really appreciate it.
You know what?
She's ruining our lives.
It's just my wedding.
I know.
You are.
I really wish I could enjoy my wedding without you ruining it.
I know you do.
Could you just go down to Bell Labs for an hour?
How about it's my daughter's wedding?
Just for an hour.
Just let her get married, please.
This person is not my daughter.
My daughter's getting married.
Will you tell her that?
Did you have a white set of people who are really here?
No, listen, tell her that we don't like what she's doing to our country.
I'm going to invite them.
You know what?
Tell her.
Tell her.
I don't disagree with any of your people and your point of view and your rights.
It's my daughter's wedding.
So, throw her out.
Please just go down to the corner for one hour.
Please.
It's my daughter's wedding.
Shame.
Shame.
Sh Sphere.
Wishful Thinking on Both Sides 00:06:16
And Kristen Sinema should be able to go to the bathroom without being harassed.
She should be able to go to a wedding, or I guess maybe she was officiating at this wedding without the wedding being disrupted.
And there's just, it's thuggish, goonish behavior, and that lacks all common decency.
This woman who's getting married, you know, it's a day she'll remember the rest of your life.
And why are you blighting it?
What's possibly being accomplished there?
What is this besides an expression of just witless malice and sheer destructiveness?
And lack of consideration for other people.
So, you know, the people on the right can do this too.
You occasionally have people showing up with bullhorns at people's houses.
It just shouldn't happen.
No one should do it.
It's wrong.
It's un American.
Eventually, someone's going to get hurt.
We've already seen, you know, we had congressmen shot up at a baseball field as a function of partisan hate, but we could see more of that coming unless people just kind of back off.
And I'll just say the last thing I'll say about this, Megan, is, you know, if you're in the public sphere, when people abuse you, Even if you know they're out of bounds, it's kind of hard to take.
You know, it can get under your skin, it can rattle you.
And just something that I've been really struck by is just how utterly composed Kristen Sinema has been throughout this.
That bathroom incident, you know, she goes in the stall, she does her business, comes out, washes her hands.
Excuse me.
I know.
She's totally unflappable.
There's an airport video where she was talking to Tim Scott at the National Reagan Airport when they're, you know, leaving Washington, D.C. for the weekend.
And again, someone's trailing, harassing her, and she just says, you know, sorry, Tim, I'm sorry, you have to put up with this.
So I think she's been really impressive and a very, very interesting and unusual lady.
I like witless malice.
That's exactly right.
If that had been me coming out of the bathroom stall and they'd come over to me, I would have rubbed my hands all over them.
I would have, right before you get to the sink.
You come over to me before I wash my hands, your business.
Too bad.
You got my business and now you're in it.
Now you're really in it.
But can I, you guys have been making the point on the editors, which I love the editors, the podcast, about how, you know, they keep pointing at her as like Bernie Sanders and others point at her and Manchin and say, it's just not right for two senators to be able to hold up the will of the people, you know, to, Hold up this $3.5 trillion spending bill on all these Democrat wish list items in addition to the $1.2 trillion.
The numbers are mind boggling.
We've never passed money or bills like with this amount of spending in them before.
Never.
This is like crazy beyond wartime spending.
And they make it sound like she and Manchin have some obligation to the country to fold, but it's not two senators upholding the will of the people.
Yeah, it's 52.
So, you take a 50 50 Senate, subtract two Democrats, and you have 52 against.
That's a majority.
That's not anti majoritarian.
It's the definition of majoritarianism.
And the reason why they're having so much trouble getting this agenda through, obviously, is they're acting as though they have FDR, LBJ style majorities.
And they just don't.
FDR came in 1932 with a 200 seat majority in the House and 58 senators and went up astonishingly enough in 1934.
I think in 1934, Republicans were down to 89.
Members of the House and 16 senators.
I mean, the Republican Party had basically been vaporized.
Yeah.
And in that circumstance, you get to do what you want, more or less.
Even then, you know, party coalitions can be complicated.
So even then, you don't just get to do, you know, work your absolute will, but you get to force historic change through.
And when you, Joe Biden, and you lost seats in the House in 2020 and have a 50 50 tie and certainly are going to lose the House.
Next year, it's going to be really hard to pass through a transformational agenda.
And they kind of fooled themselves.
There's a lot of wishful thinking.
There's a lot of wishful commentary in the press about how amazing Joe Biden was.
Now the cold reality is slapping them in the face.
And they'll probably still get these two bills, the infrastructure and the reconciliation bill.
But as we've seen, they're going to be much reduced and understandably so.
Meantime, the country's not behind Joe Biden.
The latest Gallup poll shows his approval rating at 42%, which apparently is lower than any other modern first year president at a similar rate.
Point in time, with the exception of Trump, who is at 37%.
And 71% of the American people believe the United States is on the wrong track.
That's up eight points since August.
So, since Afghanistan, I mean, it was falling during that.
It's kept going in the wrong direction for Joe Biden.
That includes 93% of Republicans who think we're on the wrong track, 70% of independents, and even 48% of Democrats.
People have no confidence in him and they don't feel optimistic about the country.
And they don't think he's competent or effective, nor do they say he's uniting the country.
I mean, it's fail, fail, fail, fail.
So, what do you make of that?
How does that go?
Great.
Yeah, before that, other than that, it's wonderful.
Yeah, he came in at a weak place because he was a default president.
70% of Biden's voters say they were voting against Donald Trump rather than for him.
And Joe Biden's been around a very long time in Washington, and no one ever said, that's the guy.
That's the guy we need leading this country.
He just happened to be in the right place.
And the right time survived the Democratic primaries, primarily because it wasn't Bernie Sanders.
So he's kind of a double default president.
And then he thought conditions would just lift him.
You know, the economy would be roaring, the pandemic would be crushed.
And obviously, those two things have been much more complicated than he counted on.
And then he just violated what should be a cardinal rule don't create unnecessary debacles.
He did it at the border and he did it in Afghanistan.
And when you run as the guy based on norms and calm and competence, it's especially important not to create unnecessary debacles.
So he's, you know, I don't think the bottom has quite fallen out.
Kamala's Lack of Sincerity 00:05:42
But 42%, you're getting close.
And if these bills go down or there's some other debacle lurking here, he could get into the high 30s and then you could see all bets are off what happens in the House then.
40, 50, 60 Republican pickup could be conceivable in these circumstances.
You think?
Yeah, if he takes another lurch down.
Now, I'm not sure that's going to happen.
I think he'll probably get these bills and maybe he kind of.
Floats up a little bit from that, but it's easier to see how more things can go wrong than how they're going to work out for him the next six or 12 months.
He continues to stumble on his words at virtually every appearance, does not instill confidence when it comes to his mental competence.
And his VP doesn't either.
She is a uniquely uninspirational figure if you look at how the public reacts to her.
Even Democratic crowds, we're going to show you a bit of that after this.
Quick break so you can see for yourself.
I mean, you've seen it before, you will see it again momentarily.
And then we're going to talk immigration and about these massive payments we're apparently considering paying out now to families who sent their children across our southern border, willingly sent their children across our southern border, got separated, and now want the American taxpayer to pay half a million dollars per person.
It's more than Gold Star families get paid.
That's in one minute.
Also, remember, you can find the Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
And our full video show and clips you can watch as well when you subscribe to my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/slash Megan Kelly.
If you prefer the audio version, you want to share it with somebody who missed it, you can subscribe, download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts, and post a review while you're on there because I still read them all.
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Check it out and post a comment, and I promise you, I will read it.
So, Biden's approval numbers are down.
Optimism and direction of the country is down.
And his number two is not making people feel more inspired than he is, that's for sure.
So, she gets involved.
They're all involved now in trying to rally the troops for Terry McAuliffe back to Virginia.
And gosh, every appearance she does, she fails.
I mean, it's awkward.
She just can't land it.
You know, she's just not well received by Democrats.
I mean, this isn't Kamala Harris in front of a bunch of Republicans.
So, here she is trying to fire up.
The McAuliffe crowd watch and listen.
Tell everybody you know to vote tomorrow.
Nothing like saying, You want to meet me tomorrow?
What are you doing tomorrow?
You got any plans tomorrow?
Tomorrow's a good day.
It's going to be a good day.
But the point is to find smattering, smattering of applause.
Your thoughts.
Yeah, so she's just not very good.
I mean, there's a reason why she was at 3%.
In the polls, and was one of the first Democrats to drop out.
And then she won this great lottery ticket by getting selected as Biden's Veep.
And this, Megan, has to be what the scenario that keeps Democrats up at night.
Something happens to Biden.
Right, God forbid we all wish him well, but for some reason he can't run again in 2024, chooses not to run again in 2024.
And then Kamala Harris is either already president or is you know running as a sitting vice president for the party's nomination.
How would you turn her away?
Right, the first African American vice president, first woman vice president, the historic figure at the time when the party is absolutely obsessed with woke identity politics.
At the same time, everyone knows she just is not.
Very good at this.
I mean, she can't even keep stats.
Her own staff doesn't like her.
So that scenario where you're running Kamala Harris against Donald Trump against anyone is the single worst possibility for the Democratic Party.
It's like you point out how Terry McAuliffe, he's good at retail politics as a general matter, not this past month or two, but as a general matter, he's well liked and he can fire you up and he can make you laugh.
She's the opposite.
She likes even what is she saying?
See you tomorrow.
You know, it's a good day.
It's going to be a good day to say see you tomorrow.
What is she saying?
How is that her message to try to fire up the crowd?
She just doesn't get it.
She's not able to connect on a human to human level in a way a politician generally must to ascend to an office like that.
So it does speak to the real predicament these Democrats are in.
Yeah, it's Hillary.
It's the same problem Hillary Clinton has.
There's just a lack of relatability there that goes.
Back at the end of the day to a lack of sincerity.
And, you know, very often politicians fake sincerity, right?
But they have to be good at it.
The good ones.
If you're not good at it, people feel it's false and no one's going to like you, even the people who agree with you on every single issue.
And Kamala Harris just has this problem in it in a huge way.
And it's not something, you know, you either have it or you don't at a certain level.
And it's not something that she's going to learn or not something that she's going to get better at.
This is just the way.
The way she is.
Yeah, like Barack Obama had, or Bill Clinton had, or Trump had.
You know, I mean, they all have that ability, and she does not have it.
DOJ Plans Border Payments 00:03:20
Okay, let's talk about immigration because it's sort of a stunning headline.
I think the journal reporting that the DOJ, HHS, and Homeland Security are all meeting about a plan, considering paying about $450,000 per person, potentially almost a million per family, because apparently most of these kids who were sent across the border either came alone or came with one alleged parent.
They've filed a lawsuit, a lot of these folks who came across the southern border illegally through the ACLU, demanding $3.4 million per family.
They want the American taxpayer to pay them for the family separation policy that Trump put into place, which was meant to deter this kind of behavior.
He didn't want more illegal immigrants coming across, and it was working.
The total payout could top $1 billion.
The ACLU alleges the children suffer trauma and anxiety.
You know, you could very well argue they should take that up with their parents who made this reckless decision.
One of the government attorneys, apparently trying to defend against the ACL lawsuit, actually objected, threatening to remove his name from the pleadings because he found this so objectionable that we were going to pay half a million dollars to people breaking our laws when we only pay $100,000 to the families of those who lose their lives in the line of duty, Rich.
So you tell me how this is going to play politically and whether this could ever really happen.
Yeah, it would be a debacle for them politically.
And look, this was a bad policy.
It was a mistake.
Stake.
The idea was you'd have zero tolerance, meaning that everyone who came across illegally would be prosecuted, at least notionally, charged with the crime.
And while you're doing that to the adult, the child would be off somewhere else and then they're instantly reunited.
At least that's at the time, that's the way the idea was presented.
To me, and I supported it because that seemed reasonable to me.
But what happened is, you know, if you're holding the adult for a certain period of time while he or she is awaiting the court proceeding, you can only keep the child in a certain facility.
You know, there's a strict time limit on that before HHS takes them, and then they're resettled somewhere in the country.
So you had this unsustainable situation where these kids were kind of disappearing in this bureaucratic mall.
And that was wrong, and it should have ended, and it did end.
And this was At a time when the Trump administration was just desperate to find some solution at the border.
This wasn't it.
They ended up with a solution remain in Mexico and associated policies that Biden undid.
But the forcing element in this problem, obviously, is folks coming across the border illegally in the first place.
And the idea that the United States government should pay them from having mistaken policy to try to discourage them from breaking our laws and violating our sovereignty, doing something they never should have done in the first place.
Is really hard to take.
And just the disparity you point out between what these payments would, in theory, be and what we pay the families of the fallen.
Dan Crenshaw hit this as well in a viral tweet a week or so ago.
That is just totally unsustainable.
And Peter Ducey of Fox News shadowed a question overseas to Biden about this yesterday or today.
And Biden didn't say anything as going down the elbow.
He sort of scratched his head somewhat awkwardly.
Strengthening the Mandate Case 00:14:57
So, I'd be surprised if they do this.
If they do do this, it will supercharge what's already a pretty fierce backlash against the Biden administration.
As a lawyer, I'd say fight.
Fight the case because you've got an assumption of the risk.
Trump was implementing these policies at the time.
A lot of these people made the decision to come.
And Stephen Miller told us on the record that these parents were given the option to return home with or without the children, and most shows without.
So, there's a legal case to be fought there.
Rich Lowry, always a pleasure.
Be sure to check him out on National Review.
Love National Review.
Love the editors.
And we'll talk again soon.
Coming up, Alan Dershowitz on Alec Baldwin, vaccine mandates, and more.
A big day at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The justices are now hearing arguments regarding that controversial Texas abortion law.
And another case that could soon be in the hands of the justices President Biden's vaccine mandate.
The lawsuits against it are piling up.
And joining me now to discuss it all, Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of the new book, The Case for.
Four vaccine mandates.
So you know what side he's on.
That's one thing we love about Alan.
He never hides what side he's on.
Alan, great to have you back.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, let's start with what's happening before SCOTUS today.
The Supreme Court taking up this controversial law down in Texas where they tried something we had never seen before, which was to pass basically a private right of enforcement of a law that said you can't have an abortion later than six weeks.
And the average term of Pregnancy that leads to an abortion is around 16 weeks.
So, this is well before the average time a woman would seek an abortion.
The federal law at the Supreme Court level has already been recognized to extend to a 24 week ability to abort a fetus.
And Texas got around it by saying, we're going to make it six weeks.
We're going to tie it to a heartbeat.
And we're going to say, instead of having a state official come after you if you violate that as a mother, we're going to allow a private right of enforcement by a cab driver, anybody who aids or abets.
Anybody could bring it against a cab driver, et cetera, who aids or abets in the performance of the abortion.
Finally, it goes up before the Supreme Court.
And so far this morning, the reports are not totally unexpected.
But it looks like Alito and Gorsuch are the ones who are potentially open minded to upholding the Texas law.
Clarence Thomas always says nothing, but I'm going to guess he's with them.
Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts suggested he's not totally unsympathetic.
He said, I share some of the concerns voiced by Alito and Gorsuch, but you tell me that's four at best.
I don't know about Amy Coney Barrett.
You know, she's a potential vote for that, but this is a crazy law.
I mean, it's really, this is out there.
And whether you think, based on what I've just said, it has any chance of being upheld.
Well, the argument that's being made is an argument I made the day the law was passed.
And I wrote it in an article on The Hill.
And that is if this law is upheld, then any liberal state can pass a similar law saying anybody who owns a gun can be sued, anybody who participates in a gay marriage can be sued, anyone who does anything that the conservatives don't like and the liberals like can also be the subject of this.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
And it doesn't pass the shoe on the other foot test.
So, this is not just about abortion.
It's about whether any state can circumvent the Supreme Court's decision by simply allowing a bounty to be offered to anybody outside the state or in the state who wants to earn $10,000 for challenging the lawsuit.
And that was raised even by Justice Thomas, who's very concerned about the Second Amendment.
Well, what if this was used in New York?
If New York passed a statute saying anyone who tries to possess a gun.
Consistent with the Second Amendment in Heller, or helps anybody get a gun, can be sued for at least $10,000 plus their legal fee.
So, my prediction the court will not uphold this, and there will be probably two or three votes.
I'm not even sure about Thomas, but I don't think they're going to get five to uphold this terrible precedent, forgetting about abortion, terrible precedent that would have completely undercut the civil rights movement, the anti segregation movement.
All Mississippi had to do.
Is passed a statute saying that anybody who went to Greats in school can be sued by anybody who doesn't like it.
And if that were to be upheld, that would be the end of the Supreme Court's power in the area of segregation, gay rights, religious rights.
It's an obvious end around what's been recognized as a constitutional right.
You may not agree that it's a constitutional right, but the Supreme Court has so held.
It's an obvious end around that.
That's not the way the system is designed to work.
You may like it on this case if you're pro life, but you will not like it when it's used by the Democrats, as you point out.
Or, as Kavanaugh actually raised today, conservative justice appointed by Trump, when it comes up, for example, on a gun right.
Kavanaugh said, to your point earlier, anyone who sells an AR 15 is liable to a private citizen for a million dollars.
Would such a law be subject to this?
So, all the justices are struggling with what this means and what they term the floodgate issues on this.
The two liberals, Breyer and Sotomayor, two of the three, Kagan's another, are pressing all sorts of hypotheticals that could lead to.
Private citizen end arounds when it comes to race integration of schools, as you mentioned, the right to same sex marriage.
There's no end to what an angry citizenry could do.
It would lead to the complete erosion of predictability on our constitutional rights and the law, and not just for judge made law like Roe, but actual rights as documented in the Bill of Rights.
Sure.
I mean, you could do it with the First Amendment.
Anybody who engages in hate speech, even though hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, can be.
Can be sued.
So, this is not an abortion case.
The abortion case will be argued.
This is not an abortion case.
This is a case about whether states can circumvent rights by allowing private citizens to bring lawsuits that would make it impossible for people to exercise their rights.
Nobody's going to.
Take a chance.
No cab driver, no Uber driver, no doctor is going to take a chance that he can be or she can be ruined completely by a lawsuit.
Now, you know, once the lawsuit comes up, it'll probably be struck down as unconstitutional.
But in the meantime, and we all live in the meantime all the time, thousands of women are being chilled out of being able to get abortions now.
And by the time the Supreme Court rules, they may be beyond the period where even under the Supreme Court, they can get abortions.
So it will have succeeded in undercutting.
A woman's right to have an abortion before a certain amount of time passes.
They can.
I mean, obviously, they can go to another state outside of Texas, but given the socioeconomic situation that a lot of women are facing, not everybody's got the money for that.
Not everybody's got the time to drive all the miles and so on.
So, I mean, you know, as a lawyer, I look at this and say, I get that you don't like it.
This is not the way to do it.
There is a real case coming up that's going to challenge Roe versus Wade out of Mississippi.
The court's going to hear it.
They're going to get to the bare bones of whether Roe should stand and Casey, which reinterpreted it in 1992.
This is not the way.
Okay, so let's switch gears.
The case for vaccine mandates by Alan Dershowitz.
And so I didn't read the whole book, but there it is.
But I've read the outline that my team did.
Why don't you summarize?
Because I know you're measured on it.
You're not saying in every case they can do it.
You're basically saying it has to be a balancing test on whether they can do it.
So give us sort of the bottom line version on whether you think they can do it here with respect to the COVID situation.
Well, it always should be a last resort.
Making people do anything to their body should always be a last resort.
The first thing we should do is make sure that vaccines are available to everybody.
Second thing we should do is use the bully pulpit of the president.
And today, lots of, for example, black doctors are getting on television and urging members of the African American group community to get vaccine.
That's the way to do it, to make sure it's available.
Second, you can limit coming to places based on not being vaccinated.
For example, somebody may say, I have a right.
To go to the theater and not be vaccinated.
Well, I have the right to go to the theater and not catch your illness.
So it's a balancing right.
And I think the courts will and have upheld that.
For example, Indiana University restricted coming on the campus.
That will be upheld.
The last question and the hardest one will be what if nothing works and we really have to compel people to get a vaccination like Massachusetts did in Massachusetts versus Jacobson in 1905?
Of course, they only had a dollar fine and they're.
It was a state statute that was passed.
I don't know how the court will come out on that.
I think it's a last resort.
I do think that there's a strong case for compelling vaccination if nothing else will work to stop the pandemic.
George Washington required every single soldier fighting for the revolution to have a smallpox vaccine, saying that we're at greater risk of losing the revolution based on smallpox than we are in losing the revolution based on British victories on the battlefield.
That's not a precedent.
But it tells us that I think decent people should favor vaccination if vaccination can help prevent the spread of disease.
In the book, I give a hypothetical.
What if we develop a 100% foolproof vaccine?
No side effects.
It cures cancer and heart disease, but it has nothing, no effect on communicable diseases.
Everybody should take it, but the government should not be allowed to compel people to take a vaccine that merely saves their own lives.
Only when The vaccine will help prevent the spread to others who don't want to get the disease, should the government have the power to do that.
That's not me speaking, that's John Stuart Mill, that's many great philosophers over time.
And I think that's the right approach.
Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose, and your right to sneeze on me without being vaccinated ends at my nostrils and my lungs.
And so we have to strike an appropriate balance, and the balance is last resort.
You don't do it unless it's absolutely essential.
Then there's the question of exceptions.
Should there be a religious exception?
Wait, before we get to that, let's table that for one second and just stick with part one before we get to the exemptions.
I feel like that would have been a stronger argument, you know, the mandate, because we have to protect public health and your right to sneeze and sort of infect me ends up my nose when we were dealing with the alpha variant versus the delta.
Because the delta can be spread by the vaccinated as well as by the unvaccinated.
I actually thought it was kind of interesting just this weekend and getting ready for this segment.
I read an article in The Lancet, this respected medical journal, citing a study by the Imperial College of London, et cetera, and other researchers.
And what they concluded is the vaccinated.
Are just as infectious as the unvaccinated.
They are just as infectious.
So you do not prevent my sneeze from causing you COVID by the fact that I'm vaccinated or unvaccinated.
It just, that's not the way Delta works.
And I think it undermines the case for vaccine mandates.
What say you?
Well, what say I is that there are disputes about that study and about other studies.
There are other studies that say, The fewer people get the disease at all, the lower the rate of spreading.
And if you have initial vaccinations, even against the first variant on that, it will prevent or help prevent the spread.
It's not 100%.
It's a question of the balance of probabilities.
But we know from demographic experience that countries in which there is massive vaccination, such as New Zealand, Israel, Denmark, some other countries, have a much lower rate, not only of the spread of the disease, but of hospitalization.
And of death.
But that's a different story.
Lower risk of hospitalization and death speaks to did I get the vaccine to protect myself from being hospitalized or dying?
Yes, I did.
So Megyn Kelly is better protected versus somebody who doesn't have the vaccine and didn't have COVID.
But I think it's a tougher argument to make when I can infect somebody.
Now, maybe not for the same amount of time.
I see the argument like you are, if you're vaccinated, you are still less likely to catch COVID.
The time you can spread it.
Is shortened.
But when you do get infected, these so called breakthrough infections, as they have been dubbed, Jen Saki just announced she got one, you are just as efficient a spreader as the unvaxxed.
And as you know, the courts have sort of a sliding scale where you look at how necessary is it, how much protection would it give if we mandated it.
And I think the fact that you can spread it really, really well as a vaccinated person undermines the case for vaccine mandates.
I make that case in my book.
Even before some of this data became available, I said in my book, if it turns out that The spread of the disease is not slowed down by the third vaccine or by the second vaccination or even by the first vaccination.
That strengthens the case against the mandate.
I acknowledge that.
It has to follow the science, it has to follow the data.
And it would be unconstitutional, I think, for mandate vaccination if the data shows that there is no effect whatsoever on preventing the spread to other people.
I don't think that's what the data is now showing.
I don't think we're at no effect whatsoever.
I think that overstates the Lancet argument.
Yeah.
So let's switch to exemptions because there's been some interesting legal precedent back and forth.
I continue to follow it.
I would say, in general, it's going.
For the mandates, the legal precedent that we've seen so far.
Not just Jacobson from 1905, but the more recent cases to challenge mandates, the challenges have been losing.
But here and there, you see a win.
So, what's your take on what we've seen so far from the courts on the exemptions?
Let me start.
Medical exemptions, of course.
I've had members of my own family that have been medically exempt because of pre existing conditions, et cetera.
And that should be done.
And that's being done for the most part.
And it should be broadened to make sure that nobody has to take a vaccination if it.
In any way, it endangers their health.
I think the religious exemption is largely a phony.
Religious Exemptions Are Phony 00:06:42
And I have challenged rabbis, priests, and ministers to show me where in the Jewish religion, in the Protestant, in the Catholic, or in the Muslim religion, there is any prohibition on vaccination.
I know the Jewish religion best.
The Torah commands that anybody who has an infectious disease must be taken out of the camp and put in the outskirts of the city until the infection dissipates.
In Jewish law, this A concept called Pikach Nefesh, the saving of life.
And that's why 99% of rabbis say take the vaccine.
99% of priests, 99% of ministers say take the vaccine.
Now, if you're a scientist or a Jehovah's Witness and have a longstanding historical objection to any medical intervention, I would give that exemption some support.
But if you're a mainline Catholic, Protestant, and Jew, you're misusing your religion to try to.
Have a political decision.
That's number one.
Number two, the Supreme Court has held in a case called Seeger versus the United States, a conscientious objector case, that if you're going to have a religious exemption, it has to apply to non religious ideological exemptions if the ideology fits the place that religion would fit into the life of somebody who was traditionally religious,
which means the religious exemption can basically eliminate the mandate because anybody can then say, oh my God, I don't believe in God, I'm not a traditional this, I'm not that.
But For me, it's so important.
It's just like it would be if it were religious.
And so the very fact that we've expanded the religious exemption to include people who are not religious makes the religious exemption much, much harder to apply without gutting the entire process.
So I get the objection to the religious exemption.
I do.
I take myself pre COVID and I think about all the kids who more and more who are showing up at school in New York City with measles, you know, a disease they did not have to get and it's highly contagious.
And I remember being like, oh, If they would just get the vaccine, we wouldn't have to deal with this.
I don't want my kid next to another kid with measles.
So I get it.
But I do also see the difference with the COVID vaccine because it's newer.
And if you take it to the opposite extreme, let's say we know that the COVID vaccines were tested, they don't have in them, but they were tested on clones of stem cells that at one point were linked to fetuses.
I'm told it was voluntary abortions 50 years ago.
But we still have those stem cells.
And clones of them were used to test the vaccines here.
That's the reality.
Let's say it came out that the vaccines actually had stem cells in them from aborted fetuses.
Don't you think Catholics could come out, even ones who hadn't objected to the MMR vaccine, and say, whoa, no, no, we're not, I'm not putting that in my body.
Certainly not Catholics, maybe Protestants, certainly not Catholics.
Catholics take their guidance from the Pope and from the Vatican.
The Pope is infallible.
The Pope has said, Get vaccines.
Now, I never signed on for that.
I never signed on for Pope Infallible.
I didn't sign that clause in my Catholicism class.
You're not a real Catholic.
If you were.
In fallibility, you're like me.
I don't sign on for rabbinical perfection.
That's why, you know, I'm a secular Jew and you're a kind of secular Catholic.
You have to sign on for Pope infallibility.
You have to sign on for the Vatican telling you what you're going to do if you're otherwise become a Protestant.
Protestants talk directly to God, they don't need the intervention of a Pope or a hierarchy.
That's why there was a revolution of the Reformation.
But if you're going to say the Catholic Church, Says don't take vaccines.
You got to cite the Vatican, you got to cite the Pope, you got to cite your priests.
If you can't do that, I don't think you have a Catholic.
I don't know if you're right.
All right.
So now that we've broken down my Catholicism, I don't think you're right because we are seeing some of these religious exemptions upheld.
There was just a ruling in New York.
I think there was one in the 10th Circuit where more and more they're saying you do have to allow, might be wrong about the 10th Circuit, but New York certainly there was one saying you've got to allow for a religious exemption.
You can't have these vaccine mandates without it.
Religion is prevailing.
The Supreme Court today.
Has a six to three majority to overrule a previous decision written, interestingly enough, by Justice Scalia, which says that religion is no special status.
If there's a law of general application, even if it violates your religious rights, you have to comply with it.
I think there are now six justices, at least five, that are prepared to overrule that decision and say that if you have a special religious exemption, you may have a right under the Constitution not to do it.
So if you're asking me to predict what the Supreme Court will do, I'm on your side.
If you're asking me to tell you what I think is right, I think that the medical exemption is right.
I think the traditional religious exemption for people who have a longstanding objection to any medical intervention is right.
But when you get a couple of Jews here and there, a couple of Catholics here and there, and some Protestants saying our interpretation of the religion goes against everything that the established religion says, but we want to have our own interpretation, there I'm skeptical.
Let me tell you something crazy.
At our school, one of our schools that our boys go to, The medical exemption is as follows.
If your son has an adverse reaction to the first shot, then we will recognize a medical exemption.
I mean, it's insane.
It's like, what if we have a blood clotting problem in our family?
What if he already's had myocarditis and we don't want to take the risk of having it get worse?
The answer is no.
He has to take it or gets expelled.
And that's insanity, Alan.
That's insanity.
I can't take it.
I personally cannot take the third shot because I do have a clotting issue.
I took the first two shots.
But I can't take the third shot.
I want to take the third shot.
I'd like to, but my doctors have told me I can't take it because there may be some clotting problems.
I think, as I said right in the beginning, there should be very broad medical exemptions.
When in doubt, exempt, because it really doesn't matter if a few people don't get the vaccine.
By the way, if you don't get it, you have to be more careful.
I've decided not to go to the opera because I can't get the third shot.
I wanted to go to the opera, but I'm making a personal decision because I can't get the third shot.
I'm making decisions not to eat in indoor restaurants, not to go to the opera, not to go to the theater.
I would have otherwise.
Broad Medical Exemptions Needed 00:15:38
So you have to make sensible judgments about these things.
It shouldn't be political, it shouldn't be ideological.
It's very upsetting to me that more Republicans are skeptical of the vaccine than Democrats.
That shouldn't be the case.
Skepticism should arise out of personal views, personal belief, personal experience, not ideology, political.
It's well, and you're doing the right thing because you're, I think, I think you're 80 now, right?
And so you just do eight, proudly eight to three.
Yeah, you got to be careful.
And so I support that.
You know, it's different when we're looking at young kids and it's like you have to get it despite the fact that you might have a family history.
No, family history is not enough.
You, you is this.
You know, 12 year old, you have to have the history.
It's like, well, I have a history of nothing.
I'm a little boy.
So, some of these policies are insane.
Anyway, we continue to see the cases come day by day.
I think it is going to play out legally.
And I think the law ultimately will wind up being a little bit more sympathetic towards those objecting to the vaccine mandates, though they haven't exactly had a great record so far.
The thesis of my book is be careful, be balanced, be nuanced, don't be ideological, follow the science, use mandates only as a last resort.
Recognize individual autonomy, all of that.
But in the end, I'm not an anti vaxxer.
And that's what the thesis of.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not either, but I'm an anti mandator.
More with Alan after this.
Alan, so two cases to go over.
And let's start with the one that's been all over the news these past couple of weeks.
And that's what happened to Alec Baldwin on the set of his movie, where.
He shot the cinematographer Helena Hutchins.
Just breaking now, New York Post, her final words.
It's chilling.
You recall she was shot by Alec Baldwin, who was on set and reportedly did not know that the gun that he had in his holster was loaded with what we're told was a live round.
That means here, a live actual bullet, which most of the experts say should have absolutely no place on a movie set.
They've got, and just so the audience knows, they've got blanks that go into guns that.
Um, are a little dangerous that can make smoke and they look and sound like real bullets.
Then they've got dummies that just look like real bullets, but they wouldn't give you the sound.
But that's just that's for like a gun like this where you could see the bullets in the movie shot and they just want it to look like a real loaded gun because you can see in a Colt 45 if the bullets aren't showing.
That's what a dummy round is.
Then there's a live round which should not be on a movie set.
And what the sheriff seems to be saying is this was a live round.
Alec Baldwin never should have had in that gun.
Somebody gave him the gun.
Somebody admitted that they didn't check the gun.
The assistant director.
In any event, now we're learning that Helena Hutchins told a boom operator on the Russ movie set as seconds after she was shot.
Sad.
That was no good.
That was no good at all.
And within a few hours, she was pronounced dead.
Also being told that as soon as, because the director, Joel Souza, was also reportedly struck by the same round, he dropped to the floor, said, What the F was that?
That burns.
What the F just happened?
He had no idea.
And, um, They are reporting that Alec Baldwin said before he fired the shot.
So I guess I'm going to take this out.
I'm going to pull it and go bang.
It was supposed to be loaded with dummy rounds.
He was practicing for the scene.
And now the sheriff's saying, Alan, that they are very much taking issue with the word accident and that we should be talking about this in terms of potential crime.
Do you see criminal charges being brought?
Well, remember, I was involved legally in the two prior cases.
I was involved in the Twilight Zone case where Vic Morrow and two children were killed.
I helped to represent John Landis, the director.
He was acquitted.
And then I was involved as a consultant on the Brandon Lee case.
Those two cases should have led to never allowing a real gun, even with blanks, on a set.
That should be the law.
Fake guns made out of wax, use CGI, use all kinds of special effects, never allow a gun on a set.
The Second Amendment doesn't apply to movie sets.
And so this was a homicide scene.
This was a homicide.
The question is is anyone guilty of manslaughter?
Remember, the presumption of innocence doesn't operate about a set or an event.
There's a presumption that if somebody is killed like this, it was a crime, it was not an accident.
But then every individual has a presumption of innocence, and you have to focus on each individual.
Now, I can't see a strong case being made against Alec Baldwin.
He was given a gun, saying it was a cold gun.
Although he was a producer, I don't know what that really means in the context of a movie like this.
It's hard to pinpoint criminal responsibility on him.
The person handing him the gun, perhaps.
The person who is the armorer, perhaps.
You can't have a conspiracy here because nobody agreed to do anything that would have caused death.
But I think this should be a homicide investigation, and the effort should be to see whether there's proof beyond a reasonable doubt that any individual engaged in manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, improper use of a gun.
But this is a homicide scene, not an accident scene.
And just to, you know, you're not to get conspiratorial, but I guess we don't really know.
I mean, who knows whether somebody intentionally manipulated that gun, that the armorer wasn't union?
Yeah, I'm not impugning the union, but I'm just saying that would not be a.
Voluntary manslaughter, that would be murder.
But, you know, let's not presume anything.
Yeah, yeah.
There's no evidence that somebody intentionally tampered with the gun to create a murder.
There's no doubt between stupidity and malevolence.
I always opt for stupidity.
That's been my experience over time.
So, in New Mexico, where this happened, they don't have a negligent homicide charge.
It would be involuntary manslaughter.
That means a person engages in a lawful act, but unintentionally kills someone in a negligent way or in a way not using due care.
It's a fourth degree.
Felony, you could get up to 18 months of prison slash probation.
So I do wonder because you've got the armor, Hannah Gutierrez Reed.
She would have been responsible for the gun initially.
But then it was the assistant director, David Halls, who was apparently overseeing a series of onset mishaps with that gun and admits he did not check the, you're supposed to check the barrel and, or the, I actually don't know the word, but you're supposed to check the bullets and look at each one of the six bullets.
And he admits he didn't.
And that's how he missed the live round.
What do you think?
I mean, do you think in a normal case that didn't involve celebrities, they would even be considering charging somebody here?
Oh, I think you have to consider charging.
The circumstances are such that you have to presume that there was a crime here.
In New Mexico, yes, negligence is enough, but it has to be a higher level of negligence than the ordinary civil negligence.
There's also another statute, a gun negligence statute, which creates a minor misdemeanor, and that Also requires a degree of negligence higher than a simple tort negligence.
So, if you ask me in the end, or I think they're going to be criminal charges, I think it's going to be very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any particular person engaged in criminal negligence.
But the investigation ought to be a homicide investigation.
And it's tricky because you're going to have everybody for the listening audience, I'm pointing to my left and my right, but you're going to have everybody pointing at each other.
It was him, it was her, it was his fault, including folks who are going to point at Alec Baldwin in two different roles.
Number one, He was, this is according to Zach Knight, a pyrotechnic and special effects engineer who's a member of Local 44.
This is to the Daily Mail.
He said, Baldwin ignored the golden rule of gun safety by pointing the prop at someone.
The gun never should have been loaded, obviously, with live ammunition.
But he says, every single person on a movie set has a right to inspect the weapon before it's fired.
And there's no reason to ever put a person in front of a weapon that's firing.
Anytime you see a movie where the barrel's pointed down the camera lens, there should not be an operator behind it.
And so apparently, what they normally do is they train actors.
You never Just in case, God forbid, something like this were to happen.
You just never know.
You just never point your gun at a real person on set.
And so Alec Baldwin is not off the hook legally yet.
And this may explain his demeanor.
Of course, the shock of having taken a woman's life, even inadvertently, has got to be overwhelming.
Here he was this weekend in Manchester, Vermont, with his wife, Hilaria, dealing with the paparazzi who got him to make some comments.
Listen.
I've been ordered by the sheriff's department in Santa Fe.
I can't answer any questions about the investigation.
I can't.
It's an active investigation in terms of a woman dying.
She was my friend.
She was my friend.
The day I arrived, in Santa Fe to start shooting.
I took her to dinner with Joel, the director.
We were a very, very, excuse me, we were a very, very, you know, well oiled crew shooting a film together and then this horrible event happened.
What are the questions that you have other than that?
You met with the, I'm afraid I forget her name at the moment, but you met with her family?
Yes, I met with her family.
Yes, I met with her family.
If you're spending this much time waiting for us, you should know her name.
Her name is Helena.
Helena Hutchins.
I met with her husband Matthew and her son.
Yeah, that's right.
And how did that meeting go?
I wouldn't know how to characterize it.
They're mortified.
You guys, you know what?
No details.
Do me a favor.
I'm going to ask the question.
Well, I appreciate that he was probably very upset.
The guy is overwhelmed with grief.
This is something that, you know, there are incidental accidents on film sets from time to time, but nothing like this.
This is a one in a trillion episode.
It's a one in a trillion film.
And so he is in shock.
He has a nine year old son.
You know, we are in constant contact with him.
Would you ever work on another film set that involves firearms of that nature?
I couldn't answer that question.
I really don't have any.
I have no sense of that at all.
I do know that an ongoing effort to limit the use of firearms on film sets is something I'm extremely interested in.
Do you think production will start up again on that?
No, I doubt.
So just do me a favor, if you don't mind.
My kids are in the car crying.
Because you guys are following me.
As a courtesy to you, I came to talk to you.
I'm not allowed to comment on the investigation.
I talk to the cops every day.
My point is that, I'm just asking, we sat down as a courtesy now to talk.
To you.
Now, please, would you just not follow us for the rest of the rest of the day?
Just leave us alone.
We gave you everything we could give you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Condolences.
Thank you, Dorado.
Now, turn it off.
Okay.
I have a couple of thoughts that I'll just make on my own.
You don't have to own these.
But the fact that he keeps shutting his wife up is just classic Alec Baldwin.
The fact that she tries to inject herself in every two minutes is classic Ilaria Baldwin, who did the fake accent and pretended she was Latina and she's not.
She almost slipped into her Latina accent there at the end.
Careful observers will hear.
And the fact that he actually stopped and spoke with the paparazzi was not smart.
They follow you.
This is what they do.
But I don't think he should have been speaking at all.
I do think he got a couple of colonels in there, Alan, legally, that were probably intentional.
Like, this was a very, very well oiled crew.
That's not what the news reports say.
That's going to hurt him.
That's going to hurt him.
This was not a well oiled set.
This was a set filled with problems.
And if I were a prosecutor, I would have welcomed that statement as subject to.
Cross examination.
The other point is that he's not allowed to speak.
Of course, he's allowed to speak.
The sheriff can't stop you from speaking.
The sheriff has told him not to speak.
And either you speak or you don't speak.
But you don't go and speak a little bit and then say you can't answer the hard questions.
So I think it was a mistake for him to have allowed himself to be interviewed.
So he could get sued.
I mean, because the civil lawsuits 100% are coming.
If you let him know, money.
Yeah, that's guaranteed.
So how does that play out?
Because he.
He does raise a good point.
This is one in a trillion episodes.
All right.
Now, I mean, it's not unheard of, as you pointed out at the beginning of this talk, but it's extremely rare to be seeing something like this.
So I think that does help all involved.
You know, there's probably a reason the assistant director was.
Lacks in checking the gun, the armorer.
We have yet to hear her full story.
And Alec Baldwin.
Everyone's on there assuming there is zero chance there's a live round in this gun.
Does that help them as a civil matter?
It does.
It helped us a lot in the case involving John Landis.
We were able to prove that helicopters having their rudder delaminated had never happened before, and the jury acquitted on that ground.
This is different.
There have been accidents involving guns.
And that's why you have to take such extraordinary precautions.
And if they didn't take all the precautions, then the one in a million, one in a billion doesn't operate.
The one in a million operates when the precautions are taken.
It doesn't operate when an assistant director hands you a gun saying it's a cold gun without having personally inspected it.
So I think he made a terrible mistake by talking about well oiled.
It wasn't well oiled, it was a disaster.
And we know that people walked off in advance.
We know that there were.
Complaints.
We hear that there were other incidents involving guns.
And we know that although killings are very rare, accidents involving guns are not that rare.
People get hurt by the percussion sound, by the blast.
There should never be a firing, even of blanks, on a set.
Everything should be CGI.
And if that means that one or 2% less realistic, too bad.
You sacrifice realism for life.
What about?
I think the reason he said that is because he's not just on that set as Alec Baldwin, the actor.
He's there as a producer.
So, this is in part his production.
Now, I don't know.
Generally, when you're Alec Baldwin, you get your name on there as a producer, even though you might not actually be the one who has effective control.
But I have heard reports that he did have control on this set and that people were very wary of upsetting him and so on.
And so, I felt like that very, very well oiled crew was with his producer hat on, not wanting to get sued as the man, one of the men or women ultimately responsible for all the mistakes on the set.
He can't really win this by pointing at the assistant director because he's got a higher role.
He's not going to win this, first of all, civilly, because even if it was the assistant director of this in tort law, responde it was superior.
You're responsible for the people that you hired.
And so, although his role as a producer was probably nominal, civil liability, if I were his lawyers, I'd be moving to settle immediately with payments of extraordinary amounts of money.
There's no way he can win a civil case.
But I think none of that necessarily leads to criminal liability.
So, I think there'll be a A distinction, but I hope that the fact that there might not be criminal liability will not affect the changes in the future.
The key is the future no real gun should ever be allowed on a set.
Cuomo Denies Allegations 00:04:01
Period.
End of the sentence.
Every gun should be fake and every blast should be done by CGI.
You cannot allow real guns on a set.
And here there were rumors that there was hunting off the set.
You just can't do it.
It has to be 100% clear, 100% certain.
No guns, no real guns on the set, even with blanks.
Remember that Rendon Lee was killed by a blank.
There was a blank in the gun, and the blank had a little bit of a shard from a previous bullet.
The shard, the tiny little shard, severed his aorta and killed him.
And that couldn't have been anticipated, which is why the defense won that case.
But once you know that, that's not an excuse the next time around.
42 year old woman who was killed.
She's got a nine year old son.
I mean, it's just terrible that, you know, that was no good.
That was no good at all.
Poor woman.
Anyway, we'll continue to watch that and see what happens.
Now, on to Andrew Cuomo, our last topic.
He has been, well, charged.
The sheriff is charging him, but the DA.
Is saying, I am surprised.
I was not involved, which is very weird.
But the charge is forcible touching of a young woman named Brittany Camiso, who I'll put it in her words this is what she says Andrew Cuomo did to her.
You should know that the governor, now former, denies it.
Here she was speaking to CBS.
And the hugs at first were hugs, and then they were hugs when he would pull me close to the point where he could feel my breast on his chest.
I.
Then felt while taking the selfie his hand go down my back onto my butt and he started rubbing it.
Not sliding it, not, you know, quickly brushing over it, rubbing my butt.
And did you ask him, what are you doing?
Well, this was while I was taking the selfie.
I became so nervous that my hands were clearly shaking.
Came back to me, and that's when he put his hand up my blouse and cupped my breast over my bra.
So, forcible touching is a misdemeanor in the state of New York.
It involves touching one for the purpose of degrading or abusing her or for the purpose of gratifying one's sexual desire.
He says it never happened.
She says she's got proof that she was at the governor's mansion on the day in question in December a few years ago.
And he says all your corroborating evidence shows is that you were in and out of the mansion as part of your job.
That's nothing.
Quote, this did not happen.
Your thoughts on how this is going to play out?
Well, first of all, we have to ignore anything that Letitia James has done, her report completely.
She is an opportunist who decided to run for governor, and she decided to get rid of Cuomo as governor because he would have been reelected.
So, A, she should never be allowed to run for governor.
B, her report should be totally dismissed because it was so biased and so involved in a conflict of interest.
What it ends up being is a pure he said, she said case.
There's no corroboration.
The proof only establishes what Cuomo admits.
And that is that she was there.
She was there from time to time.
She may have been there on the day that she claims this happened.
I don't know how to assess that.
She has a story.
He has a denial.
If there's no further corroboration, that's the way it will go to a jury.
But no, the thumb should not be put on the scale based on Letitia James.
What she did was an absolute disgrace remain in the case and file a report.
Completely one sided report intending to use the report to run for governor.
That's just not the way the legal system should operate.
Well, I've admitted my bias on this because one of my closest friends, Janice Dean, really wanted Cuomo gone and did a great job of calling attention to the nursing home scandal, which is really what should have done it.
No BS on Letitia James 00:00:58
But I also have to say, I believe Brittany Camiso.
I don't question her.
I think she seemed very credible to me.
Her story aligns very well with that of the stories of many other women.
This guy's got a pattern.
He's a leech.
That's how he looks to me.
I'm glad he's out of office.
Criminal liability, that's going to be a tough nut to crack.
But I always love talking to Alan Dershowitz about everything, agree or disagree.
Great, great insights and great television, as always.
Great to see Alan.
Thank you so much.
Tomorrow, I love these guys.
The cast from Ruthless, a great podcast, are going to be with us for the first time.
In the meantime, go check us out on youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.
You got to check out my Being Attacked by a Bird clip from Friday and download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.
See you tomorrow.
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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