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Nov. 29, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:30:53
20211129_omicron-panic-and-limbaughs-legacy-with-kmele-fost
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Panic Over New Variants 00:14:54
Hello, my name is Levertium.
Yes, this is the first time I have a hundred and a half years of Levertium.
Yeah.
Prevail with me.
This is the end of the summer, I have a fast summer prize with three for two for Jacob's Suit.
And a huge box of Coca-Cola Serotics is a very good one.
I will show you how to make a new style of the world.
Levertium.
My name is Levertium.
And now, what's for Kix?
Kix can furnish the grins, and it's a selfie.
The Southern can have a good accent and crush it.
Then, we will start the business.
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 and happy Monday.
Hope you had a nice time with your family over Thanksgiving.
I certainly did.
We actually went across the pond to London for a bit.
Have never done that before with the fam.
And it was truly wonderful.
It was so wonderful.
More on that this week because I'm going to show you something really cool that happened.
But now it's time to panic.
Let's just kick the show off today with widespread panic.
That certainly seems to be the message that we're getting from the headlines out there now regarding the new COVID variant.
Doesn't it seem like these media folks are enjoying it?
It seems like they're like, yes, another variant.
Yes, right?
I'm like, would you calm down?
Calm down.
At the same time, of course, Dr. Fauci refuses to rule out more lockdowns.
He loves to lock us down.
Fauci loves the lockdowns, telling us to prepare for the worst and also to trust him because he, quote, represents science.
Those days are gone, Doc.
Sorry to tell you.
I don't know if you're the last to know, but we don't trust you anymore.
The left trusts you implicitly and does whatever you say, but the rest of the country no longer trusts you because you've misled us so many times.
There's a lot to get to this afternoon.
In our second hour, we're going to be joined by James Golden.
I'm looking forward to talking to him.
You may know him better as Bo Snerdly, the longtime producer for Rush Limbaugh and a big part of Rush's show for 30 years.
He's got a new book out on Limbaugh's legacy.
He's been deeply affected by Rush, and I loved reading it.
It really brought back some memories of my own of Rush, who I knew well.
So we'll talk to him in just a bit.
But first, I'm so happy to have back with me now three of my favorite guests.
They are the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast Michael Moynihan, who's a correspondent for Vice News Tonight, and Matt Welch, who is Editor at large for Reason Magazine, and Camille Foster of Freethink Media.
Welcome, guys.
Great to have you back.
Howdy, Megan.
Hi, Megan.
All right.
So, just for the audience at home, it's Michael, the people watching on YouTube.
Michael's on the left, Matt's in the middle, and Camille's on the right.
Am I wrong?
Doesn't it seem like there's a bit of celebration in the media?
It's like, ah, another variant.
Yes, I feel it.
I feel it from Fauci, I feel it from the media.
Like, would you calm down?
I think folks are afraid we would enjoy all of our Turkey Day festivities a little bit too much.
So, to have something awful that they can throw over the whole thing like a wet blanket, you can't pass that up.
Doesn't matter if we don't know how infectious it is.
Doesn't matter if we don't know how deadly it is.
Doesn't matter if there aren't many people who are even necessarily positively confirmed cases that are infected with this variant or if it's in the United States, we should all panic.
We should all freak out right now.
And lockdowns are imminent.
I feel like it's almost the new Russiagate.
You know, it's like another tidbit of information.
Here's what happened with me.
I typically, because it's my job to pay attention to the news, I try to pay attention to the news.
So, over Thanksgiving, I said, you know what?
I am going to pay attention to my lovely, beautiful 10 year old daughter and my friends and my family for the first time in 10 years.
That's the first time she's met me.
And so we're really excited about this.
And I'm going to not pay attention to the news, right?
So I start paying attention yesterday and I just was like, oh my God, it's all over.
So I get how people panic about this stuff.
So if your interaction with this is mostly headlines, so then I start reading a little more and I was like, oh, okay.
So you notice this in the markets too.
The markets tanked in response to this.
And then pre market this morning and so far today, roaring back because they were like, oh, yeah, that's just, that's a bit of hype.
I mean, it's very early indications and, you know, we'll have to consult Dr. Science.
About this sometime soon, but I haven't seen anything that suggests that it is more deadly.
It sounds like we're doing Delta all over again, except it's a little bit more infectious than Delta.
Well, what did we do last time?
What happened when Delta happened?
We forgot everything we'd learned the previous 12 months.
We're like, oh my God, we're going to have to close schools because, you know, think about the kids.
Well, the kids are still very comparatively not infectious, not, and thankfully they don't get hurt.
Comparatively to the rest of the populations, it's crazy.
The numbers are still less than 700 people under the age of 18 in America out of the 775,000 people who've died were kids.
So we're doing it all over again.
If there is no difference ultimately in how much this affects people, right?
The deadliness of it, we're living in a world now where we have vaccines and we have therapeutics.
And we know, we should know by now that we shouldn't freak out, especially about kids.
And people are just starting the engines back up again.
It's mad.
Yeah.
I think it was you, Matt, was pointing out that.
More kids died of pneumonia last year than died of COVID.
And yet we don't impose anywhere near these crazy restrictions on our schools because of pneumonia.
All right.
It's like we've lost the thread.
But the glee over it to me, I was saying, it's almost like the way they loved Russiagate so much.
Any incremental information on Russiagate would lead the news every night on the left wing channels.
Nikki, she was about to join us.
They were looking for confirmation of their worldview, you know, of their.
They're having already settled on a narrative and a story that they liked.
And I almost feel like the approach to these new variants is the new version of that.
They've decided to panic over COVID.
They've decided that anybody who downplays it in any way is a denier, right?
As opposed to just, to quote someone we all love, a person of reason, right?
And I see it in the reporting.
And so to me, it's upsetting that we've gotten to this place where it's like, it's a chance to affirm your worldview as a Democrat.
In order to celebrate when you celebrate a new variant, yeah.
And if you're at all concerned about COVID and you think that Americans should take a pandemic seriously or that people around the world should take things seriously, then you should be concerned about hysteria related to health security theater or public health theater because people can't take the reporting seriously.
They certainly can't take the guidance of public officials seriously if they are freaking out about absolutely everything.
And if the media coverage is driven more by a desire to sensationalize or to, To cater to particular political biases than it is actual tangible evidence that there is something that we should all be concerned about.
You know what else is problematic, Neil?
We should all be concerned about these things.
You know what else is problematic?
It's a slow news week.
It always is over the Thanksgiving holiday.
And that means the media, especially cable news, but also papers, they've got to fill the headlines.
They've got to fill the paper.
They've got to fill the hour after hour.
And this is what they do they'll just take it, report on every little line item, and blow it up like the plague has returned.
In fairness, there is three countries that have stopped travelers.
From entering the country anymore, right?
Israel and Japan and Mulvania, I think it was the third time.
Damn.
But I want to give one shout out to a contrary voice out there in the MSM wilderness, which is David Leonhardt from the New York Times.
Fantastic.
Who has been like this?
His newsletter this very morning said it's not science based to preemptively freak out at everything before, you know, and actually that's deleterious to mental health if you do that.
We don't know yet whether it's more dangerous.
So maybe calm down.
But he's like, he's the one who's like trying to tell neurotic upper class lefties that it's okay not to completely be irrational, crazy people.
Well, and the terrifying thing about that and the David Leonhardt thing is that he has been.
A voice of calm and reason.
And, you know, when he was writing about economics in the New York Times, I used to throw the paper out the window.
And now I'm like, oh, this is interesting.
But the incredible thing about how much this has been a culture war waged on both sides in the mainstream media, we hear often about people, you know, they're not masking and they're protesting and they're Trump people.
The culture war is raged in a much more, you know, it's kind of a sharper way from the left.
And you can see that within the New York Times, I've heard this from people, that there is anger at David Leonhardt.
For actually being calm and rational.
And it's a very, very simple equation here.
Why do people freak out about this?
And why do people freak out about the new variants?
When they know nothing, it's a very, very simple thing.
It's they're pointing their finger at people who have taken the mask off and say, everybody calm down.
We hate Fauci and say, see, here's another one.
Here's another one.
And you're not doing anything.
If you don't take this seriously, look, it's going to get bigger and it's going to expand and it's going to envelop us all and kill us all.
And that is the simple equation for these people.
They don't care about the actual science behind it because science, of course, is not a word that means anything anymore.
I mean, Anthony Fauci has become.
He was appointed by science.
There's apparently a science gone to the university.
There is science over there.
I'm going to start doing that.
I'm just going to start saying, I am journalism.
I am law.
That's it.
You've been saying it quietly over here for a while.
With your face on it that says, she's journalism.
What kind of a weird way of defending your positions is that?
But just a little fact check for people out there who are wondering about the Omicron variant.
Here's what the.
She's the director.
Director of the South African Medical Association.
She's the person who jumped up and down, sounded the alarm, and said, Hey, we got a new one.
Dr. Angelique Kotzi.
Quote, it's all speculation at this stage.
It may be it's highly transmissible, but so far the cases we're seeing are, quote, extremely mild.
Extremely mild.
So we have no evidence to believe this is any more dangerous than the earlier variants, nor even necessarily more transmissible.
Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, came out and citing her and said, Look, so far the symptoms seen are mostly mild.
We have not seen a spike in hospital admissions.
And then he criticized all these travel bans we're seeing, saying there is too much we don't know, too much we don't know to impose economically, socially ruinous policies on South Africa and other nations.
Ready, fire, aim is not prudent public health policy.
Vaccine testing requirements for incoming travelers could be prudent.
Outright travel bans can hurt more than help.
And yet, as we point out, those bans are everywhere now against these South African nations.
The United States, Canada, Russia, Italy, Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Malta, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, I could go on.
Israel plans to ban all foreigners for two weeks after one case was confirmed there between seven and 10 suspected others.
They're tracking people on their iPhones if they've got it.
There's a legal challenge already to that.
Great Britain, yes, travel ban.
And also, all travelers from abroad now must not only get a PCR test within 48 hours of arrival, but any contacts of those who test positive with a suspected case of Omicron.
The contacts have to self isolate for 10 days.
So don't plan on going to Great Britain any.
I got it in just under the wire.
On and on it goes.
Based on what?
No evidence of anything.
We want to have this illusion that there's a button that we can push to make the thing go away.
And especially that there's a button that the bad people that we don't like aren't pushing, um, so that we can blame them for this traumatic virus, uh, that's killing people.
Um, it's a bad uh instinct that we should have.
The instinct should be, what can we do?
What do we know works at this point?
Well, we know that probably the best thing for people to be, um, is vaccinated.
Okay, so like, what can you do, uh, as a government to speed up that process?
Well, you can do a hell of a lot more than the FDA has done, not just of vaccines, but also of testing, right?
Like, if, if, uh, if We should have had easily affordable, easy to get home testing kits to everybody such a long time ago.
We don't, right?
And that doesn't feel to stupid culture war political people like a button to push.
And yet, that's the thing that we need to be thinking about how do you get vaccines more widely distributed and approved quicker?
And then, how do you get the diagnostics available?
But it doesn't fulfill our stupid animal desires to punch somebody in the face and have a culture war argument about it.
It's very frustrating.
Yeah, it's also, I mean, we don't have many conversations about what has worked and what hasn't at this point.
And we have enough time and enough data that one would think, you know, for the first six months, I lived in Sweden for many years.
I followed that debate very closely, that people were saying, can you believe what the Swedes are doing?
They're saying, let her rip, don't wear masks, et cetera.
Now, can we go back to the data of countries that shut down, countries that didn't, countries that had tight lockdowns, countries that were looser, countries that demanded masking and said that, you know, this is your choice, and see what has happened?
Because when you look at this stuff, It's not clear that any one thing has actually worked really well, travel bans included.
So, I mean, this reaction, and to be clear, this could be bad.
We don't know.
And the message, and I think that we're all kind of in agreement on this, is that there's no data to suggest that it is.
But that doesn't mean that it won't be.
But so far, right now, to Scott Gottlieb's comment of like, do not panic first and then see what happens later.
It's complete nonsense.
But we've gotten to that place of where panicking feels good.
It feels like an affirmation that our earlier predictions of doom and gloom.
We're right, right before we know anything.
And then you've got Fauci out there.
I mean, once again, refusing to rule out lockdowns.
It's like, I don't, you're going to tell me I'll play the soundbite, but my position is we're not doing that again.
Americans are not going to do that again.
Maybe his acolytes on the far left will, but the rest of the country won't.
But here's what he said to George Stephanopoulos Do we expect to be seeing more lockdowns again, new lockdowns, more mandates?
You know, I don't know, George.
It's really too early to say.
We just really need to, as I've said so often, prepare for the worst.
Politics Demand Mandates 00:15:21
Would we do it?
I don't think we'll do it again.
It's not too early to say.
You do lockdowns when you don't understand anything and when there's no vaccine.
We understand a lot more, and there's a vaccine and a booster and great therapeutics.
There's all kinds of stuff to mitigate this now.
You don't do lockdowns, they don't work.
I'm not going to bang the pot again at seven o'clock.
No, we need to.
Done with the pot.
At talking about these things in the most urgent way imaginable, as opposed to, and I actually rewound and went back and looked at some of the earliest responses to COVID stuff that people would say now, oh, we moved too slow, we weren't fast enough, we should have locked down immediately.
As you just mentioned, Moynihan, the countries that did lock down very early on, it's possible that they saved some lives early on.
It's also the case that New Zealand and Australia are still struggling with COVID despite those early lockdowns.
And this seems as though this is our new reality, and you cannot lock down in perpetuity.
So, knowing what we know now, It seems like some of that early restraint was probably appropriate, and what we could do with it. Is a great deal more of that early restraint.
And Fauci early on was on board with the restraint train.
Don't freak out.
Don't panic.
Be prudent.
Those are precisely the things that he could be saying now.
And you're absolutely right, Matt.
If you watch that whole 15 minute segment, it's a sequence of questions where is it more infectious?
We don't know.
Is there evidence that it's just kind of like breaking through and more people are going to die?
We don't know.
Okay.
Why are we doing this?
I mean, what are we going to talk about?
Early responses.
Do you remember the early responses?
I was getting like text messages from.
This city of New York and saying, Could you please go to Chinatown?
Oh, go to the parade, soup dumplings, and hug people.
If you don't, you can't work out with them to prove that you're not racist, start kissing people randomly.
But that actually might violate some other Me Too thing.
But you go back and look, and there's some chaotic response.
But to Megan's point, not only is it silly to even mention lockdowns, but to Megan's point, people won't do it.
And it is not people in kind of red states, which is this kind of myth.
I don't think people in New York will do it after having gone through this.
Now we're back at restaurants.
Now we're out in New York, which is even a little crazier than out in Long Island.
Nobody wears masks out there.
The rest of the country, people aren't really wearing masks.
But if you look, and this is the utter stupidity of these myths that there's some sort of Trump virus amongst these people and the sort of brain virus.
Look at Europe.
There's like riots in Austria, in the Netherlands, in Belgium.
People got shot in the Netherlands by the police.
They were able to open fire.
Wow, the police have guns in the Netherlands?
They borrowed them.
Yeah.
So they just gave them back.
But it's insane because these people are out there doing the exact same things.
They're Trump free countries, they're very social democratic.
Yet, for some reason, tens of thousands, if not in some places, hundreds of thousands of people on the streets saying, We're not doing this again.
Mostly peaceful?
Yeah.
There's only one right answer by Fauci or anybody else to are we going to lock down again?
And that is, No, we're not going to.
We tried that when we were in an uncertain place and it had disastrous consequences.
But no, we're not going to do that again.
But he can't let it go.
So, Joe Biden, speaking of things that we haven't learned from, Joe Biden ripped on Trump.
For his travel ban.
The day after Trump implemented it, Joe Biden tweeted out, and I quote, We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus.
We need to lead the way with science, not Donald Trump's record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear mongering.
Then he also promised that he would eradicate COVID if we elected him.
So he's been elected.
And here he is, not even a year into office, implementing what?
A travel ban.
A travel ban against several of these South African countries.
Although he was criticized by some for saying, It's going to kick in in a couple of days.
We're going to let everybody travel in for the next 72 hours, but then we're going to ban.
And some people are saying, well, how does that work?
Aren't we supposed to, like, you know, we're shutting it down?
Isn't it supposed to be shut down?
I don't know.
But you tell me whether there's been a bit of a double standard by the president when it comes to these bans and even by the media who are now trying to defend his ban, whereas they thought Trump's was racist.
I mean, the ban makes so much less sense now, again, because we have all this stuff that we didn't have back then.
The place.
I don't think the bans were a good idea to begin with from an American point of view.
But the place where it made the most sense is a place like New Zealand, right?
Or Australia.
You have an island country.
You don't have a vaccine.
I'm like, all right, maybe let's cut down on the incoming visitors while we try to figure something out.
That is an island nation.
And that is 2020 in April.
We are not an island nation.
And it's 2021.
And we have all this stuff.
It doesn't make any sense.
The virus is going everywhere.
That's what they do.
And we have all this protection for it.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
And he should be held to a more exacting standard, actually, than Donald Trump was back then.
He most certainly is not.
And he most certainly is not.
And he's not the standard now.
Yeah, I mean, it's you.
Politics is annoying in the sense that, I mean, remember that Mitt Romney was brutalized for saying Russia was our greatest geopolitical enemy.
People are like, can you believe this cold warrior?
Donald Trump comes into office.
It's like, we literally have to bomb Leningrad.
It's called St. Petersburg now, but fine.
People freak out, right?
They change on a dime if the politics demands it.
And the politics has demanded it.
And nobody is actually offering that assessment of how well Joe Biden is doing in numbers, in rhetoric, and in policy, because there's actually You know, there's no future in it for them.
They know it's going to kind of even out with what they saw with Donald Trump, and they prefer not to talk about it.
Can we just spend one minute on the loony New York governor, Kathy Hochul?
She's already declared a state of emergency.
This allows non essential procedures in the hospitals to be postponed in order to increase capacity, despite no evidence that we need any increased capacity.
She says she did it to deal with keywords, staffing shortages, and to boost bed capacity amid an anticipated spike in new cases.
Oh, great.
Okay.
So who's anticipating it?
Because it doesn't sound like the CDC necessarily is, the WHO, Scott Gottlieb doesn't seem to necessarily be.
And by the way, new cases doesn't mean new hospitalizations.
And you guys tell me whether staffing shortages caused by her vaccine mandate are what she's really looking to cover for here.
Well, I mean, that is the ultimate sort of gotcha, isn't it?
Like the staffing shortages induced by your policies that were supposed to be this precautionary thing.
Everyone who works in a hospital has to be vaccinated.
If any population, if there's any population I'm not uniquely concerned about with respect to their voluntary decision not to get vaccinated, it's probably the people who have been dealing directly with COVID for almost two years now.
I would like for as many people as possible to get vaccinated.
It seems quite clear to me that there are plenty of people who are actively making the decision not to get vaccinated, and some of them are probably doing so in response to the mandates.
Hi, mom.
Yeah.
I mean, they have my sister and in law and brother both work in the healthcare industry.
They're both vaccinated.
Hope I'm not outing them.
But there is a countrywide nursing shortage right now, just as there's a labor shortage in general.
But nurses and people in the medical profession are burned out, understandably.
But also, if there's a labor shortage everywhere, which there is, and you add the special extra sauce of a vaccine mandate that you cannot test your way out of, You can't just get a test once a week.
You can't show antibodies from having had COVID before.
That's not enough.
If you add that little extra thing, one, the media was full of reports like, well, people were upset at the vaccine mandates, but 97% of healthcare workers complied with it.
So what's the problem?
What's the problem?
That 3%.
You have a staffing shortage.
You have absolutely no increase, really, of hospitalizations happening in New York, although there is the predictable regional and seasonal surge of COVID cases.
But That little 3% means that you have to have, or the governor thinks you have to have, an emergency order of your own creation.
And this is going to replicate all over the place in California, all over the country.
People are doing these vaccine mandates, including of students and K 12 students all over California, which is crazy.
They're going to kick students out of school over the next couple of months, tens of thousands, and send them into remote learning, which we know is terrible, send them to their families, right?
Which is going to make them more at risk, probably, too.
And we're doing this just because we want to see that we press that button.
Called science and did this thing that wasn't really scientifically based.
Can we create a panic tracker?
We need one of these things because we have beyond the map.
Oh my God.
Because you remember, people forget this.
I mean, remember Rochelle Walensky in, I just look at the data, it was in March.
When she was literally crying, George is always crying on television.
The head of the CDC is weeping.
Literally, there's no crying in baseball or the CDC.
And she's weeping and she says, impending doom.
That's what's around the corner in March of 2021.
This is crazy.
And then now we have so many great governors of this state, don't we, in New York?
Is that we know what's going to happen?
It's going to be awful.
So we're declaring a state of emergency.
State of emergencies, like executive orders, should be used sparingly.
And we should not put that much power into the hands of people when there's actually no impending crisis other than one that's been created by the government.
They all make it.
How much more emergent can we be?
Because we still, if you have a kid in New York City public school, and I know a couple of you guys do, your kid's eating lunch outside still with a mask on, socially distanced, in what last Wednesday was 39 degree weather.
So, I mean, now what?
In a state of emergency, but they don't get to eat at all because you do have to take your mask down for two seconds.
But what happens, Reagan, as you know, is that they're.
Now, just like closing schools.
My favorite is that they were doing this around just coincided with Veterans Day, which was on a Thursday.
So that Friday became a mental health day for a whole lot of students to help you cope with COVID.
It had nothing to do with the mental health of teachers who wanted a four day weekend.
But we're seeing these preemptive and also staffing shortage led closures all over the country.
It's been a huge spike everywhere, and especially in blue states, places where the teachers' unions have more sway.
And can dictate terms a lot more.
So we're seeing that as well.
And this is exactly the opposite of what those kids need.
And all of the hysteria has probably hit that population, people under the age of 18.
They've suffered from adult hysteria more than any other population in the country over the last two years.
I think we're going to be dealing with the after effects of that for years.
Hopefully they can all bounce back, but it's awful.
And I think people are going to lose those.
There's going to be a lot of parents.
You'd think people were mad in Virginia in November if they reimpose.
Like school lockdowns and closures and things like that, there's going to be a lot of otherwise really good Democrats whose eyes are going to pop out of their skulls and look for anyone to vote for except for those people.
Well, and that's a good place to pause it because, um, but hold that thought, we'll take it off there when we come back after a quick break because there was some polling and apparently a big meeting amongst these top notch Democrats trying to predict what's going to happen with the party.
And they're speaking of panic, they're there more with the guys of the fifth column in just a bit.
Hi, I'm Levertiem.
I'm going to tell you that the taco quelling is healthy.
Yes, I'm going to tell you that.
I'm going to tell you that 30% of the taco product is healthy.
So, I'm going to tell you that I'm still not going to tell you that.
Levertiem.
I'm going to tell you that.
Let's kick it off here.
I don't want to move on from COVID and the latest variant without talking about Fauci because to me he's getting more political.
In his statements.
And I think it's a mistake.
I realize it must be very irritating to get attacked all the time, but it comes with a job, especially in times like these.
And here he was on one of the weekend shows over the summer, I mean, over the weekend, Sunday, trying to respond to attacks by Ted Cruz on him.
Listen here.
My job has been totally focused on doing what I can with the talents and the influence I have to make scientific advances to protect the health.
Of the American public.
So anybody who spends lies and threatens and all that theater that goes on with some of the investigations and the congressional committees and the Rand Pauls and all that other nonsense, that's noise.
Margaret, that's noise.
Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted.
Yeah.
I have to laugh at that.
I should be prosecuted.
What happened on January 6th, Senator?
I'm just going to do my job.
And I'm going to be saving lives, and they're going to be lying.
Anybody who's looking at this carefully realizes that there's a distinct anti science flavor to this.
So if they get up and criticize science, nobody's going to know what they're talking about.
But if they get up, And really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci.
Well, people could recognize there's a person there.
So it's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science.
OMG.
The God complex, the referral to himself and the third person, the obvious partisanship, you know, raising January 6th.
What's happening?
Yeah, it's very odd.
I mean, there's one he said on numerous occasions that he represents science, like on numerous occasions.
I can almost give you one of those.
Right?
Like maybe just inelegantly, you say this thing and it kind of comes across the wrong way.
It's a little boisterous when you do it repeatedly.
What the hell is wrong with you?
Like, either you just don't get it or like something is actually off in here.
Like, it's very strange to have someone talk in that particular way.
And we call this fallacy appeal to authority.
We know that that is not an adequate substitute for actually having a conversation on the basis of facts.
And it is all nakedly partisan and nakedly political.
And it's not as though in his Ongoing feud with Rand Paul, Dr. Fauci has been extremely forthcoming.
It is fair to say that people are being partisan and political on multiple sides, but his comments publicly about gain of function research and the difference between what he has funded and what others have funded or what others have talked about is less than honest and less than forthright.
And it is the case that it is almost certainly not true that there's any connection between the stuff that Fauci was funding around to the tune of what, like $200,000, $250,000.
Affinity Groups Controversy 00:12:18
It's very unlikely that that is what caused the pandemic.
But if you were more candid about this from the outset, this wouldn't be an issue.
It's too complicated because you're an operator now.
The gain of function stuff was too Byzantine and complicated for people to really get upset at him for because what money went where and what does gain of function even mean?
So, I mean, he kind of skated on that one in a lot of ways.
But, you know, and Rand Paul just looks like he's bullying Mr. Science.
I mean, that's how it's played.
But the science thing is weird because.
At what point are you Mr. Science?
Because the science, in quotes, has gotten things wrong, as it will.
Because what is science?
It is not a thing.
It is a process of discovery.
And in that process of discovery, things change, facts change, ideas change when numbers come through.
So if he says at one point, I am Mr. Science, go to Chinatown and just be nice to everybody.
Don't panic about this stuff.
Maybe the next week.
Masks cannot help you.
Masks cannot help you.
I mean, what are the Things, when are you Mr. Science and when are you not?
I think it's unbelievably manipulative to actually say that there is one thing called science and I am the representative of it.
And if you question that, you're somebody that hates science.
There's a lot of this around, particularly in this city and people that I know, that wield science as this kind of talismanic thing that I believe in it and you don't.
It's that simple.
And if you believed in science, then all this would go away.
It's simply not true, number one.
And it's just implausible in almost every possible iteration of the way he talks about this.
The CDC, about 10, 15 years ago, came out with a document of what to do during a pandemic.
One of the biggest underlying resolutions of it was the public messaging has to be key.
Explain what you know in a timely and honest fashion, including what you don't know.
That is so important.
That just hasn't happened here.
When Donald Trump was president and he was doing the daily press conference, that didn't help that process at all.
But Tony Fauci hasn't helped either.
Why is he talking about himself, by the way?
Is that his job, is to reflect on his role in the politics?
No.
It's actually not.
We should be.
And also, why are we going to him about lockdowns, anyways?
That is not a science.
That is a public policy thing of which he might have something to say, but I want to hear him come up with a scientific measurement of how these lockdown things happened and did they work?
Did they not?
In Sweden, did they not?
That's not what we're hearing.
That's not what we get from Mr. Science.
We get from, like, oh, we have to prepare for the worst.
That's not science.
January 6th was pretty bad.
It's one thing to have a politician in office, we're used to this, who is a partisan hack.
Who we understand at heart really kind of hates half the country.
Like, we, I think we've had a lot of those recently.
But it's another thing to have our public health leader, I mean, he's the face of public health, at least in the United States, be so dismissive of the millions of Americans out there who have questions about his messaging.
And to raise the January 6th thing, you know, to me, I was like, talk about pressing political buttons that you don't need to press Fauci.
He's gotten a little too offended, I guess, by Ted Cruz and the attacks on him, but he needs to shift into a lower gear.
If he wants the right half of the country to listen to him, At all anymore.
And they do matter.
They do matter from his fear, public health.
I mean, a reasonable response to Ted Cruz suggesting you ought to be put in jail and prosecuted from someone in Fauci's position is listen, I'm not going to politicize this.
This isn't about me.
My job is to give you the best possible information I can about this pandemic.
And if you have questions about that, I'm happy to answer them.
I can understand how someone might take this very personally and make this about themselves in that context.
But once that starts to happen, Your boss, the president of the United States, someone ought to weigh in and say, Hey, you know what?
This isn't how we ought to be doing public health at the federal level.
It just isn't.
This is too.
That answer was so good, Camille.
You should call him or let's send him this segment.
Instead, it's, I am science.
I am science.
I don't know what he thinks about January 6th, but I like him.
Okay, I wanted to ask, I think it's you, Matt, who had an article recently about the affinity groups in the New York City schools.
Right?
Was it you?
Yeah.
I read it and I was horrified, but also not surprised, right?
Now they're doing, or they did, in the New York City public schools, or at least one of them, this sort of lower Manhattan community middle school, which is public, in the highly coveted District 2, affinity groups to kick off the day.
And so you tell me what they thought was a good way of promoting diversity amongst children, anti racism, as it's called.
So in first period, you stand up and you get to choose which affinity group you belong to.
And these are groups that you can go and talk and feel like.
In both a safe and brave way, I'm using their language, talk about issues about cultural identity and racism in this country.
So you got to choose that you can go into the Asian group.
You can go into the whites group over here.
You can go to this special group called African American and Hispanic.
They're one group.
It's the, we call it the David Ortiz group over here.
Big copy group.
There's multiracial.
So David, is he multiracial?
So you get to choose.
And then there's the I don't really want to choose group.
It's also called racist.
Fascist.
Monster.
And what is.
What's brilliant about it is that people are genuinely baffled.
This became a subject of at least small controversy.
It was written up in the tabloids in New York.
And the people who are promoting this, the Department of Education in New York, said, This is a two day celebration.
This is an opportunity for a celebration to wake up in the morning and, in the name of fighting segregation, just segregate yourself in these groups that don't really necessarily mean much of anything.
If you think about what is a more common thing, if you're going to do this, and I wouldn't, and because of the influence of Camille, I just opt out of racial categories whenever given the option to.
But if you're going to lump together people, what would be a more unifying thing?
If you are an off the boat immigrant from any country, you have more in common with the off the boat immigrants from all the other countries than you do about what color of skin you have.
My God, it's so much more obvious.
But the way that Americans talk about and the way the sort of race industry talks about this and sorts people into these affinity groups, Which is bananas to, I would guess, 90% of the country.
To them, it makes total sense.
We're creating safe spaces for people to talk about racism.
And that's the thing.
This is the thing that people tend not to notice when just they're outraged by it and they should be outraged by it.
But there's a purpose to this.
And one of the purposes to this is what you said.
You're quoting them saying, we're segregating people into these affinity groups so they can be brave and safe.
What is the presumption there?
The presumption is if you don't do this, people are wandering around New York City.
Public schools, not a very right wing place, feeling unsafe and not very brave because they're being set upon because of their race.
So it establishes this thing that doesn't exist and solves it.
I mean, it is like Orwellian in the actual sense of the word Orwell, of 1984, creating problems out of whole cloth and then having Big Brother solve them.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
If people do feel racially oppressed in New York City, generally speaking, they probably need therapy.
That's the truth.
But more than that, And it's worth like coming back to this all the time.
We were having the conversation about the pandemic and about all of the politicization of everything.
And what actually matters is people's health.
And when we're talking about the schools, what actually matters is whether or not these kids are learning, whether or not the schools are at all any damn good.
And there are so many ways in which these schools have been failing these kids for now going on two years.
In the midst of this pandemic, kids like at home, schools closing for mental health breaks, not taking into consideration that the best thing that they could possibly do for mental health, the mental health of the parents, And likely the students is one, stop segregating them on the basis of race.
I thought we figured that out.
And put them in class and allow them to learn things.
Stop shaming them.
Stop screwing up with them, screwing with the math curriculum for the purposes of racial equity.
Do the things that you know are absolutely essential.
Focus on the universe of things kids ought to be learning in K through 12 and stop the insanity.
But instead, all of this garbage is a cover for people who have been inept.
And who have been derelict in their duties when it comes to educating their children.
And that really is the thing that we have to focus on with respect to the culture wars.
The reality is that so much of this insanity is going to fail.
In much the same way that DARE, the program to eradicate drugs in public schools and drug addiction, did not work.
The critical race theory phenomena is not going to inspire a race war.
What sane people who see this garbage for what it is need to do is recognize that deficiency and say, take the moral high ground here and say, The thing we ought to be prioritizing is education.
What are kids learning?
What do the standardized testing results look like?
In most of the places that are focusing on this stuff in obscene ways, They aren't doing great.
No, they haven't been doing great for a very long time.
And they just want to attribute it all to systemic racism as opposed to let's take a look at our teachers and our unions and how we allow passing of the trash when it comes to bad teachers and so on.
No, I looked at this and I thought, okay, first of all, the way they're grouping the kids, it comes straight out of the Democratic National Committee.
You know, like the Hispanics with the black kids.
That's exactly how they want people to vote.
That's why they're so upset that Hispanics are slipping away, right?
When they went for Trump down in Texas and they were like, no, no, no, Hispanic, you're black adjacent.
You're not white adjacent, right?
But if you did go for Trump, then you're white adjacent.
But they're like, come back, come back to the minority group that we can control with the Democratic Party.
And the other thing I thought was okay, great.
I'd love to walk around and just be like a little bird listening to the conversations of the kids in the affinity groups.
I guarantee you, if you have a conversation in the Hispanic and the African American group that goes like this, what's it like to be a person of color?
I feel strong.
I feel empowered.
I feel smart.
I feel special.
They'd be like, yes, it's working.
You heard that same conversation in the Asian or the white group, the school would shut down.
Like, dude, what?
Oh my God.
I'm proud to be white.
You might even say I have a type of white pride.
Not going to go over well.
And it shouldn't go over well, by the way.
You told me.
You told me to group by race and talk about what it's like, right?
Like, I mean, there is nothing on earth more racist than this idea that Hispanics are one contiguous unit.
It's insane.
There's no difference between Mexicans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and people from South America now being lumped to this.
You know, somebody who's the ambassador to Spain's daughter.
Is the same as somebody who grew up on the Hamilton Heights in the Puerto Rican neighborhood.
That's the flattening of this stuff, which is so dumb.
But I have to get one thing off my chest because I am a little too annoyed by this.
We really have to destroy this cult of mental health.
And what I mean by that, to be clear, is that this overuse and the misuse of it, so it allows people to do crazy things.
So if you say speech is violence, for instance, you don't like violence.
So nobody wants to say I'm against free speech.
That's a bad thing.
So you say it's violence because people can be against violence.
This is the same thing in these public schools.
They say, like, oh, it's a mental health issue.
We need a mental health break.
You oppose mental health?
I mean, look, the other day, Best Buy told people they could have a mental health day because of the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.
No.
I'm trying to get a hard drive.
What are you talking about?
You're sad?
Like, what is this?
Did you get a day back on?
Did you have to work double time because of the Arbery verdict?
Was it a good verdict?
I don't understand this stuff at all.
Relax.
Your mental health is fine.
You're making mine horrible.
I'm losing my mind, as you can see.
Speech Is Violence Debate 00:03:21
You guys are making all of ours better.
Quick break, then we'll get back with this Democratic meeting.
Don't go anywhere.
And don't forget, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel, 111 every weekday at noon East, and the full video show and clips when you subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.
If you prefer an audio podcast, subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free.
And by the way, I do read the reviews over on Apple Podcasts, and I love hearing from all you guys.
So if you want to send me a message, go on over there.
I've read all 21 podcasts.
Plus thousand of them, you could be the one to get us over to twenty two thousand.
Look forward to reading.
Hi, Dominie Levertiem.
Yeah, this is the first time we have a fast summer breeze, metre for two, Jacobs, who talked to us, who are a boxer, Coca Cola, Serotic, and Drone Gruner.
Going Pomini and Nobis, still not just a student, all dog, whatever, Levertiem, many Levertiem.
All right, so before we get to the Dems, There's an ad.
It's a Norwegian ad.
It's making headlines because in it they make Santa gay.
So Santa's not only gay, but he kisses another man.
I'm going to play it.
And if you want to go to YouTube later, you'll be able to watch it.
I just watch it for the first time.
And I say it's very awkward.
And it's an ad, gentlemen, for the postal service.
For the people listening on SiriusXM, it shows Santa.
And he's looking at a man in a suit.
And they've got loving eyes.
They're getting closer.
Their lips are getting closer, closer.
They're cocking their heads to the right and to the left, respectively.
And now they're kissing.
They're making out.
They clearly love each other.
And my question to you guys is two, one, why is this necessary?
And two, What the hell happened to Mrs. Claus?
This is bullshit.
I mean, that's the most Norwegian thing I've ever seen, by the way, because the post for the postal service, as someone who lived in Sweden, they will take any opportunity to just make characters gay.
We will?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Sante is the nicest he likes this man.
I thought, first of all, that it was Wilfred Brimley making out with that guy, but apparently he has diabetes and died.
But yeah, that is the most insane thing ever because it's about the postal service.
What is the connection there?
It's like a long production.
I mean, it is an intense thing where they're following this man and his relationship with Santa as a false over the course of years.
It is so.
So is he cheating on Mrs. Claus with this random Norwegian?
There's no mention of Mrs. Claus.
But you know what?
The Clauses have a notoriously open relationship.
It's been a source of scandal for so long.
Please let the next one be Mrs. Claus with the pool boy, for the love of God, if there's justice in this world.
I want to direct everyone's attention to the 1972 ish.
Was it Santa Claus is Coming to Town?
There's one in which.
It's young Chris Kringle and young Mrs. Claus.
Yes, it is Jessica.
Jessica, and she has a breakthrough kind of drug and sex moment.
What is that?
Like she sees the lights, the rainbows.
I can sing the song.
I watch it all the time.
Megan's got that on her phone.
She's incredible.
You may have heard I'm obsessed with sanity.
That's incredible.
Okay.
I had to get that in.
Independent Voter Shifts 00:02:30
It was too good.
Now, the Democrats are apparently in a panic.
They had a big meeting.
Third Way, which is described as a center left group, and its pollsters met and reported.
Bad news for us.
The Democrat brand is broken.
The infrastructure bill is not fixing it.
They had this meeting after the Virginia losses.
They looked at a focus group at polling.
The voters couldn't name anything that they had done.
They said, the infrastructure spending bill, it's too late.
One strategist said, we're effed.
This guy advises major donors.
Love this quote from Megan Jones, former Harry Reid advisor and Nevada based Dem consultant.
Her brother recently told her that the Build Back Better plan sounds like a fucking Fitness plan.
Nobody knows what it is.
That is great.
That is amazing.
Hire them.
So, are they right to panic?
Wow.
Oh my God.
Yes.
I mean, they're right to panic.
And it's the first, I never thought I would say this, you know, 20 years ago, advising the Democratic Party to go get the dregs of the Clinton administration advisors because they're the only ones that are actually making any sense.
I mean, this is, of course, an era that was an era of free trade and ending welfare as we know it, et cetera.
But it's, you know, James Carville, every time his little turtle head pops up, he's making sense about the faculty lounge.
You say, like, you know, we can't use the language of the faculty lounge, which is true, which is the kind of, you know, Nicole Hannah Jones sort of thing, and actually talk to people about this sort of average issues.
And this is why Republicans won in 2016, why they're doing well now amongst working class voters.
Nobody, including Republicans, talked to or about working class voters for a very, very long time.
And when Democrats are out there fighting these battles, In the media sphere of issues that have literally zero resonance to the average Democratic voter.
On top of what Megan pointed out, is that people just can't point out what they have done.
It explains the cratering poll numbers.
And the media fell in love with AOC and the squad.
And that is the wrong sort of direction for the party in the future if they want to win.
Biden won because of independents who were sick of Trump and sick of like the tumult around it.
Independents didn't vote for Biden.
That's also third party voters who voted a lot for third parties in 2016, and they came back to major parties in 2020.
They voted for him not so that he would do transformative $5 trillion spending, you know, whatever's on party line, you know, tiebreaker votes.
That's not why.
Try doing that.
Try doing that spending and then lock us down again and see how that goes.
In the next election.
Rush's Generous Leadership 00:03:15
Guys, always such a pleasure.
You guys are so fun.
Michael, Matt, Camille, to be continued, I hope.
Coming up, Bo Snurdly.
James Golden is his actual name, but we know him better as Bo.
On Rush Limbaugh's legacy.
Don't go away.
Hi, I'm Niel Levertiam.
I'm going to tell you about the first summer breeze.
Joining me now, James Golden.
He is here to discuss his new book, Rush on the Radio, a tribute from his sidekick for 30 years.
Think about that.
Millions, millions of Americans loved Rush Limbaugh, the man with the golden mic, the man who completely invented talk radio.
He really did.
But to really know Rush was to understand the true generosity of a man with insane, Insane natural talent and the ability to captivate listeners for decades.
Only one person had the truly best seat in the house, and that is James Bosnerdly Golden.
Welcome, James.
Thanks so much for being here.
Megan, what a pleasure it is.
How are you today?
I'm good.
Boy, oh boy, did you have the best seat in the house.
And I love that this book captures Rush's, as we pointed out in the intro, his generosity and his kindness.
I know you experienced it, I experienced it personally.
You're a black man, I'm a woman.
He was called racist.
He was called sexist.
His life said different.
People took comedy bits and his irreverence for anyone and everyone, right?
And tried to turn that to make him into this monstrous figure.
But the way he actually treated people was, as his microphone, golden.
Yeah, you know, Rush was just such a unique human being on so many different levels.
I, and Megan, you're so right.
Being around somebody for Decades, you really do get a chance to see who they are.
And when the cameras are off, when the microphone is off, you get to see them, you get to know them.
I can tell you that every single day, regardless of whatever interaction it was, Rush was the epitome of politeness, of kindness with people.
That's not to say, I mean, we all have our moments.
Yeah, you do something that would harm his show, he'd throw you under the bus pretty quick.
But what a generous, wonderful, Human being, he was generous.
Some of the stories of his generosity are still emerging because one of the things that he insisted was that people not talk about it.
You know, he would do something and he said he didn't want the credit for it, he would just do it because he felt it was the right thing to do.
And in terms of his kindness, look, we had a staff of about 24, 25 people, Megan, on the everyday staff.
And most of the people that were with us were there for decades.
not for a year or two, but for decades.
Pain Addiction Struggles 00:04:12
Why?
Because Rush hired people based on their merit, number one, and then he let them do their jobs.
We didn't have a lot of meetings.
We didn't have a lot of back and forth.
He just hired people and let them do their jobs.
And like me, I say anybody on our staff could have written the book because we all have this in common.
We loved Rush very deeply as a human being, not liked our boss.
No, we loved our boss.
We loved the man.
And we wanted to please him, we wanted to be excellent.
He set a bar for excellence, and we all strove to meet it every day.
That was what working with him was like.
He was fallible as any man or woman is.
And of course, his critics want to use weirdly things like his drug addiction against him.
I mean, if it were a liberal, they would never mock one's drug addiction.
Because it was Rush Limbaugh, people like Joy Behar thought that would be fair game to just try to completely delegitimize him.
But he said, and I learned this from your book, he loved not being addicted to drugs, but he thought it was a gift.
And the rehab that he went to to get over the Oxycontin addiction was.
He thought it was directly from God.
Can you talk about that?
Well, let's start with where it started.
It started because he was in physical pain.
He had a back surgery.
Look, I remember these days so well, Megan.
He did some shows on the West Coast at a remote radio station, and he could not even sit down for the shows because his back was in such bad shape at the moment.
So he had surgery to correct it.
The surgery didn't work.
Now, how many people have that story and know that story?
So, to help mitigate the pain, his doctors prescribe pain medication.
What happens when you are in pain that doesn't stop and there's no one really doing a very serious pain management regime on you?
Most people get addicted to the drug.
And that's what happened to Rush.
When it became apparent that he was addicted and that he had to stop, he stopped the behavior and he didn't relapse and relapse and go back and relapse.
He stopped.
But it also, during the time that he was in rehab, he said that it really did allow him to understand so much more about himself and some of the ancillary reasons why he was using the drugs as well as the pain.
And that's why he viewed it as a gift.
And I think it's a remarkable testament.
Anybody that's been addicted to anything knows how hard an addiction is to break.
He broke that addiction, never went back to it.
And that was a willpower for him.
And it was a strong willpower.
Look, I've had my own addiction issues over the years with cigarettes.
You know, you quit, you go back, you quit, you go back.
It's very, addictions are very hard.
And so many Americans are addicted.
Pain medications, particularly because they are given so freely to combat pain, have become a real problem in most American households.
We know somebody in our family, our immediate family, our distant family, or our circle of friends.
Those had issues with pain and pain addiction.
That's right.
And especially like Rush had, you know, back in the 90s, and we've had this in my own family, when you were becoming addicted to Oxycontin or an opioid, you didn't know that you were part of a sea of millions across the country that was being over prescribed these drugs and told that they were not nearly as addictive as they turned out to be.
And so, you know, for somebody as smart, as rich, as famous as Rush to, you know, talk about that, to be an example of it.
I think it helped a lot of people ultimately.
And that's, I don't know, if you believe in a God that sort of guides our collective lives, you could see why he would make somebody like that, you know, a public figure, the face of it for a time, just to let other people know they're not alone.
Building Audience Bonds 00:14:18
I said in the intro, he basically invented talk radio.
I mean, it existed before Rush, but in that field, there's Rush Limbaugh and then there's everybody else.
Rush had a unique talent.
He came prepared when, look, he was fired multiple times for trying to be the person that he wanted to be on the air, for injecting his personality when program directors didn't want the personality injected.
Strong.
About his own ideas of what radio should be.
He left radio for a while and went to work for the Kansas City Royals.
He decided he was going to give radio one more shot.
And when that opportunity came, it was in Sacramento for him.
He took it and he finally was given the license to just be himself, to do what he wanted to do.
And the show exploded in Sacramento.
And that's when.
Ed McLaughlin and his other broadcast partners that saw what was taking place in that show decided this is a show that we want to syndicate.
Now, Megan, in radio, one of the rules, quote unquote, rules at the time was you don't put a syndicated program on in midday because no one is going to really listen to it.
Within months of that show being on the air, the number of stations started multiplying like crazy.
The number of listeners started growing.
First, a million, then three, then five, five million a week.
Up until the time Rush died, the show was still growing.
33 years later, there was still a new audience coming in.
It was a remarkable feat that nobody in our radio profession, and we have some great people in talk radio, great people with lots of talent.
And by the way, you're one of them now.
That's right, I crossed over.
Yes.
Yes.
With immense talent.
But nobody could do radio like Rush did.
He understood every single nuance that a radio performer, because it is a performance, you're on a radio stage, you're there talking to a microphone, maybe two or three people in a room looking at you while you're doing it.
Or now with cameras, with now millions of people perhaps looking, but he knew every element of that business.
He could make, and Even those of us on the staff joke about this how he can make almost anything, the most mundane topic that he found interesting, he could persuade you that it was interesting for you.
That's right.
That's right.
Just a remarkable talent.
As he used to say, I was born to host and you were born to listen.
Well, he used to say it in jest, but I really do believe, going back to what you said about God preparing you for things in your life, God gave him the tools to be as persuasive as he was and to have that his tool set.
Shine uniquely.
Doug and I went down there and visited Rush a couple of times and at his home and saw him in front of a group of people and then on his marriage to Catherine.
And one thing I can tell you, the audience about Rush, you've seen it many times, James, is whereas some of us, we can get up in front of a crowd and we can handle speaking in front of a crowd, may not love it.
You watch Rush Limbaugh do it and you do realize the difference between an introvert and an extrovert.
He Thrive on it.
He came alive in front of people.
His chest would puff out and his energy would shoot up and his body language got big.
And you just saw this larger than life figure rally the troops to do anything.
You were willing to do anything.
Whatever he wanted you to do, you would do it because.
He was, in a way, a great salesman for whatever the cause was, but it was inspirational as a matter of public speaking.
You know, for me as a public figure, I was like, this is it.
He's got it.
Yeah.
And that's something no one can teach you.
You either have it, that thing, or you don't.
No one can teach you how to not have butterflies in your stomach when you're cripped or not have it.
No one can teach you how to read an audience to see and make adjustments to how you're speaking.
or to whether the audience is absorbing what you're saying or not.
Those are all the things that he could do.
He could be in an audience situation, really understand what it is that he needed to do to be persuasive.
And he would do that.
And he was also so quick-witted.
But see, Megan, look, you know this, both in your broadcast career, but I suspect, Megan, that you know this even from your career in the law.
None of that comes without preparation.
All of those hours by yourself, reading, preparing, becoming more knowledgeable about your subject matter, maybe even reading things and you're not quite sure how it's going to be used someday.
All of that counts because in those moments, you draw on everything that you innately know in that moment.
And that's what Rush was able to do extremely well.
And he never stopped preparing for his show.
He never handed off those duties to anyone else.
He spent hours.
Every single day that he did a radio show, he spent hours and hours preparing for it.
Yeah.
And he, I mean, he talked about how he understood people loved him, his audience loved him.
He said it was surpassed only by his love for his audience.
But I would say it must have been damn near equal because one of the thoughts I had forgotten about this, James, but tell us about what happened when they tried to boycott Rush.
It was the Florida Orange Juice Commission.
That was running, I guess they spent a million dollars advertising its product on Russia's program.
And then a group of feminists got upset and tell us what happened.
This was remarkable because this was early on in the program.
This is while the program was still in quote unquote its infancy.
The Florida Orange Juice Commission was the first million dollar sponsor to the program, which was a big deal.
They came up, they had meetings, they had decided, okay, this we want to advertise on this show.
They did it.
Before the advertising started, Patricia Ireland and what later Rush would call the NAGS, the National Association of Gals, but was the National Organization of Women, decided that they were going to run a quote unquote nationwide boycott on Florida orange juice.
They went to Florida.
in an attempt to begin the rally.
They were surprised because what they were met with were people, Russian Limbaugh fans, who had beat them to their location and had bought out every single container of orange juice in the store that they were holding their boycott.
That's where they went after that.
They were met with Russian Limbaugh fans who cleaned the shelves of orange juice in support.
I think this was important because this was also the first time that I think we saw that the left was hollow.
This idea, you know, they could show up with 12 people and you'd get national news coverage.
When it became apparent that they were being outnumbered.
By hundreds of people who were coming to support Rush, all of a sudden the news coverage on that story stopped cold.
Did not want the leftists that run much of the mainstream media, did not want to see their ideological allies in the National Organization OF Women embarrassed as thoroughly, as thoroughly as they were embarrassed by that so-called boycott.
It was hilarious and Rush had a lot of fun with it on the air.
You know, I feel like it was Dave Rubin who said in a tweet during Trump, and I was like, this is so good.
This really sums it up.
He said, Trump taught Republicans how to fight.
And that is true.
You know, that is one of the reasons why so many Republicans love Trump.
He didn't roll over.
And Brett Kavanaugh is the best example of it.
You know, what other president would have stood by Brett Kavanaugh?
And the fact that Trump did it allowed the process to play out in a way that totally exonerated Brett Kavanaugh.
You know, otherwise he would have skulked away, his reputation ruined, his Supreme Court dreams.
Dashed and Trump would have replaced him with some generic other candidate.
But only Trump, I really think, had the guts to say no.
He had the guts to fight.
Rush Limbaugh did the same.
He fought.
He didn't.
It took so much.
Like Rush would not just lie down if you came for him.
He would fight.
And I just wonder if you think, because Rush was one of the people, he didn't really endorse Trump early, but he kept the door open for him.
He wasn't one of those early people to be like, no, never screw this guy.
He's terrible.
At a time when most of the Republican Party was saying that.
So how did he.
Do you think it was that connection?
You know, the appreciation of a fighter, of an outsider, of somebody who wasn't like, what do you think made Rush be able to see the potential of Trump when virtually no other Republicans were seeing it?
Well, as always, you're quite perceptive.
You know, I can tell you just from some of the inside discussions that we would have with Rush in the studio about it, not only was the door open for Trump, he was very, very cognizant of what was going on in the Trump campaign.
And I do believe that he recognized those same qualities about Trump.
That he had himself.
And in fact, Rush actually said it.
He said, like me, the only person that can screw my career up is me.
Rush would say this all the time.
He said, the mainstream media didn't make me, and therefore they can't break me.
The connection, Rush would say, that I have with my audience is the connection that was established based on a trust between the audience and I, and only I can destroy that.
And the same thing with Trump and his base of voters.
The voters that voted for Trump, the people that came out for Trump, Donald Trump trusted him.
And by the way, they still do trust him, much to the chagrin of establishment Republicans and Democrats.
There was a piece today I just read, another one of these endless pieces on how Donald Trump is so awful for the Republican Party.
The Republican Party has never run like it has with Donald Trump.
And yet you still find these establishment types in the Republican Party and Democrat Party who are still so engrossed in their Trump hate that they can't think of anything.
But that.
But it is the same kind of thing.
Rush had built a bond with his audience.
Donald Trump has built a bond with many people on the conservative side.
And by the way, on some Democrats, many Democrats, he actually enlarged the tent for the Republican Party, something they've been saying they want, they've wanted for decades.
Donald Trump did it.
But the Republican establishment.
They don't want to have any parts of it.
And this is the same Republican establishment that decade after decade.
Like the Democrats keep promising black folks that things are going to get better, things are going to get better, just stick with us.
We're your heroes.
And nothing ever gets better.
Your last segment, by the way, dealing with education and what's going on with these failing schools, that point, that is crystal clear to that point, how for years and years, Democrats have claimed they're going to lead people to the promised land, and instead they lead them into abject misery that's just sustained for decades.
Well, these Republicans have kind of done the same thing.
They've promised conservatives for years and years they're going to be pro-life, and yet they bail on the pro-life movement.
They promise Republicans that they're going to nominate conservatives, and yet what you get is a bunch of milquetoast people on the course.
They promised for years and years they would fix immigration.
When they were elected to power and they had the power, they did nothing.
Donald Trump actually came in and did what the voters did for the voters, what he said he would.
Donald Trump, I think his biggest accomplishment.
is barely even talked about, and that he won a trade war with China.
And we did win a trade war with China, followed very quickly, by the way, by the coronavirus, which threw the economy of the United States and the world into chaos.
But before that, the big story was the trade war with China.
And Donald Trump had backed China up into a corner over their theft of intellectual property, Their misusing the world currency and devaluing their own currency when it wasn't necessary, and their unfair trade practices with the United States.
And he did what no Republican or Democrat in the last century dared to do, which was to take on this giant, which, by the way, holds billions and billions, little Carl Sagan there, billions and billions of dollars.
In the United States, debt.
Well, you know what's interesting about China is, you know, Joe Biden was very critical of Trump's tariffs on China, and he's kept most of them.
So it's like, well, anyway, listen, there's so much more to go over with James Golden.
Confronting Opposing Views 00:04:55
You're a gold mine of information about Rush, the radio business.
And I want to get to a couple of things, including the terrible trick that was played on you when you were up and coming in radio, for which you wound up thanking the prankster.
And we got to spend a minute on Rush's announcement when he knew the end was coming and how.
How much dignity he showed in that final year.
Hi, Dominique Levertium.
Yeah, this is the first time I've been here.
Yeah, I've been here.
30 years.
And James, you were his call screener, but also his sidekick.
And I know you call yourself his chief discriminator and had to determine.
You were the guy who would determine who would get on to speak with Rush and who would not.
So, what, how, I mean, I have one of those guys right now.
He's doing that at this moment, talking to people calling in.
What would you say is the most important piece of that job?
Finding the people that will bring out the best in your host, whether the best is a disagreement, whether the best is something that they can bounce off of.
To just go into areas that they want to go into, or maybe unexpected areas, to just bring the best people that they are likely to have a great conversation with.
And it's as easy as that sounds, it's not because you have so many people.
That and some of them don't want to listen.
Some people just want to do their own little diatribe.
Other people, you know, they may not be able to articulate their point of view quite as well.
And sometimes you have to actually help them reach that point of view so that they can express it.
And you're talking to a lot of different people with a lot of different agendas and being able to sort out all of that so that the on air product, as we call it, is as good, compelling.
To listen to as it possibly can be.
That's smart.
And I know Rush loved to have people, he read in the book how he wanted the people who disagreed with him to go first, not last.
He wanted them to get right on.
Yep, exactly.
This was not a man who was afraid to confront opposing views.
He wanted them because it gave him a chance to further articulate why he believed what he believed.
And he was just exceptionally gifted at doing that.
And doing it in a way that didn't alienate the person that called, very polite to everybody.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
You know what?
That speaks well, not only of Rush, but of his audience, because then who was listening to Rush?
It wasn't just sycophants.
You know, it wasn't just hard right.
Yes, go, you know, we hate Obama.
We love Trump.
It was a vast array of people and parties and the people who would disagree with him.
Some of them wouldn't much like Rush, but they listened.
They listened and they'd call up.
And he was just as kind to them.
Absolutely.
One of the things after one of the particularly bad outings that Democrats had when Tom Dasher was still the majority leader of the Senate and had slipped, I think, into minority leader status, that he revealed was that the Democrat Party had done some polling.
And one of the things that they were really concerned about was the number of Democrats who were listening to the Rush Limbaugh show and who were being affected by it and were converting their votes over to.
Conservative or Republican candidates.
They were extremely, amazing.
Well, you know, I can speak to this having grown up in very blue New York State.
You don't get exposed to a lot of Republican ideas.
You really don't.
It's certainly not in the K 12 schooling.
It's not really, you know, your parents' friend circles are mostly Democrat and so on.
And even for me, you know, Roger Ailes asked me, how does a daughter of a nurse and a college professor wind up a fair and balanced person?
And I explained to him, you know, I was never particularly ideological, my parents nor I, but then I went out, I got put myself through school, started to pay off my debt, saw what was happening to my.
Paycheck, got exposed to other people at a big law firm who had different views, listened, and started coming to my own decisions about this world instead of stuff force fed to me.
And that's the danger to a lot of far left people if they see their troops exposed to some of the really wise ideas on the right, they understand they may lose them.
And for me, very interesting experience you related there because for me, I grew up in a conservative household, but we didn't identify as conservative.
My parents are Democrats.
My mother was part of the Democrat hack party machine out in Queens and loved being a proud Democrat hack all of her life.
Maintaining Conservative Values 00:05:26
But when I first started with the Russia Megan, she came to me one day and said, You know, James, my friends at church are wondering what has happened to you?
What happened to you?
And I just said, Mom, you know, I still maintain the same values that I was taught in this house.
I still maintain the same values that I was taught in the church.
The question isn't what happened to me.
The question is what happened to you guys?
Yes.
So you came into this job with Rush, honestly, because you had your own history in radio from your teenage years.
You knew you wanted to be involved in this in some way.
And during and after your time with Rush, you yourself have been on the radio doing shows.
And I didn't know the story of the mean prank that was played on you.
When you were 17 years old, you got a letter from WWRL AM from that station.
And tell us what happened and what your takeaway was.
I had gone, this was the first station that I had ever visited.
My cousin was a disc jockey, Gerald Bledsoe, Jerry B., and he was a celebrity in New York in his own right, just an amazing broadcaster.
Also, television did a dance show for local television.
And national commercials, big star.
Anyway, I went to the station to see him when I was 14 years old, walked in, fell in love.
I knew I wanted to be in radio that first day.
And I would continue to go to the station for years.
We call it now a gopher.
I wasn't paid to do anything, but I was always hanging around the radio station, going for this, for this person, going for that.
And when I was 17, I got a letter, big show, biz break.
WWRL, this station wanted to hire me.
So I get dressed up, best suit, best, you know, the suit and tie routine, go to the station.
I can't believe my good fortune.
I get there, show the letter to the receptionist, and I have an appointment with the program director.
She has a really puzzled look on her face.
Hmm, I didn't know about this.
Calls up, more sort of, what's going on here?
I finally meet with some of the people on the program director's staff, and they had to break the news to me.
We're sorry, this letter is a fraud.
We didn't send this letter.
It was our station letterhead.
So wrong.
It was so humiliating.
I was, yeah, yeah.
I was so humiliated for years, but it also fuels something in me, Megan.
I was determined after that that no matter what, I was going to work in this industry and I was going to get a job at that station.
And a few years later, that's exactly what happened.
Ah, I got to chill.
Yay.
I honestly, I love that.
And you talk, you write about it in the book.
She's talking about how.
In the end, you basically said, Thank you.
This is how the book reads Whoever forged that letter, if you're reading this, I want to say thank you.
Out of that humiliation came a relentless desire to achieve my first goal in radio, to land a job at WWRL, no matter what.
And it does say, sometimes, you know, you can't see it at the time when you have a setback like that, how it's going to fuel your fire later, right?
I love there's a t shirt out there you can get that reads, Underestimate Me.
See how that works out, right?
See how that turns out.
I love that.
So it's good.
Like sometimes just a little, I don't know, kicking the ass.
We, Doug and I went to see that movie, I Tanya, and it features, it's about Tanya Harding, and it features her mother, played by Allison Janney, saying the meanest, nastiest things to Tanya Harding before she got on the ice every time because she knew it would fuel her to skate her best to prove the naysayers wrong.
And I love that you have that in you.
I can relate.
Yeah, you know, I am just, Megan, I am just incredibly grateful.
For my career, I have worked with professionals, some of the best professionals in the business, not just with Rush, but the people I work with at WWRL were great.
Some of them are my mentors, my lifelong friends.
Some of them I look at now as like one, Gary Bird, my older brother, who spent so much time with me, helping me understand how to think big and how to execute those thoughts.
Then I moved over to WABC and it was like graduate school.
And I really learned the ways of corporate radio and I succeeded there.
But I also worked with some of the biggest names in the business up until that time.
WNBC was the biggest, most iconic radio station in the world.
Big time.
This was WABC, where the Beatles came.
This was WABC that set the standard for all of the music that was played in Top 40 Radio.
I produced their very last music show.
Megan walked into another studio and produced their first talk show.
I'm going to go back to something you started in the beginning about the way God prepares people for what it is they wanted to do.
Throughout all of this, throughout the time I also wanted to be a musician, I was still always keyed into the news.
My first memory as a human being with my father was sitting on his lap and he was reading to me.
Honoring A Legacy 00:08:11
I grew up in a household that promoted education, promoted reading.
I was reading the New York Times, the Long Island Press, the Daily News, the New York Post, the Amsterdam News.
My friend, we had papers all the time in the house every single day.
And so when it was time for me to make the transition, From music, which I love and I still love to this day very deeply.
But I was also equally well prepared to move into the news talk side of the business because of this self, this never ending self education I had with politics.
And a lot of that happened in school too.
I had teachers that challenged me.
I had one teacher that challenged not just me, but a bunch of us to become better by giving us special assignments in history.
All of those things helped me become prepared to do what I was supposed to do.
Well, maybe it's your connection with music.
Maybe it's your family.
I don't know.
But I can say that a lot of people who are steeped in news make the mistake of losing heart.
You know, they get kind of cold, they get kind of separated.
And I think it can make them a little hard.
That didn't happen to you.
And the one thing the book shows us is your heart, like your connection with Rush, your connection with the audience.
I don't know.
To me, like, I think we're fully in love with you by the time we.
Find out about the Rush diagnosis and just hear more about how it all went down.
The day he announced that he'd been diagnosed, and I know you point this out in the book, that he used the term advanced, advanced lung cancer.
You knew before the audience knew.
Tell us about that day.
The day I'll never forget, I learned we were going to have a meeting.
That was the first jitter because we never had meetings.
We had a meeting.
Rush walks in the room, stoic as ever, wouldn't know anything's wrong, and tells us he has advanced lung cancer.
Immediately, Megan, he apologizes to us.
Oh, gosh.
What the hell?
No.
And I screamed, no.
How are you apologizing to us?
It had to be the worst day of his life because he felt he let us down.
It is still so heartbreaking to me.
But he, after the meeting, went back in the studio, did his show for two hours and 45 minutes, and you wouldn't know that anything was wrong.
Just, we all knew it was coming.
We were all trying to keep the tears and everything else.
In check during the show, those of us that were in there, Don Baczynski, Brian Johnson, me, we were all just looking and just trying to give each other comfort because we knew what was coming.
And then at 2 45, he announced it to the world.
And of course, life was never the same after that.
But I'll tell you what, Megan, Rush had a bucket list.
His bucket list was his audience.
Every single day that he was healthy enough to come in, He came in, prepared, and did an amazing show.
Only those of us in there saw what that took out of him every day.
Some days after the show, he could barely move.
It was disheartening.
He did an amazing show every day up until the last show that he did.
And he really loved what he did.
He loved his audience.
He loved his family.
He loved this country.
But boy, did he love being Rush Limbaugh.
He was amazing.
He did.
And then Trump gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
And I loved that.
I was thrilled to see that happen.
Of course, the left lost.
Lost his mind, which was also perfect, right?
It was just like, that's all part of Rush's legacy.
He just doesn't, you know, whatever.
Okay, go ahead.
But he did inspire millions of Americans.
If you're not a Republican or you're not conservative or you're one of Rush Limbaugh who was a Democrat, you may not have fully understood Rush and who he was and his talents and so on.
You just have this snapshot of the person that is delivered to you by the mainstream media.
To me, it would drive me nuts because they'd take bits he would do as a comedy.
He was funny.
He would do these comedy bits and they were irreverent, same as Dave Chappelle's are.
And then they would try to make this the measure of a man to say this is what he thinks about certain groups of people.
Anyway, fine.
You can't spend too much time worrying about those folks.
But you point out in the book, and I thought this is such a great point, Rush did what, or President Trump did what no one else could do.
He gave Rush the highest civilian honor in America and made sure almost every elected Democrat attended the ceremony.
Yes.
And I would forever be grateful to President Trump for that.
That was as beautiful and well earned and.
And just delightful it was to see Rush honored in such a fashion.
But it was also just incredibly delicious to look at the reaction of Democrats in the chamber as this happened live in front of their faces.
At the State of the Union.
Yes.
At the State of the Union.
Forget it.
Which, of course, led Nancy Pelosi, I guess, all that pent up frustration for her tearing up the State of the Union speech.
How undignified at the end of it.
But that's just.
Thank you, President Trump.
It was pretty perfect, I have to say.
And you know what?
We know what it said to me.
I was surprised.
Like, that was one of the few times that Rush got emotional, and you could tell it really meant something to him.
Why do you think it really meant something to him?
It meant a lot to him to be honored in such a way.
It really did because he had, and he so deserved it.
And we all knew that.
But I think he never expected it.
He never expected that that would happen.
And it did.
And it was just incredible that it happened that way.
So, what do you think?
I mean, I miss him because I would love to hear his take on what's happening in today's day and age.
You know, I'd love to hear him on the latest panic about every iteration of the variants and, you know, the potential lockdowns and Fauci, I am science.
And, you know, Biden bit by bit seemed to lose his faculties.
And by the way, I should tell our audience you say nice things about Biden in here.
He may not be your political cup of tea, but to your credit, you talk about how, you know, you saw a good man in many years going on to Capitol Hill.
I like that about you.
You're not hard partisan and can't see goodness where it presents in your face.
But what do you, I don't, did you ever, like, you know how when you know somebody really well, you can tell others what his opinions would be?
Do you have that with him?
Most of the time, but see, here's the problem.
Every time I would think that I knew what Rush's opinion, I know what he's going to say.
He always said something completely different.
I think I know what he would say on some things, but I'm never quite sure because he was just so unique and he could come up with such unique opinions and things you'd never thought of before.
because he had his own viewpoint of the world, his own lens to look through, and would always come up with something that was compelling, unique, and wow, what a take.
Only Rush could come up with that take.
It's so true.
Gosh, that's what's so painful.
It's like, I've just got to be quiet and be still and hope somehow he channels into my mind so I can know what he was saying.
And honestly, like, obviously, Rush was definitely more conservative than I am, although I don't know by today's standards.
I think I might be Rush Limbaugh.
You know, it's like things, the ground is shifting underneath us, right?
It's like, I don't even know what a conservative and what a liberal is anymore.
But I liked hearing his point of view because he could articulate it wisely, smartly, in a way that was very entertaining.
I am thinking about, you know, the staff and wondering, What February 17th, 2022 will be like.
Because you always dread the anniversaries when you lose somebody.
We're making plans for our staff.
We're making plans.
I don't want to go into too much detail, but we're starting to talk about among ourselves about coming together that day because we are a family and we so badly miss our rush.
Optimistic American Future 00:02:06
I can relate.
But it's so great to see people like you, in a way, carrying on the legacy, right?
Like you're out there doing it.
You know, you're doing more and more hosting.
I look at your schedule.
I'm like, does he ever take a day off?
I mean, are you working seven days a week right now?
But I think he'd love that.
Yes, I do.
And I love what I'm doing.
I'm back in 1W ABC now six days a week, and I'm having a blast being on the air and doing the show.
But see, Russia's legacy is going to go on.
We have so many young conservatives out here, millions.
And by the way, many of them are activists too.
They're not just sitting on the sidelines, they're actually getting engaged in the process.
And Megan, you have your own following that's huge, and you inspire so many people as well.
And so all these legacies are coming together that.
That's why I am so optimistic about America.
Look, we are still such a young nation, Megan, and we are going to be okay.
Man, I hope you're right.
I believe you're right too.
And I believe most people can see through the nonsense of all this focus on identity politics and remember our deep connection to one another as Americans, first and foremost.
And I also believe it's worth fighting those who are trying to smother that legacy.
They must be defeated.
And so there is a time to fight.
You know, though we've lost one of our generals, the rest of us are still here, you know, ready to go.
And I know you're one of them, James.
I am too.
Such a pleasure.
You've always been such a gentleman, so kind to me.
It's great to see you in person.
And good luck with the book.
May I just say one thing, Megan?
Thank you for reading the book.
See, folks, this is what I'm talking about prepared.
She read the book, which is amazing.
It was my pleasure.
It was 100% my pleasure.
All the best, James, to be continued.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS.
No agenda and no fear.
Hi, Dominique Levertiem.
Hi, this is the Grill that man can follow the Alt Tegreelfest in Poland.
This is the minute.
Now, I'm going to grill cool.
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