The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220404_faucis-finances-and-growing-immigration-crisis-wit
Aired: 2022-04-04
Duration: 01:31:20


=== Toddlers, Masks, and Mayor Adams (14:34) ===

[00:00:20]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:32]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:33]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:35]  So much to cover on this Monday morning, including the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, laughing in the face of parents, upset over the remasking, mandatory masking, thanks to him, of their toddlers.
[00:00:48]  Remember how we ended the show on Friday with the good news?
[00:00:51]  Well, it turned bad later that day.
[00:00:52]  We'll update you.
[00:00:54]  Plus, President Biden apparently forgetting that he was Barack Obama's vice president.
[00:01:00]  It was he, Joe Biden, not his wife, Jill Biden.
[00:01:05]  And the backlash he's now facing from his own party over ending a Trump-era immigration policy.
[00:01:12]  With one top Democrat outright calling the decision frightening.
[00:01:15]  The situation at our southern border is about to get seriously worse.
[00:01:20]  Joining me now to discuss it all and much, much more, the co-hosts of the Ruthless Podcast, Michael Duncan, Josh Holmes, and the man known to us as Comfortably Smug.
[00:01:30]  Good to see you guys.
[00:01:31]  Good to see you, Megan.
[00:01:33]  Good to be back.
[00:01:34]  All right, Smug, I'm going to be looking like you in about four days.
[00:01:36]  So I'm wearing my glasses so I'm going to have LASIC on Thursday.
[00:01:42]  Yeah, I will let you.
[00:01:43]  I'll let the world know.
[00:01:44]  But they say you have not just bloodshot, but potentially blood, like bloody eyes after it.
[00:01:50]  So I decided I was just going to pull a smug and put those glasses on, and I'd be good.
[00:01:55]  Yeah, everything I've read is like you have to keep your eyes completely covered for like 24 hours.
[00:02:00]  Like any light could damage your eyes.
[00:02:02]  I mean, it sounds intense, but you might look like Joe Biden in that first primary debate where he burst the blood vessel in the eye.
[00:02:11]  I will definitely be pulling a smug in that case.
[00:02:13]  You will not see my actual eyes.
[00:02:15]  Maybe ever.
[00:02:17]  We'll see.
[00:02:17]  I'll update you further as the week goes on.
[00:02:19]  So let's kick it off with Eric Adams.
[00:02:22]  I'm so mad about this.
[00:02:23]  I'm just so irritated at so what happened on Friday was we had the guy on our show who filed a lawsuit saying you don't have the power to do this to the toddlers.
[00:02:32]  It's the toddlers.
[00:02:34]  They have the lowest risk from COVID.
[00:02:38]  And yet they're saying, oh, because they can't be vaccinated, they have to wear the masks.
[00:02:44]  And so he filed a lawsuit.
[00:02:45]  He won.
[00:02:46]  A trial court judge in New York said, this is unconstitutional.
[00:02:49]  You didn't have the powers to declare this.
[00:02:50]  Yay, that's how we ended our Friday show.
[00:02:53]  Then, of course, I was like, maybe Eric Adams is the reasonable man.
[00:02:56]  Some told us he was, and he just won't appeal this.
[00:02:59]  You know, maybe he's just looking to like appease that far-left constituency and he can say, sorry, you know, we lost in court.
[00:03:07]  No, that wasn't it.
[00:03:08]  They filed an appeal immediately and they got an appeals court ruling saying they have to wear the masks while you know the case plays out.
[00:03:18]  And so the masks are back on.
[00:03:20]  And just to set it up for you, Eric Adams went to yet another celebrity event this past weekend and parents were mad and showed up there to protect.
[00:03:30]  I mean, you know what it takes to make somebody actually go out and protest.
[00:03:33]  You're like, they're irritated.
[00:03:34]  You got it, like, especially New Yorkers who they're constantly irritated.
[00:03:37]  They don't protest.
[00:03:39]  They showed up outside of it was like a theater he was going to for some show.
[00:03:42]  I think it might have been the Jessica Parker, Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Brodock show.
[00:03:50]  Anyway, he's walking in, and this is how he handles the parents.
[00:03:53]  It's hard to hear for our listening audience, but basically, this other guy's got his arm around Eric Adams and the parents are yelling.
[00:04:00]  And the other guy's like, oh, Todd.
[00:04:03]  Oh, Adams goes, toddlers in masks.
[00:04:06]  How you doing, man?
[00:04:07]  And the friend's like, hey, good to see you.
[00:04:09]  Adams says, Welcome to politics.
[00:04:10]  The friend's like, Yeah, welcome to politics.
[00:04:13]  Ha ha ha.
[00:04:13]  Why you have angry parents?
[00:04:14]  Take a listen and a look if you're watching on YouTube.
[00:04:32]  Ha ha ha.
[00:04:33]  So funny.
[00:04:34]  So funny to have the two-year-olds in the masks forever.
[00:04:37]  Your thoughts?
[00:04:38]  Well, I mean, imagine going to the mad on that, right?
[00:04:42]  I mean, look, we know that progressives across this country are having a very difficult time grappling with the fact that they actually have to move on from COVID, right?
[00:04:51]  It's fulfilled their wildest fantasies in terms of government intervention in the lives of the American people.
[00:04:57]  But that, I mean, look, I can't, I can't even fathom how you make the decision that, oh, no, no, no, we got to go absolutely to the end of the year to make sure that this kindergartner is forever starred with a mask.
[00:05:14]  Well, Holmes, you and I talked about this a few days ago and that, you know, because we live in Washington, D.C., and you see similar sorts of things, people still masking out on the streets and stuff in public, you know, outside.
[00:05:25]  And you get this sense that these liberals are playing a game of chicken amongst themselves, that the person who keeps the mask on the longest has the most virtue, right?
[00:05:35]  And so I think in these liberal enclaves like DC or New York, that's what we're seeing transpire right now.
[00:05:41]  But it's particularly sadistic when you're talking about Todd.
[00:05:44]  Yeah.
[00:05:44]  Of course.
[00:05:45]  I mean, there's not a speck of research that indicates that that would be good for anyone.
[00:05:49]  There's tons of research and, in fact, a ton of clinical data that suggests that you may have longer-term problems with toddlers not being able to recognize like facial recognition, expressions, emotional development.
[00:06:01]  Yeah, anybody, any way to like, you know, we could be raising an entire generation that stares at each other.
[00:06:07]  Right.
[00:06:07]  Right.
[00:06:07]  I mean, it is, it's just sickening.
[00:06:10]  And I can't for the life of me understand how anyone, particularly someone who tries to think of themselves as a reasonable human being, would draw the line here.
[00:06:19]  Yeah.
[00:06:20]  I mean, I think this is a huge issue for a number of reasons.
[00:06:25]  Holmes brought up, you know, the most salient one, which is the science has shown that children are the least at-risk group.
[00:06:33]  The most at-risk group, other than comorbidities, is the elderly.
[00:06:38]  And, you know, not too long ago, you had Joe Biden in a room full of a bunch of elderly people at the State of the Union discussing about how, oh, it's good to be here without masks.
[00:06:50]  So the decision making here isn't in, you know, in any way connected to the science.
[00:06:58]  I think a lot of it might have to do with the fact that, well, toddlers can't vote.
[00:07:03]  So a lot of these dams just take it for granted on the face of that, which makes it all the more important that their voice is heard by their parents.
[00:07:11]  And I think we saw that in Virginia.
[00:07:13]  And I think we're going to see it again in this election.
[00:07:16]  I think it's more important than ever for parents because, again, like Holmes said, the damage that's being done to children, you saw a statistic that came out last week where it was what, like 15% of teenagers contemplated suicide during lockdowns.
[00:07:29]  This is having a very significant impact on the youngest people, the one who count on the adults in the room being the adults in the room and making decisions that help their future and are looking out for them.
[00:07:41]  And that, you know, you've got a mayor who will show up to parties and thinks that, you know, parents being concerned about their children's health is just politics.
[00:07:51]  Right.
[00:07:51]  Yeah, they really feel like they're they that they're untouchable, they don't care what parents have to say.
[00:07:56]  We've already seen, you know, uh, this federal government, you've got Merrick Garland who will go after parents considering they are like domestic terrorists, right?
[00:08:05]  So, I think stop for one second on your way into your celebrity-filled event to say, I hear you, I hear you.
[00:08:12]  You know, I'm following the recommendations of my health guy.
[00:08:15]  You know, we're keeping a close eye on it.
[00:08:17]  I know you don't like it.
[00:08:18]  I'm listening, you know, something not just like ha parents and masks and toddlers in masks.
[00:08:25]  I mean, look, we like to laugh and joke about absolutely everything.
[00:08:29]  It's really hard to laugh and joke about this topic.
[00:08:32]  I mean, this is one of the saddest topics that of many, many sad topics that COVID has brought us.
[00:08:38]  But what has happened to the youngest amongst us is really a tragedy in every possible way, right?
[00:08:44]  But it's also, you know, it's also indicative of this larger catch-22 of one of many catch-22s that Democrats have in their party right now is that they know they've been killed by their COVID politics, right?
[00:08:55]  They know that it's hurting the Democratic Party all over the country.
[00:08:58]  Saw what happened in Virginia.
[00:08:59]  It's, we're watching it happen, play out in generic ballots and all that.
[00:09:03]  And the Biden administration has basically pretended ever since Ukraine started, basically, that COVID no longer exists, right?
[00:09:10]  And they'd like for all of their followers to continue that sort of facade.
[00:09:15]  And what's happening is it's running up against an activist element that treats us as a religion, basically.
[00:09:22]  I mean, they're bought it full lockstock and barrel.
[00:09:26]  That's a good question.
[00:09:27]  Triple mask, you know?
[00:09:28]  Because if COVID is so problematic that we still have to keep these muzzles on two-year-olds who are literally at virtually zero risk from COVID, then why are we taking away Title 42 at the border?
[00:09:44]  Why are we now opening the border to all immigrants who want to quote seek asylum?
[00:09:50]  Sure.
[00:09:50]  Okay.
[00:09:51]  Here in the United States, because we were only doing that because COVID's no longer an emergency.
[00:09:55]  So how do you square the two?
[00:09:56]  How is it toddlers shut up and keep your faces covered, but migrants come on in?
[00:10:01]  Welcome back.
[00:10:02]  Again, it goes back to the voting issue where when you had a Democrat primary and every single candidate on stage raised their hand and said, I would let any migrant who makes it into America have health care and all the benefits that come with citizenship.
[00:10:15]  New York City is testing out letting illegal immigrants vote.
[00:10:19]  Hey, we can either have all parties, but you know, these toddlers aren't going to be voting for us.
[00:10:24]  So that's all they're concerned with is power, not what is in the best interest of the people or the kids or what's most helpful for this country.
[00:10:32]  They just want to hold on to power.
[00:10:34]  And the Democrats are not only getting rid of Title 42 at the border, they want to ask for more money in the budget to fight COVID.
[00:10:43]  How do you square that circle?
[00:10:44]  I mean, you got DHS anticipating like 18,000 border crossings a day.
[00:10:50]  And that's now with Title 42 in effect.
[00:10:54]  They need those, they need that money, Michael, to pay for the N95s that they're going to mandate on those toddlers.
[00:11:01]  Very important.
[00:11:02]  We need miniature N95s for all of the children.
[00:11:05]  I mean, you're going to shore that up.
[00:11:06]  When you come to the conclusion, if your goal as a president and as sort of the larger Democratic establishment governance across this country was to do everything wrong, like if you were like, I'm going to take the next two years and I'm going to try to make every bad decision I could possibly make just to see what would happen.
[00:11:27]  What would you change?
[00:11:29]  What would you change?
[00:11:30]  I mean, the border stuff, are you kidding me?
[00:11:32]  Now it's Title 42.
[00:11:34]  How about the Remain in Mexico policy?
[00:11:36]  We pull that day one.
[00:11:37]  It's like, oh, holy shit.
[00:11:38]  I guess the caravan was real.
[00:11:41]  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, even like Jill Biden's attempt to undo the Melania Rose Garden, I'm against it.
[00:11:50]  That's bad too.
[00:11:51]  Even her Christmas decorations, I think Milani's were better.
[00:11:53]  Not going to lie.
[00:11:54]  I don't think they have any taste.
[00:11:56]  I just don't.
[00:11:56]  Sorry.
[00:11:57]  I mean, you can say what you want about Milani Trump, that she doesn't have good taste is not one of those things.
[00:12:02]  Let's talk about Title 42 and what's happening because a lot of people don't even know what that is a reference to.
[00:12:06]  But it was a CDC directive during the Trump administration at the southern border saying, we're not really interested in your asylum claims during a pandemic.
[00:12:14]  Sorry, but take your troubles walking, bring them someplace else, ask another country.
[00:12:19]  We're dealing with a pandemic and we can't handle your problems too.
[00:12:23]  And it was left in place when Biden took over for very good reason.
[00:12:27]  And now the CDC, and it's funny because the White House is like, we got nothing to do with it.
[00:12:32]  It's not us.
[00:12:32]  It's the CDC.
[00:12:33]  It's the CDC.
[00:12:35]  We have no power over the CDC.
[00:12:37]  What would make you think that we control Rochelle Walensky?
[00:12:40]  It's crazy talk.
[00:12:42]  We already nominated her.
[00:12:43]  They're lifting it.
[00:12:44]  Right.
[00:12:44]  And by the way, it's like, oh, well, you know, I mean, obviously, so you, the White House doesn't control Rochelle Walensky, but the teachers unions do.
[00:12:50]  Okay.
[00:12:51]  I don't understand the power balance there.
[00:12:53]  So a couple of the numbers that you were just citing to put some meat on them.
[00:12:58]  This CDC directive has caused migrants to be expelled 1.7 million times since March of 2020.
[00:13:04]  The White House admitted on Wednesday of last week that they are expecting, quote, an influx of migrants, of illegal migrants, again, quote, seeking asylum, of course.
[00:13:17]  They defer to the CDC.
[00:13:18]  We defer.
[00:13:19]  We defer to the CDC on this decision.
[00:13:22]  And DHS last Tuesday said we're getting about 7,100 migrants per day, as you point out.
[00:13:29]  Jay Johnson, who was Obama's DHS secretary, National Review was reporting this, said anything over 1,000 a day, quote, overwhelms the system.
[00:13:38]  Anything over 4,000 a day is officially, quote, a crisis.
[00:13:43]  We're already getting 7,100 a day, officially in crisis.
[00:13:48]  This is before we lift Title 42.
[00:13:52]  And on top of that, Axios reports that we believe that there's 170,000 migrants now just sitting there in Mexico, waiting to immediately rush the border once this thing is lifted soon in a couple of weeks.
[00:14:11]  And also, I think it's important to remember that even before they're trying to get rid of this, the crisis at the border is happening.
[00:14:21]  It's continuing.
[00:14:21]  It's an emergency.
[00:14:23]  I was having dinner with a buddy last week, and he was telling me that something that a lot of folks probably haven't noticed is that flights out of South Texas airfare has gotten very expensive.
[00:14:35]  And the reason for that is if you're just trying to get a plane ticket, you're now competing with the United States government because they're buying commercial flights to fly migrants around the country.
[00:14:46]  So on his flight, it was about 75% migrants who are being flown across to various locations across the country.

=== Putin's Travel Vision Explained (02:44) ===

[00:14:55]  They're all given the same uniform.
[00:14:57]  You know, they basically give your like Welcome to America starter pack.
[00:15:00]  They're like, you know, we think you're going to show up to this assigned, you know, hearing a year from now, which most likely they're not going to.
[00:15:09]  They'd rather just here's your Democrat sample ballot for the next election.
[00:15:14]  And maybe you'll show up at the hearing or not.
[00:15:15]  I don't know.
[00:15:16]  Well, it's an honor system.
[00:15:17]  Right.
[00:15:19]  I mean, it really shows where their priorities are.
[00:15:21]  Yeah.
[00:15:22]  Well, the good news, look, the good news is Kamala is not on price, right?
[00:15:26]  Because nobody has more clearly articulated our vision at the border.
[00:15:31]  Yeah.
[00:15:31]  Well, that's true.
[00:15:33]  That's true.
[00:15:34]  I mean, really, truly, what she says is probably a good articulation of our vision.
[00:15:39]  If you can figure it out, I guess that's all words.
[00:15:42]  Just a lot of words that mean nothing.
[00:15:45]  She is one big air sandwich.
[00:15:48]  Oh, man.
[00:15:48]  It's incredible.
[00:15:49]  Here she's trying to hire a new speechwriter.
[00:15:52]  The good news is with her speeches, you can write the words forward or backwards and they're all the same.
[00:15:57]  That's right.
[00:15:59]  And then you just do like a copy paste and then you say it again.
[00:16:02]  Well, then you hit your word count.
[00:16:04]  Just for fun.
[00:16:05]  I mean, since you raised it, here she was asked.
[00:16:08]  Let me see what the context was.
[00:16:10]  I wrote it down so I didn't forget because it's tough to know from just listening to her.
[00:16:16]  Let's see.
[00:16:17]  Let's see.
[00:16:18]  She's, oh, yeah.
[00:16:19]  She was asked if Vladimir Putin should be removed.
[00:16:22]  And basically the answer was, I've been to Poland.
[00:16:24]  Stand by.
[00:16:25]  Listen.
[00:16:27]  He said that Vladimir Putin should no longer be the leader of Russia.
[00:16:32]  Do you agree?
[00:16:33]  Listen, I think that you frame the point quite accurately and well, which is America's policy has been and will continue to be focused on the real issue at hand, which is one, the needs of the Ukrainian people, which is why our policy from the beginning has been about ensuring that there are going to be real costs exacted against Russia in the form of severe sanctions,
[00:17:02]  which we know are having a real impact and an immediate impact, not to mention the longer-term impact, which is about saying there's going to be consequences.
[00:17:13]  And I think the president has been an extraordinary leader.
[00:17:17]  To your point, Joy, I've been to Poland.
[00:17:20]  I was in Romania.
[00:17:21]  I've been to Europe, I think, probably at least three times in the last four months.
[00:17:25]  I was in Munich.
[00:17:26]  I was in France before that, speaking with heads of state about this issue, among many other issues, but most recently about this issue.
[00:17:37]  And they all love what we're doing is basically what she said.

=== Joy's European Trip Revealed (03:00) ===

[00:17:40]  Wait, what did she say?
[00:17:42]  She was asked about Vladimir Putin and she's given us her travel idea.
[00:17:47]  She managed to get stumped by a softball question by Joy Reed.
[00:17:52]  I mean, it's time to hang up the cleats.
[00:17:56]  I mean, it really is the ultimate Billy Madison every time, right?
[00:18:00]  It's like, you remember that Billy Madison routine where he would give the speech and it's like, that's the dumbest thing.
[00:18:05]  Everyone in this room is now dumber for having heard it.
[00:18:08]  Honestly, it's like, God have mercy on your soul.
[00:18:11]  Every time she's asked to speak on any issue, it's kind of like a kid who had to do a book report, but they forgot to read the book.
[00:18:18]  So they're like looking at the back cover.
[00:18:20]  Right.
[00:18:21]  Trying to hit the word.
[00:18:22]  You get this.
[00:18:23]  You get this sense that she's sort of buying time for her to come up with an actual answer.
[00:18:27]  Yes.
[00:18:27]  But she never gets around to it.
[00:18:29]  It's just a lot of like dependent clauses and the sentence never ends.
[00:18:32]  Just like, no, I was saying on the show last week, it reminds me of a certain personality at Fox News.
[00:18:37]  I'm not going to name who it was.
[00:18:39]  I'm not even going to say if it was a man or a woman, but this person used to, this is how this person's answers used to sound every time.
[00:18:46]  You know, what do you think of that?
[00:18:48]  I think it's inappropriate.
[00:18:49]  It's wrong.
[00:18:50]  It's improper.
[00:18:51]  And there should be consequences.
[00:18:52]  There should be severe consequences for how wrong that was.
[00:18:56]  The American people need to stand up.
[00:18:57]  They need to fight injustice and things that are wrong and offensive.
[00:19:02]  And this is one of those cases.
[00:19:04]  What?
[00:19:07]  What?
[00:19:08]  It sounds like you can make it sound good.
[00:19:11]  You can make it sound like, you know what this reminds me of?
[00:19:14]  When I was in the first grade, I learned how to count to 10 in Japanese.
[00:19:20]  The first grade.
[00:19:21]  And we asked that we studied Japan.
[00:19:23]  Now you couldn't do it.
[00:19:24]  We made little kimonos and we would walk in and walk out.
[00:19:26]  We'd say, sayonara, Mrs. Peterson.
[00:19:27]  Now we'd be called cultural appropriators and so on.
[00:19:30]  But we learned how to count to 10.
[00:19:32]  And I never forgot.
[00:19:33]  Well, I don't do it well, but I still know how to do it.
[00:19:35]  And I used to do this bar trick where if you say the numbers really fast together, it sounds like you can speak Japanese.
[00:19:40]  Like, here we go.
[00:19:42]  Ichi ni sachigo.
[00:19:43]  Roku shishii haji kuju.
[00:19:46]  I am impressed.
[00:19:47]  I'm very impressed.
[00:19:49]  Thank you.
[00:19:49]  You have to say it like with conviction, you know, like you're really making a point, like you're angry or you say it with a laugh, like, hey, she needs to go.
[00:19:57]  Anyway, so I would try to, right?
[00:20:00]  She's got that like contemplative look on her face when she gives these answers, like she's really thinking about it, you know?
[00:20:06]  That's what she's doing.
[00:20:07]  She's doing my little Japanese number trick.
[00:20:10]  And I tried my trick one time in a bar with on some friends.
[00:20:14]  And one of the guys there, unbeknownst to me, speaks Japanese.
[00:20:19]  And all my friends looked at him and said, what is she saying?
[00:20:22]  And he goes, I think she's counting.
[00:20:28]  No, I'm not.
[00:20:30]  I look at Colairs.
[00:20:32]  I'm like, she's counting.
[00:20:33]  That's what she's doing.
[00:20:35]  I love that.
[00:20:36]  This is a lot of people.
[00:20:37]  I see exactly what's going on here.

=== College Loans and Inflation Crisis (11:28) ===

[00:20:40]  So back to the border.
[00:20:42]  Now, DHS, this is going to comfort you.
[00:20:44]  Okay.
[00:20:44]  You're going to feel better.
[00:20:46]  They're planning.
[00:20:47]  They are planning for this, for the influx, or as Jay Johnson, Obama's guy would say, the crisis that we're already dealing with.
[00:20:55]  They are planning for as many.
[00:20:57]  Keep in mind, 4,000 is a crisis.
[00:20:59]  We're getting over 7,000 every day right now.
[00:21:02]  And we got 170,000 people waiting on the border to rush it as soon as they lift this.
[00:21:06]  DHS is planning for as many as 18,000 arrivals daily.
[00:21:10]  They say it's not a projection, not a projection.
[00:21:12]  That's just our planning and our preparing number.
[00:21:16]  And so don't worry because we're on it.
[00:21:19]  Now, they won't say how they're on it.
[00:21:21]  I have absolutely no faith that they actually, in fact, are on it.
[00:21:25]  And I wonder, I do wonder what actually is going to happen to all these migrants.
[00:21:29]  They say there were 55,000 of them released in the United States in January alone, in January alone, because they take these folks, they don't make them show up at their asylum hearing.
[00:21:39]  And then if they get, quote, deported, they never follow up.
[00:21:42]  They don't actually like escort you back down to the Mexican border.
[00:21:45]  They're just like, now you got to go.
[00:21:46]  Bye.
[00:21:47]  Oh, man.
[00:21:49]  Well, look, part of the issue, and you put your finger on it here, if you can set aside sort of the sovereignty issues and the economic issues upon American citizens as a result of all of this, it's all super inhumane, right?
[00:22:06]  There's this sort of progressive viewpoint that somehow having open borders is better for people, is better for these people that are trying to get across.
[00:22:15]  I think by any demonstrable evidence, you can quickly ascertain that it is probably the most inhumane thing you can do to a bunch of people with absolutely no hope, then provide them this glimmer of hope and then the ability to try and reach it only to get to a border that is absolutely jam-packed without the resources necessary to even house them.
[00:22:41]  That is the most inhumane thing.
[00:22:43]  There is no compassion in that point of view.
[00:22:47]  That is cruel.
[00:22:48]  But that is what this administration's view and basically the progressive view of immigration is in this country.
[00:22:54]  I mean, that's a really interesting point.
[00:22:56]  It seems kind of like an inherent fiber of modern progressivism is this masquerading chaos as compassion, where a fine example is like in San Francisco, where they're like, well, you can have basically an open air drug market.
[00:23:11]  You can let people do whatever they want if they want to steal from a store, whatever.
[00:23:16]  But you have to understand, you know, the reason these people are breaking into a jewelry store is because they have to feed their family.
[00:23:22]  Like their family only eats diamonds.
[00:23:24]  It makes no sense.
[00:23:25]  It has nothing to do with compassion of giving these people a glimmer of hope of wherever and enabling an entire market of human traffickers.
[00:23:35]  Right.
[00:23:35]  Yeah.
[00:23:36]  Like, that's right.
[00:23:37]  They're essentially, they're building a pipeline for human trafficking by having this kind of a policy.
[00:23:42]  Yeah.
[00:23:43]  And by the way, politically, how stupid is this?
[00:23:47]  I mean, this is like your bread and butter.
[00:23:49]  This used to be your full-time business.
[00:23:51]  How stupid is this?
[00:23:53]  You look at the polls.
[00:23:54]  There was one, I think it was last week.
[00:23:56]  It was a Harris poll saying of nearly 2,000 registered voters.
[00:24:00]  Most important issues facing the country.
[00:24:02]  Number one, inflation, clear winner, 32%.
[00:24:05]  Number two, the economy.
[00:24:07]  It's kind of the same thing, 27%.
[00:24:09]  And number three, the very next most important issue after inflation/slash economy is immigration, 21%.
[00:24:15]  They care about immigration.
[00:24:18]  And by the way, I think it was an NBC new poll, a new NBC News poll showed the GOP has a seven-point advantage over the Dems already on who's better suited to handle immigration and the problem at the border.
[00:24:31]  So where's the sense in this politically?
[00:24:34]  Well, I mean, I was just going to say the political acumen in this administration.
[00:24:38]  Wow.
[00:24:39]  Wow.
[00:24:40]  Right.
[00:24:40]  I mean, like you said, number one issue, inflation, 7.7% inflation on top of everyone's mind.
[00:24:46]  What's the solution?
[00:24:48]  You read Monday morning, well, we're going to try to reconstitute BBB.
[00:24:52]  We still have to try to figure out how to spend $5 trillion, right?
[00:24:55]  Yeah.
[00:24:56]  And then immigration, right?
[00:24:57]  You're concerned about immigration, the crisis at the border.
[00:24:59]  Oh, I know.
[00:24:59]  I got a perfect idea, guys.
[00:25:00]  Let's just open it up and create complete chaos.
[00:25:03]  So whatever concern you had up to this point will be magnified times 10 before the election.
[00:25:07]  Each and every issue, literally every single thing that you, that comes across this president's plate, the path that they choose is political disaster.
[00:25:18]  Thank goodness, because the actual policies that they are disastrous, right?
[00:25:22]  I mean, thank goodness that there is recourse with elections on this situation.
[00:25:26]  And I think, especially the timing, and I think that's something to hammer on is that, you know, a week from today, taxes are due.
[00:25:32]  Americans are having to pay their share of their paycheck to this government.
[00:25:37]  And this same government is basically allowing people to become citizens for free.
[00:25:43]  No responsibility, no accountability.
[00:25:46]  You know, if you're lucky enough to be able to, at this point, become lucky to be able to make it by.
[00:25:52]  I think it was something like, what, 40% of Americans are saying that inflation is outpacing their ability to afford their living expenses.
[00:26:00]  Well, yeah, it's like everything, like you were saying earlier, Holmes, everything that they do, their solution to these crises that they create is to double down and make the crisis worse.
[00:26:11]  For example, like, you know, with the inflation and gas prices, you know, they're saying in California, like, oh, we'll just give everyone gas cards.
[00:26:18]  And it's like, how do you think inflation works?
[00:26:21]  You know, like, let's not drill more in the United States.
[00:26:24]  No, we'll give everyone gas cards with the taxpayer money.
[00:26:27]  That's also their money.
[00:26:28]  And then the gas will be cheaper for them because it'll be free.
[00:26:31]  Excellent.
[00:26:32]  Everything's free.
[00:26:33]  Well, that's what AOC was saying.
[00:26:34]  I mean, not that anybody cares what she has to say in response to anything, but that was her push in response to these polling numbers and inflation and so on.
[00:26:41]  She was like, you know, if we could just like stick to the agenda, get BBB passed, push this stuff through and get rid of college debt for all, you know, college students.
[00:26:49]  You know, she's back up.
[00:26:50]  She's a one-trick pony.
[00:26:51]  Everything should be free.
[00:26:52]  We should go back to our socialist roots.
[00:26:54]  And then the Democrats won't be facing a bloodbath in November.
[00:26:57]  And all these numbers will turn around.
[00:26:59]  Free college for everyone.
[00:27:00]  Didn't you guys have somebody pay for your college?
[00:27:03]  I mean, it's just such a stunning.
[00:27:05]  I mean, I know you're super hot on this one, Smug.
[00:27:08]  Oh, I mean, especially because I remember going to state school, which was inside my budget.
[00:27:14]  I remember being a bouncer at a college dive bar.
[00:27:18]  And bouncers are the guys who have to clean the bathrooms.
[00:27:20]  And that sucks at the end of the day.
[00:27:21]  Which was news to us.
[00:27:22]  We didn't know that until Smug like that.
[00:27:24]  I don't think that's true, Smug.
[00:27:26]  I feel like somebody took advantage of, you know, at the East Village.
[00:27:31]  Terrible dive bar.
[00:27:32]  It was actually a good dive bar.
[00:27:33]  It was a decent dive bar.
[00:27:34]  I ran a tight door.
[00:27:36]  An unsuspecting smug was in with a plunger three times a week.
[00:27:40]  But I mean, everyone else in this country has always figured out a way to budget for their education.
[00:27:47]  And then, again, it's progressivism masquerading as this is compassion.
[00:27:52]  No, it's not.
[00:27:53]  It's a handout to the wealthiest liberal coastal.
[00:27:56]  It's like the liberal coastal elites embodied.
[00:27:58]  It's the people who have taken out massive loans from universities.
[00:28:04]  And the majority of those people, they're not working class Americans.
[00:28:07]  The size of these loans is, okay, if you go to Columbia and you want to major in like underwater basket weaving and pay $100,000 a year for it, I mean, you have to be responsible for that decision.
[00:28:19]  That's not on everyone else's back who decided that, you know, I'm going to earn a living and I'm going to try to stay within my means on top of inflation going up to 7.5% a year.
[00:28:29]  It's completely absurd.
[00:28:30]  It's completely absurd.
[00:28:31]  And it's a handout both ways.
[00:28:32]  It's a handout to their liberal base of these coastal elites.
[00:28:36]  Like you look at Elizabeth Warren's replies, it's all like, oh, yeah, Senator, I'm in Massachusetts and I support you.
[00:28:40]  I don't want to pay for my daughter's tuition.
[00:28:42]  It's like overeducated wine moms.
[00:28:44]  And then who's the money going to?
[00:28:45]  It's the university system, which is building, you know, a generation of their progressive troops.
[00:28:50]  Yeah.
[00:28:51]  Universities with multi-billion dollar endowments, right?
[00:28:54]  Yeah, I see taxes.
[00:28:56]  It's just a handout.
[00:28:58]  It's basically just a complete, you know, cash funnel to their base.
[00:29:02]  That's all this is.
[00:29:03]  And wouldn't it be great if you could do something with a degree?
[00:29:06]  I mean, it would really be really excellent if some of these schools sat around and thought about, I don't know, maybe like something to do with the semiconductor industry or like artificial intelligence, you know, something that has applicability in today's world.
[00:29:20]  Oh, like women's studies is going to get anyone anywhere.
[00:29:24]  And that's like, you know, I think about it in my own life.
[00:29:27]  My audience knows that my dad died suddenly when I was 15 of a heart attack.
[00:29:32]  And my mom already had two kids in college at that point.
[00:29:35]  My brother and sister are older than I am.
[00:29:36]  They're in college.
[00:29:37]  She's trying to, you know, she, he was only 45.
[00:29:40]  We were not in, we weren't rich to begin with.
[00:29:42]  So it's not like he had some big fat life insurance policy.
[00:29:45]  He had like the bare minimum you have when you're in your 40s and you're a professor, which is what he was.
[00:29:51]  Anyway, what did she do?
[00:29:53]  She used the entirety of that payment to pay for the rest, what she could of my brothers and sisters college and my college education.
[00:30:01]  And all three of us had to take out loans on top of it, of course.
[00:30:05]  So like, do I think now that, you know, I would have been better off if the federal government had stepped in?
[00:30:11]  Look, it would have been nice, but that's that, I don't think the neighbor should have to pay for my college education.
[00:30:17]  You know, my mom made a sacrifice.
[00:30:19]  She could have been living off of that money.
[00:30:21]  Suddenly she didn't have a, you know, two income home, but she used it to help her children.
[00:30:26]  Like that's what parents do.
[00:30:27]  They scrimp and they save and they do what's necessary to pay for things like education.
[00:30:31]  And we took out loans too.
[00:30:32]  And then we paid those loans back.
[00:30:35]  Why should these snot-nosed kids today?
[00:30:38]  I'm sorry.
[00:30:39]  The ones who really need it, they can get loans, right?
[00:30:42]  But like, like you point out, a lot of these people are going to be these sort of college Columbia elite graduates who are going to spend their years in journalism trying to shame half of America for doing absolutely nothing wrong.
[00:30:53]  Why should I be paying for their college education?
[00:30:55]  I don't want to.
[00:30:57]  Totally.
[00:30:58]  But there's another element to this too, that I think actually has huge consequences, which is if you're guaranteeing a loan, I don't know how you structure a full bailout of anybody who went to college.
[00:31:09]  Certainly you can't do it retroactively.
[00:31:11]  But if it's still in a loan, you're not changing the price of the school.
[00:31:15]  You're not changing what it costs.
[00:31:18]  That curve has gone up by enormous amount over the years.
[00:31:24]  And if you think about the American taxpayer guaranteeing those loans and actually being on the hook for all of those loans, what happens when you have the first significant economic downturn that we've had since 08?
[00:31:36]  And all of those recent college graduates can't find jobs.
[00:31:40]  They can't pay anything on those loans, right?
[00:31:43]  And all of a sudden, you can see a way where it makes like a subprime housing market look like a modern drop on a you know 10 points in a stock market, right?
[00:31:54]  Because that huge McMansion you can't afford when you get the ninja loan is the equivalent of the underwater basket weaving degree that you can get because it's going to be financed by the federal government.
[00:32:06]  You've not changed the incentives at all.
[00:32:08]  No, no.

=== Trans Trump Campaign Watch (08:51) ===

[00:32:09]  And I mean, I think it's a really interesting situation to go a little further on this.
[00:32:13]  I was reading these reports on who in finance, when a lot of bankers are reaching out to manage retirement portfolios and just brokerage accounts for folks, they're now being told, you know, start going through the phone book, look for folks who own an HVAC business, look for folks who own a plumbing business because these people are actually making money.
[00:32:34]  They've got a skill and a trade.
[00:32:37]  They're doing great right now because they have something that society actually has a usefulness.
[00:32:42]  And it doesn't go away.
[00:32:43]  And it's highly in demand.
[00:32:44]  Highly in demand.
[00:32:45]  Well, listen, we know it's a really good job if you can get it.
[00:32:48]  It doesn't pay that well, but it's pretty good.
[00:32:51]  Vice president.
[00:32:52]  And you may recall that when Barack Obama was president, he had a vice president.
[00:32:57]  His name was Joe Biden.
[00:32:59]  He's now president.
[00:33:00]  And talking about his term during the Obama administration, he now appears to believe that his wife had that job, not him.
[00:33:11]  We're going to play that for you right after the break.
[00:33:13]  And then we'll talk about the media gaslighting America on the alleged missing phone logs in the Trump White House on January 6th.
[00:33:21]  Yet another media lie with a host of root lists, which you must be downloading and watching and listening to as a podcast immediately if you're not already.
[00:33:29]  That's next.
[00:33:30]  Don't go away.
[00:33:54]  I mean, it's like another day, another gap.
[00:33:58]  And this one from President Biden seeming to forget that he was Obama's vice president.
[00:34:04]  He, he was, not his wife.
[00:34:06]  Here it is.
[00:34:08]  And I'm deeply proud of the work she's doing as first lady with Joining Forces Initiative.
[00:34:14]  She started with Michelle Obama when she was vice president and now carries on.
[00:34:20]  Oh, Jesus.
[00:34:24]  But the White House, they tried to fix it with the, you know, like the corrective brackets in like the transcript.
[00:34:33]  You know how you do the corrective bracket?
[00:34:35]  Yeah.
[00:34:35]  And instead of like, now that it says, she started with Michelle Obama, who when she and they struck out she and they put in the bracketed, I, I was vice president.
[00:34:50]  Can you imagine how busy the corrective bracket guy is over at Colin?
[00:34:55]  I mean, think of that.
[00:34:57]  You know, it's charging by the bracket.
[00:35:00]  I mean, he'd be a millionaire by week's end.
[00:35:03]  It's just like he's busier in a one-armed paper hanger over there.
[00:35:06]  What's interesting about this guy's job is usually, you know, every administration runs in this at some point with a transcript or something where something was said incorrectly.
[00:35:14]  Usually the stakes are pretty high in that moment.
[00:35:17]  It seems like Joe Biden can't open his mouth without the bracket guy having to come in on it.
[00:35:22]  And it's like these situations are hilarious, right?
[00:35:25]  When we're talking about the first lady and it's just boilerplate stuff, but it gets a little scary when he's over there in Europe and he's, you know, all suggesting regime change, regime change that we would respond to chemical weapons used by Putin in kind, as in we would do it as well.
[00:35:42]  And then talking to these troops about you'll see when you get there, as if we're going to put boots on the ground in Ukraine.
[00:35:47]  And then all of that has to be walked back by the administration.
[00:35:50]  And then Peter Doocy, bless his heart, has to ask Biden to his face, hey, do you think this is a problem?
[00:35:55]  He's like, none of that happened.
[00:35:57]  That was my favorite book.
[00:35:59]  Which he sounded pretty sincere about, frankly.
[00:36:02]  I don't think he remembers.
[00:36:03]  That's the thing is he should phrase it correctly and say, I don't remember that happening.
[00:36:07]  And people are like, all right, well, finally he's being honest.
[00:36:10]  You're exactly right.
[00:36:11]  And you know, one of the things we didn't spend much time on was when he called for clearly he called for a regime change.
[00:36:17]  Like, and it was, then they said it was a gaffe, it was a gaff.
[00:36:19]  And then he was like, no, I stand by it.
[00:36:21]  It was just my personal opinion.
[00:36:22]  I was speaking for my personal opinion.
[00:36:24]  Not, it was like, dude, you're the president.
[00:36:26]  There's no line there.
[00:36:27]  Like, you don't get to draw that line anymore.
[00:36:30]  But we didn't spend any, because like to me, I actually think he believes it.
[00:36:33]  I think he, he's one of those people who thinks if we could just get rid of Vladimir Putin, this whole mess would go away.
[00:36:38]  As if I really think he and other Democrats believe that like Jed Bartlett is going to be the next president of Russia.
[00:36:46]  You know, they're going to get some like liberal hero to take over.
[00:36:50]  Like, do you know anything about Russia?
[00:36:52]  And it's like, it's history.
[00:36:53]  You're probably not going to like the next guy that much better.
[00:36:57]  Well, I mean, look, you know, by listening to our show, we think that everything in Democratic politics is viewed through the prism of the West Wing.
[00:37:05]  Yeah.
[00:37:05]  Right.
[00:37:05]  That's right.
[00:37:06]  Like literally every single decision that they make, however small or however big, is viewed through the prism of like Josh Lyman and President Bartlett discussing very important, serious things and then coming to the conclusion that we've unified the world.
[00:37:23]  We just get everybody in the room and a speech is made by the president and everybody is stirred to action and they change their minds and they're like, yep, we're doing it.
[00:37:30]  Yes.
[00:37:31]  As if that's the way it works.
[00:37:32]  Or to your point, Megan, like that there's going to be some coup or something in Russia.
[00:37:37]  And then that general is going to call the oval and be like, sir, I'd like to enter NATO.
[00:37:43]  You know, it's like, that's not the way politics works in the real world.
[00:37:48]  It's not.
[00:37:49]  And this one's particularly, you've got like, you don't, this guy doesn't have anywhere near Jeb Bartlett's oratory skills, right?
[00:37:57]  Like instead, you've got like corn pop.
[00:38:00]  That's what, that's what our comedian on Friday was doing.
[00:38:04]  That's perfect.
[00:38:06]  Well, I mean, was it week before last where he would, do you see him trying to talk about the first lady and the second gentleman?
[00:38:14]  And he got them all crosswise.
[00:38:17]  And by the end of it, I think he had diagnosed two of them with COVID.
[00:38:20]  I mean, it was like this just mess, absolute mess that the bracket guy must have been having a heart attack.
[00:38:28]  Poor bracket.
[00:38:29]  The bracket guy really.
[00:38:30]  Oh, we do.
[00:38:31]  We have a sad of Dunnegan doing Biden.
[00:38:33]  Oh, we need to see that.
[00:38:33]  Oh, so Kyle Dunnegan was on our show.
[00:38:35]  He's a comedian.
[00:38:36]  He's amazing.
[00:38:36]  He's got his own YouTube and he's spectacular.
[00:38:39]  He tried out for SNL and he totally choked.
[00:38:42]  He couldn't do it live.
[00:38:43]  Like he was not good live.
[00:38:44]  So they did not cast him.
[00:38:45]  But he's great in an interview setting and he does stand up.
[00:38:49]  He just couldn't do it in front of Lauren Michaels.
[00:38:51]  But here he is.
[00:38:51]  He does this weird face swap thing where he makes his face look like the person.
[00:38:55]  Here's a little bit of his Joe Biden watch.
[00:39:00]  Vladimir Pukin is not Pukin.
[00:39:04]  The guy, the guy without the shirt, man, he's a bad dude.
[00:39:09]  He's a liar, man.
[00:39:11]  Not to be trusted.
[00:39:13]  So I don't believe a word that guy says.
[00:39:16]  He's like, he's like corn pop.
[00:39:19]  Some guys in the world, man, you just can't.
[00:39:25]  Can't trust him, man.
[00:39:27]  Hey, hey, did you, did you share my pants or did I?
[00:39:31]  Mr. President, what happened when you seemed to call for regime change earlier this week, something that is not U.S. policy and actually could place other world leaders, including men like yourself, in danger.
[00:39:44]  Why'd you do that?
[00:39:45]  Huh?
[00:39:49]  What did I do?
[00:39:50]  You said it.
[00:39:51]  You said it, pal.
[00:39:53]  I didn't say nothing about that.
[00:39:59]  So that is so accurate.
[00:40:00]  So good.
[00:40:01]  If anything, I might give him a little bit too much credit.
[00:40:05]  I mean, forming those sentences is a bit more than the real deal.
[00:40:08]  I mean, that's the only talent.
[00:40:10]  You said it.
[00:40:11]  You said it.
[00:40:12]  Wait, can we go before we be before we move on to our next topic?
[00:40:15]  I've got to show you his impression of Trump.
[00:40:17]  He called up trans Trump.
[00:40:19]  It's Trump as if he were trans and running for office.
[00:40:22]  You must see this watch.
[00:40:26]  Just it's trans Trump to do a new campaign.
[00:40:30]  Okay.
[00:40:30]  Trans Trump.
[00:40:32]  So stunning.
[00:40:33]  So terrific.
[00:40:34]  Trans Trump.
[00:40:38]  Look, you got to vote for me.
[00:40:39]  You got no choice.
[00:40:40]  You got to do it.
[00:40:42]  You got to do it.
[00:40:43]  Look like Leah Thomas, the greatest swimmer of all time.
[00:40:48]  I will be leaving all those fat losers in my wake.
[00:40:52]  Trans Trump.
[00:40:54]  That is amazing.
[00:40:56]  Incredible.
[00:40:57]  The hands are really good.
[00:40:58]  You know, he does a really good demonstrable.

=== Russian Calls and Media Bias (05:35) ===

[00:41:01]  He's got it all.
[00:41:02]  All the hand movements.
[00:41:03]  And he did something that not everybody who imitates Trump remembers to do the breathing in through the teeth.
[00:41:11]  That's good.
[00:41:11]  I hadn't noticed anybody calling attention to that before.
[00:41:13]  Okay, I've got to get to the media gaslighting on the missing phone logs from January 6th.
[00:41:19]  Dun, dunk, dun.
[00:41:21]  Washington Post, Bob Costa, Bob Woodward write a piece.
[00:41:26]  They're not giving us all the documents that the White House owes us.
[00:41:30]  There's a several hour gap in Trump's phone logs, which they're withholding from us.
[00:41:38]  And what's in the phone logs?
[00:41:40]  Well, of course, it turns out to be a complete BS story.
[00:41:45]  I'm trying to find the way they described it because they did it.
[00:41:47]  Oh, seven hours and 37 minutes.
[00:41:50]  There's a gap, they said.
[00:41:52]  It's 457 minutes from 11, 17 a.m. to 6.54 p.m.
[00:42:00]  The committee now has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol.
[00:42:04]  And you've got every favorite in the liberal cabal on Twitter tweeting out, Dan Rather, a gap in phone logs.
[00:42:12]  I can't remember.
[00:42:13]  Was anything happening on that day that Donald Trump might have been talking with people about?
[00:42:17]  Got HuffPost politics.
[00:42:19]  A gap in official records raises the possibility that Donald Trump was using burner phones.
[00:42:24]  Susan Glasser puts Nixon's 18-minute gap to shame.
[00:42:28]  Lots of references to Watergate, except it turns out it was all wrong because the follow-up reporting, credit to CNN, they reported this, reflects this was totally consistent with Trump's typical phone habits if you look at every single day of his presidency.
[00:42:45]  He apparently placed calls through the switchboard, which is all the January 6th committee got, only when he was in residence, but rarely when he was in the Oval Office.
[00:42:54]  And that explains the fact that the log does not show the calls while he was sitting in the Oval Office because he typically just while there used had staff place calls directly for him on landlines.
[00:43:04]  That's okay.
[00:43:04]  Or on cell phones.
[00:43:05]  And those would not be noted on the log.
[00:43:07]  So yet another fake story.
[00:43:09]  What do you make of it?
[00:43:10]  It was even framed fake, right?
[00:43:12]  because the actual framing of it didn't have a specific specificity in terms of the switchboard.
[00:43:20]  It basically just said all calls.
[00:43:21]  Like they were supposed to have access to all calls.
[00:43:24]  Well, that of course is not the case.
[00:43:26]  And we learned from subsequent reporting by CNN.
[00:43:28]  I think the biggest thing is, doesn't this remind you of RussiaGate?
[00:43:31]  I mean, it just, it reminds you of what we've experienced over the last five years.
[00:43:35]  Every time Adam Schiff's staff came up with some absolutely incredible allegation.
[00:43:41]  They ran directly to the Washington Post or New York Times.
[00:43:44]  They wrote this just splashy front page stories alleging all kinds of nefarious behavior.
[00:43:49]  And then you find out like a month later, it's complete bullshit.
[00:43:52]  Right.
[00:43:52]  And it's sort of an easy allegation to make to say like something is being withheld.
[00:43:57]  We need the, we need the super transcript with no redactions.
[00:44:01]  You know, I mean, that's always like sort of a tell in all of Russia Gate was at least that, you know, they couldn't, they couldn't actually find any of the things that they were accusing Donald Trump of.
[00:44:12]  So there was always something just beyond their reach.
[00:44:15]  And that was the thing that was going to prove it.
[00:44:18]  Right.
[00:44:18]  And that's sort of a tactic they've used with everything, I think.
[00:44:21]  And now on the Hunter, on the on the Hunter laptop, it's exactly the opposite, right?
[00:44:24]  That nobody went with that story.
[00:44:26]  And now the Washington Post editorial board comes out and says, look, the reason we didn't do it is because I want to get this.
[00:44:34]  The media had been unwitting tools of a Russian influence campaign in 2016.
[00:44:39]  It was only prudent to suspect a similar plot.
[00:44:42]  The lesson learned from 2016 was evidently to err on the side of setting aside questionable material in the heat of a political campaign.
[00:44:50]  Sure, I'm sure you would have set it aside if you thought it hurt Trump too.
[00:44:57]  They were the media campaign.
[00:44:59]  Like, that's the funniest thing about that is that they still can't figure out.
[00:45:02]  It's not that they were victims of anything.
[00:45:04]  They were the Russian media campaign.
[00:45:06]  Right.
[00:45:07]  Like they're the ones that carried the water on the whole deal.
[00:45:10]  It's like, what's the hot dog meme?
[00:45:12]  Yeah.
[00:45:13]  We're trying to figure out who did this.
[00:45:15]  It's like all of Russia gate was fed through you through surrogates of Hillary Clinton, who paid for the dossier and, you know, came up with these, you know, the abuses of the FISA court system and all of it.
[00:45:24]  And you were willing participants in all that.
[00:45:26]  But then suddenly you get some sort of conscience about the whole thing when it, you know, it's October of an election year and maybe this hurts Joe Biden.
[00:45:35]  I saw you, Duncan, I saw you saying out there about Leslie Stahl, right?
[00:45:39]  Remember her?
[00:45:39]  Like, it can't be verified.
[00:45:41]  Can't be verified.
[00:45:42]  It's history repeating itself because you've got a situation where the January 6th committee is leaking and clearly they don't have anything strong to roll with.
[00:45:52]  So they're trying to just feed their media allies these salacious fake news stories to get some kind of attention going, to get imprinted into the public's mind that, oh, Trump must have done something wrong.
[00:46:05]  The same way they spent four years on this fake media campaign about Russia that we now all know was completely phony made up garbage that launched how many careers, how many cable news contributorships, how many book deals?
[00:46:19]  Because they don't actually think that they can win on the law.
[00:46:21]  They just want to win in the court of public opinion.
[00:46:23]  And that's why there's no accountability in journalism is because it's too, you know, the racket pays too well to push fake news.
[00:46:30]  How many, how many, I mean, like the number of these Trump Russia conspiracy books that came out is insane.

=== FOIA Requests Exposed (16:02) ===

[00:46:36]  The number of people who launched careers.
[00:46:39]  Here's the good news.
[00:46:40]  We can end it on a positive note.
[00:46:42]  Unlike six, seven years ago, the American public is caught on.
[00:46:47]  They know the media is biased.
[00:46:48]  And so the media's power, like these stupid leaks, they do nothing now because the entities to whom they leak have lost all credibility.
[00:46:55]  No one cares anymore.
[00:46:57]  Like who gives a damn that the Washington Post is finally caught up to the New York Post reporting?
[00:47:02]  It's too late.
[00:47:03]  You've already lost your credibility.
[00:47:05]  The liberals don't care anyway, by the way.
[00:47:07]  So WAPO thinks it's like sustaining its credibility, but like we're on record with the truth.
[00:47:11]  Liberals don't care.
[00:47:13]  And they don't care about the Fauci reporting either.
[00:47:16]  And now we're at a point where they've been defanked.
[00:47:19]  The media's been defanked because of their own behavior.
[00:47:21]  All right, I got to leave it at that.
[00:47:22]  Guys, love, love, love the Ruthless Podcast.
[00:47:25]  If you are smart, you will go subscribe right now and don't miss a single episode.
[00:47:30]  Thanks for being here.
[00:47:31]  We'll be ready.
[00:47:37]  My financial disclosures are public knowledge.
[00:47:41]  and have been so.
[00:47:42]  You are getting amazingly wrong information.
[00:47:46]  So lie by Anthony Fauci because they're not.
[00:47:51]  And up next, we will have a guest, Adam Anjievsky, who has been working night and day to get information on Fauci's salary and how much he's made during the pandemic and other information.
[00:48:01]  Why is our federal government fighting him?
[00:48:05]  That's next.
[00:48:11]  Our next guest is Adam Anjievsky, founder and CEO of the national transparency organization, openthebooks.com.
[00:48:19]  Up until recently, Adam was also a Forbes contributor who reported on, among other things, Dr. Fauci and his finances, including on the fact that Fauci is the highest paid federal employee, a fact we know thanks to Adam.
[00:48:31]  That is, until the backlash came and Adam was no longer associated with Forbes because of the Fauci reporting.
[00:48:39]  Adam, great to have you here.
[00:48:40]  Thanks for being here.
[00:48:42]  Megan, thank you for having me on.
[00:48:44]  Great to be on the program.
[00:48:45]  So you've been working, it's not just Fauci, you've been working for years to try to hold our public officials to account and to expose more information about the money that we as taxpayers spend and where exactly it's going when it comes to our federal workers.
[00:49:00]  Absolutely, Megan.
[00:49:02]  So back in 2011, I founded the watchdog organization, openthebooks.com.
[00:49:07]  Here's our mission.
[00:49:09]  It's to capture and post online every dime taxed and spent at every level of government across the entire country.
[00:49:16]  We simply summarize our mission as every dime online in real time.
[00:49:20]  And last year, to that end, we filed 47,000 Freedom of Information Act requests.
[00:49:27]  It was the most in American history.
[00:49:29]  And we successfully captured $12 trillion worth of federal, state, and local spending.
[00:49:35]  And we posted all for free on our website at openthebooks.com.
[00:49:40]  Yeah.
[00:49:40]  So you're not picking on Fauci.
[00:49:42]  You're a guy who wants to know where every tax dollar is going and whether we're putting it to good use, or at least you give us the information so the taxpayers can make that decision.
[00:49:51]  So along comes Dr. Fauci and he testifies in what became a viral exchange before the Senate.
[00:50:00]  And there is a senator, a Republican from Kansas named Roger Marshall, Senator Roger Marshall, who starts questioning Fauci about his money, his investments, and so on.
[00:50:12]  And he's trying to get at exactly how much money Fauci's been making as this long-term, almost 50-year bureaucrat.
[00:50:19]  And Fauci, instead of just disclosing it, because he works for us, gets very defensive and winds up calling the senator a name that was caught on an open mic.
[00:50:29]  Here's that exchange in part.
[00:50:32]  My financial disclosures are public knowledge and have been so.
[00:50:38]  You are getting amazingly wrong information.
[00:50:41]  So I cannot find them.
[00:50:43]  Our office cannot find them.
[00:50:45]  Where would they be if they're public knowledge?
[00:50:47]  Where?
[00:50:47]  It is totally accessible to you if you want it.
[00:50:51]  For the public.
[00:50:51]  Is it accessible to the public?
[00:50:53]  To the public.
[00:50:54]  Great.
[00:50:54]  We look forward totally incorrect.
[00:50:57]  We look forward to reviewing it.
[00:50:58]  Senator Marshall, Dr. Fauci has answered you.
[00:51:01]  It is public information, and he's happy to give it to you if you would ask.
[00:51:05]  Senator Moran.
[00:51:07]  What a moron.
[00:51:09]  What a what a moron Fauci says about the center.
[00:51:11]  And it turns out that neither, you know, the woman at the end nor Dr. Fauci were correct.
[00:51:17]  It's not you, you, you tell us it's not public.
[00:51:22]  It's not just there ready for the rest of us to grab and see.
[00:51:25]  And one of your questions is, why not?
[00:51:29]  Exactly.
[00:51:30]  Well, you can't be America's top doctor if you're misleading the American people in a Senate hearing when you're under oath.
[00:51:38]  So look, for 14 months before that exchange, and Senator Marshall knew about this, our organization had openedthebooks.com.
[00:51:46]  We had filed Freedom of Information Act requests on Fauci's finances to open the books.
[00:51:52]  And we filed that with his employer, the National Institutes of Health.
[00:51:56]  They produced virtually nothing on the Fauci financials.
[00:52:00]  So 10 months later, with Judicial Watch as our lawyers, we sued NIH in federal court to open the books on the Fauci financials.
[00:52:08]  Then the U.S. Senator Roger Marshall cited Forbes, my column, and demanded that Fauci open the books on his finances.
[00:52:17]  And Fauci misled the American people.
[00:52:20]  He said that his finances were public knowledge.
[00:52:22]  When I called him out on it in my column at Forbes to have NIH post online the Fauci financials, that according to our lawsuit, there's 1,200 pages that NIH admits to.
[00:52:36]  That's when NIH came down hard on Forbes.
[00:52:39]  Forbes came down hard on me.
[00:52:42]  I told the truth.
[00:52:43]  Forbes pulled the plug.
[00:52:45]  It's crazy.
[00:52:46]  Next thing you know, you're out of a job.
[00:52:48]  And it's when you look at the editor's note to you, it's very clear they were most unhappy that they were getting blowback from the NIH and with your column, though.
[00:52:57]  And you know, me, I, I was like, did he screw it up?
[00:52:59]  Let's get to the bottom of it.
[00:53:00]  Maybe Forbes had a right to get rid of him.
[00:53:02]  This is a nothing.
[00:53:04]  What they're picking on you for and the minor sort of thing that they're coming at, it's a nothing in any other newsroom.
[00:53:11]  Like you changed one word in response to the NIH report.
[00:53:14]  We can get to what that was about.
[00:53:15]  But it was a nothing burger.
[00:53:17]  They used this as an excuse clearly because it seems they didn't like you focusing on Fauci.
[00:53:24]  So here's what we've come to realize, Megan.
[00:53:27]  Fauci is unrevealable by his employer, the National Institutes of Health.
[00:53:32]  He's untouchable and he's protected by the United States federal government.
[00:53:37]  So, you know, we unearthed the memo.
[00:53:39]  It was back in 2004 that is evidence of all of this.
[00:53:44]  And it's a memo that spells out a permanent pay adjustment.
[00:53:47]  It's why Fauci's the top paid federal employee out earning the president, four-star generals in the United States military, and all 4.3 million of his colleagues.
[00:53:56]  This memo gave what's considered a permanent bonus, a permanent pay adjustment to Dr. Fauci, expressly because of his work on biodefense.
[00:54:06]  Megan, in other words, Fauci was paid to stop the next pandemic through research, through defense, and obviously the pandemic happened, and so through his response.
[00:54:18]  And so all of this needs to be debated as to whether Fauci actually failed on all three points.
[00:54:26]  Right.
[00:54:26]  We're entitled to know.
[00:54:27]  I mean, it's like, it's like somebody who works for me and my team saying, oh, you forgot what you pay me.
[00:54:32]  Well, I'm not telling you.
[00:54:33]  But guess what?
[00:54:35]  I'm entitled to that information.
[00:54:37]  I'm Fauci's boss.
[00:54:38]  So are you.
[00:54:39]  So are all of our listeners.
[00:54:40]  So we get to know what we're paying him.
[00:54:42]  You did find that out.
[00:54:44]  Can you just, let's just start with, because you say he's the highest paid federal employee, more than the, I mean, you sound on a tweet or something that really brought it home.
[00:54:50]  You're like, how does Fauci, who works for a sub-agency of a sub-agency, make more than the head of the entire agency?
[00:54:57]  Never mind the president above him.
[00:54:58]  He makes more than his boss's boss, his boss's boss's boss, all of them.
[00:55:03]  So give us some of the numbers.
[00:55:05]  Yeah, he makes about two and a half times what the Secretary of Health and Human Services makes, and that's a cabinet-level position, Megan.
[00:55:12]  Okay, so here's what the record shows: here are the facts on the Fauci household compensation.
[00:55:18]  Number one, Dr. Fauci outearns the president and makes in 2021 $456,000 a year.
[00:55:26]  Number two, Mrs. Fauci, Christine Grady, many people don't know, she's actually the chief bioethicist at Fauci's employer, the National Institutes of Health.
[00:55:37]  And Mrs. Gray and Christine Grady outearns the vice president of the United States at $236,000 per year.
[00:55:47]  Here's the third thing we found.
[00:55:49]  We estimated that when Dr. Fauci retires, he'll retire on the largest golden parachute retirement pension ever in U.S. federal government history.
[00:55:58]  In his first year, he'll retire on $355,000 a year.
[00:56:03]  Now, here's the point.
[00:56:05]  Everything that I just talked about, we received none of it from Fauci's employer over at the National Institutes of Health.
[00:56:12]  We had to file Freedom of Information Act requests with other federal agencies just to get how much Dr. Fauci and his wife make.
[00:56:21]  If it was up to NIH, we wouldn't even know how much he makes.
[00:56:27]  And it's so crazy to see him get so indignant in response to the questions from the senator saying, Give me the information.
[00:56:34]  Him being like, it's public information.
[00:56:35]  You don't know what you're talking.
[00:56:37]  It's the same exact thing he did to Rand Paul.
[00:56:39]  I mean, identical, just obfuscation, indignation, but no information, at least none that's correct.
[00:56:46]  That's a fair characterization.
[00:56:48]  This is what we didn't know.
[00:56:49]  At the time of that hearing, this is what we didn't know.
[00:56:52]  We didn't have his ethics and financial disclosures on an unredacted, non-redacted, non-blanked out basis from 2019 and 2020.
[00:57:02]  And it was federal fiscal year 2022.
[00:57:06]  We didn't know his stock and bond trades during the pandemic or currently.
[00:57:11]  We didn't have a copy of his job description, just a basic public document.
[00:57:16]  We didn't have copies of his contract with all amendments, additions, and modifications.
[00:57:22]  We don't know if he has a hush agreement, Megan.
[00:57:25]  So he's done all this media, and we don't know what he can't talk about if he's got a non-disclosure agreement.
[00:57:32]  We didn't know if he was getting royalties.
[00:57:35]  Now, only a small portion of this we know to this day.
[00:57:39]  Most of it is still hidden over at the National Institutes of Health because we requested this.
[00:57:43]  We're suing on this.
[00:57:45]  They admit they're holding 1,200 pages subject to our request.
[00:57:50]  They haven't produced it.
[00:57:52]  And so, right here, I so appreciate your platform.
[00:57:54]  We want to issue the transparency clarion call to the National Institutes of Health.
[00:57:59]  Dr. Fauci says that his financial information is public knowledge.
[00:58:06]  It's not.
[00:58:07]  You're holding it.
[00:58:08]  You're being sued for it.
[00:58:10]  So release it to the American people.
[00:58:12]  Come clean with the American people.
[00:58:15]  How can the NIH withhold it?
[00:58:17]  I mean, you're quite literally in the business of forcing these bureaucrats to fork over information like this.
[00:58:24]  So how do their protestations match up against other pushback you've received in going after other federal bureaucrats?
[00:58:31]  Megan, you're a lawyer.
[00:58:33]  You know the cost of litigation.
[00:58:35]  You know the time.
[00:58:36]  So here's what's going on at the National Institutes of Health.
[00:58:39]  They are using expensive litigation funded by taxpayers to keep taxpayers in the dark.
[00:58:46]  They're using this litigation and slow-walking Freedom of Information Act requests, forcing us to sue on an expensive basis funded by taxpayers to keep taxpayers ignorant.
[00:58:59]  The National Institutes of Health, because of our federal lawsuit on discovery, we now know that the National Institutes of Health are behind their past due on 633 Freedom of Information Act requests.
[00:59:13]  They're being sued in addition to the two lawsuits we have against them 33 other times.
[00:59:19]  And Megan, this is by design.
[00:59:23]  They have underfunded their Freedom of Information Act production department, while they, for instance, have fully staffed their public affairs public relations department.
[00:59:36]  According to our data at openthebooks.com, the National Institutes of Health employs 86 PR officers for a total annual taxpayer cost north of $15 million a year.
[00:59:48]  So they have plenty of time to pressure mainstream news organizations like Forbes.
[00:59:52]  Yet on the other hand, they're pass due on an incredible, a stunning amount of Freedom of Information Act requests 633 during a pandemic, no less.
[01:00:03]  The NIH has 86 press flaks.
[01:00:08]  Yes.
[01:00:09]  That's unbelievable.
[01:00:10]  That's incredible.
[01:00:12]  So yeah, but you say it's by design.
[01:00:14]  That's an important point.
[01:00:15]  It's not like they really want to comply with your demands if only they had the staff.
[01:00:19]  I mean, this is basically Fauci.
[01:00:21]  He runs the public health industry in America.
[01:00:23]  He does, he has no interest in complying with any of these things on a speedy basis.
[01:00:28]  Otherwise, they would have staffed that department adequately.
[01:00:31]  Well, think about the war on transparency over at the National Institutes of Health.
[01:00:36]  Megan, every year they spend $30 billion that they dole out on grant making.
[01:00:41]  And that buys you a lot of friends.
[01:00:42]  That buys you a lot of favors.
[01:00:44]  They dole out 56,000 grants over at the National Institutes of Health.
[01:00:49]  And they want to do this without accountability.
[01:00:53]  They're basically telling taxpayers, you and I, Megan, pay up, shut up, but we run it the way we want to.
[01:01:02]  And these are unelected bureaucrats.
[01:01:04]  It's so disturbing to me because we've seen in the course of this pandemic, and there's new reporting all the time now that backs it up, that Fauci, he behaves more like a mob boss than he does the director of this offshoot of the NIH.
[01:01:19]  He threatens, we've seen it in the papers that we've gotten via the intercept and other news organizations.
[01:01:25]  When the great Barrington doctors came out and said, what we need is focus protection.
[01:01:29]  We need to focus on the most vulnerable, not massive lockdowns and so on.
[01:01:32]  There was a concerted plan to ruin them.
[01:01:34]  I mean, to dismiss them as fringy.
[01:01:37]  And there was follow-up to make sure that was being done with Fauci and Collins and so on.
[01:01:42]  Those two colluded when it came out at the beginning that a bunch of the world's top virologists saw this virus and said, that thing looks like it came from a lab and not just any lab, but the Wuhan lab.
[01:01:54]  And where's Peter Dazik, who's been doing this exact research in the Wuhan lab?
[01:01:59]  Let's get him in here.
[01:02:01]  And within 24 hours after talking to Fauci and Collins, they'd all reversed themselves.
[01:02:05]  They know how to strong arm and silence Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC.
[01:02:11]  He came out and suggested, this looks like it came from a lab.
[01:02:15]  Before you knew it, he was silenced.
[01:02:17]  He was moved off of all the discussions.
[01:02:19]  He actually just went on the record with Vanity Fair and said exactly that.
[01:02:23]  So he's a mob boss.
[01:02:25]  That's how he behaves.
[01:02:27]  And it's no coincidence, if you ask me, that you lost your job at Forbes after you had the temerity to not go along to get along and to actually try to unearth real information on him.

=== Silencing Robert Redfield (14:56) ===

[01:02:39]  Well, and let's put Dr. Anthony Fauci and his position in the context of the federal bureaucracy.
[01:02:45]  I really believe he's a bureaucratic genius, better than anybody else in Washington, D.C., he knows how to manipulate the system.
[01:02:52]  Think about this, Megan.
[01:02:54]  You've got Health and Human Services, and then the sub-agency, the National Institutes of Health.
[01:02:59]  And then there are actually 28 sub-agencies under NIH.
[01:03:04]  Fauci runs just one of them.
[01:03:07]  But over the course of the last 55 years, he's learned how to work the bureaucracy.
[01:03:13]  And all of a sudden, I don't even know if this is without argument.
[01:03:16]  He's probably the most visible federal bureaucrat ever in the history of the United States federal government.
[01:03:23]  So he has learned how to work his small little agency into massive.
[01:03:29]  Nobody over the course of the past two years has affected American public health policy more than Dr. Anthony Fauci.
[01:03:36]  Well, and the reason it matters is because there is not proof positive, but there's circumstantial evidence and more and more proof along the path that may take us to we the American taxpayers in grants approved by Dr. Anthony Fauci helped create this pandemic.
[01:03:58]  We're not there yet.
[01:03:59]  We don't actually have the smoking gun, but we do day by day get more reporting that Anthony Fauci was funding Peter Dazik's group, EcoHealth Alliance.
[01:04:09]  They, in connection with the Wuhan lab and the so-called Bat Lady, were doing gain of function research, gain of function research.
[01:04:17]  Fauci's denied under oath that that's what they were doing.
[01:04:19]  One of the new documents revealed by this Vanity Fair article specifically has them saying it's gain of function research.
[01:04:25]  There's no mystery.
[01:04:26]  People already knew.
[01:04:27]  But anyway, that we were funding it.
[01:04:29]  Peter Dazik was doing it with the Bat Lady, where they would take a bat coronavirus and impose one of these furin cleavage sites that's man-made to make it more transmissible to humans and test it out in, quote, humanized mice.
[01:04:42]  That's exactly what they were doing over there.
[01:04:44]  That's what they were doing over there.
[01:04:45]  And the only leap that hasn't been concluded proof positive is that what was ultimately released, what came from this lab, which wasn't being well oversighted, right?
[01:04:55]  Overseen, was in fact the virus that infected the world.
[01:05:02]  So when we unearthed that 2004 memo, that showed that he was paid for his work on biodefense.
[01:05:09]  There's three components of that research.
[01:05:11]  Did the firemen become the arsonists?
[01:05:14]  As you've alluded to, Megan, that is an open question.
[01:05:17]  And there needs to be a bipartisan congressional investigation.
[01:05:21]  Number two, he was paid to stop the next pandemic.
[01:05:25]  He obviously failed on that basis.
[01:05:28]  Number three, he orchestrated the response to the pandemic.
[01:05:32]  So here's the open question.
[01:05:34]  Was the cure, was the cure promulgated by Fauci worse than the disease itself?
[01:05:41]  All of this.
[01:05:42]  America's ready for a serious conversation.
[01:05:44]  We need a serious, robust, deep conversation on our response to COVID-19.
[01:05:51]  Well, and the thing is, Adam, he won't go.
[01:05:54]  Like there, he gave an interview recently saying, I'm not going anywhere.
[01:05:58]  I'm not retiring until this thing is done.
[01:06:01]  And, you know, into Anthony Fauci's eyes, it's never done, ever.
[01:06:04]  It will never be And it's starting my me, it's causing me to think, is he in a position, sorry to compare him to Vladimir Putin, it's not valid, but almost like a Vladimir Putin, where like he can't leave because if he leaves, he steps away from all the power that has protected him for all these years.
[01:06:27]  If somebody else comes in, God forbid, somebody, you know, fresh and unbiased and uncompromised who wants to take a hard look at everything his little subgroup of the NIH has been doing, how will that reflect on Anthony Fauci, who will now no longer be in a position to exert all his control over all these virologists and immunologists who he threatened allegedly because he's no longer doling out the grants.
[01:06:53]  So you've raised a very important question, Megan.
[01:06:56]  Earlier in the interview, I said that he's unrevealable by the National Institutes of Health, his employer.
[01:07:03]  Well, think about this.
[01:07:04]  He's probably not fireable either.
[01:07:07]  Okay, it's an open legal question as to whether the president of the United States could fire him.
[01:07:12]  Obviously, Biden won't.
[01:07:15]  So who fires Dr. Anthony Fauci?
[01:07:17]  So then, you know, the director of the National Institutes of Health.
[01:07:21]  But as you remember, Francis Collins, he was the director and he left.
[01:07:27]  He went into retirement.
[01:07:28]  So now you have an acting director that nobody's ever heard of, Lawrence Tayback.
[01:07:34]  Okay, is an acting director going to fire Fauci?
[01:07:37]  No way.
[01:07:38]  So then you have possibly the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Javier Becera.
[01:07:44]  So is the former California Attorney General, the Attorney General in California that succeeded Camilla Harris, is he going to fire Fauci?
[01:07:52]  Not a chance.
[01:07:53]  Yeah, right.
[01:07:53]  So Fauci knows he is untouchable.
[01:07:56]  He's protected.
[01:07:57]  He's unfireable.
[01:07:59]  And he's been a long time ago knighted by the United States federal government that he was in this protected basis.
[01:08:07]  I mean, think about this.
[01:08:08]  This was during the George W. Bush administration when that memo that gave him the permanent pay adjustment, the permanent bonus was given out.
[01:08:15]  And then it was publicly announced.
[01:08:17]  Everybody got the message in 2008 when Bush gave Fauci the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
[01:08:26]  That's, I had Josh Holmes of the, or Josh Rogan, sorry, of the, of the Washington Post, who he's been doing great and bold reporting on Fauci and gain of function and the Wuhan lab and all that.
[01:08:38]  He's been leading the way.
[01:08:40]  And he's been writing about this since March of earlier of last year.
[01:08:46]  He came on my program, I think, in April and said, it could, it could have been Fauci.
[01:08:53]  Like this whole lane of doing gain of function.
[01:08:57]  And I know that the audience is like, duh, it was Fauci.
[01:08:59]  We don't have that proven.
[01:09:00]  If you were in a court of law, you wouldn't have it proven.
[01:09:02]  You could offer a circumstantial case, but you couldn't.
[01:09:05]  It's not, you don't have the smoking gun.
[01:09:08]  So I'm just saying, you know, he's offer, as a reporter, you're not supposed to say it's proven because it's not necessarily.
[01:09:14]  We think it, and there's lots of reasons to believe it.
[01:09:16]  So he said, it could be, it could be that Fauci, that we essentially unleashed this virus through that Chinese lab and the bat lady and all the research that we were funding.
[01:09:27]  And since then, a couple of people have picked it up in the mainstream, trying to look at it a little bit.
[01:09:31]  But I mean, now that you see the amount of power he has, the amount of times he's managed to ruin careers, shut down POVs, points of view he doesn't like, the amount of power he has in terms of granting grants to people.
[01:09:45]  Like, for example, those virologists who did the 180 on, oh man, it looks like it came from a lab.
[01:09:50]  Then a conversation with Collins and Fauci and 24 hours later, no way, definitely came from some weird animal that we were never able to find.
[01:09:56]  And then they got a $10 million grant approved by the NIH or by Fauci, right?
[01:10:00]  So it's like now that we see all that, a year plus later, the evidence is only growing that we need an independent investigation of him, of ourselves, of the NIH, of the, you know, NAID, whatever the letters are for his group, Peter Dazik, all of it.
[01:10:17]  And not the fake Intel thing we did and not the fake WHO thing that had Peter Dazik.
[01:10:23]  He was on the group, right, that the WHO sent over there.
[01:10:27]  It was a joke.
[01:10:28]  But I'm talking about. real, like sort of 9-11 commission stuff where you've got non-hacks sitting there trying to find real answers.
[01:10:38]  Well, the Washington Post has done great reporting on gain of function and everybody watching or listening to the program should read the August article, Science in the Shadows, where the Washington Post no less did an analysis of grants and they came up with $44 million in grants 18 times that NIH and Collins and Fauci funded what the Washington Post defined as gain of function research.
[01:11:03]  And this was through the Obama years.
[01:11:05]  It was from the years 2012 through 2018.
[01:11:07]  So through Obama and through Trump.
[01:11:09]  When there was a ban.
[01:11:10]  There was a ban.
[01:11:11]  There was a federal government.
[01:11:12]  When there was a ban.
[01:11:14]  Correct.
[01:11:15]  They did it by changing the definition of words.
[01:11:18]  Again, he's a bureaucratic genius.
[01:11:20]  He knows how to get exactly what Anthony Fauci wants funded.
[01:11:26]  This is all so, it's all part of the same puzzle.
[01:11:30]  You know, it's like you can see all of it coming together.
[01:11:33]  I'm trying to find that one excerpt where the word gain of function.
[01:11:36]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:11:37]  So this is again from the Vanity Fair report.
[01:11:40]  It says, in July, the National Institute of Health accepted Dazik's terms because Dasik was saying, give me money to go over there and do all this exact research that we find so problematic, where you take the back coronaviruses and you try to make them more lethal to humans.
[01:11:55]  You know, he says the NIH accepted his terms and there was an agreement of mutual transparency in which both parties would disclose concerning developments involving the lab constructed viruses.
[01:12:05]  And he writes, Dasik writes to the NIH, quote, this is terrific.
[01:12:10]  We are very happy to hear that our gain of function research funding pause has been lifted and off he went to the races.
[01:12:19]  I mean, it just, it gives you some context for the Rand Paul, Dr. Fauci exchanges.
[01:12:24]  No, no, we weren't doing gain of function.
[01:12:25]  No, it's a lie.
[01:12:27]  You don't know what you're talking about.
[01:12:28]  And then look at him against, you know, the senator we were just talking about.
[01:12:31]  No, you don't know what you're talking about.
[01:12:32]  You're a moron.
[01:12:33]  You know, all of my information.
[01:12:35]  He has an uncanny ability to look right at a U.S. senator while under oath with cameras on him.
[01:12:42]  And it's my opinion, lie.
[01:12:45]  That's a lie.
[01:12:46]  He's telling lies.
[01:12:47]  Those aren't mistakes.
[01:12:48]  They're not turns of phrases.
[01:12:50]  In my legal opinion, you can tell he's lying.
[01:12:54]  Well, and then they have the power to get their critics deplatformed and canceled.
[01:12:59]  So NIH put a lot of pressure on Forbes on it.
[01:13:03]  And here's how sensitive the Fauci financial information was to Fauci and NIH that I published in my column at Forbes.
[01:13:12]  Here are just some of the findings.
[01:13:13]  He's got a net worth that rivals $11 million between his federal salary for him and his wife.
[01:13:20]  If you add the cost of benefits, they both clean off north of $900,000 at taxpayer expense every single year.
[01:13:27]  He won a $1 million prize, which NIH allowed him to accept by the Dan David Foundation out of Israel for quote unquote speaking truth to power during the Trump years.
[01:13:40]  So these are just, you know, that is such sensitive information.
[01:13:43]  We know it's sensitive because on a Sunday morning, two bureau chiefs over at the National Institutes of Health, two directors of the agency, and two of their top PR people took time out from defending the nation during a pandemic to write a note to Forbes, an institution that's been around for 100 years, basically saying, back off, subliminally delivering the message.
[01:14:12]  We don't like Angievsky's work, and we want you to do something about it.
[01:14:16]  Forbes got the message.
[01:14:18]  They folded quickly and my column was terminated.
[01:14:21]  Megan, it's the last column I ever wrote at Forbes.
[01:14:25]  It's unbelievable.
[01:14:26]  Now, wait, I, two things.
[01:14:29]  One, a question about his finances.
[01:14:31]  And then two, I want we're going to do a second block because I want to talk about the firing and Forbes and what it did.
[01:14:39]  So we'll get into that deep after this.
[01:14:41]  But can I just ask you quickly?
[01:14:43]  No, no, we don't.
[01:14:43]  Yeah, no music yet.
[01:14:46]  You mentioned the total value of his investment accounts, 8.4 million.
[01:14:49]  His wife, who also works for us, totaled another 2.1 million.
[01:14:53]  So you're over $10 million.
[01:14:55]  To me, I realize he makes a lot and so does she.
[01:14:58]  That seems like a huge investment account for a government bureaucrat.
[01:15:02]  I mean, that seems like they're rich.
[01:15:05]  That's eight figures for a couple of bureaucrats.
[01:15:09]  So is that suspicious to you?
[01:15:11]  Or does that make sense given that he's been making over 400 for so many years?
[01:15:17]  So they're deca millionaires.
[01:15:19]  That's national news.
[01:15:20]  And the column was important.
[01:15:22]  Every time I wrote about Fauci and gave him oversight on his finances, we broke national news, whether it was top paid salary, whether it's his largest retirement golden parachute, whether it's his net worth in the DECA millionaire status.
[01:15:36]  I mean, all of these columns were very important to the national debate.
[01:15:41]  I don't know.
[01:15:41]  It's a big number.
[01:15:42]  And it would be worth, I mean, it's good reporting and it would be worth probing just a little bit further and find out how it got to be quite so big.
[01:15:49]  Maybe he's just a brilliant investor.
[01:15:52]  We will probably never know since you're having trouble even getting them to produce the full documents, never mind the ones you get with all the redactions.
[01:16:00]  Okay, I want to talk about that, but I also really want to get into Forbes' fig leaf of a claim against you.
[01:16:07]  And we'll be naming some names right after this.
[01:16:15]  So Adam, January 5th, you published an article on Forbes.
[01:16:19]  And by the way, just before that point, you'd publish so many articles.
[01:16:21]  You've been with him for eight years.
[01:16:24]  Any problems prior to that?
[01:16:25]  Was that was all good?
[01:16:27]  Did you have like a history of being corrected?
[01:16:29]  Or how was it before you published that article?
[01:16:32]  Well, I think you have to be fairly humble when you're a journalist.
[01:16:35]  I always subscribe to what the progressive Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who just happens to be the father of modern day transparency as well.
[01:16:45]  He's the guy that coined the phrase, sunlight is the best of disinfectants.
[01:16:49]  And Brandeis said about journalism, there's no good writing, only good rewriting.
[01:16:55]  And that's a philosophy I subscribe to.
[01:16:58]  So I went back and searched my emails from my primary editor in 2021.
[01:17:04]  And there's only a handful of emails the entire year.
[01:17:07]  We published 54 pieces in 2021.
[01:17:10]  So, I mean, it's rather rare that I would ever hear from an editor at Forbes.
[01:17:14]  I treasured the platform there.
[01:17:15]  I put up 206 pieces even after they terminated my column.
[01:17:20]  They recognized the value of those columns.
[01:17:23]  They've left my author archive live.
[01:17:25]  I appreciate that.
[01:17:27]  Although I'm disappointed in Forbes itself for folding so quickly after being pressured by a government bureau.

=== Caroline Howard Email Investigations (13:44) ===

[01:17:35]  Yeah.
[01:17:35]  All right.
[01:17:35]  So let's talk about what happened.
[01:17:37]  So you published the article.
[01:17:38]  shares Fauci's household earnings of 1.7 million in 2012 between he and his wife.
[01:17:45]  And then you get an email from Caroline Howard, executive editor at Forbes, someone you had not interacted with in your career.
[01:17:53]  So this is weird.
[01:17:54]  This comes out of left field.
[01:17:56]  And she writes to you, and let me pull it up, saying in part, okay, I believe.
[01:18:07]  Someone who's been redacted spoke to you about the tone of your posts straying into advocacy, not to mention the reporting errors pointed out today.
[01:18:17]  It's your third article on Fauci in three weeks.
[01:18:21]  Huh.
[01:18:22]  Huh.
[01:18:23]  She actually writes, huh, in the email.
[01:18:25]  Then she goes on, to be clear, anyone who engages in this type of writing, this type of writing, is subject to review and swift action from coaching to reprimand, warning, and dismissal.
[01:18:40]  And this was in response to a complaint, as you point out, from six top communications, government relations, and public affairs officers, meaning PR Flax, at the NIH, who wrote to her saying you got your facts wrong and this was deeply concerning to them.
[01:19:02]  And there was some, I don't know, some guy named Randall Lane, who purports to be the chief content officer and editor over at Forbes, who was apparently responsible for the decision to bar you from writing about Fauci at that point from that point forward.
[01:19:18]  So let's go back over your alleged mistakes so the audience can decide whether what you did was worth the death penalty here.
[01:19:27]  What were they mad about?
[01:19:27]  Because as I read their letter, it's like, it's a yawn.
[01:19:31]  You tell me.
[01:19:32]  It is a yawn.
[01:19:33]  We were tip of the spear on giving oversight to the Fauci financials.
[01:19:37]  I did have a typo.
[01:19:39]  There was a number in the body of the piece when it initially published, when it had less than 350 views that an editor caught.
[01:19:47]  The number was right in the title and wrong in the body of the piece.
[01:19:50]  It was quickly corrected.
[01:19:52]  They had some other phrasing and language edits that they wanted made.
[01:19:57]  I'm light to lift.
[01:19:58]  I quickly made them.
[01:19:59]  The piece today is the definitive repository of the 2020 Fauci Financials.
[01:20:05]  That's the last year available, Megan, and it has over 130,000 views today.
[01:20:10]  So these things were corrected quickly and the piece was robust and substantial.
[01:20:16]  So let me just read, you explain to me whether this is correct or not, because you reported in the original piece that Fauci collected 8,100 bucks to attend three galas.
[01:20:26]  Then they wrote in saying only one of those galas honored Fauci as an award recipient.
[01:20:33]  And he reported the gifts of free attendance with the market value of the tickets face value.
[01:20:41]  He quote, never collected any money for these events.
[01:20:45]  Is that true then?
[01:20:46]  He did not collect 8,100 to attend any of these galleys, galas.
[01:20:52]  Right.
[01:20:52]  He didn't collect any cash.
[01:20:54]  He collected, quote unquote, the market value of $8,100 for the tickets.
[01:21:00]  So I took their edit.
[01:21:02]  It's no problem.
[01:21:03]  I changed collected to reported.
[01:21:05]  It's a difference without a distinction, Megan.
[01:21:07]  It didn't mean anything to the veracity of the piece.
[01:21:11]  Here's what NIH didn't correct.
[01:21:14]  They didn't correct his salary, the benefits, the investment gains, the royalties, the $1 million prize of speaking truth to power.
[01:21:23]  All of our substantial findings in the click piece, they didn't say anything about, which essentially validates them.
[01:21:31]  If we'd made a mistake on anything else, they would have certainly pointed it out.
[01:21:36]  So these were just ticky tack.
[01:21:38]  It was a ticky tack quote unquote corrections email.
[01:21:41]  But the purpose of it was to put me on the bad list with fours.
[01:21:45]  And that's because the mission accomplished.
[01:21:48]  To underscore that.
[01:21:49]  So the second complaint.
[01:21:51]  I mean, you'll tell me, but like, unless there's another email from them complaining, is there?
[01:21:55]  Like, this is it.
[01:21:56]  This is the complaint email.
[01:21:57]  Yes.
[01:21:58]  Yeah.
[01:21:58]  Okay.
[01:21:58]  So there was that one.
[01:21:59]  They don't want you to say he collected 8,100, that he reported.
[01:22:03]  an $8,100 value to him in attending the galas.
[01:22:07]  Okay, you did it.
[01:22:08]  The second point they raise, because they make it sound like you, your string of corrections, you completely blew that article.
[01:22:14]  It's like, I went back.
[01:22:15]  I'm like, what did he do?
[01:22:16]  Oh my God.
[01:22:17]  I'm like, this is it.
[01:22:18]  The second one is Fauci's reports also disclose his approved editorial board position with McGraw-Hill.
[01:22:25]  With regard to the Forbes reporting about travel perks, the editorial board members at McGraw-Hill meet in person when organized by the publisher and they're reimbursed for their travel expenses that they pay for themselves out of pocket to begin with.
[01:22:41]  Dr. Fauci as a board member receives the same travel reimbursement as other non-federal board members.
[01:22:48]  That's it.
[01:22:49]  So what's that about?
[01:22:49]  Did you say that he was getting some sort of a big perk from McGraw-Hill that he shouldn't have gotten?
[01:22:55]  Well, it is a perk because he does have to, by law, disclose it on his ethics and financial disclosure forms, which I reported on.
[01:23:03]  Now, I had reached out to the National Institutes of Health for a request for comment on this point.
[01:23:10]  They did not respond before the article was published.
[01:23:13]  They responded after the article was published on a Sunday morning.
[01:23:17]  Okay, that's fair enough.
[01:23:19]  We updated the piece with their additional context.
[01:23:21]  I didn't quibble about it.
[01:23:23]  Again, we're just light to lift.
[01:23:24]  We want to be fair.
[01:23:25]  We want it.
[01:23:26]  You know, they responded eventually to the request for comment.
[01:23:28]  We updated the piece.
[01:23:30]  So that's it.
[01:23:31]  That's it.
[01:23:32]  And then you get the sort of tis-tis email from Caroline Howard.
[01:23:37]  Your tone.
[01:23:39]  Just about Fauci in three weeks.
[01:23:41]  Huh?
[01:23:41]  Yeah, go ahead.
[01:23:42]  Just to be clear.
[01:23:43]  So the Caroline Howard email from Forbes came first.
[01:23:47]  Forbes was already upset.
[01:23:49]  I was writing about Fauci three times in three weeks, that we were making national news being cited in the Senate hearing when Marshall questioned Fauci and cited Forbes, which was my column.
[01:24:01]  Obviously, by the tone of that email, they did not like that citation.
[01:24:06]  They did not like giving oversight on Fauci's financials.
[01:24:11]  That's before Fauci and his comrades complained?
[01:24:15]  Yes.
[01:24:16]  Oh my gosh.
[01:24:17]  Wow.
[01:24:19]  Okay.
[01:24:19]  So then they complained.
[01:24:21]  You make the changes.
[01:24:22]  And then you've got Randall Love, Chief Content Officer and Editor at Forbes, who basically cans you.
[01:24:29]  He bars you from writing about Fauci and mandates pre-approval for all future topics.
[01:24:35]  Or was that like an interim step before the end of the relationship?
[01:24:39]  So we got the Caroline Howard email from Forbes that's quibbling about three columns on Fauci in three weeks.
[01:24:47]  Then we have the pressure from NIH, the two bureau chiefs, the two directors, the two PR officers, a message cleared at the highest levels of NIH.
[01:24:57]  And then within 24 hours of that email, I receive a phone call from my regular editor with two rules that had never been instituted on me.
[01:25:07]  Number one, I was barred from writing about Anthony Fauci any longer.
[01:25:12]  Number two, I had to pre-clear every single topic with them before I published again.
[01:25:19]  Now, I tried to do that.
[01:25:21]  They went silent for 10 days and then terminated the column.
[01:25:26]  Wow.
[01:25:27]  Wow.
[01:25:28]  Here's the update to this, Benny.
[01:25:30]  Let me just put one other point on it because then as I understand it, they went on and on about like their journalistic standards and about how Forbes, they have high editorial standards and that they don't allow, I'm trying to find it here, basically opinion or bias.
[01:25:47]  Let me find it.
[01:25:48]  Let's see.
[01:25:51]  Oh, I'll find it.
[01:25:53]  But basically, they sort of tried to take the high road saying like, this just doesn't meet our high editorial standards.
[01:25:58]  We don't allow bias.
[01:26:00]  We don't allow opinions.
[01:26:01]  We don't allow sort of, you know, scale tipping at Forbes.
[01:26:04]  I'm like, okay.
[01:26:05]  I mean, I love Steve Forbes.
[01:26:07]  I believe that's true about him.
[01:26:09]  As for these other people I've never heard of, I doubt it.
[01:26:12]  I highly doubt it.
[01:26:13]  And it's actually reflected, if I'm not mistaken, the one guy, Randall Lane, the one who was telling you, no more Fauci.
[01:26:23]  No, you can't write about him anymore.
[01:26:25]  This guy wound up offering an op-ed in Forbes calling, or called as follows, a truth reckoning, why we're holding those who lied for Trump accountable.
[01:26:39]  And he goes on talking about how as American democracy rebounds, this is January 7th, 2021.
[01:26:45]  So about a year later after this at January 6th thing, we need to return to a standard.
[01:26:51]  Wait, no, it was, yeah, it was right after.
[01:26:54]  As American democracy rebounds, we need to return to a standard truth when it comes to how the government communicates with the governed.
[01:27:00]  The easiest way to do that from where I sit is to create repercussions for those who don't follow civic norms.
[01:27:05]  Let it be known to the business world.
[01:27:06]  Hire any of Trump's fellow fabulists and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firms talk about is a lie.
[01:27:15]  Well, that doesn't exactly, that sounds a little opinionated and slightly biased against Trump and his supporters.
[01:27:23]  Well, absolutely.
[01:27:25]  And here's a corollary to that.
[01:27:27]  Just about 45 days ago, Forbes announced that they were giving a lifetime achievement award to Hillary Clinton.
[01:27:34]  Of course.
[01:27:36]  Of course they did.
[01:27:37]  Shay, she's done a lot.
[01:27:39]  Stop it right now, Adam.
[01:27:41]  She hasn't been recognized enough by the media.
[01:27:44]  They need one more award just to make them feel like they're not misogynistic pricks.
[01:27:48]  Oh, sorry.
[01:27:49]  So just to give, just to give some context to all of this.
[01:27:53]  So in the year 2020, I published 36 investigations at Forbes.
[01:27:58]  And Megan, 26 of those investigations, the editors at Forbes specifically designated as editor's picks for special promotion on the website.
[01:28:08]  So two out of every three pieces, they chose as an editor's pick designation.
[01:28:14]  The first piece I wrote in 2021 was the piece on Dr. Anthony Fauci is the most highly compensated federal employee.
[01:28:23]  That piece has over 900,000 views.
[01:28:25]  It is not an editor's pick.
[01:28:27]  I put up 55 more investigations between 2021 and 2022.
[01:28:33]  None of them were editor's picks.
[01:28:35]  Something changed at Forbes when I wrote about Dr. Anthony Fauci.
[01:28:39]  I went on the bad list.
[01:28:41]  Wow.
[01:28:43]  So how do we get information about this guy?
[01:28:45]  I mean, his tentacles are everywhere.
[01:28:47]  His control is vast.
[01:28:50]  And there are very few reporters willing to do what you're doing.
[01:28:54]  I'm so pleased to be on your program because today, you know, it's the internet world and the internet does have a way to curate the top content and being able to come on your platform and talk about all these issues in long form format.
[01:29:10]  Thank you very much for having me on the platform to help you and I and your platform to help educate the American people on these issues.
[01:29:19]  Highly critical.
[01:29:20]  Oh, the pleasure is mine.
[01:29:21]  And I should apologize to you because Adam was actually booked the day we had to cancel our show because of my son Thatcher's spleen injury.
[01:29:30]  And you were so nice about it.
[01:29:32]  And I felt bad that it was a last minute cancellation, obviously for a good reason, but you've been just so cool and cooperative and unlike what Forbes is implying, very easy to work with.
[01:29:42]  But now if people want to read your stuff, because they do need to continue reading your reporting, how do they do that?
[01:29:47]  Where do they find you?
[01:29:49]  The best way is to come to openthebooks.com.
[01:29:51]  And then there'll be a pop-up.
[01:29:53]  Just put your email and address into that pop-up and sign up for our newsletter.
[01:29:57]  You'll get one about one only when we have serious and substantial investigations that we publish.
[01:30:03]  And you'll get an alert right away on that.
[01:30:05]  The second way, especially to read all the details about what we're talking about here today, Megan, is over at Substack.
[01:30:13]  We opened up a Substack account.
[01:30:15]  It's openthebooks.substack.com.
[01:30:19]  And again, you'll be the first to know about all of our investigations that publish.
[01:30:24]  That's awesome.
[01:30:24]  You're doing important work and keep us in the loop too, because we'd love to have you back anytime.
[01:30:28]  Adam, thank you.
[01:30:30]  Super, Megan.
[01:30:31]  Thank you.
[01:30:32]  Wow.
[01:30:32]  Fascinating, right?
[01:30:33]  God, it is one of the things I love about the new job is like you can go in depth and you can really expose.
[01:30:38]  I mean, did you think those sins, his alleged sins were so bad, he should lose his eight-year relationship with Forbes?
[01:30:44]  Okay.
[01:30:45]  Huh.
[01:30:46]  Three articles.
[01:30:47]  Huh.
[01:30:48]  Listen, I want to tell you that tomorrow, I'm excited.
[01:30:51]  I've never had Andrew Clavin of the Daily Wire here, but he is so smart and cutting and unsparing.
[01:30:59]  And his son has got this really cool podcast on the classics too.
[01:31:03]  So I'm looking forward to talking to him.
[01:31:05]  You can download the show in the meantime.
[01:31:06]  Subscribe at youtube.com slash MeganKelly.
[01:31:09]  Do it just to check out those Kyle Dunne invitations.
[01:31:12]  You won't be sorry.
[01:31:13]  We'll see you tomorrow.
[01:31:16]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:31:18]  No BS, no agenda, and no