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March 2, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:32:52
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Democrats' Message Reset 00:15:19
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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, hours after President Biden vowed to make Russia pay.
For its attacks on Ukraine, there is little evidence that Vladimir Putin is ready to retreat.
Instead, the president of Ukraine offered this grim warning overnight.
They have an order to erase our history, erase our country, erase us all.
Even before the war began last week, there was a lot riding on President Biden's speech.
Democrats were hoping for a reset of the party's message because they have midterms facing them down in November, apparently hoping that Americans. Might forget about the mask and the vaccine mandates to the calls to defund the police departments around the country to what's happening down at the southern border and so on.
How'd that go?
We'll get it discussed in a second.
Now they wanted a pivot toward unity, right?
Unity.
Remember Biden's calls for unity in his inaugural address last year and right after he won last year?
And then, of course, there was the way he actually governed since that point.
Here's a reminder.
Without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury.
No progress, only exhausting outrage.
Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?
Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor?
Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?
This is the moment to decide.
We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.
And your refusal has cost all of us.
Let's stop seeing each other as enemies and start seeing each other for who we are, fellow Americans.
So he doesn't talk to the American people writ large the same way he does when he is not on a big stage, right, for things like the State of the Union.
And I think the American people know that.
Look, joining me to break it all down for us, all angles on the State of the Union, we have Charles C.W. Cook with us today, senior writer at National Review.
And Jeremy Peters joins the program for the first time, national political reporter for the New York Times.
And author of the new book, Insurgency How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.
It's a clever title.
Welcome to you both.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Okay, Charles, so let me start with you because I know you have a piece up on National Review this morning, which everybody should read.
It's called All the President's Incoherence.
Your thoughts on how he did?
I thought it was an unmitigated disaster.
Now, I'm not perhaps the target audience.
As you and your listeners know, I don't rate this president.
But even on his own terms, I thought it was misconceived.
The first 10 minutes on Ukraine were fine.
But after that, he didn't do any of the things that we were told he would do.
He was supposed to reset.
Well, he didn't.
He was supposed to shift to deficit reduction away from Build Back Better in an attempt to win over Senator Manchin.
He didn't.
He reiterated the entire Build Back Better agenda without saying those three words.
He contradicted himself.
He introduced topics at random.
I likened it in the piece to David Bowie, who used to write down random lyrics.
On a piece of paper, cut them up, throw them up in the air, and then reassemble them.
That's how it sounded.
And then there's the question of his delivery, which is getting worse and worse.
People say that it's because he had a stutter when he was a child.
It's not.
I've been watching Joe Biden for years.
He wasn't like this 10 years ago.
He does seem old.
He seems incoherent.
He slurs his words.
He reads the wrong words.
I didn't think this worked for him at all.
Jeremy, what do you make of it?
What do you think?
I think it was the message that you would expect from the leader of a party that doesn't really have a coherent message to unify voters around going into this next midterm election and possibly even into 2024.
It was a string of very vague utopian promises.
We're going to end expensive prescription drugs.
We're going to end expensive housing.
We're going to end all inequality.
We're going to end poverty.
We're going to end misery, period.
And it seemed that all of those promises, the president really couldn't back up with any specifics.
I mean, it struck me how vague many of his lines were.
And I think that while there probably were some appeals there that he made to the center, you know, there was a line he had where he said, We're not going to defund the police, we should fund the police.
I think the perceptions of this administration as captive to The far left are really problematic, even if that's often exaggerated.
I think that the hardest thing that the Democrats are going to have to contend with over the next few months is a version of what we saw unfolding in Texas last night with the primaries in the southern part of the state, where you have a progressive and a moderate who are headed off into a very contentious runoff.
And if that progressive ends up winning, it's going to really make it hard for the party to say that it's representative of most Americans and not a far left entity.
I want to get to that defund the police thing in one second.
But, you know, to your point of this, you know, wish list, this Democratic utopia, all I could think while watching it was okay, so he's throwing out these huge things.
And again, we're going to cure cancer and we're going to have all sorts of provisions for Democrats that they've been asking him for.
And I thought, all right, well, in 2022, I would like to have the body of Giselle and the skin of JLo and the energy of a 12 year old along with the metabolism.
Those are my goals for myself.
They're just about as attainable as his goals.
And the thing about Joe Biden's list, Charles, is that it was sort of, he wanted to have it both ways on so many things, right?
Like, build back better is gone, but I'm bringing it back in pieces.
I'm going to do something about inflation.
But here are all these huge things, these spending measures, which, by the way, I know I cannot get through, but they're going to make you feel good as you go to sleep tonight.
Neither party at the moment is especially coherent.
And when I say that, I don't just mean that.
Both parties have broad coalitions full of people who disagree with one another, although that is true.
I mean that their stated policy aims are often incoherent.
But it was remarkable last night.
To hear incoherence from one person, the president of the United States.
There were two moments that jumped out to me.
The first was that Biden tried his folksy stick about how he understands the effects of inflation.
He knows what it does, he understands why people are so angry.
And almost in the next sentence, he touted the $2 trillion in spending that his party rushed through last March, which is responsible for exacerbating inflation on a grand scale.
Pick one.
The second thing he did was focus in on what is really a more Trumpian line, which is make it in America, build it in America.
Now, that's actually quite popular.
And the reason he's doing that is that he has found out from focus groups that when Democrats talk about inflation, people don't really buy the idea that it's because we have greedy corporations, but they do buy, erroneously, because this is economic nonsense, the idea that we can fight inflation by bringing manufacturing back to the United States.
So he went all in on that.
But then he proposed a whole litany of ideas that would make it much more difficult to bring manufacturing back to the United States by making us less competitive, by making labor more expensive, and by making capital likely to flee.
Again, pick one.
So, in a sense, this was a president who was trying to push buttons and work around the public's distaste for him, but doing so in no thought through way at all.
I think in reading opinion pieces from the left and the right this morning, most people are in agreement that the best part was on Ukraine, where he kicked it off at the top, and they had a real moment of unity where both sides stood and clapped for what he was saying.
Here's just a little bit of that.
This is Soundbite 2.
He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over.
Instead, he met with a wall of strength he never anticipated or imagined.
He met the Ukrainian people.
Our forces are not engaged and will not engage in the conflict with Russian forces in Ukraine.
The United States and our allies will defend every inch of territory that is NATO territory with the full force of our collective power.
Every single inch.
What did you make of that, Jeremy?
Because one point somebody made was great.
He's rolling along strong.
He's got everybody standing.
And then it just sort of pivoted to something that was more like, like you said, a wish list or sort of a college discussion.
It's just like.
A couple minutes later, we're talking about such small minutiae after this big moment.
One pundit was suggesting shorter, less, pick your top three points, get in, get out, sit down.
Right.
Well, that, Megan, is the problem with the speech overall.
There was nothing unifying it.
And I think right there, you have a perfect example of the way that Democrats have struggled to connect with voters.
Okay.
So on the surface, he's saying the right things.
Yes, the Ukrainian people are standing up.
The United States is behind you, Ukraine.
However, There was no concrete action to back that up.
And I think people are kind of left with the question okay, that's great.
It's nice rhetoric, but what are you going to do?
And I'm not saying that I think there is a whole lot militarily the United States should be or could be doing right now that wouldn't drag us into a full on military conflict with Russia.
But it's an example of the way that I think the Democratic Party has struggled to effectively speak to people's concerns and anxieties.
And this is why the Republicans and Donald Trump have been making really Big inroads with a lot of voters who wouldn't ordinarily think about voting Republicans.
Republicans, right now, are just better at channeling the anxieties.
The fears of voters out there, and giving them a sense that they understand, to borrow a cliched phrase here, the voters' pain.
There's an empathy there that is much more concrete, that I think works for everybody from Donald Trump on down, who is speaking to this notion that there are Americans who feel like their government isn't doing much to help them in what.
Are pretty depressing and trying times for a lot of people.
He tried.
He tried to do the Joe Biden folksy.
We've heard him do it a million times, Jeremy, right?
I get it.
I get it.
You know, the increased prices, the inflict.
Trust me, I get it.
But there wasn't a lot that followed to make you actually believe he gets it.
I think that's exactly right.
Like we said, he was very short on specifics of how he would address it.
But then when I listened to Kim Reynolds' speech, who delivered the Republican response, there was a real Fire there.
Like, you know, she was speaking to a lot of the concerns that voters have that their elected officials aren't representing them, that they aren't listening to them.
One Democratic strategist I spoke to before the speech said, like, you know, the Republicans understand that parents, for example, don't want to hear that school boards don't want them involved in their children's education.
And, you know, regardless of the specifics of any particular debate in any given school district, that's true.
Parents don't want to be told.
To shut up and sit down, just like average voters on any number of concerns don't want to be told, oh, well, what you're worried about isn't really a big deal.
So let's move on.
And I think the Democratic Party's problem and what Biden's lack of specifics last night really points to is the struggle that Democrats have had in acknowledging people's problems, whether that's inflation, whether that's crime, whether that's what the curriculum that's being taught in schools.
They have a denial problem.
And until they learn to speak to the concerns that not just Republican or even centrist voters have, but that many Democratic voters, many Democratic parents have, they're going to come up short.
Charles, it makes me wonder whether it's good old fashioned shame, but most politicians don't feel that.
But the old, you can't kill your parents and then beg for mercy on the ground that you're an orphan.
Is there any chance Joe Biden's not touting those things and not speaking about his understanding of the working class because he knows very well that his Exorbitant spending has helped put them in the position they're in now, not to mention these COVID mandates that have resulted in the loss of so many of their jobs and so on and so forth.
No.
That's not it.
Shame.
I don't think he knows.
He still seems to think Afghanistan was a success.
He didn't mention it at all last night.
Maybe his speechwriters know.
I don't think that this is a man who is feeling shame.
No, he may be feeling frustrated.
He may also be feeling, and this is true in certain ways, that much of what is going on is not his fault.
But I think he strongly believes in everything that he pushed again last night.
Biden's Unity Efforts 00:05:38
I think that was Joe Biden.
I don't think this is a ruse.
I don't think this is a calculation, some 8D chess.
I think that is Joe Biden.
And the cancer thing you mentioned earlier is a good illustration of this.
The way that Joe Biden talks about cancer is indicative of somebody who has spent his whole life in politics.
Obviously, everyone wants to fight and defeat cancer.
But Joe Biden seems at one level to believe that if the government gets more involved, we'll do it.
That we haven't done this thus far because the government hasn't been sufficiently supportive.
And that's not why we haven't defeated.
Cancer.
And that, as far as I can see, is his view on pretty much everything.
What he is interested in doing tends to change because he likes to keep himself at the center of the Democratic Party at any given point.
This is one reason he's moved so far left because the Democratic Party has.
Joe Biden is not a man who spends a great deal of time thinking about ideology or policy.
He moves with the wind, at least the wind as it is defined by the Democratic Party.
And so, what he wants to do alters over time.
But his constant is that government is good and that Democrats running the government is good for the little guy.
And the problem he has at the moment is that Democrats running the government is not especially good for the little guy.
Now, again, I don't think that all of the problems that Americans are facing are Joe Biden's fault or the Democratic Party's fault or, frankly, the government's fault.
I do think, though, that he can't get out of that mindset.
And so, what did he do last night?
He made a speech about how every single thing that is currently wrong or every single thing that is currently motivating the members of his party and his coalition could be fixed if the government came in and did it, even though there is almost no chance of the government coming in and doing pretty much anything he tried.
Right.
He's already tried that, and he doesn't have the support for most of these policies amongst his own party, never mind if you factor Republicans into it.
One point, and then, well, two points, and I'd love to get your reaction, Jeremy.
First, I personally thought it was not a good idea to yet again raise his son Beau's death.
At the same time that he was totally ignoring the death of the 13 service members in pulling out of Afghanistan.
Just don't, if you're not going to go there, you're not going to touch Afghanistan, you're not going to touch on the 13 dead Marines and service personnel, then don't raise your own son's death.
Charles has talked about this before.
It's just too much, it's too insensitive, and the loss of those 13 families is still too recent.
But the second point I wanted to make was more broadly on Ukraine.
I actually thought he had more room for.
Touting what he's done.
I was surprised he didn't spend more time on it.
Just this morning, I listened to the Daily, the New York Times podcast with Michael Barbaro, which I always try to do.
And it's interesting.
I like to get my information from both sides of the aisle.
And today they had a great report about what actually Joe Biden had been doing months prior to right now to try to generate unity amongst the Europeans against Putin.
And that was the subject of the podcast.
It was about how the Europeans came together.
And they didn't give Joe Biden all the credit, but they.
Talked about how he had been going to the Europeans and sharing the American intel and saying, No, this is what's going to happen.
You need to take a hard look at this and really sold it personally for them to believe it.
And it was a great story about how there's this other guy who wears like sneakers and bad suits who is in the European Union who everybody sort of mocks normally.
But this one little guy who understood the importance and value of US intelligence went country to country within the EU trying to convince various factions, We got to do something.
We got to do something.
And that's why they were able to act so quickly on the sanctions.
And it was a great piece.
Didn't hear any of that.
Why did I hear that in the Daily and not in the State of the Union?
I think it speaks to the larger problem that this administration has had with talking about the right things.
They seem to constantly be on the subject, on the wrong subject, really.
I mean, and this is not just something that I hear Republicans and conservatives criticizing this president for.
It's something I hear Democrats talking a lot about, too, is that one of the things that voters will punish you for undoubtedly, Is that if they believe you are not on the right subject, if you are not connecting with what is important to them in that moment?
And when America was concerned about the coronavirus restrictions in Afghanistan, Democrats were busy fighting each other over this infrastructure bill.
I mean, that's a perfect example.
And right now, when the world's attention and America's attention is focused on this conflict in Eastern Europe, the president isn't really talking about why they should care, why they should, frankly, look to what his administration has done and be proud of that.
And I think that's what you're identifying there.
It's just an inability.
To talk about the right things.
And if that doesn't change, if the kind of lack of a coherent message that we saw last night in the State of the Union isn't fixed, I don't see how Democrats are going to be able to communicate with the country in a way that puts them back in the same place where they were two years ago, which is we're the party that can restore normalcy and competence to the government.
Funding Police Without Excuses 00:10:24
It's so true.
Talk about missed opportunity.
It's like I learned all about the beams that go in certain buildings, but I didn't learn any of this stuff.
That actually would have been unifying, would have instilled some patriotic feelings, and as a result, some good feelings about him.
But nope.
You mentioned it, Jeremy, a second ago the defund the police thing.
I don't believe the solution is to defund the police.
We should fund the police.
Okay.
Well, that is not representative of a huge faction of his party.
And it's not in touch with what we saw happen over the past two years in this country to the great consternation of many.
Black, white, Democrat, Republican.
We're going to play that moment, what Joe Biden said, and what the Democrats around him have been saying prior to this when we come back after a very quick break.
Don't go away.
Let's talk about this defund the police moment.
To listen to Joe Biden last night, you would have thought there's absolutely zero daylight between Joe Biden and even Donald Trump on the issue of defunding.
The cops.
Here's what the president said last night.
We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police, it's to fund the police.
Fund them.
Fund them.
Fund them with resources and training.
Resources and training they need to protect their community.
Look at Kamala Harris on her feet.
Kamala Harris, who's been pretty explicitly on the other side.
But forget them, because the Democratic Party has so many representatives who have been pushing for this and who got it over the past couple of years, resulting in disaster after disaster in cities like Minneapolis.
We put together just a short list of examples.
Here they are.
Suck it up.
Defunding the police has to happen.
We need to defund the police.
Mayor Eric Arcetti saying, take some of the money from policing, about $150 million.
And I applaud Eric Arcetti for doing what he's done.
Not only do we need to defund.
Invest for in police, but we need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.
So, yes, defund your butts, defund you.
Yes, I support the reallocation of resources from NYPD.
We will be moving funding from the NYPD to youth initiatives and social services.
They are talking about reducing the allocation of resources to that department, and I think every single city in this country ought to be thinking about the same thing.
Yes, I support the defund movement.
I'm for.
Responsible reallocation of resources and defund the police.
I think you do all those other things, you don't need all the money that's going to the police department.
So, yeah, I mean, the spirit of it, I do support that.
Okay.
So, Charles, he can stand at the top and, you know, stand at the lectern all day long and say he's against defunding the police.
But the American people have a memory, and we've seen it tried in city after city.
And we've heard those Democrats very publicly calling for it.
And it's been a disaster.
That plus the soft on crime DAs has led to real crime problems in many cities.
So, what do you make of it?
I think there's two things to say here.
The first is it would be churlish not to applaud Biden.
For taking this position.
The purpose of politics is to convince people that you're right and they're wrong.
Now, Biden has never been a defund the police guy, but it should be seen as a victory for those who are against this idea that he felt the need to stand up there.
This is something Jonah Goldberg always points out.
What you actually want is for the other side to adopt all your ideas, because then you don't have to fight very hard.
And the fact that Joe Biden said this does signal a shift.
And it is a good thing that he's not on board with this.
So I would certainly give him that.
The political problem for him, as you say, is that he's still taking a defensive action there.
He felt the need to say it because his party, not all of them, but certainly the most vocal elements, have created this hostage.
Bill Clinton did not say fund the police.
George W. Bush did not say fund the police.
Barack Obama did not say fund the police.
Why?
Because they had nothing to respond to.
Certainly there have been criticisms of the police, some of which are warranted.
But this movement is something of a weight around Biden's neck.
And so, although I applaud him for saying it, he probably didn't want to have to.
This is not a good thing for him to have to respond to.
And that it is still out there is going to hurt his party going forward, especially, I suspect, in the sort of moderate suburban seats that he's going to need in 2022 and if he runs for reelection in 2024.
You know, Jeremy, it's Defund the Police is an explicit piece of the Black Lives Matter platform.
It's on their website.
They've made no mystery about it and of so many Democrats as we just played.
And there was a bizarre tweet by Eli Mistow of The Nation in response to this.
Quote, he writes, We don't need to defund the police.
We need to fund them.
He's quoting Joe Biden with resources and training.
And then he responds, What freaking bullocks.
But it's what whites want to hear.
Now, the truth is, it's not just whites who want to hear that.
It's actually black voters, even more than white voters, who have pushed this reversal.
And if you look back at the history of what they did in Minneapolis and what they did in Detroit and so on, all these other cities that fell victim to the defund the police pushers, it was black voters who were objecting the loudest.
In Minneapolis, three quarters of Minneapolis black voters were against defund the police.
And in fact, what they said there was well, what about just having a Department of Public Safety?
Where we reimagine the police department.
And they were like, not only no, but hell no.
No, we don't want that.
Blacks more than whites saw the same thing in Detroit.
So while people will try to racialize this, you know, the push to fund the police as opposed to defund them, the truth is the facts belie that claim.
It's not only untrue that that's what whites exclusively want to hear, and that blacks don't want to hear that.
Neither do Hispanics.
If you look at what happened in Southern Texas in the 2020 congressional races, a lot of the backlash to the Democratic Party there was because of the heavy law enforcement.
A lot of the people who live down there are in the Border Patrol or they are in some type of law enforcement that they rely on for their family's survival.
And they don't like to hear defund the police slogans any more than people who live in high crime areas do.
And I think that I actually want to point out, Megan, that while there are loud voices in the Democratic Party that you played, the vast majority of Democratic voters and people who are liberal, and even the vast majority of the Democrats in Congress don't support this.
The problem is they just haven't pushed back when the loudest voices call for defunding the police.
Well, and the second problem is that it's actually been happening.
You know, I mean, I lived in New York City.
One of the final straws in our relationship between Manhattan and our family was when de Blasio said he was going to defund the police by $100 million.
It was like, peace out.
Right.
And so it actually, it's not just the rhetoric of people like Cori Bush or Rashida Tlaib, it's actually been happening in major blue cities.
Yeah, but voters have also rejected it.
Like the overwhelmingly liberal Democratic voters in Minneapolis rejected the Department of Public Safety proposal that you were talking about.
And in New York City now, the new mayor, a former cop, has very wisely shifted away from that kind of talk.
It's talking about how we need to have a better relationship with our police forces.
And he didn't change in his proposed budget this year, didn't touch police funding, which is basically a Repudiation of what the people under in the de Blasio era were calling for from the city council on up.
So, yeah, I think there is a much bigger recognition now that Democrats need to learn how to respond when the ideas of a relative minority of people in their party have no constituency.
I mean, there is no constituency for Defund the Police, it's a tiny fringe movement, but it gets outsized attention.
And Democrats struggle with how to deal with that.
I think one of the things that we saw play out in the 2020 elections, and I get into this in my book, is the way that Democrats struggled to even say things that were complimentary about law enforcement.
I talk about this race in Iowa where the Republicans started doing polling, asking people, okay, do you agree with the statement?
Are there a few, are cops mostly good people, but there are a few bad apples who need to be thrown out?
Or do you believe that the policing?
In the United States, it is systemically broken, and we need to start from scratch.
And overwhelmingly, they agreed with the former that there are a few bad apples, but that most cops are good people.
But Democrats never figured out how to express that, and they're still struggling with how to do that.
Charles, this sort of speaks to a wider point of some of the items that Joe Biden was hitting last night.
So, okay, defund the police is not the right move, it's fund the police without any acknowledgement of how that became an issue and why it's on the mind of so many Americans who have lost their safety in part because of these policies, right?
Illegal immigration.
He talked about how we need to secure the border, right?
Partisan Messaging Struggles 00:07:35
Well, the American people know very well that he's implemented a whole host of policies that have, I think it's fair to say, loosened the border as opposed to securing it.
And they know that's on him.
And he ticked off some small things.
We have new technology like scanners to detect better drug smuggling.
Okay.
Joint patrols with Mexico and Guatemala.
All right.
But we're not, we're missing sort of the big policies that, for example, President Trump put in place that did make a dent.
Didn't solve it, but did make a dent.
And then the big, the mother of all of those was COVID, right?
Like COVID.
Things are getting better and we're going to take the masks off and we're, you know, well, you don't have to listen to me say it.
Here's Joe Biden saying it.
I think it's Soundbite 3.
So stop looking at COVID as a partisan dividing line.
See it for what it is, a god-awful disease.
Tonight I can say we're moving forward safely back to more normal routines.
Our schools are open.
Let's keep it that way.
Our kids need to be in school.
Under the new guidelines, most Americans and most of the country. Can now go mass free.
And based on projections, and thanks to the progress we've made in the past year, COVID 19 no longer need control in our lives.
So, how did all of that happen to us?
How did the schools stay closed when they should have been open?
How did COVID become such a partisan dividing line?
Could it have been all the rhetoric demonizing people who had already had COVID but didn't want to get a vaccine, medical workers, et cetera?
I'll let you take it from there.
Megan, you're failing to relate to your audience the extraordinary good fortune that Joe Biden has benefited from in that the science changed one day before his State of the Union.
No one could have seen that coming.
There's two years worth of tests, and it just so happened that March 1st, 2022, is a cutoff point.
I found this very, very annoying as a Floridian to be lectured about political divisions on COVID by President Biden and his party.
Because here, as I've said to you before, everyone that I know did not initially see this as a political question.
And it was quickly turned into one.
And certain states and approaches and governors were vilified nationally, including by President Biden.
And for him to talk in that saccharine way, I think is unreasonable.
I think more broadly, the three issues you mentioned show that the Democrats can also suffer from having so much cultural power.
There are a lot of ways in which the Democratic Party benefits from its prominence in the media, in academia, and entertainment.
But sometimes it can become captured by those institutions and it can have fringe messages or elite messages amplified to its detriment.
And it seems to me that the defund the police case, Jeremy is right when he says this is not held as a value by the vast majority of Democratic voters, but it is popular among wealthier, more heavily educated, and more nationally influential types.
And so it was pushed out there, it was promulgated across the entertainment world, across the media world, across the academic world.
You have, therefore, a Democratic Party whose reputation on questions such as defund the police, enforce the border, and our COVID rules is hostage to a smaller group, but a more influential group than the party represents at large.
And I think for once, Democrats are really suffering from this because if you talk to sort of rank and file Democrats across this country, they do not sound like The New York Times editorial page or the Washington Post editorial page on the question of COVID.
They don't sound like the faculty at Harvard, but a lot of those people are really struggling to give this up.
And until they do, things even that Biden is not responsible for are going to continue to weigh him down.
That's very true.
I mean, it does seem like Joe Biden couldn't really have a spike the ball in the end zone moment, just given the past behavior and messaging from the administration.
But also because there's a strong piece of his base that is still very afraid of COVID, Jeremy.
I mean, speaking of the Daily, they did a deep dive into this with David Leonhardt not long ago.
On how it's become so partisan that the hardcore left is just definitely not willing to let go of COVID.
And that's one of his challenges in declaring victory and sort of trying to clear a path between now and November for we beat it, forget those two years and the masks and the mask mandates and the vaccine mandates and so on.
Right.
And this is a perfect example of, you know, most of my colleagues, the vast, vast, vast majority of my colleagues in the media are not.
The kind of people who are making things up.
They're not purveyors of fake news.
They're good, decent, hardworking, honest journalists.
But the problem with the way that a lot of the media portrays these issues is perfectly emblematic of this larger struggle with the Democratic Party in that they are talking and promoting the ideas that only a relative small elite is talking about on social media.
And there's a huge difference between the conversation that is happening on social media among progressives.
And many in the media, and what voters are saying back at home.
Defense is a perfect example of that.
And so is COVID, right?
I think the majority of the country, if not moved on, is ready to live with COVID in a way that does not restrict them.
And if you look at even in New York City, like I live in New York City, I was walking down the sidewalk the other day and I heard a woman on her cell phone saying, Thank God, the masks will be over.
And there are people who have, you know, I know there's this cliche that New York, everybody is like super liberal and COVID phobic, but people have been done with masks outside here for a really long time.
And you don't see people wearing them as much, nearly as much as you used to.
And if you're seeing that in New York City, that's an example of, I think, how people have just, the leaders of the Democratic Party in a lot of ways and many progressives are just out of step with how people want to live their lives and what they're worried about right now.
To your point about the media not getting, you know, what really is on the mind of the voters, I think it was CBS, but yesterday they did a story on how the war in Ukraine is going to affect one particular transgender person because, you know, the Russians aren't so pro transgender issue.
Ukraine and Voter Priorities 00:15:32
Like, talk about like a day 200 story running on day six.
Like, okay, we could get to that.
Changes in Ukraine once Russia takes over.
If they take over, we could get there.
But right now, there's actual still fighting in the street, and the Ukrainians still believe they might actually pull this out, and the international community is rallying behind them.
And that is really the story.
I don't think people are really focused on the one in any event.
Okay, let me pause there.
I'll do another break and come back.
I got to ask you about the weirdest moment with Nancy Pelosi and the closed fist clapping about the fire pits.
I don't know what was going on there, but we have to talk about that and about, you know, Biden and his many gaffes that just continue to surface.
And what we should be taking from that.
More with Charles and Jeremy, and more on Jeremy's book coming up.
Back with me now, Charles C.W. Cook of National Review and The New York Times is Jeremy Peters.
Who is the author of a brand new book called Insurgency How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted?
Let's start with that, Jeremy.
What does that mean?
Okay, so I don't think you can tell the story of the modern Republican Party and Donald Trump's rise without acknowledging that this wasn't a hostile takeover.
Trump didn't come in and displace everybody and take command of the party.
It was a partnership in a lot of ways.
Many establishment Republicans agreed to take with the bad that came along with Donald Trump was a lot of the good that they saw from a policy perspective.
And that's why, you know, when you ask many Republicans from, you know, social conservative anti abortion activist types, who I spoke a lot to for this book, to folks who are, you know, more establishment minded, who were part of the Bush wing of the party, they're fine.
Well, maybe not fine, but they are willing to say that January 6th wasn't.
All that big of an issue, as far as they were concerned, they could look past it because Donald Trump delivered the Supreme Court for them.
And the Supreme Court is about ready to strike down Roe v. Wade, we think.
So that's just one example.
But if you look at the types of Republican policy that was pushed through during Trump's presidency, a lot of it was very conventional Republican fare.
A lot of it, of course, on trade and immigration was not.
The establishment of the Republican Party went along with Trump at first reluctantly, but then willingly because they saw it was a good deal for them.
And ultimately, that is Donald Trump's transactional style of politics.
And he infused the party with that in a way that I think surprised a lot of folks.
Well, Charles, you're a good person to respond to that because I know you're not a Donald Trump fan.
Our audience knows that about you.
But on the policies, I would imagine you're much happier with how Trump governed.
Than with the presidents who preceded or came after him.
Well, and with how I thought a president Trump would govern, Jeremy's absolutely right to say a lot of what came out of the Trump years was pretty standard Republican fare.
The one thing he got done through Congress was a tax cut.
There you go.
He tried to get Obamacare repealed.
And in fact, it wasn't for lack of effort on Trump's part that that failed, although his total Disinterest in and lack of knowledge about healthcare probably did hurt.
I would just, as a personal matter, distance myself.
I'm not suggesting other people don't believe this from the idea that January 6th was worth it.
I would never see that as a moral or reasonable way of judging it.
I think that it is possible, though, to say that January 6th was a national disgrace and that many of the things Trump did as president.
Were good.
And I think really the inability of many people, some on the right, some formally on the right, some on the left, to distinguish between these things is one of the reasons our politics is so messed up.
You know, it is simply not to endorse all of Donald Trump's shortcomings to say that, say, Amy Coney Barrett is a good judge.
She is.
That is true independently of Trump.
And I hope that at some point we'll be able to.
Go back to a politics in which that man is not at the center of everything we believe.
I heard the regret in your voice at the CPAC straw poll that he still ran away with 59%.
DeSantis was the next closest, but it wasn't really close unless you took Trump out of it, in which case, DeSantis was the heavy favorite.
But Trump's numbers went up this year versus last year.
And so the Republican Party, they seem to miss him.
How that will play out over the next year or so, we can only wait and watch and cover as reporters and commentators.
Okay, can I just ask you, because it's a bit of a weird turn, but I've got to ask you about the weirdest moment of last night, which was Nancy Pelosi.
What was going on?
As Joe Biden was talking about the burn pits that our servicemen may have been getting cancer from in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
She stood up to applaud.
I don't know what's happening with her fists, but for the audience listening at home, she's got closed fists and she's kind of bouncing them together.
And she looks, I mean, as the kids would say, awkward AF.
All right, here it is.
One being stationed at bases, breathing in toxic smoke from burn pits.
Many of you have been there.
Jeremy, would you like to take a shot at what's happening there?
I don't know.
I think one of the things that people don't realize who haven't been in the room during these State of the Unions is.
Members of Congress have the speech there in front of it, right?
So they're reading along.
And who knows, which maybe she skipped ahead a few lines to what he said next and was anticipating that and got up a little too quickly.
Just get back down then.
Sit back down immediately.
Yeah, it was hard to explain.
There hasn't been worse clapping since Nicole Kidman at that awards ceremony with her weird rings on that day.
Okay, how long is the Biden sort of gaff sought, Debbie?
All right, let's play it.
Here's Biden, a mashup of some weird moments.
It may circle Kyiv with tanks, but it'll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.
Time to see what used to be called the Rust Belt become the home of a significant resurgence of manufacturing.
Bless you all, and may God protect our troops.
Thank you.
Go get him.
Now, Charles, you write at National Review that you saw an oblivious, ignorant, overconfident blowhard last night, so I'm going to guess.
You didn't like it, and that you thought some of those moments were the reasons, but you tell me.
Well, I think he's been that for a long time.
The thing that worries me about him is he can't speak, he can't read off a teleprompter.
He clearly doesn't have the mental acuity anymore to digress, even.
You see him reaching for stories he's been telling for years, and he can't finish them, he can't remember them, and he can't incorporate them into what he's saying.
And this isn't a one off thing.
I'm notoriously soft on politicians who make Mistakes.
I was always the guy at National Review saying the 57 states thing didn't matter.
Corpsmen didn't matter.
It doesn't matter if a president or a politician who travels all the time says hello, Detroit, when he's in Indianapolis.
But Biden does it every 30 seconds.
And I think that should matter.
I think that should matter, especially in the sort of international crisis that we're in now.
Indeed.
I want to remind the audience that Jeremy's book is called Insurgency How Republicans Lost Their Party.
And got everything they ever wanted.
Thanks to both of you for being here.
Don't go away.
Matt Welsh is back next, along with someone you're going to love.
Joining me now, Nancy Rommelman and Matt Welsh.
Nancy is an author, journalist, and co founder of Paloma Media.
And Matt is co host of the Fifth Column podcast, which is awesome, and veteran guest of The Megyn Kelly Show.
You're a veteran, Matt.
Great to have you both with me.
I'm Susan.
Hey, Megan.
Thanks, Megan.
I like it.
You can show Nancy the ropes.
This is what we do when she does this.
Good.
Okay.
So let's start with the news of the day.
And I'd love to get your reactions to last night's State of the Union.
Matt, thoughts?
I.
Yeah, it was a great 10 minute speech and a really bad 50 minute follow up to that speech.
I'd like the Ukraine stuff.
I think he spelled out explicitly and correctly that the US is not going to get involved militarily in this fight and with Russia, which is, I think, what you should do.
And also that the NATO alliance will be defended within every inch of territory.
Both of those things are what a US president should do.
Wasn't a little bit more queasy about we're just gonna start seizing, uh, you know, random Russians' property, uh, right and left.
My libertarian heart doesn't like that.
So, you're a libertarian, I'm like, get them, yeah, I know a lot of people, a lot of people like that.
But then the whole laundry list at the end, I mean, he he pivoted from like uniting all of us to saying, oh, yeah, and the tax cut trickle down theory only benefited the one percent.
It's like, what, what are we doing here?
It's it was very uh, it detracted from the seriousness of the first 10 minutes.
To make the last 50 minutes be like a Bill Clinton speech from 1999.
Yeah, the misleading on the tax cut and the misleading on the protection that gun manufacturers have on their.
You know, they're the only company, the only company that can't be sued.
They can be sued.
100% they can be sued.
They manufacture a gun that misfires in a way that actually hurts a human.
100% you can sue them.
You cannot sue them for violence done by some random criminal with their gun because we've recognized that that's too attenuated a link.
In any event, he says it all the time, and I guess his base loves it.
What were your thoughts, Nancy, overall?
Well, the first thought, I thought this every time I saw the State of the Union.
I really wish they'd get rid of the Soviet era clapping.
It's just, it just takes so long.
Is that even Chuck Schumer?
No, that was fantastic.
I was like, what was that?
What happened with him?
He just got like ahead of the applause.
He stood, nobody else stood forever.
He kind of went, oh, oh, ah.
So, number one, number two, I agree with Matt.
I mean, though I said, you know, at lunch earlier today, I'm like, look, dude, if Joe Biden can cure cancer, I will vote for even the corpse of the man in 2024.
But it's just like, you're just throwing on all this stuff.
And you know, I mean, he better than anyone, how long has he been in politics?
He knows these things are not going to happen.
So, why?
What's the point of listening to it again?
So, yeah, there were a few things I liked, but none of those were part of it.
You liked funding the police.
I did.
I did.
Yes, you like funding the police.
But can we talk about the moment where he tried to say that women fell out of the workforce during COVID because they didn't have childcare?
What?
And why do you think they didn't have childcare?
I don't know what could have been happening at the same time.
Where would kids usually have been during the day?
Why was childcare necessary Monday through Friday during school hours?
And portraying our sudden maskless moments, which I can't wait for the rest of Washington, D.C., like the schools, to be able to also enjoy, in addition to the octogenarians breathing on each other in a closed space.
But to celebrate that is like, you know, we won.
No, a lot of people didn't win.
That, I mean, I'm not saying that he was being callous to those who died, but he's sort of taking credit for the policies of the last two years.
And the policies, especially towards people who have kids in schools, as Megyn Kelly knows with gritted teeth, haven't been a winning thing for a lot of people, especially in places controlled by Democrats.
It's been really two different pandemics.
The attempt to sound like the voice of reason, you know, it's time, given the progression and the way COVID is now, you know, the decrease in cases.
Okay, so here just we went back for fun to take a look at March of 2021, which is when Texas lifted its mask mandate, okay?
And the Democrats freaked out.
Biden called it Neanderthal thinking.
Fauci, you're inviting another surge.
Beto, it's a death warrant.
Gavin Newsom, absolutely reckless.
Guess what the daily average of cases was when that happened, when it was absolutely reckless and Neanderthal thinking?
It was around 54,000.
That was the daily average.
Guess what it is now?
Now that Biden thinks it's okay to take away the masks, 100,000, almost double when he called it Neanderthal thinking.
And why?
So, how does he get there?
Well, he says, well, it's time to focus on the hospitalization rate instead of the case rate.
Well, that's always been the case.
You just refuse to do it.
Right, right.
Welcome to the party.
So, no acknowledgement.
That's why I said they're, I know the term gets overused, but like they're gaslighting us.
The, you know, David Leonhardt from the New York Times is a classic case of someone who's, you know, he's writing for the New York Times audience, telling them very gently what those of us who are not working for the New York Times have been screaming about, you know, a year to 18 months before.
Like maybe we don't really, like when Saturday Night Live did its skit the other day of people talking around and kind of realizing that.
At a dinner party, that maybe all of these sort of mask policies and these things were more theatrical than a science.
You know, it's infuriating.
I'm happy to see it happen.
My daughter's daughters are going to be able to take their masks off at school next week in New York City, finally.
So I'm happy and I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it is infuriating.
And Republicans are right to, in their response, say, hey, look, there's a parental revolt happening right now because you screwed with.
Parents and you got in bed with the teachers' unions in your making of policy, which is absolutely true.
Joe Biden literally goes to bed as he brags in his speeches with the teachers' union member every night.
It's so true.
There's a lot in there.
So, David Leonhardt, I agree with you.
I think he's a gift, though.
He's been on this show too.
He's also a veteran.
And the reason he's so important is because he does speak to the audience that we most need to convince.
I know we're angry at these people who imposed all this stuff on us, but like he is a voice they will listen to and they get mad at him, but he does keep.
Reminding them of what the truths are.
And I will say, even when he was on this program, we were talking about Omicron.
It was at the beginning.
And I was like, well, you know, it doesn't seem to be that serious once you get it.
So, you know, what's the big freak out about?
And he was like, well, if you look at how easily it's spread, it will result in a massive number of deaths if it spreads like this.
Mask Mandate Backlash 00:13:47
And some of my audience wrote me and said, well, we don't like it.
We don't hear from him.
He's an alarmist.
Well, he was right.
Exactly what he predicted would happen did happen.
So, to his credit, You know, he speaks truth no matter who the audience he's in front of.
And I appreciate that in a reporter, left or right.
But yeah, can we talk about that Saturday Night Live skit?
So people may have missed it because they're not really watching Saturday Night Live.
But it was unbelievable.
It was like two minutes long.
We won't play the whole thing.
But it was all these actors from SNL out there pretending to be Democrats.
Sure, pretending.
What great acting.
And like starting to criticize what the Democrats did to us for all this time with these mandates and shutdowns and so on.
And like questioning the orthodoxy a little.
Here it is.
Well, I heard the CDC is going to lift all mask mandates soon.
Oh, yeah, I know.
It's so weird.
It's like COVID's not over, but it's just going to stop.
I don't know how I feel about that.
Oh, you know, that reminds me of this article I read.
Honey, no one wants to hear about that.
Well, it was in Bloomberg, and I thought it was interesting.
What article?
Well, honey.
It was just saying how mask mandates had.
I don't know, little to no effect on COVID.
Cue the shocked looks.
Nervous water pouring.
I am sorry.
It's not like I'm anti mask or anything.
I just sometimes wonder if any of the things we did actually helped.
I went to a child's birthday party, self careful, and they did gymnastics.
In masks don't.
And then they went into another room and took off their masks to eat pizza.
This is the end of me.
So did they really need the mask?
Oh no, did any of us ever need the mask?
No, oh my gosh, you want to laugh, but also I want to punch them in the face.
I mean, Nancy's been leading a one woman crew to take masks off people's faces since about June 2020.
Oh, my sister from another mister.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I started having people over for lunch in June 2020, and everyone's like, wait, what?
What do you mean?
I was like, don't do just come, just lunch.
We're not going to French kiss.
We'll just have like two people.
And everybody like crept out of their houses.
I was like, it's okay.
And it has been okay.
So the skin was pretty funny.
It was kind of, they had one a couple of years ago based on Me Too, which I actually thought was even funnier than this one.
But it is kind of amazing to me as someone who has not been of that ilk to think that people really, really, really believe what they're doing.
Like they really believe they are right in having masks on this time.
I mean, is that really possible?
I think there's a signaling exercise with it that's pretty explicit.
And we've seen this in school policies too, right?
Like people were afraid to, up until basically election day 2020 in blue states, express out loud too much.
That they were against school closures because, and this is on the record, lots of people said that they didn't want to be perceived as Trump supporters, right?
They didn't want to be as Trumpy.
My daughter, who goes to middle school in Brooklyn at the nice white parent school, I should hesitate to add, she used to be a mask kind of fanatic, but then she's now been kind of the leading, put it on the chin or take it off altogether.
And she's immediately called Trumpy by her classmates in a place where there might be, yeah, you know, my daughter, that's not.
Likely, um, but uh, in a place that probably voted 103 percent uh for Joe Biden this last time, so there's a there's a sense of and you saw this in Portland, right, where Nancy's done a lot of great reporting of people wearing a mask to signal their like a sort of solidarity and their political uh point of view more than that they've grappled with any of the science.
We had Jennifer say on the program, uh, and I want to hear about Portland one second, but we had Jennifer say on the program who is the um head of Levi's and she got forced out.
Because what was her sin?
Was she out there parading against, you know, with the truckers against the vax mandates?
No.
Was she even parading against the mask mandates?
No.
She wanted the schools to be open in San Francisco, which now we've seen, and I want to get to this too.
She wanted those school board members recalled.
She wanted the schools to be open, and they called that Trumpy within Levi's, supposed to be America's brand.
Guess again.
Consider Wrangler, everyone.
And she wound up fired.
She wound up fired for that absurdity.
Go ahead, Nance.
Well, I was just going to say, I just spoke with someone from Portland two days ago who said that Portlanders keep their masks on because they want to signal that they care.
They care more than other people.
They care about old people and whoever might be more vulnerable.
And even now, even now that it's being lifted everywhere, they're not lifting it yet.
In Portland.
In terms of the recall, we were both at the recall party.
We were at the We Call Watch Party, and it was like being inside an Alka Seltzer.
It was so exciting.
You could tell, like, there was no way that these people were not going to be recalled, and they were slaughtered.
They were slaughtered.
And it was really, really nice to see.
And I think I am going to go back and cover the Chesabudin recall because I think.
Yeah.
The Chesabudin thing is blowing my mind.
My audience knows I'm now obsessed with Chesabudin.
I mean, people don't know, but like, he.
That this is the man, this is the son of two convicted murderous terrorists, of domestic terrorists, who was raised by two other murderous terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorn.
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorn.
I mean, Bill, the head of the Weather Underground, which bombed several buildings.
They actually did blow up a building, including themselves, not Bill and his wife, but their group, and so on.
That's his parents and then his adoptive parents.
No wonder the guy does not want to fight crime.
And now he's gotten all his bad press for the murder rate in San Francisco and the crime rate and the carjackings and the car thefts and so on.
Unlike London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, who's like, oh shit, I'm gonna pivot on this.
I'm pivoting.
He's like, more prosecution does not stop crime.
I'm telling you, you guys need to listen to me.
What I am doing is working.
He is going to be recalled.
Yes?
Yes, he's going to be recalled.
I'm in touch with some people that are leading the recall there, and they are adamant.
I think the wave is with them.
I think, especially after the slaughter of the school board members.
And when you look at what these people have done, like item by item, it's It's unbelievable.
I think he will be recalled.
I think we might be seeing a little sea change in San Francisco.
We'll see.
I mean, there's a political sea change, too.
You can see it in the personage of Eric Adams in New York.
I mean, there's a big city backlash against over progressive policies.
Some of that stuff is going to lead to places that makes me uncomfortable.
I think that in addition to Chase of Bedeem being a clown and in way over his head, that people, not just in San Francisco, but in New York, are They're pinning those policies for things that may or may not have something to do directly to the things that they're mad about.
Some of them do, some of them don't.
And they're going to perhaps throw out some what I would consider to be good policies about cash bail, for example.
Not to say that you let people go who are going to be.
I'm against you again.
It's that if this is your 12th time and you're violent, that's a different thing altogether.
But you're seeing a real backlash.
And I think.
You know, you can even bring it back to CDC masking policies and the fact that we somehow took the masks off last night in Washington.
It's amazing how the science seems to be impacted by what happens at the ballot box, beginning with Glenn Youngkin in Virginia and then going on to other Democrats.
And literally, literally one day, I think it was after this Democrat polling group came out with a red alarm fire notice to the Dems saying, you will lose.
Being such downers on COVID.
The American people are over it.
They want to live with it.
They do not want to be reminded of restrictions or any of this.
Just stop it.
Stop it.
And suddenly, 102,000 cases is no longer a problem when 54,000 was death, destruction.
You don't care about people.
Yeah.
Again, it's really hard not to grit your teeth at this, given everything that every single person.
Including people who are not like us.
We are public figures.
I understand, Megan, that you've been criticized a time or two in your public career.
It's happened to be known to happen.
I have two, maybe to a lesser extent.
But that's fine.
It's part of our job description, but it's not part of the job description of.
Just parents who are going to school board meetings and saying, Hey, how come the schools aren't open?
And they were brutalized by teachers' unions, by politicians.
Richard Carranza, the school board chief in New York, until he fled about a year ago, they would just call those people racist.
And it's an incredible discouragement of public participation.
And one of the interesting things about the San Francisco recall, the co organizers of it were really great people, one of whom is an immigrant from India, and the other, who is a woman progressive from Caltech.
And they just didn't give a rat's patootie about being called a racist.
And in fact, they saw what they did.
And that was the number one thing that they would be hit with in San Francisco.
We're going to hit the Democrats by calling them racist.
What?
Why would they live here?
They wanted to make the discourse safe for people and have people be brave and say, when you are called that, laugh at the person, say, that's just not true, and then just move on immediately.
And that part of the Alka Seltzer in the room is that you could see there's a galvanizing effect on people.
Who are no longer discouraged from public participation by this kind of freighted name calling?
So, can I tell you, this is one of the very, very rare disagreements I have with the brilliant Douglas Murray.
I mean, he's just such a smart social commentator.
And his book, The Madness of Crowds, is just well worth your time.
But he really feels strongly that if somebody hurls the R word at you, you should respond indignantly.
You should be like, how dare you?
Dare you use that word against me?
How dare you water it down in this way?
And I am like, that may have been true three years ago, five years ago, but they hurled around so much now.
I mean, truly, I think you're right.
The only response is to laugh and move on.
Like, okay, I got it.
I'm racist.
Then I'm racist.
Okay, got it.
Let's move on.
Because they've used it against everyone Black people, white people, Republicans, Democrats, doesn't matter.
What?
I mean, someone can say to me, you know, you are a seven foot tall.
Left handed Croatian tennis player.
And I'm like, yeah, that doesn't have anything to do with me.
And they could call me racist.
Like, it doesn't have anything to do with me.
Let's move on.
It's just, it just doesn't have any power.
And it's a shame because bigotry is bad.
And Kay, you know, like making collective demonizations of populations based on stuff that they didn't choose, or even sometimes stuff that they do choose, like their politics.
But to say that an entire large class, millions of people, are, you know, deplorable or beyond the pale in some way or inferior in some way, that's awful.
And we need a language to describe that.
And that language has been so abused, and the threshold of evidence for it has been so incredibly lowered, especially within journalism over the last five, six years, that it's kind of robbed us of the language to call things by their proper names.
And that's a damn dirty shame because racism sucks and we shouldn't tolerate it.
Xenophobia sucks.
When Donald Trump said that Judge Curiel, for whatever his name was, in 2016, Said that we can't trust him to make a judgment in a case because of his background.
That was terrible.
You should never do that.
And you should have a language to describe that.
That was one of the things that I hit Trump for.
It was actually Trump, you know, he had attacked me and then we kind of made up.
And then, you know, I continued to hit him when he deserved it.
And I can continue to this day to defend him when he deserves it.
That's like what a real, what an honest journalistslash commentator should do.
If somebody's uniformly defending one side or so on, then you're.
You know, you should understand what you're getting, which is somebody who's partisan, not objective.
But that was clearly beyond the pale and it was a nonsense objection to Judge Curiel.
Anyway, yes, we need that word.
We need the word racist to work.
But it doesn't anymore.
They've completely diluted it past the point of it being effective.
And I think, to your point, Nancy, like the people who spoke up at that school board meeting, they got it.
And I give them credit for being Democrats and getting it.
I think we actually have a clip.
This is your clip.
This is from your video.
You were there of one of the parents there talking about how the school board needs to think about educating the kids and not just renaming schools while the education is shut down.
Diluted Language on Racism 00:06:49
Here he is.
Now, you want to see school board members who put Education first.
And who put the needs of the most disadvantaged kids first, who have been the ones who have fallen the furthest behind in the two and a half years that the school has been shut and who have lost the most in this pandemic.
And who the school board, which talks about social justice nonstop, has not prioritized.
It is not progressive to send back the kids who are the most disadvantaged to not prioritize their education.
It is not progressive.
And San Francisco today has shown us what it means to be progressive.
Yeah, like that guy.
Oh, man, he was great.
Boy, his voice, when he gets at volume, boy, he was, whoo!
Doesn't need a microphone.
Yeah, he was one of the main organizers, he and his partner.
And they were accused, you know, we actually went to their apartment.
They live in kind of like a big rambling apartment with five kids, and they were accused of being part of the billionaire class.
It was like, yeah, not really.
Not really.
Nice try.
Yeah, that's what they'll get you on something.
If they can't get you on racism, you know, because you happen to have brown skin.
They'll try anyway.
They don't care.
They'll try anything.
All right.
So there's a lot more to talk about, including Nancy's significant time with a bunch of serial killers.
So we're going to get to that.
So I would be remiss if I moved on to serial killers without talking first about another notable performance last night or yesterday.
And that is the vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, who well before.
The events of last night gave an interview earlier in the day to a radio station in St. Louis that has been universally mocked.
I mean, it was mocked by the left and the right all over Twitter yesterday.
And take one listen and you tell me why.
Ukraine is a country in Europe.
It exists next to another country called Russia.
Russia is a bigger country, Russia is a powerful country.
Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine.
So, Basically, that's wrong.
Sharing is caring.
Now, I will say he asked her to explain it in layman's terms or simple terms.
Is St. Louis now just suddenly a bunch of kindergartners?
Did all the grownups leave the city?
Yeah, I was going to say, was that to a second grade that she was speaking to?
I mean, at least it's better than that thing that she said about six weeks ago when someone was asking her about COVID policy and.
And whether they got tested wrong or whether they did bad things.
And she said something to the effect of every day is the day to start doing the things that are better.
And that's why we are going to be doing that.
That was like the old total serial kill, I think, right?
Today.
Before we leave the State of the Union, I'd like to give one thing for me that was surprising and positive.
This is when he started talking about policing, which is something that I've covered a lot since I covered.
Protests in Portland and the murders in the NYPD here, and just in general, have talked a lot about policing.
When he started talking about it, I was terrified, Megan.
I was like, oh my God, he's going to be like, we got to start defunding and we have to have neighborhood groups doing this instead.
And when he said, We have to fund the police.
And I think he said it three times.
I was heartened to hear that.
You know, we talked about this with our first panel.
And I mean, yes, he said the right words, but he's not really the problem.
It's Democrats across the country who are the problem.
I agree.
But I think we saw in the run up to the election that he was, I don't want to use the word pandering, but he was listening quite a lot to the really, really more progressive wings of the Democratic Party.
He did try to hedge a little bit more.
You're right.
He was hedging on this issue a bit more.
Yeah.
So let's see.
You're applauding the end of the hedging.
I would applaud the end of the discussion altogether.
As long as he legalizes weed, I guess.
Yeah.
Look, my feeling is, and I know, like, it's he's easy to make fun of.
So is Kamala, but, and so is Trump.
But people died as a result of these crazy policies, the defund the police policies that were pushed on city after city.
People died.
And you know who died more than anybody?
African American people, because it was their neighborhoods that lost police presence and needed them most in too many big cities.
And so, where do those people?
Who unnecessarily lost loved ones go for their apology now that Biden's pretending like he and his party have been against this all along and they're the voice of reason.
Nonsense.
They are the reason this happened.
And it's yet another thing to hold them accountable for.
I'm glad he's changing his messaging.
Go talk to Cori Bush, talk to Ilan Omar, talk to AOC, who is one of our first guests was talking about how, yes, Mayor de Blasio said he was going to defund the police by $100 million in New York City, but Eric Adams hasn't changed the budget for this year, but they already took the money away.
Real people have suffered as a result of these decisions.
And that's what elections are for.
That thing with the cops was so awful, Nancy.
And I don't think the New Yorkers are soon to forget it.
In Portland, where they have as acrimonious a relationship with their police department as any city in the country, they are on target now to have 30% more murders this year than last year.
And last year was a bit of a record, not the record, the 80s, it was larger.
But you can't look at what's going on in cities in terms of violent crime.
And then say, you know, really, what we really should do is keep going down the road where we're taking more money from the force and having a more acrimonious relationship with the police department.
It's got to stop.
And you see the cops, like, I'll see cops out there who listen to the show or know me, and they're so grateful.
They're just so grateful that there's anyone out there defending them at all.
They don't need just a defense.
It's just, I don't quote, defend the police.
I offer facts.
These are the facts.
I counter non factual narratives with truth.
And for that, they're so grateful.
Because people within the Democrat Party are the ones spinning lies that have endangered and cost lives.
And they can't get away with just defund the police.
No, what do you mean?
We're going to fund the police.
That's us.
And Joe Biden's been trying to play that for a while with, like, remember, he claimed his American Rescue Plan, which was the COVID relief, you know, that he was trying to fund the police with $300 million in that.
And that was like his attempt to fund.
And because the Republicans wouldn't support his whole wish list of stuff, they were against it.
Whatever.
Countering Non-Factual Narratives 00:03:22
It's all over.
Political maneuvering.
Okay, let's talk about serial killers.
Matt's like, yes, yes, you've been waiting for this.
Why are you spending so much time with them?
Well, and what have you learned?
It's not so many serial killers.
I did interview John Wayne Gacy before, about a week and a half before his execution, because I had an opportunity to drive cross country with one of his pen pals and interview the guy, and nobody really had done that.
It had been very, I think one journalist from the New Yorker had, and it was kind of a mingy piece.
Sorry.
Writer for the New Yorker.
And so I did that.
I have written about a Munchausen by proxy mom who killed herself and her daughter.
And then a book that I wrote a couple of years ago called To the Bridge A True Story of Motherhood and Murder.
Great book.
Thank you, Matt.
That a woman in Portland threw her two young kids off a bridge in Selwood, the Selwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and the little four year old died and the seven year old survived.
She actually saved her own life.
She screamed and screamed until she was rescued by some Good Samaritans.
It's not that I'm like fascinated with murder, it's just that sometimes these stories get told and they're told in a way where people are incurious because they're scary.
And I always think it's a little better to really look at things and unpack it and sort of understand it.
And that's what I do.
I get fascinated and I go looking and I write the story.
So.
So, when you walk into jails before and sat with criminal defendants, people accused of murder, it was like one of the greatest stories of my legal career involves such a moment.
I'll tell it quickly.
I was very young.
I was interning for a criminal defense attorney out in Syracuse, New York, where I wasn't actually yet even in law school.
I was just, this was a do you really want to be a lawyer type internship?
And believe it or not, I went on to become a lawyer after this story.
But anyway, I taught aerobics at the time.
And so my boss said, we got to go to the prison on Saturday.
And I was like, well, I got to teach this class in the morning.
And he said, that's fine.
Just meet me at the office after you're done and we will go.
I said, fine.
Well, something happened on his end and he wasn't able to meet me at the office.
And without understanding that I didn't have my business outfit at the spa, at the gym, he came by the gym to pick me up and we were going to go directly to the jail, maximum security prison.
And I didn't, you know, I was planning on going home and then going to the office and changing, but it didn't work out.
So, I mean, now it was, I was in college for between 88 and 92.
Okay.
So this is, I guess, whatever, 91 probably.
And, you know, The aerobics of the time was very spandex y, was very neon y, it was very tight, it was very revealing.
What I had on was a.
Or it didn't happen.
I had on a one piece black leotard, of course, skin tight, because it was like, you know, skin tight, with a neon orange thong, neon orange thong on the back of it, right?
My bottom was covered because it was black, but, you know, that was the look with neon orange slouch socks, because that was, of course, and a neon orange scrunchie with my.
Big over teased hair sticking, and I that's how I so we show up to the prison.
The guards that you have to, I had a winter coat on it, thank god, because at least it was Syracuse.
You know, you always have to have a winter coat.
The guards, you can't take your coat in when you go visit the prisoners at the maximum security.
You have to take the they made that rule out, truly.
Prison Visit Rules Explained 00:06:02
I'm like, oh my god, what the is going on here?
So we're going, and they're like, she's got to take the coat off.
And my boss looks at the guards, and he looks at me, and he goes.
Show them your little outfit.
So I like open the coat and they're like, the coat stays on.
She keeps the coat.
They did not make me go in to see the murder defendant in that outfit, but trauma, trauma.
I get it.
I need a trigger warning when you talk about going to the prisons.
You just reminded me of something that I forgot.
So when I went to go see Gacy, you know, you check in and I was not wearing spandex, but I was like 30 years old and, you know, whatever, looked okay.
So he was up, of course, he was on death row.
So he was up.
We went and visited and there was not like, There was no plexiglass or anything.
I was sitting at a table with the guy, like three feet between us.
His hands were shackled.
But going up to see him, we had to kind of go up this long, curvy staircase, and prisoners could see us from other windows.
Oh, boy.
All of a sudden, I started hearing this like, wah, wah, wah.
It was just a cyclone of men because it was a woman.
And, like, you know, they don't get to see women.
It's just like, honey.
Anyway, yeah.
Then you're wondering, like, is this skirt long enough?
Is this like going up the stairs?
Short enough.
Is it short enough?
Matt's going a different direction.
So, what I mean, weird, weird question, but everybody wants to know what was John Wayne Gacy like?
What was it like to be across from him?
You know, I've said this a lot.
He was kind of like, kind of old and fat, like super cheerful.
Hey, Megan, how are you doing?
How's your family?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like that show too.
Hey, hey, guards, get this lady a cheeseburger.
So tell me, Megan, like, tell me, like, you can tell me about your sex life.
It's fine, though.
You can tell me.
He was super, super loquacious, absolutely hungry for communication.
But it was the John Wayne Gacy story.
It does show.
It was like he was on stage.
And I got to tell you, it was exhausting.
Was it scary?
You know, you're sitting in the maximum security.
There's guards right there.
They're armed.
His hands, like, he's not going to do anything to you.
But, you know, you do learn when you leave that someone that looks just this sort of like your fat Uncle Johnny actually has killed at least 33, and not just killed, but killed and tortured and raped 33 young men and boys.
So that's kind of an eye opener.
If people want to read about it, it's on Amazon.
Then go buy it.
So, okay.
Gosh, that's like, this is so disturbing.
And I know, yeah, you've written about how it's sort of bizarre to be across from somebody like that who's clearly a psychopath.
And yet wants to charm you.
Like, what's going on?
Absolutely.
But that's, you know, these sorts of charming sociopaths, they have this terrible and terrific trait of making you believe that they really like you and you have a lot in common.
And that's why people fall for them.
It's a terrible, terrible talent.
And people have asked me, like, do you think that he understood right from wrong?
I'm like, oh, I'm sure he does.
But what we don't understand is that we're not allowed to do those things, but he's so much smarter than the rest of us that he's allowed to do those things.
That was what I came away with.
Okay, let's.
Sorry to ignore you, Matt, but there's a lot of interesting stuff to go on.
Sorry to sit there.
Okay, let's talk about the Me Too dust up that you got into, which I find fascinating.
So, when the Me Too movement was happening, you saw an opportunity to offer a different point of view.
Like, all right, something else could be going on with some of these accusers, some of these women, not everybody, but some of them, and it's worth probing and it's worth providing due process for those who get accused.
And you got the shitstorm raining down upon you and your husband and his business because.
That was, I guess I will be charitable to the people who came after you and say that was the bomb throwing phase of that revolution.
And they were taking down anyone who had the temerity to question the believe all women narrative.
Something I do think we're now over.
I do.
I do.
It's a different time right now.
We're also a different city.
This was in Portland, Oregon.
You know, had this happened, it was a former angry employee of my husband's.
You know, if she had gone with her information to the Press and she lived in New York City where there are 5,000 restaurants and you know 150,000 employees.
It would have been a non story, but in Portland, it was a story and it was a story.
Um, they wanted to hear, they wanted to have confirmed that they were correct.
And anybody that spoke with some nuance, I mean, our first story that I did was talking about like, you know, is Aja Argento really the best face of Me Too?
Like, I don't really think so.
Okay, sorry, yeah, who had been accused of statutory rape and they'd been paying off the boy, her.
Late boyfriend Anthony Bourdain had.
And it was, you know, it was an interesting story.
And yet she's out there with Rose McGowan.
I am the face of me too.
And, you know, I thought that was probably a pretty poor choice.
But, you know, I was writing about this yesterday.
We were talking earlier about these words, right?
Misogynist, racist, transphobe.
And I was writing yesterday that it's sort of like people take these shortcuts, right?
They take the shortcut to the destination they want, whether it's a destination that they want a better future for the world or they take a destination that they want to look heroic for bringing somebody down.
It's like a game of chutes and ladders.
You know, you can go all the way around the board.
Oh, or you can find this one ladder that springs you up really fast because I'm going to call Nancy Rommelman a misogynist and then.
I will look like a hero for rape apologists.
Oh, yeah.
I'm a rape apologist.
I mean, sure.
Right.
Yeah.
It's bananas, but you know what?
It works or it used to work.
But people do, you know, we spoke earlier about this.
You're just like, that has nothing to do with me.
But at the time, you're completely right, Megan.
At that time, you know, this was just, you just set fire to this stuff and it burns up.
And it was, it was extremely devastating.
I should take some of the blame for it because I came up with a name of their little YouTube, whatever, Video podcast of which there's five episodes from on Analysis.
Overcorrection in Equity 00:08:21
What was it again?
It was like, not me, or what was it?
Me neither.
Me neither.
It's a good name, but it's also like, hit me.
It's Matt's fault.
It's my fault.
Everything, really.
Yeah.
But do you think, I'm curious now, because I do think, you know, we're definitely in a very different place in the Me Too movement.
And with, you know, all these states investigating Black Lives Matter for its fraud and for pocketing the money and the donations.
And, you know, we started off talking about how they're the ones who pushed.
Defund the police more than anyone, which is now, I mean, all the way up to the president of the United States, the Democratic president of the United States being dismissed and disagreed with.
Do you feel like what's happened with that sort of racial reckoning, the overcorrection, not just actually taking a hard look at whether we see racism in this institution or that, but like the craziness, the insanity of like all the black students get free tutoring and nobody else does.
And, you know, like just this sort of all the white people have to resign from their jobs so that black people can have those roles, like the guy from Reddit.
Do you feel like that phase is over too?
I don't.
I keep waiting for the corner to be turned decisively.
We were not in the mania that we were at the height of the George Floyd protests and afterwards, by which I don't actually refer to the George Floyd protests themselves, but like the media reaction.
There's a guy, the director of a museum in San Francisco, had to resign for like saying something completely innocuous.
Poetry magazine.
It was supportive of BLM, but not enough.
And then it's like, well, you're past racism.
You should shut up.
The Poetry Foundation in Chicago completely imploded.
There's like knitting groups, like a terrible, terrible fratricide with the knitting groups happening.
We're not exactly in that freak out that was there that summer that caused a lot of implosion in the media.
And that's good.
But the trend lines, the stories keep happening.
I mean, John McWhorter wrote about a story just like that today in the New York Times.
It keeps with us.
I'm afraid that the.
There's an institutionalization of this, of diversity, equity, and inclusion training and departments at universities and things like that.
They need something to do, right?
It's like you see this in some of the coverage.
There was a piece, I think it was CBS News, and I'm sorry if it wasn't, but out of Ukraine, which is a really interesting place right now.
A lot of news happening that you could write about.
And it was about what would happen, you know, the experience of one trans Ukrainian.
Yes.
We're on the same page.
I mentioned this in the A block.
Yes, it's absurd.
Who cares about that right now?
It is a story.
Every individual, you know, dignity and story.
But like you could see that there are these desks that exist at media institutions and they need to come up with stories.
And there are departments within and human resources departments.
My God, the amount of which this has been institutionalized.
So I'm afraid that we're going to keep seeing this over and over again.
And we have this whole generation of people who've just been compiling social media that can be mined by, you know, outrage archaeologists.
So, I would like to think that we've turned the corner, and I really hope so.
And the more that we laugh and just call BS right in its face, the better, the quicker we'll get to a different place.
But I think it's going to be a while before the legacy.
What you said reminded me of something that Joe Biden actually said on Defund the Police.
At the time when he was candidate Biden, he was asked about this, right?
It was in the height of the post George Floyd time and he hadn't yet been elected.
And he was asked, where do you stand on defund the police?
And he said, oh, no, I'm for reform, police reform, and funding the police so long as they have the requisite number of diversity hires.
So the police department in Butte, Montana, where our guest on Monday was from, which has very low black population, they need to have 50%.
Black police, in order for Joe Biden's view, in his view, for them to get their funding, right?
Like he needs perfect parity between blacks and whites.
That's what he was saying when he was running.
And not only that, on his first day or second day in office, he signed a whole of government executive order to install an equity lens by which they will measure all of their output and inputs and hiring and everything else.
I know people who work in the federal government, it's changed the way that they do their work because they're fulfilling this basically HR request, but also sort of a measurement impact request.
As well, that you have to show some work at the end of that.
So he has been very receptive to this notion.
But it is interesting, as my fifth column co host Camille Foster pointed out on Twitter yesterday, the word equity didn't show up in that speech.
This was not the most woke speech from a Democratic president that we've seen in a long time.
If anything, it was kind of closer to the opposite.
Back to the, so this is a separate memo that went out to the Dems about two weeks ago from the DCCC.
They had done their own research and they said, voters find us.
Preachy, judgmental, and insufferable.
And we have to stop with the culture war stuff because we're losing.
So it's like they're finally getting the memo.
I feel like I feel vindicated because everything we've been saying is right, has been proven right.
And we're not only right with the Republican voters, we're right with the Democrat voters.
I've been saying this all along that I've been saying to my Republican friends, do not divide our army because when it comes to fighting this woke cultural rot, the left is with us.
It's the far left wokesters who are against us.
And I even don't even want to say.
Far left.
Because Crystal Ball, she once said, I'm kind of far left, but she's not woke.
It's the woke warriors who have nothing to do but create problems for people.
Like you say, what is it?
What archaeologists?
The online archaeologists?
Outrage archaeologists.
Those people, those are the ones who have been the enemy of normal, reasonable people, black, white, left, right, and they're losing.
There's the thing that people don't realize, I think, is when that wave comes to them.
I mean, most people don't really.
Necessarily identify with quote unquote cancel culture stories or whatever, as long as it doesn't directly encroach on them.
This is why the parent revolt is so significant because there are 50 million plus kids in public schools.
A lot of parents out there, when they see these policies affect their lives, their kids' lives, they've got a lot of skin in the game and suddenly they're noticing a lot more things.
This is also true with just normal, or not normal, abnormal kind of woke related type of things.
Struggle sessions at your work.
When that comes into your workplace, and I've gotten hundreds of emails from people, you know, people in their own company, they started their own company, were sat down and subject to these kind of cross examinations.
They go, hold on a second.
This is now where I live.
And the stuff seems so crazy.
The San Francisco School Board, like the way that they conducted themselves, the language with which they talked about their own work is so crazy sounding to normal people that as soon as it hits normal people, either at their workplace or their kids or something else like that, There is going to be a huge backlash because it's going to be seen like an alien came down and started spouting all this gibberish at them.
This is a Tremendous threat, I think, to Democrats going forward.
And you're going to see a lot of people backpedaling furiously.
Well, I'll end it with another quote of Douglas Murray, the great and the one and only Douglas Murray, who, you know, he says, when your employer comes to you and tells you that you must participate in a session like that, you should say, I refuse, I refuse to let you re racialize my country, my company, and myself.
I love it.
He's brilliant.
Always worth listening to, as are you two.
Nancy, Matt, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you, Megan.
Don't forget to watch tomorrow because we've got Buck Sexton and Jason Whitlock.
Check us out on YouTube in the meantime, and we'll see you tomorrow.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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