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Feb. 7, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:28:44
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Joe Rogan and Selective Outrage 00:10:19
Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.
It's a busy Monday in the news biz.
Joe Rogan apologizing over the weekend for his repeated use of the N-word and for another controversial remark.
But Spotify's CEO for now is standing by him, saying while the comments were Hurtful.
Canceling voices is a slippery slope.
There's a lot going on in that case this morning.
We'll bring it to you.
Also, protests erupting in Minneapolis after police shoot and kill a black man during a no knock warrant, during the execution of the no knock warrant.
We'll get into that as well.
And my first guest today is the perfect person to discuss this and much more with Jason Riley, one of my favorite people to read.
I mean, honestly, his books, his columns at the Wall Street Journal, whatever he writes, you should be reading it and you will be smarter.
And he is the author of the book.
The Black Boom, which is out today.
So we'll discuss that.
And he's also, as I mentioned, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Jason, welcome back.
Thank you for having me, Megan.
Congrats on the book.
We'll get to that in one sec.
Let me just hit a couple of news items with you.
And I'll just kick it off with Joe Rogan.
So they tried to get him over the past couple of weeks for, quote, COVID misinformation.
You know, he put on Dr. Robert Malone and others, and some didn't feel he questioned them aggressively enough about their anti vaccine opinions.
He came out and said, okay, I'll try to do better.
I'll put on more diverse voices and I'll press harder.
Then they switched the narrative to he's a racist.
And we saw the same tapes that they're circulating about him now right after he endorsed Bernie.
You know, it was very clear the Biden people put out the tapes saying, you know, this guy doesn't listen to Joe Rogan.
He may like Bernie, but he's a racist.
And indeed, the tapes show him using the N word at least a dozen times over the past several years.
I think it's in the past decade.
And telling a story about going to see the movie Planet of the Apes in a predominantly black neighborhood, and Joe Rogan saying, It felt like I was on Planet of the Apes when I went to watch the movie.
And he apologized for that too, saying, I realize that sounds incredibly racist.
You know, even to me, it's horrible.
I'm sorry, sorry, sorry.
And I wonder because you're always fair on these issues, those are tough comments.
But what is the big picture in your view about what's happening right now with Joe Rogan?
Well, you know, I'm not really familiar with this show.
I don't listen to it, Megan, but it does seem to fit.
This instance does seem to fit a pattern of what we've seen through this whole, you know, cancel culture phenomenon where someone says something controversial or something you don't like, and the idea is not to debate that person, but to silence them or to shun them in some way.
You know, and as a journalist like you, I don't like to see that.
I think, you know, I take.
Free speech and freedom of expression and that sort of thing very seriously.
And I think if someone says something controversial, you push back by pointing out where they're wrong and then you move on.
And that's what we do in this society.
But this idea that we're going to police speech is something that doesn't sit well with me as a journalist.
And I'm sure it doesn't sit well with a lot of Americans who can decide for themselves.
If people don't like what Joe Rogan is saying, they'll stop listening to him.
I mean, that's sort of the way it works here.
And yet, that's not the way they want it to work.
They want him gone.
They want him deplatformed entirely.
And you've got people like Indy Ari coming out and saying, I don't care about the COVID stuff.
I care about the race stuff.
And I don't want my music on a platform.
With a guy who makes comments like that, what do you make of it, right?
Because it's like, I understand, even in the past 10 years, people knew not to use the N word.
It's not like that was a new revelation.
And yet, that word is all over Spotify's music.
If you listen to Spotify for two minutes.
It's very, obviously, it's a very selective outrage.
I mean, that's been clear for a long time.
But it's also selective in the sense that the left rarely wants to call out their own.
When they get in this sort of trouble with their misuse of it.
I mean, you know, the civil rights leaders, anti Semitic remarks made over the years, racist remarks made by Blacks and others on the left, they seem to get a pass.
We don't linger over that.
We move on.
So, yes, but it is very much selective outrage.
This idea that Black people melt when they hear that word is a lot of play acting.
I mean, Dave Chappelle can't string together two sentences without using this word.
One of the most popular entertainers in the country.
So, I, yes, I do see a lot of performance art going on here.
Yeah, I'm thinking of somebody like Chelsea Handler, who was praising Louis Farrakhan, who has made the most disgusting remarks possible about Jews.
Didn't hurt her career.
No one cares.
Fine.
She can be cast in, no one's saying she should never act in another movie again.
Different story.
And so, yeah, you could do this to a lot of very popular, especially somebody like Joe Rogan, who's just been, it's not like he's been anchoring the CBS Evening News.
You know, he's been out there having like these no holds barred conversations for all his time, and his show exploded.
And I just don't think.
He ever put guardrails on himself.
And now he's realizing with a bigger platform, he may have to.
That's part of the deal with all the power he has and the partnership with Spotify.
I would like to call your attention, though, as a journalist, and you're with the Wall Street Journal, but here is, listen to this, Margaret Sullivan.
She's a columnist at the Washington Post for our audience.
She comes out with this, Jason.
She says, I'm disgusted by Joe Rogan's weak apology on the COVID stuff.
My former colleague's death at age 47 makes it worse.
My friend was 47.
He was overweight and asthmatic, very much at risk, and he was unvaccinated.
And she's blaming Joe Rogan.
But then she adds this I don't know for sure whether getting vaccination and booster shots would have saved his life.
And I have no idea whether he'd ever listened to Joe Rogan's podcast or for what reason he chose not to be vaccinated.
But let me get back to the point it's Joe Rogan's fault and Spotify's too.
I mean, this is the lunacy on the left, Jason.
It is lunacy.
And again, it's sort of this condescension, this condescending view of the American public and their supposed inability to separate the sort of wheat from the chaff in this sort of thing.
I mean, there's all kinds of information coming at everyday people all the time.
They decide who to take seriously, they decide who to go to for medical advice.
And the idea that a comedian can't be out there doing his thing, or someone just talking off the top of their head, that people are sitting at home and as if this is a biblical script.
That they're hearing and are going to go immediately act on it.
It's just, it's nonsense.
And again, I think it's a very insulting view of the intelligence of the average person in this country, including the average Joe Rogan listener who knows when he's fooling around and when he's trying to be serious.
Plus, they're getting, I mean, on the COVID stuff, they are getting the other narrative by the boatload every channel they turn on.
So he puts on an alternate voice with an alternate viewpoint.
Like they don't need Joe Rogan to interview, although he did, Sanjay Gupta to get Sanjay Gupta's point of view.
Yeah, the idea that you need, he needs more balance on his program, where the existence of his program is providing balance.
Yeah.
You come up against this all the time, this sort of token balance that the left believes in.
I get invited to do panel discussions and things like that all the time.
And it'll always, almost always, be three on one, four on one.
And because they have one more conservative voice, it's, oh, we have balance now.
No, you don't have balance.
You have window dressing, is what you have.
And so, yes, this idea that Joe Rogan's show needs more balance.
Oh, my goodness.
One of the few conservative voices out there, and they can't tolerate that.
I mean, I really do think with him, I mean, they do go after their own, the left woke mob.
It's not all liberals, it's the leftist woke mob.
But they go after their own sometimes.
You know, we've seen that in a couple of cases.
But somebody like Joe Rogan, who is not woke and is fighting them on that core issue of making identity politics everything, you know, race essentialism and trans ideology and all of it, is a particular threat, especially given that his platform.
You know, he's got 11 million viewers or listeners.
It dwarfs anything in cable news.
I mean, anything.
You could combine the average ratings of, you know, all the Fox News evening hosts who dwarf MSNBC and CNN hosts, and they still wouldn't reach Joe Rogan.
So he's a bigger threat.
So, and so that's what this is about.
They want to silence him for those viewpoints, not for any particular offense they claim to be experiencing from his comments on race or his COVID stuff.
There could be something to that.
You could be absolutely right about that.
But I still think the dominant media in this country is very left of center and mostly left of center.
I mean, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the biggest networks, all of academia, for example, the Hollywood left in terms of the entertainment industry, where people are thrown at, they have such a tremendous advantage.
The idea that they can't tolerate a Joe Rogan here or there, that he is somehow a threat.
To their dominant narratives out there, I find pretty pathetic.
You're talking about some very insecure people, if that's what they really believe.
Alvin Bragg Rolls Back Policies 00:06:51
Yeah.
Well, now the CEO of Spotify comes out and says he's standing by Rogan.
He says, I strongly condemn what Joe has said.
And I agree with his decision to remove past episodes from our platform.
Apparently, between 70 and 100 episodes have been removed.
He's saying by Joe himself.
But he says, I want to make one point very clear I don't believe that silencing him is the answer.
We should have clear lines around content and take action when they're crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope.
Looking at the issue more broadly, it's critical thinking and open debate that powers real and necessary progress.
This, Jason, while to appease his critics, he's donating, not donating, but he's going to invest $100 million to license and develop the marketing of music and audio content from historically marginalized groups, right?
So it's like, get off my back.
Look at me.
A lot of the most popular music in this country is already coming from historically marginalized groups.
I'm not sure that's where these groups need the most help.
Well, you know what he actually means.
He's referring to his deal with Meghan Markle.
Okay.
He's already paying them $50 million for a podcast they've released one episode of.
It's pathetic.
All right, let's move on to matters more important.
New York is a microcosm of what's happening in cities all across the country with its crime rate.
You know, from San Francisco to LA to Chicago, Pennsylvania, and so on, crime rates rising in our major cities, homicide rates, or homicides rising.
And now, Because of these soft on crime DAs, among other things, and the demonization of police writ large in the wake of George Floyd.
And so now, after the death of two police officers that made national news in New York and their funerals last week, in which this DA, Alvin Bragg, was specifically called out by name, he is rolling back a couple of his policies.
Okay.
I thought it was interesting to ask you about because I saw you recently did a column on Mayor Dinkins in New York, who was our first black mayor.
And you were saying, hey, Eric Adams.
Adams, of course, being the mayor, Alvin Bragg is our DA.
You were like, pay attention to what happened with Dinkins because, you know, there's some lessons to be learned.
But Bragg says, okay, great news.
Commercial robberies done with guns, loaded or not, andor with knives, will be considered felonies again.
Great, great.
Make crime, make felonies felonies again.
That's going to be his new policy.
Terrific.
It's all we ever wanted.
And he says, and also, quote, violence against police officers will not be tolerated.
Okay.
Go on.
Right?
Because what he did was he removed the death penalty.
He took it off the table for anybody who shoots and kills a cop.
I'm not saying that's why these cops got killed, but it doesn't help.
It's one of the reasons why the widows are calling him out.
And I wonder, because there's that, but there's so many other issues in New York that he's not touching.
And I'll just take this from a New York Post columnist, Bob McManus wrote it.
How many innocent bystanders need to be eulogized before Alvin Bragg moves?
How about targeting housing authority gangbanging?
Folks from the projects don't get 24 7 coverage like murdered cops, but shouldn't they count?
How many more needless deaths in the subways will it take to compel Bragg to address the chaos there?
How many more Rite Aids have to close before Bragg agrees to take organized shoplifting for the broad social threat that it is?
Two?
Ten?
All more?
How many?
And here's a larger question he writes How long will Manhattan stand for his perverse pick and choose interpretation of criminal codes?
This is not prosecutorial discretion, he says.
It's prosecutorial nullification.
Your thoughts.
I think McManus is absolutely right.
And there he's writing about the sort of downstream.
Effects of putting targets on the back of police officers.
It's not just the physical safety of cops that's the concern here.
It's that these cops will then pull back.
They'll become less proactive.
They'll be slower to answer 9 11 calls, more reluctant to get out of their cars and interact with members of these communities.
And what's going to happen in these communities is that the bad guys, the criminals, are going to have the run of the place.
And these criminals, particularly, prey on their neighbors.
So it is the Black poor who are mostly law abiding.
That will bear the brunt of what you see happening in these cities.
And that's what McManus is talking about here.
And you're right, it's not just a New York phenomenon.
We're seeing it in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, all over the country, these district attorneys bragging about who they will not prosecute, how much they will back off going after the bad guys.
And this message is getting to the bad guys.
And that's the problem.
And in New York, what's unique in New York.
Is that you have a mayor who ran on a law and order platform and won on a law and order platform.
But this district attorney you mentioned, Alvin Bragg, was independently elected during an election not a lot of people were paying attention to.
And so there's going to be a conflict here between this law and order mayor, or at least a mayor who was talking the law and order game, and a prosecutor who comes right out of the progressive central casting here, talking about how he doesn't want to go after these criminals.
And so we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
But I think the lesson from the Dinkins years is that when you make police do their job with one arm tied behind their back, they can't.
And the criminals win.
And we saw record levels of homicides, of violent crime during the Dinkins years, and that did not end.
Essentially, until Rudy Giuliani came along after Dinkins and let the cops do their job.
It made it clear that City Hall had the backing of law enforcement.
And then they went about cleaning up New York.
And Michael Bloomberg, who followed Giuliani, pretty much kept his policing policies in place.
And New York was back again.
And so we'll see what happens.
But I think there's going to be a real conflict here between the new mayor and the new district attorney.
I hope so.
I hope there's a real conflict.
I mean, so far, Eric Adams has had Alvin Bragg's.
Back.
And that's a problem.
He should be cracking down on him.
Maybe that helped Bragg reverse his downgrading of armed robberies into misdemeanors back up to a felony.
I mean, it's insane that we even spent a month with that weird approach in place.
But he didn't completely pull his controversial memo.
So I think we're going to get a lot more crime in New York City unless Eric Adams and our very weak-kneed governor, Kathy Hochul, do something to keep the pressure on this guy.
But here's the other side of it: we've been talking about how.
After George Floyd and the talk about police by these politicians as universally racist and awful and out there in the streets hunting black men has absolutely led to an increase in crime.
Gun Violence Narrative Swings 00:11:46
Cops are like, okay, fine.
It's the Ferguson effect, right?
They stand back, as you were just saying, crime goes up and they got their arms crossed saying, okay, how do you like life without us?
Now you see cops getting killed, but invariably you see another case of police accused of.
Of being too trigger happy.
And the narrative swings back the other way.
And we've seen that over the past weekend.
I don't know if you've heard this case of a mere lock.
So there were protests in Minneapolis.
It happened in Minneapolis.
Of course, George Floyd, too.
This guy was 22 years old.
And what happened was he was fatally shot by cops in a Minneapolis apartment last Wednesday.
They were executing a no knock warrant where you don't have to sort of knock and say, police, police.
They had a key, actually.
They went in.
They woke him up.
He was asleep on a couch, you know, 6 48 in the morning.
And you see the guy wrapped in a blanket.
He was not the subject of the warrant, the man who was shot and killed, Amir Locke.
He was apparently what we're told, staying at his cousin's house.
One presumes the cousin was the subject of the warrant, though they haven't made that clear.
The police come in.
The whole thing took 54 seconds.
And they shove the back of the couch where the guy's sleeping.
From the couch.
I don't know whether he had the gun in his hand from the second he emerged, like he was holding it while he was sleeping, but within seconds, he was certainly pointing a gun.
The cops say, At them.
The family says, That's far from clear.
And he was shot and killed.
An officer shot three times Officer Mark Hanneman, who'd been on the force since 2015.
He's been on paid administrative leave since last week now.
And civil rights attorneys, Benjamin Crump, Jeff Storms, they represented George Floyd's family.
They're already involved.
And this is the next big thing where protesters have taken to the street.
Reviving the anti cop narrative.
What do you make of it?
Well, I don't know enough about the details of this case to comment on it specifically, but you're right, it does fit a pattern that we've seen in recent years with these high profile incidents.
And what I worry about is the failure of the media to put these interactions into a broader context.
These are rare instances, and they're presented as everyday affairs.
And that's simply not true.
They also never talk about what is drawing police to these neighborhoods in the first place.
In other words, they never talk about criminal behavior and the role that that plays in the number of incidents that occur overall.
And therefore, the number that could possibly go sideways, which happens sometimes.
But you can't really talk about racial disparities in police shootings without talking about racial disparities in criminal behavior.
And the media is very reluctant to do that.
And so the broader public hears about incidents like this, and everyone covers them, it gets nonstop coverage.
And they assume that because something is getting more coverage, it's happening more often.
And that simply is not the case.
And I wish that the media would do a better job, again, of explaining.
Crime rates in this country, and what is going on in these interactions overall between police and civilians.
And the media simply does not do enough of that.
And I think it's quite misleading to the broader public.
It's one of the reasons we saw these enormous protests after George Floyd.
People are convinced that your typical Black person walks out his door every day worrying about becoming the next George Floyd, when in fact, in these neighborhoods, young Black men leave home every day worrying about being shot by other young Black men.
Not by facing lethal force from the pops.
That's not what is foremost in their minds.
So now MSNBC and CNN will put this on loop.
I will show it to our audience.
I tell you, it is disturbing because I want you to know what we're talking about.
But this is the real time video of it.
We have one where it's slowed down.
But here's the real time shooting video.
And then we'll play the slow motion video right after of what happened.
Let's watch and listen.
And the audience listening at home, this will be on our YouTube channel later.
Where it's slowed down.
But here's the real time shooting video.
And then we'll play the slow motion video right after of what happened.
Let's watch and listen.
And the audience listening at home, this will be on our YouTube channel later.
So, to correct my earlier statement, it happened in nine seconds.
It's just that the whole tape we have is 54.
Nine seconds.
They went in.
The guy didn't have much of a chance to do anything.
Even gun, you know, Second Amendment defenders are saying, hey, he's allowed to have a gun in his own apartment.
It was licensed and he had a permit.
And the cops are saying, we have to make decisions in split seconds in our business.
We went in, we'd been told this was a dangerous criminal's house.
And next thing we know, this guy on the couch, you can see he's got a gun in his hands and we don't take chances.
And this is a still of him.
You can see, you can't, Jason, but the audience when they watch this on YouTube.
We'll see.
The guy's still wrapped in his blanket on the couch and he's holding a gun.
And again, I think it's, I don't know what happened in this particular situation, but we do know statistically that it is extremely rare.
Police, lethal use of force by police is rare.
There are 7,000 or so Black homicides every year in this country.
Police are involved in maybe 2 or 3% of them.
At most.
So, this is a statistically rare event that is now going to be presented as an everyday affair.
And again, the problem here is that when you put a target on the back of police, what you do is encourage them to pull back.
And that has all kinds of impacts on these communities.
And the other thing we have to keep in mind is that these people in the media who are stoking this.
The fire here, when it comes to police community relations, they're not speaking for the people who live in these communities.
This whole defund the police movement, this whole let's reduce resources to law enforcement movement, is not a sentiment shared according to poll after poll after poll by the people who live in these communities, who repeatedly say they want more police presence in their neighborhoods.
Black folks in this country call the cops more than any other group.
That's hardly a way of showcasing that you don't trust the police or don't like the police or don't want the police around.
But that is what these elites are telling us, people in these communities.
Want.
And they're not speaking on behalf of the people who live in these communities who have to deal with this stuff firsthand.
That's exactly right.
They don't want demonization.
They don't want defunding.
Some police reform.
I've heard a lot of black activists who are totally reasonable on these issues say, yeah, let's talk about that.
Let's talk about community policing, working with the cops and all that.
There's a way forward without these crazy extreme measures.
This is not to say all cops are saints.
There are police who abuse their power, they shouldn't be on the force.
I have no problem with making it easier to fire bad cops.
I have no problem with that at all.
But the people who live in these communities, as I have, who've gone to school in these communities, as I have, worked in these communities, know that the problem is not the policing.
The problem is the criminal behavior.
They know that.
The cops know that too.
And these elites go on television and pretend that is not the case.
And that's what I take issue with.
Right.
And so the demonization of cops will go on.
Because that's what the media does in particular.
And the softening on crime will continue in these big cities, notwithstanding the murder rates spiking.
I mean, it's crazy.
When you see the mayor of London, I always say that the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, out there begging her DA, Bill Ayers' adopted son, to get out there and enforce the law against the criminals, you really reached a tipping point.
And yet, no, so far it doesn't.
But that's what happens when you elect Bill Ayers' adopted son as your DA.
Don't.
Hire the child of two domestic terrorists to enforce the law.
And one of the other downstream effects of this uptick in crime, Megan, is that it's very hard for upward mobility to take place in communities, in violent communities.
And so you see businesses leave crime prone neighborhoods, jobs follow, property values fall.
I mean, that is one of the reasons that you want law and order in these neighborhoods.
There will be no upward mobility in violent communities.
That's a great point.
And to your point, of course, one of the protesters was bringing the message along those lines to the protesters over the weekend, saying, okay, what are we going to do in this neighborhood now?
Burn it.
Burn it and burn the police precincts.
Listen here.
Fill your anger fully.
Be mad.
Be mad.
Because your anger is justified.
Burn precincts, reappropriate what they've stolen for you for thousands of generations.
Most of all, show love to one another, radical love, and show absolute hate to those who oppress us.
Power to the looters, power to the rioters.
Say his name!
Thoughts on that one?
Well, this is again a reprise of what we've seen in the past in this country.
If you go back to the rioting of the 60s in Watts' section of Los Angeles, in Detroit, in Newark, in Baltimore, I mean, you're talking a half century ago.
Some of those communities still have not recovered.
From the rioting that took place back then.
So, you can do long, long term damage to these communities when you promote violence in the way that this is being promoted.
It is not in the interest of helping the people who live in these communities.
The activists raise money doing it, stay relevant, but you're not helping low income minorities when you encourage them to behave in this way.
And again, you're talking about mostly in these communities, most of the people are law abiding.
That's the problem.
They live there for a lack of resources, but most of them obey the law.
They want safe schools.
They want safe streets.
That's all they want.
And by siding with the criminals who prey mostly on their neighbors, you simply are not doing these communities any favors.
Yeah.
And the urge to encourage hate against one's oppressors while burning police precincts is probably not the way to go.
Trump's Economic Gains Explained 00:11:50
But Jason, stand by because we're going to squeeze in a quick break.
And we're going to come back and we're going to talk about his latest book called The Black Boom.
And it talks, the book is about the economy and how black Americans did a hell of a lot better under Donald Trump than the media will ever tell you.
That's my own short synopsis.
That's not the whole book, but it's got some really interesting points in it.
Jason, I'll let you describe it.
But my takeaway in this is President Unity, who we have right now, who's running around calling everybody Bull Connor if they don't support his agenda.
hasn't exactly been the most unifying force.
And the economy under Joe Biden and under a black president for whom he was vice president, Barack Obama, was not as good for black voters as it was under the man they've told us is a devil, racist, hater, Donald Trump.
You're exactly right.
The blacks in this country fared far better economically under President Trump prior to the pandemic than they ever did under President Obama.
And that's one of the reasons I wanted to write this book.
It's a story that I think was underreported because the media largely had it in for President Trump from day one.
They were quite surprised that he won the election and then spent all of his presidency resisting him instead of covering him.
And if they had done their job and reported what was happening in terms of economic inequality under President Trump, they would have had a great story to tell about shrinking.
Income inequality, something they obsess over.
And what this really was is a function of the working class writ large getting a boom under Trump.
And it just so happens that Blacks are disproportionately represented among the working class.
So we saw racial inequality shrinking under President Trump, who was presented in the media as this bigot whose policies would harm the prospects of Blacks.
Instead, we saw record low unemployment rates.
Record low poverty rates.
And we saw the wages of black workers rising at a faster rate than the wages of white workers.
That's, I mean, that's crazy.
And yet it totally explains why Trump did improve his numbers with the black vote second time around, with a Hispanic vote second time around, because those folks were thinking about what was in their wallet, not what was on MSNBC.
Absolutely.
And, you know, one of the problems you mentioned Joe Biden and the policies he's putting forward here.
One of the concerns I have is that he wants to reverse a lot of what President Trump was doing in terms of economic policy, reversing the tax cuts, re regulating sectors of the economy that were less regulated.
Under Donald Trump.
And I'm concerned that they will lead to the same outcomes we saw pre Trump in these minority communities.
And we shouldn't be going backwards.
And maybe if more people knew about this economic good news story that occurred under Trump, there'll be more resistance to the types of policies that Joe Biden wants to take us back to.
But you're absolutely right.
I think this economic prosperity that we saw in Black communities goes a long way towards explaining why Donald Trump improved to showing.
Among both blacks and Hispanics, and particularly men in both of those groups, when he ran for reelection.
So, even though he didn't win, I think that's part of the reason why you saw an uptick in black support and an uptick in Hispanic support.
You write in the book about, we covered this at the time.
Is it Star County, Texas, that had gone 30 points or 60 points for Hillary Clinton?
Yeah.
Can you tell us that?
Because that's a success.
I think that was a county in southern Texas that Hillary Clinton had won.
Overwhelmingly, and Biden barely won.
And it just shows you what the priorities are of some of the people who live in these communities.
Heavily Hispanic County.
Yeah, a very Hispanic County.
And what you're seeing here is during the lockdowns, a lot of people could work from home and continue doing their job.
But a lot of the folks we're talking about, these low income minorities, could not.
They were in the service sector, they were in hospitality.
And I think that Trump's emphasis on reopening the economy.
Really resonated with them.
And that's why we saw that showing in his reelect numbers.
Also, they had bigger paychecks.
I mean, it's hard.
We have to remember just how bad things were for Black Americans economically throughout most of Barack Obama's presidency.
It was not until the seventh year of the Obama presidency that the Black unemployment rate fell below double digits, Megan.
I mean, Black folks had it really hard economically under Obama.
But I mean, he would say that's because he inherited a mess, right, with the financial crisis.
He did, but historically, the deeper the recession, the more robust the recovery.
That has been the pattern historically.
That is not what happened under Obama.
We saw the slowest economic recovery in the post war period under Obama.
And then when Trump got into office, he cut taxes, he deregulated, he focused on growing the economy, and we saw an acceleration.
In growth, disproportionately helping these groups, Blacks and Hispanics and low income working class Americans in general.
And I think it was related to these policies that he put in place.
This is not a book that defends Donald Trump's character.
This is a book that defends free market economic policies.
And Donald Trump put in place a lot of free market economic policies to the benefit of a lot of low income Americans, a disproportionate number of whom happen to be Black.
Well, that's the thing.
Like, you can dislike a lot of what Trump.
Tweeted and said, but separate yourself and the way he made you feel in response to reading these things from what the policies did for your fellow Americans.
Like, did they work or didn't they?
Are we helping the groups that most need help or aren't we?
That's what an adult does, not what a child wants to make it all about him or her.
It's also what the media should be doing when they're doing their jobs.
And I take the media to task in this book for not doing their jobs, for not following the practices that they traditionally had followed in covering a president.
And I think it really was to the detriment of not only their own profession, because who knows how long, if ever, it will take for the media to recover the credibility it lost in the way it covered Donald Trump.
But we are just, our conversations in this country are more divisive and all the rest because of the way the media covered this president.
And like I said, I think this is a very, very underreported story about the economic gains that certain groups are having.
And the media simply played them down or didn't cover them at all because they wanted to present this president as anti Black, as a racist, and insisted that his policies would be harmful.
And so, of course, reporting this would undermine that narrative that they chose to go with.
Even if it was not rooted in the truth.
Well, and you point out in the book that, yes, you know, the economy was finally starting to do better in Obama's seventh year.
So it wasn't like Trump took over from him in year three of Obama's term, but that even Larry Summers had predicted that we were going to go back potentially into a recession.
Like the people under Obama were not predicting growth.
Trump came in and gave us growth, notwithstanding all the experts saying, don't expect that.
That's not how the Trump presidency is going to go, that's not where the economy's going.
Well, you had two things going on.
The last year of the Obama presidency, economic growth fell by 50% from what it had been in the previous year.
And people like Larry Summers feared that we were headed into another recession.
Trump did not inherit a growing economy, he inherited a slowing economy under Obama.
And it wasn't just Larry Summers who was predicting this.
The Federal Reserve was predicting this, the Congressional Budget Office was predicting this.
Everyone thought we were at the end of a business cycle.
Unemployment can't go any lower.
Job growth can't go any faster without inflationary concerns coming into play.
And Trump's proved them all wrong and never got any credit for it.
Everyone said, we saw this boom, and everyone said, oh, this is just a continuation of what was going on under Obama.
Obama was claiming this two years into the Trump presidency.
Obama was taking credit for the economic growth we saw.
Biden was taking credit for it.
So, again, this is just the media not simply not doing its job.
Yeah, no, we have that.
Listen, here's Obama.
I think it was the year was October 2020.
2020, right?
Because he was trying to help Biden get elected, running around saying this, and it was parroted and totally accepted by all the media.
Listen to him.
It's not that complicated.
Donald Trump likes to claim he built this economy, but I just want to remind you that America created 1.5 million more jobs in the last three years of the Obama Biden administration than in the first three years of the Trump Pence administration.
That's a fact.
Look it up.
And that was before Trump could blame the pandemic.
He, in fact, inherited the longest streak of job growth in American history.
But just like everything else he inherited, he screwed it up.
So, is that true?
No, no, it's not true.
The Obama defenders are trying to.
Present a sort of heads I win, tails you lose argument here.
They were predicting economic catastrophe under Trump.
And if it had happened, I don't think they would have blamed it on Obama.
But because it didn't happen, they want to give Obama credit for it.
I mean, you can't have it both ways, Megan.
But the truth is that the growth accelerated under Trump.
It accelerated.
You can't give Obama credit for a situation that improved markedly under his successor.
Not under Obama, whether we're talking about jobs, whether we're talking about economic growth.
And again, against all these expectations that said otherwise.
This is what the Trump administration produced prior to the pandemic.
So, no, I don't think Obama deserves credit for what we saw under Trump.
And I go into the details in the book.
And as the book points out, in particular, for people of lower socioeconomic status, white working class, yes, but also blacks and Hispanics and all the groups that we were told he reviled, he helped them more than anybody.
And even I had Brianna Joy Gray on the show not long ago, who worked for Bernie.
She was making the point all the Trump policies only helped corporate America.
That's it.
And this book really makes the opposite point.
No, it actually, his policies really helped the working class in a way we're no longer seeing.
And it's not all about Trump, it's about those policies, which tend to be more right leaning and which could be repeated if we had somebody who would pay attention.
All right, stand by because there's a lot more to get to.
California Rejects Race-Based Admissions 00:06:01
And I've got to ask you about what's happening now as this big case goes up to the Supreme Court.
It'll be in the fall, asking whether race based preferences can live on.
In the college admissions process.
I know you've written a lot about this and what happened in California and want to get your take on how this is likely to go.
More with Jason Riley, the greatest, in two minutes.
And don't forget, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday, noon East.
And the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.comslash Megan Kelly.
If you prefer an audio podcast, you subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, or Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast for free.
And there you'll find our full archives.
More than 250 shows, including, and you should definitely go back and listen to the first time Jason was on episode 115.
You're welcome.
So, Jason, let's talk about speaking of what's coming up.
SCOTUS, the Supreme Court, has taken a case that they're going to hear in the fall on whether it's okay for colleges to continue using race as a factor in college admissions.
Quotas are not allowed.
They haven't been allowed for decades.
But I was at the Supreme Court case when they argued it back in 2002 or 2003, where they said, We're still going to allow it.
It can be a factor.
We're not ready to throw away this program yet.
And at that point, the court said, Maybe in 25 years, we hope to never have to allow this.
Like in 25 years, we hope this will go away.
Then the Roberts Court issued a similar ruling as recently as 2016, allowing it.
Now it goes back up there.
And it's Harvard in particular and UNC Chapel Hill, I think, that are.
That are defending using race in their admissions practices, but they all do it.
And this, we have a history to look at to tell us whether, if the Supreme Court says, you know what, we're at the point, no more, no more of this.
We don't solve racial issues by becoming more racial.
And if they throw out the ability to use racism as a criterion, we can look at what happened in California, something you've studied as well.
So walk us through what's at stake here and how it's likely to go.
Well, I'm pretty excited about it.
As you just described, the court has been kicking the can.
On this issue for decades, telling schools it can be, race can be a factor as long as it's not the deciding factor.
But schools have clearly let race become the deciding factor because they're obsessed with getting racial balance on campus.
So I'm hoping that the Supreme Court will rule that the Equal Protection Clause means what it says, the civil rights laws mean what they say, that race cannot be used in a discriminatory way.
And the one thing they also have on their side, Megan, is public opinion in this area.
A lot of people don't know it.
But polls have consistently shown that a majority, not only of Americans overall, but a majority of Blacks, a majority of whites, a majority of Asians, a majority of Hispanics, all support.
Ending the use of racial preferences in college admissions.
So there's a chance here for the court to do what's not only right by the Constitution, but popular in this country today, though you'd never know it from the elites.
And some people are concerned about the incrementalism on the part of Chief Justice Roberts.
Will he not want to move too fast on this?
But it's interesting in my reporting, I'm told on racial issues, he has not been much of an incrementalist.
He wasn't on the voting rights case, Shelby, he wasn't in a Seattle case.
Earlier about the use of race.
And so on racial issues, he's the guy who said the way to end racial discrimination is to end discriminating by race.
And so I'm pretty confident that we could maybe get a 6 3 ruling here in the right way.
I think you're right.
In California, back in the 90s, they said, you know what, let's try this.
Let's get rid of race as one of the factors that you can consider on college based admissions.
And everybody on the left predicted, oh my God, this is a catastrophe.
And the numbers went down a bit in terms of, I guess black enrollment at their most elite institutions within the UCLA system.
But over time, my understanding is that got reversed and blacks who were able to graduate with degrees in science and some of the more sort of hard sciences went up.
And like the matching system worked much better because we weren't just putting people at schools where they couldn't necessarily handle the curriculum based on their pigmentation.
Yes, exactly.
You're absolutely right.
Recovery recovered quite, I should say, admissions of minority students recovered quite.
Quickly, even at the elite schools.
But overall, graduation rates for both Black and Hispanics rose by more than 50%, including in the hard sciences, as you mentioned.
And so, yes, the outcome was better.
And more poignantly, in 2020, California politicians and liberals tried to reverse what they had done back in the 90s and allow race and admissions again.
Californians, our biggest state and our most diverse state, overwhelmingly rejected going back.
To race based college admissions.
Again, what tells you something about where the country is on this issue.
And a lot of Asians got involved in this because they know that schools like Berkeley and UCLA were discriminating against their students when it came to racial balancing.
So they were especially opposed to reversing, to going back to the battle days of discrimination, of racial discrimination.
And they also happened to be the plaintiffs in the Harvard case.
These are Asian students who don't like being discriminated against.
It's no accident.
And we'll see.
It's not quite 25 years since that 2002 or 2003 case, but I think we're close enough.
And I think you're right about how it's going to go.
Jason, always a pleasure.
Thank you so much for being here.
Good luck with the book.
Thank you.
Biracial Doctor Challenges Discrimination 00:11:58
Coming up, an exclusive interview with a doctor suing her former employer for racial discrimination against her.
A prominent biracial doctor was demoted for what she believes was her personal opposition to critical race theory and Black Lives Matter.
After the death of George Floyd.
It's not even just her belief.
I mean, it's pretty much in writing from the hospital.
She is now taking action against her employer, claiming that she's the one who suffered racial discrimination in this case.
Joining us now for an exclusive interview is Dr. Tara Gastillo and her lawyer, Daniel Craig.
Welcome to you both.
Thank you so much for being here.
Afternoon, Megan.
Sure.
So let me start with you.
So you're a very well respected doctor, trained at the best institutions, and you wind up chairing, not just working, you're an OBGYN, but not just.
Practicing medicine, but sharing the entire department at, is it Hennepin?
What's the name of the institution?
I want to get it.
Hennepin Healthcare System.
Okay.
And where is that?
It's in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Okay.
And how long were you the chair of the department?
So I was interim chair for about three and a half years, and then I was permanent chair for about two and a half years.
And you yourself, I normally wouldn't go over this, but it becomes relevant later.
But you yourself, what's your ethnic background?
And just tell us about your family and your own personal history.
So I'm the fifth child of a Filipino immigrant.
My father is an orthopedic surgeon who came here in his mid 20s from a small town in the Philippines called Monopoly.
And he married my mother, who was a nurse at the time.
She's from Taylor's Falls, Minnesota, which is a small town in Minnesota.
She was a farmer's daughter.
And so, you know, my parents are kind of a biracial couple.
So I grew up with them.
Tell us about your own nuclear family.
Okay.
Yeah.
And my first husband happened to be African American.
I have three biracial children.
Who are 23, 22, and 18 at this time.
Okay.
So, I mean, anybody can deduce from that that you're not exactly a seething racist.
Don't jump out as an Archie Bunker, which is what the hospital's kind of trying to say about you now.
It's insulting.
So, I just want to lay the foundation.
But not only that, not only your history, but while you were chair of the department, you took a look at things like what's going on in terms of the birthing practices and how can we better serve our diverse patients.
What did you do to advance that cause?
Yeah, so the community health assessment in 2018 showed that there were market disparities in birth outcomes with African American and Native American women, indigenous women.
And so we were kind of charged with taking a closer look at that.
So we got a group of community leaders as well as physicians and healthcare folks together, and we started talking about how to best address it.
We started working on a program kind of culture, what we were Calling culturally congruent prenatal care group prenatal care pilots,
which my thought was to help us learn more about these two specific communities so that we could understand how to serve their needs better and eventually do a similar kind of deep dive with other groups that we serve because Hennepin Healthcare serves a quite diverse community.
And then ultimately, my hope and goal was to create a kind of a care model that could serve everyone that was open enough to serve all the different cultural backgrounds that we're working with.
And before I get to your postings after George Floyd and all that, I know that you've said now that hospital, your hospital, has taken that program and turned it into racially segregated care.
What does that mean?
We were talking about it just amongst my staff last week.
Like, what, what, What does that mean?
So, you know, when we started these culturally congruent care models, my thought was that we were going to use that as a learning to then kind of universalize our care in a way that was open to everyone and comfortable for everyone.
As I started, as I continued on in that work, comments were being made like, you know, oh, we won't be ready to kind of have an open care model like that for decades.
I was on one group where we couldn't, we wanted to have a community healthcare worker who, and it was for an African American pilot.
They didn't have one that was African American.
And so they were having a discussion on how to get around their anti discrimination bylaws.
And I said, What are we talking about here?
I mean, are we doing segregated care?
Isn't the ultimate goal to train all of us to know how to take care of folks from diverse backgrounds?
And there was just kind of a silence.
Oh, in other words, you can only have a Black doctor work on Black patients.
They were like, We need somebody, a Black doctor, because to serve the Black patient population.
Right.
And so the initial pilots were kind of say, were the initial pilots that I worked on were kind of like, okay, clearly there seemed, from what we were hearing from the community, there was this barrier, right?
And so we said, well, let's do a pilot to understand that barrier.
And yes, let's try and match the clinician's race.
But then it became more than just a pilot, or seemingly to me, it became more than just a pilot.
And it became a thing that, like, no, this is going to be our care model.
And so You know, for me, and I maybe it's a fine distinction, but my thought was it would be useful maybe to understand what was going on and what the barriers were.
But I never anticipated that it would be thought to become kind of a care model to be carried on, right?
If that makes sense.
No, I was very confused because I was like, if they have segregated care in the nursery, right?
Like, it's going to get very awkward.
And what does a biracial woman like yourself do with your baby, right?
Like, which part of the ward does he go to?
I mean, it's just if you're going to take it that far, it could get very uncomfortable very fast.
So that's, but that's not sort of what got you in trouble with the hospital.
That's just by way of background, by saying you're not insensitive to cultural differences and to the different needs of different patients based on skin color and cultural backgrounds and so on.
You're tuned into that.
However, however, after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, you know, your town, and tensions were running high.
You were among the first to say, hold on with the narrative that's being pushed.
Just hold on.
I'm a doctor and I'm fact based, and let's see whether these narratives about police are true or whether this is sort of propaganda being pushed on us.
And you started to make some, I guess we could call them heterodox, certainly for that time, postings on your social media about, you know, let's be careful here because the data about police that you're being fed.
America and colleagues may not be based in fact.
Is that a fair summary?
That is a fair summary.
So, yeah, after George Floyd was murdered, I remember looking at that initially, and it didn't even strike me that it was a black man.
I just saw this policeman killing someone.
And I was really appalled.
And when it became, everyone seemed to immediately jump to race.
And I thought to myself, am I so out of touch?
And so I actually started pulling up all the FBI statistics and I went back and I was looking.
And I wasn't insensate.
Of course, I had seen quite a few news stories about Black police brutality to people of color.
But I just got, when I got the statistics and I saw that they really weren't bearing out this narrative that people of color were being targeted and hunted, I felt like one, personally, I felt kind of angry as a mother of a Black.
Of two Black sons and a Black daughter, that I had been unnecessarily so afraid once I actually saw the statistics.
And then, two, I went and looked kind of into.
What had happened in other places where police were weakened, and knew that it was not good what happened, and that people of color, if the police were going to be defunded and weakened, that people of color were going to be disproportionately affected by that move.
So I did, I began posting.
I even went to my CEO and the board of directors at Hennepin Healthcare and asked them to consider.
Opposing defunding of the police because we knew what would happen to the population that we serve, which is violence would rise in their communities.
Yeah.
I mean, you were prescient.
That's exactly what did happen, not just in Minneapolis, but in city after city after city, which are now all refunding their police departments, having realized the devastating consequences of going the way that you were urging them not to go.
So, And by the way, I do have to say, though, it's very brave of you because I read that you were doing this in July of 2020 when, you know, most people were afraid to touch this.
Maybe you were more emboldened because you are biracial and you're the mother of Black children.
But I had to tip my hat to you because that took guts.
And they did not exactly throw their arms around you and say, these are great ideas, Tara.
Like, let's go with that.
You could feel the brush back right from the start.
Yeah.
So, you know, what I got from the executive leadership and the board was just, you know, You're so brave for speaking out, right?
What I got from my colleagues in my department was, you know, especially when I kind of spoke out against Black Lives Matter for this reason, for their position of wanting to defund the police, that, you know, I was, that wasn't as important as supporting Black people.
And I was trying to explain that I viewed it as supporting Black people.
Of course, I don't disagree with Black Lives Matter, but some of the other things that they were advocating for, I could not support.
So you wouldn't stop.
They told you to at least put a disclaimer on your social media that you don't speak for the organization.
Fine, right?
Okay.
Yeah.
But then it seems like they started to step it up a notch.
And the next thing you know, they're pulling in some human resources firm to do an investigation of you.
Who I think at that very moment, or at least for years earlier, they had been promoting on billboards throughout the city.
That's how much they loved you.
Department Letter Sparks Acrimony 00:04:02
Now, suddenly, human resources has got to review what exactly?
How did they phrase it?
Yeah.
So, you know, you're right.
I was on billboards.
I was on the actually the board of the directors for the hospital for five and a half years.
I was a chair of the board quality committee.
I was chair of the medical staff quality committee.
So I had held quite a few.
Administrative and leadership roles within the organization.
My colleagues had expressed concerns over my political beliefs to the point that they kind of said that they didn't think I was able to run the department anymore because of them.
And so they said that they were going to bring in an HR firm to kind of understand this better, which is what they did.
It's really amazing.
I mean, I'm just going back and looking at, you know, some of my team's summary of some of the postings.
That you believe CRT is a race essentialist ideology that presupposes zero sum racial conflict, seeks to remedy that by discriminating against individuals so as to make group outcomes more equal.
That you had a personal opinion that CRT is not a continuation of the civil rights movement, but rather a repudiation of it.
Right.
Okay.
This is all true.
I mean, I think that's really clear.
I think even the BLM supporters would say, yeah, Martin Luther King had a place in time, but this is not it.
You know, we've got to move forward and we reject that.
You know, I don't see color and all that.
And they've been pretty explicit about it.
Like, it's not even all opinion here.
This is factual.
But in your profession, like so many others, you're not allowed to have an opinion that doesn't go along with the masses.
Because I'm going to guess that there were doctors speaking out the other way who had no problems whatsoever.
Yes.
So, you know, I mean, people, which, you know, people were wearing BLM buttons and things like that.
And You know, there was really nothing said about that.
The organization was clearly, although officially they said they weren't going to support any specific organization, they clearly were more tolerant of certain political points of view.
I know that they wanted to write a letter generally about, like, to the staff and, you know, all the letters that went out at that time, like, oh, we care and we're here.
And there was one line item in particular that you went to battle with them over.
What was that about?
So, yeah, after the death of George Floyd, my department decided they wanted to send a letter to our patients, which I thought was a great idea.
And one of the lines that they included was to the extent of, you know, we support you in your unrest.
And at that point, this is after, you know, the riots in Minneapolis.
And I said, you know, I have a hard time.
Signing a letter that says the term unrest.
Can we remove that term?
I think some people may read that as riots, and I can't, I don't want to be seen as supporting the riots because I don't.
I think it's really detrimental to our community.
And they wanted you to sign it.
Yes.
So they wanted to come from our entire department.
And I said, you know, I can't have it come from the, if you want to keep that term in there, you are welcome to sign that individually.
But it cannot come from our entire department because at least one person in our department has a problem with the letter.
These are doctors who are in your group who wanted, you know, who drafted this and wanted you to sign it.
Okay, I got it.
Workplace Tensions Over Political Stances 00:12:44
Yeah.
And so I said, you can sign it and send it.
You just can't sign it from our department because I don't feel comfortable signing that letter.
If you revise it and take that term out, I'm happy to have it come from our department.
You know, and my goal there was to try and create a space where we could all feel comfortable.
And I also told them that if anyone else had a problem with any of the verbiage in the letter, to let me know, because it was really important to me that this not divide our department, that this be something that we could all agree with and work together on.
But that was not an acceptable stance with many of my partners.
Do you know now, with the benefit of hindsight, whether there are other doctors in your department who feel as you do?
Or are they all against you?
You know, I think that there are many of my partners who maybe would have taken the attitude of, you know, her beliefs are her beliefs.
That's fine.
She's working.
She works well, right?
There were some very vocal people in the department who had a problem with my political stances.
And so, you know, I think at the end of the day, they won out.
You know, my executive leadership forbade me from talking to any of my partners, which was my initial inclination, was, you know, clearly we're miscommunicating.
And so, can I sit down and talk with you?
And My executive leadership said that that would be seen as retaliation, just talking with my partners.
Oh, wow.
So that's how crazy the law is, by the way.
They're not wrong about that, but it's insane that we've gotten to that point.
The lawyers ruin everything.
Unlike doctors, objection.
You know it's true.
You know it's true, Dan.
So, okay, the human resources group comes in and now they're doing an investigation.
And I mean, you've got to be thinking to yourself, this is insanity.
I posted things online trying to say what I think about what's really going on here.
And they're effectively threatening my livelihood, my job, even potentially, but certainly your position as chair of the department, which you had earned through excellence.
Yes.
And so do you go to them and say, This is a sham.
What do you do?
Like, I'm on the billboards.
I've had nothing but wonderful feedback my entire career.
This is political persecution.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I certainly said, How.
Why are you letting this stand?
Why, for me, for them to go to the place of you're racist, you are unfit because of that, given my personal history and also my life's work.
My entire career, I've been working with very many different diverse populations.
To me, and I've also had like a hundred percent approval rating from my patients from a very diverse population of patients.
So to me, yeah, I said, you know, this is let me talk, let's have a mediated discussion.
You know, but if you can't even talk, if you can't defend yourself, if you can't even give your point of view, there's not a lot, you there's not a lot of recourse, right?
At that point, especially when an The people who are on the other side of the issue are freely able to express their views.
That's madness.
It's totally unfair and it's wrong.
And we're seeing it, of course, everywhere.
All right, I'm going to squeeze in a quick break.
And after this, we'll talk about what that hospital did to Dr. Tara Gustilo.
It was very wrong.
And she's fighting back with her lawyer, Dan.
He's one of the good ones.
So, Tara, the HR people come in and they do their little investigation.
What did they ultimately decide to do with you?
So, what they said was that they felt like there was too much distrust between my colleagues and me for me to continue on as chair, that a mediated conversation was not going to be possible.
And that, you know, basically the recommendation was that I should step down.
And I'll jump in, Megan.
Just note there was an HR meeting specifically where they admitted that.
Her political views were the trigger for her demotion.
It's really, it's unbelievable.
It's great for you.
It's wonderful.
It's an incredible admission.
Right?
It's great.
You don't always get that.
Usually they're saying, well, she sucked.
You know, it sucked.
It had nothing to do with that.
Now they're like, no, we hated what she said.
She should have been pro BLM.
That's basically what they've said.
I'll get to their defenses and what they're now trying to claim now that you've gotten a lawyer.
The story changes a bit.
But so they booted you as chair.
And just for the record, can you tell us the race of the person who replaced you as chairperson of the department?
She's a white woman.
Okay.
Black children for a white woman.
Okay, that's how it works, but it's all about your political positions.
So then it makes sense.
They questioned your ability to lead based on the statements on your Facebook page and so on, and specifically your views on race, according to your complaint.
I think Daniel suggested that.
Now, here's what they say, and Dan, you can jump in too if you want.
They say Tara alienated her entire department and was not providing the necessary leadership required of a department chair.
This is quoting now.
She incorrectly and myopically viewed the legitimate criticisms of her performance as a department chair as based solely on opposition to her political positions.
This same lack of self awareness is what led to her downfall as chair.
They're basically saying she was so polarizing during such a difficult time within the hospital that she lost the support of her, you know, the people under her or around her and could no longer lead.
Is that a fair complaint?
Maybe I should jump in here.
It's not fair if the motivation.
Is essentially a flavor of racism.
You know, if you take us back into another time where you can imagine a racist workplace where the workers are said, you know, we can't have a black supervisor, we won't get along, that doesn't immunize it.
That just highlights the illegality.
And so when her coworkers are saying she essentially doesn't have the proper views for a person of color and we can't work with her, that's an admission essentially of the Title VII violation that they want to discriminate on the basis of race.
So, you're not based, because there's an allegation of race discrimination against Tara.
That's not exactly based on her race.
It's based on her standing up to racism within the department and them saying you're fired for that.
Yeah, there's a couple different things.
And I suppose one important thing to note is Hennepin Healthcare System is a county hospital, this is a public institution.
Dr. Gastillo is a public employee.
And so we have claims that are kind of two sides of the same coin.
We have a First Amendment retaliation claim for the things that she said outside of the scope.
Of her employment, her personal Facebook page, and things like that, where it's absolutely clear that adverse employment action can't be taken against a public employee for things they say off the job.
And then she was also advocating within the workplace, essentially for compliance with Title VII.
You know, things like advocating against racialized care or segregated care, advocating for equality rather than equity.
You know, the distinction being you have this.
1960s civil rights 2.0 view of everyone needs to be equal under the law and we don't discriminate on the basis of race.
And we have this new idea, old word, new meaning of equity where we must discriminate against individuals in order to make groups equal.
In our view, equity is that view of equity and acting on it is a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
And so when Dr. Castillo was out there advocating essentially for equality, she was advocating for compliance with Title VII and they retaliated against her for that.
So they claim that's not the case now.
Now they're saying this was not the first time that there had been issues, Tara, with.
You as chair.
And here's what they say, just as a couple of examples.
They say in early 2017, two new female African American OBGYN doctors spoke to HHS Human Resources regarding how they were being treated in the department.
One characterized it as a pattern of microaggressions toward black physicians and subtle racism.
Others specifically related to you.
In other words, they're not necessarily pinning those bad behaviors on you, but it's your department.
Then they say others related specifically to Tara.
Saying to some extent, all the physicians felt that when you, Tara, bring concerns to their attention, you are being asked to take the blame.
They don't like you asking the physicians in your department to take the blame and that the physicians feel like they are not supported.
Those are the two main examples that they've given for the real reasons why you could no longer remain chair.
What are your thoughts on it?
So, one, the 2017, no one.
No one from HR came and talked to me.
There was an issue in 2017 where there was actually a Black patient who didn't want to get care from a Black physician.
And at that time, we didn't really have a policy on that.
And it was a concern.
And it was a concern that we talked about it within my department.
And I brought it to the executive leadership and said, we really need to have a Clear kind of guideline on how to handle situations like this.
And I will say that it was never acted upon at a higher level, even though I brought it up numerous times.
So I don't know if that was what they were referring to, but that would have been about the right timeframe.
Regarding my saying that when physicians had conflicts with people, we should, quote, take the blame.
I don't think I've ever said we should take the blame.
What I said was, There's a power dynamic within medical care, and physicians are at the top of that power dynamic in general.
So, when there's an issue, it's often incumbent upon the physician to be the one to solve it.
So, if I've had an issue with a nurse, oftentimes the nurse is not going to feel comfortable coming to me and talking it out with me.
And so, I encourage my colleagues to go when they had issues with other folks, go and talk with them.
And be the one to initiate, understand there's a power dynamic within medicine.
And so, as the physician, it may often be incumbent upon you to do that.
What do you make of the microaggressions?
Did anybody come to you and complain about microaggressions?
You know, that term microaggression, not so much with me.
I think the, you know, certainly there were times where people, and I will say, not just the clinicians of color, but there were just in general with.
Where they felt like they were being asked to unduly take on extra burdens and things like that.
And we would talk about that.
If it involved another individual, I would always encourage them to talk with that individual first and try and work it out.
And if they couldn't, then to let me know, and either I or someone from HR could have a mediated conversation with them.
I mean, it's really crazy to think about the nation's doctors at this level of practice getting upset about microaggressions.
Hospital Vote Removes Chair 00:13:09
You know, like little nits that people behave like jerks in every workplace.
There's going to be nasty comments.
They're not totally evolved in any profession, right?
People.
And so you're always going to deal with the one jerk who says this or says that.
It's like most of us just like saying, that's life.
I'm moving on.
You know, like I don't need to go complain, make a thing out of it.
And look, to me, it continues to seem like.
This actually wasn't even a big deal at your organization.
They're just digging things up they can find in the past to try to smear you, billboard lady, because it's really hard.
They've got to try to tear down that image, probably actually and figuratively.
Right, Dan?
That's absolutely right, Megan.
And I think Dr. Gastillo can speak to the exact date, but recently, the current chair asked her for help in leading a discussion with all of her coworkers on how to deal with the stress of clinic and dealing with the public and everything because she does such a good job of it.
And as you can probably tell, she was actually a great leader.
And it's now the lawyers at Hennepin who are trying to gin up a pretextual reason to justify what they did.
So that's the real rub, right?
It's like they shame you for your political abuse, then they punish you by demoting you.
Then when you fight back to say what you did was wrong, then they try to ruin your reputation entirely, right?
And this is why so many people are afraid to speak out.
This is why most people don't do what you did.
And it's why I do think it was brave.
So, how much did they cost you when they demoted you?
Like, what was the difference in salary?
Well, it was probably about a third of my salary was taken away from me with that demotion.
You know, I will say for me, it's not so much, I find the thing most concerning to me is that, you know, medicine is based on the individual.
We have public health, which is based on groups, right?
But, you know, the, the, We swear an oath to kind of for unconditional love for our patients, right?
It doesn't matter who you are and what you did before you walk into my office.
I am going to try and understand who you are as an individual and apply the science that I know to you as an individual to help you become healthier.
And I really think that that is what's getting lost in all of this that our job is to deal with individuals and help them to become healthier.
And you can't do that if you have these preconceived ideas of who this person is because of their race or socioeconomic background or any of it.
You have to think and approach people as individuals in order to be a healer and to be in medicine.
At least that's my opinion.
So, what do you make of them using an email and no good deed goes unpunished?
True to form.
You too tried to take responsibility for what you could.
And I guess you wrote a letter and an email to the entire department, trying to sort of reunite what was at the time a fractious situation.
And you said, and this is them bringing this up now I'm deeply saddened that this letter, which should have brought us together, seems to have created acrimony and hard feelings.
I'm even sadder that I have become the nidus a new word I learned.
It means a place in which bacteria have multiplied or may multiply.
Doctors, I'm even sadder that I have been the nidus.
Of this conflict, I have actively been working to unify this department for years.
You went on to say, I was too forceful in my assertions as they were my beliefs.
It was never my intent to force anyone to agree, but I admit I did hope to persuade.
In the past, I've been told I'm too passionate and can be a bit of a bull in a china shop.
Sister, word.
I clearly need to keep working on these aspects of my personality.
Okay, so that's you trying to say to your colleagues, I get that I ruffled some feathers.
I wanted to be more unifying and I will work on this.
And now they say, She only got worse.
And they talk about your social media posts.
So, do they, do you wish you hadn't written that email?
And how do you see it now with the benefit of hindsight?
No, you know, for me, I think I wanted them to understand why I was making decisions I was making.
And so I explained myself, which to me is a good leader.
I'm making a decision or I'm making a choice that you don't agree with.
This is my reasoning.
And yes, of course, we were seeing things differently.
And so anytime you explain yourself, you hope that people can at least say, well, that.
I disagree with it, but I understand where she's coming from and can at least respect it.
Right.
I did not, you know, I, the way I worded that is I don't, I think if you read my original email, I don't know that everyone would read it as this like very forceful thing.
Was it about the letter and not saying unrest, not supporting the unrest?
It was about the letter and not supporting unrest.
Also, there was an incident after George Floyd's death where.
White Coats for Black Lives put on a sit in at the Capitol.
My department had wanted to do that and had started working on creating an acknowledgement of what had happened.
And then White Coats for Black Lives heard about it and kind of took it over.
And then at that rally, our department was publicly thanked for helping create that rally.
And that was one, something which Hennepin Healthcare had explicitly said that we were not supposed to affiliate ourselves with anyone in that manner.
And two, I expressed my concerns with some of the positions of White Coats for Black Lives, which is associated with BLM.
And that I felt like going forward, we as a department needed to be very aware of who we were affiliating.
Ourselves with and making sure that everyone felt comfortable doing so.
So here's the thing I'm reading the story, and then I get to the part where the hospital says the group voted 25 to 1 in the end in favor of removing you as chair and that you were the one who voted that you should stay.
So I understand as a practical matter when you're running a business, et cetera, you know, could you see their point that you could no longer lead, even if these people were being unfair?
Clearly, they didn't want you.
And so, can you really remain as chair when the entire department has turned on you?
So, for me, I think it's one of those things where, again, let's take it to if my department had said, This is a, she's Filipino.
We can't, we can't have a Filipino be chair.
Would that have been an appropriate thing?
And if the executive leadership, rather than letting it unravel, The way they did, had stepped in earlier and said, Hey, this is her political belief.
It's unacceptable for you to, you know, discriminate against her for that manner.
She's doing this good work.
Maybe it would have been different.
I don't know.
I do know that, you know, from my perspective, I was put in a position where I could not speak with my department.
I could do nothing to kind of.
Meanwhile, they were ginning up.
Acrimony against you.
And one of your other sins that we didn't even touch on is apparently you were a President Trump supporter.
And this is, they point this out in what they found on your social media.
So.
That's not, that's also not allowed in left leaning communities amongst our leaders.
You're not at least supposed to say it outside, Tara.
Maybe nobody told you that.
Say it out loud.
Yeah.
Before we run out of time, can I tell you where we're at in the case?
Yeah.
I love that, Dan.
Yeah.
So we just had a pit stop at the EOC and now we've just filed in federal court here in Minneapolis.
We do have a long road ahead of us, but luckily we have some good support with my co counsel at the Upper Midwest Law Center, public interest law firm, and then FAIR.
An organization you're on the board of directors of has platformed our case and is also doing fundraising to help us get through this.
They do have a fundraising page up on their website at fairforall.orgslash gustillo hyphen v hyphen hhs.
That's g ustilo hyphen v hyphen hhs.
And again, at fairforall.org.
Yeah, no, that's important to know.
And of course, part of my own disclosure that I sit on the board of a group that.
That is supporting.
I think I've made clear in our interview that I support you.
I don't think it's not on the nose because what they did to you was wrong.
And it's just you need to look no further than the own organization, which is openly supporting BLM.
That's okay.
But raising questions about BLM costs you your job.
And to your point, what if they'd been running around saying, we really want to refer to every white patient who comes in as a white nationalist or a white supremacist?
And you said, we're not going to do that.
And then they fired you.
And voted 25 to 1, right?
Like that, yes, of course, you'd have a lawsuit that wouldn't be lawful for them to do.
You're fighting back against racism.
And what's happened in these situations is, you know, some of these tenets that BLM pushes are absolutely racist.
They don't see it that way because they think you have to be the group in control, the group that's quote powerful, and that that's always white people in order for there to be racism.
So these are some of the issues you're going to be dealing with.
Dan, you, so it's a, as of now, what claim are you asserting?
Race discrimination?
Yes.
So race discrimination, retaliation for advocating for Title VII compliance and also Minnesota Human Rights Act compliance, and a First Amendment retaliation claim that addresses her off work speech on Facebook or elsewhere.
Yeah.
Well, can I ask you about that one quickly, though?
Because what if she'd been on her social media?
This is not the case.
But what if she had saying the N word over and over, saying something very clearly racist and awful?
Could they then stamp on her First Amendment rights, understanding that there are You know, a county organization or a city organization, that means the state's involved.
Could they then say, you got to go?
Well, you know, on that specific factual scenario, I don't know.
If there was an extreme disruption, it's possible there would be some wiggle room there.
But generally speaking, she's going to be protected in her off work political speech from retaliation on the job while a public employee.
It's an important case.
If you get a bad ruling, It's going to be very bad for people who are already scared to speak out.
But if you get a good ruling, it'll have the opposite effect.
So I know you're kind of hamstrung in how you respond to this, Dan, but how do you like your judge?
Well, we got notice of our judicial assignment today.
I think she'll be okay for us, but we're looking to send this one up on appeal as well.
So someday, I think this case will probably be heard in the Eighth Circuit, and we'll see how it goes from there.
I do like our chances in the Eighth Circuit a lot.
They have an older view of what equality means than the current proponents of equity.
And so I think once we get there, we're going to be in good shape.
And let's face it, it goes.
To this U.S. Supreme Court, you're in a good position too, because it's more with the conservatives now.
And even the liberals have been fiercely protective for the most part of free speech rights.
And you've got a good free speech claim in there in addition to the others.
Listen, thank you for coming on and telling your story and for the courage it took to speak out in the first place, Doc.
We appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
And Daniel, thanks to you as well.
Thank you, Megan.
Okay, and check it out.
If you can't remember all that, you can go to Fair for All, and all the links are there.
Don't miss tomorrow.
We got a big show then, too.
Going after Chessa Boudin.
That ought to be fun.
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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