The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220124_medias-failed-pushback-on-power-and-ridiculous-cov
Aired: 2022-01-24
Duration: 01:28:46


=== Crisis of Meaning and Political Scrutiny (12:19) ===

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[00:00:35]  Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:47]  Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
[00:00:48]  Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show.
[00:00:50]  Lots to get to on this Monday morning as tensions ramp up at home and abroad.
[00:00:55]  President Biden is reportedly going to make a decision this week about whether to send thousands of U.S. troops to Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
[00:01:03]  And here at home, the uptick in crime has now led to the death of a young, newly married New York City. Cop.
[00:01:10]  This police officer was married in October, 22 years old, had everything going for him.
[00:01:15]  His partner, meantime, clinging to life right now after being shot in the head.
[00:01:20]  Joining me now to discuss it is Nick Gillespie.
[00:01:23]  Nick is the editor at large for the libertarian Reason magazine.
[00:01:27]  Nick recently had this to say about the state of our nation What we're facing in America is not a pandemic or economic malaise or resurgence of inequality, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, or lack of options, food, shelter, you name it.
[00:01:40]  What we are facing Is a crisis of meaning.
[00:01:43]  Nick, great to have you here.
[00:01:44]  How are you?
[00:01:45]  Thanks for having me.
[00:01:47]  Despite not having real transcendental meaning in my life, I'm doing very well.
[00:01:51]  So thank you for having me.
[00:01:52]  So, what does that mean, a crisis of meaning?
[00:01:54]  You know, where that came from, I write a lot at Reason Magazine, I write a lot about politics and culture.
[00:02:00]  And I think we're in a particular stage now where politics is toxic and all consuming.
[00:02:06]  And those things are not, you know, they're linked.
[00:02:09]  When politics becomes everything, they become toxic.
[00:02:12]  And I think we are looking for politics to give.
[00:02:15]  Big meaning to our lives in a way that politics can never provide.
[00:02:20]  But we keep doing that rather than looking for meaning outside of politics in our interactions with people, building businesses, building communities, helping people, and things like that.
[00:02:32]  And so I think we're in a particularly bad moment right now because politics is everything.
[00:02:39]  And that makes us hostile, it polarizes us, and it also ultimately keeps us from living the lives that actually would give us some kind of community and some kind of forward optimism.
[00:02:50]  When you say politics, do you include like culture?
[00:02:54]  I mean, I've heard it said.
[00:02:55]  Yeah, and I agree that a lot of these sort of woke leftist activists think of themselves as the next Rosa Parks because they're trying to get women redefined as bodies with vaginas, something I literally saw this weekend in a magazine.
[00:03:10]  Okay, like we're cadavers that just happen to have female lady parts.
[00:03:14]  But they think that they're Rosa Parks or some sort of, you know, earth shifting activist.
[00:03:20]  Because they're policing language in a way that a lot of us find defensive.
[00:03:22]  Well, and that when you can't escape from politics in any part of your life, at a certain point in the early 70s, German student feminists were famous for castigating men who urinated standing up.
[00:03:38]  So at every point of your life, it is subject to some kind of political scrutiny.
[00:03:45]  There's some cause for that, but then it becomes totalitarian in the strongest sense of the word.
[00:03:50]  You are not allowed to have bad thoughts because that might give rise to bad speech.
[00:03:54]  And so now we have to police your mind.
[00:03:56]  I don't think it's simply.
[00:03:59]  A function of the left.
[00:04:00]  But I think in its most successful and its most visible form right now, it is this kind of woke activism that is everywhere.
[00:04:08]  And it makes it hard for people to talk because you might say the wrong thing and then you don't want to think the wrong thing, et cetera.
[00:04:15]  And it puts us on our heels as a society.
[00:04:18]  And we just don't, you know, you can't live your life if you're constantly worried about saying the wrong thing or thinking the wrong thing and then doing the wrong thing.
[00:04:27]  You've.
[00:04:29]  You sort of have a point just in your writings about how we're blessed to be living in a great period, really.
[00:04:36]  I mean, if you look back at the 20th century, and they always had big crises or big massive shifts going on in society to focus on or bring them together from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression to World War II, and then the post World War II recovery period where we were settling down, we were having families, we were sort of living in the new America.
[00:04:54]  Those were sort of some golden years in some ways, not in all.
[00:04:57]  The 60s came in the Civil Rights era.
[00:05:00]  The 70s that brought money in.
[00:05:02]  Gas lines.
[00:05:03]  No, but it was great.
[00:05:04]  I mean, also, like, you know, and I realize you may have a more jaded view of the 60s than I do, but, you know, the 60s is when civil rights actually became a reality or the civil rights, you know, revolution was fulfilled in 64 and 65.
[00:05:19]  Blacks became more part of the country.
[00:05:21]  Women, you know, by the end of the decade, women and gay people were able to start living their lives more fully.
[00:05:26]  I think, you know, it's, we've been expanding opportunity, we've been expanding wealth and resources, you know, throughout.
[00:05:34]  Our lifetimes, and it's kind of great.
[00:05:36]  And what I was arguing, that was a long Twitter thread that kind of went viral.
[00:05:42]  What I was saying in the piece you were quoting from at the beginning is we have, we're very high up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
[00:05:49]  We're at the tip of the pyramid, really.
[00:05:52]  And clothes, food, shelter, these things are basically covered for the vast majority of people in America and in North America and in Europe.
[00:06:01]  And then we're left with the question of, well, what do you do with all of this freedom?
[00:06:06]  What do you do with all of this opportunity?
[00:06:08]  And I think we're shirking the responsibility of building something positive.
[00:06:12]  And we're trying to make everything into a political battle where some minority that gets enough votes and enough power can say to everybody else, you have to live my way or get out.
[00:06:22]  Yep.
[00:06:23]  Well, that's the problem.
[00:06:24]  So, I mean, even getting into the more recent era after the Cold War, we wound up having 9 11.
[00:06:29]  And that kept us together fighting the war on terror for a number of years.
[00:06:32]  And now it's like we do live in a pretty good time where people are suddenly, they've just decided to treat 2022 and the year before it.
[00:06:40]  As though it were still 1964 when it comes to civil rights, when it comes to women's rights.
[00:06:47]  And those of us, I wasn't alive in the 60s, but I was pretty closely born to them.
[00:06:51]  And I understand the progress that was being made back then.
[00:06:54]  And I've lived the progress for 50 years, looking around saying, you're ignoring reality.
[00:06:58]  You're creating problems because you appear to need drama.
[00:07:03]  Right.
[00:07:03]  I mean, this is, you know, one of the problems I think with a lot of liberationist movements is that they get to a point where they can no longer accept progress.
[00:07:12]  And so, You do have a lot of people who are acting as if it's 1952 rather than 2022 in terms of opportunities, in terms of the mass eradication of kind of structural racism in American society, where schools were segregated, housing was completely segregated by law, not by custom, and things like that.
[00:07:35]  So much has improved.
[00:07:36]  And it doesn't mean like, okay, we've had enough progress, we can stop talking about that.
[00:07:40]  But if we are going to live in a world where we're acting, we're describing Bull Connors America in a world where People are so free and so liberated, it keeps us from actually taking advantage of the opportunities that are in front of us.
[00:07:56]  And even something like the pandemic, COVID.
[00:07:59]  COVID is real.
[00:08:00]  It is awful.
[00:08:01]  It has killed over 800,000 Americans, which is mind boggling.
[00:08:05]  In two years, it's killed more people than were basically killed in the Civil War, World War II, from an American perspective.
[00:08:13]  But what's also great about that is that we developed vaccines that are safe and effective and widely distributed almost immediately.
[00:08:21]  We could have done it even faster if the CDC and the FDA were kind of put to the sideline or were not given a monopoly on how to do public health responses.
[00:08:30]  But the fact is, You know, we're in an exceptional moment where there is a great amount of freedom, agency, autonomy, economic possibilities.
[00:08:39]  And we are litigating the smallest, weirdest kind of, you know, issues that we should be moving past.
[00:08:47]  Yeah.
[00:08:48]  It's like a marriage that's too good.
[00:08:50]  And one of the spouses just decides to nitpick the other one over the small bullshit where it's like, you have a great relationship.
[00:08:57]  What are you doing?
[00:08:58]  Right.
[00:08:58]  Like you're ruining it for no reason.
[00:09:00]  His sideburns, you know, he just won't do what I want.
[00:09:04]  Him to do about the sideburns or something.
[00:09:05]  Yeah.
[00:09:06]  So, like you're focusing when you have everything in front of you, you're focusing on things.
[00:09:10]  I am also worried that we, you know, the 21st century, and I was born in 1963, so I'm 58.
[00:09:16]  And I can remember, you know, thinking about what's the 21st century going to be like.
[00:09:20]  And I was excited that I was going to get to live in a new century and all of this kind of stuff.
[00:09:25]  And the 21st century has been very disappointing to me in some ways.
[00:09:28]  I mean, it's great, you know, people are wealthier, you know, things like the internet, you know, I mean, it's just, it's a fantastic technological world.
[00:09:35]  But we are living in what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben talks about, like a consistent series of what he calls states of exception in liberal democracies.
[00:09:47]  He's picking up on a Nazi philosopher who talked about how you can take over liberal democracies, constitutional democracies, by kind of ginning up a state of exception where you say, in order to protect the liberal order, a limited government, a lot of freedom, free markets, things like that.
[00:10:07]  You create a state of exception and then say, well, in order to save society, to save this great society, we have to suspend the rules because there's an emergency going on.
[00:10:15]  9 11 provided that.
[00:10:18]  And then that was running out of juice.
[00:10:19]  Then the financial crisis came.
[00:10:22]  Then there were crises on the border.
[00:10:24]  So we have to suspend certain types of things.
[00:10:26]  Then COVID comes.
[00:10:28]  And we, in the 21st century, we have been living in a consistent set of states of exception that say, you know what, we need the government to be bigger, we need the government to be doing more, to be regulating more, to telling you more how to live.
[00:10:41]  And then you have these people who are kind of, you know, what are they called?
[00:10:46]  You know, the types of fish that get onto sharks and things like that and feed off them.
[00:10:53]  And now you have a lot of people, you know, trying to become host or, you know, parasites on big government and direct it to their preferred way of living, which worries me.
[00:11:03]  This is, for me, the major battle is, you know, we live in a country where in 2019, we spent $4.4 trillion, the federal government, In 2021, we spent $6.8 trillion.
[00:11:15]  The government increased by 50%.
[00:11:18]  It shoveled so much money into the economy.
[00:11:20]  That's why we're having inflation.
[00:11:22]  Politicians on the right and the left are talking about trying to regulate every transaction that we have on some level.
[00:11:28]  And that's the fight I think we should be having.
[00:11:31]  Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more.
[00:11:33]  It used to be that we'd spend a couple trillion dollars, it would make headlines for months.
[00:11:37]  The debate over it would dominate every news cycle.
[00:11:39]  Now it's a rounding error.
[00:11:40]  No, yeah, I mean, you know, the infrastructure bill or whatever, you know, or the COVID relief bill was.
[00:11:46]  Too small.
[00:11:47]  And now people are redoing the economic crisis and saying the problem with Obama's stimulus, which came in around $800 billion, was that it was too small.
[00:11:56]  It's like, no, no, it's not that.
[00:11:58]  It's like, You know, we have been, you know, if there's inflation anywhere, it's just in this, you know, the idea that the government needs to be spending even more than it does in order to change things.
[00:12:09]  And it doesn't help with that.
[00:12:11]  Like we are doing phenomenally well.
[00:12:13]  And I think, you know, this is for me one of the problems with politics it's a zero sum game.

=== Loss of Trust in Major Institutions (15:52) ===

[00:12:19]  And, you know, you get enough votes and you can force everybody to live the way you want to.
[00:12:24]  And I think the promise of America, rarely realized, but it's the ideal.
[00:12:29]  Is that no, what we do in America is we squeeze politics down to the smallest part of our lives.
[00:12:34]  There's certain things I'm a libertarian, I'm not an anarchist.
[00:12:37]  I believe there is a role for government and the provision of certain types of goods and services and structuring certain parts of society.
[00:12:43]  But the American ideal is that we squeeze that down to the smallest amount possible so that people are free to kind of create themselves and innovate their lives, inform the communities, you know, and the lives and the jobs and the businesses they want.
[00:12:57]  And that's the vision that I want to see us.
[00:12:59]  Kind of pursuing going forward.
[00:13:01]  This is on our show.
[00:13:02]  We pride ourselves on being one of the only shows out there that gets, I mean, we'll have people from the established right, from the Trump right, all the way over to the, you know, considered left.
[00:13:12]  We've actually had a couple of woke people on, but for the most part, I stay away from the wokesters.
[00:13:17]  But last week, we were talking to Brianna Joy Gray, who she calls herself a libertarian socialist.
[00:13:22]  She's a Bernie gal.
[00:13:23]  She worked on his campaign, very thoughtful, great gal.
[00:13:27]  But she was making the point we had an argument over COVID and the restrictions and the kids.
[00:13:31]  And I was saying, they've done their part.
[00:13:33]  It's enough on the children with the masking and all the nonsense.
[00:13:35]  And she said, you know, no, she said, don't you understand?
[00:13:39]  You know, they need to sacrifice for the good of the community.
[00:13:41]  You know, it's for the good of the community.
[00:13:43]  I kind of told her, look, I'm done.
[00:13:45]  The children are done for the good of the community.
[00:13:46]  Like, we want to do good of the community.
[00:13:48]  You could do that from any angle.
[00:13:50]  Why don't you sacrifice for the good of my children?
[00:13:53]  Why don't the old people say, I'm going to sacrifice?
[00:13:55]  I'll take a risk so that your children can have a normal life.
[00:13:57]  That kind of thinking spins us into places I certainly don't want to go.
[00:14:01]  No.
[00:14:02]  And, you know, I mean, one of the stark realities of COVID and the, you know, the reaction and the response is that children, and by that, you know, I'm old enough where I'll say anybody under 30 is a child, and certainly anybody under 20, right, or 21, you know, they have borne in many ways the toughest price.
[00:14:20]  They have had their lives and their views, you know, just massively disrupted.
[00:14:24]  And it's not clear, you know, when that's going to end.
[00:14:26]  I mean, places like Flint, Michigan are still saying, you know, we're going to do online schooling indefinitely and things like that.
[00:14:32]  And these are the people who are the least likely to be harmed by COVID or to, you know, Anything.
[00:14:36]  And we were making them pay the biggest price.
[00:14:40]  I don't know how that's going to play out down the road.
[00:14:43]  You know, I look at those pictures.
[00:14:44]  There was a famous shot that got widely circulated of a marching band or a school band in Washington state where schools had reopened.
[00:14:54]  And it was kids, you know, in the brass section in these plastic zippered bubbles playing, you know, the trumpet and the saxophone.
[00:15:02]  And it's like, wow, man, we have really screwed up.
[00:15:05]  I started one of the first big stories.
[00:15:07]  I've been at Reason forever since 1993.
[00:15:09]  The magazine itself has been around since 68.
[00:15:12]  But I wrote a story about that was in 1997 or 98 called Child Proofing the World.
[00:15:17]  And I was saying, you know, on every level, kids in America were doing better than ever, but we were talking about them as if they were living in Mad Max beyond Thunderdome.
[00:15:26]  You know, it's this horrifying world where they were going to be made mentally ill by heading soccer balls or eating too many hot dogs or they were going to be abducted on the street.
[00:15:35]  I mean, it was insanity.
[00:15:37]  And we are still in that world.
[00:15:39]  Like we're literally in some places putting kids in, you know, zippered up.
[00:15:43]  Bubbles supposedly to protect them from a disease that is dangerous but is not going to harm them in any meaningful way.
[00:15:51]  I mean, we have it so backwards.
[00:15:54]  And again, this is, you know.
[00:15:56]  For me, politics, you know, when you come, when it comes down to COVID, you know, there's a period where, you know, people didn't know very much what was going on.
[00:16:03]  We have a good sense of that.
[00:16:04]  We have vaccines.
[00:16:06]  What should be done now is, you know, people can take their own risk level and act accordingly.
[00:16:12]  If you don't want to go to a business that doesn't, you know, require masking or vaccine mandates, then don't go there.
[00:16:18]  If you don't want to get vaccinated, and I think if you don't want to get vaccinated, you're, you know, and you're not immunocompromised or something, you're wrong.
[00:16:26]  You're stupid.
[00:16:27]  You're taking a chance that you shouldn't be.
[00:16:28]  That's not true.
[00:16:29]  What if you have national immunity?
[00:16:31]  No, well, you know what?
[00:16:33]  I've had COVID twice and I have three vaccines.
[00:16:35]  So, you know, I, but what I'm saying is the point isn't that my decision shouldn't be, you know, the thing that rules your life.
[00:16:43]  We can devolve risk taking and risk assessment down to the individual level and then let people live the way they want to.
[00:16:50]  And that is a better world, even if it means, you know, my preference is not always going to be, you know, followed.
[00:16:57]  But that's what a free society is, you know, where you all right, Nick, you tell it to this girl.
[00:17:01]  Tell it to this girl.
[00:17:02]  Because this past weekend, In D.C., they had a march in favor of freedom and against the mandates.
[00:17:10]  And there were some 50,000 people reportedly who showed up to say we're anti-mandate.
[00:17:14]  A lot of these people are pro-vaccine, they're anti-mandate.
[00:17:17]  Some of them are, some of them are not.
[00:17:18]  And I consider myself anti-mandate, I'm pro-vaccine.
[00:17:22]  I watched a bunch of footage from that, and there's people like Robert Kennedy Jr., who has been anti-vaccine.
[00:17:27]  He wrote a discredited and ultimately pulled story from Rolling Stone years ago about how MMR vaccines cause autism, which was faith-based false research.
[00:17:37]  I agree with that.
[00:17:38]  I agree.
[00:17:38]  And we've done a lot of reporting on that too.
[00:17:40]  But I will say it was a fascinating profile by him in Rolling Stone just this past weekend by Rolling Stone.
[00:17:47]  It was, I think it was in Spin.
[00:17:49]  It was in Spin.
[00:17:50]  Anyway, in that, he says he's not anti vaccine and I guess has moderated some of his MMR vaccine views.
[00:17:58]  The problem is his original stance undermines his criticism of the current vaccines because we're all like, you hated even the good ones.
[00:18:05]  You know, like this is a good one too, but like more controversial because it's more recent.
[00:18:09]  No, and also, let's not talk about him or any kind of anti vax person either.
[00:18:14]  A big problem right now is that, and this is also something I write a lot about the loss of trust and confidence in major institutions, particularly government, but also the private sector and also in philanthropy, things like the Catholic Church.
[00:18:28]  The handling of the knowledge of what was going on about COVID and how to deal with it, coming out of people like Anthony Fauci, the CDC, and the FDA, has been terrible.
[00:18:40]  And they really have done such a disservice.
[00:18:43]  By not being square with people, not being honest with people, and kind of pursuing a noble lie strategy where Fauci and other people would say, like, masks are useless, don't wear masks.
[00:18:55]  And then they admit later, oh, well, we didn't want people to buy personal PPE because we might have needed it for other people.
[00:19:02]  We learn now that there was a stockpile of N95 masks that the government was holding on to until recently.
[00:19:09]  And it's kind of like, wasn't this the emergency that you pull out all the stops, the CDC and the FDA, especially when it came to?
[00:19:17]  Kind of really fast tracking vaccines.
[00:19:19]  They put it, the vaccines into one process, but they still took their time to kind of really hustle through all of the safety requirements and everything.
[00:19:29]  Well, it's amazing to me.
[00:19:30]  Once they got there, they really hit their stride.
[00:19:33]  Wait, let me finish the point I was trying to make about the rally in Washington this weekend.
[00:19:37]  So they show up there, and what do they want?
[00:19:40]  They're not saying no one should take the vaccine, whether you have RFK Jr. there or not.
[00:19:44]  That's not what the message was.
[00:19:45]  The message was pro freedom and to get government off our backs and to get rid of these mandates.
[00:19:50]  And they had firefighters who'd been.
[00:19:51]  Fired.
[00:19:52]  The heroes a year ago now fired because they wouldn't take the vaccine.
[00:19:55]  And medical workers, same.
[00:19:57]  Deal.
[00:19:58]  And look at this lunatic from, I guess I'm just assuming she's from the left.
[00:20:02]  She's definitely a Trump hater.
[00:20:05]  Listen to how she viewed the people there, firefighters, nurses, and so on, pushing that message.
[00:20:10]  Watch.
[00:20:12]  The dollars are going to pay for the police to shut down the road so that these fucking white supremacists can party and have a hell of a time celebrating their loser president!
[00:20:26]  Loser Trump!
[00:20:29]  Go the fuck home!
[00:20:31]  Stop invading our territory!
[00:20:33]  Go the fuck home!
[00:20:35]  Take your loser president and shove him up your ass!
[00:20:41]  I think I'd double the Xanax.
[00:20:43]  I'd double the Xanax on her perspective.
[00:20:46]  But this is what happens, right?
[00:20:48]  I just had a great, great dinner on Saturday night in New York with a bunch of new friends to me.
[00:20:54]  And it was, let's say, 11 women who, all of them, except for me, were.
[00:21:03]  Established liberals, like campaign for Joe Biden type liberals, a year, 14 months ago.
[00:21:09]  All of them.
[00:21:10]  And they've all been red pilled.
[00:21:12]  Why?
[00:21:12]  Because of the erosion of freedoms in COVID.
[00:21:14]  Some of them are also onto the CRT stuff and objecting to that.
[00:21:17]  But my point is, all of them are angry.
[00:21:20]  They're not white supremacists like this lunatic is yelling.
[00:21:24]  They're pissed about what's being done to their kids, the erosion of freedoms, how too many Americans are rolling over and letting it happen, complete submission as opposed to fighting when fighting is necessary.
[00:21:34]  When it comes to our civil liberties, our freedoms, the things that made us proud to be in America not too long ago.
[00:21:40]  And I do believe this is going to have massive electoral consequences eventually.
[00:21:44]  It did already in Virginia.
[00:21:45]  And when we get to those midterms, November 8th, it's going to again.
[00:21:50]  Yeah.
[00:21:50]  And, you know, Gallup has shown that, you know, over the past year, there's been basically the biggest swing ever from kind of people predisposed to voting for Democrats to going to Republicans.
[00:22:02]  And, you know, my only concern with that is that, okay, let's vote out the current people and the Democratic.
[00:22:07]  Party, but then you're voting in the Republicans, who, as we'll recall a couple of years ago, were voted out because they were terrible in their own way.
[00:22:16]  And for me, it depends on the crisis of the day.
[00:22:18]  The one today is liberty.
[00:22:20]  Well, I agree with that.
[00:22:22]  But it's also like this is the problem from a libertarian point of view is that my lodestar, my North Star is freedom, individual liberty, autonomy.
[00:22:33]  Neither party is giving that, which also helps to explain why over the course of the 21st century, We have had what political scientists like Morris Fiorina at Stanford talks about as unstable majorities.
[00:22:46]  Each party, you know, they're becoming more and more extreme.
[00:22:49]  They're nominating more and more extreme people who can be more stable.
[00:22:52]  And less and less stable.
[00:22:53]  Yeah.
[00:22:55]  And they push through their agenda in the first couple of years they're in office, and then they get voted out every two, four, or six years.
[00:23:02]  And they get replaced by people who are like, okay, this might be our only shot.
[00:23:06]  So we're going to go whole hog and dump a bunch of stuff into the system that alienates people.
[00:23:11]  You know, when you look back at, The first two years of Obama's administration, he was handed a blank check.
[00:23:17]  He got everything he wanted, and the Democrats got kicked to the curb in the midterm elections.
[00:23:23]  Something like that is going to happen to Joe Biden, who also got into office partly because people were voting against Trump.
[00:23:29]  They were not embracing Joe Biden's agenda.
[00:23:32]  And while it's good to see people punished for overreach, what I'm concerned about is that we're not working as a society, and neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party seem to be working to come up with an agenda that is.
[00:23:44]  Legitimately pro freedom and will produce a consensus that a lot of people can live with.
[00:23:51]  You know, we need, I think we need a government that does fewer things, but does those few things well.
[00:23:56]  Nobody is talking about that right now.
[00:23:58]  Everybody, you get into office and then you settle a bunch of scores and you get kicked out a couple of years later.
[00:24:03]  Nick, you're going to have to find your favorite Republican, your favorite libertarian that's as close to passing for a Republican as you can find.
[00:24:13]  You're going to have to make him wear the R on his chest for the jersey and run him.
[00:24:19]  Because right now, as you know, I know you know, no third party can win, no libertarian can win.
[00:24:25]  The closest thing you got is somebody masquerading as something else.
[00:24:29]  What I'm excited about over the past couple of years, including the turn against the COVID overreach, which goes into business, it goes into medicine and public health, it goes into school policy.
[00:24:40]  People are pushing back against that.
[00:24:41]  So I think that's good.
[00:24:43]  And there are serious libertarian reforms over the past 30 years, the past 50 years, things like drug legalization, the end of certain kinds of institutional racism, the deregulation of markets, so that we have things like Amazon, the growth of the internet.
[00:25:00]  A broad variety of wins that have been happening that are consistent with the libertarian world.
[00:25:07]  Electorally, that's not the case.
[00:25:09]  But with my colleague Matt Welch, who I believe has been on your show, we wrote a book 10 years ago called The Declaration of Independence.
[00:25:17]  And it started with the insight that fewer and fewer people were identifying as Republican and Democrat and more as independent.
[00:25:26]  Right now, Gallup is showing nearly record highs of that because 42% independent, I think 23% Dem, and 27%.
[00:25:34]  Republican.
[00:25:35]  Yeah, something along those lines.
[00:25:37]  And, you know, it takes really slow.
[00:25:40]  Politics is a lagging indicator of where society is, but people are done with these parties.
[00:25:44]  They were, their current identities were, you know, they're a kind of bundle of special interests that were kind of hammered out in the late 90s or even in the 70s and 80s.
[00:25:54]  And that world that they speak for doesn't exist anymore.
[00:25:57]  And we need parties that are, you know, that are new and modern and that actually speak to what life is like in America.
[00:26:04]  And I think give people more freedom while also offering the kind of support.
[00:26:08]  That everybody wants to see for people who are down on their luck or who need a hand up and things like that.
[00:26:15]  We may be headed there.
[00:26:17]  This is one of the things I talked with Brianna about, which is the sort of ends of the party seem to be going around to the place where they're meeting.
[00:26:25]  The Bernie voters are not that dissimilar from the Trump voters.
[00:26:28]  There was a lot of talk about that during the election.
[00:26:30]  There's a reason for that.
[00:26:32]  These parties and their broad platforms don't really represent everyone.
[00:26:35]  It'd be great to see more options.
[00:26:37]  Wait, stand by, Nick.
[00:26:37]  I'm going to squeeze in a commercial break.
[00:26:39]  We'll be right back with Nick Gillespie talking liberty.
[00:26:43]  Don't miss that.
[00:26:50]  So, Nick, speaking of epox on both their houses, right, the Republicans and the Democrats, this is why I've said to my audience many times I don't wear a partisan jersey.
[00:26:57]  I've been a registered Democrat.
[00:26:59]  I've been a registered Republican, but I've been a registered independent for the vast majority of the past 20 years.
[00:27:05]  And while it doesn't allow you to vote in some primaries in some states, I don't care.
[00:27:09]  I just don't care.
[00:27:10]  I just refuse to put their jerseys on.
[00:27:12]  There's just too many disgusting people in both parties I don't want to associate with.
[00:27:15]  And ideas.
[00:27:15]  I'm just like, whatever.
[00:27:17]  I'll make up my mind issue by issue.
[00:27:18]  I'm not accepting platforms.
[00:27:19]  I don't think it's honest.
[00:27:22]  No judgment against people who do.
[00:27:23]  It's just for me, it's like I'm too all over the board in my politics to do that.
[00:27:28]  You wrote about how you hope, you hope we see a repeat of Trump versus Biden in 2024, writing, I hope they face off again because it will be the third time in a row where the parties are like, please kill us.
[00:27:42]  It's either from your podcast or your written pieces.
[00:27:46]  It's a podcast.
[00:27:47]  Okay.
[00:27:47]  I love that.
[00:27:48]  I think you're right.
[00:27:48]  I understand that there's deep love, especially for Trump.
[00:27:51]  But my God, we have to keep running the same near-octogenarians over and over.
[00:27:56]  This is the best we can do.
[00:27:58]  Yeah, I mean, it is, you know, it's the personification of parties that are, you know, dead, you know, and they're just paper mache at this point.
[00:28:07]  They need to be pushed over and gotten rid of and built from the ground up.

=== Dead Parties Need Ground-Up Rebuilding (02:25) ===

[00:28:11]  You know, neither of these guys can deliver what America needs.
[00:28:15]  You know, I mean, they're just not with it.
[00:28:18]  And, you know, Trump is losing support among Republicans.
[00:28:23]  According to, you know, various kinds of internal polls, his support among likely Republican voters is at an all time low.
[00:28:30]  Which makes sense.
[00:28:31]  He's tried in two elections.
[00:28:33]  He's never gotten more than 47% of the vote.
[00:28:35]  He's not going to get more than 47% in 2024.
[00:28:38]  Biden has the stink of one term all over him.
[00:28:42]  That can always turn around.
[00:28:44]  But Biden, like Trump, they are always looking backwards to try and recapture that moment in time when they were young and they thought the country was great.
[00:28:53]  And they're just not up to the task of governing in a world that is incredibly diversified, incredibly decentralized, where America's role is important in the world, but nobody is going to be a global hegemon anymore, where people identify in different ways with overlapping identities.
[00:29:13]  These guys are just not going to cut it.
[00:29:15]  Unfortunately, I don't really see anybody in either party who I think is going to deliver on the vision of government that I think we're ready for.
[00:29:24]  And that when you're in a networked age, when you're in an international age, when you're in a world where power is more decentralized than ever, I don't see that.
[00:29:33]  Yeah, I don't see people who are willing to go in that direction from either party either.
[00:29:37]  So that's.
[00:29:38]  You went on to say the Democrats may have it rougher because they have to get rid of two people, quote, because there are two dead bodies in the White House.
[00:29:44]  Yep.
[00:29:45]  I mean, that is for sure.
[00:29:46]  Yeah.
[00:29:47]  We have our questions about Joe Biden.
[00:29:48]  Kamala is alive and well, but not nearly prepared to hold the office, never mind a vice president, of president of the United States.
[00:29:55]  Yeah.
[00:29:56]  No, she doesn't seem, you know, particularly with it.
[00:29:59]  And it does seem like they're trying to keep her under wraps.
[00:30:02]  You know, and again, what I, you know, I care less about.
[00:30:05]  Politicians' personalities and more about their programs.
[00:30:08]  Her problem is, you know, she's kind of a shapeshifter.
[00:30:11]  When she was attorney general and, you know, at a major political figure in California, she was all about arresting, you know, pot dealers and things like that.
[00:30:21]  When she became vice president and was running for that, she would joke about her pot use and things like that.
[00:30:26]  And what we need is a leader in a country where, you know, something like 70% of people think pot should be legalized and people are moving in the idea of allowing people intoxicants of their choice.

=== Chicago Crime and Punitive Justice Failures (07:48) ===

[00:30:36]  And then you hold them responsible for the behavior that they.
[00:30:39]  Commit on intoxicants, you need somebody better than Kamala Harris.
[00:30:43]  She doesn't seem to have the ability to kind of be true to anything, but she's an old school politician.
[00:30:50]  She wants to control people's lives.
[00:30:52]  And that ship has sailed.
[00:30:54]  We now have so much wealth, we have so much freedom, we have so much technological innovation.
[00:31:00]  Now more than ever, individual Americans can live their lives the way they want to.
[00:31:05]  We can eat what we want, we can grow what we want, we can marry who we want.
[00:31:10]  We need the government to kind of recede.
[00:31:12]  And just kind of help people who need help and kind of keep general order.
[00:31:17]  We don't need people micromanaging every aspect of our lives.
[00:31:20]  But I think both parties are kind of invested in that old 20th century model of governance.
[00:31:26]  And not on the minor drug use prosecutions, but in many other ways, I'm more with the former Kamala Harris.
[00:31:34]  I mean, right now with the crime wave sweeping the country, just a solid, remarkable stat before I came on the air.
[00:31:41]  We used to cover the Chicago crime waves.
[00:31:43]  All the time.
[00:31:44]  And of course, it's been in the news this past year because you see BLM out there protesting the death of one black person in the street saying, Every life matters, say his name, say his name.
[00:31:55]  And they do nothing about what's happening in Chicago.
[00:31:58]  The vast majority of the victims there are black.
[00:32:00]  The vast majority of the perpetrators in those murders are black as well.
[00:32:03]  And there's just not a peep.
[00:32:05]  And in fact, if even if as a black pundit, if you try to draw attention to it, they'll attack you as you know, sort of the Black Lives Matter, you know, activist crew.
[00:32:13]  It's so wrong.
[00:32:14]  But the stat was that they hit a 25 year high in the murder rate last year in Chicago.
[00:32:20]  In Chicago, they reached 800 murders.
[00:32:24]  And no one seems to be paying much attention, but we are seeing.
[00:32:29]  A willingness to look the other way in Chicago's DA, Kim Fox, a willingness to look the other way in LA, in San Francisco's DA, in RDA, in New York City.
[00:32:39]  And just this past weekend, four cops were shot.
[00:32:41]  Two are dead.
[00:32:42]  A 22 year old cop shot dead, his partner clinging to life, another cop shot dead.
[00:32:47]  These two cops in Harlem went in, a mother had called the cops on her 47 year old son in the apartment saying she was concerned.
[00:32:56]  And they came in, he of course had a long criminal history, and they walked down the hallway.
[00:33:01]  He came out of the Bedroom shooting, and they had no chance.
[00:33:03]  I mean, the gun that the perpetrator used against this poor 22 year old cop, there's no chance he had modified it in a way that is illegal to make it more like, you know, closer to a machine gun, basically, just rapidly firing away a semi automatic and not.
[00:33:18]  The DA, Alvin Bragg, in New York City, we're showing a picture of it now, it has this attachment to it.
[00:33:22]  The DA, Alvin Bragg, has just said, just last week, he's no longer going to be seeking the death penalty.
[00:33:28]  And you shoot a cop in New York before, yes, before Alvin Bragg was there, you could face the death penalty.
[00:33:32]  You, you, Murder a child or torture a child under the age of like 14, I think it is, you could have faced the death.
[00:33:38]  Now, no.
[00:33:38]  So they're taking this.
[00:33:41]  I think it's different than libertarianism, though, what they're doing.
[00:33:43]  This is like, we're just not going to prosecute crime anymore.
[00:33:46]  That's not what libertarians want.
[00:33:47]  Yeah.
[00:33:47]  No, no.
[00:33:47]  And, you know, a couple of things about this.
[00:33:50]  One is, you know, I remember New York in the 70s and in the early 80s, and it was, you know, it was a rough place.
[00:33:56]  The crime we're seeing here in some ways is increasing things like murder, other violent crime is going down, certain types of property crime is down.
[00:34:04]  And it's important to remember Carjackings are at an all time high.
[00:34:07]  Yeah, but we're, you know, it's also important to recognize that we are not back in, you know, the kind of Gotham city of, you know, John Lindsay or Abeem.
[00:34:16]  But I agree with you.
[00:34:17]  And I also believe in a lot of the criminal justice reform.
[00:34:20]  I'm not a fan of cash bail.
[00:34:21]  I think that's usually used in a punitive way that does not actually have positive outcomes and things like that.
[00:34:28]  I do think we need police.
[00:34:29]  And I think police need to be focused on actual, you know, violent crime and property crime that gets, you know, that destroys the ability of communities to live well.
[00:34:38]  And there is a lot of abdication of that.
[00:34:41]  Of that, um, you know, what's going on with that kind of stuff, and as important when people start to sense that there is a crime increase, and the powers that be in the media and especially in law enforcement and in city government, you know, keep saying, No, there's nothing to see here, there's nothing to see here, you know, that freaks people out.
[00:35:01]  And you know, civilization is more resilient than we often think it is, but like, you don't want to be adding, you know, you don't want to be lighting more and more kind of matches on Tinder that could really destroy things.
[00:35:13]  One of the things that I find Disturbing is, you know, in New York City, I live in NoHo, you know, the drugstores here and all through the city, you know, they're starting to put things like Atkins diet bars and deodorant sticks behind lock and key because of shoplifting.
[00:35:31]  And it's.
[00:35:31]  Did you see the Rite Aid on 50th in Hell's Kitchen just shut permanently?
[00:35:35]  The Rite Aid, it's their main grocery, their main pharmacy.
[00:35:38]  What is going on with that?
[00:35:39]  That's troubling.
[00:35:40]  And this is the type of thing where I think, you know, a lot of the policies that were credited to Rudy Giuliani and things like stop and frisk.
[00:35:48]  I think they were discriminatory and I don't think they yielded the right results.
[00:35:52]  Having said that, I think having police presence or people understanding that if you break a crime, There will be consequences for it immediate, intense, near term consequences.
[00:36:03]  This is how you stop crime.
[00:36:05]  And not many people are talking about how do you bring that back so that most criminals follow incentives like other people.
[00:36:14]  And if you make it easier to get away with crime, you're going to have more crime.
[00:36:19]  And we need to be having a frank discussion about that.
[00:36:22]  Especially when you have a DA announcing he's not going to come after you for certain things and you don't have to worry about it.
[00:36:27]  And lowering the penalties on something like killing a cop is not a good idea.
[00:36:32]  Just to put some names with the stats, an eight year old girl fatally struck by a bullet while walking with her mother in Chicago this past weekend.
[00:36:41]  Third grade, an eight year old girl, Melissa Ortega, struck in the head by one of several rounds fired by a male suspect toward a 26 year old known gang member.
[00:36:51]  So, one gang member possibly shooting at another.
[00:36:54]  And as we've seen so many times in Chicago, a little girl, look at this old girl, she gets caught in the crossfire.
[00:36:59]  Disgusting.
[00:37:00]  The police officer, In New York, I want to get his name for you.
[00:37:06]  It just had it in front of me, but I'll make sure.
[00:37:08]  Jason Rivera.
[00:37:09]  Jason Rivera is the 22 year old who just got married in October.
[00:37:14]  His wife tweeting out or putting up on social media now your soul will spend the rest of my days without me, throughout me, right beside me.
[00:37:24]  I love you till the end of time.
[00:37:27]  Wow.
[00:37:28]  So you forget, you know, these are real people who are the victims of these policies and these criminals.
[00:37:35]  And too many times in New York and LA and so on, we've seen it's homeless people who the city was like, let's get them out of the homeless facilities, the mental facilities.
[00:37:43]  That's wrong to keep them locked up.
[00:37:45]  And it's like, okay, well, they need a place to go.
[00:37:47]  You have to make sure that they're just not set loose on the populace to unleash crime left and right.
[00:37:51]  And that's what we're seeing in city after city.
[00:37:54]  I think, you know, Chicago is a particular example of you can point to the crime, but you can also point to the education system.
[00:38:00]  You can point to the finances of the city, the care of roads and everything.
[00:38:07]  Chicago is a failed city.
[00:38:09]  And it's more, you know, crime is one big element of that.
[00:38:13]  And you can't rebuild a city if crime is growing and it's out of control.
[00:38:17]  But, you know, it should be a model for people to look at and figure out how do you get around that?
[00:38:21]  Because Chicago is collapsing as a city.

=== Biden's Disastrous Foreign Policy Risks (06:01) ===

[00:38:25]  And that should be, you know, a subject of concern for everybody.
[00:38:28]  Again, I'm a libertarian, not an anarchist.
[00:38:30]  I think government should be doing certain things and it should be doing them well.
[00:38:34]  And you have in a place like Chicago where it's not doing that.
[00:38:37]  I lived for a good chunk of the past.
[00:38:40]  12 months, I was in LA.
[00:38:41]  I was living in Venice, California, where there is a serious problem with homelessness and kind of public drug addiction and mental illness.
[00:38:52]  And the city is not really doing anything to address it, which is really, really bad.
[00:38:58]  I mean, that drives out people.
[00:39:01]  It makes it impossible to start or maintain businesses.
[00:39:04]  It means people start thinking about, okay, I'm going to go someplace like in Texas or Florida.
[00:39:10]  Cities and governments need to take this stuff seriously.
[00:39:13]  And they don't, partly because they're too busy doing everything else.
[00:39:17]  And instead of things like maintaining basic order, giving people access to decent schools, keeping the roads clear, the garbage picked up, these are the things that government should be doing.
[00:39:29]  And all too often, they're fancifully trying to structure everything in a utopian way so that they don't do the core functions of government.
[00:39:39]  Okay, up next, I want to ask you whether we think that Joe Biden is about to involve.
[00:39:46]  The United States in another war, this one in Ukraine, because of a verbal gaffe he committed at last week's presser.
[00:39:53]  As the White House announces, they're considering between 1,000 and 5,000 American troops.
[00:39:59]  Over, not in Ukraine, but around it, and up to potentially 50,000 American troops heading that way in one of his considered plans.
[00:40:08]  Nick is right back after this.
[00:40:10]  And remember, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
[00:40:16]  And the full video show and clips when you subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.comslash Megan Kelly.
[00:40:21]  If you prefer an audio podcast, subscribe, download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast for free.
[00:40:28]  And there you will find our full archives with more than 240 shows.
[00:40:39]  President Biden's weighing several options now with respect to Ukraine, as Putin's got some 100,000 troops amassed along the border.
[00:40:48]  One of the options is deploying thousands of troops to Eastern Europe and the Baltics, as well as warships and aircraft to, again, NATO allies in the Baltics and Eastern Europe region, not into Ukraine.
[00:41:02]  And I wonder whether this is all one.
[00:41:05]  Massive cover for his gaffe at last week's presser.
[00:41:09]  Your thoughts?
[00:41:10]  You know, it wouldn't be the first time that we were improvised into major conflicts.
[00:41:16]  By all accounts, Barack Obama talked about a red line with Syria, which he improvised, and it ended up helping to extend a disastrous foreign policy intervention in the Middle East.
[00:41:27]  I don't have a lot of trust in Joe Biden.
[00:41:29]  I was glad that we pulled out of Afghanistan.
[00:41:31]  And, you know, it went poorly, but it had to be done.
[00:41:35]  But Biden.
[00:41:36]  Uh, you know, Biden is an internationalist.
[00:41:38]  I worry about this.
[00:41:39]  We this is one of the things we need new thinking on.
[00:41:43]  Uh, you don't have to be an isolationist, uh, in order to want to reduce the uh footprint of America's military around the world for two reasons.
[00:41:52]  We can't afford it, and we tend not to do very well when we start getting involved in other battles.
[00:41:58]  This, you know, NATO should have been completely rethought or gotten rid of at the end of the cold war.
[00:42:03]  It was fought to contain the Soviet Union, or it was created to contain.
[00:42:07]  The Soviet Union, which doesn't exist anymore.
[00:42:09]  NATO needs a major rethink.
[00:42:11]  Biden's foreign policy, I think, is going to be on the disastrous side, especially if, as you're suggesting, and I think there's reasons to believe, if he's not exactly sure what he's talking about, but then you commit and then you feel a need that you have to do this.
[00:42:27]  I'm very uncomfortable about all of this.
[00:42:29]  Yeah.
[00:42:29]  I feel like he said, if I'm not mistaken, during Barack Obama's presidency, he said something about how he would negotiate with the Ayatollah.
[00:42:38]  I can't remember.
[00:42:40]  It was some very controversial world leader.
[00:42:41]  I think it was from Iran.
[00:42:43]  And it was clearly a gaffe.
[00:42:45]  I remember Charles Krauthammer pointing this out on Special Report one night saying it was a gaffe for which he was roundly criticized.
[00:42:52]  Then he made it into policy just to pretend it wasn't a gaffe.
[00:42:55]  Oh, no, no, I meant what I said.
[00:42:56]  That was definitely thought through.
[00:42:58]  And to me, this is what's happening here.
[00:43:01]  He's committed a verbal error by saying out loud that a minor incursion wouldn't necessarily be a big thing for us.
[00:43:08]  And now he's got to act like, now he's actually got to behave as though any sort of, because Nobody really believes that there's going to be a massive incursion into Ukraine.
[00:43:17]  Apparently, even the Ukrainians don't believe that.
[00:43:19]  Putin normally behaves, if not pleasantly, rationally.
[00:43:24]  And he hasn't been running around just willy nilly for no reason invading countries.
[00:43:29]  You know, you could talk about what happened in Georgia.
[00:43:31]  You could talk about what happened with Crimea.
[00:43:32]  So the odds of him just invading Ukraine and trying to take over, I think, are slim.
[00:43:36]  But if you're talking about potentially 50,000 American troops, 50,000?
[00:43:40]  Yeah.
[00:43:42]  One of the great libertarian victories of the past 20 years, then unfortunately, it was paid.
[00:43:46]  For with the bodies of countless people in the countries we invaded, but also American forces, is that America needs a better and different foreign policy.
[00:43:55]  We are not good.
[00:43:57]  At occupying countries for decades.
[00:43:59]  We don't do that well.
[00:44:01]  And again, this is another type of conversation that should be having, but it's not going to happen as long as the parties are run by these octogenarians who are stuck in a Cold War mentality.
[00:44:14]  When you think about Donald Rumsfeld, who was going to be the great transformational figure in American defense, what a disaster, because that's a guy who was stuck in 1974.
[00:44:24]  He was fighting battles from the Ford administration.

=== Renewed Commitment to Liberty Over Government (02:37) ===

[00:44:26]  We need real thinking about this that goes away from the idea that.
[00:44:30]  Either we don't intervene anywhere, anytime, even with economic power, or we have to be the world's policeman.
[00:44:36]  And Biden is clearly, I mean, he's the last gasp of so much in the 20th century.
[00:44:43]  And I don't mean that just totally critically.
[00:44:45]  It's just the world he lived in doesn't exist anymore.
[00:44:49]  It would be better for him to spend his golden years raising his grandkids or something like that than commanding the American military deep into the 21st century.
[00:45:02]  All right, let's leave it on a happy note.
[00:45:04]  Got about a minute or two left.
[00:45:06]  The one good thing of the COVID mania, you were touching on it at the end of our A block, is a renewed commitment among many to liberty, to saying no to big government, to remembering how important these liberties that we were afforded by our God, by our humanity are.
[00:45:26]  Yeah, I completely agree.
[00:45:28]  And, you know, one of the things that also, you know, freedom comes with responsibility.
[00:45:33]  And I think one of the things, if we can, Make this the big lesson of the pandemic is that we are now responsible.
[00:45:39]  We want expert help.
[00:45:41]  We want the government doing things like speeding up the creation and the dissemination and distribution of vaccines that are safe and effective.
[00:45:48]  But ultimately, we want to be in charge of our lives.
[00:45:52]  We want to be able to live the ways that we do peacefully.
[00:45:56]  And that takes a lot of responsibility.
[00:45:59]  And I think Americans, there was a period two years ago where, for basically the first time, Gallup found that.
[00:46:05]  A majority of Americans wanted the government.
[00:46:07]  They said, you know, the government should do more to help people, you know, that businesses and individuals usually do.
[00:46:13]  That was for one year right after COVID hit.
[00:46:16]  It has gone back down to now it's a majority of people saying government is trying to do too many things.
[00:46:21]  That needs to be the lasting lesson from COVID, which is that, you know, we are, we have our, you know, our freedom and we have our responsibility and we are going to build the worlds that we want to live in peacefully and make everything better.
[00:46:36]  Amen.
[00:46:37]  It's funny because at that dinner with my new gal pals, we were talking about how we have told our kids to, you know, it's okay.
[00:46:43]  We're going to make it through this.
[00:46:44]  Try not to make it too big a deal out of the mask mandates.
[00:46:47]  We think it's a big deal, but we haven't encouraged them to think that.
[00:46:50]  But we're all, a lot of us are changing the messaging now to, no, there's a time to comply and there's a time to fight.
[00:46:57]  And we're there now.
[00:46:59]  We're at the time to fight.
[00:47:00]  Nick, come back, would you?
[00:47:01]  I will.
[00:47:02]  Thank you so much.
[00:47:03]  Nice to see you.

=== Journalism Burnout and Big Pharma Ramifications (15:00) ===

[00:47:04]  Coming up, she quit a top Canadian media news outlet in a very public way, speaking out on their crazy left coverage.
[00:47:10]  She's here next.
[00:47:16]  Over the past few years, we have witnessed a number of journalists who have decided to say goodbye to corporate overlords and go it alone, sick and tired of the agendas and the lack of thoughtful discourse in the newsrooms all across America and the world for that matter.
[00:47:30]  And my next guest is one of them.
[00:47:32]  She recently quit her job in dramatic fashion, saying her former employer has gone far too woke at the expense of stories that matter to most people.
[00:47:41]  Tara Henley is a former CBC producer and now Substack writer, and she joins me now.
[00:47:46]  Tara, so Canadian broadcast company, you're Canadian, and you were at CBC for a number of years, which is publicly funded, right?
[00:47:54]  I mean, for the most part, they're funded with taxpayer dollars.
[00:47:56]  It is funded by taxpayer dollars.
[00:47:58]  Indeed.
[00:47:59]  Yeah.
[00:47:59]  Okay.
[00:47:59]  So you kind of, I mean, it reminded me of Barry Weiss, who gave me her first podcast interview after she quit.
[00:48:05]  And basically, you know, she went out in a blaze of glory and just completely, like, she could have quietly left and started her Substack.
[00:48:14]  She wanted people to know what was happening at the New York Times.
[00:48:16]  She didn't want to go quietly.
[00:48:17]  She's not the quiet type.
[00:48:18]  If you know Barry, it's awesome.
[00:48:21]  And neither are you.
[00:48:22]  So what did it for you?
[00:48:24]  Because you'd been there for a number of years.
[00:48:26]  I had.
[00:48:26]  And, you know, that letter actually had, A big impact on me.
[00:48:30]  And so I think what it was for me, I had been there since 2013 with a break to write my book.
[00:48:36]  I had worked in both the Toronto newsroom and the Vancouver newsroom on separate occasions twice.
[00:48:42]  And I had worked in the producer pool, so working between a lot of different shows.
[00:48:46]  So I was very familiar with the network and got a really big gauge on what things were like.
[00:48:51]  Now, the woke worldview had always been in the building.
[00:48:55]  But in recent years, that view has become more pervasive and it has Become more extreme, and it had become more and more difficult to get more diverse viewpoints on the air.
[00:49:07]  And so, you know, like many things, it was sort of like a death by a thousand cuts.
[00:49:12]  It was many, many things over the course of two years.
[00:49:16]  I pushed back daily within, you know, meetings and within the organization.
[00:49:21]  I did not feel like that was accomplishing much.
[00:49:24]  And I began to feel like the, you know, broadcaster was not necessarily serving the public.
[00:49:31]  Interest.
[00:49:31]  And I was getting more and more feedback from the public that that was the case.
[00:49:35]  And so I felt compelled when I left to start this conversation, to draw attention to what I had been seeing and experiencing.
[00:49:44]  And I didn't think it was going to get talked about otherwise.
[00:49:47]  And so I felt compelled to say it publicly.
[00:49:49]  All right.
[00:49:50]  Now, I confess that even though I've been in American television for some 20 years now, I have never watched one minute of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television, like sitting in front of a TV.
[00:49:58]  I'm sure I've seen clips.
[00:49:59]  I don't know what it's like.
[00:50:00]  I don't know whether I assume it's biased.
[00:50:02]  I had an interview with a comedian who told me he was.
[00:50:04]  On fire in Canada, but they told him there's no way they could give him a show because he was a white guy.
[00:50:08]  Brian Lam, yep.
[00:50:10]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:50:11]  I love him.
[00:50:11]  He's brilliant.
[00:50:12]  But I don't know.
[00:50:14]  If you told me you quit NPR, I'd be like, oh, yeah, I get it.
[00:50:17]  So, how was it always significantly tilted to the left in its coverage?
[00:50:23]  I think what we have seen in sort of the last two years since the murder of George Floyd, which was horrific, there has been a sort of significant move to the left.
[00:50:34]  Okay.
[00:50:35]  You have seen that with a number of top down policies that have happened from leadership, but you have also seen it sort of with the influence of Twitter on the newsroom.
[00:50:43]  And so the internal sort of movement has been dramatically left, but it really has been within the last two years.
[00:50:53]  I think that the last two years, it has really been quite a lot more difficult to get diverse viewpoints on the air.
[00:51:00]  Diverse viewpoints, meaning more right leaning to counterbalance whatever leftist narrative they're putting on.
[00:51:05]  Yeah, and I don't even just mean politically.
[00:51:07]  I mean, sort of, educational background.
[00:51:09]  I mean, religious background.
[00:51:10]  I do mean political background.
[00:51:12]  But I also mean, sort of, within the big issues of our day, even within the race conversation, there are many, many viewpoints on that.
[00:51:18]  And we were sort of striking one note, in my opinion.
[00:51:22]  And as I was doing a lot of research on my own and exploring independent media and exploring a lot of the different voices out there, I was really starting to see that the views were quite limited in terms of their scope.
[00:51:35]  So, now what's your political background?
[00:51:37]  I mean, as a As a journalist, sometimes you don't wear it on your sleeve, but did you come to this with any political stripes?
[00:51:45]  Yes, I am far left.
[00:51:47]  And I think that is what made this experience so surprising to me is that I am far left and I do agree with a lot of the aims of the far left.
[00:51:56]  Have supported a lot of leftist policies and principles.
[00:51:59]  But I also am someone who reads a lot and listens a lot and interviews a lot.
[00:52:05]  And I feel like it's really, really important to read and listen and interview across the political spectrum.
[00:52:11]  I have also learned a lot from conservative thinkers in the last two years as well.
[00:52:16]  And so I feel very open to different viewpoints.
[00:52:18]  And I feel like it's very important to represent different viewpoints, particularly in this moment of political polarization that we're in right now, that I think it's really important to be looking across the aisle and to be.
[00:52:30]  Trying to understand things from different perspectives.
[00:52:33]  You know, you're just, I said at the top of the hour last hour, I had a dinner this past weekend with several, almost a dozen new friends to me, one of whom was my core friend.
[00:52:43]  And they were all, all leftists, not leftists, but liberal, liberal, all of them in New York City.
[00:52:49]  All voted for Joe Biden, some campaigned for Joe Biden.
[00:52:52]  All of them are ready to vote Republican this time around.
[00:52:55]  They're so angry with what they've seen, in particular with respect to COVID policy in New York, which is.
[00:53:00]  Madness.
[00:53:01]  I realize I'm speaking to a Canadian.
[00:53:03]  So, what's happened up there is insanity, too.
[00:53:06]  I have two gals on my staff who work for me in Canada.
[00:53:09]  So, I get the updates to them.
[00:53:11]  But my point is, it's crazy in New York as well.
[00:53:14]  So, they've been sort of red pilled through the whole process in the same way you have, but would say, okay, I guess I'm more Republican now, but I did nothing.
[00:53:22]  I changed no views.
[00:53:23]  Like the party left me.
[00:53:25]  And that's what you seem to be saying about your old employer.
[00:53:28]  Well, I think this is happening to so many people on the left right now.
[00:53:32]  I think it's such a broader conversation.
[00:53:33]  And I I've been hearing a lot from people on the left who feel the same way as well, that they feel like they have no political home at this point.
[00:53:40]  And the problem, I think, is that this sort of new brand of far left kind of thought is not really consistent with what the old left believed.
[00:53:50]  You see this a lot in the conversation around censorship and free speech, you see it a lot in the conversation around race.
[00:53:58]  And a lot of the views that are being put forward on race are quite new in terms of the left.
[00:54:03]  And so I think that what's happening right now is that this sort of far left, Kind of woke collection of views is quite out of step with most of the public.
[00:54:14]  And it's difficult to unpack because it presents itself as incontrovertible truth for one, and also with basic decency.
[00:54:23]  And how do you untangle that from the greater aims in society?
[00:54:29]  I mean, I think most people would agree we are all for racial justice, we are all for trans rights, we are all for women's rights.
[00:54:36]  I mean, these are big, broad ideas.
[00:54:39]  But the way that the left is Approaching them right now comes with a lot of liberalism, with a lot of censorship, and with a lot of intolerance to how we get there, the views on how we achieve these goals.
[00:54:52]  And those things are up for debate.
[00:54:54]  They should be up for debate, particularly in newsrooms, particularly in newsrooms.
[00:54:59]  Yeah.
[00:55:00]  Oh, I mean, there was an open apology by one news station overseas.
[00:55:07]  I'm trying to remember where it was.
[00:55:08]  They openly apologized to their viewers for not being more skeptical of the information they were being given.
[00:55:14]  By their government leaders on COVID, that they had just been taking the information and reporting it without skepticism.
[00:55:22]  And it wasn't true.
[00:55:23]  They had been inflating the case numbers, the death numbers.
[00:55:26]  They hadn't been doing the old died with COVID as opposed to of COVID.
[00:55:31]  And so it's been a massive problem in media with journalists not being skeptical enough, lionizing leaders like in this country, Anthony Fauci, who's not been elected to do anything, he's just been appointed, but now is our king.
[00:55:47]  And maddening, but the press has a duty to be more skeptical.
[00:55:50]  The press has a duty to be basically assholes in dealing with government officials.
[00:55:55]  That's what we get paid to do.
[00:55:56]  We're not there to.
[00:55:57]  Kiss their ass.
[00:55:58]  We're there to make life uncomfortable for them.
[00:56:01]  Absolutely.
[00:56:01]  I'm so glad that you raised that point, Megan, because I believe that was a Danish newspaper.
[00:56:05]  It was Danish, yes.
[00:56:07]  Yeah, that story really struck me because this was one of the things I was arguing for a lot in our story meetings is, you know, since when do we as journalists take government's word on something?
[00:56:17]  Since when do we just go, okay, that's fact?
[00:56:19]  And you could go right down the line with that.
[00:56:21]  You could, you know, talk about that with pharmaceutical companies.
[00:56:24]  You could talk about that with experts.
[00:56:27]  You know, you could talk about that with the debates that are going on in science right now.
[00:56:30]  Science, there's never been a consensus in science before.
[00:56:34]  It's unnatural to have some sort of presentation of consensus.
[00:56:38]  Science has always had a ton of arguments.
[00:56:40]  And the fact that we haven't been seeing those or airing those publicly in the last two years is really a problem.
[00:56:47]  But as you say, journalism is an adversarial role.
[00:56:51]  And I think this is part of what's getting lost is that we are meant to be hypercritical, we are meant to be adversarial, we are meant to be aggressive, we are meant to Question everything all the time.
[00:57:03]  It is not a natural state for journalism to not do that.
[00:57:07]  And I think part of what's happened, you know, just is people are burnt out.
[00:57:12]  People are exhausted.
[00:57:13]  People are tired.
[00:57:14]  People have been afraid.
[00:57:16]  People have been isolated, particularly here in, you know, Toronto, where we had really, really long lockdowns.
[00:57:22]  So I think that's playing a role in it.
[00:57:24]  But I also think that the Twitter culture is playing a massive role as well because people have been so isolated and online all the time that the influence of Twitter is now outsized.
[00:57:34]  Twitter definitely promotes.
[00:57:36]  Specific narratives about all of the stories that we're covering every day and stifles entirely different ones.
[00:57:43]  Like you can't even get it on the air, never mind have a debate.
[00:57:47]  Well, and I think these things happen in subtle ways sometimes.
[00:57:50]  I think that you have really high interest level for some stories in a story meeting, whereas you have very low interest level for others.
[00:57:57]  You've been in many story meetings, some stories are a much harder sell than others.
[00:58:03]  Especially if you have less kind of viewpoints in a story meeting, it's more difficult to get more nuance.
[00:58:09]  I also think, and this is something that I've talked about somewhat, is that the labor practices are really playing into this as well.
[00:58:16]  So you have media now using precarious labor.
[00:58:19]  My employer, my former employer did that.
[00:58:22]  It was, you know, I don't know the exact number at this particular day and time, but it was usually around a quarter of the workforce was precarious.
[00:58:28]  What does that mean?
[00:58:30]  Are you talking about, I don't know what you mean by precarious workforce.
[00:58:33]  Yeah.
[00:58:34]  So at the CBC, a good portion of the workforce is not a permanent employee.
[00:58:38]  So they would either be on contract or they would be working day to day.
[00:58:43]  The number is usually around a quarter.
[00:58:45]  I don't know what that number is today exactly, but it's a large portion of the workforce.
[00:58:49]  And so, particularly the people that are working day to day without contracts, they would be sitting in story meetings auditioning for their job day after day after day.
[00:58:58]  And that does not lend itself to the sort of attitude you and I were speaking about a few moments ago about that adversarial fighting for stories, arguing, looking for new perspectives, challenging.
[00:59:11]  You can't do that if you don't have permanent employment.
[00:59:15]  That's interesting.
[00:59:15]  Yeah, your typical journalist of yesteryear was like the grizzled guy who had a bottle of bourbon in the bottom of his desk, who was subversive and he was smoking a cigarette and he would challenge anybody.
[00:59:26]  And he hated his colleagues and he hated the government, but he loved his pen and his audience.
[00:59:32]  And now a lot of that has changed for the better.
[00:59:34]  It's fine.
[00:59:34]  The bourbon is fine.
[00:59:35]  Cigarette doesn't bother me.
[00:59:37]  Man, woman, that's good too.
[00:59:38]  But this bootlicking situation into which we've grown is dangerous.
[00:59:44]  It's dangerous for the way society works, for people's lives.
[00:59:48]  Leading to that apology in that Danish newspaper.
[00:59:51]  But I also think part of it is I don't know how it is in Canada, but our media is controlled by Big Pharma.
[00:59:55]  I mean, Big Pharma's got drug.
[00:59:57]  Ads everywhere.
[01:00:00]  And they're reticent to cross them.
[01:00:02]  I mean, I know that.
[01:00:04]  I have lived that in my past life.
[01:00:05]  It's one of the reasons why I own my own company now.
[01:00:08]  But they control a lot here.
[01:00:09]  And most of these TV channels and a lot of print outlets don't want to cross them.
[01:00:15]  I don't have any experience with that.
[01:00:17]  I don't see that influence the CBC, a big pharma.
[01:00:19]  And, you know, again, CBC is a public broadcaster, so publicly funded.
[01:00:22]  So I don't have any experience with that.
[01:00:24]  But I do think right now in the public, you know, public opinion.
[01:00:28]  There has been very little criticism and debate about big pharma during this last period of time.
[01:00:33]  And I think that's really unhealthy.
[01:00:35]  I also think that, you know, with the way that science has been covered in the last couple of years, it's almost as if there is the goal of just like explaining the science to people, as opposed to looking at science as an endeavor like any other endeavor where they say science is a verb, it's not a noun.
[01:00:54]  And some people in science are going to be in conflict of interest.
[01:00:57]  Some people in science are going to be corrupt.
[01:00:59]  Some people are going to be making Human errors.
[01:01:02]  Some people are going to be exhausted and burnt out.
[01:01:03]  I mean, this is an endeavor like any other endeavor and should be criticized and scrutinized in that way.
[01:01:11]  So, was there anything in particular?
[01:01:13]  I'm just wondering, like, if you ask me for particular instances of woke bias at NBC, I could give them to you.
[01:01:19]  Conservative bias at Fox News, I could give those to you as well.
[01:01:23]  Was there anything in particular that comes to mind, like that you saw or a straw that broke the camel's back?
[01:01:27]  Well, there were many things.
[01:01:28]  I mean, I think that the fact that the housing crisis affected So many people, and so many people I know personally, and I felt it was undercovered.
[01:01:36]  That was certainly an issue.
[01:01:37]  I also felt that the opioid crisis did not get the attention that it deserved.
[01:01:42]  That was a difficult sell in the newsroom.
[01:01:43]  People felt that was quite a depressing story.
[01:01:46]  So, those were some of the broader stories.
[01:01:48]  I also felt, you know, billionaire wealth didn't get any coverage at all.
[01:01:52]  In the pandemic, we've seen Canadian billionaires increase their wealth by about 68%.
[01:01:57]  It's a big story that has a lot of ramifications.
[01:02:00]  It wasn't getting covered.
[01:02:01]  So, those are some of the things that I felt weren't getting covered.

=== Media Peril and Lack of Diversity Coverage (07:28) ===

[01:02:04]  The other things with school closures, until very recently, we just weren't hearing debate about that.
[01:02:10]  And that is something that I think is just a massive change in society and needs to be robustly debated and discussed and defended if that's what we're going to do.
[01:02:23]  Personally, I don't think that school closures are a good public policy at all.
[01:02:27]  I also felt that with the lockdowns, there just wasn't enough debate about that.
[01:02:31]  And we weren't hearing any views that were critical of the government lockdowns.
[01:02:35]  Are the schools still closed?
[01:02:38]  They are open as of today, but they were just closed for two weeks again.
[01:02:42]  And this is the first time, this last period of two weeks, where I've seen more public discussion and more media discussion about it.
[01:02:49]  But it really has not gotten the debate it deserves.
[01:02:52]  And then the vaccine mandates were another one that I felt personally like it was not a logical sort of public policy.
[01:03:03]  And the reporting I was doing did not line up with sort of the public conversation on it.
[01:03:08]  And so look at this.
[01:03:09]  They're sabotaging you to this moment.
[01:03:11]  They just turned off your lights.
[01:03:12]  They're listening.
[01:03:15]  They're still there on your shoulder trying to sabotage you.
[01:03:19]  This is so amazing.
[01:03:20]  In Toronto right now, we are in a form of lockdown.
[01:03:22]  So I'm speaking to you from the common room in my condo building so that my little puppy does not make noise.
[01:03:29]  Trust me, Ben Amir, I get it.
[01:03:31]  I can relate.
[01:03:32]  Those are a lot of examples.
[01:03:34]  Another example that was a personal example for me because I cared quite deeply about it was the Dave Chappelle Netflix controversy.
[01:03:41]  You know, I started my career in hip hop.
[01:03:43]  I spent the first six years reporting in hip hop.
[01:03:46]  And Dave Chappelle very much comes from that world.
[01:03:49]  And I felt, you know, here's a huge global comedian who has so many fans, millions of people watched that special.
[01:03:57]  He's very beloved in the public and very beloved in the comedy world.
[01:04:01]  And I just didn't see that perspective represented.
[01:04:05]  The coverage was very one sided.
[01:04:07]  And that one in particular stood out to me.
[01:04:09]  So I think the thing that tipped me over the edge were the vaccine mandates and the Dave Chappelle coverage.
[01:04:15]  The CBC did give us a statement.
[01:04:17]  I'm sure you've read something similar.
[01:04:19]  They respectfully disagree with your perspective.
[01:04:21]  They say a few minutes on Google will surface countless recent CBC news stories on the very subjects that Tara claims we're ignoring.
[01:04:28]  From the housing crisis and affordability to the epidemic of drug overdoses.
[01:04:31]  They say they were nominated for Canada's highest journalism honor.
[01:04:35]  Okay.
[01:04:36]  And they say that some of their programs keep track of the gender, race, and location of people who appear to make sure they're representative of the Canadian population.
[01:04:45]  That relates to another allegation you made in your Peace Outletter where you basically said they're asking the race of guests who are coming on.
[01:04:51]  I have to Google around on the internet to try to figure out is this a black guy?
[01:04:55]  Is this a black woman?
[01:04:56]  I need to make sure my numbers are right or I can't just have, you know.
[01:04:59]  I don't know.
[01:04:59]  I can see why.
[01:05:01]  Most networks say you don't want just one race on the air.
[01:05:04]  Like, if every face is a white face, you can't have that, right?
[01:05:07]  So, I see their defense there.
[01:05:09]  But, what are you saying?
[01:05:10]  That they've got like a quota system now?
[01:05:11]  Because they deny that.
[01:05:13]  Yeah.
[01:05:14]  So, basically, what I was referring to is after sort of the George Floyd incident, basically, what they decided to do was to pilot content tracing projects throughout the service.
[01:05:26]  So, they were public about that.
[01:05:28]  The one that I was involved in was not public.
[01:05:30]  So, I sat on a committee for this.
[01:05:32]  And basically, the idea was across Current affairs to take a look at what the demographics of our guests were on air.
[01:05:41]  The problem being was because it was not a public project, we were not able to ask people who we were interviewing what their racial background was.
[01:05:51]  And so, as you mentioned previously, we're on Google, we're on social media trying to guess, which is quite a fool's errand in a city like Toronto, which is so multiracial.
[01:06:02]  As for the diversity.
[01:06:03]  I have to mention, it's fraught with peril.
[01:06:05]  Fraught with peril.
[01:06:07]  It's a very strange way to approach it.
[01:06:09]  Now, in terms of the broader question of diversifying our newsrooms, I do support that.
[01:06:14]  I think that's very, very important.
[01:06:15]  What I was objecting to was the sort of obsession with racial diversity and the lack of focus on other kinds of aspects of diversity.
[01:06:26]  So, a narrow definition of what diversity is, and the implication being that if you have a different skin color, you automatically have a different perspective.
[01:06:35]  And so, I reject that.
[01:06:36]  Premise while affirming the idea of diversifying our newsrooms.
[01:06:40]  And really, what I'm calling for is more diversity, not less, more viewpoints, more people of different economic backgrounds, more people of different religious backgrounds, more people of different political and geographical backgrounds.
[01:06:54]  I want more fulsome diversity.
[01:06:56]  That's what I was arguing for.
[01:06:58]  So, has there been any fallout to you personally from this, from leaving and saying why?
[01:07:03]  I mean, have any of your lefty friends left you?
[01:07:07]  I have not lost any friends over this, no.
[01:07:10]  I have had, you know, of course, when you're in the eye of a media storm like this, it is a very surreal experience.
[01:07:18]  I think one of the things that has really stood out to me is just the volume of mail that I'm getting, Megan.
[01:07:23]  Like, it's just, I've never experienced anything like this before.
[01:07:26]  I'm hearing from people all across the country who are very concerned about the direction that our media is going, who don't feel served by the media, who don't feel like the media speaks to them and the issues that they care about.
[01:07:37]  I've also heard from journalists all across the country, some of which in my old newsroom and in colleagues across the country who are happy that I've raised this issue, who are happy that I have started this conversation.
[01:07:52]  So it's been about 95% positive.
[01:07:55]  It's been a really exciting.
[01:07:56]  Kind of incredible thing to live through to get that level of communication with so many people all at once.
[01:08:02]  And then, of course, there have been some difficulties on Twitter, of course, as you would expect.
[01:08:07]  Of course, that's not the right forum.
[01:08:08]  But, you know, to me, it reminds me of I mentioned this.
[01:08:11]  Dan Wooten came on last week to talk about Prince Andrew and his new legal troubles, but he works for GB News, Great Britain News, GB News over in the UK.
[01:08:19]  And they're not Fox News, but they're a more fair and balanced alternative to the BBC.
[01:08:26]  I go on with Dan once a week because I support their mission.
[01:08:31]  They too are trying to reach the forgotten masses of the UK whose viewpoints don't seem to matter, right?
[01:08:38]  To the people who are in charge and controlling the programming, who get glossed over like they're nothing, right?
[01:08:43]  Like they're, quote, deplorables, to borrow a term.
[01:08:45]  So it's an important mission.
[01:08:47]  And if these big companies were smart, right?
[01:08:50]  Like the BBCs of the world and the Canadian broadcasting corporations of the world, they too would just listen, right?
[01:08:56]  And expand.
[01:08:57]  Don't get defensive.
[01:08:58]  Listen, readjust, try to make more room in your programming.
[01:09:03]  Okay, you can cite some examples.
[01:09:04]  I get it.
[01:09:05]  How about more?
[01:09:06]  How about more?
[01:09:06]  Can't you do better?
[01:09:07]  Right?
[01:09:07]  Like, fold those people in, you'll do even better.
[01:09:09]  All right, I'm going to pause it there because I really want to get into one of the biggest stories that you've been pursuing or sort of narratives that you've been pursuing over the past few years, which is what the hell happens when you're 39, you're single, you're childless, and you realize you've been sold a bill of goods about having it all.
[01:09:27]  Stand by.

=== Lost Lessons for the Next Generation (14:50) ===

[01:09:33]  So, Tara, you wrote a book last, well, just about last year, March of 2020, called Lean Out.
[01:09:39]  And this is from the publisher.
[01:09:42]  In 2016, journalist Tara Henley was at the top of her game working in Canadian media.
[01:09:46]  She had traveled the world interviewing authors and community leaders, politicians, and Hollywood celebrities.
[01:09:51]  But when she started getting chest pains at her desk in the newsroom, none of that seemed to matter.
[01:09:58]  It was not, thank goodness, a heart problem.
[01:10:01]  It was?
[01:10:03]  Anxiety.
[01:10:04]  Yeah, anxiety.
[01:10:05]  And so, what were you realizing at that point?
[01:10:08]  Oh, my goodness, Megan.
[01:10:10]  So, the day that I sort of had to take a step back from the newsroom, this is, I guess, five years ago, quite a while back now, maybe even a little longer.
[01:10:22]  I was in the newsroom and I was on a call.
[01:10:25]  I was interviewing an executive coach who was walking clients through burnout.
[01:10:32]  That was my assignment for the day burnout and work related stress.
[01:10:35]  And he was telling me how many of his clients were experiencing such extreme stress that their bodies were physically breaking down.
[01:10:42]  And Megan, while I was on the phone interviewing him, I was holding my chest to keep the chest pains from overwhelming me.
[01:10:50]  I know, like just one of those crazy moments.
[01:10:54]  So I was having very intense chest pains and I did have to take time off.
[01:10:58]  And as a result of that, went on this sort of journey with the book and really learning about.
[01:11:03]  Anxiety and you know, it comes to be as I did the research, it's much much bigger societal problem, and started to look at some of the systemic things that are contributing to it.
[01:11:12]  But as you alluded before, I also started to look a little bit, I think this was my beginning of questioning identity politics, was looking at feminism and at the role and the position that so many of us professional women find ourselves in these days, which is to have you know, great, successful, uh, fulfilling careers, but not necessarily to have personal lives that are satisfying.
[01:11:34]  And I, it was something I was hearing.
[01:11:36]  From people all across the board at the time I was working on the book.
[01:11:39]  And that, you know, this idea that we can work like men and achieve like men, but also sort of do all the things that our mothers did as well is, I think, an unrealistic expectation and kind of a false bill of goods.
[01:11:57]  Couldn't relate to that more.
[01:11:58]  I totally agree with that.
[01:11:59]  I mean, I wrote my book in 2016 called Settle for More, and it was about my life and sort of my own philosophy towards succeeding.
[01:12:08]  And Settle for More is based on a Dr. Phil saying, which I heard many moons earlier, that goes as follows The only difference between you and someone you envy is you settled for less.
[01:12:20]  And so, what I meant by Settle for More, and if you look at the book, it shows this, is you have to figure out what more means for you.
[01:12:27]  Right?
[01:12:28]  Not what society tells you.
[01:12:30]  What does more mean?
[01:12:30]  And my book actually closed in 2016 as I was trying to decide whether to stay at Fox or what to do with more right now for me means more time with my family.
[01:12:40]  And then I left and I went to NBC to try to do like a daytime show so that I could be home with them and so on.
[01:12:45]  So by then and now, I have managed to strike a balance where I am raising my own children.
[01:12:50]  But it's not true that you can reach, for example, in my situation, the pinnacle of cable news beyond in the prime time, which I had to leave my house at 3 p.m., I didn't get home till almost midnight.
[01:13:01]  And feel like a great mom.
[01:13:02]  That was not true in my case.
[01:13:04]  I never saw my children.
[01:13:06]  My nanny was lovely.
[01:13:08]  My husband's amazing, but I didn't care.
[01:13:11]  I wanted to be there.
[01:13:12]  I didn't want to miss it.
[01:13:14]  And it was a lie told to me by society that I could manage both at the same time.
[01:13:20]  For me, if you want to prioritize your career and being a present, involved mother, those two things were not possible to do simultaneously.
[01:13:29]  I think that's so interesting.
[01:13:30]  And I think the idea goes back to the.
[01:13:33]  To the feminist movement, and what they kind of prioritized and what they chose to emphasize was women's ability to compete in the labor market.
[01:13:41]  But that is just one part of us as women, and that is only one way of achieving equality.
[01:13:47]  And you know, one of the things that bothered me so much around the conversation around this, the Cheryl Sandberg conversation around this, that it was our job to sort of be leaders and be more ambitious and take a seat at the table, and you know, that was it was ignoring another form of leadership in that women are often the glue that holds society together, and there are all kinds of Things we do to be leaders in our communities and our families.
[01:14:11]  And that form of leadership, whether it is taking care of people who are sick or taking care of children or taking care of community members and bringing people together, that is another form of leadership and a really important one, particularly in this crazy moment in history that we're in right now.
[01:14:29]  So I do love Cheryl.
[01:14:31]  I have to say, she's a friend of mine.
[01:14:32]  And I realize her book has become controversial.
[01:14:34]  But I think one of her main messages was if you want to be a gunner at work and you want to get ahead, This is how you do it.
[01:14:40]  You do have to lean in.
[01:14:41]  You have to be more aggressive.
[01:14:42]  Some women do lean back.
[01:14:43]  We're less likely to raise our hands first and all that kind of stuff.
[01:14:47]  And she did offer some good advice in there on, you know, how could you do it?
[01:14:51]  What are you probably doing that's self sabotaging that effort?
[01:14:54]  But what I object to is now we've switched into a push like, I don't know, they give motherhood a nod.
[01:15:01]  You know, they know that they have to, but it's just a nod if that sort of the modern day messaging.
[01:15:05]  But it's all about STEM.
[01:15:07]  Like the little girls, they've got to go on to become the next NASA scientist or somehow they've.
[01:15:12]  They've settled for less, right?
[01:15:14]  Like, what if they don't like science?
[01:15:16]  What if they genuinely aren't good at it?
[01:15:17]  What if it's not that the teachers are teaching the little girl she's less than?
[01:15:21]  What if she really just doesn't have an aptitude or a taste for it?
[01:15:25]  Now there's like a judgment, unless you're going that way, you've somehow failed.
[01:15:30]  You've failed the feminist movement, you've failed to advance womankind.
[01:15:34]  That I object to just as much.
[01:15:36]  I know.
[01:15:37]  And it's sort of a perplexing thing because I do think that what we really want.
[01:15:43]  Is equality and we want the ability to sort of pursue lives of meaning and purpose on our own terms.
[01:15:50]  But the idea that that is going to look one way for all women is, is A fallacy.
[01:15:55]  And I think that there are many, many ways of having a meaningful life.
[01:15:58]  And one of the things that I really came to in my book is just how important social connection is and how important family in particular is.
[01:16:06]  And that's something that is really getting lost in the present moment.
[01:16:10]  And it's really, you know, during the pandemic, it's been so exacerbated that when we do not have really close, fulfilling, rich social connections, we really fall apart as people and as a society.
[01:16:23]  And I think it's important to get back to that.
[01:16:26]  So, you wrote, this is again back.
[01:16:31]  I'm not exactly, this is part of your documentary, I think, because you did a radio documentary on this issue.
[01:16:36]  Okay, I want to quote As daughters of the feminist revolution, we'd been told that we didn't need to seek out marriage and motherhood.
[01:16:44]  Our job was to go to school, get a career, fulfill our potential.
[01:16:47]  The rest would fall into place.
[01:16:49]  But lots of times it didn't.
[01:16:51]  And as we live this new narrative out, it dawned on us that the timeline didn't make sense.
[01:16:56]  So true.
[01:16:57]  You go on exactly how we're supposed to push our careers with long office hours and around the clock smartphone accessibility, and at the same time find someone to build a life with and then marry them and get pregnant and care for small children.
[01:17:12]  It concentrated too many life events in our early 30s.
[01:17:17]  It's true.
[01:17:18]  You're supposed to do it all.
[01:17:19]  And even, and I was on the opposite end, I started it all in my late 30s, and it's just as hard to get it done in your 40s.
[01:17:25]  But like the system worked maybe a little better when we had the babies, like maybe in the 20s, and then we sort of focused on the career more in the 30s, but trying to do it all at the same time.
[01:17:36]  I don't want to say impossible, but it's crushing.
[01:17:40]  It's crushing.
[01:17:41]  It's total insanity.
[01:17:43]  I mean, I think back to my early 30s, and I mean, I was working 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day, and, you know, very, very focused and very driven.
[01:17:52]  And I did have friends who did have children in that time period.
[01:17:56]  And my goodness, Megan, their lives were so, so, so intense because it wasn't as if The demands at work led up at all.
[01:18:04]  And it wasn't as if the home demands led up at all or the relationship demands.
[01:18:10]  It's just, it's too many things all at once.
[01:18:12]  It's just too many demands.
[01:18:14]  And some people are able to do it.
[01:18:16]  And, you know, again, their lives are very, very hectic and stressful.
[01:18:21]  And I don't know if that's what we want for everybody.
[01:18:23]  I don't know if that's what we want for the next generation of young women.
[01:18:27]  I often talk to young women about this issue.
[01:18:31]  And my advice is often.
[01:18:32]  Often to prioritize relationships.
[01:18:34]  I think that's probably the most important thing.
[01:18:36]  I wish somebody had said that to me when I was in my early 30s.
[01:18:40]  It just wasn't on my radar at all.
[01:18:41]  And as a result, I did not have children.
[01:18:43]  And I do feel very sad about that.
[01:18:46]  But I think that that's something that we have to be really honest and really forthright about with the next generation letting them know that the chances are, if you are working the way that we all work, that those things don't naturally just fall into place.
[01:18:59]  It's too many demands all at once.
[01:19:00]  Yeah.
[01:19:01]  And there is a biological clock.
[01:19:03]  That we have to be realistic about.
[01:19:05]  I mean, that's just true for women.
[01:19:07]  I have so many friends who are 40 and realizing I'm not getting good numbers back and it's not the way I thought it was going to be.
[01:19:16]  And you're right.
[01:19:17]  So, if you want to actually have your own biological child, there's no question.
[01:19:21]  There's a window and it has to be prioritized if that's your goal.
[01:19:25]  But so, were you unmarried and you didn't have children when you wrote it?
[01:19:30]  And now, what, you're 46, 47?
[01:19:32]  So, did you manage to change your situation?
[01:19:34]  Did you find love?
[01:19:35]  Like, what did you do?
[01:19:37]  I did find love for a period of time.
[01:19:39]  And then that relationship ended right before the pandemic, actually, right before I moved back to Toronto.
[01:19:45]  And so I had the experience of dating a bit during the pandemic, which I have to say was very surreal.
[01:19:52]  It was a lot, Megan.
[01:19:53]  It was a lot of mass.
[01:19:56]  Outdoor walks.
[01:19:56]  Oh my God, will you be like, can you pull that down just for one second so I can see what I'm looking at here?
[01:20:02]  Let's see, before I make any further decisions to see your actual face.
[01:20:06]  But also, I found it, I did find it really interesting.
[01:20:08]  And I felt so much empathy for, you know, the men that I met who I was having coffee with and getting to know because the pandemic was just very, very difficult on people in general.
[01:20:20]  But I had the sense that it was quite difficult on men in particular.
[01:20:23]  Women are just so much more socialized.
[01:20:26]  And I just really noticed that, you know, the men that I was, Meeting and listening to it, we're just feeling quite isolated socially, and that the pandemic was really taking a toll.
[01:20:37]  Well, that complicates it too.
[01:20:38]  It's like you don't want them to choose you out of desperation.
[01:20:40]  Like, I need company for the love of God.
[01:20:42]  No, that's not going to be the basis of a good.
[01:20:45]  I just found it an interesting journalistic exercise at the end.
[01:20:48]  I mean, it was just really interesting to hear how many people were sort of dealing with the stresses all around us and how they were dealing with it.
[01:20:56]  So, do you think, I mean, I realize you're not an expert, but do you think we're headed for?
[01:21:03]  A 1950s style revolution where women in much larger numbers say it wasn't such a bad situation for more and more women at then back then, it wasn't exactly always a choice, but for more and more women to choose staying at home and building their life around the family.
[01:21:22]  And it doesn't mean you're like getting slippers on your husband every morning and evening, though it could if that's your thing.
[01:21:28]  Um, it's like I choose to make the home my priority and get a lot of fulfillment out of that, and that's a recognized.
[01:21:36]  Acceptable social choice.
[01:21:37]  I wonder if we're going to see more and more women go that way.
[01:21:40]  You know, I don't know what we're going to see going forward, but I do have a real sense.
[01:21:44]  I mean, I think that we're witnessing a real crisis in society right now.
[01:21:48]  And that's really what I have been responding to for the last couple of years the political polarization, the fragmentation, the real sense that we're losing liberalism, that we're losing some really fundamental aspects of our society.
[01:22:03]  My basic contention, I think that this.
[01:22:07]  Kind of fragmentation comes back to the break between men and women that we have seen in the last couple of decades.
[01:22:12]  And so I don't know where that goes from here.
[01:22:15]  I know that most people I talk to are very unhappy with the state of affairs, that they, you know, either they're single and finding that quite difficult, or they're married and stretched so thin with family responsibilities and work.
[01:22:28]  But whatever the situation is, it's an unsustainable state of affairs right now.
[01:22:33]  And so where does that go?
[01:22:35]  I mean, does that mean we're going to see sort of a backlash against the sort of careerist?
[01:22:41]  Thrust in our society.
[01:22:42]  And not just from women, but from men too.
[01:22:45]  Exactly.
[01:22:46]  I hear that from a lot of my male friends that they're just not up for the level of intensity that so many of our jobs require now.
[01:22:54]  And that we're losing really, really important things as a society.
[01:22:57]  We're losing community.
[01:22:58]  We're losing family.
[01:22:59]  We're losing love.
[01:23:00]  We're losing children.
[01:23:01]  We're losing big, big things here.
[01:23:03]  And so I do think you're right that there's something brewing.
[01:23:06]  I just don't know what direction that's going to go.
[01:23:08]  I also feel like a factor that plays into this is what we do to our children now.
[01:23:13]  You know, K through 12 education, because right now it's a grind.
[01:23:19]  They're so stressed out.
[01:23:21]  They're that so much is put upon them.
[01:23:24]  You know, back when I was a kid, granted, it was the 70s and my parents really didn't give a shit.
[01:23:29]  They were like, fine, you're good.
[01:23:30]  You know, you figure it out.
[01:23:32]  Get back to us and let us know how it works out.
[01:23:34]  But that actually had a lot of advantages.
[01:23:36]  I did not go off to college.
[01:23:37]  I did not go to Ivy League college.
[01:23:39]  I went to Syracuse.
[01:23:39]  It was fine.
[01:23:40]  But I did not go off even remotely stressed out.
[01:23:42]  I was like, yeah, it's fun.
[01:23:43]  I had a fun first 17 years and I'm looking forward to another fun four years here.
[01:23:48]  No, I was never at the top of my academic class.
[01:23:51]  When I got to law school, I started taking things seriously.
[01:23:53]  But I'm saying we send these kids off now.
[01:23:56]  Just completely stressed.
[01:23:58]  They have to play in three sports and they have to be in 10 clubs and they have to get straight A's.
[01:24:02]  Otherwise, they're a loser.
[01:24:04]  And the kids do it to the other kids.
[01:24:05]  It's not just the parents.
[01:24:07]  So we kind of rob them of all this joy and free love and energy and then put them through the grinder of, you know, college and post grad school and then expect them to be energized and ready to go for 20 years working 14 hours a day.

=== Immense Pressures on Young People Today (04:22) ===

[01:24:23]  Indeed.
[01:24:23]  I mean, I think the pressures on young people right now are just immense.
[01:24:27]  And when you look at the The economy and the way things go, and how competitive things are.
[01:24:32]  And then you look at the housing market, how expensive it is just to find a place to live.
[01:24:35]  I mean, these are major, major pressures on young people.
[01:24:38]  Plus, then you have social media and you have the pressures to appear a certain way, and the kind of pylons that happen to young people all the time on social media.
[01:24:47]  It's not healthy.
[01:24:48]  It's not healthy at all.
[01:24:50]  And I do worry about that next generation.
[01:24:53]  I'm with you.
[01:24:55]  I'm a child of hippie parents.
[01:24:58]  And so my childhood was sort of that mix of quite a lot of freedom and then also.
[01:25:03]  Quite a lot of eye rolling.
[01:25:04]  I feel like I've been criticizing progressives my entire life.
[01:25:08]  On the other hand, I did have a lot of freedom and I was able to travel a lot and do a lot of things and was kind of ready for adulthood and energized and ready to meet those challenges and resilient and had a lot of, yeah, resiliency on board.
[01:25:24]  And so I do worry that we're, you know, coddling young people now and at the same time, coddling them and giving them this unsustainable set of affairs to work with.
[01:25:34]  With jobs and housing and all the rest.
[01:25:36]  Well, I had Tristan Harris, who is one of the stars of The Social Dilemma on Netflix a few years ago.
[01:25:42]  He's an insider at Google, an ethicist within Google, who left and has really ever since been calling very publicly for more ethics in tech and in social media in particular.
[01:25:52]  But one of the things he was saying was one of the big problems in the way we're raising kids today is the lack of free time and ability to make your own decisions and fail and so on, right?
[01:26:02]  And then kids get older and they don't have those life skills.
[01:26:06]  It was either him or it was my free speech guy from Fair.
[01:26:08]  I can't remember.
[01:26:09]  They were both making similar points, but they were brilliant.
[01:26:12]  Not from Fair, from Fire.
[01:26:13]  Fair and Fire.
[01:26:14]  They're similar, but slightly different in their purpose.
[01:26:17]  Anyway, my point is the kids need free time and they need to fall.
[01:26:20]  They need to make their own decisions.
[01:26:21]  They need to resolve their own fights and they need time to just veg and be stupid and watch dumb programming.
[01:26:27]  And they don't need three sports and 10 clubs and perfect days to get ahead in life.
[01:26:32]  Getting a Harvard degree is not all it's cracked up to be.
[01:26:34]  Trust me, it doesn't guarantee you anything.
[01:26:36]  And if you can work on your kids' EQ, You know, their emotional intelligence and not just their IQ.
[01:26:42]  It's just as valuable an asset.
[01:26:45]  Anyway, and it can lead to greater happiness as well.
[01:26:47]  Tara, I love your choices and I think it's going to work out well for you.
[01:26:51]  Now you've got your own Substack.
[01:26:53]  I feel like something's going to happen for you in the love department.
[01:26:55]  You should probably come down here to America a few times because we got a lot of hot men in America.
[01:26:59]  I'm just saying, they're like great.
[01:27:02]  And I think it's going to go well.
[01:27:03]  Let's check in like in the not too distant future and we'll see.
[01:27:06]  Oh, that sounds great.
[01:27:07]  Megan, let me thank you.
[01:27:08]  I listened to your show.
[01:27:09]  It has Been just such a great thing during the pandemic.
[01:27:12]  I really appreciate how many viewpoints that you represent.
[01:27:15]  And I think it's a really good show.
[01:27:17]  So thank you.
[01:27:18]  Thank you so much.
[01:27:18]  I appreciate it.
[01:27:19]  All right.
[01:27:19]  We'll come back soon.
[01:27:20]  Thanks again.
[01:27:21]  She was great.
[01:27:22]  So refreshing, right?
[01:27:23]  Thanks to our guests for joining us today.
[01:27:25]  Thanks to all of you for listening.
[01:27:27]  We appreciate it.
[01:27:28]  Tomorrow, our pal, Abigail Schreier, is back with us.
[01:27:31]  Love her to talk about the latest in that story of the transgender swimmer at UPenn and how, you know, this is a biological man swimming as a woman who just lost.
[01:27:43]  Lost to a biological woman swimming as a man, and now there's a report they may have colluded to make that happen.
[01:27:53]  We'll bring you all the sorted details as the NCAA once again punts all responsibility so it doesn't have to take a stance.
[01:28:02]  We'd love to have you tune in for that.
[01:28:03]  In the meantime, please download the show, The Megan Kelly Show, on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.
[01:28:08]  You can get it for free and go to youtube.comslash Megan Kelly and subscribe if you would do me that favor.
[01:28:15]  Thanks to everybody for listening.
[01:28:16]  I am still reading the reviews, even the ones that are like, if you really read these reviews, you'll read it on the air.
[01:28:20]  I'm not going to necessarily do that, but I do read them all, I swear.
[01:28:24]  I see you.
[01:28:25]  And thanks.
[01:28:25]  I appreciate it.
[01:28:28]  Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
[01:28:30]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.